By Ilka Oliva-Corado on June 1, 2025
Nebaj Guatemala, Photo: Bill Hackwell
Tanita always longed for a fruit smoothie, an unattainable dream in her childhood. Blenders were something magical that they talked about in radio commercials when they tuned in to Porfirio Cadena’s “El ojo de vidrio” (The Glass Eye). What excitement, Tanita recalls, when it rained on the radio, listening to the thunder shaking the roof of the house, the sound of horses’ hooves walking on the cobblestones: taca, taca, taca, ta…
She imagined that all this was happening in the mountains and lost herself in the royal roads, the red guava trees, and the grasslands. She wondered if the houses there were also lit by oil lamps like hers, or if the girls also had to carry water from the stream like she did. If they had a battery-powered Philips radio like her grandfather’s, if they also mended clothes and if they made salt lollipops when they were playing. If the men slept in one bed and the women in another, like in her house and in the houses of her neighbors in his village.
If they had hammocks hanging from the beams in the hallway and if their villages also had springs. If they traded salt, oil, and brown sugar and paid for them with loads of firewood, bundles of ocote, and izote flowers in season, like in her village. If in Porfirio Cadena’s village girls also longed to go to school and if women could decide not to have children, if somewhere in the world women could decide not to have children.
If they brushed their teeth with salt and ash and if they made soap from olive oil. At lunchtime, her father tuned in to Mosaico en madera, the radio program that introduced her to the beautiful melody of the marimba.
A silent sob moistened her eyes as the notes slid slowly like vines between the branches of the matasanos and the jocote corona tree, watching from above the pigsty where she shelled corn for them to eat. She felt a kind of dizziness, a sigh that remained stuck in her throat, something as deep and harmonious as the song of the cicadas caressing her soul at midday or as the darkness of the night being courted by the light of fireflies.
What is the marimba, what do they call Tierra Fría, the Guatemalan highlands? Everything she knew was there. The furthest she had ever traveled was to Ahuachapán, El Salvador, when she climbed the big rock in the yard and saw a handful of tile roofs peeking out from among the trees in the distance. Her sea was the Paz River. And a narrow, winding road, cushioned by the bark of red oak, conacaste, and chaparrones trees, was the border between Guatemala and El Salvador.
She always had questions that stuck in her throat and that she never dared to verbalize: why girls don’t go to school and boys do, why the men in the house don’t wash the dishes, why only men are allowed to make pork rinds, why women are forbidden to climb trees. What does argeñar mean? Why do adults say that when someone is very happy and smiling, it’s because something bad will happen later, that it’s better not to be so happy and to avoid misfortune? Why is it forbidden to be happy if misfortune is actually having amoebas in your stomach and being covered in lice? Why do children eat their boogers? And the fundamental question of her life: why do May zompopos bring so much happiness?
The day she emigrated to the capital as a teenager, Tanita received her first paycheck as a domestic worker and went to the Terminal market. Thirsty from a lifetime of deprivation, she bought a fruit smoothie, but it tasted so bland that it was like drinking atol shuco made from white corn.
Surprised by the stab in the back that progress in the capital had dealt her, she came to realize that the great advance everyone was talking about—concrete and urbanization—was not enough to ensure that the daughters of domestic workers could also go to school.
Bleeding from the wound, in the famous town she met the sisters of many musicians who played the marimba when they gathered on Sundays at Guatemala Musical, girls and teenagers who, like her, were destined for domestic work while the men of the house were respected artists.
Then she learned that a blender was not a luxury, that fruit juice was not unattainable, and that imagination was sweeter, more welcoming, and more human than reality. So she started her own revolution: she began to learn the alphabet.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English