Of Cursing, Tienditas con Barras, and Comparative Realities

Thoughts on an article – “La Esclavitud Ignorada en Ciudad de Guatemala, in the December 2017 issue of the excellent online Guatemalan magazine Nomada. I found this article in an FB post on the CLAH Central American Studies Committee page.

If you’ve ever seen “El Norte,” the classic movie about Guatemalan migration and clandestine asylum seeking in the US, you will remember the scene in which the Guatemalan immigrant launches into a crude string of curse words to convince US immigration authorities that he’s Mexican. In the movie, it works. While I don’t think it would actually work in real life, it’s absolutely true that Mexicans are known for their lush use of cuss words – and Guatemalans are not.

What that means for me is that, having learned Spanish in Guatemala, I never learned to curse. To the point that I failed to put two and two together with words I already knew, and asked a very shy evangelical guy one time what “chingados” – which I read on some graffiti – meant. (fuckers) The guy simply responded that “oh, that’s a very bad word,” which knowing the verb “to fuck” led me to figure it out very quickly.

Anyway, I still don’t know how to curse in Spanish, which is not entirely OK. So I’m always pleased to run across some new curse word – although I find I need to ask just how offensive it is from a native speaker, so that when I choose to use it I know that I’m using a word that is arrestingly forceful, and not, in reality, a word that has the impact of the English word “Poo-poo” and has the effect of making me sound silly rather than profane.

That’s kind of the case with a word I learned from this article, “jodido/a,” which the dictionary translates as an adjective meaning “fucked up” … but which might have more the sense of “screwed up,” which is to say somewhat crude versus discursorily polite to describe a bad situation. I kind of think that the latter, more polite version, is more accurate – at least in Guatemala – given the casual way it’s used in this article.

But about this article . it’s quite good and absolutely spot-on … about the fact that minimum wage in Guatemala can’t pay — dah dah? …. are you ready for this? – even the most basic costs of living. Imagine that. In Guatemala! Where ELSE do you think that might be true? Maybe in our own fractured states of America?

But isn’t that always the way of things? Of all the subjects I’ve explored, and all the research I’ve done in Guatemala, it’s always the case that they have the same problems there that we have in the United States. It’s just that their baseline is always SO much lower … so that in this case, life for the sub-survival wage worker in Guatemala is infinitely more precarious and uncertain and dangerous than life for the penniless here. And of course the article is right in suggesting that the lack of labor and child-protection laws result in what amounts to slavery for what must be an astonishing percentage of children and other vulnerable populations … in conditions that wouldn’t, couldn’t ever fly in the US.

Is that bad? Of course it is … but is it ALL BAD? Hmmmmm. I can’t say with any conviction. At least the impoverished families who run these little stores are able to do so with the help of very cheap labor, providing a slight bit of income to help them survive. And maybe more important, at least it’s SOME kind of income for the even more impoverished kids and women who work in them. So maybe it’s one of those cases that trying to force a higher minimum wage and formal sector labor laws on these little stores would result in a loss of ALL income for everybody involved. There’s always trade-offs, you know. And I tend to waffle on doing what’s trulyl right to do when it means that people will be hurt by it. Trade-offs, you know.

One last note … the barred-off little hole in the wall little store in this photo, where apparently the Chichicasteco kid in this article works? There are tens of thousands of these in Guatemala, along the tiniest of country roads back up in the mountains, and in virtually every block of every town and city. It’s got to be the most common form of cottage industry. I’ve never paid a great deal of attention to the details of any one of them. But next time I go I think I’ll maybe try to find ones that have some visual merit for a series of photos.

Footnote of sorts. I found a webpage of Spanish curse words and phrases that’s kind of fun. It can be found here.