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A t an elevation of nearly four thousand metres above sea level, Comitancillo, a province in northwestern Guate­ mala, was a formidable place to farm. The air was thin and cold. I followed Rosa towards her home along a

well-trodden path on the side of the mountain. My lungs were crying for oxygen, overworking like moth wings. Maya-Mam communities had lived on these barren slopes in northwestern Guatemala for nearly five hundred years. Before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, the Mam splintered off from the Mayan Empire, which had chased them off the lush green flats and up into the Sierra Madre. Looking down the mountainside, I witnessed how the Mam adapted to live on their mountain fortress: they'd carved steps into the mountainside, thousands of terraces that cascaded down to the bottom of the valley. I was awestruck by such architecture. "We've been cultivating la milpa for hundreds of years," said Rosa. Milpa was a Spanish word that summed up the three crops that had sustained the Mam for centuries: maize, beans, and squash. Planting all three crops together formed a sacrosanct principle of Mam farming.

The Mam were one of twenty-four indigenous cultures in Guatemala, a country where nearly 50 per cent of the popu­ lation were indigenous people, most of whom dwelled in rural areas and depended on subsistence and small-scale agricul­ ture for survival. Despite having a near majority of indigenous people comprising its population, the country had never elected an indigenous president. The mestizo elite owned politics and power in Guatemala, while the Mam formed only a minus­ cule fraction of the country's population. Marginalized to the mountains in the northwest, they survived on growing food and grazing livestock. Traditionally, men played a larger role in farm management while women were responsible for grazing sheep, grinding maize, cooking, cleaning, and nurturing the family.

The dusty husks of the harvest and the season past dried in the slanted fields on the mountainsides. The bright sun caught and illuminated their yellow leftovers into gold. Nothing would be wasted on the mountains. Rosa would harvest the dried crops for pig and sheep feed.

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"Our seeds are hardy and meant for these mountains. The seeds people try to sell us don't do well in Comitancillo. They grow and the wind breaks them."

Years of living on the mountains had also ground Rosa into a hardy woman. The fifty-year-old woman barely reached five feet. She wore a striking turquoise blue huipil, a traditional blouse, embroidered with magenta flowers. She parted her long black hair in the middle and braided it down her back in a single rope. Rosa was a widow. Her husband had died twelve years earlier after falling from the rickety scaffolding on a construc­ tion site and quickly dying of his injuries. He'd been working as a migrant labourer in Xela, a city situated in one of the valley flats, nearly three hours away aboard a series of chicken buses: long yellow school buses carrying men with bags of maize and beans, and women with plastic washing basins filled with fried foods to sell in the market. Every seat, every inch of space in the aisles of the buses was occupied with bodies, limbs, live­ stock, and the odours of delicious fried foods and sweat.

Rosa didn't learn of her husband's death until five days after it happened. His body came home in a crudely constructed casket and she buried him behind their home, marking his grave with a small wooden cross. A green plastic rosary dangled

· from the cross and shook in the cold wind that whipped over the mountain and stung my cheeks.

Alone on the mountainside, she raised five grandchildren. She lived in a two-room house made of mud bricks. The fa<;ade was rounded and smoothed with mud and mortar, and white­ washed with a mixture of lime, ash, and water. Her recent maize harvest hung on a rope from below a roof made of iron sheets. The maize coloured her home with spectacular shades: eggplant purple, indigo blue, crimson red, orange like a dusky sun.

"I grow food for survival," she said plainly. She didn't have any grand illusions about her work, or what

she expected the earth to give her. Rosa didn't sell her food in the market, and even if she did sell, the return for small-scale farmers in Guatemala was marginal. It was the sad absurdity of being an indigenous farmer growing ancient maize: they grew

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their staple food, preserved for hundreds of years on these hostile slopes, sold it for mere cents, and bought back the imported GMO varieties for 300 per cent more than the regular price. The market laws that promoted subsidizing and dumping imported grains from the U.S. Midwest in Guatemala punished poor, indige­ nous farmers. How could they compete with the mechanics and productivity of multinational farming operations?

Even so, Rosa loved to farm. When she planted maize, she remembered brighter days and memories of the past with her husband. He was a good man, she said, and also a farmer. Together they gave birth-" dar a la luz" she said in Spanish, which meant "give light"-to six children. Rosa was fifteen years old when she met her husband, who taught her everything he knew about working the land.

