November 11, 1999

The finca is redefined as a plantation in the HACIENDA-PLANTATION-CENTRAL CONTINUUM.

That is, it is still family owned (if by two families), produces an export crop--coffee--for an international market, has a factory-in-the-field, the beneficio coffee processing plant, owns several subsidiary coffee-growing estates to which the beneficio is central, but it has not made the transition to a joint-stock corporation, and the patron still deals personalistically with the workers.

#3 A view of the entrance avenue, with tall gravilea or silk trees, lined by the homes of the colonos, resident workers, leading to the covered bridge over the river, and then up to the finca courtyard or plaza. The avenue expresses the monumental nature of the finca, and leads guests to expect something courtly, the establishment of a patrón, the personal head of the enterprise. In that sense it still has many elements of the hacienda.

#4 A partial view of the finca courtyard, showing the chapel in the center of warehouses, the cobbled expanse, and the trapiche, or primitive sugar mill in the foreground. This under the original hacienda (inefficient estate producing for the local market) was a mill powered by ox teams turning the grinding stones. In the 1880s the finca got a huge waterwheel to power both the sugar mill and the machines to remove the coffee berry hulls and the coffee bean dryers in the coffee beneficio. Now the beneficio is powered by electricity from the national grid. An ox team and cart with sugar cane illustrate the older form. (From the mid-1970s the finca no longer grinds sugar at the trapiche, and some time after that management planted the sugar cane fields in coffee.)

# 5. A young man with rake, drying hulled coffee beans in the patio of the beneficio. The plantation could dry the beans in a huge machine that it owns like a giant clothes drier. German coffee importers pay a premium for sun-dried coffee of high quality, so the finca dries the best highland (Antigua grade) beans in the sun, in effect by hand. The young man is a son of a colono, settled worker family. He is thus a cottager completely at the mercy of his patron, the finca manager. This particular young man (the slide was taken in February, 1961) married and settled down on the finca, getting a house and a grant of land to farm in milpa (maize fields). Today, in the 1990s this benefit has been entirely phased out. The labor excess is such that the finca no longer needs to tie workers to them in this way. Permanent workers from the colono families now settle in Alotenango proper on houses they buy or build themselves. Members of the more upward mobile families get secondary schooling in Antigua and enter the urban lower middle class.

In terms of class structure this Ladino youth depicted is a cottager. Were he to get into the supervisory (foreman) ranks of the colonos he would become "bright peon." And were he to invest in lands or a business in Alotenango, as some of his cousins have, he might become "second-class rich." That's as far as he might go. A cousin of this man's father was a very beautiful woman who became a member of Guatemala's urban elites in the 1940s or '50s. She became the mistress of the Army Lieutenant who was posted to the district. When he was posted to another part of the country he sent for her and married her. Somehow she got enough social polish to move into polite society, in that sense she was a "Pygmalion" figure, the figure of the person who is completely changed by speech and manner and raised in social class, as in the G. Bernard Shaw play of that name, and as in the musical based on it My Fair Lady.

#6 A view of the tin roofs of the beneficio with steam rising from the coffee dries, and the peaks of Fuego and Acatenango rising above them, bathed in morning light.

#7 Don Federico's granddaughters giving presents to the wives and daughters of the colonos through the barred windows of the finca office, where, on payday, the administrative staff gives out cash. This is on the finca fiesta day. These granddaughters seem like queens of the world from the point of view of the peasants, but in fact their upper class status is not secure, and today as grown-ups they are members of the urban middle, not upper class. They are the daughters of Don Federico's oldest son. What I could not say in the book was that this man was an alcoholic, he never held down a job for very long. He married an enterprising woman from a "good" but not socially elite family, who was under the illusion she could dry him out. She worked hard at various schemes: purveying fancy vegetables and cheeses to greengrocers for example, but she never made a fortune from that. These girls were heirs to their father's share of the finca when don Federico died and their father died relatively young a short time later. Don Federico owned one fourth, his three children claimed one third of that fourth or one twelfth, and these kids had a fourth share each of that one twelfth share. The finca income each may be getting today may help them with their Christmas celebrations, but it's certainly not enough to live on. So the population explosion effects upper class people too, and helps demote some of them into middle class status.

#8 Don Federico standing in the beneficio drying patio with Gumersindo the beneficio foreman. Note Don Federico's Panama hat, his Havana cigar, and his walking stick. He is the lord of the land to his workers, most of whom are scarcely aware that he owns only a fourth of the enterprise.

