Walking To LA Milpa: Living In Guatemala With Armies, Demons, Abrazos, And Death

Walking to LA Milpa: Living in Guatemala With Armies, Demons, Abrazos, and Death

From BooklistVillatoro's prologue vividly explains the meaning of the title. Translated as "the cornfield," la milpa also signifies a sacred, sustaining life source that is inextricably linked with the people who tend it. Latino American Villatoro and his wife lived in a Guatemalan village for a number of years and connected with la milpa: working with other Christian missioners, forming deep friendships, witnessing poverty, and encountering violent acts of terrorism that have unsettled Central America for so long. The stories told here reveal the essence of the couple's experiences during their years in Guatemala; and just as Villatoro's accounts touch the heart, they also inform in this intimate portrait of the hardships and the satisfactions of life in an isolated Guatemalan town. Alice JoyceA Latino American describes his two years working as a lay missionary in rural Guatemala, describing the impoverished town in which he and his wife lived, the corrupt government military, the guerrillas, the threat of disease, and the shocking situations that he encountered. Tour. IP.From Publishers WeeklyMilpa means cornfield, which is sacred to farmers of Central America who depend on corn for sustenance. The term is a symbol of the culture that Villatoro, a poet and novelist (A Fire in the Earth), wished to experience. In 1989, he and his wife left Alabama to live in Poptun, a Guatemalan village, as lay missionaries of the Maryknoll order. The author was not entirely an outsider: his mother, a San Salvadoran who had fled to the U.S., kept alive her Latin culture and Villatoro grew up in East Tennessee feeling close to it. Nevertheless, to the Poptun villagers he was a gringo. Here, in a series of vignettes, he conveys the character and ambience of the town and its people, whose lives are suffused with fear and violence. However, Villatoro does not discuss politics but focuses this sensitive memoir on the warmth and fortitude of the people.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalA milpa is a cornfield, and walking to it is to be invited into the culture of the "Men of Corn," the Maya Indians. From 1989 to 1991, Villatoro and his wife were lay missionaries in Poptun, a village in northern Guatemala, and this book recounts their experiences there. Although they felt welcome, like the natives they had to balance extreme fear with true compassion and understanding. Such irony is normal in a country where violence under a corrupt and ruthless regime is routine. The CIA's complicity and duplicity in the terror is now known, owing to two cases of which it was aware?the murder of an American restaurateur and torture by death squads of an American nun. The book misses its mark, however, for the uneven presentation makes the reader lose focus. For large libraries only.?Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., GainesvilleCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Kirkus ReviewsA harrowing memoir of life in the Central American killing fields. Born in Appalachia to a Salvadoran mother, novelist Villatoro grew up with stories of entire villages rounded up and slaughtered by government soldiers, and of brutal dictators who sent photographs of their victims as greeting cards with the caption Feliz Matanza--``happy massacre.'' Determined to see whether this world still existed and to explore his Latino heritage, Villatoro traveled to Guatemala as a member of the social-service organization Witness for Peace. He quickly set himself apart from those he calls ``missioners,'' settling into a tiny, isolated village and embracing the people's causes as his own, becoming increasingly critical of the right-wing government in faraway Guatemala City. Along the way he becomes something of an expert in bicycle repair (bicycles being the vehicle of choice in the mountainous countryside) and in coping with the endless grief that surrounds him: Children die of malnutrition, adults of government