While she was born in Comitancillo, Rosa didn't grow up on the land. She spent most of her childhood working on coffee fincas, - plantations owned by foreigners and wealthy Guatema­ lans that sprung up along the humid coastlines in western Gua­ temala. The government forced Mam and Maya farmers in the northwestern highlands to abandon their milpa fields and travel to the plantations to work as labourers tending to the coffee on the west coast. Rosa's family, her parents, were amongst those relocated farmers. The practice traced back to the policies of the Spanish colonial regime in the eighteenth century. According to law, every municipality in the country had to send a min­ imum of ten indigenous mozos, mosquitoes-a derogatory word for indigenous people, to build roads and work on the planta­ tions owned by bureaucrats and landowners. Men were packed together like beans in poorly constructed shelters and subsisted on a diet of only ground maize flour. This forced labour policy continued for decades into the 1900s. By the 1930s, under the dictatorial rule of President Ubico, Mam men in Comitancillo were forced to work on the plantations for upwards of 150 days, nearly the same amount of time as the milpa harvest.

This policy left women alone on their farms. Harvests were poor and children fell asleep hungry. Women did everything: planting, weeding, harvesting, grazing sheep, and grinding

GUATEMALA 33

maize on large, flat stones into flour for making tortillas and tamales. Not until 1947 did all forms of forced labour become illegal under the governance of President Arevalo, who cre­ ated the foundation for basic workers' rights in Guatemala. But by the time the law abolishing forced labour came into effect, the Mam population was so poor and downtrodden that many farmers continued to seek low-wage employment on the coastal plantations, including members of Rosa's family. Over one hundred years of forced labour had disrupted the Mam's agricultural productivity. It had severed the flow of knowledge from Rosa's mother and father to their daughter.

But Rosa didn't want to talk about how the past had impris­ oned her parents on the plantations, or how it had robbed her of a childhood of experiencing the entirety of the seasons on her ancestral land. There was every reason to mourn the past, but Rosa wanted to talk about the present moment. She wanted to talk about what was under her feet. She wanted to talk about what every woman in Comitancillo wanted to talk about. She wanted to talk about the owners of the mine who had blasted open the mountainsides and whose destruction of the moun­ tain was creeping closer to her land .and livelihood every day. She wanted to talk about how the mines had already changed everything for the Mam. Like many women I'd come to meet, Rosa deeply feared the loss of her farmland, terrified that the mining company would come knocking on her door and issue an order, legitimized by the Guatemalan government. "You have no other option; you have to sell your land. You must go," they would threaten her. With force, they could remove her from the land; they could take the land out from under her feet. "W hen I think about my land and the little I have . . . " her voice trailed off. "If the company takes it, what am I going to do? W here will I go?"

Mam women in Comitancillo waited anxiously for that sudden knock on the door, for the government's orders, armed with weaponry and authority, to leave their ancestral lands. Fear grew in the fields: Uncertainty of what was to come hung in the cold mountain air. Women knew that, while they planted

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the milpa on the surface of the earth, it was what lay beneath that mattered. The mountain was a body filled with veins of gold and silver.

For women, the mine was changing everything.

THE MAM NEVER INVITED the mmmg company to crack open their mountains. The Marlin gold mine was supposed to be an orchid farm.

That's what the municipal government told people in Com­ itancillo before the first convoy of trucks arrived with their machines and milling cylinders in late 2004. "People won­ dered, W hat kind of orchid farm is this? They were fooled," said Gabriel. Anger seared the edge of his voice.

GUATEMALA 35

On my first morning in Comitancillo, I woke at 5 a.m. to the sound of the market vendors setting up outside my hotel window. The frigid air slipped through the window and I could see my breath. I reached for my scarf and leather jacket to cut the cold.

Outside, market day transformed the cobblestone streets of the peaceful mountain town. A sea of bodies had overtaken the streets. The vendors tied their plastic tarps together to form a massive roof that stretched seven blocks long. Mam farmers and traders gathered to sell their goods: indigenous aki, dried red chilli peppers; necklaces of garlic; onions; tangerines from the west coast; and a rainbow of woven tapestries, belts, and hand-embroidered blouses that would have inspired even Frida Kahlo. I watched a Mam man stop by a booth selling toiletries. He greeted the vendor, a round, smiling woman. I noticed that they didn't kiss on the cheek, greeting the mestizo, or Spanish way. Instead, they touched their index fingers together and then gently touched the middle of their foreheads.

"It's the Mam way of greeting. The touch to the forehead symbolizes communication, openness, and deep respect," Gabriel explained. I met him at Mama Yaya's, a small cafe down the street. We were the only patrons. I sat down across from Gabriel. He was a short man with pointed, bird-like fea­ tures and thick black hair that fell onto his forehead. He was also bundled against the cold morning, wearing a black leather jacket and plaid scar£

"The Spanish tried to break us, the government tries to erase us," he laughed. "But we're maintaining the ways of Mam culture."

