Long time no blog! This update has been on my to-do list for months and months now, but last week I had a particularly blog-worthy moment, so now that I'm all caught up on my fieldnote writing I've finally managed to write something up for you all as well.
I spent last week out in the community of Uaxactún (wah-shak-TOON), a village of a little less than 1000 people tucked out at the end of 23km of rutted dirt road past Tikal National Park. The community has a sustainable forestry concession here inside the reserve, and is set smack on top of a major archaeological site, flanked by an ancient mayan solar observatory on one side and a grouping of temples on the other.
One night after dinner at the local
comedor, a casual restaurant set up in the front of Doña Mirna's house, Mirna and a friend of hers announced that they'd like to speak with me, and sat down very seriously across the table from me. I was nervous as they began speaking, until a moment later I realized they were asking me to take part as part of the judge's panel for the following day's "niña de independencia" pageant. "Sure!" I answered happily, "sounds like fun!"
I began to wonder, however, when Daniel - one of my coworkers during the visit - reacted the next day to the same invitation with an "ohhhhhh no, I'm not doing that again!"
"No, it's different now," insisted Mirna, "there's no money involved anymore, it's just for
simpatía."
They explained that in past years, the girl who won the annual contest would receive a cash prize, as well as the honor of representing the community at various fairs and functions throughout the following year. In the past, the whole community had voted on the winner, but each year scandals erupted as families made alliances and bought votes for their daughters, and the pageants were always followed by accusations and community-dividing fights. Daniel, it turned out, had been in charge of vote counting in a previous year, and after the results came in, half the people in the town turned on him, accusing him of throwing the vote. After some goading from Mirna, he reluctantly agreed to take part in the new system - no money involved, and only a panel of community-outsiders like ourselves judging.
So, against all odds, the next night I found myself - a white, Canadian-American feminist science studies scholar - seated alongside four Guatemalan men, judging the outfits, artistic technique, and charisma and expression (our three criteria categories) of a group of rural elementary school girls, ranging in age from 6 to 12.
The evening's festivities commenced with a formal, almost solemn, series of patriotic demonstrations. Two flags made a slow procession through the room to the stage, followed by the endless (12 verses!) national anthem, then a pledge of allegiance to the flag, and finally a remarching of the flags back again to the back of the room.
The MC of the evening's event was one of the teachers from the local school, whose stern and disapproving manner started out a pale shade of nasty, but only worsened as the pageant wore on, the corners of his lips pulled further and further down in disappointment with the conduct of audience and judges alike. He announced the entrance of the first contestant, and a six-year old girl danced her way towards the stage in a two-piece shimmery outfit, with a green headdress made out of the leaves of the local
xate palm - harvested from the local forest and exported to the US and Europe for floral arrangements,
xate is the "daily bread" of many families in the community. With her cheeks sucked into a heavily rehearsed fish-face pout and arms twisting side to side in practiced choreography, she made her way down the aisle, up onto and around the stage, then took up a spot at the back, as her seven co-contestants followed her one by one in order of advancing age.
As this first girl took the stage, I glanced down at the score sheet that I had been given, and realized that I would be required to assign points to little girls for how well they pranced around in cute outfits. I was suddenly uncomfortable, wanting to back out, or to just give all the girls a full 100 points in everything. I noticed, too, that each of us judges seemed to be making up our own idiosyncratic point systems, not to mention disagreeing about what exactly "artistic technique" meant in this context.
In their first 'presentation,' the girls each wore outfits symbolizing some aspect of the life, history, or culture in Uaxactún: xate palm, the local archaeological sites and mayan ruins, a character from a classic colonial-times story, maize, forest conservation, etc. For their second presentation, they came out in their school uniforms, and performed a group dance number. This was by far the most uncomfortable moment of the pageant for me, as the girls strutted in their short plaid skirts and knee socks with tiny hips swaying, blowing kisses to the crowd, a disturbing juxtaposition of performed sexuality and stylized schoolgirl innocence. I tried to shake it off, and to pay attention to which girls were smiling (charisma points!) and which lost their way in the more complex choreography of the second dance (artistic technique!), but I was glad when they sashayed back away to change for their final act.
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| Six of the candidatas in their symbolic outfits |
This final presentation involved the girls coming out in evening gowns, as their favorite colors, school subjects, pastimes, etc, were announced by the MC. The girls tottered awkwardly on high heels, such that another student was posted to help them up the three steps onto the stage. They lined up along the back wall, posing in a standard one-hand-on-hip stance, and one after the other approached the front of the stage to give a short speeches touching on patriotism, local pride, or the future of the community and country --- their 'message' as candidates for independence day queen.
