On May 14, 1998, my paternal great-grandmother, Zoila Malekos, passed away. I felt a great sense of loss; I was thirteen years old at the time and had never had the chance to get to know her fully. There was a slight language barrier—English was her second language, and she was much more comfortable speaking Spanish. My grief was also compounded by the loss of family knowledge that Zoila carried with her. She had emigrated from Guatemala to the United States with her son, my grandfather, in 1944. A link to the past, in essence much of our family history, had been lost with her. However, my great-grandmother’s death prompted me to learn Spanish, travel to Guatemala, and study Latin America, a course I have continued to follow through my college career.
A few weeks before Zoila passed away, my aunt, Jennifer De León, had arranged to meet with her, armed with a tape recorder and questions about our heritage. She intended to gather stories and information, names and dates, and the reason behind her leaving Guatemala. Zoila died before they were able to talk to one another.
My research for this project has been a continuation of my aunt’s efforts. I have conducted telephone interviews with relatives in an attempt to piece together our history, before it is lost further or forgotten completely. I have spoken with my grandfather, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Unfortunately, my grandpa, Leonel, the last link to Guatemala, is extremely reticent when it comes to sharing information; he is to this day afraid of deportation.
These talks with my family have shed light upon our history and that of Guatemala, especially the social strata of the country, United States intervention, and the widespread racism, originally set in place by the colonial Spanish, that holds to this day. Through the lens of my ancestry I have come to better understand my family’s country of origin, my family, and myself. My travels to Guatemala and the interviews with family that I have conducted have led me to examine the realities and perceptions of race in the country, the history behind it, and the impact this had within the last century.
Growing up, there was a prevalent duality when it came to my relatives—my mother’s side consisted of Irish and German immigrants settled on the east coast; my father’s, as previously mentioned, from Guatemala, Spanish-speakers living on the west coast. I was quite a surprise when I was born; everyone assumed I would arrive looking like my dad—olive-skinned and dark-haired. However, some strong recessive Irish genes won out, leaving me red-haired and freckled, a fact that makes me stick out like a sore thumb at De León family reunions; it also confuses people into thinking that my last name is French.
Despite my appearance, I have always been aware of my Guatemalan heritage, even if it is not talked about or acknowledged that much among my family. Yet simply knowing where my family came from was not enough. There has always been secrecy, even outright lies, concerning the story of my family, most of which has to do with my great-grandmother and grandfather’s illegal entrance into the United States. Much is denied, and hardly anything explained. I share the same feelings with my aunt Jennifer, who stated that we are “disconnected; it is isolating not feeling like family, or knowing our story.” So we decided to take action.
In February of 2003 I traveled to Guatemala with Jen. I had graduated high school a semester early; I was disenchanted with the public education system, but most of my angst came from living in Southern Pines, NC, basically a golf retirement town in the Sand Hills of the state. I was ready for an adventure, but the driving force behind the trip was the disconnection we both felt, and an urge to find the answers to our questions of heritage from the source. Along with immersing ourselves in Spanish, we would meet the family we never knew, and hopefully solve some familial mysteries in the process.
The flight into Guatemala City was one of the most frightening of my life—La Aurora International Airport sits at over 5,000 feet. You weave your way through mountains, including the active Pacaya volcano, fly low over the capital, and drop steeply onto a short runway situated in a valley. Unbeknownst to me, that was the easiest part of the journey.
After making our way through customs and having our passports stamped, Jen and I headed outside to hail a taxi. At this point I was shocked into silence, and I found that my four years of high school Spanish had escaped my mind. Everything was new to me and confusing—sights, smells, sounds, everything. Guatemala City is sprawling, filled with people, tall office buildings and lean-to shantytowns, smoggy and dirty. I was struck dumb by the sight of a child, no more than three years old, standing in the middle of four lanes of traffic. His face was painted like a clown; he was crying and dodging traffic, trying to sell balloons to the passing vehicles. I took this as a bad omen, a not-so-nice welcome to Guatemala.
Our first mission was to check into the American embassy, just in case. My aunt, having much less knowledge of Spanish than I, became frustrated and copped an attitude with the cabbie. He swindled us, but got us to the embassy.
Outside, at least fifty Mayan women with children in tow were trying to gain entry, but to no avail. Jen and I walked straight in, with no hassle. I could feel the steely glares from the women behind us, boring into the backs of the privileged gringas. I felt sick to my stomach, guilty and afraid.
We were not staying in the city, however, and bought tickets and boarded a bus that would take us to Quetzaltenango, in the western highlands of the country. There waited El Centro Maya de Idiomas, the Spanish school Jen and I would be attending, and hopefully our family whom we had never met.
I was exhausted, but coming slightly out of my culture-shock stupor. I remember winding through the mountains, catching glimpses of small towns and milpas, the crop-growing fields of the Maya, focused on corn production. We arrived after dark, to find that the school representative who was supposed to meet us was missing. So Jen and I found a cheap hotel and collapsed.
The next morning cast a friendlier and welcoming glow on our new surroundings. Quetzaltenango, also known as Xelajú (Xela for short), is situated in a valley surrounded by hills, hot springs, and volcanoes—Santa María and the active Santiaguito. Much of the colonial Spanish architecture survives, and through hilly, cobbled streets, munching on freshly made tortillas from a street vendor, we navigated our way to El Centro Maya de Idiomas (now known as El Centro Maya Xela).