Gabriel was a social worker with a local community orga­ nization that worked to help poor families access health care, education, and agricultural training and support. He was also a writer, he told me. He wanted to publish books in Mam to preserve their language, stories, and culture.

"Tell me about the mine," I asked him. On December 4, 2004, when Mam communities in the San

Marcos province realized the government had never intended

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to grow Bowers, over two thousand men and women gathered on the roadside to block the company's trucks from passing. This protest would be the first of many standoffs between the Mam and Glamis Gold, a Canadian-registered mining com­ pany. Women boiled beans, patted out tortillas made from maize Bour, and steamed squash on fires lit by the roadside. Men erected tents on the road and huddled together at night for warmth. They stayed there for over a month. Their resolve was absolute: the Mam never granted consent to Glamis and the Guatemalan government. They were illegally developing the mine on the Mam's ancestral lands.

After forty days, the military arrived on the scene. Photos depict women at the front line, facing off with men dressed in full riot gear, protected by bulletproof vests. The women are wearing handwoven cloth, protected by their courage and faith. They are dressed in their traditional blue, purple, pink, green and yellow skirts and blouses, a rainbow of colour resisting the military, who wore belts of ammo across their chests and cradled AK-47s. The military fired into the crowd and killed a farmer named Raul Castro Bocel. Men and women dropped the sticks and stones from their hands and ran back to their villages.

Ten months later the first mining blasts on the mountain­ sides rang in their ears. The Mam acted quickly. Women and men began organizing. They held consultations and referendums to discuss and debate what changes the mine would bring to their communities. Sixty-five villages in San Marcos placed their votes, and the results were resounding: all sixty-five villages voted against the mine. They wanted the mine to go.

But ten years later, the explosions on the mountainside could still be heard.

Goldcorp, a Canadian-owned and -registered mining com­ pany, was expanding from the original site near the village of San Miguel Ixtahuacan to a second site in Chocoyos, where they were cracking open the mountain to mine silver. Gabriel lamented that Goldcorp had illegally extracted over one mil­ lion ounces of gold. And they weren't stopping at that. They ' d

GUATEMALA 37

applied to the Guatemalan government for upwards of two hundred exploration licenses on the Mam's territory in San Marcos.

"Practically all of our communities are sitting on top of potential mine sites," said Gabriel.

His black eyes look away. His face swam with mixed emo­ tions: anger, frustration, and eventually, grief. Then he laughed and threw up his hands, ironically.

"That's development for you."

THE ROAD TO ELENA'S HOME curved and coiled up the side of the mountain like a yellow snake lying in the sun. I clutched the handhold on the ceiling of the 4x4 pickup truck as we wound around and around, ascending to 3000 metres. To the north,

38 WOMEN WHO DIG

Tajamulco, the tallest volcano in the region, appeared on the horizon like a bluish-gray bruise against the sky. The morning sun reflected off the yellow earth. The white light was near­ bliriding. A large truck, its bed packed with young boys and men, passed us, turning up a cloud of dust and grit.

"Where are they going?" I asked the driver, a paunch-bellied man. He shrugged and didn't take his eyes off the road.

"�Quien sabe? Xela? La Ciudad? They're going to work." Aside from farming, employment was scarce as rainfall in

Comitancillo. Unemployment uprooted young boys and men. I' d see this trend in many other countries: men leaving their farms and migrating to plantations or cities in search of work. Some followed the train tracks north into Mexico. In Mexico, they hired coyotes, smugglers, who stuffed them into trucks and trunks, and led them across the Rio Grande into the United States. The ones that remained in Guatemala worked on large­ scale farms, planting, weeding and spraying, or on building roads and apartment buildings.

The UN estimated that 35 per cent of Guatemalan men were employed in wage labour, while only 7 per cent of women were employed in wage labour. In Comitancillo those num­ bers would be significantly less, practically null. Mam women lived primarily as subsistence and small-scale farmers. "It's in our blood," they told me. During the last several decades, women had grown accustomed to taking over the farm work when their husbands migrated for work. But after the mine came to Comitancillo and dug its teeth into the earth, women were no longer only cultivating their land, they were defending it from the mine. They held their ground, sowed the sacred milpa, and faced off against the third-largest mining company in the world.

