More Guatemalan highlands and El Salvador

The next several days we traveled to the pueblos of Guatemala to visit local industries and weaving coops. During the final weekend we went south to El Salavador and saw the miraculous resurrection of a century old indigo plantation and the studio of a woman who is trying to reintroduce the weaving tradition lost during decades of political upheaval.

There follows a whirlwind tour that only barely hints at this remarkable journey.

	San Andres Xecul As you drive across the valley and up the hill to San Andres and gaze at rooftops full of drying yarn, it is clear that this is the home of many dyers. Dyeing yarn for the weavers is the major cottage industry of this pueblo.
An extended family both lives and works in these multi-storied workshops with everyone, including the youth, contributing. The safety of working with the dyes and chemicals is overshadowed by the need to make a living. Guatemalan pueblos are not yet ready for OSHA.
	From high on the third story roof you can see many such small businesses in this hilly mountain village as colorful yarns dry in the sun.
The town is also known for its church which is a folkart masterpiece.	And about a mile up the hill is another small chapel that can be seen from the church. It is up this hill that the Easter procession climbs in remembrance of Christ’s climb to Calvary.
	Chirijquiac We drove across fields rutted with dirt to the tiny settlement of Chirijquiac to see the women of the area who have formed a coop to help them improve the marketability of their weaving.
The women, who only speak one of the Mayan languages welcomed us into one of their tiny homes. Through an interpreter who spoke Mayan and Spanish they told us about their work.
	In the courtyard the women demonstrated how they worked and we had a lively discussion that included many hand gestures and a fair amount of laughter.
We traveled to another pueblo where the standard of living was a little higher. There a workshop had been established at the home of one of the weavers who had a larger house. She had a larger loom and was better off because her husband, whom she had not seen for five years, was in the U.S. working and sending money back to support his family.
	The youngest member of the coop, Angelique, still just a teenager, had joined so she could learn to weave better and sell enough to make money to go to college.
Clemente Clemente’s father was a master weaver and so is Clemente. For ten years Clemente has worked with the coops of UPAVIM to help weavers imporve their work to attract a wider market. We visited his father’s workshop. And later the new workshop Clemente has started. He has left UPAVIM to start his own business and hopes to help make Guatemalan handweaving economically viable.
	Clemente’s father has a separate building for his workshop. Men, some young, some older work at about a dozen looms. Their young sons run through the workshop and sometimes help with warping the looms
At Clemente’s new workshop he is developing more modern techniques for producing traditional textiles. Complex designs are worked out for production on the early version of a "computerized loom. Holes punched in the wooden slats move as the loom is treadled and indicate which shafts rise.
Salcajaj	The main industry in Salcajaj is weaving corte, the lengths of fabric for women’s skirts. Many of these have intricate patterns that are made by tie-dyeing the threads before they are woven. In order to do this the warp threads, sometimes up to 100 yards in length, are stretched for a block or more down the streets.
After they have been tied and dyed, they are restretched and untied. Then through an intricate sorting process they are rearranged to form the pattern that appears in the cloth. Amazing !

	El Salvador El Salvador, a short few hours south of the Guatemalan highlands is a different world. After decades of strife during which much of the native population was killed, and then the rich lander owners were killed and the land redistributed, El Salvador lost much of its rich past history. Since the end of the carnage toward the end of the last century, there are efforts being made to resurrect what remains. One such effort is underway at la Hacienda San Juan Buenavista, an indigo plantation on the west coast of El Salvador. This is a picture of the plantation as it was in the 1970s.
During a civil war that lasted from 1980 to 1992, many of the wealthy landowners whose families had lived in El Salvador for generations were killed and their land was taken and given to the peasants. Grace was the daughter of one of those landowners. Her father, and grandfather owned a huge indigo plantation. She, along with her mother and brothers and sisters were sent to New York for safety. Before her father could join them, he was killed. Grace was eight. Her mother vowed never to return.
	But later, when the war was over and she was approaching thirty and had two children of her own, she ventured back to see the land she loved as a child. She did not tell the villagers who she was until she had made inquiries about what had happened to the plantation and what the local people thought of the family that had owned it. She found that her family had been well liked; the property had not prospered under its new owners because they did not know how to manage it. Much of original plantation was up for sale.
She decided to buy back the parts of it that she could. Some of the local people who had worked for her father came back to work for her. She is replanting the indigo and has resurrected the vats that are used for processing it. Most of the buildings had fallen into disrepair. Little by little she is restoring them. And this year she has scored a major contract with Brazil who will buy all the indigo she and other growers in El Salvador can produce. A nice success story for all involved
	And in San Salvador Margarita Lainez works to restore the lost weaving traditions of her country. Her studio supports classes for local individuals and she teaches weaving classes at the university. Although the weaving there is non-traditional, many of her students are now designing for major international markets.
Would I return? In a heartbeat. These women and men of Guatemala and El Salavador have survived much. I can learn more from them than they can from me. Together maybe we can weave a real peace.