We arrived and were greeted by our new teachers, who for three weeks would give us one-on-one Spanish lessons. El Centro is completely Mayan-run (K’iche’, Q’anjob’al, Kaqchikel, Tzutujil, and Mam), and their profits go to education scholarships for young indigenous girls. Jen and I were also placed with a local host family, whom we stayed with until be were able to locate and contact our family.
After two weeks or so, and lots of phone calls and digging by my instructor Gregorio, we contacted our Aunt Elvira, who lived on the outskirts of the city. She was extremely excited to meet us, and offered to let Jen and I stay at her house for the duration of our stay in Xela.
Elvira greeted us like long-lost daughters—she hugged us, cried, told us how pretty we were, cried some more, and finally offered us food. Elvira is short and stout with dyed red-purple hair, at the time in her late 50s, very proud of her home (which remains “under construction,” with scaffolding every where and a dangerously unfinished staircase, in order to avoid taxes), and even more proud of her children and grandchildren. Under her roof she housed my cousins: Rony, an architecture student at the university and a few years older than I; Mariana, sixteen, shy, and enamored with our American clothes; Pamela, extremely quiet and seemingly deathly afraid of the gringas, and Krisia, smart as a whip, outspoken and hilarious, both 8 years old.
I was overwhelmed by this welcome, but I was incredibly happy—I’d never felt such a sense of family, especially from people who were literally complete strangers to me. That would come to change, and within a week, we were just that: familia. Elvira showed us off to all her neighbors, her ladies church group, and friends in the market down the street. Pamela, Krisia and I played with the neighborhood kids, who coined my nickname La Canchita Bonita (Canchita is the Spanish-ized version of the Mayan canche, can meaning yellow and che meaning tree, referring to my height and light hair). We would sit together in the market and sip atol, a hot, sweet drink made from corn, and listen in on the gossip between Elvira and the local vendors.
Jen and I were honored guests, but I could not help feeling that most of that honor came from the fact that we were white, or at least looked it on the outside. Before coming to Guatemala I had studied up on my history, knew about the deposition of Árbenz, the military junta of Castillo, and the resulting civil war that took hundreds of thousands of (mostly indigenous) lives. I thought I was educated and in the know, but in reality I had deluded myself into thinking that since the war was over, the peace accords signed, everything was put right.
I had no idea that a veritable caste system still existed in the country, with Mayans (known derisively as indios) at the bottom, ladinos, or those of mixed ancestry, in the middle, and pure-blooded Europeans at the top. Guatemala, and all of Latin America in general, began in colonial times structuring society around race, or, as I would put it, conceptions of race. I was flabbergasted to find this same system in place when I visited the country. According to Laura Matthew:
In Guatemala today, “indigenous” and “ladino” are typically understood as mutually exclusive categories. Being indigenous means belonging to an ethnic group with roots in the pre-Columbian past, such as the Maya or Xinca. Being ladino is, in the modern usage, an identity of negation: that is, not indigenous…“Indigenous” is associated with conquest and internal colonialism, while “ladino” is associated with full citizenship in and affiliation with the Guatemalan nation-state. (para. 1)
Julio Portillo, an uncle of mine in Quetzaltenango, referred to the Maya as “animals,” even though he himself is half indigenous—like my great-grandmother, the product of an affair between a well-off ladino and his servant. Elvira also alluded to the less-than-human attributes of the indios, even though she shares their ancestry, and is in fact unashamed to don traditional garb when selling goods in the marketplace. A few of my cousins here in the United States vehemently deny any trace of Mayan blood in our family tree, and basically told me I was crazy for thinking so.
I was sickened by this, and by my naïveté, but I also began cultivating an understanding of my great-grandmother and grandfather’s reluctance to speak about Guatemala, and their willingness to leave, to Americanize the family. They were indios, or at least partly so, and were considered lazy, dirty and ignorant, the lowest of the low, in their own country. They wanted to forget; they wanted a chance to start over. And it was through my studies at Appalachian State University that I gained a greater scope and knowledge of Guatemalan history and the underpinnings of race and class relations in the country.
The racism still so predominant in Guatemala today can be traced back to the Spanish conquest of the nation in 1524 and its subsequent colonial rule. Captain Pedro de Alvarado was placed in charge of exploration; his commander, Hernán Cortés, stressed that he “endeavor with the greatest care to bring the people to peace without war and to preach matters concerning our holy faith” (Perera 2). Alvarado did no such thing—his conquest of Guatemala became one of the bloodiest in all of Latin America, with he and his army betraying former Mayan allies, burning kings and nobles alive, committing outright massacres, and “stifling all resistance with their habitual brutality” (Perera 4).
Until his death in 1541, “Alvarado ruled and exploited Guatemala as if the country were his personal fief” (Lovell 76). The conquistador’s unchecked bloodshed was only outmatched by European diseases unknown to the New World, which often raced ahead of the conquerors and were responsible for killing more Mayas than the Spanish. All Mayan kingdoms had fallen by 1697 (Perera 4).
With the colonization of Guatemala underway, and Alvarado out of the way, the Spanish set forth to establish order and government. In the 1540s, they began a policy known as congregación or reducción, which entailed the congregation of scattered indigenous groups into more centralized towns (Lovell 76). This was mainly touted as something of a humanitarian mission, centralizing the Maya in order to ensure their conversion to Catholicism. However, the underlying motives of congregación were control and exploitation: it made easier the tasks of civil administration, such as “the enumeration of the native population, the payment of tribute, and the control of labor” (Lovell 76).