ELENA HAD BEEN FIGHTING against the mine since the first rounds of dynamite broke open the skin of the mountain. Although she called herself an activist, she didn't look the stereotypical part. Her hair had turned silver around her temples and her face was

GUATEMALA 39

like a creased map. She wore a cream-coloured apron around her vast midsection and a blouse that sagged at the neckline. Her watery eyes had signs of cataracts, likely from many years working outside in the bright white light. But she looked at me directly when she spoke and I could sense her power, her con­ viction. Elena didn't hesitate to move, or speak, or claim the space she occupied. She owned every breath expelled from her lungs, every movement, every word from her lips.

She invited me inside her kitchen, a small building erected from wooden planks. We sat together on low stools drinking steaming cups of pifzol, a traditional porridge made from maize flour and cinnamon. Elena's five-year-old granddaughter knelt on the floor beside her, playing with a doll made from dried cornhusks. She looked up shyly at me with large, coffee-bean eyes. I wrapped my hands around the pink plastic mug and warmed my cold fingers. The piftol tasted sweet and soupy. Elena watched me, her eyes searching.

"How old are you?" Elena asked. "Twenty-eight.'' "Verdad? Truthfully? You look so young! Are you married?" "No, I'm not." "Do you have children?" "No," I answered a little too quickly. Her brow furrowed with wrinkles, as though she was trying

to figure out why I'd traveled so far from the place where I was born. She wondered, W hy was a single, twenty-eight-year-old woman working alone in a country that wasn't her own? West­ erners would argue that I was privileged to enjoy that kind of freedom. I would agree, though I was unsure what Elena thought of me. She knew I was single, childless, and far from home. W hat kind of belonging, purpose, or happiness could that bring? I shifted awkwardly in my seat, averting my eyes self-consciously under her strong, studying gaze.

Elena married when she was fourteen years old. Before her sixteenth birthday she'd already given birth to her first child. She and her husband raised five children together. For over thirty years they lived entirely off a handful of scattered plots

40 WOMEN WHO DIG

of milpa and wheat. With pigs and sheep they were able to meet the needs of raising five kids, although they lived simply. Her husband encouraged Elena to work by his side on the farm.

"I was the first woman to join one of the all-male farming groups," she said proudly.

Through her participation in the group's meetings and training activities, Elena learned to do what most women would never do: castrate pigs and sheep, and provide basic veterinary care to livestock. She also learned the art of fruit-tree grafting. Elena considered herself lucky that she and her husband were never forced-by law or economic necessity-to migrate for work. Her husband had passed away twelve years earlier. She was glad that he never lived to witness what had become of their ancestral territory: the gold and silver mines, the severed mountains, the deep, gaping wounds. It seemed to me that Elena felt the impact of the mines as if the mountain was her own body. She was wounded and angry.

Outside, Elena led me to her orchard and vegetable garden. She shooed a hen off the path and a fuzzy gang of chicks sprinted behind their feathered mother, cheeping frantically. We passed the pigs that snorted and slopped around in the muck of their pens. Elena opened a small wooden gate that was hinged to the post using strips of a bicycle tire. She beckoned me inside. The garden brimmed with fruit trees and vegetable crops thriving in the slices of sunlight that lay scattered on the leaf-covered ground. The hen and her chicks scuttled into the garden, pecking furiously and overturning leaves to dig at grubs and worms.

"I have avocado and cherry trees. I even have peaches here," Elena said, taking my hand and leading me over to a small tree spotted with fuzzy fruits the size of marbles.

"But, sadly, production has fallen these days. Things aren't what they used to be."

Two years after the mine came to Comitancillo, Elena began to notice a sudden drop in her farm's production. She wasn't alone. Women from the neighbouring farms moaned and com­ plained at the negligible yields. They'd sow seeds and the rains

GUATEMALA 41

would stop. The sun grew bolder, hotter, and the rains became increasingly infrequent. Was it climate change? Was it due to the mine? Fear began to take root in the fields of dried milpa, the maize stalks stunted by the heat, bean tendrils burnt to brown crisps. The aphids attacked, colonizing the underbel­ lies of leaves. Even the wild plants they foraged for seemed to vanish into the heat, to disappear from their lives. Epazote, an aromatic herb that grew low to the arid slopes, was now scarcely found. Women used the small leaves of epazote to brew a special tea for the chuj ceremony, a cleansing sauna that Mam women took weekly to purify the body and spirit. How would they survive?

