At LEC, We see Possibilities at Every Turn

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on January 11, 2008

I just came back from a 26 day trip to Guatemala, where I went with my wife and three kids to spend Christmas and New Years with family and friends.  During this trip we were able to see much more of Guatemala then in previous trips when we dedicated most of our time to a project in a single place.

Part of this trip’s purpose (besides visiting as much of my family as possible and improving the kid’s Spanish skills) was making sense of the work that we do with Latin communities in Minnesota by looking at what we do through the lenses of those who live in the towns and cities where many of the immigrants come from.  There is a lot to learn from the way life changes in these places when families separate in search for a better income, or to re-unite with relatives who migrated before.  There is also a lot of incredible new developments happening all over in Guatemala and other Latin American countries, and those changes affect our own ability and effectiveness here in MN as we work with part of these same populations, sometimes still closely connected and other times removed by one or two generations.

In the town of San José Poaquil, for example, located up in the highlands of Guatemala in the province of Chimaltenango (which you can map out by going to google maps and search for San Jose Poaquil; you will need to zoom out to about half of the zoom bar in order to get the map to show the towns  accurately, otherwise it mixes them up), one can see a town that to any visitor unaware of its economic, social and political web, would look like an isolated place.

I happened to work with traditional weavers and agriculture cooperatives from this region from 1989 to 1992 and saw what this town looked like then. Today it looks much different, many more buildings, cars, trucks and money wiring services receiving the “remesas familiares”  as the money sent home from the U.S. are called.  The roads are not gravel anymore either, the market is much larger, there are two and three story buildings that just came to be recently.

This time we visited with my sister Argelina, who runs the orphanage Hogares Santa Maria de Guadalupe, she is part of the School Sisters of Saint Francis, 25 or so kilometers up the road from San José Poaquil.  She has continued to work on economic development in this village since the time I was there.  The current mayor of this town was raised at the orphanage after his parents lost their lives during the Guatemala civil war that ended officially in 1996.  The point about all of this is that despite the apparent isolation of this little town of around 15,000 residents, according to the mayor, there is probably only a handful of families who do not have family, relatives, or close friends living in the U.S.

The same case can be made for many more places, but more specifically about 4 municipalities in the Northern rainforest of Guatemala where my parents and most of my family live.  These municipalities have joined forces in order to better deal with economic development issues and formed the Mancomunidad de Municipalidades del Sur de Peten or MANMUNISURP.  They fully understand that their socio-economic situation has been significantly transformed by the migration of young people to the United States.  The primary reason for such migration is the lack of local economic opportunities.  These conditions have continued to deteriorate under pressure from global and regional economic forces which these small communities are not prepared or able to absove or accomodate.

This context needs to be understood when working with immigrant populations from Latin America in the U.S.. One of my top priorities for the trip (together with meeting with local government and economic development leaders)  was to explore opportunities related to the large influx of money from the U.S. back into these communities, as it represents a large system of micro-investment that if effectively utilized, has the potential to re-vitalize local economies.

Later this month, I will be traveling with Father Dennis and a group from St. Dominic Catholic Church in Northfield to conduct the same exploration in Veracruz, Mexico.  After this two encounters, there will be exchanges aimed at developing a model to capitalize on the transfers of money from migrant families in the U.S. back to their hometowns.  Aligning municipal programs to improve the return on these investments and encouraging more economic activity associated with the ripple effect that this money has, could significantly improve the ability of these communities to create wealth and opportunities locally.  These are also already existing resources, currently invested in a disorganized manner and without local incentives for increasing their size and aligning them with regional priorities where local government money is also being invested.  So far, governments have been looking at this cashflow simply as a way to bring in dollars to buy foreign goods, our aim at the LEC is to establish a couple of projects involving people we work with in Minnesota and show and document the deeper possibilities for rural economic development that already exists within this system of “remesas familiares.”