The smell of frying tilapia seeps into the living room of the Lucas home as 16-year-old Maria, scrunching her face and sighing, struggles to wrap a traditional Guatemalan corte skirt around her waist.
“I don’t know how to tie this on!” she shouts to her father, Francisco.
But on the night of this annual Mayan fiesta, he has his own tasks to complete.
Francisco kneels by the crackling wood stove, dragging a saw through a brass curtain rod, crafting a scepter fit for the Mayan Queen who will be crowned that evening. The metal is hard to hack, and the Catholic Mass that precedes the fiesta starts in just 20 minutes.
It takes work to keep tradition alive. But in Alamosa, where 400 transplanted Q’anjob’al Indians from Guatemala find themselves straddling worlds old and new, this tradition is what separates them from the families that live down the street and links them to the families they left behind.
Their culture, thousands of years old, descends from one of the world’s great civilizations. Now refugees in the United States, this close-knit community struggles to retain indigenous beliefs and customs — music, dance, language, rituals — amid the modernity of American lifestyles.
Maria waves the corte again.
“Daddy!” she pleads.
No use. Francisco is focused: gathering the incense, the earthenware censer and a box that brims with new costumes, each from a different ethnic region, to show at the fiesta for Santa Eulalia.
As the leader of the local Mayan community, he is keeper of a renowned culture that created temples, pyramids and a complex calendar lauded for its accuracy — a culture of mysticism and prophecies, herbalists and healers. A grand past sustains and inspires these transplants, now rooted in the San Luis Valley, one of the poorest regions in the state.
Living in the new world
The Q’anjob’al Indians stand on the lowest rungs of Colorado’s economic ladder. When the first members of the community arrived as refugees from their country’s civil war in the 1980s, they found work in the lettuce fields and potato warehouses, or the local mushroom farm. The men had less than an elementary-level education; the women had no formal schooling.
They lived in run-down migrant houses on Adams Lane. Over time — often living with vigilant frugality — many bought small plots of land and moved their extended families into double-wide trailers.
Juana Francisco, the first Mayan wife to move to Alamosa, now lives in a mobile home on a snow-covered country road. A second, smaller trailer, for housing additional family, sits in her backyard amid a flock of chickens, turkeys and a large goat.
Many Guatemalans work on the mushroom farm, but others labor in places like Oscar’s Mexican Restaurant as dishwashers or waiters, and in hotels as cleaning staff. Those who have learned English, like Francisco’s wife, Lucia, have jobs in places such as Wal-Mart, where she works in the shoe department. Other women, working long hours and caring for family, lack time for learning a new language.
Francisco devoted many years to English lessons and now works as a janitor at Trinidad State Junior College. He spends every spare moment preserving traditional Mayan customs and beliefs, including a weekly show he broadcasts on KRZA in Spanish and Q’anjob’al, a language thick with lisps and glottal stops that make it difficult for American-born kids to master.
He also teaches traditional dances to the new generation and is working with the San Luis Valley Immigrant Resource Center for a grant to buy marimbas. Teens, including his own daughter Maria, are expressing more interest in their culture and want to learn to play their country’s national instrument.
On the night of the fiesta, however, Maria’s determination to practice the ancient ways aims elsewhere. As the sun sinks below Mount Blanca in a burst of salmon-streaked purple, her obsession is getting the corte right. She shoots a quick glance at her mother in the kitchen. She could help.
But Lucia, checking the clock on the wall, continues to flip fish in the sizzling pan. She’s ankle-deep in a jumble of plastic jugs filled with water because the pipes froze overnight, so all day there has been no water to cook with, nor to do the laundry — and there will be no showers after this back-breaking day of decorating the gym with Guatemalan fabrics and flags, and then lugging in those heavy wooden marimbas.
Maria wanders back to her bedroom to consult with her sister, Lucy, a 14-year-old high school student enamored with horses and basketball. With minutes to spare, Lucia slaps foil over the fish and races to help her daughters dress.
Juan, the family’s oldest child, paces amid the chaos, nervous yet excited about soon escorting the Mayan Queen to her coronation.
At 22, Juan — whippet thin, with a graceful smile — is living testimony to his father’s courage and strength. During the 1980s, when civil war ravaged Guatemala, Francisco faced a heart-rending decision: whether to abandon his infant son.
Leaving the old world
It was 1985, just a few years after genocide in Guatemala hit its peak, when the army tortured and shot 20,000 of the country’s poorest, wiping out 400 Mayan villages. Lucia still remembers the day she walked past a massacred village, all those dead bodies and slaughtered children.
Back then, Juan’s grandmother argued that it wasn’t safe for the baby Juan to escape with his parents.