Uncertainty loomed, though Mam women knew one thing, they felt it down to the marrow of their bones: the mine had to go. They had never given their consent to the mine. With their world wilting around them, they wondered if the stretched-out season of sun and dust was a result of the mine. The skies emp­ tied of moisture like a grape left to dry on a hot rock. Could it be a sign of the mine? Western science had never been on the side of indigenous women and their communities. No scientists had come to verify the cause of the extreme weather, but the women possessed a different kind of science, a deeper science, and a richer history farming on the mountainside. The science they saw with their own eyes made them fearful.

"The mines are consuming an enormous quantity of our groundwater. They mix cyanide with water to wash the rocks, which separates the gold from rock. The contaminated water then flows into our rivers," Elena explained.

Every hour that passed, Goldcorp sucked upwards of 250,000 litres of water for their mining operations in San Marcos, and yet they weren't paying a cent to the Guatemalan government. The water flowed freely for the thirsty company. Elena and other women worried the mines were drying up the mountain­ side and polluting rivers and streams with toxic chemicals.

"Water runs through our bodies like blood. It's the same with Pachamama, Mother Nature," said Elena. "If we cut a vein, the water disappears. W hat are we going to drink?"

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Elena's sister lived and taught at a primary school in San

Isidro, a village located downstream of the mine. Her sister told her that many of the children were coming to school with rashes all over their bodies. I had seen photographs of the chil­ dren she was talking about. Rights Action, a Canadian-based advocacy organization, documented numerous cases of infants and children who were suffering from violent rashes on their limbs, scalps, and bodies. The children lived in San Isidro· and other villages located directly downstream of Goldcorp's mining activities. Physicians for Human Rights believed that a connection existed between the contaminated water and the recurring rashes and illnesses in San Isidro because the rashes and respiratory effects that the children suffered are consistent with exposure to cyanide.

In 2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (rACHR), acting on behalf of Mam communities in San Marcos, demanded that Goldcorp and the Guatemalan government respond to the issues of the overconsumption and contamina­ tion of water by providing nearby communities with sufficient, safe drinking water. But both Goldcorp and the government denied reports of poor health among the Mam and the mine's environmental impact on the land. They ignored the commis- sion's order.

"We've demanded for the government to cancel the explora­ tion licenses, but they don't listen," cried Elena. "If we protest, the military hits us with water bombs. Or worse. It's an injustice."

Before I left her home, Elena wanted to show me the river. She led me down the hill from her house through a stand of cypress trees to what remained of the river. Her granddaughter rushed past us and clambered onto the large river boulders.

From the embankment, we gazed down at the dried-out riverbed, ten metres wide and three metres deep. Clear moun­ tain water trickled along the bottom of the bed. In three months, Elena claimed, the riverbed would go bone dry.

"We can't eat gold, or drink gold. We can't use the gold for clothing. To us, it's an unnecessary luxury. It's something we

GUATEMALA 45

can live without," she said solemnly. "But water? Air? Land? These are vital to us. We can't live without the Pachamama."

Down below, Elena's granddaughter excitedly hopped from rock to rock. She was too young to understand her grand­ mother's worry and the significance of what would be lost.

LATER THAT EVENING in my small hotel room, I fast-forwarded and rewound back and forth through the recordings of my con­ versations with the women in Comitancillo. I listened over and over again. Their voices haunted me. ''Abandon these lands?" they said. "God gave these lands to the Mam," they said. "The company should leave us in peace. That's what we want here."

One of the women asked me, "What do you think will happen?"

I didn't have an answer for her.

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I didn't tell her the same thing was happening to indigenous communities in Canada, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Columbia, and other countries all over the world, as mining, oil and gas, pipeline, and logging companies were operating without com­ munity consent and threatening to destroy land, livelihoods, and traditional cultures.

I didn't tell her that the company and government would likely, eventually, drive the Mam off the land. That they' d blast open the mountainsides, one by one, and drain the region of every last ounce of gold, silver, and nickel. That the moun­ tains and forests and rivers and streams would disappear into memory and their ancient seeds would be taken from the hands of their children.

Instead, I told her, "Don't lose hope. Don't give up la lucha, the struggle."

I told her that I believed Canadians would hear their stories of protest and, in turn, urge the Canadian government to inter­ vene. I didn't tell her that Canadians had already been down that path in 2010 and failed. In late October 2010, Canadian members of Parliament defeated Bill C-300, the Responsible Mining Act, a piece of legislature that would force Canadian mining companies to comply with international human rights and environmental standards.

I also didn't tell her how Goldcorp's website reassured inves­ tors that the company hadn't caused any social or environ­ mental harm in San Marcos and that the claims in IACHR's report were false.

