Comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition . . . The first syllable . . . harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ig-norance to knowledge.
Amitav Ghosh, "The Great Derangement: Lecture 1," The Berlin Family Lectures, University of Chicago, 2015
In the late morning, he sat down on one of the benches in the Parque Central and began reading an English language paperback edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s novel, El Señor Presidente, Mr. President. He had just read the opening pages when a soft-spoken voice interrupted. “Le lustro, señor?” Shoe shine, Sir? The reader, a twenty-one-year-old native Chicagoan, had become inured to this question in his months traversing Mexico and Guatemala. The gringo wore huaraches (Mexican sandals).
The reader looked up and then down, as the portable cajon de lustro (shoeshine box) was already on the ground, as the squatting suplicante, sitting on his banquito (a small wooden bench) turned his face upward, meeting the gringo’s gaze. The gringo replied, softly, without harshness: “No necesario. No me gusta. Llevo puesto huaraches.” This lustro was different. This mobile shoe shiner lacked the hard edge typical of the street. This lustro was a foot-and-a-half shorter than the lean six-foot gringo. He had black hair, cut in a semi-bowl style, framed by brown eyes, set in a face that projected a placid demeanor. With his slight arms, he weighed less than one hundred pounds. He wore a white t-shirt and a pair of jeans ripped at one knee. The gringo speculated that this lustro was in his late teens or early twenties, close to his own age. And, this tiny lustro had a pronounced hunchback. Intuitively, the gringo relaxed, and asked the lustro his name: “Me llamo Porfirio,” the lustro replied.
Porfirio and the gringo met in the early Summer of 1974, in Antigua, Guatemala. In the early 1970s, Antigua was not yet the teeming tourista stop promoted across blogs, podcasts and social media sites. The gringo and his twenty-three year old Irish-American partner, Maura, met Antigua just prior to an inflection point, less than two years before the country-wide devastation of the February 1976 earthquake, and Antigua’s subsequent, UNESCO-fueled transformation into a mass tourism destination. The ambiance of the Antigua that the couple experienced was a product of its colonial past, where the slow rhythms of native life dominated and historical ruins were left untouched. With a population a third of what it has become a half-century later, their Antigua was lentamente, a considerably smaller and far more insular town. At that time, the couple were among the early 1970s Norte Americanos who traveled “The Gringo Trail,” a de facto counter-cultural trek, moving southbound on the Pan-American highway.
Retrospectively, his memories of Antigua are impressionistic. For example, inside one of the arched portals facing the Parque, there was a barber shop where he periodically went to get a strap-razor shave for fifteen cents. Circling the perimeter of the Parque was a small fleet of once-retired, subsequently imported, and vividly repainted American Blue Bird school buses. Squeezing into the remaining spaces were smaller caminonetas (micro-vans). There was a constant, auction-like barking of “Guate, Guate,” among the bus drivers’ assistants, Ayudantes, raucously repeating the destination as if a mantra, vying for enough passengers to make the short, mountainous trip to the capital profitable. More than once, the couple climbed into a Blue Bird, or were stuffed into a micro-van, only to find the bus slowly detouring through all of Antigua’s neighborhoods, and returned to the Parque, while el Ayudante squawked the destination, as he hung off the vehicle’s outer steps, in an intense attempt to snare more passengers. With all that circuitousness, a thirty-minute trip often became a ninety-minute one, or longer.
Under the arched portals opposite El Parque Central was a community of a few dozen boys and adolescents. For reasons of economics, bad behavior, family tragedies or discarded due to disability, the members of this pack were all homeless. They lived on the street and slept under the portal’s arches at night, worn gray blankets at the ready. The rhythm of their lives was only marginally better than what Asturias portrayed in the opening pages of El Señor Presidente. The initial chapter, En el Portal del Señor, depicts the daily routines of beggars, at the turn of the twentieth century, in Guatemala City. However, unlike Asturias’s beggars, most of the Parque’s young portal population owned a cajon de lustro. Informed by the novel’s depictions, as the weeks went by, the gringo, in his serviceable but limited Spanish, and Porfirio, with a relatively narrow vocabulary of his own, would chat, in simple terms, about his life. Sometimes, the gringo would share his snacks with the tiny, placid innocent perched next to him. Most of the time, Porfirio seemed content just to sit silently nearby, while the gringo read a paperback. They enjoyed each other’s presence through that silence.
