Every month we’ll be posting an entry from a guest contributor who has some advice, resources, information and/or inspiration they want to share. This month’s guest contributor is Tom Hemingway. Tom Hemingway has explored the outer limits of Latin America from the U.S. to Argentina through many years of travel, study and work, including seven years on ethno-linguistic projects in Guatemala. He has managed health projects among migrant farm workers in Michigan, served on projects with a Spanish language church in Texas, and now volunteers for an NGO that sends teens to service projects across Latin America. Tom enjoys chance encounters, reading Ivan Illich and contemplating how big—and how small—the world really is.
Of all life’s strange encounters, one of the strangest for me was at a convergence of my choice to be a remote village’s crazy foreigner, an affection for an elderly peddler, and the overwhelming forces of globalization.
While researching the disappearance of a highland Guatemalan Mayan language spoken on the border with Mexico, we discovered that the community had over one hundred years of annual migration down to the mountain slopes of Chiapas, Mexico, to work in the coffee plantations. The timing between peak labor times at home in the highlands and down below on the plantations complemented each other perfectly, so by making a few trips back and forth by foot during the rainy season, Tacanecos could grow their own crops while also earning some desperately needed cash.
One of the trails that leads from Tacaná to Mexico and the world beyond.
This push (need for cash) and pull (need for laborers) describes the universal rhythm of migration, and this migration has spread so far that it has pushed us into redefining the boundaries of Latin America. For generations, the ebb and flow of migrants from highlands to lowlands has kept us supplied with coffee and sugar, chocolate and vanilla, piñas y papayas. Since World War II, when foreign guest workers were brought into the U.S. to make up for the lack of workmen, Latin Americans have played a major role in the production and low prices of nearly half the fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle of your local grocery store. Our own Tacaneco neighbors soon found new ways to apply their age old skill at migration, with the ease of Polynesian navigators searching out islands in the sea.
We left Guatemala for snow-laced Michigan, where I managed a health project for 20,000 of these rural migrant workers. I spent a good share of my time in the field (literally) overseeing the services we provided to this poor, underserved and nearly invisible population. Entire clans packed up and came to the same Michigan farms year after year, and I couldn’t help sometimes but just take in the sounds and smells and textures of villages I had known far away.
Occasionally at our health center, I was called upon to interpret, and in one of these sessions I met a woman patient who had a curious accent. “Are you from Guatemala?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. But there was still something about her that was more than just Guatemalan. Going out on a limb, I asked further, “Are you from Tacaná?” Her eyes grew big in shock. “Yes, I am,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I used to live in Tacaná,” I explained. “We lived in the house across from don Odilón, next to the molino.” In typical Guatemalan fashion, we went through the litany of her family tree, looking for some common link between us. We discovered that her uncle, the peanut vendor, was one of my favorite old timers; he and I passed many hours sitting on the sidewalk, shooting the breeze and nibbling away at his inventory. After the discovery that I knew her uncle well, she thought for a moment, and the lights went on. “Now I know who you are!” she shouted. “You’re the GRINGO!”
So, repatriated volunteers, where have you rediscovered your own beloved corner of Latin America?
For more from Tom, check out his other post, Seeing the World in New Ways. For more about Guatemala, check out posts by La Vida Idealist bloggers Lisa Hetzel and Miranda Pope.
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