Coming to Guate, I had no stereotypes already about Indigenous people here. They look, act, and talk completely different from the Indigenous people in the US so to make a comparison isn’t logical. Not only have I heard close to nothing about Guatemala in my education, I haven’t seen (that I can remember) any images of this country or it’s people in the news or on popular TV. I haven’t read any books or magazines with any mention of Guatemala. Maybe in DC, I had read policy briefs that included the country in a sea of sterile statistics. But basically, I have no reference to fall back on to distinguish between Ladinos (those of Spanish descent) and Indigenas (those native to Guate, who still make up about 50% of the population).
To me, all Guatemalans are simply Guatemalans – and simply fall into the catagory of “not like me”. The one clear distinction my untrained eye could see the first day we were here was that obviously some of them still dress in traditional clothes and some do not. But it didn’t register with me what that means, what kinds of prejudices I might apply to that.
After you’re in Guatemala for a while, you start uncovering the racism against the Indigenous people here. Not only are they recovering from an ugly civil war, where the government basically enforced a policy of genocide against the Indigenas for 37 years, but for hundreds of years, these people have been systematically oppressed, forcibly converted to Christianity, violated, raped, killed, stolen from, and humiliated by Spanish Conquistadors. For centuries, like African and Native Americans in our country, the government has poured out racist propaganda which has been reinforced in schools, official government documents, pop culture, and family life. And now it is simply part of the culture.
Why? Because they are “different” than those of Spanish descent. And because they were sitting on a wealth of minerals and lucratave natural resources.
Obviously, like those oppressed minority groups in the US, the Indigenous population make up the majority of the poor and are largely illiterate. They do the dirty jobs like domestic work, janitorial, and farming. They have scarce access to education, health facilities, or the political arena, and as a result fall further and further into marginalization and poverty. Perhaps most egregious, is the fact that there are 23 different Indigenous languages still spoken in Guatemala and there is absolutely NO acknowledgement of this fact. If you can’t speak Spanish, you will not understand one word your president or any other goverment official says in this country. And you can’t go to school. Worse yet, if you speak Spanish, but don’t write it, you don’t understand what you’re voting for or even know how to sign your name to legal documents. Basically, you are stripped of your political and civil rights by extension of being illiterate.
Like cases of banned Hijabs (Muslim scarves that women cover their heads with) in French schools, there are cases of banned traditional clothing in schools here. In other words, you must choose education or your cultural identity, but cannot have both. And similarly to Islam, it is the women who carry the brunt of the racism because of their more specific dress (the Indigenous men here rarely wear traditional clothes anymore).
Indigenous kids - a girl, wearing traditional clothes, next to her brother, who is in modern clothes.
In cases where girls can go to school in their traditional clothes, the racism and prejudice is out of control. A common site here is one, lone Indigena girl walking down the street with her head down, as Ladino school girls hurl insults at her from across the street. Men on the bus will give their seat to me, a white woman, or to Ladino women, but never to an Indigenous women who is usually carrying a baby on her back and a giant basket on her head.
Never in my life has racism seemed so ludacris. To my untrained eye, and my un-propagandacized-soul, everyone here seems the same. I have never been truly free of subliminal messages that I’ve received all my life in the US about an ethnic group that is different from me. I cannot distinguish between Ladinos and Indigenas inside of myself – they are simply all Guatemalans.
What a stroke of luck. I’m viewing racism without context, a completely new way of looking at it, and of feeling about it.
As a result, the idiocy of prejudice and racism has never seemed so pronounced. While Ladinos are also victim to years of propaganda, lies taught in schoolbooks and societal pressure, this systematic oppression of the Indigenous population makes Ladinos look like complete idiots. In the US, of course, it’s more complicated for me. As a white person, I understand the complexities of the racism issues in the US – not all whites are racist. We also have a lot of different ethnic groups in the US (in Guatemala, there are just 2 visible ones, Ladino and Indigena) and they are all racist against each other. There are African Americans who struggled so bravely for civil rights, now advocating AGAINST the civil rights of LGBT folks. There are white people who are ok with black people, but not Arabs. Arabs hate the Persians and Persians hate the Arabs. African Americans blame Latinos for taking away jobs. It is a mess.
But here, I’ve seen it like a child, ignorant of all the complexities that go into making prejudice and racism functional. To me, it’s just black and white. There are Ladinos who are discriminating against Indigenas because they wear different clothes. How much lower can your IQ get? They don’t talk to each other, don’t make friends with each other. How much more of an asshole can you be? Oppressing 50% of your population induces crime and violence and brings down the integrity of your entire country. What kind of an idiot self-sabotages like that? There is no question, no complexity in my mind here. Racism has never seemed more illogical, more evil, more completely opposite of what God would want from us.
In the US, racism infuriates me, but somehow in a duller way. I’m used to it. I grew up all around it. I have less hopes of it getting better in my lifetime. Sometimes, I don’t even notice it. But, experiencing racism here infuriates me with a hot anger. It is completely intolerable.
And really, I’ve never felt like a bigger idiot myself for the prejudices and stereotypes that I carry in my own heart.
I’m so glad I’ve gotten this perspective as I head back to the US, back to the maze of racial prejudices that lay just below the surface of politically correct words. I feel like I’ve been able to see this issue from a different point of view and I will carry that insight with me back into my own environment.