The gringo did not live in Antigua, proper, but in Ciudad Vieja (Old City). Ciudad Vieja is about five kilometers southwest of the Parque. In the mid-1970s, it was a “poor sister” to Antigua, with a population of a few thousand. Maura and the gringo rented a street-facing casa (house), from which they could see the Volcán de Fuego (Fire Volcano) looming in the distance. On one end of the street, toward the center of town, was a casket maker. The few times that the gringo snuck a peek inside the wood shop, he was taken aback. The casket sizes ranged from tiny to small. These were caskets for newborns, infants, toddlers and small children. On the other end of the street, on the way out of town, was the cemetery. The corteges were always led by an indigenous crone dressed in a flowing dress and scarf, her visage covered in black from head to toe. The crone evocatively wailed with impressive passion and volume, as she led the grieved to the cemetery. Later, the couple realized that these crones were professional mourners.
Toward the end of September, as the late summer gave way to the early fall, minor plumes of ash, from the Volcán de Fuego began settling in Ciudad Vieja. Ash permeated their hair, food, nostrils, mouth, eyelids and clothing. Maura and the gringo had furnished their rental sparsely. They had bought a simple unfinished wooden table, two wooden chairs and a pair of thin single mats/mattresses that they slept on. Some mornings, they woke when the ground rumbled underneath them while their rudimentary furniture wobbled nearby. The couple was alarmed, yes, but without a full grasp of the peril around them.
While the gringo sat with his improbable friend, Porfirio, in Antigua’s Parque Central, Maura was immersed in an indigenous aspect of Guatemalan culture. Most mornings, she would ride the ten kilometers on “the chicken bus” from Antigua to the periphery of a small town, San Antonio de Aguas Calientes. She spent her days sitting in the dirt, cross-legged, with the small of her back traversed by a wide belt attached at either end to a pole. Maura was with a small group of Kaqchikel women, all of them similarly situated under an open-air canopy. She was learning the precolonial art of backstrap weaving. For these indigenous artists, the huipiles (tops) and other woven items were central to their identity and to the culture of their town. No two towns wove the same combination of patterns, icons, colors, or told the same stories through their textiles.
How Maura gained entree into their world was a wonderment to the gringo. Retrospectively, he conjectured that beyond her small payments, her quiet but focused demeanor earned their initial trust. With patient deference and a steady commitment over the summer, Maura mastered the loom, and how to form vivid, complex patterns, accepting that producing a single huipil or tapestry took months. Maura worked without fuss, without guile, because she loved the process and the product. The work was focused concentration, fundamentally meditative. These Kaqchikel women were her teachers, she was their pliant student. Because she put in the time and deferred to them, they first accepted, and later, respected her.
One sign of their “in-group” acceptance of Maura was when the couple were invited to an intimate community event, a Kaqchikel wedding, toward summer’s end. The gringo’s guess was that the bride and groom were, at most, twelve or thirteen years old. This was not seen by the Kaqchikel as a shotgun child marriage. This was a celebratory occasion. The bride and groom were adorned with elaborate symbolic costumes, during the ceremony. Initially shocked, subsequently befuddled, it took years before the gringo grasped the connection between the pint-sized caskets crafted in Ciudad Vieja with the fragility of life in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, in the 1970s. During that decade, the average lifespan hovered around fifty years, probably lower among the indigenous rural population. Childhood mortality, defined as death before the age of five, was somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent, again, probably higher among the Kaqchikel and other indigenous groups. In the context of a compressed time-span coupled with a high infant mortality rate, early adolescent weddings were not inexplicable, but normative.
When the calendar turned to October, the Volcán de Fuego’s activity intensified, unleashing literal mountains of ash, piling up the way snow piles up in Buffalo, New York, in January. Campesinos donned cloth masks as they swept half-meters of ash off metal roofs, daily. Ash was embedded in everyone and everything. Meanwhile, the morning tremors became more pronounced, and longer in duration.
Military and paramilitary forms of violence, marked by thousands of disappearances and hundreds of arbitrary massacres of villages, were already an endemic feature of Guatemalan life, particularly in the indigenous north, in the wake of the 1954 CIA-backed coup. Guatemala’s President, Arana, during the early 1970s, infamously iterated the tone: “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.” In the early 1970s, the couple were nebulously aware of the political and genocidal reality, at the outer periphery of their consciousness.
In mid-October, as the couple was setting a date to leave, the twenty-one-year-old gringo wanted to make some gesture, to thank him for his time and his presence. Over the summer months, the gringo had formed a bond with this outlier among outliers, an outsider even in the world of the lustrodores. So, they went to lunch. The lustro was not used to sitting with other customers at an outdoor cafe, but he enjoyed it, subtly smiling, even as others shot disapproving glances. After the meal, the gringo gave Porfirio a ten quetzal bill, a red AM transistor radio, and a bag of TorTrix corn chips. Then, the improbable pair amiably went their separate ways.
For the next three days, the gringo did not see Porfirio. On the fourth day, the gringo spotted Porfirio laboring across the Parque. The top half of Porfirio’s head, left ear and arm were fully wrapped in white bandages. As Porfirio trudged toward him, Porfirio’s condition shocked and alarmed the gringo:
The Gringo: “Qué te pasó!” (What happened to you!!)