I didn't tell her that Goldcorp was throwing money at the community, supporting the construction of schools and health clinics in the communities surrounding the mine through the work of its non-profit organization, Fundaci6n Sierra Madre. Goldcorp continues to claim that they are doing more good than harm with their mining activities in the region. In a recent blog post entitled "Marlin's Socio-Economic Legacy," they boasted of providing "much-needed support for health and educational programs, as well as infrastructure that will benefit communities in the long-term." During my stay in

GUATEMALA 47

Comitancillo I spoke with more than thirty women, but not a single person made mention of Goldcorp's schools and health clinics. I realized that the preservation of the mountain and the Mam's traditional way of life meant far more to them than the ostensible improvements to their lives provided by Goldcorp's schools and hospitals.

I did not tell her that since the first explosion in the moun­ tains ten years ago, Goldcorp had extracted over a million ounces of gold from their mountainsides. The company's profit on the Mam's territory had reac�ed billions of dollars.

The farmers I met were likely living on less than a dollar a day. But they would never put a price on their land. The Mam's loss to the mine was unquantifiable.

AMELIA DREW NO BOUNDARIES between her home and the land that fed her. The balance of her work as a farmer in the fields and a caretaker in the home ebbed and flowed as the sun and moon tug at the sea. I sat outside Amelia's home in Tuixcajchis, a village located less than ten kilometres away from Goldcorp's newest silver mine in Chocoyos. The sounds of dynamite shat­ tering rock echoed too closely to home for Amelia. The mine was on her doorstep.

Amelia moved about the land with the rhythm of a hon­ eybee. She scattered maize for the birds and removed the sun-and-starch-stiffened laundry from the clothing line. She emerged from the kitchen holding a red washing basin full of large, oval, tangerine and purple frijoles and spread them on a wooden table to dry in the sun.

I watched young chickens scurry in and out of the kitchen, hunting for fallen maize kernels. A gargantuan male turkey made a regal show of promenading across the patio, opening his black and white feathers like fan, making a dramatic whooshing sound. The white and red and purple milpa har­ vest hung under the roof awning to dry. She had piled up the season's harvest of ayote, a watermelon-sized indigenous squash, beside the kitchen. At my feet, month-old puppies

48 WOMEN WHO DIG

somersaulted about in happy play and a pied-coloured pup rugged at my shoelace.

Amelia was dressed in a navy blue skirt and red embroidered blouse with a black belt, the traditional colours of the Mam. The thirty -five-year-old woman had grown up under starkly different circumstances than some of the older women I inter­ viewed. Her parents allowed her to walk two kilometres every morning to take classes in the single-roomed school. Amelia never graduated past primary school, but she knew how to read and write and speak fluently in Spanish, an anomaly in the isolated highlands where government services lagged behind, resulting in the lowest literacy rates in Guatemala, particularly amongst older women.

In the fight against the mine, Amelia used language as a weapon. Her words were bullets to fire back at the company, who communicated their every move in Spanish. They facili­ tated community meetings in Spanish. They prattled off news and updates on the radio in Spanish. Amelia's efforts to under­ stand, interpret, and defend the Mam doubled as her mind searched for words to translate cultural meaning. The sound of Spanish came from the tip of the tongue, whereas Mam grew from the back of the throat. Often, she struggled to find the right word, the bullet that would penetrate. Spanish lacked the diversity of the Mam's lexicon for understanding the intricacies ofland. But Amelia's literacy gave her power in her community. She was the president of the Tuixcajchis Women's Association, a group of thirty women who met weekly to discuss their issues at home and on the farms. They hosted agricultural training workshops to help women diversify crops and apply new tech­ niques to prevent drought and erosion. And, with the new silver mine at Chocoyos only a short distance away, they were actively organizing and collaborating with other women's groups in San Marcos to protest against the mine.

The radio crackled and blared a Mexican ranchera song. The singer's voice whined of lost love and failed crops. W hen the song cut out, the radio DJ's voice began speaking in a fast cur­ rent of Mam. I couldn't understand, but I saw how Amelia

GUATEMALA 49

reacted to his words. Her body bristled and she clucked her tongue in disapproval.

"W hat did he say?" I asked. "He's talking about a new program that's supposed to help

women living on less than a dollar a day. The government is promising to give allowances and seeds to women-as if that's going to really help," Amelia said. Her voice was bitter, sharp as a machete.