After four days in Spanish school we joined other WARP members who were gathering for the annual meeting and a tour of sites of interested led by Deborah Chandler, the founder of WARP who is currently the Director of Mayan Hands. I have been a WARP member for several years.

UPAVIM

The first stop on our odyssey was UPAVIM, a coop run by women in a very poor section on the outskirts of Guatemala City. These women, seeing very little hope for their children, have banded together to form a viable business manufacturing handwoven products for sale. They now produce enough that many of them are now able to provide for their families and send their children to school.

Daycare is provided in the same building where the women work and gets the kids ready for school. Even Clifford, the big red dog seen in the mural on the wall, is famous in Guatemala–and is a personal favorite of mine.

Panajachel

Friday, Saturday and Sunday we stayed in Panajachel on the shore of Lake Atitlan where we learned about some of the projects in Guatemala that are striving to help Mayan families raise their standard of living by providing improved working conditions and markets for their work.

Some of the Mayan women from the weavers’ groups were there to show us their work. Many speak one of the twenty-one Mayan languages still in use.

Although we could often communicate with actions instead of words, we had translators who could speak both Mayan and Spanish.

I had a chance to meet Albertina and her daughter Melissa again. I met them first in Los Gatos in 2004 when we had the WARP annual meeting here in the Santa Cruz mountains. Albertina’s youngest daughter was also with her this time. Albertina is coming back to California this May to teach Guatemalan weaving at the Mendocino Art Center.

Karen Piegorsch, who has degrees in both engineering and public health, has designed an award-winning ergonomic bench for backstrap weavers which allow them to weave more comfortably for longer periods of time. This not only improves their health, it also allows them to produce more in order to increase their income. The benches are being made and distributed by Oxlajuj B’atz (Thirteen Threads), an educational project of Mayan Hands.

Karen’s company is called Synergo Arts and is dedicated to “exuberant application of ergonomics for artists and artisans.”

Chichicastenango

Every Sunday the small mountaintop town of Chichicastenango north of Panajachel is transformed into a huge market. This street runs down to the residential area below the central square at the top of the hill.

The 400-year old church of Santo Tomas is a cornerstone of the market. Each of the 18 stairs that lead up to the church stands for one month of the Mayan calendar year. The Mayan calendar has 18 months of 20 days each. It is built atop a Pre-Columbian platform, and here as elsewhere in Guatemala, the Catholic religion is simply an overlay to the Mayan traditions. These steps originally leading to a temple of the pre-Hispanic Maya civilization remain venerated. Shamans still use it for their rituals, burning incense and candles and in special cases offering a chicken for the gods.

The famous market of Chichicastenango draws not only the local Maya of the surrounding region, but vendors from all over Guatemala.

Vendors start setting up their own portable booths in the main plaza and nearby streets of Chichicastenango the night before and set-up continues into the early daylight hours. Everything imaginable is available in the eight to ten square blocks of the market.

This woman is selling tied and dyed warps for traditional Mayan weaving (know as jaspé). I bought one.

The central section of the market is a gigantic food court with a variety of Guatemalan specialties and plenty of tables. Guatemalan fresh corn tortillas are exceptional and may be made from either yellow or blue corn. I became addicted to them. They are a cut above and unlike any others.

Lake Atitlan and Panabaj

On Monday we took the hour-long boat trip across beautiful Lake Atitlan, the caldera of an ancient volcano. The Lake is ringed with small villages. Mayan women washed their laundry in the Lake against a backdrop of a few grand homes that occasionally dotted the shore. And over all loomed the volcanoes that have shaped and reshaped the landscape.

A ride in the back of a pick up truck took us to the hotel and workshop of Susie Gunn Glanville, an artist who has lived in Guatemala for many years and who, with her husband, owns a tourist hotel on the Lake.

In 2005 Hurricane Stan triggered a mudslide that buried half of the nearby Mayan mountain village of Panajab. The women pictured here are some of the villagers who survived.

