CHAPTER 9 TRANSNATIONALISM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MESOAMERICA 355often demand the equal distribution of land and other resources among all chil-
dren, and the further diminishing access to land for each passing generation. Cou-
pled with population increases, this difficulty has resulted in the emergence of a
large sector of landless peasants. These peasants find themselves forced to leave their
towns, since they are unable to save enough money to buy or rent land. In most areas,
villagers have followed the sometimes-implicit rule of not selling land to outsiders.
In recent years, however, entrepreneurial peasants have decided to ignore this tra-
ditional rule in order to gain access to land at prices that they can afford. This is the
case of some villages in western Guatemala, such as San Pedro Almolonga (for an eco-
nomic description of this town, see Box 9.1).
Box 9.1 Agricultural Petty Commodity Production: A Case Study
of the K’iche’ Mayan Township of San Pedro Almolonga,
”The Central American Garden”Almolongueños can be seen selling vegetables in most markets of the central area of the mar-
keting system of western Guatemala (particularly, the surroundings of Quetzaltenango and To-
tonicapán). They are quite noticeable. The women wear very bright clothes and elegant
hairpieces. The men are said to dress better than others and to drive good trucks and jeeps. Lo-
cated five kilometers from Quezaltenango, on what in 1983 became a paved road, a sign at the
entrance of the town states: ”Welcome to Almolonga, The Central American Garden (La Huerta
de Centroamérica). At present, Almolongueños are successful traders; they sell vegetables in
Guatemala, Mexico, and throughout Central America. They have diversified markets and prod-
ucts, and have become more prosperous than many of their neighbors.
At the present time, many Guatemalan peasants suffer from poverty and malnutrition. In fact,
Almolongueños have little land: 86 percent of the plots are less than one manzana(about two
acres). Furthermore, as is the case in other villages, Guatemalan inheritance rules stipulate that
land be subdivided among a person’s children in equal parts, making the few available lots in-
sufficient for subsistence or commercial purposes. The situation in Almolonga is similar to that
of the rest of the region. According to the Agricultural Census of 1979, the region holds 40 per-
cent of the total amount of plots in the country, which in turn comprise only 19 percent of the total
amount of land. In addition, population has increased in the highlands as a whole, and in Almo-
longa it has quadrupled in the last 100 years.
In other communities, change and capitalization brought about, for the most part, proletar-
ianization. Almolongueños, however, chose to exploit the land by trying nontraditional crops and
specializing in trade, taking advantage of their closeness to the large market in Quezaltenango.
At present, there are no communal lands in Almolonga, and, with one exception, there is no mem-
ory of their existence in the past. On the contrary, many villagers denied it emphatically; Almo-
longueños, in their view, have always had private property, and the idea of sharing land seems
totally foreign to them. Only one old man mentioned in passing that the largest extension of fer-
tile land in the valley (approximately 9 acres) at one time might have belonged to the town, only
to become the potrero,or grazing field, owned by a mestizo family. The family was forced to sell
the land back to the Indians in very small plots of one or two cuerdas.Even after recovering this
land, Almolonga’s cultivable flat land is less than two square kilometers. To the scarcity of land, Al-
molongueños responded by purchasing land in Quezaltenango, Salcajá, San Cristóbal Totoni-
capán, and San Marcos. Almolongueños can pay prices that locals cannot, and old traditional
community models that prevented selling land to outsiders were overridden by the need for cash.
(continued)