La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo

On my way to work I came across this small farmers’ fair at the Alameda of El Calvario Church. This fair is promoted by the Ministerio de Agricultura, Ganaderia y Alimentación (The Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Alimentation). Come back tomorrow for a closer look at the offerings.

All the weekends of Lent (Cuaresma) and during the Holy Week La Municipalidad de La Antigua Guatemala (Municipality or City Hall) imposes an entrance fee to all the visitors on wheels.

So on top of all the traffic, crowds, processions, carpeted streets, you have to bring spare change (lots of it) to pay to visit La Antigua Guatemala. Fortunately, the locals (and I mean the villages around LAG) don’t to pay to enter the city.

The sign reads: Prepare you payment for parking and demand your ticket (3 Km ahead). Fine you say, I don’t mind paying for parking, except once you have paid, you entered the city and you realized there is no special parking or anything of the kind; only the same unsafe streets.

This is the kind of road the motorcycle riders arriving to La Antigua Guatemala may find. Even I would like to ride a Harley-Davidson chopper on this road… if it wasn’t for the other uncivilized drivers whom I would have to share the road with. I, like Woody Allen, don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Well, between precessions, a jazz festival and a Central American meeting for Harley-Davidson motorcycle riders, La Antigua has been anything but a quiet place. The roaring of hundreds of Harley-Davidson choppers from all over Central America was deafening. The long row of motorcycles overcrowding the 7a avenida sur was something to be seen.

Boy, I wished you were here!

Connecting the dots

Dot 1: A few weeks ago, I read an short note about how China will forbid the giving away of ultra fine plastic bags (below 0.025 millimeter of thickness) starting June 1st. The article appeared in the business supplement Pulso of the Guatemalan Siglo XXI newspaper. The article produced some scary numbers: The Chinese consume about 3 billion plastic bags daily; “… the plastic bags are convenient for the consumers, but they generate grave contamination, waste of energy and resources”, according to the press release by the Chinese government. The article ended with the suggestion by the Chinese government to go back to bags made from textiles and baskets.

Dot 2: The very same day, after reading the article above in my lunch hour, I walked back to the office and sure enough a plastic bag came dancing towards me, just like in the American Beauty film. So what was I to do, but to pull my camera and to start shooting this new enemy. This incident happened right in front of Doña Luisa Xicotencatl restaurant; one of LAG’s landmarks.

Dot 3: I don’t know if it was inspired by the muy loco Guatemalan photo shooting a plastic bag in front of their entrance (can you imagine what kind of show that must’ve been). Nevertheless, the owners of Doña Luisa Xicotencatl decided to stop giving away plastic bags in their business, beginning with their 30th anniversary, a couple days ago. So to celebrate their 30-year anniversary, they gave away reusable, recyclable vinyl bags to all their frequent customers. You can see the all different sides of the bags and learn about their campaign by clicking the thumbnails below to get a blowup image (No. We are not talking about Cortazar’s Blowup kind of images). According to the tag in the Doña Luisa Xicotencatl’s bag, plastic bags take about 450 years to be fully destroyed by nature alone.

Dot 4: What are your feelings about plastic bags?

So you wanted to know what happened to the Indigenous singers from February 2nd, right? Well the municipal police told them that they also needed to work and that if they did not have a permit to sing on the streets their supervisor would get on their case. Sure enough, less than a half of block away, these two tourist police were stopped by their supervisors. The Indigenous singers were told to go to the ‘Muni’ to get a permit to sing on the streets. I am not sure such permit exists, not for the Indigenous people, for sure.

The two blocks from the 5a avenida norte (5th North Avenue) that separate El Parque Central (Main Plaza) and the La Iglesia de La Merced (church) are known as the Calle del Arco (the Arch Street) and the weekends this strip becomes a pedestrian’s throughway. In my humble opinion, the whole city should turn the streets in pedestrian only walkways before it’s too late.

The cobblestone streets of La Antigua Guatemala were originally designed for horses and horse-carriages. So, it is no wonder that even light vehicles, like cars, create a lot of damage to the streets which, therefore, need constant repairing. Now you can imagine that huge and heavy trucks like the ones pictured above not only damage the streets, but the foundation of the houses and the city itself.

It is sad to see a city like La Antigua Guatemala go through a daily process not because its enchanting beauty, but because a living monument, patrimony to humanity, will for sure disappear. Does anyone care? you may ask yourself, like I do.

