Guatemala: Market Report

Quick walk through the mercado central in Antigua, Guatemala, shot on an Altoids-sized camera. Link to 1:11 video (in Flash or Quicktime).

Travel haiku: homesick fading battery

you are more precious
to me than call time on
a dying Li-Ion

Guatemala: art in response to "femicides"

Blogger arte-sano writes (my ham-fisted translation of their more eloquent Spanish):

My friend Rosa is an artist of Mexican heritage from the Bay Area who has strong connections to the Guatemalan community. She recently began working on an art project about "femicide" in Guatemala. The project is designed to create awareness of the crimes against women, to create solidarity among the families and friends of the victims, and above all -- to denounce the impunity that prevails in our country [Guatemala] which has allowed to proliferation of this type of violence. Rosa has sent out an invitation to participate in the project, and it occurred to me that by sharing this on my blog, perhaps more people might want to collaborate on this project, so here it is.

Link to full text in Spanish. The artist, Rosa Valdez, can be reached at rosavaldez at hotmail.com.

Background: Amnesty International has more information on femicide in Guatemala here. By various estimates, approximately 2,000 women were murdered in Guatemala from 2001 through March 2006. AI states,

Exceptional cruelty and sexual violence characterize many of the killings. Some of the victims had their throats cut, were beaten, shot or stabbed to death. Many of their bodies show signs of rape, torture, mutilation or dismemberment.

Previous posts:

* Film -- Killer's Paradise
* Thousands of women protest wave of "femicides"

Technorati Tags: art, femicide, guatemala, photos, sex

Guatemala: vintage video about evil volcano near Antigua

Found on archive.org: a sensationalist (and racist) newsreel film from 1934 about indigenous communities that live near the volcan de agua near Antigua, Guatemala. The room where I stayed during my time in Antigua looked out over this "menacing monster volcano." This 72-year-old film is full of offensive comments that reflect the bias of the time -- at one point, the narrator refers to the "semi-barbarous" Mayan people as "human mules" -- but the images of daily life are amazing. In some communities in Guatemala, those daily scenes have changed very little since 1934. Link to "Menace of Guatemala" on archive.org (about 9 minutes long) where you can stream or download.

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous, video

Guatemala: vintage video, "Journey To Banana Land"

A corporate promotional video produced by United Fruit Company in 1950, four years before a CIA-backed coup protected that firm's interests in Guatemala by overthrowing democratically-elected leader Jacobo Arbenz.

If the company's foreign policy ambitions had a name: Bananifest Destiny.

Link to archive.org page where you can download or stream the video, which is about 20 minutes long.

Previously:
Guatemala: internet video on CIA role in 1954 coup

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous, video

Guatemala: internet video on CIA role in 1954 coup

Was noodling around on YouTube, archive,org, and Google Video for material related to the 1954 CIA-backed coup of democratically elected Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz, and found:

Documentary: "A Coup: Made In America," written by Alan Mendelsohn and Nadine Pequeneza, originally aired in 2001 on Canadian television program "Turning Points of History." Patrick at Guatemalan Solidarity Network blog wrote about this here, and arte-sano (who pointed me to these videos via comment on this blog -- thanks!) wrote about it here. A Google Video embed of one clip is below, but I found a bunch of sections on YouTube, too: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Then-vice-president Nixon says in this clip, below: "In other words, the Arbenz regime was not a Guatemalan government, it was a foreign government controlled by foreigners."

"The CIA in Guatemala, 1954" -- snip from a documentary on U.S. intervention in Guatemala and the 1954 coup, mostly in Spanish. I'm not sure who produced this, but it opens with former CIA agent Philip Agee.

And an odd related find on YouTube -- a bunch of film clips from the 1944 Guatemalan revolution, set to motion over the Radiohead song "Sail to The Moon."

The GSN video blog points to a number of other interesting Guatemala-related video finds online, including more recent documentary films produced by Guatemalan filmmakers: Link.

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous, CIA, video

Guatemala: Is "Apocalypto" Racist?

The actual title of the essay in question was "Is 'Apocalypto' Pornography," but IMO that gives perfectly respectable porn a bad name. Here's a critical analysis of Mel Gibson's colonialist co-opting of Mayan history for his latest vanity vehicle. The author is Traci Ardren, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, who...

...has studied Classic Maya society for over 20 years while living in the modern Maya villages of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Espita in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Her credentials include contributing to and editing Ancient Maya Women (2002) and The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006). Ardren's reaction to the new film "Apocalypto," follows. Scholars are well aware that some aspects of Maya culture were violent, but Ardren finds fault with what she sees as a pervasive colonial attitude in the film.

Snip from Ms. Ardren's essay:

Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamucil this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in "Apocalypto," no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World?

I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic.

Link, via Tom Zeller's "The Lede" blog at the New York Times website.

Technorati Tags: film, guatemala, indigenous

Back in the USA

I'm back in the United States now, sorting through gigs and gigs of sound, video, photos... and a fat moleskine notebook full of hastily scrawled notes. Heading in to the studio to whittle that down to a series of radio stories, and I'll be working on some print and video stuff, too. I'm really jetlagged right now, but eager to begin work... and eager to share what I learned there. As soon as I can see straight, I plan to also post a series of notes about the tech equipment I brought. I learned a few more things this time out about what works, and what doesn't, in the way of road gear.