grandmothers’ recipe books.” Dinner concludes with dulce
de ayote — pumpkin boiled in spices and sugar. “I wanted
you to try this,” says Rebeca. “In the north, they’ll eat it
this week to celebrate Day of the Dead.”
In Guatemala, the iconography of this festival is
different to that celebrated in Mexico — there are no
grinning skeletons here. Rather, festivities are distinct
and regional: in the Highlands village of Todos Santos,
men engage in a day-long, death-defying drunken horse
race back and forth along a short dirt track; and outside
Antigua, in the communities of Sumpango and Santiago
Sacatepéquez, locals spend all year building towering
paper-and-bamboo kites that are judged on 1 November,
All Saints’ Day. “The tradition for kite building started
because there were bad spirits here,” Raphael tells me as
we join the hoards moving towards the main cemetery of
Santiago Sacatepéquez. “For us, when you fly a kite you
release the spirit of the dead — you communicate with
your ancestors.”
The Giant Kite Festival is in full effect; between the
tombs, families are enjoying picnics, serenaded by folk
bands, and parents are teaching children to fly little
hexagonal kites. The air is full of fluttering shapes and
streamers. Along the perimeter of the cemetery are the
show-stoppers — kites so tall they’ve been propped up
with house-height bamboo struts and moored to the earth
by thick ropes. In the rising wind, they strain against
these shackles like caged animals. “They’re too large to
fly,” Rambo explains. “The medium ones, they’ll try to
get them airborne later. But with the giant kites, it’s more
about the message they’re conveying.” In recent years,
the delicate collages pasted across the kites have spoken
of deforestation, indigenous rights and the scourge of
domestic violence. This festival honouring the dead has
become tangled up in issues of the living; it looks to the
future as much as the past.
Raphael climbs a mausoleum, paper kite clutched in
hand. There’s a boyish grin on his face as he throws it
upwards and unspools the line. The kite doggedly rises
through the aerial network of strings until it’s a speck
in the sky. The views from up there must be incredible:
a mass of volcanoes and virgin forests stretching to the
ocean. “We’ll let it take our messages to heaven,” he says,
handing me the line to release. It sags and pools for a
moment, then whips into the air. We watch it go.
Our kite — along with our missives to the beyond — is
now at the mercy of the elements.
RIGHT: Guatemala’s Giant Kite Festival, celebrated
here in Sumpango, is a jubiliant and political affair
— the kites often depict Maya symbols and indigenous
rights messages
80 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel
GUATEMALA