My two sons and I spent the last ten days traveling in Guatemala with a friend who runs a nonprofit which brings Guatemalan students to the US to learn English and go to high school. Guatemalan society is divided into three main strata; the descendants of the families of the original Spanish oligarchy, the mixed race ladinos, and the largely marginalized indigeneous descendants of the Maya, for most of whom Spanish, if they speak it, is a second language.
We stayed for three days in El Estor, a sleepy little town on the shores of Lago Izabel, the largest lake in Guatemala. The proprietor of our motel , Raul, had been born on the other side of the lake and spent thirty years in Rhode Island before returning two years ago. Like many middle to upper class Guatemalans his family had left at the onset of Guatemala’s twenty five year civil war. Raul is a friendly garrulous man who took us on a boat ride, told us of local attractions and generally helped make our stay in El Estor enjoyable.
One evening he told us of an incident in Rhode Island in which his son had been arrested for a minor infraction. When he went to retrive him from jail a ” racist cop” made comments about hispanics and shoved his son. Raul then hit the policeman and ended up in jail, though later exonerated because the incident had been on video.
In several conversations Raul warned us about ” the indigenous”, that they were thieves and generally the cause of most problems in the community. At one point he even said, ” those damned indians”. The word indian is considered a post colonial slur by the indigenous. Some indigenous are squatting on land owned by a Canadian mining company at the edge of town. The mine is to be reopened in a couple of years and Raul is certain that the army will have to come in to remove the squatters and that Greenpeace and others will come in to make an international incident and accusing Guatemala of mistreating its indigenous people.
I like Raul. I wish I had known him well enough to have a discussion about the blatant hypocrisy of his attitudes- and given our history, the hypocrisy of this country accusing another of mistreating its indigenous peoples.
And where lurking in my own mind is a little of Raul.
