‘Candles glow like fireflies through the smoke,’ Ronald Wright observes as he climbs up to Mass in a Catholic church that doubles as a Mayan site in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. ‘Women on the lower steps are selling arum lilies and other flowers, as bright as their striped huipiles; silent babies stare wide-eyed from brilliant carrying cloths on their mothers’ backs. Most of the Quiché men wear straw Stetsons and cheap manufactured clothes, but at the top of the platform, there are half a dozen chuchkahau dressed in the outfit we’ve seen on the hotel staff. Here the strange blend of Mesoamerica and Europe seems appropriate, adding dignity to the lined, fervent faces swinging censers, calling on ancestors, kneeling in quiet supplication, oblivious of the orderly turmoil all around them.’
It’s only one paragraph among a thousand such, at once vivid and suggestive, drawing expected exoticism together with unexpected details into a fine, complex mesh. I can see the candles like fireflies, the wide-eyed gaze of the babies amid the dazzling colours. Yet I can also see how the local indigenous population has a genius for surviving by taking in the ways of the conqueror and making them its own—the central theme of Wright’s account of travelling through Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize in 1985. I see how Stetsons and somewhat inauthentic local costumes merge, and how shades of Europe (those ‘swinging censers’) flit through the New World setting. Everything is ‘orderly turmoil.’ In the same breath, I notice how my guide to the site can recognize lilies as well as esoteric customs, can register how the scene before him is and is not something authentic and traditional. Our author is a passionate empiricist, we realize, less interested in passing judgment than in collecting observations, sensory and human and historical, so that we find ourselves constantly encircled by the world he is describing, and subliminally aware of how Mayan culture can sustain its cyclical calendar in the midst of a younger world committed to linear ‘progress.’
Click to newsletter