My closet Julia Child comes alive during the holiday season. I have never been so excited to wrap an apron around my waist and spend whole afternoons watching homemade foods pile up in my kitchen in advance of Thanksgiving or Christmas. I love producing the whole spread, inviting beloved guests, delegating certain aspects of the meal, and thinking of ways to be creative with the cuisine (i.e. love me a kale caesar salad to go with my turkey).
 |
| Sunday afternoon buzz along the road leading up to the Arc of the Old Convent, Antigua. |
But this year needed to be different, mostly due to the work schedule and travel calendar I had been keeping over the past 11 months. Thanksgiving in Antigua, Guatemala with my mother fit the bill – one part family, one part adventure, one part wander.
We arrived following a seamless transit day from Washington, DC to Guatemala City. We landed at the Quinta de las Flores hotel in the lovely Antigua, Guatemala’s former capital and a place I had lived for a summer about 10 years ago. Given my mother’s ailing health and limited mobility, any transit that runs seamlessly is a miracle, so the universe was on our side from the start.
 |
| Antigua’s central church located on the Plaza Mayor. |
The majestic volcanoes were the same, as were the magnificent church architecture and the cobble stoned streets. Antigua has a quiet about it, a true calm that few cities can achieve at the height of a work day or at the peak of a Saturday evening. And I don’t know if it’s the montane landscape and subsequent temperate climate but Antigua manages to deliver exquisite days consecutively, with only some clouds to decorate its neighboring volcanoes. Beautiful sunsets were born here.
 |
| Volcano spying at dusk, Antigua. |
Antigua offers up an interesting crossroads of Guatemalans, indigenous communities, and a groundswell of American and European ex-pats too. Guatemala’s indigenous communities comprise about 60 percent of the entire population and despite their rich and ancient history in this country and region, they are consistently poorer, less educated, less empowered and as a result, more invisible than their non-indigenous equivalents. Nobel Peace Prize winner and Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography, I Rigoberta, is an illuminating chronicle of the indigenous exploitation that characterized Guatemala’s 1962 – 1996 civil war.
An amateur student of indigenous populations and one of the main reasons I was drawn to Guatemala a decade before, I was both impressed and sympathetic for the women and girls pushing their textiles and other items on the streets to gringas like me. While my focus on indigenous populations and land tenure rights was originally academic during my research and writing days as a graduate student, I have ever since been moved to learn about indigenous communities wherever I travel. In the encyclopedia of “things” that we all hopefully develop as we progress our lives and cultivate our curiosity, indigenous land tenure rights were, at one time, “my thing.”
 |
| Me and Mom, Antigua. |
Wandering the streets with my mother and comparing the limonatas, chocolates, and coffee across the places we dine, I am reminded again why I love this woman so much. Her endless curiosity and questions model how I want to live at age 71. Her willingness to try the language, develop a Spanish accent for the eight words she knows, and be game for any activity are reminders to me that happiness is an attitude and a chosen path. Her unconditional commitment and patience with me is a gift that gives more and more everyday. My mother, my first friend in this world. Happy Thanksgiving, Mom.