STARVING IN McMANSIONS
Guatemalans own elaborate luxury homes but dwell in shacks and suffer from poverty
The white, two-story villa that dominates the entrance to this hamlet on a volcanic hillside in the Mayan highlands could have been plucked from any prosperous suburb in the southern USA.
Under the terra cotta-tile roof, classical columns support the porch and frame its paneled windows and spacious rooms. Doors sport curving polished handles and inlaid glass. The two-car garage has an automated door with embossed panels.
Four feet away in the same dirt yard encircled by a concreteblock wall is a dark, single-room adobe shack covered by corrugated metal where the owner of both houses lives, with barely enough to feed six of his kids.
Money sent from his other children — ages 16, 22 and 25 — who are working near Atlanta paid for the mansion. What’s left covers the meager diet.
“We eat more or less, one can’t say well. Frijoles, tortillas, this way we survive,” Alejandro Rojas said. He was waiting for an evangelical pastor to start Sunday services in the outsized and empty house that Rojas rents out while hoping his older children will one day return to live in it.
“They went because of necessity, but I want them to come back,” he said.
There are many homes like this throughout Mexico and Central America, but they are most visible in smaller villages such as Aldea (or township) San Antonio, where so many young men have left for work in the USA.
Many are deserted for a variety of reasons — the construction was never finished, the owners never returned or they’re so different from the homes people are used to that they’re simply uncomfortable living in them.
The transnational dreams of Guatemalan migrants are especially evident in the clash between these McMansions — often decorated in red, white and blue — and the below-subsistence everyday life in largely indigenous areas such as Cabricán.
“In the United States, the indigenous (migrants) go to the bottom of the ladder, but then coming back, it’s the opposite, they’re at the top of the village,” said Ruth Piedrasanta Herrera, an anthropologist at Guatemala’s Rafael Landívar University, a private Jesuit school.
“Here, they are the successful ones, and the social marker is the home,” said Piedrasanta, who has studied the growing trend.
HUNGER AND REMITTANCES
Suffering is something the people of the municipality of Cabricán, most of them Mam Mayans, know well. They routinely try to alleviate it by joining thousands of others traveling to the USA.
About 80% of 25,000 Cabricanecos — nearly three quarters of them younger than 30 — live in poverty, according to a study by David Hernández Gamboni of the Rafael Landívar University.
The level of malnutrition is so high that nearly 70% of the population suffers from stunted growth, the government says.
Two out of every 10 people in the municipality have gone to the USA, said the mayor of the main town, also called Cabricán, leaving virtually no family untouched, including his.
“What I have no ability to react to is the lack of employment. Teachers, nurses, professionals even await opportunities,” Mayor Vitelio Enrique Pérez said. “All remain stagnating, and it’s these people who have to leave.”
Since the 1990s, young men in particular have left to seek work and get ahead. More than 1.5 million Guatemalan immigrants live in the USA — legally and illegally — according to various estimates.
Remittances have increased nearly sevenfold since 2001, according to the International Organization for Migration. The money is projected to reach $5.9 billion this year, the Bank of Guatemala reports — more than 10% of the nation’s GDP.
“With remittances, they think of building houses, of doing something for their families,” Mayor Pérez said. As a result, he said, hamlets such as San Antonio are unrecognizable after the influx of big homes, cars and paved roads.
But the cash flow has hardly made a dent in massive structural issues such as chronic malnutrition, illiteracy and the lack of basic health and education services, Hernández’s research found.
RISKY BUSINESS
Big houses — unattainable with quetzales, the Guatemalan currency — are risky investments for remittance dollars, especially since most migrants used what little assets they had — land and their existing homes — as collateral for the large loans necessary to pay smugglers’ fees for their family members to get to the USA.
A home like the one built from the money sent by Rojas’ children costs about $64,000 (or 500,000 quetzales) to build here.
In Guatemala, workers with only elementary education, such as the Rojases, earn an average of 1,904 quetzales a month, according to the nation’s Chamber of Industry. That means they would have to invest every bit of their salary for more than 21 years to build such a house. The automated garage door alone would cost a little more than two months’ wages.
Remittances can dry up if migrants lose their U.S. jobs, get deported or start families across the border and disappear.
Then the homes are swallowed up by creditors or become a bulk- ing waste, built without permits in unstable terrain and far from commercial centers where they could be turned to business use.
On the main mountain roads outside the regional capital of Quetzaltenango, one house decorated with Nike swooshes was deserted. Another was being built in a desolate clearing by the road. No water or electricity connections were visible, but a 5-foot eagle sculpture painted in red, white and blue perched proudly on the rooftop penthouse.
Such mixed architectural and design motifs are a sign of the hybrid lives of many migrants. Their new U.S. tastes, showed off as marks of success, are grafted onto their desire to feel a connection to the ancestral lands where most never permanently return.
“They thought they were building castles — beginning to construct a dream,” Piedrasanta said.
THE AMERICAN INFLUENCE
The decorations often speak of the American dream — bands of white-on-blue stars around balconies, friezes of U.S. flags, even an entire facade bookended by the fresco of two spread eagles resting on waving U.S. flags above a stars-and-striped “USA.”
Exuberantly colorful tiles with swirling floral and geometric patterns are what Andrés López likes best in his vivid green, two-story house, a hundred yards up the main paved street from the Rojas compound.
López got the design idea from homes he saw on a trip to Houston during the 12 years he spent in the USA, most of the time working in marble and granite.
As he sent money to his wife to replace their adobe house with this large, terraced home, the masons added their own touches, such as carvings of the national long-tailed bird, the quetzal, among the facade arches.
López came back to Guatemala because he felt lonely away from his family, he said as he peeled potatoes into a bucket in his yard.
“I preferred to be here, happy,” he said. “It’s enough that I achieved my little home.”
He bought the truck he uses to transport concrete blocks for the 15 homes remittances are helping to erect here this spring.
He’s building one behind his own home for his son, who went to the USA when he was 14 and now has a wife, baby and legal status.
“He will come back to visit, maybe two or three months,” López said as he showed off the unfinished house’s elaborate floors. “Now he can stay here.”