The very next day that the former mayor of La Antigua Guatemala found out he was not reelected for a second term, he decided he was not going to do any more work for the ungrateful antigüeños. So, within weeks the cobblestone streets began to deteriorate at such a fast rate that within a month or two, driving around town felt like driving in the lunar surface (not that I have had the pleasure to visit the moon lately). Gone was the regular vista of the Cobblestone street worker repairing the streets. Many weeks and months went by since September 9th, 2007 and the streets were more like rivers of craters that one had to drive around whenever possible.

As the new mayor took office on January 15th, he launched a new campaign to rescue the streets for the lent celebrations which begin in February. Right now there are crews of cobblestone street workers almost everywhere and many streets are closed for repairs. Let’s hope they can meet their goal since Lent or Cuaresma in Spanish is approaching soon.

These Indigenous people came from Santa Clara La Laguna, Solola, to sing and collect some money from the good Samaritans visiting or living in La Antigua Guatemala. Everything was fine until the Municipal Police decided this was too exotic and this kind of activity may seemed too third world.

I find the singing of the indigenous people extremely haunting and touching, even though, they are singing evangelical hymns. To me this singing has another layer of pain and denouncing which is above the meaning of the words they sing; something much older and more mystical than the religious hymns brought by the European Christianity.

I don’t know, maybe I hearing more than what really is there… what do you think?

Once again Manolo, in his effort to become the pebble in my shoe, points out that I am such a voyeur… Can you believe that! Manolo made such comment about the capture of a group of women tourists taking a sunbath in a public place, La Fuente Restaurant to be precise, while having lunch or a snack break.

I do not think I am crossing the line since I am capturing everyday life scene as I come across them; sometimes influenced by your comments and suggestions. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to check that I am not crossing the line of capturing private moments, so I found this great discussion about Street photography or voyeurism at photo.net, one my original favorite site (boy, we are talking all the way back to the mid 1990s). Anyway, I leave a teaser quote by Barry Fisher who said this:

…Often the object is moving anyways. I have no simple answer as to when or not to. If I really think someone is going to object or they’ve actually indicated they don’t want to be photographed, I will usually honor that but then, for me, its a balancing test of many factors. I suppose it has more to do of how you identify with personal space. If you believe or are in a frame of mind that “we are all here in public sharing space and time, and I’m going to capture the wonder of it all” then I suppose you won’t think of it as being voyeuristic. But if you feel like you are capturing people’s private moments even stealing them, like we all must at sometimes, then you are a voyeur at that moment. Do you have a problem accepting that you may be a voyeur? —Barry Fisher at Photo.net

We are talking about voyeurism as in the act of observing people without the sexual gratification which is normally associated with the word; just to clarify it. I believe that I do tend to be a voyeur or obsessive observer when it comes to capture the most natural street life scenes. My goal is to capture the intriguing split-second scene. I do not like posed photographs, especially posed street photos because once the subject is aware of the lens the natural feel is lost; the window that I open for you into the daily life of La Antigua Guatemala is broken.

Yet, sometimes I ask permission before actually clicking the shutter and once the permit is granted I wait until the subject goes back to the natural state; less defensive mood. Such was the case for this shot of Jacque (Jack in English he said) drawing this colorful chicken bus in front of Hotel Aurora.

Is this voyeuristic enough for you (Manolo)? Or is it just an honest shot of what you may encounter yourself while strolling around the streets of La Antigua Guatemala? What is it?

I don’t know who had the bright idea to rent the clean body of almost-new vehicles for advertising, but many vehicles receive a monthly quota for allowing advertisement on their cars while they drive around the country in their daily routines. I sure think they’re ugly and offensive to the eye, but everybody wants to earn a buck whichever way possible.

Sometimes you just have to ask yourself what kind of strange brew are the Canadians brewing way up north, heh. See, first they steal our bright minds; then they take our gold and buy out our postal service; they insert strange things into our antigüeño breakfast (bacon they call it); even our money is now Canadian (it reads Canadian Bank Note on the brand-new Quetzal bills); just to name a few things. In return they send salsa-dancing-craze Spanish students and the horrible and hostile weather. Come on, this is Guatemala, a tropical country in Central America, you know, the tiny land that impedes the Caribbean Island from moving over the Pacific Ocean. So what business does it have freezing-cold-ice-capping winds in La Antigua Guatemala. See, we don’t need no stinking ice-capped mountains and volcanoes in our gorgeous temperate-always-sun-shining-eternal-spring weather. Those volcanoes you see in the background are ice-capped (see larger image).

We will most definitely need stricter migration rules for all things Canadian; don’t you think so?

The photographer was capturing fleeting emotions, split-second gestures, temporary smiles or pensive introspections, passing pedestrians, et-cetera. Stealing souls, pues!

Watching the Watchers Watch is what we call in Spanish a trabalenguas or tongue twister.

What kind of stories do you see in this picture?