She had grown weary of the government's tactics intended to sway the Mam into surrender. Government officials jour­ neyed eight hours from Guatemala City to host rallies and deliver boisterous speeches in Comitancillo. They paraded through the surrounding Mam villages, handing out sacks of GMO maize seeds with empty promises of building schools and health facilities bouncing off their tongues. Many women planted the maize seed, hopeful. But the cold mountain winds in Comitancillo were too much for seeds that were mod­ ified to do well within specific conditions and applications. Women couldn't afford the expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that the GMO maize required. Usually, the maize stunted, bent, and broke in half. Women watched their entire fields collapse and felt the strain on their family's food stores, their savings, their means of survival. Yet these ill-suited gov­ ernment solutions, these cheap gifts, at best, continued in Comitancillo.

"They're trying to buy our support for the mine," said Amelia. Only a few months earlier, Amelia received visitors, two mes­

tizo men, who worked for the mining company. They wanted to talk with Amelia and her husband about the benefits the Choc­ oyos mine would bring to T uixcajchis and other nearby villages. "New schools," they said. "New health centres and pharmacies," they promised. "Jobs," they added enthusiastically, nodding at Amelia's husband. She asked them to leave.

"We'll never work for the mine," she said defiantly. "The majority of men at the m1ne aren't Mam, they're mestizo men from Xela. The engineers are all from la Ciudad, the capital city. The Mam aren't working in positions of leadership-they only

50 WOMEN WHO DIG

do the physical labour. It's dangerous and the pay is very low. They treat our men like mozos."

In defiance, Amelia strove to make her land as productive as possible. She refused to be bought out by the government. She wanted her daughters to inherit the land and grow older knowing, deeply, what it meant to be a Mam woman. She was teaching them to feel, see, taste, and understand the satisfaction of being a farmer, how to eke from the earth different shades of cultural sustenance-the ancient maize of a thousand colours, the tangerine and purple fava beans, the seeds of ayote, the for­ aged herbs like epazote.

Amelia showed me around the farm. Though it was only an acre of land, every inch of the place was under cultivation. She

GUATEMALA 51

collected pig manure, vegetable waste, and dried maize stalks in giant heaps where she turned it weekly as the material trans­ formed into black organic soil. "It's a solution to the produc­ tivity problem we're facing today," she said confidently.

In a rectangular garden with a fence made from sticks, Amelia let the vegetable crops go to seed. She collected a handful of thin seeds from a kale crop and tucked them into the tiny cloth purse she wore around her neck on a string. She pointed to her medicinal plants and counted off the number of illnesses they'd treat: stomach flu, menstrual cramps, sore throat and colds, skin infections, and minor cuts and wounds. In order to reach the pharmacy in town, women had to walk three hours down the winding dirt road and three hours back up. "We're resurrecting the knowledge of our Mam ancestors to treat what we can, to

· tend to our health in the ways that we can," she explained. Before I left Tuixcajchis, I accompanied Amelia to one of

her meetings with the Tuixcajchis Women's Association. We reached the meeting on foot, walking a kilometre along the mountain on well-trodden footpaths that cut through the empty fields. The dried maize stalks fluttered in a slight wind. A few sunken squash had been left behind. They deflated into the earth, slowly rotting and returning to the soil where they had started as seeds.

The trail led into a tightly knit forest of pine and cypress trees. The pine needles stung my nostrils, the smell provoking memories of my childhood in northern Alberta. I felt a strange sense of protection offered by the trees. I felt comforted by the familiarity of the smell.

We reached a small clearing where a group of twenty women had gathered on the hard-packed earth. The topography of their skin revealed their age or their youthfulness: the older skin full of the lines of tributaries, the young skin dry and tight as desert. Some of the women bounced babies on their laps and others wore colourful slings that held sleeping babes on t_heir backs. Toddlers waddled about and older children played a game of tag while the women talked and laughed together. They greeted us, one by one, with a gentle touch to the forehead. Communication,

52 WOMEN WHO DIG

openness, and deep respect. I heard Gabriel 's words in my mind, reminding me of the quiet, steady significance of the Mam's symbolic greeting.

Women gathered beneath these trees every week to visit with one another, to speak in Mam, to give voice to the experiences of farming, of protecting the land, of being women. Beneath the large, protective branches of the trees, the women kept a nursery for tree seedlings. Beneath the trees, women planted the seeds of pine, cypress, and avocado in tiny black biode­ gradable bags of soil. They watched the seedlings over weeks, from germination to seedling. I estimated around a thousand seedlings, maybe more. W hen the rains returned each woman would go home with the seedlings and plant the trees on her land, acts of reforesting the barren mountains. Trees would bring back and hold the rain, they said. They' d provide food, forage, and fuel to keep the Mam alive on the arid slopes.

