Guatemala Communiques 1998

Guatemala Prologue

To communicate the ideas rather than the images collected on the trip, I chose not to take a camera but a computer and cell phone. Images as photographs would limit me to an outside perspective looking into the experience and I wanted the work to evolve directly from the experience of this field trip. I also wanted those people involved by way of their support to be more directly connected via frequent email to my experiences. The following are the collected images edited from my email this summer:

Auspicious Start

Safety* has remained a constant concern. Other than a long, arduous and frustrating border crossing into Guatemala from Mexico, we have run into no difficulties. The one Guatemalan citizen of the team persuaded us cross the border at 6AM Sunday morning (that's 5AM Guatemalan time). The Mexican guards had to awaken the officials, who were sleeping off the night before behind the counter. When we reached the Guatemalan checkpoint, their officials were not there. When they arrived around 9:30, hung-over, the one in charge realized he had not brushed his teeth and went home to start over again. We got into Guatemala about noon.

It rained last night - a very encouraging sign. The entire way down everything we passed was parched and dry as a bone. This is normally two weeks into the rainy season here. Without rain our work will be severely hindered. I will get into some long thoughts about our work here - how and why it is done - latter. For now what is obvious is that the native environment or natural habitat here is virtually gone. The vast farming areas we drove through yesterday were rain forests only a few years ago. The sheer numbers of people here, along with a finca- or plantation-based rural economy, is devastating the fauna of this once pristine environment.

Driving down somewhere in the blur of southern Mexico we passed a man peeing facing the road, his back turned to a group of people. As we approached, the congregation was revealed for the most part to be seated facing away from the road. Between two old ramshackle adobe huts on a table (or maybe it was a bed...the image passed so fast) lay an old woman dressed all in white, her arms folded across her chest. We passed on down the highway.

* We left the Dallas area May 20th 1998 during the fires in Southern Mexico and Guatemala that blanketed the entire Southern United States and the area between with dense smoke.
*The uprising in Chiapas coupled with increased kidnappings and an attack on a group of US college students had almost canceled our trip.

Nenton (nen-'toon)

We have commented often on the number of young children on the streets. Not orphans, just the children of Nenton. Seems there must have been a gigantic baby boom just after the war. There are children everywhere from 6 or 7 years old down. I don't want to think about what will happen when these youngsters grow up, yet I can't help it. The land is being raped. This slash-and-burn process is leaving little to no top soil. There is no industry in the countryside. The cities are ringed with shanty towns. The prevailing image in the countryside is one of apocalypse. The freshly burned brush in a lava stone field conjures up images of Mad Max. What little wildlife remains is doomed; something we are powerless to change. Only to preserve.

I have always hoped that in some sense Art had the *power to change public consciousness. Being here, a stranger in a strange land, not speaking the language, observing a system whose time has run out, preserving dead specimens of nature that I would prefer to save alive, leaves me cold yet full of emotion in ways I am not yet able to communicate.*

We eat here in only one place, the Comedor Letty. It is worth describing in detail. Two garage door-size openings open onto the main street just off the town market. Everything is in one room, two open-fire cook stoves with no exhaust vents other than the open doors, four long tables with an assortment of chairs and benches, three upright cold drink machines that serve up luke-cool sodas, and one chest-like coke machine that serves as a refrigerator. One small sink serves to wash everything, meat and dishes. Someone brought in a live old rooster Saturday. After Letty haggled with its owner, it was today's caldo (soup). Many of the more rural people who stop in to eat seem shy and curious. Some just stand in the doorway and stare at the gringos. We are certainly a rarity here.

Yesterday Joe and I went to Letty's for a late lunch after we returned from the morning's hunt. Two apparently affluent travelers stopped in on their off-road BMWs. They parked each bike in front of a door, unloaded a flask, and covered one complete table with their garb before sitting down to order their lunch. The image of the gentry among the peasants was like one of Proust's flamboyant descriptions of understated class distinctions. They were pleasant enough gentlemen, ordering with a decisive manner and no familiarity. The entire air of Letty's went cool and distant, something unusual in my experience of our comedor. The gentlemen greeted Joe and me pleasantly as we left.

* Art in the flow of history has reflected change in society. In some instances Art has helped to provoke social change, as in Mapplethorpe's erotic images. Lines were drawn. Judgements were made. We see homoerotic in a new light. We will see a larger view through Art. The opportunity to provoke change is always there between the artist and the veiwer. It is a one on one experience. And for me Art is experience.
*this body of work ... writting and installation is the communication I was not then able to do then.

