QUIRIGUÁ
A rocky road studded with jade and copper-blue rocks cuts for several miles through banana plantation, heading for the heart of the Maya past. This land formerly of Cuauc Sky, Jade Sky … formerly of the United Fruit Company, now (in this late-December of 1993) of DelMonte.
A hedge of clavel separates road from field. Their bright red flowers cascade towards the dustraised by passing trucks and tourist buses. Three men ride up on bicycles, a small bunch of bananas slung from the handlebars. They pass a sign. PROHIBITED TO CUT RACIMO DE BANANO.
The finca stretches to either side, laced with irrigation ditches and overhead cable lines. Broken sunlight shifts on the ground with each sway of the broad green leaves splitting into thick frays. Large purple and red teardrop flowers bow. As each aged petal curls away, the delicate fingers of a new bunch of bananas is revealed. The growing racimo is protected from sun, dirt, rain by blue perforated bags. Trees are tied to one another with a thin white cord to keep them erect beneath the weight of heavying fruit.
Four workers emerge from a field. One has a small bundle of bananas in hand. Their loose rubber boots slap against calves. The lunchtime silence interrupted by birdsongs and the sound of water erupting from upright black pipes. A circulating sprayer pounds it down upon the leaves like a torrential rainstorm. The road wettens, muddies. It continues through a guarded gate. HALT PRIVATE PROPERTY BANDEGUA.
An old rail line passes through its own yellow and black barrier. Across the road and rusty tracks lie the ruins of Quiriguá.~
~ Upon entering the site the banana forest gives way to palms and amates, ceibas and almond trees. Elaborately carved stelae rise seven, eight, nine meters towards a rain-threatening sky.
This Quiriguá once was a colony of Copán only 50 kilometers away as the cuervo flies.But Cuauc Sky chose independence. He captured 18 Rabbit and beheaded that Copán rival. These stones record the history. This Maya kingdom, tough, faded with the rule of Jade Sky. The spirit houses and monuments sank into the returning jungle.
Many centuries later arrived a new conqueror: United Fruit. It stretched its fincas to the hills that roll down to the Río Motagua that once divided those great Maya kingdoms, that divided the great rival fruit companies. An island in the new banana jungle, United Fruit donated this site several decades after acquiring these lands.~ ~ ~
I turn back following the rusty rails into the heart of the finca. Yellow flowers and grass cover the rotting wood ties. Banana fields dense on either side.I soon come upon a light-ochre structure: PLANTA 22 – WITH TEAMWORK WE HAVE SUCCEEDED IN PRODUCING BANANAS OF THE BEST QUALITY DEL MONTE.
The sound of water and voices echo from the open building. The packing plant is idle until day after next when the banana branches will arrive on those cable lines. Their wire-mesh baskets hang empty.
But still the workers toil their seven days a week, from sunrise to after sunset. Barefoot women scrub the tanks in which the choice bananas are washed and disinfected. They scoop the water out of the vat with their hands and brush the rims and outside walls. A young boy helps his mother. The smell of their chemical bath hangs in the humid air. Empty Del Monte boxes stack. A woman rubber cements bright yellow plastic on blocks of styrofoam. They will divide the boxes, protect the fruit when packing resumes.
Outside, an empty truck waits, its rear doors open, to take the rejects to Central American markets. The conveyor belts to carry that clean, perfect fruit lie slack.~ ~ ~ ~
Again I walk atop the railroad barranca. A man in a short-sleeve t-shirt straddles the walls of an irrigation ditch. He turns the massive black wheel handle. Stagnant water seeps then flows into the field. A dirt road leads to grid-laid tin-roofed, smooth-plastered walls of the workers’ housing.
A blue tractor pulls a flatbed trailer. On benches sit four bananeros going into the fields.At the low bridge before Quiriguá village, the banana forest ends, and just at the edge of that pueblo, a yellow and black guard gate blocks the old tracks: HALT.
This branch off the Puerto Barrios line continues into the village of sagging wooden houses straddling canals. The tin roofs rust under the stormy sky.
Lorraine Caputo is a wandering troubadour whose writings appear in over 300 journals on six continents, and 22 collections – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019) and Chaco Dreams (Origami Poems Project, 2022). She also authors travel narratives, with works in the anthologies Drive: Women’s True Stories from the Open Road (Seal Press, 2002) and V!VA List Latin America (Viva Travel Guides, 2007), as well as articles and guidebooks. Her writing has been honored by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2011) and thrice nominated for the Best of the Net. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful knapsack Rocinante, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.
Follow her adventures at www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer or http://latinamericawanderer.wordpress.com.
