Giveaways
FROM Lake Atitlán, I continued my westward journey through the highlands of central Guatemala to the city of Quetzaltenango, also known by its historic Mayan name of Xela (or Xelajú).
Quetzaltenango is a Native American name, from quetzal (presumably the bird) and -tenango, meaning home of, place of, or town, a common suffix in Central America.
Ironically, this kind of indigenous name, so distinctive of the region, was bestowed by the conquistadors. It comes from the Nahuatl language of Mexico, the language of the Aztecs, who were allied to the Spanish in the early 1500s.
This is why many people from Quetzaltenango now prefer to call their city and its surrounding department of the same name Xelajú — thought to come from a phrase meaning ‘under ten mountains’ in the local Mayan language (Mam), and in use at the time of the conquest — or the shorter version, Xela.
Like Antigua — a name which means ‘ancient’— Xela is of great historical importance, and is generally said to be the second largest city in Guatemala; though, like Antigua, even Xela is much smaller than today’s Guatemala City, with only 200,000 inhabitants or so depending on where one draws its boundaries.
Xela was quite prosperous in the 1800s, thanks to coffee production, and is full of magnificent architecture from that period, whereas Antigua’s most famous buildings are from the 1600s and 1700s. Though both cities are full of artifacts and activities of cultural significance, Xela has nonetheless gained the nickname of Cuna de Cultura, meaning ‘Cradle of Culture’. This perhaps reflects the number of noted artists, writers, and other creative people born in Xela, which is considerable!
The city of Xela mostly lies at an altitude of 2,300 to 2,400 metres (7.550 to 7,875 feet), a couple of thousand feet higher than either Guatemala City or Antigua Guatemala, so the climate is quite mild even though it is in the tropics (though the sun is strong).
This short video shows my first impressions of the city’s central square, the Parque Central, officially the Parque Centro América. I’ll go into some more detail about the local landmarks, below.
They have lots of amazing food in Xela, including bakeries. Here’s the sign outside one I enjoyed visiting, called Xelapan.
As the phrase ‘under ten mountains’ suggests, there are several more volcanoes visible from Xela as well, and you can go hiking up them, too, via firms such as Quetzaltrekkers, which donates its profits to a children’s charity.
I booked to go on a hike with Quetzaltrekkers, but was ultimately too tired to go on it, perhaps because of the altitude.
Indeed, the area around Xela is known as Los Altos, meaning the highlands. The region is at a high elevation even by the standards of the rest of central Guatemala.
Los Altos was also the name of a short-lived sixth province, or nation, of a historically larger nation, the Federal Republic of Central America, established after independence from Spain at the start of the 1820s.
The Federal Republic consisted of the five states of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica in something like their present borders: but not Panama, which used to be part of Colombia until the USA engineered its independence, the better to build a canal through it.
The Federal Republic had an idealistic national anthem called La Granadera, still widely sung and performed on various official occasions in Central American countries today. It can be heard, with English subtitles, on the English-language Wikipedia page for the State of Los Altos.
(Spain’s Marcha Real is also called La Granadera, but it is quite different.)
Throughout Central America, there seems to be a degree of nostalgia for the days of the Federal Republic, and occasional proposals to revive it.
Indeed, all the flags of the former states of the federal republic — Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica — have a blue-white-blue theme which harks back, nostalgically, to the original colours of the Federal Republic, said to have symbolised the land — in the form of a white strip — between two blue oceans.
So, why did the original Federal Republic fall? The answer can be found in Guatemala.
Guatemala was the most powerful of the states of the Federal Republic. For its part, Los Altos, which split from Guatemala in 1838, was the most prosperous, economically developed, and politically liberal part of Guatemala.
The flag and coat of arms of Los Altos were the first to include the resplendent quetzal as a symbol of freedom.
The independence of Los Altos was recognised by the government of the Federal Republic, but resented by the merchants of Guatemala City, now reduced in importance.
This development hastened the collapse of the Federal Republic, the emergence of an independent Guatemala, and the reconquest of Los Altos by the new nation of Guatemala in 1840.
The leaders of Los Altos were taken out and shot. Paradoxically, their symbol of freedom, the resplendent quetzal, was then incorporated into the flag and coat of arms of Guatemala; not that the Guatemalans were to be permitted much freedom of any kind for the greater part of their subsequent history.
Los Altos would rise against the Guatemalan State again in the year 1848, that most revolutionary of years, and once more in the 1870s. In 1897, there was a further significant rebellion by the inhabitants of Los Altos: a rebellion which was again crushed by invasion from Guatemala City. After which, for at least the second time, the would-be rulers of a free and liberal Los Altos were executed by the victors.
Despite these spasms of repression, the Guatemalan government was never able to exercise total control over the rebellious Los Altos region. Not long after the 1897 rebellion, monuments were created to the martyrs of Los Altos, including a freedom gate on the approaches to the city, with a bronze lion (cast in 1910) on top, the lion of Quetzaltenango.
The first freedom gate was demolished in the 1950s, ostensibly for road-widening, but a new and larger one was erected on the eastern approaches to the city. The lion of Quetzaltenango, which was for a long time relegated to storage or watching over a park, once more bravely faces all comers from the direction of the capital.
Here is a night-time photo of the arch, formally known as the Arco del Sexto Estado de Los Altos, the arch of the sixth state of Los Altos, taken by a photographer named Harry Díaz. Along with the bronze lion, the arch bears the coat of arms of Los Altos and the words ‘The Love of Freedom Made them Heroes / The Hate for Tyrants Made them Martyrs’.
The corrupt and oppressive elites who spoiled the initial high ideals of the Federal Republic, and had the liberals of Xela shot (twice), were often sponsored by outside forces including — let us not beat about the bush here — the United States.
