Community and Resistance in Guatemala
BY CASPER CHATELIER
25 NOVEMBER 2024
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Right: Dogs relaxing at Ulew Fuego, where I researched local flora
This article was produced as part of the Global Diversity Foundation’s Darwin Initiative-funded project “Mentoring GEN Fellows to incubate Global South biodiversity-livelihoods initiatives”. Through the project, we coordinate a programme to support grassroots conservation organisations in the Global South in welcoming and overseeing Masters’ students from UK research institutions as organisational interns. This offers the organisation support through the production of relevant research and communications outputs and supports the Master’s students by offering them the opportunity to discover grassroots conservation realities in the Global South and conduct research for their MSc theses.
The following article is by Casper Chatelier, an MSc Ethnobotany student at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. They interned at Asociación SERES in Guatemala. SERES’s mission is to cultivate and catalyze youth leaders to build more just and sustainable communities in Guatemala and El Salvador. SERES’ Co-Executive Director Abigail Quic is a member of the Global Environments Network who participated in our Conservation & Communities Fellowship in 2024.
Disclaimer: This article reflects the voice and opinions of the author and does not represent the Global Diversity Foundation. The views expressed herein are solely those of the author mentioned and should be interpreted as such.
When I arrived in Guatemala, my main concerns were practical: developing my language skills, finding transport, arranging accommodation, and organising research site visits. I was theoretically prepared, but I didn’t anticipate the emotions. There was the hope and frustration of ordinary lives, with their opportunities and inconveniences. The joy of the everyday. And there was anger and rage that could easily have slipped into despair when confronted with the large-scale geographical and political processes I’d mostly only read about, now experienced in their destructive, untouchable reality.
Before I’d even started my research, I mentioned to a guide while hiking Acatenango Volcano that I was interested in medicinal plants. He directed me to an old man leading one of the groups who, to my surprise, was thrilled to share his knowledge, stopping every 10 minutes to tell me about a wild plant on the trail, while the rest of the group stood by, confused. His enthusiasm made more sense when I went to thank him after the hike. He told me nobody had asked him such questions in years. Years!
It made sense, given his current occupation of guiding tourists up and down the volcano. But what about others with his knowledge? He said he didn’t know any others. Despite the hundreds of tourists and guides traversing the volcano daily, he didn’t know any others with similar expertise.
This lovely old man, eager to share his knowledge with a visitor like me, had no one else to pass it on to.
Sitting in class, I had taken notes on the degradation of traditional knowledge transmission, but it was an entirely different experience to stand before a man who might be the last link in a chain stretching back generations.
I didn’t realise it then, but this moment marked the beginning of a series of realisations that would fuel my growing rage against exploitative tourism and neocolonialism.
A parade in Antigua accompanied by religious figures blessing passers by, a marching band, and coloured carpets of dyed sawdust temporarily covering the street.
Following this excursion, I spent quite some time settling in. It took some getting used to hearing explosions that sounded like gunshots throughout the day, only to be told they were celebratory. Two months later, I accepted that the celebrations never stopped, Saint’s Day after Saint’s Day, parade after parade. I could barely keep track, and many of the locals I spoke to couldn’t either.
The exception came when I visited a colleague in her hometown on Lago de Atitlán, not knowing it was the town’s Saint’s Day. As she showed me around and shared the town’s history, distant music grew louder and closer until we found ourselves inside a cavernous public hall. Two stages faced each other, alternating bands as hundreds of people spun on the dance floor in traditional clothing, with their friends and families watching from the side. It was barely a corner from the town centre, head-pounding in volume, yet I wouldn’t have found it without a guide.
It was joyous, made even more so by the tour my colleague had given me, during which she shared the history of the community’s efforts to facilitate sustainable tourism, support traditional practices, and resist modern-day colonisation. She showed me a medicinal plant association, and weavers collectives, and lamented the difficulty of getting free-spirited artists to unionise. Having not yet visited the rest of the towns on the lake, I couldn’t have known how bad it could get.
The streets of my colleague’s town and the hall hosting the Saint’s Day dance.
The next day, after the lancha I boarded took me across the lake to the next town, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. On my way to the nature reserve I had come to visit, most of the streets I passed through were narrow and empty. The walls were broken only by occasional doors advertising astrology, crystal healing and astral projection, all in English. The only Guatemalans I saw were selling souvenirs on the main street.
When I finally arrived at the nearby nature reserve and began hiking to see the wildlife and ceremonial Maya altars, I began to think: if these altars are in use, where do the Maya people live? It’s surely not the locals running ecstatic dance retreats. the answer hit me when I paused for a break, overhearing an English conversation about improving local property prices. I then recalled the many construction sites I’d passed on my way, knocking down the old structures for more modern, marketable venues tailored to spiritual Westerners.
