Livingston, Guatemala

Then Livingston. I have imagined it many times, having heard that it has only one street, but it is not at all what I expected. Coming in from Rio Dulce, it looks like many towns along the coast of California, say Moss Landing..…moored sailboats and motorboats, some very fancy homes, and many of the unique-to-3rd world country homes of bamboo and thatch on stilts next to the river. Once we disembark, we stop at the first restaurant we come to on the hilly main street, eat a fantastic breakfast with fresh-squeezed oj (I haven’t found any, yet, in Antigua) on the veranda of the restaurant, and watch the people go by. Next to us, two Hispanic women in the large lacy blouses and loose skirts typical of this area work on laptop computers. It turns out that they are associated with the local project for providing job education for young people in this area, which this wonderful restaurant BACAMAMA exists to benefit. I am looking everywhere for evidence of the Garifuna people that Livingston is famous for, but they are in the minority on this cobbled calle, although a few black women approach us with photos of women in a little album, asking us to choose a style to have our hair plaited (just like in Jamaica.) Most people walk or bicycle by, but there are a few cars, which we ask about. Evidently there is a daily ferry, on which any cars have to come. The heat and humidity are really oppressive, but welcome breezes from the river and the Bay are frequent. Maria Cristina and I have hooked up with the young American man and a woman from Holland for breakfast, and we then start off together to explore the town. The first sight is the concrete basketball court, where many people are spending a lazy Saturday watching the local teams play basketball, not futbol as in the Antigua area. We meander along the usual sorts of stalls and small shops, selling local crafts, food, lots of signs for Liquidas – bottled water and sodas. When we get ¾ of the way down the one main calle (although lots of side roads run off into the residential areas,) I ask our tour guide about the Garifunas – is there a special area where they congregate, or something? “Oh they’re all over,” he says, without much interest, but up to this point I have seen very few black people, proportionately. We pass one large attractive restaurant with the word Garifuna in the name, but otherwise I have seen nothing to indicate the presence mentioned in the guidebooks. I had imagined music coming from one after another open-air bar, colorful costume (though what I’d seen on the Garifuna youth playing music at El Pelicano bar in Antigua wasn’t TOO colorful) and the sort of rich patois I’d heard in Jamaica. Then we see a bunch of folks from our tour congregating next to a shack on the side of the street, talking with an old black man with a grizzled beard. He speaks English and as we come up he is describing a tour he and his band had made to Holland, and says that they have recently been in New Mexico. The folks in our group from those areas speak up enthusiastically and he engages with them, naming towns they know, and places they are familiar with. I elaborate about this, here, because he looks like an old drunk and I make the snap judgment that he is b.s.ing us about the grand travels of his band. I take the chance to ask him about the Jovenes de Livingston, the group of young Garifuna musicians I had met in Antigua; hoping, really, to connect with them again, here. He says he has heard about them from many people, but he doesn’t know who they are – they must be from Puerto Barrios, on the other side of the river, and just using the name of Livingston – he seems rather scornful. I ask more about the Garifuna influence in Livingston. He says that they have been more and more shoved out of eminence here by the Hispanics, who had “come in with their restaurants and their culture.” Now the Garifuna are a minority in their “own land.” I ask other questions, and he offers to take us on the tour that the tours don’t offer (he says something about that to our tour guide, who is hanging back from this conversation – in English, which he doesn’t speak – but also with some apparent degree of scorn, or desire to distance.) Five or six of us swing in behind the man – Aurelio Gota – and he takes us (and our reluctant guide) down to the end of the calle, and then along the ocean – because, tho the shoreline along the bay looks the same as along the river, Livingston is where the Rio Dulce meets the bay and then the sea. There is no beach to speak of, and the water is resplendent with some floating plastic bottles and bags, and other wonders made by man. Not dreadful, but not very pretty. We walk along among groups of children playing, a few tiendas offering food or liquidas, people taking their leisure in the cool ocean breeze. Most of these people our impromptu guide speaks to by name, and we of course say Hola and Buenos Dias to everyone we pass. One tienda is playing a CD, and Aurelio says, “That’s my music,” and offers to sell us a CD. I go back to get a cold bottle of water and ask the woman, jestingly, if the music is really his, and she says, “Oh, certainly!” When I return to the group, Aurelio is handing out the CDs and when I take one, I joke with him that I had checked it out and what he is telling us is true. Unfortunately, he takes some offense, even though I apologize and explain to him that so many people try to sell different things to us tourists, and so often exaggerate their value or the story connected with them that we become skeptical. As we continue to walk along the shore – meeting one white couple (from our tour group,) and few Hispanics, but dozens of Garifunas – he shows us a pink and white mansion on the shore, with a beautiful garden, among the shacks that otherwise line the shores. He says that Nazis, fleeing Germany after the war, settled here and remained for 3-4 years, then disappeared. He says that you hardly ever saw them outside their fortress (which had a two-story tower, as if to look out to sea,) but he remembers them. I ask how old he was then and he says about two. I say I was ten when the war was over, born in ’35. He and the young man we are walking with express surprise, and he said he was born in ’53 (which would mean that any Nazis he saw would have had to be there for nearly eight years.) I am shocked because from his appearance I would have thought he was 75 or so. He laughs and says, “Well I was thinking about courting you, but now I know you are old enough to be my mother!” 