Francisco refused to leave his son, so he and Lucia joined the exodus of refugees, carrying the baby as they walked over mountains into Mexico and then to the United States, through the blazing deserts of Arizona, with Lucia still breast-feeding.
Once in the United States, Francisco called his brother-in-law, Jesus Gaspar, to ask for help. Jesus had crossed the U.S. border a few years earlier. Through the network of migrant workers, Jesus heard of field work on the farms of Blanca, so they caught a ride to the San Luis Valley.
In 1985, Jesus and Jose Gaspar drove to Arizona to pick up their sister Lucia, the baby and Francisco, shuttling them back to the tiny community of Mayan mushroom pickers, which then numbered about seven.
For many years, these refugees — who’d received political asylum — picked at the Rakhra Mushroom Farm, here in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where others from their country eventually joined them.
Rakhra is a science-based company owned by four Sikhs from India, who purchased it in 1985 and named it after a Punjabi village. Mushrooms are grown indoors, in windowless rooms. Water drips from the ceiling. Pickers harvest the mature mushrooms, moving up and down rows of large wooden trays, stacked floor to ceiling. Plucking the fragrant fungi from topmost trays, pickers straddle the aisle, high in the air, each foot planted on opposite rows. This year, four crews of 30 pickers each, mostly Mayan, will harvest 13 million pounds of mushrooms, for about 15 cents per pound.
“They’re good people,” says Karmjit Sahl, one of the owners, who wears a blue turban, beige sweater vest and thick rubber boots. “Everyone works as a family.”
Where worlds collide
On the day of the fiesta, Lucia’s sister-in-law, Eulalia Cristobal, picks mushrooms from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., then heads to Lucia’s house for hours of cooking, after which she jumps into her corte and huipil blouse and heads to Mass, where she and Lucia serve as eucharistic ministers, standing next to the priest, offering the body of Christ.
Afterward at the fiesta, they watch as Francisco stands ramrod straight on the stage, teaching the values of the ancestors to this new generation of American-born Mayans. Like other Colorado kids, they are into sports and iPods, they watch TV, but their parents want them to appreciate the past too.
“A lot of our people may not go to school or college, but we know astronomy and the stars,” he says. “Mayan religion and spirituality is very sacred for that reason. The Mayan spirit, the way we live, is the most important thing.”
This gathering of Guatemalans at Sacred Heart Catholic Church is connected to Pastoral Maya USA, a national organization started in the mid-1990s to educate about Mayan history and religion, which is now primarily Catholic with an overlay of indigenous ways.
This summer, Lucia traveled to Atlanta to attend the national conference, which included a workshop for young trilingual Mayan-Americans who will join a national program of interpreters working in their native language, plus Spanish and English.
At this year’s fiesta, for the first time, people like Flora Archuleta notice a new confidence among the Mayans, a sense of unity that derives, perhaps, from an increased understanding of their culture, a diminishment of isolation. Archuleta, who is Latino, works closely with the Guatemalans as executive director of the San Luis Valley Resource Center.
“The Alamosa community had it hard when the people started coming in,” she says.
There wasn’t discrimination as much as separation. “They couldn’t communicate with them because of their language. . . . They didn’t really know how to deal with it, so for the longest time it just stayed like that.”
“People are adapting to us”
Over time, however, leaders from the disparate groups began to build bridges. For the past two years, public-school teachers from Alamosa have traveled to Guatemala to work with teachers in indigenous schools.
As part of this cross-cultural fertilization, Sheryl Ludwig, an assistant professor at Adams State College who organized the trip, hopes to bring traditional Mayan weavers for a visit to Alamosa.
The goal is to help refugee women who speak only Q’anjob’al escape social isolation and depression.
The future of the Mayan community here is propelled by people like Matias Francisco, who arrived in America at age 7, speaking neither English nor Spanish. Now he’s a trilingual translator for the Mayans at Valley-Wide Health Systems.
“There was a barrier to getting accepted,” he says. “We’d never been seen before, so we’re always stereotyped.
“They automatically assume we’re Mexican. We had to face a lot of that growing up, but now I think people are adapting to us and understanding that we do contribute a lot to their society.”
The fiesta for Santa Eulalia serves as a public declaration of this unique culture. At the start of Mass at Sacred Heart church, white candles flicker as the white-robed procession moves slowly up the aisle. Pungent clouds of incense wrap around the framed photograph of Santa Eulalia, held high overhead, a tiny, lace-shrouded miracle-worker with red lips and black hair.
It’s just like the fiesta Mass back in Guatemala, only filled with American-born Maya kids like Maria, who kneels in silent prayer, the fabric of her corte perfectly tucked and twisted.
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
