Lords Of Atitlan

My first love in Guatemala was onions. As a tourist to Xela in my first days in the country, I walked up above Zunil to the hot springs Fuentes Georginas. En route, I passed the most beautiful and intensively-worked farm fields I had ever seen. A world of activity unfolded before my eyes. Men cultivated corn, potatoes, and tomatoes with large hoes (azadones). Women and children cleared weeds from the vegetables with long sticks. Entire families moved in unison. Some gathered young onion shoots into bundles, others planted the newborn shoots, others prepared the loose, fertile volcanic soil for planting, and still others harvested, washed, and arranged the opulent produce for presentation in the public market. I recalled Bernal Díaz`s words as he looked down on the Valley of Mexico for the first time in 1519 and spoke of "things never before seen nor seldom ever dreamed of."

As the roadway spiraled higher and higher, I encountered more spectacular views at every turn. Small terraced garden plots over-spilling with vegetables and shaped to the contours of the terrain climbed the mountain slopes through the fog and clouds to the hot springs. The landscape was a patchwork of green in every imaginable shade; and in the air, the strangely-sweet scent of onions, everywhere.

Coffee groves dominate around much of Lake Atitlán, as do corn, potatoes, and pole beans at the higher altitudes. Where there is ample sunshine and year-round water, however, as in the lakefront of many towns, along the rio San Francisco in Panajachel, or along tiny mountain streams, the crop of choice is onions. Onions are a cash crop requiring intensive labor. Their production is continuous, almost without season. A single plot of onions can be harvested and replanted the same day. Stacked lengthwise in piles, braided and and bunched, onions and their stems are a glorious sight. Added to that, onions are harvested and washed in landscapes, and by people, of nearly incomparable beauty.

Below Barrio San Bartolo in Sololá are a breath-taking series of onion terraces that tumble to the rio Jaibal. Driving from Sololá along what was once the Camino Real (Royal Road) one passes hundreds of onion fields near San Isidro, Peña Blanca, Monte Mercedes, and Buena Vista. Rounding the bend above Sector Chiroy and Tierra Linda one looks out across the canyon carved out over the millenia by the rio San Francisco at a fantastic scene: Lake Atitlán, the volcanoes Tolimán and Atitlán, the river valley, mountainsides, several towns, and countless corn and onion fields.

Dropping from above the canyon wall winding down into Concepción (Quechelá) is like entering Brigadoon. Quechelá, in many ways, is a land frozen in time, with social relations and religious beliefs at times predating the Conquest. In many towns, the ceremonial kiss of the hand is limited to religious processions and certain activities of the cofradía. In other towns, it no longer exists at all. But, in Concepción, farmers assembling in the morning for work in the fields kiss each others` hands as a sign of respect. The owner of a store and her customer kiss hands over the purchase of a Coca-Cola. In Concepción, too, Mayan priests (chamanes) consult red beans or smoke tobacco with their principal god, Maximón, to determine the optimum time to plant crops. Farmers still utter small prayers as they drop their seeds into the soil.

Concepción was once an important town on the road to Mexico. Its church was built in 1621 and is one of the lake`s oldest and by far its prettiest. The church is a real jewel, jam-packed with paintings, furniture, religious relics and adornments, silver chalises and custodias (ceremonial staffs), and images of the saints, all from the early 17 through 18 centuries; this, despite major thefts by gringo tourists. Quechelá means "between the mountains". On one side, Concepción is bordered by limestone cliffs rising above slopes laden with corn. On the other, huge bluffs brimming with onions roll gently to the canyon, then fall. Sometimes standing in the onion fields is like being on the edge of the earth or floating in air.

Panajachel, now a busy tourist center, is somewhat a modern mess, with too many moto taxis, motor scooters, shops, vendors, restaurants, and churches. Once, though, it was a quiet town of fishermen and simple onion farmers planting their tender shoots in the flood plains of the rio San Francisco. Onion beds still border the river and ascend in terraces up the mountain slopes to Tierra Linda on one canyon wall and San Andrés Semetabaj on the other. Today, little of the work is done by townspeople. Those who plant and harvest onions in Panajachel wear the traje of Sololá, and come from Peña Blanca, Buena Vista, and, most often, Tierra Linda. Most are women, the same ones who walk down to Panajachel or ride pick-up trucks to Sololá or buses to San Lucas to sell their produce on market day. On October 4 and 5, 2005, flooding, tumbling boulders, and mud-slides in the wake of Hurricane Stan all but obliterated the onion fields of Panajachel and the pathways down from Tierra Linda and San Andrés. Working with ant-like tenacity, the people of Tierra Linda have now fixed the trails and restored the onion fields to something beyond their former glory.

The onion harvest contains two inter-twined elements of my own childhood hay-baling experience and that of my father threshing wheat: competition and cooperation. The onion harvesters, as we did, try to outdo one another but without selfish motivation. Rather, they try to outdo one another to help one another, to accomplish the task at hand without undue strain on their fellow workers. So if one man carries 150 pounds of onions on his back, the next carries 200.This cord struck with my past makes the onion harvest dear to my heart.