He then leads us up a steep meandering path away from the ocean, through backyards and into a house, where he introduces his bedridden aunt – probably a bit shocked to have 6-7 foreigners show up while she is in bed. But she is very gracious and Maria Cristina does her usual charming Spanish thing with her, and we leave her with well-wishes for her health. Then through many more back “yards” – this path reminds me very much of the ones we took off the road in Jamaica. A few children bounce along with us for a way, some teenagers call out jokingly to us, many people look askance. I get the feeling that not many tourists show up here. We then go through a big cemetery with gravestones and some larger edifices a bit higgley-piggley on the varied terrain and also, he tells us, tumbled about by the hurricane last year which demonstrated to the people that they needed to abandon their traditional bamboo and thatch houses and begin to build with concrete. This comment interests me, as it suggests that recent hurricanes have been more frequent or more devastating than previous ones. In the center of the cemetery, he shows us a huge tree 100 feet tall or so (not many trees in Guatemala reach the heights I’m used to in California) and at least 20’ around with many trunks grown together. He says something lovely about the roots reaching down into the graves and the bodies of the people, which include his parents and a sister, feeding this tree spiritually as well as physically. He has been talking all along about his attempts, as a leader in his community, to keep the Garifuna culture alive, through his music group, but also through his school. The children come there outside of regular school to learn the Garifuna language, history, music, and customs. At this point he shows us the building where his school is located, although he also says sometimes they meet on the beach. He says there hasn’t been much interest by other agencies in helping. I ask why the community in general doesn’t take part more in the tourist activities, which is the economic base for most of the country……….why not more restaurants, with Garifuna music and dance? I tell him that tourists come all the way here to see the Garifuna culture, and it’s not in evidence – why not take advantage of this? People could raise pigs and goats and chickens and vegetables to supply the restaurants – everyone could benefit! He says, “I think we Garifuna are a lackadaisical people.” An interesting word to use. What I see is a people being marginalized in their own town…..second-class citizens. But maybe they don’t care. Maybe they are happy with their lives as they are. I know many Europeans and especially Americans have met this sort of lazy resistance to their efforts to improve the lives of various indigenous peoples around the world, who are actually fine with things as they are, or don’t want foreigners interfering. Given my rather negative experience with child-rearing where I was in Jamaica, I ask him at one point about parent-child relationships: “Are the Garifuna pretty loving to their children?” I say, ingenuously. “Oh sure, they are! Of course they have to be strict with the kids, a little whipping never hurt anybody! These mothers, they are STRONG,” he says, admiringly,” You don’t mess with them.” I hear in his voice his memory of his mother. So, in my mind, it is the same as what I saw in Jamaica….and for that matter in a lot of areas. When M.Cristina asks about the Garifunas’ relationship to Africa, he goes off on a heated oration for 5-6 minutes about how the Garifuna are NOT, as is said in the books, decendants of shipwrecked African slaves, and not from Africa at all. He knows that the Garifuna people came from Venezuela and spread up the coast (and it’s true that there are Garif settlements all along Central America on the Caribbean…thru Honduras and Belize, for sure.) I don’t know if he actually believes this – he seems to – or if it’s a concept he uses to help the children of his community feel more proud of their derivation. He then takes us to a locked-up restaurant made of wood but designed to let the air in, as the thatch houses do. In its dark recesses, on a low stage, are four drums of the type I saw with the Jovenes de Livingston group. He says he made the drums and that they are very different from the Djembes of Africa (which is true – much more primitive looking) and he sits down and plays for his very appreciative audience for a few minutes. He then stands and says the tour is over. He had said all along that we could give whatever we felt for the CDs (home-executed copies) but when we offer 100 Q for the two we had asked for (pretty much all we had-$13) he is offended and says “For the tour, too!” though of course that it was not free was never mentioned. But we cough up what little more we feel we can spare from what we have left for the expenses we will still encounter. And we walk the short way back to the center of town. We still have 50 mins. until we are supposed to meet the boat, so people congregate on the wharf and some have more to eat and another beer, but I am pretty much out of money.