With the indigenous population now concentrated and controlled in townships and villages, the encomienda system was able to take hold. Grants of encomienda were usually given by the Crown to soldiers who had fought in the conquest, and were “a means by which privileged Spaniards enjoyed the right to exact tribute, and initially also labor, from a specified number of Indians” (Lovell 95). Tribute extracted from the Maya population enriched either an individual encomendero or the Spanish Crown; they were put to work in mines, fields, and Spanish households, and in hard times handed over what they had or entered debt peonage (Lovell 117).
Uprisings of abused laborers and veritable tribute slaves were not uncommon, and their revolts led to a second implementation of congregación, “aimed at breaking communal bonds by gathering the rebels from dispersed regions into closely supervised pueblos indios” (Perera 7). This new strategy of control would come back to haunt Guatemala in the 1980s, in the form of the model village program of the military, used in an attempt to quell dissent among insurgent communities of the Highland Maya; both the colonial and modern strategies of “forced nucleation of idiosyncratic Mayan communities not only undermined their cultural identity but also inflicted severe economic and environmental hardships” (Perera 7).
Thus the Spaniards set the groundwork for a country based on subjugation, of “varying degrees of servitude,” submission, and racial prejudice that were the god-given rights of the conquerors (Lovell 113). There was, however, a growing distinction being made among so-called pure-blooded Spaniards as well. The term criollo denotes “people in the Americas born of Spanish ancestry who were not offspring of mixed unions or marriages,” with stress placed on “new,” or recent arrivals from Spain, and “old,” the descendants of the conquistadors “who did not want to place themselves on the same level as the children of newly arrived adventurers” (Martínez Peláez 11).
Those criollos who mixed with the native population of Guatemala gave rise to the “mixed-breed ladinos,” beneath whom were indigenous principales charged with keeping order and collecting tribute from their lowly peasant brothers, “who were and continue to be the most cruelly exploited native underclass in the Americas” (Perera 7). This social structure has remained largely in place: “European (criollo) landowners and generals dominating the mixed-blood (ladino) administrators and officers, who in turn oppress the lowly Mayan campesinos, often through Indian intermediaries in the guise of labor contractors, pastors, army sergeants, and municipal officers” (Perera 5).
The colonial Spanish planted the seeds of a societal caste system based on race and the disproportionate distribution of land, and inequity continued to intensify even after Guatemala gained independence on September 15, 1821. “In the second half of the nineteenth century…a sustained peasant rebellion against colonial and post-independence structures and institutions” led to the rise of Rafael Carrera (Perera 8). He seized power in 1840, backed my Mayan campesinos who overran the capital and criollo- and ladino-owned farms; Carrera ruled until his death in 1865, “directly and through puppet presidents,” and while the land-owning elite was left “shaken but unmoved,” little was achieved in the way of land reform (Perera 8). Yet Carrera did have a lasting impact on the country, one that directly affected the civil war of the coming century. As stated by Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.:
Carrera’s military adventures, however, allowed him to build up the army as the most powerful of Guatemalan institutions, with a Ladino officer class separate from the creole elite that dominated political, economic, and social power. This emergence of Ladinos in the military and political leadership of the country is certainly one of the most lasting legacies of the Carrera period and one that has persisted to the present. (461)
As well as forming the majority of the army, “ladinos became the enforcers of postcolonial republican policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of which maintained the segregation between indigenous and non-indigenous Guatemalans,” a factor that paved the way for Liberal Justo Rufino Barrios to usurp the land of Guatemala’s Mayan population (Matthew para. 2).
Barrios came to power in 1873. About the only liberal tendencies that can be found in him were his efforts at the separation of church and state and his commitment to modernization, which included the building of railways. He dedicated most of his time to preparing Guatemala for large-scale coffee production by driving indigenous people “off of their lands to make room for the new crop,” while “vagrancy laws were tightened to exact more forced labor needed for the blushing berries” (Krehm 30). Coffee fincas, or farms, began to dominate the Guatemalan landscape.
By dissolving Mayan land titles and passing debt-peonage statutes, Barrios created an “army of seasonal laborers” that supplied the ever-growing coffee industry (Perera 8). His laws remained in place until 1934, but they did their job in creating a “coffee-centered economy that controlled 14 percent of the world trade by 1905 and accounted for 85 percent of Guatemala’s annual export revenues” (Perera 9).
The coffee boom further increased the societal and economic gap between the indigenous population, ladinos, and the criollo elite. “To maintain the uneasy truce between the Indian majority and the Spanish-speaking ladino shopkeepers, labor contractors, and landlords, soldiers garrisoned towns” along the railways of Guatemala (Cullather 9).
However, “the coffee market collapsed in 1930” and “ladinos needed a strong leader to prevent restive, unemployed laborers from gaining an upper hand” (Cullather 9). Enter Jorge Ubico, the last of the Liberal rulers who came to power in 1931 and paved the way for Guatemala’s status as a banana republic.
