By Mark Brazaitis
In the English class I taught in the junior high school, Paulina sat in the front row and always had the most questions. When I did the asking, she answered in a loud voice, even when her answers were wrong.
One of my secondary projects as a Peace Corps volunteer in Santa Cruz Verapaz, a town of 2,000 people in the northern mountains of Guatemala, was to teach English in El Instituto Básico por Cooperativa, a white, church-like building located on a hill above town. It often rained in the afternoons when school was in session, and despite the overhead lights, my classroom could turn so dim it was as if dusk had arrived hours early.
Paulina inevitably pierced the gloaming. Like a radiant black star, her face was simultaneously the darkest and brightest in the class of forty students. She laughed so often, and so unabashedly, it was as if everyone in the classroom, including her teacher, was a standup comic.
It was the early 1990s, and Guatemala’s civil war was in its fourth decade. It had touched the lives of everyone I knew in town. One of Paulina’s uncles or one of her brothers—or both—had been killed in it. (I found it hard to keep my students’ stories straight. There was so much loss.) Economically, her family was better off than most—her female classmates envied her shoes—although no one in Santa Cruz seemed far removed from poverty save Edgar Gálvez Peña, the owner of an enormous white house on the highway at the east end of town. Gálvez was reported to be worth $600 million at the time of his assassination in 1992. He was forty-two years old.
Because of disease, violent crime, hunger, inadequate health care, alcoholism, automobile accidents, and, of course, the civil war, premature death was commonplace in Guatemala. The average life expectancy of a Guatemalan in 1990 was 62, according to the United Nations. Gálvez’s death was notable because of his wealth and the mystery of who’d killed him. Rumored to be a narcrotraficante, though he claimed to have earned his millions in real estate, he was gunned down on his massive front lawn as he strode toward his helicopter. The newspapers listed several suspects, including a drug cartel, a political rival, the CIA, and his wife. Galvez evidently had bought the house for his mistress.
No one I knew in Santa Cruz had ever met him. I doubt any of my friends and neighbors could have imagined themselves acquiring even a small percentage of his fortune. Daniel, who worked at the post office, aspired only to one day own a Timex watch. He forever lobbied me to give him mine.
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One afternoon when my classroom turned too hot, I brought my students to sit in the pasture below the school. In the shade by a creek, I tried to teach the lesson I’d planned, but no one was interested in learning the past tense. Instead, they asked me questions about the States. Most of them had friends or relatives who’d crossed the border, usually with the assistance of coyotes, who charged $1000 or more for their services. Trenton, New Jersey, was a popular destination for Santa Cruceños and other Guatemalans. In September of 2022, the city hosted a Guatemalan parade, its crowds, according to The Trentonian, “five people deep.”
The Guatemalans I knew who’d gone to the States had made decent money, but their journeys could be harrowing and their living conditions cramped. My friends in Santa Cruz liked to tell me this joke: How many Guatemalans can fit into an apartment in the States? One more. The more money they saved on rent, the more they could send home.
Guatemalans who enjoyed prominent professional positions in their country weren’t above holding down far less prestigious jobs in the States. A man I played basketball with in Cobán, the city north of Santa Cruz, had made more money as a janitor in a bank in the U.S. than he had as a bank manager in Guatemala. Coffee was Guatemala’s number two export; labor was number one.
But as we sat by the creek in the fading afternoon light, I encouraged my students to seek futures in their country instead of in mine. I envisioned them becoming doctors, journalists, scientists, diplomats, and artists. I imagined them transforming Guatemala into a country as prosperous as Costa Rica but with a richer culture. Some of my students shook their heads at my naivete; others outright laughed.
Alvaro, to whom I’d loaned all the novels in Spanish I owned, said there wasn’t a Guatemalan equivalent of the American Dream. Having connections was far more critical to professional advancement than having talent or working hard. The connected were generally from wealthy families in the capital, individuals as rarefied and remote to my students as movie stars. Even attaining a good position in a local business didn’t guarantee a significant income, as my banker friend could attest. If Alvaro and his classmates stayed in their country, he said, they would be fated to do what their parents did, earning enough to avoid poverty but not enough to imitate, even faintly, the lifestyles they’d seen in Hollywood movies. Money earned in the States, on the other hand, had bought refrigerators, baby cribs, and TVs in Santa Cruz. One of my neighbors had built an addition to his house with income he’d made as a dishwasher in Trenton.
