356 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
Older people in Almolonga remember well the building of the Pan-American highway by
Ubico in the 1930s, since they were forced to work on its construction. Mandatory work in the plan-
tations (abolished in 1934) was replaced by a Vagrancy Law, which dictated that landless peasants
had to work 100 days a year in the plantations. By then, Almolonga peasants were once again ex-
perimenting with vegetables, probably incorporating many new kinds with those that might have
been grown in the past.
The earliest reports available regarding life in Almolonga come from Fuentes y Guzmán
(1969), who at the end of the seventeenth century described the people as very industrious and
dedicated to the production of grains, domestic fowls, and vegetables. In 1763, Almolongueños
were reported to be trading bread, pigs, and cacao in the Pacific Coast region. Around the same
time, they were producing corn, wheat, wool, and beans. By the end of the eighteenth century,
Almolongueños were trading pork, wood, and wild herbs, and the chronicles state that they were
also growing vegetables. The reports of their growing vegetables already in the seventeenth
century are particularly interesting, since people today have no memory of their great-
grandparents producing such crops, and our sources do not specify which vegetables they did
indeed cultivate. Almolongueños now say that the production of vegetables is a new activity that
developed within the last fifty years.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the main activities in Almolonga were milpa agri-
culture, growing and selling flowers, and the sale of medicinal wild plants on the coast. People re-
member that by 1925, the main activity was growing alfalfa and oats for the animals that grazed on
their lands. People from Cobán and Cabricán would bring their animals on their way to the coast.
Almolongueños say that they discovered ”by accident”—some people through revealing
dreams, one person from onions that spontaneously sprouted in someone’s kitchen—that veg-
etables would grow very well on their land. They brought seeds from Sololá (Guatemala), El Sal-
vador, and Oaxaca, Mexico. Today, 36 percent of the total production of carrots in the country is
produced in Almolonga, 42 percent of the beets, 89 percent of the cabbage, and 29 percent of
the onions. They have no permanent crops of significance and prefer growing vegetables to al-
falfa, because the ”idea of alfalfa was not ours” but came from mestizo landowners.”
Almolongueños do not go to work for wages in the plantations, and they proudly emphasize
that they themselves hire people from other highland towns to work for them (the workers come
from such towns as Nahualá and towns in the Sololá department). The Almologueños suggest
that they pay salaries that are higher than what others pay. Unlike many of their neighbors in the
region, Almolongueños have changed productive activities and techniques at least twice in less
than 100 years, thus capturing an important segment of the national and international markets.
The use of chemical fertilizers since the late 1960s, generalized throughout western
Guatemala, was readily adopted by Almolongueños. It increased yields, but to the point of abuse
and apparent detriment of their township’s environmental health. They developed new and heav-
ily specialized cash production, and new technology, sharing the monopoly over vegetables with
only the peoples of the Lake Atitlán area. The Almolongueños were responding to the limited de-
mand in Guatemala by developing new markets, and addressing production to the more solvent
mestizo market, since Indians rarely consume the vegetables they produce.
The Almolongueños explain their economic success as a result of their own efforts. Their peo-
ple work hard, from 4:00 or 5:00 A.M. to 6:00 or 7:00 P.M. Many are already irrigating their fields at
5:00 A.M., whereas in other places, as they say, the people do not even water or spray with fertil-
izers. People from neighboring villages admit that Almolongueños work hard, but many suggest
that Almolongueños are rich because they obtain money from supernatural sources. Almo-
longueños also give credit for their success to the good weather conditions in the township.
In addition, many Almolongueños attribute their successes to the impact of evangelization,
suggesting that it is because of their religion that they are able to dedicate themselves more to
work than to vices, such as drinking and womanizing.(continued)