While Liberal “reforms” imposed by Barrios and his successors, Manuel Lisandro Barillas and José María Reynas Barrios, had laid the foundation for United Fruit to build its “Guatemalan empire,” Jorge Ubico truly opened Guatemala’s doors to the company (Dosal 17). The Liberal dream of modernizing Guatemala required huge amounts of capital, which United Fruit gladly provided by building-up their distribution networks throughout the country, which “included plantations, railways, telegraph lines, housing, hospitals and ports in the producing areas” (Bucheli 434).
Under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico, United Fruit reached the height of its monopolistic strength: the company owned “566,000 acres on both coasts” and was in control of all railroad networks and the nation’s three ports (Dosal 11). Ubico assured United Fruit that there would be no government intrusion: “company executives could determine prices, taxes, and the treatment of workers without interference from the government. The United States Embassy approved and until the regime’s final years gave Ubico unstinting support” (Cullather 10).
But things were beginning to change in Guatemala. The landed-aristocracy that had for centuries controlled the country lost its authoritarian grip in March of 1945. Juan José Arévalo became the nation’s first democratically elected leader, whose guiding principles were “agrarian reform, protection of labor, a better educational system and consolidation of political democracy” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 37).
Labor and land reform began under Arévalo, whose task was a huge one: “two percent of the landowners held 72 percent of the land, and 90 percent of the people together owned just 15 percent of the productive acreage;” labor patterns of the rural indigenous population still mirrored the practices of the colonial Spanish, and “were only barely distinguishable from involuntary servitude” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 38). While land redistribution occurred and labor reform helped some workers in urban areas, the effect of these actions did not occur on such a large scale that the majority of poor rural Guatemalans experienced positive change. Arévalo did, however, show the country that government could work on their behalf (Schlesinger and Kinzer 42).
In the meantime, United Fruit continued to grow. By the 1950s, the company “controlled directly or indirectly nearly 40,000 jobs” and “functioned as a state within a state, owning Guatemala’s telephone and telegraph facilities;” it was estimated that the company had $60 million invested in the country (Schlesinger and Kinzer 12). “To the Guatemalans it appeared that their country was being mercilessly exploited by foreign interests which took huge profits without making any significant contributions to the nation’s welfare” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 73).
The man who intended to put a stop to the United Fruit Company and spearhead land reform was Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who assumed the presidency in March of 1951:
Democratically elected and reform-minded, Árbenz had ideas about how to modernize Guatemala that ran counter to the interests of the United Fruit Company, and thus the United States government. The Eisenhower Administration arranged for the Central Intelligence Agency to plan and implement a coup, a defining moment in the history not only of Guatemala but of all Latin America. (Lutz and Lovell xiii-xiv)
These “ideas” of modernization were largely based around Decree 900, the agrarian reform bill that empowered the government to seize “uncultivated portions of large plantations;” land taken would be paid for with government bonds, while its value was determined “from its declared taxable worth as of May 1952—a provision that deeply disturbed some targets of the law, especially United Fruit, which had undervalued its land for years in order to reduce its tax liability” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 54).
These measures were seen as necessary in order to wrest control of land out of United Fruit’s hands, and place it back in Guatemalan control in order to economically benefit the people of the nation. Alfonso Bauer Paiz, Minister of Labor and Economy, summed up the general sentiment in the country: “The United Fruit Company is the principal enemy of the progress of Guatemala, of its democracy and of every effort directed at its economic liberation” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 73).
Needless to say, United Fruit was not happy and began “working quietly but effectively to convince the American government that Árbenz was a threat to freedom and must be deposed” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 77). Charges of communist influence that surrounded the president did nothing to help his situation, even though the Communist Party did not, in reality, hold that much sway in Guatemala. Nonetheless, United Fruit spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and publicists in the hopes of convincing Americans that “something evil was afoot in Guatemala” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 97).
The propaganda of United Fruit certainly made an impression on the American government. “For close to a year the Eisenhower administration laid the groundwork for overthrowing Árbenz’s government,” and they accomplished the task in 1954 (Immerman 161). Árbenz was replaced by a military junta headed by Carlos Castilla Armas, who paved the way for military presidents Romeo Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt, and Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, all architects of the civil war that would grip the country during the sixties, last more than thirty years, and result in “120,000 Guatemalans killed, and another 46,000 disappeared and unaccounted for” (Perera 9).
Millions of refugees left Guatemala. 440 indigenous villages were wiped off of the map. The United States funded, armed, and trained police forces, death squads and anti-guerilla campaigns, whose missions were to eradicate the communist threat (Schlesinger and Kinzer 253). A defeatist air pervaded Latin American: why even try for democracy if you will simply be overthrown?
As in the past five hundred years, the Maya population and the poor took the brunt of the civil war, and as I discovered in Guatemala, the peace accords, while ending most of the violence, did not end the racism and classism pervasive in the country.
The circular history of subjugation, genocide and conquest in Guatemala, from colonial times to the present, has shaped my life in many ways. In a sense, it led to my existence; my family history is rooted in the country, as well as their flight from it. My connection to Guatemala, along with my abhorrence of pure greed causing inequity, violence and death, led to a college career in International Studies in the Third World, specifically Latin America, and Spanish. Half of my life thus far has been dedicated to illuminating my family’s country of origin, understanding the conditions that created it and shape it to this day, and ultimately understanding myself.
