The Conscious Traveler: Guatemala

Guatemala, the Olympic Village of Travelers. Here in any given city or town you will find hundreds of travelers from all over the world, all wanting to impress each other with how much they have seen or done. Ometepe island in Nicaragua is a close second in that regard.

The view from my bed in Guatemala

If you are in the right area there are no boring days to be had. Constantly you can participate in activities that will have you interacting with the entire tourist community. Foreigners have taken over many things there leading to them crafting calendars around events that they think other travelers will want to do. Since there are so many travelers, there are always plenty of recommendations, for not only the place you are in but also the places that you are thinking of going to.  Everything from arts and crafts to raves to yoga retreats.

I paddle boarded almost every day

I lived off of Lake Atitlan, west of Guatemala City in a town called San Pedro. It is really enriched in Mayan culture and one of the languages of choice they use is ancient Mayan along with Spanish obviously. Hearing Mayan for the first time threw me off, but it was beautiful to hear. 

Guatemalan Textiles

Having graduated College as a textile major I gravitated towards the textile industry of Guatemala, Specifically the town I was in which lay home to the Textile Foundation of Guatemala. To watch how these women piece together garments is worth the trip alone to Guatemala, if of course that is what you are into.

As soon as I got to Guatemala and the sun rose, I noticed the older men going to work all wearing the coolest pair of pants I have seen. Different colors, different textiles, but all the same silhouette and concept. From there is when I found out these particular pants are native to Guatemala and the weaving structure used and some of the women doin it are on display in a museum in a town called San Pedro on lake Atitlan. So I hopped on a bus and took the journey to see these textiles and pants being made and also buy a pair for myself.

The Irony of me calling it the “Olympic Village of travelers" is that I wrote this article over a year ago in an email to a friend and now as I publish this the Olympics are going on. Going back to that feeling though, of cities and towns in Guatemala feeling like the olympic villages of tourism: although you can meet a lot of asshole types of people which I will get to later, you will also meet some very nice and genuine people and yes some may be breaking their backs to impress each other, but they sincerely are some of the kindest travelers I have met, to a fault. Traveling can be very dangerous for naive people and these types of people have a tendency to get taken advantage of. I befriended these two people, one a woman  from Puerto Rico and the other a free spirited boy from Brazil. Where after six months of the woman paying for everything in their travels and the boy freeloading off her she came to the realization that he had been using her for a free ticket to travel the world. Beware of the free spirit- which I will also get to later in the article.

Because of the high influx of tourists and visitors Guatemala has a lot of foreigner established businesses that cater to everything from food and hostels to hiking up volcanoes. It has a feeling that anyone can make it there. For instance the gym I was training at was run by a guy ,Gabe, who was born in Guatemala and grew up in NYC- we actually know a lot of the same Muay Thai people. He got deported back to a country he knows nothing about really and was able to open up a beautiful Muay Thai gym overlooking the entire town. 

Shout out to Gabe and all his endeavors in muay thai as a coach.

This feeling that anyone can make it there has led to something very ugly in Guatemala though and if you are a consistent reader of mine than you know where I am heading with this, but like the other “negative” stuff I will put that in later.

Out of every place I have been in all over Guatemala, specifically SP is a party town. Although the town closes early- and maybe this is just in retrospect, I do remember having some very good parties. Even DJing a couple of them. These travelers love their drugs, love their parties and love their trance music. Although I find trance music to be nauseating at times it can be interesting to hang out with them.

Traveling in Guatemala can feel very pretentious. It can be aggravating running into travelers that want to let you know how much better they are at traveling than you are. I have never experienced this before being in Guatemala and I got another wind of it during my extensive time in Nicaragua, to the same extent and magnitude. It does not only come from the travelers but also the people who decided to stay in Guatemala (expats) have a superiority complex to them. Of course this is not everyone, but enough to make it recognizable.

Secondly, going off the travelers, I want to give a good tip for life that I kind of thought about in the past, but really never sat down to think about till I got to lake Atitlan. Beware of the self proclaimed free spirit, because the more free the spirit, the less they have to attach to a community, to loved ones or to their word. I find this to be true, because one of the key values to being a free spirit is to shed yourself of things that make you feel bad or to do things that make you feel good despite who it harms. Often times a free spirit will do or say something that hurts someone close to them, but not understand what the issue is because to them it was just a simple action that made them feel good in the moment, but to the other person it's they did not call to let you know that they were not coming and instead fell asleep leaving you waiting for them for hours. This is a topic I have written about in the past and absolutely will be posting about in the future.

A New Look at an Old Topic

(These next couple of sections, while although edited recently, were mostly written pre october 7th 2023)

While at the lake I would see writing in a language I was not very familiar with in characters that I had seen before in the past but could not remember. At first I had thought that it was ancient Mayan and I loved that all of the shops were in ancient Mayan, but then I realized it was in Hebrew. I thought to myself the Mayans here have converted to Judaism? No, that was not what I was witnessing. I was seeing a phenomenon that I would later find out engulfs many areas of Central America from Columbia all the way to the southern tip of Mexico.

As I got to know people I found out that throughout Central America Israelis have enclaves that they have set up in towns where they essentially take over every business, every hostel and every restaurant  in the town they are in. Most of the tourists I was seeing were Israeli and they were not there to mingle with anyone that was not Israeli. Apparently after serving mandatory time in the military in Israel, they come and hang out in these Central American Enclaves for about a year or so traveling. Which on the surface seems okay and a great way to have fun and explore. Until you get to the thick of things and realize that they travel to these foreign countries only patronizing Israeli businesses and only staying in Israeli owned hostels. They take over whole strips of commerce and force the locals to the outskirts.

