Retail

In many ways this country serves a Libertarian fantasy (that's capital L, not for the political party necessarily, but for right wing Libertarians). If any zoning laws exist they do not restrict a person from selling almost anything out of his or her house. Only in this atmosphere could an empathy be attained for the L position in the states. Ofcourse the history of Guatemala is entirely different. Vigilantism is very common because the police here, while not corrupt like the police in Mexico, are not very reliable due to the lack of resources. Taxes are avoided frequently.

Sometimes things come across my person that provoke a liking of capitalism. Not love, but some significant measure of affinity.

People produce things here. While the productivity level is not as high as the US (including per capita), the density here is such that one cannot help but noticing all of the factories that make different and useful things. Strangely, tons of used US clothing is being shipped to and sold here. The NYU student that was met by myself and Jessica three and half weeks ago was studying the impacts of it. Every other person seems to sport an MTV backpack(?)--in Xela at least. Laundary mats cost a little bit more but they do your laundry for you. Where are all the factories in the US?

This is not a rhetorical question.

People are always fixing things too. Automobiles especially. There have been no sightings of new car sales lots. But tons of old cars shown individually for sale by a regular neighbor who works a regular job. The local mechanic close to my school is always smiling. Full of greased and dirt, and smiling. If this sounds simply banal and not charmingly banal to you, go outside and take a look.

Of course this means things are always broken. The problem is that there is no developed infrastructure for what is naively referred to here as an "preventative service economy". (And it seems like it would be hard to find a person who coud be called a perfectionist in this country. As opposed to Japan.)

And instead of building a bunch of new ugly suburban houses in patches of potentially productive land, the tons of new construction that is going on my neighborhood in Xela is all being performed in, on and around existing structures. It feels like the past and future all at once.

(With the excessive corn and flour Central American diet, there is no surprise. Thought for awhile that the starch was the cause of my decreased sex drive and need for excessive amounts of sleep. But it just took a while to get used to the altitude.)

The abundance of cars from the 70s also touches the core. Lots of Datsuns! And they are all given those wonderful Electric company Sesame Street bold primary and secondary colors. The lack of new cars on the streets has even allowed me to see the actually unique designs of the cars from the eighties.

Because internet availability at the home is still low, there is an abundance of internet cafes (this person pays $3.00 for 7 hours of internet usage).

And the chcken buses! It is nice to not have to buy a bus ticket. It is nice to be cramed cheek to cheek and shoulder to shoulder in a room full of people. It allows for a very in depth observation of others. Even putting up with all of the street vendors who are allowed to come in before take off to sell junkfood and bric a brac are more than tolerable. Often a hungry vendor will go on in detail about the colorful Disney character designs of a key chain. The desire to say, ¨do you have any cut off limbs to show off instead¨ enters the mind.

It´s hard to get used to: that a large sum of the impoverished in this country have to get by with doing this crap. Who are their employers? In moments of utmost clarity it becomes easier. There is a simple desire on their part to survive another day or week. In this you can see that it´s a human being performing their current craft. At the very least it is easy to respect once one sees the honesty in their eyes. Still a day with the least amount of human interactions involving monetary transactions is ideal.


There is a curisoity that won´t go away. Hard scientific data on the numbers of those in Guatemala doing retail would be very welcome. And how Many of them are actualy small businesses? It´s obvious that those seling food are. (Something crossed my path from a trusted source: the average Guatemalan woman makes over a hundred corn tortillas a day) To what extent is it an indication of what we could define as freedom?

To be continued... socio-economic questions must be asked that are not happening in the brain currently. It can be blamed on a woman.