Sitting beside me, Paulina declared she had no interest in working in the U.S. “I don’t want to wash some gringa’s laundry or mop the floors of some gringo’s office building,” she boomed in her megaphone voice. “I’ll work in my country, thank you much.”
Her classmates looked at me aghast, no doubt worried I would be offended by her words. But I smiled. This was the spirit I hoped they’d all have. If I wasn’t a revolutionary, I at least had revolutionary inclinations (or revolutionary pretensions). I was embarrassed by the vast discrepancy in wealth between the United States and Guatemala, an imbalance my country seemed only too happy to sustain. In 1954, the CIA helped overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the country’s democratically elected president whose agrarian reforms aimed to engineer a more equitable economy. Similar motivations were doubtless behind the U.S.’s support of right-wing Guatemalan leaders during the country’s civil war. Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemala’s president from 1982 to 1983, ordered the murders of more than 10,000 campesinos during his first five months in office, but our government supported him because he was a diehard anti-communist.
If Guatemalans had earned a decent living at home, they wouldn’t have been as eager to risk their lives to work low-wage jobs in the States. Several Peace Corps programs, including mine, in agriculture, focused on improving Guatemalans’ economic circumstances. But there were less than 200 volunteers in the country—by contrast, Mormon missionaries numbered 600—and we had minimal budgets. It would have taken an enormous investment of money and expertise—or a revolution—to have slowed the flow of cheap labor from south to north.
After Paulina’s patriotic outburst, I asked her what she hoped to do with her life. She said she wanted to move to the capital, open a restaurant or panadería. Or, she said with even more excitement, she’d found an art gallery or become a TV reporter. To hear her tell it, her voice as confident as a rooster’s “good morning,” it was only a matter of time before she realized her ambition. Her classmates were skeptical, but I undercut their pessimism with a resounding “Wonderful!”
Although I hoped for all my students, I hoped a little more for Paulina.
Three years after I finished my volunteer tour, I returned to Guatemala as a Peace Corps trainer. When I visited Santa Cruz, I caught up with some of my former students. They were doing what they’d more or less predicted they would be doing: studying in the high school in Cobán and working in the tiendas their parents owned or at the sawmill on the north end of town or with local government agencies. A few had gone to the States.
Argelia, one of only a handful of my students who could hold more than a perfunctory conversation in English, was delighted to show me her ten-month-old baby. Her son was adorable, and I said so, but I feared she could see my disappointment. She didn’t know I’d imagined her working one day as a translator at the United Nations.
I see it clearly now: I was a creature of my culture, someone raised without a religion who nevertheless believed in the Protestant work ethic. Success equaled salvation. Babies were great—as long as they didn’t interfere with a person winning a Nobel Prize or finding a cure for AIDS.
Guatemala’s civil war ended in 1996, but the country soon experienced new kinds of violence. Several Mexican drug cartels, including the Zetas, moved their operations south. Facing familiar economic hardships and increased threats to their safety, Guatemalans had more reason than ever to migrate to the U.S.
Every time I read about an inhumane encounter between U.S. Border Patrol agents and Latin American migrants, I think of my students, although by now it’s more likely to be their children who are striving to reach the States. Some migrants suffer worse fates than arrest. In 2021, according to the United Nations, at least 728 migrants died on the Mexican-United States border. The following year was only marginally better, with 686 deaths. It is the deadliest land crossing in the world.
Perhaps Paulina wouldn’t have gone to the capital to open a restaurant or bakery; perhaps she wouldn’t have founded an art gallery or become a TV journalist. Perhaps she, too, would have married, had a child, settled down to a lifetime in the small town where she was born. It was cruel of me to have wished on my students something improbable if not impossible. I should have simply wished them happiness. (Maybe I should have wished the same for myself. Whatever professional success I achieved never seemed to have a corresponding joy. I was forever running a deficit; twice, I experienced long periods of severe depression.)
A month before my Peace Corps tour ended, Paulina was playing basketball with friends on a court next to Santa Cruz’s busiest road. Darkness was coming, but Paulina wanted to keep the game going. When the ball bounced into the road, she chased after it without seeing the Pepsi truck speeding west toward San Cristóbal.
It was like her to stay alive longer than the doctor expected, her heart outlasting the night in which we’d gathered to mourn.
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Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award; The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose; and the novel American Seasons. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.