For the North Americans, Guatemala was a ‘banana republic’: a place that produced bananas and other forms of tropical produce and where, if the peasants wanted too large a share of the proceeds or if urban-dwellers wanted funds set aside for national development, these outsiders would help to organise a coup d’état and then blame it on the locals.
In Guatemalan history, the most notorious of these coups was the one organised in 1954 by the CIA, at the behest of the United Fruit Company, against the leaders of a democratic interlude, known locally as ‘the revolution’ or ‘ten years of spring’.
This democratic interlude, which included the first peaceful and democratic change of government in Guatemala’s rather sorry history, lasted from the 1944 overthrow of the old-style fascist dictator General Jorge Ubico Castañeda, an admirer of Hitler who nevertheless declared war on the Axis in December 1941 and permitted the Americans to build a base in Guatemala, until the installation of the new, unambiguously US-backed dictator, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, in 1954.
Colonel Castillo claimed to be anti-Communist and therefore worthy of American support: Communists meaning, of course, anyone he didn’t like. It was under Castillo that Xela’s first freedom arch came down, ostensibly for road-widening as I say.
In much the same way that things will probably never be the same again after Israel’s current assault on Gaza, so the Guatemalan coup of 1954 did immense and lasting damage to the international reputation of the United States and its foreign intelligence agency, the CIA.
The damage is reflected in a polemical painting by the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, called Gloriosa Victoria, which shows a collection of sleazy-looking coup-instigators in the middle and the Guatemalan people around the outside, their social position returned once more to a form of serfdom, when they haven’t simply been massacred.
But let’s talk a bit more about my few days in Xela. In the first place, I found it a quiet and relaxing town, certainly much less hectic than the three-million-strong capital, yet not as frozen in time as Antigua.
Xela’s best-known landmark, which tends to symbolise the city in the same way that the Santa Catalina Bridge symbolises Antigua, is the rotunda dedicated to Rafael Álvarez Ovalle, who composed the music of the present Guatemalan National Anthem.
The rotunda sits in the Parque Central, also known as the Parque Centro América, which, as in Antigua, is the focus point of the city.
Another monument commemorates Justo Rufino Barrios Auyón, one of the leaders of the 1870s insurgency of Quetzaltenango liberals but who, once installed as the President of all Guatemala — this rising having succeeded, for once — then became a tyrant.
Barrios is best, or worst, known for confiscating and privatising the common lands of the Maya — which even the earlier Spanish colonial regime, the Federal Republic, and the first rulers of an independent Guatemala had all respected — so that those lands could ultimately be handed over to economic neocolonialists such as the United Fruit Company. And for building a huge prison in which to incarcerate and torture his enemies.
Barrios was ultimately killed in battle in El Salvador after seeking to reunify the old Federal Republic by force. It seems that not many outsiders wished to rejoin if Barrios was to be in charge.
Even so, the reign of Barrios was later commemorated at the very heart of the Parque Central. Here is a photo of the Barrios memorial, with the flag of Guatemala and the red-white-and-blue flag of Quetzaltenango, based on the old flag of Los Altos, which swapped the blue-white-blue theme for a design that looks more French in inspiration.
And here is the city hall, also on the Parque Central, with Holy Week decorations.
And the Municipal Theatre:
Here is another monument to a famous citizen of Xela that I came across, the poet and journalist Osmundo Arriola, Guatemala’s first poet laureate, which bears the legend:
You are Quetzaltenango!
So like a hilltop, you are closer
to the flowering gardens of the
golden tuberoses of the stars …!
Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the democratically elected president overthrown in 1954, also came from Quetzaltenango.
As did the revolutionary poet, active in the subsequent Guatemalan Civil War of 1960 to 1996, Otto René Castillo, of whom I saw a poster.
All of this twentieth-century conflict can be traced back to Barrios’s privatisation of the lands of the Maya.
Here are some more street scenes I photographed while wandering around the city.
Y’abal is a popular Mayan handicrafts outlet.
A plaque I came across commemorates the heroic efforts of volunteers who repaired the roads and the Santa María hydroelectric plant, after Guatemala’s worst-ever floods, which took place in October 1949:
The plaque, by a local civic foundation called Fraternidad Quezalteca, reads, approximately, as follows:
Just a year after that civic and memorable feat, this bronze is dedicated in praise of the spontaneous and heroic action of all those sons of the region of Los Altos, who on days won for rest flocked to the streets with humble tools and hallelujah chants, to repair the Santa María hydroelectric plant and to reopen the roads destroyed by the fateful storm that punished the homeland with exceptional rigor.
Xelaju, October 1950
It is interesting that the Fraternidad Quezaleteca used the Mayan name for the city: a sensitivity to language that seems seventy years ahead of its time, even if ‘sons’ and for that matter, fraternity, seem a bit old-fashioned now. But then again, this plaque was erected during the mid-century democratic revolution.
To round off, there is one thing you might notice in the collage near the start of this post, and that is what looks like a Greek temple.
In fact, it is one of a large number of Temples of Minerva, the Greek goddess of wisdom, erected across Guatemala to welcome in the twentieth century.
Like nearly everyone else in 1900, the Guatemalans thought that the twentieth century was going to be a great century of progress, in which all forms of backwardness, including Guatemala’s lingering big-farm condition, would be done away with.
The Temples of Minerva were meant to stand as an example to schoolchildren to study hard, and to remind everyone that wisdom is what makes peoples great.
In my next post, I visit the Miraflores Museum of Mayan art in Guatemala City, and then head to the town of Flores and the famous Mayan-pyramids site of Tikal, in the northern, Petén Department of Guatemala.
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