But the sad fact remains that Guatemala, from its colonial beginnings, has not enjoyed a happy history. Yet the act of gathering my family history has helped to brighten the darkness that has enveloped the country for centuries. It has been an act of reclamation, a denunciation of the death and devastation that has haunted Guatemala for so long; it has given me something to be proud of. At heart, my foray into my ancestry has been an affirmation of life—my life, my family’s, and of all the people of Guatemala, past and present.
I have grown up with a few family stories concerning my great-grandmother Zoila and her son, my grandfather, Leonel. Details (some rather glaring ones such as time, place, and family involved) change from relative to relative, and my grandpa has never been forthright in talking about life in Guatemala, or his mother’s life before they came to the United States.
He has however, told me snippets, small things that cast the tiniest light on his childhood. His favorite pan dulce, or sweet bread, was semita de anis, an anise flavored bun found in bakeries all over Quetzaltenango. He remembers waking up on winter mornings and having to break through a layer of ice that covered his washbasin. At four years old he decided to run away from home and hopped on his tricycle. Zoila finally tracked him down, and to her horror found him tottering over the edge of a bridge, flooding its banks from heavy rain. He survived this ordeal, but not without a spanking.
Leonel has also told me about his father, Leon Archelao, whom I never met. He owned a photo studio in town and allowed my grandfather to tag along with him. Miguel’s line of work provided my family with many pictures, a godsend, in my mind, because it has provided me with some semblance of a window into the past, some sort of proof that yes, my family was there.
It is, however, extremely difficult to tease information out of my grandfather, for him to identify family members in the photos, when and where and why they were taken. He focuses more on the photographic techniques my great grandfather used in the studio. Leon apparently had a lot of fun working with double exposure, a process that produces a ghost image, or two superimposed images in one photograph. My grandfather was a favorite model of Leon’s, for obvious reasons, and I have copies of some incredibly cute photos of a three-year-old Leonel boxing himself, delivering a left hook to his doppelganger’s forehead. Another set shows my grandpa in overalls on a ladder, holding a light over his posing double self, showing off his skills and proficiency working in the studio.
Beyond this I have only one more story from my grandfather. This is the closest he has come to telling me anything about the journey from Guatemala to the United States, and only, I believe, because it is humorous. Zoila and Leonel were traveling by train through Mexico. Apparently a Mexican soldier was hassling my great grandmother, basically putting the moves on her. Leonel, at ten years old, would not abide this, and decided, as best he could, to protect his mother’s honor. He approached the officer, whom he loudly (and ironically, I might add) addressed as a “bean-eater,” and told him to leave Zoila alone. My grandpa finds this episode hilarious, and luckily for them, the soldier did too. He laughed off the insult and did not cause any trouble for the mother and son.
My great grandmother shared a few memories with me as well. Growing up incredibly poor, one of her favorite stories was of how she saved the family from starvation. Her mother could not find work, and there was hardly any money or food, aside from a few stringy hens. Zoila, thinking ahead, scraped up what little money they had and came home with a rooster and chicken feed. Apparently the rooster whipped the hens into shape, and the increase in eggs gave the family something to eat and sell.
Zoila had Leonel when she was eighteen years old. She was in labor for three days before giving birth to a whopping thirteen-pound baby boy. She told me that she thought she was going to die, and in reality very well could have. She also had an overpowering craving for oranges throughout the ordeal. Zoila said she ate more oranges than she could count. I always found this mysterious, but after gleaning the internet for information on vitamin C and its effects on labor, it made sense: apparently it can cut down on the duration and pain of child birth.
Zoila also told me about her father’s plantation. Apparently he kept a few head of cattle on his property, one of which was a bad-tempered bull that nearly gored my great grandmother. She laughed as she told me that that night they had steak for dinner.
And that is about that when it comes to what my great-grandmother and grandfather have told me about their lives in Guatemala. As much as I loved hearing these stories, they only seemed to raise more questions than answers. Where was my great-grandfather when Zoila and Leonel were traveling to the United States? How could Zoila and her family be starving when her father was wealthy and owned a farm? This is where other relatives come in, aunts, uncles, cousins, who have filled in the gaps in whispers, and usually behind the backs of my grandfather and great grandmother.
I came to find out after Zoila’s death that she was the illegitimate child of the plantation owner in question. Her mother, a K’iche’ or Mam Maya from Huehuetenango, worked for him, probably as a maid or cook, and had my great-grandmother early in her life. He did not provide for them financially and never officially acknowledged Zoila as his daughter. However, I’ve been told she was his favorite child and that he doted on her considerably, hence steaks for dinner after she was nearly killed by a bull on the farm. The flip side of Zoila’s illegitimacy was having to sell eggs in order to keep her family afloat.
While in Guatemala, it became increasingly apparent that not a single member of my family shared with me the last name of De León. They are all Castros and Méridas, so I decided to ask my aunt Elvira about this discrepancy. She told me that before leaving the country, my grandfather and great grandmother were living in an apartment building. One of the tenants passed away, a Mr. De León, and Zoila was somehow able to get hold of his papers, and essentially a new identity.
This was shocking news to me, but however illegal her actions were, I am proud of my great-grandmother’s craftiness and will to survive. It did not hurt either to finally know that I am in no way, however loosely, related to Ponce de León, the famed Spanish explorer whom I’ve despised since childhood for his incredibly inhumane treatment of New World inhabitants.
