After more than three months in Guatemala, I am two days away from going to the field, where I’m planning to stay for about two months. My duties will be as follows: go to study sites in cloud and pine-oak forests, download data and change batteries, analyze data, change faulty sensors, and, at some point, collect allometric data. Though the sites are a bit remote as long as the road remains out, this will probably only require two or three days a week, leaving me time to hike around the Sierra—if my local guide indulges. I’m eager to walk through the elfin forest, a conglomeration of wind-stunted trees on the saddle below the Sierra’s highest peak, and climb El Volcán Las Palomas, a non-volcanic cone heaved up when the Cocos and Caribbean plates collided and formed the range.
The department of Zacapa has a four-fold reputation: hot temperatures and tempers, beautiful women, and the best rum in the world (now produced outside Guatemala City). My social interactions will occur in the largely Evangelical town of Santa Rosalia, the Guatemármol mining camp, and in the forest, where my guide and I might encounter poachers or illegal loggers. I have no specific expectations other than that the immediate future will be a sharp contrast to the immediate past. So before I leave for the tierra caliente, here’s my capital-city communiqué.
El Mirador beyond allegory
Last week, I went with coworkers from the Institute for Agriculture, Natural Resources, and the Environment (IARNA) to the late Pre-classic Mayan city of El Mirador, just south of the Mexican border. Excavation has only been way for a couple decades, spearheaded by archaeologist and Apocalypto consultant Richard Hansen, but the enormity of what lies buried can be sensed in the presence of near-mountains in an otherwise Nebraska-flat expanse of forest. To Twitter-educe the experience:
After walking across dead lagoons through aromatic eddies of hot air for 25 km, I climbed one of the largest structures of the ancient world.
The end of those lagoons appears to explain—at least partially—the collapse of the Pre-classic (circa 150 A.D.) Mayas, whose diaspora led to the flourishing of the Classic Era in places like Tikal.
We were fortunate enough to have as our guide Ing. César Castañeda, a retired agronomy professor who has studied the vegetation around El Mirador in conjunction with the work of the archaeologist Hansen. Ing. Castañeda explained how the first settlers arrived to a land of vast lagoons, where they remained for the wealth of flora and fauna and then began to farm, later learning to extract lime from limestone over fires of specific tree species. Mixed with corn, lime enhanced these early Mayas’ nutrition by liberating niacin locked in the kernel; mixed with water, this new material formed the bricks that built the city’s great pyramids and the panels worked into ornate frescos. While deforestation for firewood and extensive corn production led to topsoil loss, Ing. Castañeda explained that the movement of large volumes of human waste into the already ecologically mature lagoons was likely more significant in the city’s decline. Inputs of nutrients led to eutrophication (e.g., the worst problem in the Gulf of Mexico prior to the oil spill), and the lagoons became land. From atop the city’s unfathomably large La Danta (tapir) pyramid, sharp boundaries can be discerned between the once-inhabited “high forest” and the “low forest” that temporarily returns to its aquatic origins during the rainy season.
Ing. Castañeda pointed out that, in explaining the Mayan collapse, academics tend to latch onto a single factor, even though multiple causes were certainly at play. I also sense the drive to reduce human lives and decisions into an allegory with some modern-day implication: environmental neglect brought down the Mayas, or the peasantry rose up after centuries of repression. Perhaps laborers revolted after the priests and kings, managers of scientific and mathematical knowledge, failed to “bring the rain” one too many times—this explanation is particularly interesting when projected back onto the present day. We can’t be blamed for oversimplifying: apart from the archaeological setbacks such as loss of material evidence to graverobbers, the matter is rife with an all-too-human inclination to impose meaning on a given subject, be it an Intelligent Design proponent explaining why dinosaur bones were buried beneath the earth or a permaculturalist claiming that, on principle, Mother Nature never wastes. The meaning of ant colony intelligence. Of wave-particle duality. Of rhizomes. Or, as for the Mayas, the meaning of a solar eclipse, of quetzal feathers, of jade. It once occurred to me that the cloud forest exemplifies vegetative communism, wherein scarce light and overabundant water lead to ubiquitous yet stunted growth, but this was a constructed meaning I didn’t know what to do with, so I returned to thinking of the cloud forest as the apolitically beautiful provider of the more easily comprehendible benefits of water and biodiversity.
