Typical Guatemalan?

A boutique in Panajachel. Notice the indigenous woman & what she is wearing

Guatemala is not known for their fashion. Guatemala is not known for it's many professional, successful, & talented citizens. Guatemala is not known for luxury or class. 

But it should be. 

Sadly, when one thinks of Guatemala, the most common thing to come to mind is: violence. Drug traffickers. Coffee. Poverty. Mayans. 

I'm embarrassed to admit that when I thought of Guatemala, I too had similar perceptions as above. The civil war was gruesome yet many Americans don't even know that the civil war was created by AMERICA! However, moving here has opened my eyes to so many things I never knew! For one, there are MANY successful Guatemalans! There are MANY professionals! Lawyers are a dime a dozen. I've met with congressmen & business owners (of which there are THOUSANDS). Even the Indigenous people are business owners and are highly skilled in weaving textiles, in leather, in carpentry, in jade making, in agriculture: nuts, coffee, chocolate, spices, produce, & mining. If you come to Guatemala you will also see how many talented artists there are selling their paintings.

Did you know that the inventor of the "Captcha" is Guatemalan? 

Luis von Ahn, 28, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Von Ahn, who was born in Guatemala, helped develop CAPTCHA, a test used on many commercial Web sites to determine whether the user is human. He also devised Google Image Labeler, a game in which two Internet users tag images in real time and are rewarded for using the same tag. A little over a month ago, von Ahn gave a very entertaining talk on the Google campus. In that talk, he mentioned that if you could just hook his game up to Google images, and get 5,000 simultaneous players, every image in Google's index would be labeled in two months. 

There are many notable Guatemalans. If you're interested, check out a list Here.

See those ladies? Do they look 'Guatemalan?' Or did you expect all Guatemalans to look like this:

Did you know Guatemalans also compete in beauty pageants? 

The indigenous make up about 70% of the Guatemalan population. But you will also see blonde hair, blue eyed Guatemalans because many of them have Spanish & Italian roots, not Indigenous. Don't get me wrong, yes there is still a lot of poverty, mostly among the indigenous communities. There is a problem with having clean, running water. And even then Guatemalans are attempting to help themselves. A Guatemalan company called Ecofiltro has aided much of Guatemala with purifying water. They have helped Haiti after the earthquake and World Vision has used them in their humanitarian efforts.

Now onto souvenir shopping, which is my whole point. Of course we all want to buy something colorful made by the indigenous. But something struck me one day when someone was purse shopping and said "I want to buy something that looks Guatemalan." If it isn't colorful enough does it not make it Guatemalan? If it looks too much like something you would buy in the states, is it not Guatemalan?

So here's a little project I'm starting. I'm going to take photographs of things that are Guatemalan but do not have a typical, indigenous look. My goal is for people to not be afraid to buy classier looking artifacts for them to take back home. When they get complimented on a nice purse, belt, or scarf I would hope they would say "I got it in Guatemala!"