My family’s flare for the embellishment of our history came to light as well when questioning my Guatemalan relatives. Years before heading to Quetzaltenango, I had discovered a portrait of my young grandfather with a beautiful woman who was most definitely not my grandmother. Apparently it had been taken in Leon’s photo studio, and on the back read thus (translated from Spanish): “To Leonel and Julieta, from your father, on your wedding day. With love, Leon Archelao.”
Julieta was my grandpa’s first wife, whom I (and the rest of my family, for that matter) had never known about. I asked Elvira what became of her, and was told that the marriage was not a stable one. My grandfather had abandoned her not long after they were married, and Julieta, distraught, starved herself to death. That to say the least was a punch in the gut.
When I returned from Guatemala I spent about a week with my grandpa. I convinced him to go through our family photos with me, and I sneakily placed the old wedding portrait on the top of the pile. I asked Leonel who the pretty lady was, and he answered that she was his first wife. So far, so good. When I asked him what had ended their marriage, he simply stated that they were young and got married in a hurry; they were not meant for each other and eventually drifted apart. Interestingly enough, he added as an aside that she became a vegetarian and got progressively skinnier and skinnier.
To this day I do not know whom to believe. I will say that my aunt Elvira loves juicy gossip, often grisly gossip. I had to literally cover my little cousins’ ears on multiple occasions when she described, in gruesome detail, gang killings in the capital or stories from the war. My grandpa, on the other hand, has never been fully forthcoming with the truth, and the “suicide by starvation” account and my grandfather’s vegetarian comment are too tantalizing a coincidence to ignore.
While these family stories are colorful, to say the least, they do not shed much light on hard facts: the who, what, where, whens and whys. I have been able, through interviews with my father and aunt, to piece together a more coherent and linear history, less anecdotal, concerning Zoila and Leonel’s life in Guatemala. The following account is the product of an interview with my aunt Jen.
Zoila, though born in Huehuetenango, spent much of her early life on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, where her father’s farm was located. His name is given as Tomás del Cid. His wife, Evangelina, knew of Zoila’s illegitimacy, and because of this physically abused her. She was sent back to Guatemala when she was twelve years old.
Upon her return, Zoila discovered that her mother had remarried. She had two new half-siblings, and the family was barely making ends meet. This is where the “egg story” comes in, and it was due to her time on her father’s farm that Zoila had the know-how to raise chickens.
Most of Zoila’s early teen years seem to be a blank. When she was around seventeen years old she was courted by an Archelao, but not Leon. She had fallen in love with one of his brothers, whose name is unknown. He left her for another woman, so Zoila began seeing Leon. Sadly it seemed to be a loveless union, one of convenience, and because of the difficulty of my grandfather’s birth, Zoila vowed never to have any more children.
Leon Archelao was a travelling photographer. He spent most of his time taking pictures of large-scale plantations around Guatemala. Portraiture brought in some money on the side. At some point during his time in Quetzaltenango, Leon was imprisoned. I am unsure of the reason behind his imprisonment, but it is clear that Zoila made such a fuss with the higher-ups that they eventually released him. After this incident they left the country and moved to Mexico City.
From here, my father Richard De Leon picked up the story. It was in Mexico that they were able to assume the identity and name of De Leon, and in 1944 traveled by train to San Francisco. My great-grandfather’s photography skills were apparently quite helpful in producing realistic looking documents. Leon left before Zoila and Leonel, and assured them that he would meet them at the station when they arrived. This proved to be a lie.
Zoila, in an alien country, speaking no English, spent days tracking down Leon. She discovered him living with another woman, and cut all ties to him then and there.
Within a few weeks she had found an apartment and work, apparently in a factory that made dolls. Zoila’s boss, a German immigrant, ironically harbored a hatred of foreigners, and treated her poorly. She left and found work in a textile factory.
During her early days in San Francisco, Zoila learned English from the radio, television, and the public at large. She never took any formal classes. Sometime in the 1950s she earned a cosmetology license and worked as a hairdresser. She was incredibly proud of this achievement, and kept her license current up to the day she died.
This is the story as my father and aunt know it. But in a surprising (and happy) turn of events during my research for this project, my grandfather opened up to me at the eleventh hour, only a few days before this paper was due. A very long phone conversation filled in some of the cracks in the above account of their lives and brought to light stories I had been completely unaware of. I am grateful to him for trusting me and sharing his story, even if there are discrepancies between his account and those of other relatives.
Knowing Leonel’s reluctance to talk about his life in Guatemala, I framed my first questions around the topics of race and labor in the country. When I mentioned Barrios, he immediately stated that “the Mayans were taken from our part of the country to another they knew nothing about. They were treated like slaves.”
I pushed further and asked if he remembered any tension between criollos, ladinos, and Mayans when he lived in Quetzaltenango. This was his reply:
Ladino people had convinced themselves that they had no Indian in them. It was not safe to be Indian, you couldn’t be an Indian, and it wouldn’t do you any good to get ahead in life by acknowledging that. People acted like they weren’t aware that we all had some Indian blood in us, most people do, of course, but they hide it.
I received no mention about our family heritage from him, whether Zoila’s mother was Mayan, and if so whether she was K’iche’ or Mam. However, his acknowledgment that “we all had some Indian blood in us” was telling enough, and no matter how fractional this heritage may be, it is still there. That may be as close to an admission as I will get, outside of complete denial.