La guerrilla cervecera
I came to Guatemala with one mission in mind and will leave with two in progress, both of which are fueled by scheming with my boss and friend, Juan Carlos Rosito. First, continue researching a number of scientifically and societally relevant issues in the cloud forest of the Sierra de las Minas. Second, mount la guerrilla cervecera, convincing one Guatemalan at a time that they are paying far too much for a beer that is not actually la mejor del mundo, as claimed by the Castillo family that controls the market. As in the US, the major national beers are lagers, mostly pilsners: the difference is the absolute absence of ales in Guatemala. That is, until a couple weeks ago, when we bottled our first batch of pale ale into Gallo bottles. In primary fermentation, a Belgian ale is letting out the sigh of revolution.
During the most disheartening phases of constructing the sap-flow sensors—inhaling solder flux vapor while the thermocouples fell apart—I kept my spirits up by contemplating the limitless possibilities and liberating consequences of making beer in Guatemala. I devised a chart of possible local inputs, from medicinal herbs to ingredients too exotic and marketable to disclose here. Later, in response to the incessant claims of our friends and family that homebrewing is illegal in Guatemala, Juan Carlos and I found a copy of the most recent (1981) law on alcoholic beverage production and identified loopholes. The law does not prohibit production of alcoholic beverages per se; rather, it outlines the hoops one must go through and hints at the control the establishment surely maintains at each point of the process. For example, all alcoholic beverages must be aged for one year—an unreasonable expectation for brewers of beer—but pre-existing producers are exempt from the new criteria.
Looking at Guatemala through a different sort of beer goggles, I’ve learned a good deal about flora and microfauna, corporate buyouts, and the hopes and hesitations of a postcolonial society. I’ve learned the brief history of failed microbrew ventures and seen some serious opportunities, which I plan to pursue further if I return to Guatemala for continued research.
El discurso de la playa
On Saturday, I saw the infinity of the Pacific from the black sand of the southern coast. Estuardo and Melissa Mendoza, the wonderful people I live with in Guatemala City, had invited me to the resort town of Monterrico for the evening. We stopped en route to say hello to their father at his vacation home in Likin, a walled-in matrix of canals and swimming pools to which the country’s first millionaire class was expected to flock some twenty years ago. Then, after arriving in Monterrico as a downpour subsided, we searched for a hotel and settled on a single-bed, single-hammock room in a hostel for $25. At about 11 pm, we stepped onto the beach.
The bars weren’t offering the ambience my friends had had in mind. It was a night of reggaeton and the kind of people that don’t hesitate to shoot if you naively dance with their girlfriend. We instead bought a couple liters of Gallo (see above) and found a relatively tranquil patch of sand. Talking with the Mendoza siblings was much more worthwhile than enduring the heat and danger of the discoteca; they both have fascinating experiences to share and can put the kind of perspective on things that ever-so-slightly shifts your paradigm (an ability Estuardo uses in his poetry). I explained how the production values and soundtrack of Jersey Shore transmit some latent intention—something meta—that is far more complex than Snookie’s smoosh-drive, and Estuardo dubbed it el discurso de la playa (the beach discourse). Me llega.
But the beer ran out, and we were suddenly more disposed to dance. After traversing the strip, we paid the costly cover at Johnny’s Place and each found a dance partner. Maybe thirty minutes had passed when I heard what sounded like a capgun and everyone scurried like it was the final game of freeze-tag. The cops showed up after a healthy delay, and we called it a night. The next day, Estuardo told me he had heard that the man fired the shot into the floor to send a message to his coked-out girlfriend. What an absurd manifestation of machismo: change the circumstances, and it isn’t hard to imagine how he would’ve handled waking up on Christmas morning to find out Mami didn’t get him the latest soccer cleats. In three months, I’d call it luck that this is the only encounter I’ve had with explicit danger.
Much of my experience remains unwritten. For now, I will post pictures to compensate, but many ideas and impressions will likely continue to mature after I’ve left for my homeland in mid-June.
Much of my experience remains unwritten. For now, I will post pictures to compensate, but many ideas and impressions will likely continue to mature after I’ve left for my homeland in mid-June.
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