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GUATEMALA
| Politics, Development & the City
1
of 1 reflection
My
class had split into two groups and traveled
to different towns in Guatemala to do
an urban observation field project. My
group chose to go to Livingston and the
Caribbean coast. Livingston is a Garifuna
town. The Garifuna are an Afro-Caribbean
community that lives on the coast of Belize,
Guatemala, and Honduras. In addition to
Garifuna, Latinos (Westernized Guatemalans)
and Kechi(sp?) Maya live in this town.
Our task was basically to figure out how
this community defines itself and how
the three economic models we had learned,
capitalist, Marxist, and domestic, do
and do not play out in this isolate, remote
town.
We spent one whole day talking to people
about education. We went to some schools,
talked to people in the streets and settlements,
talked to the guy starting the library
and ended up on the riverfront at the
docks asking people how they teach and
learn about fishing, an economic staple
of the town. We talked to this one Garifuna
guy who told us he knew just who we should
talk to. He told us to meet him at the
edge of the Garifuna section of town at
10pm.
He took us very deep into the neighborhood
to a small two-story house with a fire
escape. We climbed the fire escape and
were welcomed by a very, very old man
and his great-niece. They served us water
and pounded yucca. He talked to us until
2:30 in the morning. He was referred to
by the Garifuna community as “the
teacher”. He was one of the first
to leave Livingston. He had taught most
Garifuna kinds of several generations
to read and write in Spanish and English
and had created an alphabet for the Cearifina
language. He had also researched the history
of his people and made maps of their passage
from Africa through British, French, and
Spanish colonies and enslavement. He gave
us a breakdown of the whole educational
system in Livingston.
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