Porfirio: “No es nada, nada, señor.” (It’s nothing, nothing, sir.)
The Gringo: “Porfirio, tu cabeza … tu brazo” (Porfirio, your head … your arm)
Porfirio: “Ya esta. Ya pasó.” (It’s done, finished)
The Gringo, his voice betraying distress: “Porque?” “Por el radio, el dinero?” (Because? For the radio, the money?)
Porfirio, his head slightly turning: “Si. Ellos dijeron que yo no merezco.” (Yes. They said that I don’t deserve this).
With this statement, the gringo grasped the unintended effects, the bitter truth of his gifts, gasping at the events that he’d set in motion.
The Gringo: “Lo siento mucho,! Lo siento mucho! Es totalmente mi culpa. Totalmente!” (I’m very sorry, I’m very sorry! It’s totally my fault. Totally!)
Porfirio looked up again, his eyes wide open, his voice unusually emphatic: “Vos no tenés la culpa, Señor.” (It’s not your fault, Sir).
The Gringo: Pero … (But)
Porfirio, his voice soft, but without much inflection: “Vos quería ser bueno conmigo.” (You wanted to be good to me). “Vos no sabia.” (You didn’t know).
Consumed with guilt, the gringo stammered out: “Yo … yo no entendí” (I … I didn’t understand).
A bit painfully, Porfirio shrugged: “Es la vida.” (That’s life). “Somos amigos. Eso no cambia.” (We’re friends. That hasn’t changed).
The pair never discussed the robbery and beating again.
Over the gringo’s last two weeks in greater Antigua, their routine resumed. The gringo’s sensibility changed. Chastened by his friend’s brutal victimization, the gringo was acutely aware that otros lustros were keeping tabs on them. As for changes in Porfirio’s disposition, it was hard for the gringo to decipher. In late October, a day before the Norte Americano couple left for points north, Porfirio’s bandages were no more. The gringo did not tell Porfirio about his exit, for reasons that were opaque. And go they did, across the Mexican border to San Cristobal de las Casas, renting a house on a hillside overlooking that picturesque town, from mid-November 1974 through early March 1975. At winter’s end, they returned to Chicago. Inexorably, life moved on. The memories endure.
Epilogue One: Chasing Ghosts
In the winter of 1977, the gringo ventured south on his own. By that time, his relationship with Maura was unraveling. Impulsively, he revisited the places and cultures they had immersed themselves in; Pátzcuaro, San Cristóbal de las Casas and Antigua, places where they had once experienced wonderment within precarity. The quixotic hope was that, in some way, he could revive what was slipping away. The last stop on his fool’s errand was Antigua.
Antigua had changed. The February 1976 earthquake that devastated so much of Guatemala savaged some of Antigua’s colonial-era structures, including the portals surrounding the Parque Central. The stone arches facing the Parque were still upright, but required buttressing with thick, provisional wooden beams placed at forty-five degree angles, on each side. At that moment, the taxing work of reclamation and repair was ramping up.
The twenty-four-year-old gringo ambled into the Parque Central, seeking Porfirio. Not finding him, the gringo asked the first lustro that he found this question: “Por favor: Dónde está Porfirio?” (Please, where is Porfirio?) That lustro answered, in the negative: “No lo conozco” (I don’t know him). Walking around the Parque, he asked another lustro about Porfirio, who was “pequeno” (tiny) and had a “corcovado,” a hunchback. “A sí, Murio en el terremoto,” (Yes, died in the earthquake). That is what he was told and that is what he believed, for forty-eight years.
In fact-checking the details of this narrative, the seventy-two year old gringo found a PDF of a June 1976 issue of National Geographic that featured an extended photo-essay and narrative on the Guatemalan earthquake. More than twenty-three thousand died, hundreds of thousands were injured, and a million-and-a-half houses were either severely damaged or destroyed. On page 829, under a subheading “Old Capital Relatively Unscathed” was this: “‘We have had perhaps sixty dead here [in Antigua]’ said young Hector Galvez, a student of accounting.”
A half-century on, the old gringo suddenly had new questions. Was Porfirio one of those sixty? Did he die months later, from secondary causes, such as injuries or infections not immediately related to the terremoto? Was the young gringo lied to? Was Porfirio murdered/disappeared? Or, the most improbable outlier, fifty years on: Was he still alive? It remains a mystery, an unsolvable question about one who lived his life without a backstop, as the Maya have, enduring centuries of subjugation with a stoic endurance. A fundamental unknowability encompasses even the narrative itself, for the circumstances of Porfirio’s death will remain forever shrouded.
