Tacaná is on our minds
It has been strange to see our own Tacaná as a dateline in the international press documenting the tragic loss of life in landslides in Tacaná and elsewhere (click here and here for Reuters photo and article). In Guatemala, El Salvador, and southern Mexico landslides and flooding as a result of Hurricane Stan have buried villages, destroyed crops and left tens of thousands destitute.
We lived in Tacaná for nearly three years in the late '80s, most of that time on the street shown in the photo above (click on the images to enlarge). The photo includes a view of Tacaná volcano (4000m) which straddles the border between Guatemala and Mexico. We were there to assess the viability of Mayan mother tongue education in the area, so I had many occasions to travel by foot to outlying hamlets to learn the social dynamics between Spanish and Tacaná Mam, one of Guatemala's Mayan languages, in the local peasant community. 
It was here where I first began to learn distinctions between my western, compartmentalized and academic approach to knowledge -- in my case regional studies and sociolinguistics -- and the kind of knowledge born in the midst of the integrated reality of poverty. As remote as it was, people in Tacaná were globalized actors as they picked coffee in Mexico, raised opium poppies for American heroin addicts, withheld their mother tongue and traditions from their children, and then sent those children to work as maids in Miami Beach. All of my book learning paled in comparison to the object lessons we were given on human dignity in the face of injustice, discrimination, and the deprivation of basic rights and basic needs. Recent events challenge me again about what I might have learned, and remind me of the debt of friendship I owe to people there. Chjonkye'. Thank you.
I agree with el Canche about the ironic coincidence of tragedies in Guatemala and Pakistan. The scale of of the South Asia earthquake far surpasses what has happened with Stan, yet these are our American neighbors, and we cannot let their story --nor this present episode-- go unnoticed.
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