"The streams that flowed here before are dying. Our harvests were once plentiful, but today there's only desert," explained an elderly woman holding a moon-faced baby on her lap. "We don't want our children and grandchildren to inherit this reality."

Only ten days earlier, she and other women of the T uixcajchis Women's Association marched ten kilometres, joining hun­ dreds of women from surrounding villages, to protest against the silver mine at Chocoyos. They linked arms and chanted "IDijanos en paz! Dejanos en paz! Leave us in peace! Leave us in peace! " The Guatemalan military stood between the women and the road that led to the mine, armed with AK-47s.

After five hours, a mestizo employee spoke with protest orga­ nizers and agreed to sign a letter that stated Goldcorp would cease all mining activities within two days, but nearly two weeks had passed and they could still hear the blasting of rock in the distance. They realized later that the agreement had been a hoax, a move to placate the women's anger and demands that Goldcorp never had any intention of honouring. Undeterred, Amelia and the women were continuing to organize and strat­ egize against the mine. It had been ten long years of fighting, but even a decade wouldn't age or persuade the women to put

GUATEMALA 53

down their stones, or to keep Amelia's tongue in her mouth, to silence her words in a language that wasn't her own.

"Let us plant trees and grow old on our land. Let us live in peace," said the old wo�an. "You tell that to the world."

ON MY LAST EVENING in Comitancillo, I had dinner with a local family: Ernesto, his wife Gloria, and their two young children. After a meal of pork and vegetable tamales, they invited me to enter the chuj, a traditional Mam steam bath. For centu­ ries, Mam men, women, and children participated in a weekly chuj, meditating in a hot darkness that emptied the body of

54 WOMEN WHO DIG

everything, purifying, cleansing, and reminding what was physical, mental and spiritual to come together.

Inside a small dark room built with thick concrete bricks, no larger than a root cellar that held a few sacks of potatoes, the fire had been burning for hours. The flames smolder�d into red glowing embers. Four black rocks sat atop the scorched coals. Gloria drew a curtain and told me to undress. My pulse quick­ ened. It felt as though the walls were about to cave in on me. From behind the curtain, Gloria's voice was a distant murmur, a soft voice instructing me on what to do next. Listening to Gloria's words, I dipped a cypress bough into a wooden bowl of water, sprinkled it onto the coals so steam erupted. I laid my body down on a wooden bench beside the fire and felt the heat and dark settle on top of me like river sediment.

I felt as though I was being buried alive, tucked like a seed into the soil and nourished by the steam, the heat, and my own mineral perspiration. Closing my eyes, I thought of one of Frida Kahlo's paintings, the one she entitled Raizes-Roots. Kahlo painted a woman with long black hair lying on her side, bleeding out from the heart. The woman's heart shoots forth roots and vines.

As the heat grew stronger, I imagined the Mam women as they unravelled their long embroidered belts and shed their skirts, woven as colourfully as a butterfly's wings, to enter the chuj. What did their bodies say to the earth? I thought of what they' d told me about their desire to survive on the sharp mountainsides where they had been born, where they grazed sheep, where they planted the seasonal milpa, maize, beans, and squash, and where they ground the yellow and purple and red and black maize kernels on large, flat rocks and mixed the flour with water to make masa for tamales and tortillas. Would I ever see myself reflected in the earth, the soil, the streams and rivers and trees the same way they did? Would I ever feel the same kind of pain they felt when the mountain was cracked open and the earth's veins were cut?

How easy, I thought, to gaze from afar at the Mam's cul­ ture and mistakenly perceive the women's ancestral maize as

GUATEMALA 55

meagre subsistence, their fields of milpa as ignorance, and their mountains as untapped wealth and potential. That's exactly how the Spanish, the Guatemalan government, and Gold­ corp had framed the Mam's existence for over half a millennia: uncivilized, poor, and underdeveloped. Of course, it was a masked excuse to justify their colonial agendas, to profit at the expense of the Mam, to exploit their labour and farmland, to destroy the land in which the lives of the Mam were so indel­ ibly enmeshed.

But women's voices weren't crying for money or seeds or 'development.' They were putting their bodies in the line of fire, crying for the right to live and die on the land that fed their physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies. They were begging for the explosion of rock and the violence on the mountainsides to stop. ''Abandon our lands," they said.

W hat would happen to the Mam women? How much older would their ancestral seeds become? I felt their uncertainty, their fear and resistance, all at once. Inside the protection of the chuj, I closed my eyes and prayed. I surrendered my body, mind, and spirit to an unnameable substance that swelled from inside the earth.

56 WOMEN WHO DIG