In response to the turbulence after Árbenz was deposed, Leonel told me this:
Lots of things would happen, and the government would blame the Indians, saying they were communists. I remember an entire family that was massacred, and they blamed these communist Indians. But people knew they had nothing to do with it. The CIA was responsible, or they at least had others do it for them.
The floodgates seemed to be opening bit by bit, after years of near-complete silence, and my grandfather continued. “In Quetzaltenango people were disappearing left and right.” He then told me about a relative I never knew I had. A brother of Leon Archelao had two sons, Dario and Frederico. Dario made it out of Guatemala around the same time as Leonel; he lived in San Francisco for years and is now settled in Denver with his family. My grandfather shared with me the story of this hitherto unknown relative:
Frederico, we called him Rico, was the athletic and intelligent one in the family. His parents were both teachers. They were also radio announcers and were very politically active. Rico became involved in this as well, and one night, sometime in the late 1950s, maybe 1958, he was out after curfew. He was shot and killed by the police. They chased him back to his house and shot him as he was trying to climb through a window.
Another story came from Guatemala City, when Leonel was 16 or 17 years old, which meant he had returned to Guatemala a few years after making it to California, something I never knew. This episode probably occurred right before or right after Árbenz was ousted:
I was sitting in a restaurant across from a park eating breakfast. There was a large pyramid in the park. All of a sudden a bunch of people came running and screaming. Then I heard gunfire. And then a tank suddenly appeared in the park, with its gun pointing right at me. I started running too. There were lots of times when people started shooting in Guatemala City. The Presidential Palace was full of bullet holes, and bigger holes from larger ammunition.
These two stories are all of what my grandfather said about the violence at the time. But it was more than I had ever heard, and it has affected me deeply. I had always assumed that my family had escaped the coup and the resulting civil war relatively unscathed. Anger, disgust and sadness filled me as he recounted these stories. Just thinking about it makes me want to cry and leaves me sick to my stomach.
We then moved on to the subject of his parents, and I was able to glean more information about Zoila and Leon. What I learned about my great-grandmother from my aunt and father largely matched up with what Leonel told me. However, he completely avoided the subject of her illegitimacy, and gave a different reason for her leaving her father’s farm and moving back to Guatemala:
Zoila’s mom remarried when they were in Mexico. Her husband was abusive, and one day she saw him hitting her mom. So Zoila picked up a stick and cracked it over his head. She knocked him out and he had to be sent to a hospital. She obviously couldn’t stay with them after that, so her grandparents sent for her and she went back to Huehuetenango. This was when she was eleven years old.
Abuse was the unifying factor for my great-grandmother’s return to Guatemala; one story involves her, the other, her mother. Yet I am more convinced by the story of the vindictive mistress; nonetheless, I respect my grandfather’s protection of her honor, at least as he sees it.
When asked about Leon’s line of work, my grandfather expanded the scope of his father’s photography business:
My dad traveled around the country and took pictures of the fincas. He would also photograph the management. And he wrote out books with the financial information and history of the farms. It was kind of like an annual report, except back then we had annual books. He would go back to each finca every year and do it all over again. Because he went from place to place, he had studios in Huehuetenango, Quetzaltenango, and Mazatenango.
And then, without even having to pry, he told me why Leon was imprisoned:
My dad was in Huehuetenango and was taking pictures of the military governor of the departamento. Instead of states we had departments. When he came to collect, they refused to pay him. He pressed them harder, so they arrested him and threw him in jail. My mom, because she was from Huehuetenango, knew the Ubico family, and they knew her. Jorge Ubico was president at the time, and your great-grandmother traveled to Guatemala City. You know how she was. She put up a fight with the president, and within the hour they released Leon from prison.
It was after this that my great-grandfather made his way to San Francisco. This was a very wise move, considering Ubico’s extremely heavy-hand: “Indians were shot for stealing pennies…‘communists’ (i.e. anyone thinking dangerous thoughts) were punished with death, often preceded by fanciful tortures” (Krehm 35).
Once in California, Leon “immediately got work because he was a master photographer. He stayed there for a few months, and then came to Mexico City to get all the paperwork started for us to come up as well.” My grandfather said he traveled to Mexico with his dad, but after a slight pause amended his statement:
Well, really my dad took off with me. He left Zoila in Quetzaltenengo and didn’t even tell her. He told her relatives not to tell her where we were, but she finally found out. She had a good friend who lived in Mexico City, whom she met up with. Within a week, in a city of millions, she made contact with us. They got back together after that.
At seven years old in 1944, Leonel remembers going to the American Embassy in Mexico City. “I was bored and looking at magazines. I was looking at pictures of these skeletal human beings, the victims of the Nazis in their death camps. Life magazine had blown up all these pictures, and at the time I didn’t know what to make of them.”
I asked him if he associated those images with the United States, if it scared him into not wanting to leave. “Oh, no, I wasn’t scared. I thought the United States, los Estados Unidos, was a big railroad train that people lived in. Unidos is like something connected, so I pictured this giant train, with lots of connected cars, big enough for everyone to live in. This was the picture I had of the United States.” He chuckled remembering this.