Nausea set in as I left the reserve and walked past yoga studios and meditation workshops, trying to find some evidence of a real local community. How far must a Maya person walk from the actual town perched up on the hill through the winding avenues of pseudo-spiritual colonisation, just to reach their altar?
I had to get out of there. I couldn’t understand it. Did these wealthy immigrants and hippie holiday-home owners not realise what they were doing? How could they not see the processes they were enabling?
The next town was much the same, though in a different guise. My inner sickness deepened as I saw the local hostel workers taking breaks in a small enclosure hidden behind a wall, while the world traveller, “employee-of-a-month” types relaxed in hammocks beside the guests.
I struggled to keep friendly conversation over “family dinner” where guests ate together. I had to withdraw before I started prodding, questioning, or blaming the people sitting across from me. I wanted to believe that they were innocent, and by extension, that I was innocent. How could I target people revelling in their exciting exploration of a foreign land when I’d never confronted my travelling friends about the same issues, or questioned how I’d ended up at the same table?
Later, I went to bed as the hostel owner performed at the open mic, encouraging the audience to sing and clap along to caricatures of Guatemalan people. The importance of the community development my colleague had told me of couldn’t have been more clear.
I altered my travel plans to leave the region as soon as I was on my own.
Waiting for a Lancha to take me away
I was shocked and sickened, spending the whole journey back to Antigua ranting online at any friends who would listen. With my political views and education, I had assumed people would know better and would care about the impact they had on communities. It was a slap in the face to realise otherwise.
My anger subsided into a melancholy acceptance when I vented at a Guatemalan friend, who barely shrugged in response, saying “They’re raised to be colonisers”.
This friend, along with others I met along the way, educated me in other unexpected areas. Being genderqueer in England has been increasingly difficult over the last few years, yet I never appreciated how good I had it. Completing my pre-research risk assessments with assurances I would mask my gender and sexuality had me considering my safety. However, I failed to extend that consideration to the Guatemalan LGBTQI+ community until I witnessed their reality firsthand.
Having become acquainted with a gay bar in Antigua and its regular patrons, where they proudly display rainbow flags and host drag acts, it was easy to forget the potential dangers until I faced them myself.
Driving home from the bar one night with a Mexican friend, we were followed by the police and pulled over. One officer stood in front of my door, dismissing my questions, while the other interrogated my friend outside. Are you married? What would your husband think? Why shouldn’t we deport you?
I gave up trying to get anything out of my assigned officer and began texting updates to my friends while frantically googling “Guatemala police violence”, and “Guatemala police bribes” – anything that might help while my friend cried and begged metres away.
In the end, we were let go after my friend managed to convince the officers not to extort us. When I recounted the experience to a Guatemalan friend a few days later, they explained just how easily we’d been let off.
A banner in the pride parade
I’d never faced violence beyond slurs for my identity before. I’d never felt physically unsafe. But my friends remained unshaken, so I did too. Not long after that incident, the city’s annual pride parade took place, and the solidarity persevered.
As the crowd slowly grew into the hundreds at the gathering point before the march, I saw crazy outfits, and flags I’d never seen before, and was asked by a young couple to take a photo of them kissing. Umbrellas opened as a relentless drizzle began, yet everyone was smiling, laughing and hugging, even when a massive police squad gathered and was deployed nearby.
An acquaintance had brought their children, and I watched as a friend played with one of them – holding them, spinning them around and giggling. At the same time, someone beside me mentioned being tear-gassed at the last pride parade they attended. But there was no fear. We were together.
As the march began, our number kept growing. The floats represented queer collectives, access to HIV medication, social justice and democracy. Sure, some bystanders had strange looks on their faces, but large bikers in scarves appeared and stood watch to maintain order.
The parade grew more dense and excited as it approached a building covered in flags, known for hosting community events
It was unlike anything I’d experienced before – true solidarity, untainted by the capitalist pinkwashing that fuels parades like the one in London. It was joyful, and it was real. In a country where the police can extort you for existing, where only two years ago Congress tried to criminalise same-sex relations, it was a show of strength.
Back home, I had participated in an art project by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, who cast my face for a piece to be displayed in London. The piece is a dialogue, a parallel between the manifestations of violence against trans people in England and Latin America. As I stood in the parade surrounded by smiling and living trans people, recalling Teresa’s stories of murder and resistance, I felt a connection to my community I never felt before.
I went to Guatemala to assist in developing local-scale ethnobotanical education, and I am proud of the ways my work will continue to impact local communities. Yet, it is the new friendships, experiences and encounters with the strength and fragility of community that have touched me. These moments will shape the direction and purpose of my work for as long as communities continue to believe in a better future.
None of this would have been possible without the support of GDF and the people I met along the way, who showed me the importance of standing together.
An informer at Ulew Fuego sharing his knowledge with me to help build a community plant conservation trail
