Lords Of Atitlan

The Department of Sololá has 19 municipalities.Three – Sololá, Concepción, and San José Chacayá – have identical culture and traje (native dress). Santa Catatrina Ixtahuacán and Nahualá also share traje and culture. The other 14 municipalities each have their own distinct traje and cultural traits, giving the lake region its cosmopolitan flavor.

Limestone, concrete, and adoquin (hinged cement block) roads now access previously isolated villages and hamlets around Lake Atitlán. Other, ancient trails (caminos) survive in pristine condition, maintained by Mayan farmers, often for millennia. They crisscross and parallel the main roadways, connecting homes to fields, marketplaces, and neighboring villages within and between municipalities and departments, as they have throughout the ages. To understand Mayan culture and daily life, to know the inter-relation between pueblos and families, you need to walk these pathways. There are a number of ways to enter and leave any town. In camino, you see farmers hoeing, planting, or reaping in the fields, women and children clearing weeds from the vegetables with long sticks, and men and women straining up or down the mountainside to their homes with heavy burdens of corn or other produce on their backs. There are families cutting, gathering, or carrying firewood, and women walking to market with colorful bundles upon their heads.

On Easter Sunday (April 12) I had left Patzutzún late, with photos yet to distribute and many requests to take others. Patzutzún practically touches Panimaché (Chichicastenango, Department of Quiché), but its culture and dress are purely that of Concepción, of which it is a part. One way to approach Patzutzún is to enter from below, first descending from Concepción through its onion fields to the San Francisco River. Crossing on a small cement bridge, you then climb straight up the mountainside to a mesa with eight homes and a school, caserio Chuitziyut. Ascending again through a series of switchbacks, you reach a narrow causeway running between steep canyons. This leads to Patzutzún, caserios Chui Solís and Panucá, and finally above to the Pan-American Highway. I often take this route, a complete tour of the municipality, but it´s awfully grueling, so Friday (the 17) I chose instead to walk down.

I stepped off the Masheñita, a bus headed toward Chichicastenango, at the entrance to Panucá, and began my descent. Two teachers from Sololá offered me a ride in their pick-up. They asked me what I was doing there. I told them I had come to pass out and take photos. They warned me that the indigenous thereabouts did not like strangers, or having their pictures taken. I told them I never take photos without permission and, because I always give my models copies, I generally have permission. I also told them that everyone in those parts knew me; I´m surprised they themselves didn´t. The teachers stopped before reaching the school of Patzutzúnspeak to a friend of mine, Marío. I had photos for family, so I thanked them, excused myself, and began passing out photos to Mario´s family and other neighbors who soon approached the vehicle. The teachers laughed as they pulled off because they hadn´t believed me when I told them I was well-placed in Patzutzún.

I arrived early and by demand non-stop all day. I never made it to Chuitziyut and only passed Panucá at sunset. People still called after me requesting me to shoot more photos as I walked through the bare cornfields to the pine forest and cafetal (coffee finca) below. It was getting dark, my camera´s chip was full, the descent, steep, and in places the pathway narrow; so I hurried, reaching finca Santa Victoria at twilight. The instant I stepped out of the finca onto the road below Patanatic, the Mendoza stopped as if on command. I boarded, clapped hands with my favorite bus driver on earth, and within minutes was in Pana. I had shot 803 photos that day, many of them pretty good. Here are some.