And sure enough, my grandfather and his mother were able to board a train that brought them to this country. Leon, as my father believed, handled all of the “paperwork,” putting to use his photography skills. Leonel told me that before they arrived in San Francisco, the train made a stop in El Paso, Texas. “That’s where I discovered American comic books and Bugs Bunny,” he said. “I liked them a lot.” I enjoy the thought of my seven-year-old grandpa becoming addicted to comics, keeping him out of great-grandma’s hair on the train-ride to California.
Leonel didn’t mention anything about his father’s infidelity, if it did occur. The fact that his father basically kidnapped him is not an indication of a healthy relationship, which I suspect was already on the rocks. When Zoila arrived in San Francisco, she and Leon immediately got divorced. This was a defining moment for my grandfather, who was more attached to his father:
Back then they always gave custody to the woman. I made a scene in court. I cried and yelled and screamed. I wanted to hit the judge. An officer had to hold me back. Zoila didn’t really care, so I went to live with my dad. I think that was good for her; it gave her some freedom.
According to Leonel, my great-grandfather had two studios in San Francisco that were quite well-known. One was on 24th and Mission; apparently the building is still there, as well as the sign. The other studio Leon co-owned with a partner, a woman named Elsie Kaiser.
My grandpa thinks very highly of Elsie:
She was like a stepmom to me. She helped me blend into American society. Elsie clued me in on customs. But the biggest thing was learning English. Every week she would make up lists of twenty-five words. At night dad would study with me, and she would test us on Sundays. She taught me how to say “strawberry” correctly, instead of “es-trawberry.” Elsie also taught me the difference between “chicken” and “kitchen”. I had a hard time with that one. It took me years to get it straight. I don’t know why. Same thing with “refrigerator.”
From this story I feel it is safe for me to assume that Leon and Elsie were a couple—they were living together and also business partners. My grandfather’s reluctance to state such things plainly is his way of casting a kinder light on his parents. It also puts his near kidnapping into perspective—his father had already started a new life in the United States, hence his abandonment of Zoila. But, as my great-grandmother proved again and again, she was tenacious and indomitable, not a woman to be trifled with. I am nevertheless grateful to Elsie for taking my grandfather under her wing, and making his transition into American life a bit smoother.
According to my grandpa, Zoila took years of English classes. But he said that when she met her husband, George Malekos, the son of Greek immigrants and a veteran of World War II, “she learned a lot faster.” She did attend beauty school, and her pride in this achievement was based on her difficulty with learning the English language. According to my grandfather:
She was having a really hard time. But she had a memory that could beat us all. She memorized everything her teachers gave her. And Zoila passed with the best grades in her class. My mom told me that the one woman in class who laughed at her, made her feel insecure about her English, well, she was the only that flunked. That was mom’s revenge.
Zoila and George did well for themselves. They eventually saved up enough money to purchase an apartment building in Noe Valley, which they rented out. These apartments housed many De Leon family reunions, as my great-grandmother rented a few of the spaces to family that managed to leave Guatemala.
My grandfather Leonel had four children: my dad, aunt Jen, Daniel and Roderick. But he chose to raise them with hardly any knowledge of Guatemala; he did not teach them Spanish. I asked my father how he felt about this and he immediately blurted out the word “cheated.”
He went on to explain how he empathized with his dad, because he had grown up in a similar environment—he was one of the few non-Hawaiian kids in his Hawaiian hometown, which he compared to an Indian reservation. He too felt the need to fit in and was discriminated against, made to feel different and inferior for something he most definitely could not help. “That’s a lot of mixed emotions,” he said, “but I still feel some resentment, a sense of loss.”
My research into our family history, in the beginning based on my own interest and need for preservation for progeny’s sake, has served to lessen the feelings of loss, disconnection, and isolation that have marked my life and the lives of my father and aunt. I shared any and all new information I discovered with them, and they never failed to thank me.
I have discovered that my family history is not pristine. Much like Guatemala’s history, it is messy, marked by violence, racism, intrigue, defeat and betrayal. But in a way this negativity makes the hope, tenacity and pride, the will to live and the need to be free, shine even brighter. It may not be the whole truth, but piece by piece I hope we De Leóns can continue to develop a greater sense of wholeness, individually and as a family. I hope the people of Guatemala can do the same.
Works Cited
Bucheli, Marcelo. "Multinational corporations, totalitarian regimes and economic
nationalism: United Fruit Company in Central America, 1899–1975." Business History 50.4 (2008): 433-454. Web. 4 Apr 2011.
Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Print.
De León, Leonel. Phone interview. 22 April 2011.
De León, Jennifer. Phone interview. 5 March 2011.
De León, Richard. Phone interview. 6 March 2011.
Dosal, Paul J. Doing Business with Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 1899-1944. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1993. Print.
Immerman, Richard H. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982. Print.
Krehm, William. Democracies and Tyrannies of the Caribbean. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1984. Print.
Lovell, W. George. Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500-1821. Rev. ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992. Print.
Lutz, Chistopher H. and W. George Lovell. Introduction. La Patria Del Criollo: An
Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala. By Severo Martínez Peláez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009. xiii-xlv.
Martínez Peláez, Severo. La Patria Del Criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009. Print.
Matthew, Laura. "Mexicanos and the Meanings of Ladino in Colonial Guatemala."
Journal of Colonialsim and Colonial History 7.1 (2006): n. pag. Web. 7 March 2011.
Perera, Victor. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993. Print.
Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Print.
Woodward, Jr., Ralph Lee. Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821-1871. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993. Print.
