12th of October 2016 (1)

To celebrate the 524th anniversary of the discovery conquest of America, yesterday Mattia was wearing this wonderful historic t-shirt, brought home by grannyChiara from a conference in Florence on that theme, right in 1992. The picture makes it particularly relevant to us, living here in Guatemala, because this is was really Maya land, but those 524 years, despite the "resistance", have taken their toll and now that culture is confined to museums, dances and other occasional events, tourism and artisanal products for roadside stalls, or fair trade markets in the better cases, but still considered as gift objects or stuff for neo-conquerors who can take an exotic piece back home...
The over 20 Maya languages are still alive and some studied at school, or at least they are part of the curriculum, but surely they're not official and there doesn't seem to be any push to learn them, and obviously so, as they represent only the lower levels of society. As it was quite interesting for Elena to hear one of them spoken "live" some time ago, it was particularly touching for Mattia, still a bit of a linguist and in love with these pockets of cultural "resistance", to hear, yesterday, 12th of October,  a middle-aged couple chatting in one Maya language on the transmetro, the nearly-free bus who moves hundreds of millions of people along the main routes of the capital. Nearly as touching as listening to the elderly (and some adult) sing traditional songs or the national anthem in Irish in the pubs of our dear Ireland, another country where the local language was nearly buried by the foreign rule.

Of course we're well aware of the fact that Ireland can thrive on the world market thanks to the English language and that a big chunk of Latin America is easily in touch with the rest of the world and with itself thanks to Spanish, but the economical advantages cannot hide the huge losses suffered at cultural and identity level: it's nice for us to be able to travel or serve abroad using familiar languages, but how sad it is to reflect on the millions of people who've lost their historic way of expression, which is just a symbol of a whole culture (tradition, life-style, world vision, art, music...) chocked by the homogeneous blanket of the West: most likely only a few members of the new generations, apart from those coming from deep inside the countryside, can understand or speak Maya languages; the current typical clothes, at least in urban areas, are American T-shirts, apart from 1 or 2 women in a hundred, wearing traditional fabrics; the coolest music is certainly typically Centro-American (raggaeton, if you haven't got a clue about it... you haven't missed much), but it doesn't surely stem from the indigenous music modes, being just a local version of shabby modern pop; traditional food, at least, is indeed still available at every corner, but is now living side by side with the worst of imported habits, from the fast-food restaurants of decently well-off areas to the obiquitous junk-food, thrown into your sight on the front of every single tiendita (little shop), in any area, poorest included; Mayan history is not even studied at school; Maya ruins, given the economical and cultural level of most people are known only as poster images or pictures to print and cut out for  homework on the national heritage, but not often visited... 

Yes, it all looks just like another tirade against globalisation, but we feel that's just an aspect of a deeper, longer-running process, started exactly on that glorious 12th of October. 

A detail summing up the whole concept from the ethnic, economic and cultural point of view? On most advertising images, despite the vast majority of the population being of indigenous origin or mestizo (mixed), faces are nearly always those of people of the white minority: 524 years of domination, quite successful.