It was a unique confluence of time, youth, a certain type of fleeting innocence, and the perishable ambiance of specific places that the couple had experienced, in those travels in the early 1970s. All of it, including the friendship with Porfirio, Maura’s months of backstrap weaving among the Kaqchikel women, the cumulative weight of their immersive cultural experiences, and the couple’s tight relationship through that period, all of it belonged to a singular time and place that had already passed.
Epilogue Two: Now and Then
Since the mid-1970s, the Antigua corridor has morphed into a contested zone, the result of a booming heritage economy. There are endemic tensions between the local and the global, between subsistence and conspicuous consumption zones, and in gaps between the underclass and the slickly produced and commodified representations of life in Antigua posted on social media. For example: While some lustrodores still sleep under the portals that ring the Parque Central at night, they’re roused early in the morning, by the police, to avoid fines. Now, most lustrodores commute from surrounding pueblos, via “chicken buses,” occasionally renting rooms by the day, or sleep in crowded communal accommodations, if business warrants a stay-over.
The “chicken buses” and caminonetas no longer circle the Parque. The bellowing of Ayudantes have been relocated out of the earshot of touristas busy posting their photos of jacaranda trees and videos of marimba bands on social media.
The decades since the 1970s have brought to the area around the Parque Central, the following: boutique hotels, higher-end restaurants, art galleries, souvenir shops, cafes, and Spanish immersion programs. Taken as a whole, the immediate area surrounding where the Gringo and Porfirio sat, more than a half-century ago, enmeshed in the local rhythms of the place, has been reshaped by a UNESCO World Heritage-impelled, tourism-oriented gentrification that displaces informal economies, raises rents, tightly choreographs selected public spaces, and generates performative cultural events for touristas.
Contemporary Antigua has been depicted as a hybrid space, one where the effects of gentrification are not evenly distributed. The colonial architecture, the enduring presence of los lustrodores, the persistence of public space, the long-extant and viable local network of artisans, families and cooperativos; all point to the stubborn maintenance of the traditional. Lowering the simmering tensions between these sensibilities is the object for continual formal and informal ad hoc negotiation.
As for Ciudad Vieja, where the couple spent several months: Over the last half-century, its population has grown by more than five hundred percent, from forty-five hundred to thirty-two thousand, reflecting, in part, a general upward trend in Guatemalan epidemiology and demography. Since the 1970s, life expectancy has risen by fifty percent. Infant mortality dropped by eighty percent. The Guatemalan median age rose from 15.6 to 23.6 years. Concurrently, the town’s pronounced orientation toward infant mortality, so evident to the couple in 1974, has receded.
When the old gringo first saw the current population on a demographic website, his instant thought was “the town’s turned into a bedroom community,” given its proximity to Antigua. And that is true: Ciudad Vieja was no longer Casketville. It has become Commuterville. Given the soaring rents and real estate prices in Antigua, service sector employees, tied directly or indirectly to the tourist trade, commute to-and-from Antigua via the heavily traveled Guatemala RN 14 during rush hours.
And what of Maura’s San Antonio de Aguas Calientes, where she spent so many hours, in deep concentration, the sola gringa, silently weaving for months at a time, as she earned the respect of the Kaqchikel matriarchs? Maura’s San Antonio was “backcountry,” barely accessible over narrow and bumpy dirt roads. Under the open-air huts where Maura and the Kaqchikel worked, there was no electricity, no running water, no plumbing or furniture. A half-century later, the worst of these infrastructure deficits have been remedied. With the considerable infrastructural improvements (including Wi-Fi), San Antonio is no longer a “backwater,” but a curated stop for Antigua-based cultural excursions, generating opportunities for Kaqchikel cooperatives to sell experiences and goods to international touristas. Inevitably, greater accessibility is a two-way street, as some Kaqchikel women have abandoned the traditional art, or are recombining elements of traje with fast fashion.
During Maura’s time, educational opportunities for Kaqchikel girls were rare. Fifty years later, that has improved, while reduced infant mortality and rising life expectancy rates are in line with Guatemala’s aggregate statistics. Nevertheless, early marriages (unions de hecho) still predominate among the Kaqchikel, reflecting the durable sense of the precarity of life in the Western Highlands.
Guatemala remains a land of astonishing natural beauty and profound social and environmental instability and peril, then (1974) and now (2026). This tight marriage of beauty and precarity frames Guatemalan life. The artistry of Kaqchikel women and Porfirio’s stoic acceptance of the limitations of his life had a key thing in common, a quality of being, the affirmation of a quiet, humble disposition in the face of an uncertain and volatile environment. For the old gringo, Guatemala’s vivid duality is what he remembers; memories of the quiet dignity of Porfirio and the Kaqchikel are what he honors.