They are not my Friends 

Because of the Israeli takeover in San Pedro it is impossible to not interact with them. Now in an act of transparency I will admit that I at first did not mind the interaction. Although Since I was a child I remember seeing at the bottom of news screens the damage Israel would do to Palestinians and it never being a real headline or it would be told in a way that would manipulate the truth. I remember the hate and aggravation my muslim friends would have towards Israelis and also some would have towards Jews and I understood it, if it be warranted or not I understood. I also as a child would consider the conflict as “complicated” and would have been pro Israel because of what the status quo middle of the lane news sources that are at our fingertips would say. Obviously the past 10 years I have learned the contrary, but I still did not blend the Israeli countrymen with the evil of its country, because to confuse me with being pleased with what the government in the United States does would be a huge fallacy. So I thought it would be likewise for Israelis.

With this said after my first interaction with the Israeli community in SP, I started to notice something, or many things. I could spend an entire day with one of the Israelis or a group of Israelis and the next day they would pretend like they never knew me. We could jump off boats, go for drinks, go clubbing and dinner and the next day they would walk right past me.

There is also the cultural thing of you having an intimate moment with an Israeli woman, but as soon as an Israeli man comes, she acts as if you don't exist. I was in a deep heart to heart conversation, or so I thought, about my mother dying while I was away from home for years and the girl I was talking to told me about how her grandmother died while she was on the other side of the world. We bonded over this and she even cried, but as soon as an Israeli guy came over she pretended as if we never spoke and she went on to ignore me till the next day.

Another thing is while interacting with the Israelis me and a friend I made always felt that they were talking about us in Hebrew or deliberately leaving us out of activities and conversations after they had invited us to hang out with them. On one of the last evenings we hung out with them, when we left we stopped and looked at each other and I said “Yo, do you feel like” and he said “like they are always making fun of us” and it was absolutely validating to know that I wasn’t being paranoid or insecure, that there was something definitely off while being in those spaces.

The Israeli Enclave 

Now, I am not going to go into a deep dive on why the situation is what it is, but due to its connection with my time in Guatemala and this article being about that, I think you the reader deserves to know why or at least my take on what is going on with the Israeli enclave in Guatemala.

I have heard stories of horror about Israeli enclaves in Colombia. Stories of sexual assaults and domination in certain groups and though I have not seen that while in Guatemala, there were groups that had passed through those areas. No, in Guatemala, although related to what is going on in other enclaves, it is much more similar to the colonization that I have talked about in past articles. It is akin to the old Americans in Belize or the French in Haiti. There is a mixture of a financial and commercial take over and also Expat living conditions that allow the Israelis to manipulate the labor force off of Lake Atitlan. There is the party aspect of it as well because of the youth of the Israeli people that are traveling and the fact that many of them have traveled post mandatory service in Israel, they are looking to “cut loose”. This was the first time seeing the both types of neocolonialism coming together. 

The Guatemalan natives have had enough of what is going on in SP and other towns off of Lake Atitlan. As I have said before in past writings, what started out for them as a new capitalist opportunity to make money off of tourists and expats has turned into them being the workforce for said expat community. What started out as selling to them is now laboring for them in their shops, hostels and restaurants .

Now once again this is too deep of a topic to talk about in whole in this article, but one day, maybe, I will write in excess about it. 

A Message to My Friends in Leftist Spaces

One thing I would like to add and this is to my leftist peers. The promotion of Israelis and Zionists as European colonists is a half truth. Although many are, many Zionist and Israelis are Middle Eastern and North and Western Africa. Most of who I have seen, met or interacted with were from Yemen, Pakistan, Morocco, the horn of Africa. The idea that natives don't destroy their own land is a fallacy. We have seen that throughout the world and although historically rare with natives in the western hemisphere that is not necessarily true everywhere else. Saying that what Israel is, is a neo-European/American colony is true and it is a deep embedded truth, but it is too simple, it ignores the propaganda machine that it is. It ignores the generational indoctrination that the government has done to not only the Israeli people but to many jews around the world. You may ask yourself what is the difference, don't they all go hand in hand and don't you need propaganda and to indoctrinate people for colonization to work. Yes, yes you do, but there are differences. In Africa when England and other European countries colonized it, it was from this idea of being better than and simply deserving of because they viewed themselves as better, but in America with the natives and in Palestine with the Palestinians it is different. There is this idea of not only deserving because you are better than, but this idea that you have the right of god to take this land. Yes, European colonizers also used god and religion to colonize as well, but it was more of a tool than a driving force. In America religion in the scope of colonization started as a tool, but it changed to a driving force in 1812 with the Manifest Destiny. In Israel it is the idea that the land Palestinians have been on for generation after generation actually belongs to Israelis because spirituality it says it in a book, but really it’s because some countries in the west decided that one day in ‘48 to make it a country so they could have ties to and eyes on the Middle East.

And that's all I am going to say about that for now. I would like to give a special thanks to my family for being so supportive of me being away for over 3 years and only seeing them once. I am lucky to be a Luckey.

Thank you

Aunt Abby

Aunt Debbie- Happy Birthday 

Uncle Mike

Uncle Wlater

-James