In March of 2003 I traveled to Guatemala with my aunt, Jennifer De Leon. 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. Guatemala, the country of origin of my father’s family, seemed exotic, an adventure, and would allow me to meet my hitherto unknown relatives and immerse myself in Spanish.
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’d 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 that was supposed to meet us was missing. So Jen and I found a cheap hotel and collapsed.
The next morning cast a more friendly 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. However, 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 were honored guests, but I couldn’t 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.
But 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 sickened by this, and by my naïveté, but I also began cultivating an understanding of my great-grandmother and grandfather’s reluctance to speak of Guatemala, and their willingness to Americanize the family. They were indios, considered lazy, dirty and ignorant, the lowest of the low, in their own country. They wanted to forget. They wanted to start over.
I’ve 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 spanning the Samalá River, flooding its banks from heavy rain. He survived this ordeal, but not without a spanking.
Leonel has also told me about his father, Miguel 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. Miguel 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 Miguel’s, for obvious reasons, and I have copies of some incredibly cute photos of a three-year-old Leonel boxing himself, delivering a right 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 though Mexico. Apparently a Mexican soldier began 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 and was in labor for three days before giving birth to the whopping ten-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. She 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’ 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 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 Miguel’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, Miguel 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 don’t 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.