Susie realized that she needed to help. As makeshift housing was built nearby for the remaining villagers, Susie started helping the weavers in the village revitalize their weaving to provide income and continuity in their lives. With her art background she is helping them with new colorways and weave structures and is providing them with new hope.

Susie (on the right) displays some of their work in the yard between the hotel and the storehouse.

It is hard to imagine the experiences these families have had. The light colored gash down the side of the mountain in the background is the scene of the mudslide. The village was located at the base of this slide and half of the houses and half of the inhabitants were buried by it.

This is the site of the new village that is being built by the government. Each unfinished cement block is for one family. Although they are not large, they often replace houses that were even smaller. But no one wanted to rebuild on what has now become a burial ground on the mountain. The wound on the mountain is where the mudslide buried the old village.

While the new houses are being built, the families are living in corrugated tin enclosures. This family has built an add-on kitchen protected by plastic and blankets. Although the climate is moderate because the country is close to the equator, the elevation is over 5000 feet and the nights are cold. But a permanent structure that serves as a school and community center has been built. It is here that the village women and children congregate and do some remarkable weaving on backstrap looms constructed from the branches of the surrounding trees.

Passport Woes

I applied for my passport the first week of December in plenty of time for my trip the last week of February. But my birth certificate got lost somewhere in the process. I eventually got a replacement about the same time the old one was found. By early February, three weeks before my trip, I knew I would need to spend a long day at the passport office in San Francisco to be certified to leave the country.

After all this trouble you would think I would hold on to it. But no. The second week of my trip I left it in a bank in Xela where I was trying in vain to change a travelers check into quetzales. I blithely left the bank without it and did not discover the error until three days later when I tried to get out of Guatemala and into El Salvador.

My stay in Guatemala lasted an extra three days while I got a replacement. The process might have been faster but the airport and the U. S. Embassy were closed because of the arrival of President Bush. I thoroughly enjoyed my extra “found” vacation time.

Week 1 – Antigua

I did not arrive on Saturday as I had planned. My flight was canceled because the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport was closed because of high winds.

Consequently I missed the first Sunday of Lent which in Antigua is celebrated with an elaborate parade through the streets. Brian was there though and you can get a taste of it from his picture on the left.

Language School

We attended language school at La Union for four days. My marginal Spanish definitely improved and Brian, shown here with his teacher, brushed up on his competency.

We both feel the school was excellent and would recommend it highly.

Coffee Plantation

While we were in Antigua we visited the local coffee plantation. The shade grown coffee is raised organically under a canopy of trees. The coffee plants are around five feet tall and each year each plant yields a five pound hand-picked harvest which, after several steps of drying, hull removal, and roasting, yields about one pound of coffee. And you wondered why it is so expensive!

Young coffee plants are ready to plant out after a year of initial growth

Each coffee flower becomes a coffee berry… which is handpicked when it turns red.

The coffee is dried in a huge yard behind the company and is frequently turned by hand in bins as it continues to dry.

The City

Antiqua has a number of now picturesque ruins that are the result of an earlier disaster. (Guatemala is plagued with disasters. More on that later.)

In 1773, a series of earthquakes destroyed much of the town. The Spanish Crown ordered (1776) the removal of the capital to a safer location, where Guatemala City, the modern capital of Guatemala, now stands. The badly damaged city was ordered abandoned, although not everyone left.

Click here for more on Antigua.

The “new” city is still reminiscent of an earlier time with cobblestone streets and people retrieving firewood from the surrounding mountains to cook their food. But the old ways are often overshadowed by the new. It is not only the smoke from thousands of stoves that dims the view of the nearby volcanoes and makes one long for a breath of clean air, it is the diesel belching from thousands old cars and buses.

While we were in Antigua we stayed at the home of Delia Ramirez de Parada and Carlos Enrique Parada. They provided us with good food, fine company, and comfortable accommodations. We could not have asked for anything better.

The entrance to their house is directly on the street (to the left in the photo of the courtyard). A covered tiled walkway runs along the side and back of an open courtyard. The bedrooms are off this side hall. This is a view from my room.

At the end of the back hall there is a sink that serves for both the kitchen and the laundry. The door to the right is the bathroom. The next door is the kitchen and to the right (out of the photo) is the dining room.

The house has a tin roof. It is spacious, elegant and simple. It is the house Delia was born in.

We would like to have stayed longer.