Return to Guambia

Al Warhaftig

This a companion piece to “Return to Silvia” also in this issue.

My recent return to Guambia was emotional and overwhelming. In my career as an anthropologist I have been involved with many peoples struggling to maintain their traditions and the integrity of their communities, but I have never witnessed a success like this! The tendency to think of the people they work among as “my people” may be an anthropologist’s pathology, but all I can say is I am enormously proud of the Guambianos and kept thinking “if only it had been like this when I was there” (but then there would have been little need for my presence).

In contrast to their virtual monolingualism in 1962, Guambianos are now fluently bilingual—not just fluent but eloquent and strikingly thoughtful. An incident that sticks in my mind came about as we drove up a dirt road built by minga. Our Guambiano companion remarked that the cabildo had considered paving the road, but ultimately decided that this would only cause people to drive faster and increase accidents and deaths.

Life is not all easy by any means. The Guambianos have to contend with an ever-growing population on a limited land base, a national government which vacillates in its tolerance of indigenous autonomy, the presence of armed revolutionary forces, and the erosive consequences of globalization, but it is apparent that the Guambianos have become skilled negotiators on their own behalf.

Problems there will be, but the people we talked to were uniformly confident of their ability to confront them.