Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. November 20, 2009.
I took a bus ride. This afternoon I caught one of Guatemala's fabled second-class buses out to the farming village, Zunil. It just happened that I stepped off into a double-whammy: a hyperactive vegetable market covering an old stone bridge AND a fiesta taking place up on the square in front of a grand old church. I was expecting a sleepy mountain hamlet and found pandemonium instead. Of course, I took hundreds of pictures, but they will need evaluating and processing. In the meantime, I will post more street pictures from "Xela" (this city's nickname). Photos for now, but don't be surprised if random commentary pops up between the images later on.
Quetzaltenango's Parque Centro is three leafy sculpted blocks surrounded by colonial grandeur - buildings with pillars, domes and huge arched windows, carved with decorative filigree. Walk away from this focal point in any direction and the city scape quickly changes to crooked alley ways of low plaster structures painted in soft colors, all connected, offering almost nothing to public view except a dark wooden door and a tiny plaque attached nearby. Even businesses make little effort to alert customers. A doctor or a notary might have a foot-square board hanging above the sidewalk. A clothing store, painted letters on the wall.
Above: This striking nod to art deco seems gaudy and wasted overlooking a hushed intersection. Who or what was Gutierrez way back when? The main floor houses a power tool dealer with an undersized show window. Only a block from the Parque, already a different ambience is taking hold. Xela's sidewalks are narrow and interrupted, stop for conversation and you're forcing people into relentless one-way traffic.
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. November 18, 2009.
AKA "Xela" (shay-lah). The streets are dark at night in Guatemala's second city. Streetlights are spaced widely and give off only a dull glow. As your eyes adjust, headlights come bouncing down the paving stones and blind you. Then you re-adjust and look sideways down a curving narrow avenue. There's nobody in the darkness, just a single dog trotting along a broken sidewalk.
I'm drawn to strange old streets like these. The ghostly dignity and lost grandeur of small Latin-American cities is what grabbed me about Mexico years ago. Not the beaches or the countryside. Xela is the first honest town of any size I've stayed this trip. By honest, I mean not like Antigua, which certainly has size, but has re-made itself over for the tourist trade and barely feels like a real town. In Xela, they couldn't care less whether I'm here or not - the city gets along fine without a mass of tourists.
So one doesn't get pestered here by poignant Mayan children selling bracelets and key fobs, or plaintive women with blankets and shawls. "It's the cunning of the peasant", one slightly bitter ex-pat explained to me in Panajachel, where the peddling is constant up and down the main road, "you have to be tough". I wasn't tough, just infinitely patient, I must have said no, gracias about a thousand times. Then a pleading gesture if they stayed; por favor, I'd cry. That seemed to work.
Xela's twisted, rolling streets offer a wealth of minor architectural marvels to a wandering photographer. I'm no master of terminology, but versions of art-deco, neo-classical, mid-century modern, for sure, all a little faded, some quake-damaged, still housing viable shops and businesses. And signage and lettering that would have been abandoned fifty years ago in North America. Living history, gloomy and understated, still expected to serve a daily purpose. I will have more such pictures, a gallery, even.
I was told twice to put my camera away as I walked around the tight central core. I was puzzled. I thought they didn't like me taking pictures. Then I heard peligro, Spanish for danger. I was being warned about delinquents who steal tourists' cameras. I'm not a tourist, I'm a visitor, I tried to explain, and a camera in a bag is kind of useless. They just looked at me with apology.
So I asked around. It might be true, I was told. But no more than anywhere else. An exaggerated truth, I figure. Guatemala is a society on permanent vigilance. Every bank and bus station and many stores have at least one uniformed guy with a pistol-grip shotgun. At government buildings and other institutions the guards have automatic weapons. There's razor wire everywhere. I'll just be careful. I don't go shooting at night - the morning is better for photography and the thieves are probably sleeping in. I can sense a nasty neighborhood or a sketchy character. I will continue my mission.
Next Page: Zunil: Market & Fiesta