#s 11-16, The Fiesta de Enero, the fiesta the town Ladinos put on in honor of the Virgin of the Concepción. Here we see Aloteco adolescent Indian youths, ministril age or younger, going ahead of the procession on Royal Street. They are dancing the baile de las fieras--dance of the wild beasts, one danced all over the highlands but usually the youths are disguised as animals with various masks. Here they are dancing in male-female pairs, disguised not as beasts but as Ladinos, and half of them as women! Some are wearing masks from the dance of the Conquest, with face masks of Spanish conquistadores. They are making fun of the Ladinos, who are only dimly aware of that. Some are supposed to be disguised as particular Ladinos, but I never could figure that out. One was supposed to be disguised as me, but there was nothing obvious to show that (like a fake camera slung from the shoulder).

#17 Three young married men, members of the Ladino Hermandad (Brotherhood) of the Virgin. One of them is Jesús Galindo, the young client of Don Federico's who has moved up fast in the social scale, owning a house in town at that time. They walk ahead of the lead truck that holds the image of the virgin enshrined in a big fake star, attended by school age Ladino kids disguised as angels.

Instead of carrying the image of the virgin on their shoulders, the way the Indians would, the Ladinos parade their trucks, which are the source of their wealth. They would ideally like to be a static, local upper class on the model of the patricians in Belmonte in Chapter 16, but the Indians have never let them. They have been unable acquire that much land, and so have had to go to commerce to stay ahead. They went into automotive transport from the start, unfairly getting the bus franchise between town and Antigua for example. Now the richest of them own trucks and transport coffee to the fincas during the harvest, and to Guatemala city for export afterwards.

#19 The second truck has a misterio or dramatic tableaux, this one representing the circumcision of the Baby Jesus, with a Rabbi enthroned under a stage set arch. In front of the group there is a child disguised as a devil, with a red suit and a red wig.

# 20 This truck has a bunch of kids dressed up as "Mexicans," flying the Mexican flag, one in the lead has a big guitar.

#21 this truck has a bunch of little kids supposedly dressed up as "Hungarians and gypsies."

#22 This has kids disguised as Kings and Queens (in the back with crowns on their heads) and "Inditos" or Little Indians. Some real Indian children may be here, but maybe not. Just as Indians dress up as Ladinos, the reverse is true in this fiesta.

#23 The crowd follows the trucks up Royal Street, good view of how Ladinos have made it a paved street lined with houses, every one of which has a shop or some such commercial establishment. They will have wide gates too, and keep their trucks inside in wide lots behind the street facades.

#s 24-31, the trucks having arrived at the plaza in front of the church, two mounted horsemen with masks and historical costumes of the Christian King (in blue) and the Moorish King (in red and yellow) meet to have a mounted duel with swordplay. Many highland Indian towns put on either a dance of the Moors and Christians (the Reconquest of Spain) or of the Conquest of Guatemala, Indians and Christians. The Ladinos chose the more Hispanic theme, and dramatize it on horseback. During the colonial era Indians were not allowed to ride horses in the Spanish Empire; they could ride donkeys or mules. Horses, then, are a Ladino symbol.

#s 32-34, Young men taking the image of the virgin from the truck. They will install her in a specially decorated altar in the church for an all-night vigil.

#35 The bride dances the son with her Godmother. This is at the morning feast put on at her own home after the church ceremony. Note Indian men and women never engage in ballroom dancing, holding each other in their arms. That is Ladino behavior. Instead Indians dance a kind of reel, the son.

#36 A scene of that morning banquet. The only times Indian women sit down to table with men to eat in Alotenango is at a wedding and a baptism. Women serve men a daily meal when they return from the fields, in the early afternoon. Men sit on chairs or stools and eat. When the men and boys have finished eating, women eat around the hearth standing up. Indians, even prosperous ones, eat meat usually only on Sundays. Their diet consists of tortillas on a daily basis, as well as black beans. Several adult householders, hardworking men in the fields, assured me that they generally eat only 20 tortillas a day, plus beans and meat on Sundays. They neglected to mention fruit and wild greens, which they eat almost daily. This turns out to be a very nutritious diet. The corn, grown with lime, allows the body to digest the proteins in beans.