El Pena Blanca*

Our driver dropped us a mile above La Libertad high in the Montanas de Cuilcos. He said it was as far as his 4 wheel drive Toyota could take us.* So Eric, Joe, and I climbed one of the highest mountains in the Cuilcos, El Pena Blanca, to reach a small primary cloud forest at it's summit. Our steep shadeless path led us up through small plots of corn and by shack-like homes that appeared to be one room structures of rough planks, or adobe, or sticks with tin or thatch roofs.

Less than half way up we stopped at a tienda for some juice. Although I dont speak spanish and missed much of the humor, the lady who owned the tienda joked with Eric and Joe about it being the first time she had ever seen gringos on the mountain. All along the way you could hear the kids playing off in the distance but as we approached they would become quiet and just peer out from around the walls or doorways. Then when we past the laughter would continue.

The trail was steep. I would look up at a little hut then in a few minutes look down on the same place. Once, when we had passed a house unnoticed and reached a point just above, a woman came out to do some errand. As soon as she discovered us she immediately ran back inside. I thought in fear. But soon she returned with her 9 children to show them the strange sight of gringos on their mountain.

Latter when we reached the summit we worked in the small cloud forest* for only a short time, before an Indian farmer came along and asked what we were doing. When we explained he jumped in and helped. We found one frog a Plectrohyla guatemalensis (miles away from the nearest stream) before the clouds closed-in and it became to dark to hunt. So the farmer led us back along narrow ledges to his home. It was a 2 room adobe structure with a porch held up by 4 poles. Each pole had a calf or pig tied to it with chickens, turkeys, and dogs running all over the small yard. We were standing in his front yard ankle deep in shit. Beautiful flowers were in coffee-like cans all around and (were it not for the clouds) there must have been a spectacular view off in the distance to the Cutchamatanies. Then his family came out. There were 10 or 11 children* 1 woman and another man who wandered out of his home and stared at us. Although we tried no one else talked they just stared at the strange gringos. They were as dirty as the yard. Dirty muddy clothes and faces staring at us.

It is a hard image to remember and one I do not want to forget.....or remember.

The twin 9 year old boys both expressed a little impish curiosity with their eyes as their father reluctantly excepted a few Quetzales for his help. Joe shot some cute animal picture* (of some piglets I believe) before we started back down the mountain. *

*The three or four acres of EL Pena Blanca was the only primary cloud forest we saw in six weeks of feild research. It was actually the only primary forest of any sort we saw. Where our best opportunity to collect the biodiversity of Guatemala was in the primary forest.
*When we reached the summit two 4 wheel drive Toyotas were sitting beside homes on the top of the mountain. There was a road our driver admitted he knew of that went up the other side of El Pena Blanca.
*The average number of children for a rural indian family in Guatemala is 11 with a better than 80% survival rate. I know I have noted this in an earlier text but it deserves repeating.
*Joe's photographing the piglets helped distract us all from the strange gravity of that yard.
* My toes were forced together into the tips of my old boots giving me blisters between my big toes coming down the steep El Pena Blanca. They may not be relavant to the story but then again it is my footnote.

Todo Santos

We arrived in Todo Santos on a Saturday afternoon. The road into town winds down the mountain side into the seclusion of a mountain valley. Cradled high in the Cutchamatanies, Todo Santos seemed more like Switzerland than Central America. From points along the road, I could see the swirl of color in the middle of town. Soon we were in a mass of Mam (a Mayan Indian people who have retained their own language and customs). It was market day. The streets were full of brightly dressed people, the first clean people I had seen in the countryside. The men all wore red vertically striped pants with a black loincloth, white shirts with red pinstriping and one bold purple stripe. Their blue lapels were oversized and embroidered like traditional women's huipiles. The women were also dressed identically: deep blue denim skirts with a lighter pinstriping, and brightly embroidered huipiles over a dark blue base. Most all the adults (men and women) wore bowler-type hats with matching hat bands. It was as though they were wearing the brightest uniform I could imagine.

Street vendors sold everything from fruit and vegetables to machetes and baby chicks. Other than a few Europeans and Latinos, everyone -- vendors and customers alike -- were Mam. The streets were full of colorful people. The road up to the hotel was the main market. Blankets covered with nuts, fruit, and sugar blocked our way. So we spent the afternoon wandering through the town, enveloped in the color and enjoying the beautiful people. They spoke Mam. Few understood Spanish, so our connections with them were very limited. We observed them and they ignored us.

The old Spanish colonial Catholic church anchored the west end of town. Todo Santos means all saints. The saints were lined up down either side of the church. On pedestals or encased in glass boxes, they dominated the awesome space. Some of the features on the little faces were European, while some were Mayan and still others were Latino. The history of the dissolving of a culture was captured in those doll-like expressions.