At the end of their speeches, the girls retreated to chairs which had been arranged for them along the back edge of the stage, to await our official judges ruling. We were instructed to consult with each other, and determine the first place (niña de independencia) and second place (niña de Guatemala) winners. As we huddled together to compare, it turned out that the winner I picked - the third grader, who blew the others away in "charisma" on my score sheet, as she was the only one with a big, genuine smile - was different from the winner the others all agreed on: one of the two sixth-graders. I agreed to let my first placer go, especially since the older girl had come in a very close second on my score sheet.
Deciding on second place was much tougher, as at this point we all had different choices, and after much discussion we ended up tallying and taking the average of all of our scores for all the girls. As we complied all our different scores, I realized that all the girls had come out within about a five point margin on my sheet, a reflection of my earlier sympathy and resistance to scoring them at all. The men had all docked far more points from the girls, leaving more clear differentiation between the winners and losers. Of course, in the end, this meant that when averaged out, my opinions ended up weighing less than the other judges in the final decision.
Still, my favorite came out in third place, only 0.4 points out of 100 behind the second place candidate from fourth grade. We argued back and forth over minor details of presentation and the younger girl's clearly winning charisma, unable to make a final call for second place, until finally one of the judges went up and whispered to the teacher that we had a tie for second place, so he announced to the audience that they would officially declare a third place spot, the niña monja blanca (Guatemala's national flower), so that we could get on with things.
By this point, it was almost 11:30 at night, and the audience of unruly kids had gotten noticeably more ruly as they grew more and more tired. Throughout the contest, the kids had been chided by the stern and serious MC, who gave pointed speeches on the values of order and discipline between acts, as the audience squirmed and squealed and pressed up against the stage, laughing and running around and spitting orange seeds onto the floor. The teacher grew more and more exasperated and severe over the evening, chiding not only the kids but their parents for letting them get out of control, and at one point marching across the floor to twist the ear of a boy who had committed the crime of sitting down on the stairs up to the stage instead of the floor where he belonged. Daniel and I exchanged skeptical looks at his disproportionate sense of outrage at the conduct of his compatriots, but at the end we too were chastised gruffly for how long we were taking to make our final decision.
We continued to argue for another few minutes about which girl would come in second vs third place, and when one of the judges finally got up to announce the winners (they wanted me to make the announcement, but I quickly and resoundingly refused) he told the room that the only reason we had chosen one over the other was that we gave the second-place slot to the slightly older girl, age being the final determining criterion. The three selected girls came up to the front, beamed out quick thank yous while everybody snapped pictures, and I tried my best not to look at the faces of the girls left sitting along the back of the stage, quietly waiting while the winners got their moment of glory.
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| Las Reinas |
Even though we judges had been selected from outside the community - a fact repeatedly emphasized by the MC throughout the proceedings - the next day there was still plenty of gossip about who had won, and why. When Daniel and I showed up for breakfast at Mirna's the next day, it was the sole topic of conversation.
"I really thought the girl in the purple dress (one of the fifth graders) was going to win," Mirna said, "she spoke so well! And everybody I've talked to was surprised it wasn't her. And, I'm a little disappointed at who did win, only because people are now talking... the girl who won is one of my son's students, and since you two and two of the other judges eat here with me, people are talking, you know."
It didn't matter that we were outsiders, that we didn't know about this obscure connection beforehand, rumors and speculation were still flying. "Still," she reassured us, "it's nothing like it was before, it's really not such a big deal."
Aside from all this pageantry silliness, the best part of the night was actually one of the side acts. Between each of the girls' presentations, students from different classes in the local school performed short dances, the vast majority poorly-choreographed shuffles to pop songs. One group of four boys, around 7 years old, clumped themselves, giggling, on one side of the MC while another teacher set up the music off to the side of the stage. When the song started pumping - a bass-thumping, latin-rhythmed top 40 song - the four boys started wiggling and bouncing along to the music.
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| In the green - the John Travolta of Uaxactún |
But when the skinniest boy in front started dancing, the whole room went wild. He shook his hips like Shakira and circled his arms to the beat, his flexibility and rhythm accompanied by a cool, nonchalant,
muy tranquilo facial expression. He was just chillin, doin his thing. But all five of us judges burst into laughter, it was so unexpected and wonderful. The other boys, wiggling awkwardly, started shifting into a line directly behind the boy, trying to hide, but he turned and waved them out again, and they shuffled back to the sides, awkwardly grinning. The boy kept up his dance while one of the judges commented to me, "he moves more than
las candidatas!" and another declared him "the john travolta of uaxactún!" I thought quietly to myself, laughing hysterically all the while, "that kid is not going to have problems finding girlfriends later in life!"