#37 A line of women at the home of the groom leaving the cooking house with large clay pots on their heads to fetch water. The pots are made in an Indian village, Chinautla, now swallowed up by Guatemala City. Women make the pots, the local craft specialty, to sell in marketplaces. Alotenango used to specialize in little handmade boxes of balsa wood, for holding candies and sweets made in Antigua. This was part of the old economic pattern of scattered marketplaces and scattered craft specialties. Today Alotecos specialize in maize production for the urban market. That and coffee are the two cash crops today.

Today you would not see these women with clay pots on their heads, they are buying brightly colored plastic ones made in a factory in Guatemala City. The clay pots are sold to tourists and to upper class families as decorative items.

#38 Interior of the groom's family's kitchen, small children standing by their mother and grandmother. There are almost no extant photographs of the interior of a Maya cooking house today.

#s 39-41, The bride and groom and their godfather kneel on mats in a special temporary family shrine room built for the occasion, to receive the blessing of the groom's father, the family patriarch, whose household the bride is joining. He scatters flower petals on their heads while he recites a blessing. Note big slabs of beef handing against the wall. A steer was slaughtered and butchered for the wedding feast. Remember these people usually eat meat only on Sundays if then.

#42 Members of the bride's family arrive in the afternoon carrying her personal effects to leave in her new home. They will join the party.

#43 Inside the kitchen again.

#44 The groom's mother blesses the bridal couple, her son weeps.

#44 Outside the cook house during the wedding feast, young male relatives of the groom rest on a bench, they have been serving the seated guests at the sit-down banquet. Only at such times do Indian men wait on women (the bride and her godmother only).

#45 The bride and groom sitting together at the home of their godparents, whom they have accompanied on a formal "return home visit." The newly weds will go back to his father's house, their new home, where a party will continue all night.

#s 46-51, We see the marimba lined up to play in front of the house of the shaman-practical nurse-bonesetter (the man who initiated Socorro into becoming a shaman). Very young adolescent boys are running around with a mock bull, imitating a bull fight, and in one case chasing an adolescent girl who has a basket of goodies to sell to little kids in a mock marketplace.

#52 A family portrait in front of a traditional thatched homestead, a woman kneeling in the foreground is weaving on a backstrap loom. Until the 1910s women in Alotenango wove just about all the family clothing. This family has very little land, perhaps five cuerdas (a plot of 25 sq. Spanish yards or varas). A nuclear family with as many as five children needs 20 cuerdas to support itself. This family does very well by a craft specialty: baskets to sell to the plantations for coffee harvesting. They are thought of as "very poor" however, even though they do not lack for cash.

#52 My comadre, co-godparent, María Pamal de Coc selling sweet atol in the fairgrounds for the Ladinos' fiesta. Women work at home, except for helping planting black beans. Otherwise they process the products of men, esp. maize, for home consumption or sale in the local market. Men will take maize by the hundredweight sack to sell in the marketplace in Antigua.

#53 The image of St. Michael Archangel (San Miguel Arcangel) being welcomed into the home of this cofradía.

#54-7 Black and white slides of the fiesta of San Miguel on an earlier year. He is the third junior ranking saint in the town's hierarchy. He is conceived of as an avenging angel who keeps the devil down in the fires of the local volcanoes, and quells volcanic eruptions. By putting on the fiestas of the saints, Indians are keeping them happy and ensuring themselves supernatural help in obtaining bountiful harvests.

#58 Respected elder señor Pancho Xoc, head of the church committee, a secular cargo that takes care of the church building. He sits in the patio of the friary next to the church, wearing the traditonal black wool tunic worn over cotton draws and undershirt, held together by a beautiful hand-woven sash. This costume had almost disappeared at the time of my first fieldwork in the 1960s.

#58 The three town elders or principales seated on a bench in the friary corridor. One wears the traditional tunic, another a black wool jacket and a gunny sack apron over his white drawers, and the last one a dark wool suit. These men have all served as mayordomos of a major cofradia. They belong to the minority of Indians who have far more than 20 cuerdas of land. When they die, their holdings will be divided among their children. Increasingly a group of cottager Indians do not have enough land to subsist without working on the coffee plantations at harvest time.

# 59 Giants stand in front of the church door where the mass for the Day of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, is taking place. At the end of the mass, the Padre takes a consecrated wafer or Host, and enshrines it in a sunburst form, called a custodia, which he then parades as the Body of Christ. Children who have recently studied the catechism in chantry classes or who are currently studying show up to accompany the procession.

#60-65 We see slides of little boys assembling in front of the church, wearing sashes, and of little girls, all wearing white veils, coming down lower Royal Street on their way to the church to join the procession.