After the market broke up, we worked our way up to the hotel and unloaded the van into the rooms. As most of us rested, Jon and Eric ventured the two blocks back to the main street to find bottled water and beer. They came back with stories of fights breaking out. The young men who had stayed in town were drinking beer spiked with grain alcohol and taking their frustrations out on each other. We did work our way down through the mayhem to dinner. The trip back to the hotel was safe enough, but it was like a scene from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Drunks lined the streets and sprawled in the gutters. People flailed away at each other. Back in the safety of our hotel we sat on the second floor balcony and listened to the evangelicals blaring traditional revival hymns, performed in Indian chant, through amplifiers. It was as though the evangelicals were playing a death march to a culture that was fighting itself.

Midpoint Thoughts

As of today I am half whay through this trip. The need to digest this experience into some comprehensible form is certainly here. Although I don't know if the timing is right -- I am struggling with the ideas floating around in my head. So:

I am midway through this Guatemala collecting trip, half way up the Pacific versant*, situated on a coffee farm (finca) between the coffee trees below and the native forest above. It is only natural to have half-digested thoughts. The coffee trees below are lush and productive, in full bloom. They do well in this place. The native forest above is lush like nothing I have ever seen. Fern trees 30 feet high dot the terrain. Begonias with 5 foot leaves and 4 1/2 foot plume-like blossoms grow alongside wild versions of the begonias we raise back home. Ferns and moss cover the rock faces. Bromeliads and orchids freckle the forest canopy. The animals we are looking for are there, hiding in the bromeliads and leaf mold, but extremely hard to find. There is no telling how many animals we have walked by hiding above our heads or below our feet. We are lucky to catch the few we do in a place like this, and this has been the most productive stop we have made.

Rainy season has started, but late. El Nino is still having his effect.

To date we have collected approximately 250 animals. Some new unrecorded species and most all with potentially unrecorded parasites. We are creating a permanent record of animals that are doomed. Some will most probably adapt to live in association with people, but most will not. This Pacific versant area was once the home to spider monkeys. I remember being able to order baby spider monkeys from the back of magazines 40 years ago when I was young. Now none are here. They probably were not all consumed by the pet trade; the local people will eat most any animal they can find. Living this close to the edge, they need all they can get to survive.

The total number of preserved animals housed in museum collections worldwide is equal to less than 1% of the wild animals that enter the pet trade annually. Gigantic numbers of the animals entering the pet trade die before ever reaching the hobbyist. And of those that are lucky enough to end up in a good home and live to a ripe old age, very few reproduce. Idealistically, I would like to see concerted efforts to selectively breed native animals to carry on the species. But outside their native environment, the results would be different than in nature. We will reason away the natural process. Snakes are already being selectively breed to create new color variations. Cross breeding that could never happen in the natural process has become the norm for a segment of the pet trade. As we are a product of the natural process, and we are producing these by-products, they are natural. This may be the "Brave New World" of H.G. Wells and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The museum collections form a permanent record of nature. If we had this sort of resource a thousand years ago we might have learned more about the change in our environment and have chosen some better process to preserve our world. Change always evokes emotion. I will readily admit my emotions are stirred every day of this trip. It is hard to watch as species die away, as it is hard to kill a turtle. Turtles have a long life span and a relatively gentle nature, an image that is close to how I view Mother Nature. We have evolved as a child of Mother Nature. So we have evolved this thought process as it has taken place in relationship to the natural demise of the thousands of extinct species. Some probably died away with no contact with man, but the vast majority as a direct result of the change in the natural environment the reasoning animal has excused away.

We (with our reasoning power) find it perfectly natural to preserve food and money as a means to preserve our quality of life. Yet in the dichotomy of our actions we even go so far as to wage wars over these symbols of our wealth and security. I have been raised in an environment driven by this dichotomy and as a result have for most of my life been perplexed by the innate struggle to overcome this situation without giving in to it. In a nutshell, this struggle is the concept my art work has revolved around.

In this Guatemalan environment where nature has provided, nature is now being consumed. We have seen lava stone fences in lava stone fields some ages old, perhaps from the times of the Mayan Empire. The same fields may have been used to produce crops to provide for a people who lived in relative harmony with nature by sacrificing people to the gods. Now the fields are being stripped bare of soil by burning. Then the erosion sets in, leaving lava stone fences in lava stone fields.

The clouds have rolled in to obscure everything over 50 yards away. Then almost as soon as I have observed the obscurity and written about it, the sun has broken through and a light rain has begun to fall. It is a near perfect collecting environment. So back to collecting herps and thoughts.

*versant - the slope between the coast and the first mountain range.