Guatemalczechs
Vaclav and Rosario, 1979.
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If I ever have a kid, I’m not really sure I’ll name them Vaclav. I only feel an obligation to do so because, as I have been told repeatedly, it’s "one-of-a-kind" and belongs to a centuries-old family tradition. But I’m a bit put off by the idea of stripping someone of their identity, you know? To an extent, naming customs seem outdated. But as the last surviving male descendant in my family, I’ve accepted my name more as a connection to its source than for the sake of keeping with tradition—having a daughter would definitely make things easier.
In any case, I’m going to have to make future Vaclav a step-by-step guide for when strangers ask him about the origin of such an odd name. At the same time, it can function as an intergenerational oral history handed down to us by those in my family who have already passed.
Regardless of language or location, questions about my name have always been asked with suspicion, as if to cast doubt on the truthfulness of the answer before I can even respond. It has gotten to the point that I answer questions about my name almost without thinking and with attitude.
My name is Vaclav. It means "more glory" in ancient Bohemian.
"And where are you from?" Well, from here, from Guatemala. "But your name isn’t from here…or is it?" No, it’s not, but I am. Here’s the thing: I’m the fourth generation of Czechoslovak immigrants. "Do you speak the language?" No, I don’t speak Czech. "And have you been there?" Yes, a few times. I think I have family there, although I'm not completely sure. "And would you like to return?" I don't want to go back to the Czech Republic because I’ve never lived in that country. In any case, I’d want to return to Guatemala City, because that’s where I’m from.
I’m going to have to tell my kids that the questions they get asked—despite being a nuisance because of their frequency—are warranted: asking about the origin of someone’s name is one of the most common ways of knowing where someone is from. Not that people should not assume your ancestry or origin. There may be times when those who assume who you don’t belong somewhere will ask questions with a suspicious tone, revealing an implicit bias to categorize you as foreign, as Other. People like to assume what a Guatemalan looks like or what names they should have; the same goes for Czechs.
The guide will have a set order First, I’ll tell my children that I grew up in my grandfather's house, from whom I inherited the name. Just as he had from his father, three generations in a row. Finally, I’ll tell them about the journey my great-grandparents took to get here—a posthumous tribute to family roots, as strange as they are innate. I’ll insist on the fact that their ancestors may be from somewhere far away and unknown, but their story goes much deeper.
Wars and Revolutions
No child of immigrants has a better story than their ancestors. My great-grandfather Vaclav Masek Tumova’s transatlantic journey from Europe to the Americas is a perfect example. His descendants, including my grandfather, would tell the story of how Vaclav sailed aimlessly during the mid-1910s to avoid the trenches.
World War I was raging and Czechoslovakia was trapped within the imperial borders of Austria-Hungary. Reneé, his only surviving daughter, told me that her father fled from a bucolic landscape in the Bohemian region, formerly known as Czechoslovakia and today, as the Czech Republic. He must have been a teenager, Reneé told me, when he boarded an English ship that brought him to Mexico, which was ironic given that the country that was in the midst of a revolution.
The boy who fled one war, only to end up in another.
Ticket from Europe to Mexico.
Upon docking in Veracruz, my great-grandfather was forced to enlist in the armed forces of the then-government. Back then, the Mexican government had engaged in a series of clashes with General José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, better known as Pancho Villa, one of the last true caudillos, whose actions persist in the Mexican imaginary as a symbol of resistance and social justice. Villa and his followers seized land from large landowners, which was redistributed among campesinos and soldiers. He seized trains and, like other revolutionary generals, printed fiat money to finance his cause.
Villa drew the ire of the United States when he decided to retaliate against the Woodrow Wilson administration for recognizing Venustiano Carranza as President of Mexico. Among his most infamous exploits is the 1916 attack on Columbus, New Mexico. This provocation led U.S. General John J. Pershing on a exhausting mission to capture Villa. For 11 months, Gen. Pershing carried out a punitive expedition in which 10,000 soldiers traveled across the deserts of the state of Chihuahua in search of the revolutionary leader. Pershing managed to disperse the Mexican forces that had attacked Columbus, but Villa disappeared into the vast Mexican landscape, outwitting his pursuers. As the corrido “Mi General Pancho Villa” by writer Miguel Ángel Menéndez goes:
En Columbus quema y pilla
Pershing lo viene a buscar
el Tigre se vuelve ardilla
y no lo puede encontrar...
Mi general Pancho Villa, le venimos a cantar.
My great-grandfather was probably unaware of the caliber of the person he was dealing with when, as a soldier in the national army, he was captured in battle by el Centauro del Norte during the Revolution. What would a teenager from Europe know about Latin American revolutionaries, anyway?
There are two versions of what happened next. The first says that after the battle, the revolutionary forces having emerged victorious, Vaclav deftly hid under a bridge to keep safe. There, he waited until nightfall to sneak away from the battlefield. That’s how he made his way south, until he reached Guatemala.
The second version, despite ending in the same way, is a little more exciting and much less predictable.
As Villa’s men tallied the dead, Vaclav was captured by soldiers while hiding under a bridge. He was forced to enlist in the battalion that only moments ago had been trying to kill him. Villa is said to have interrogated my great-grandfather shortly after he joined his revolutionary ranks. He asked the blond, white-skinned young man what a güero like him could be doing on this side of the world. To which my great-grandfather frankly replied: escaping from the misery of the Great War.
But despite this seeming like a reasonable reply, Villa asked my great-grandfather if he had any useful skills in order to decide whether or not to send him to the firing squad. In the little Spanish he spoke, Vaclav told him that he was a tailor. The caudillo then requested that he make a suit so he could check the veracity of his answer. My grandfather complied.
Irrefutable proof of this encounter, his children say, can be seen in the following photograph by Agustín Víctor Casasola entitled “Villa sits in the Presidential Chair”, dated Dec. 6, 1914. Vaclav appears behind another great Mexican leader, Emiliano Zapata, with a hat on his lap. Vaclav stands out like a blonde blemish among the brown soldiers of the revolution. He can be identified thanks to the childish grin on his face and his closed eyes as if happy to just be alive.
General Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata with comrades at the National Palace in Mexico City. December 6, 1914.
His new comrades baptized him with the nom de guerre Fortunato Contreras, a fitting allusion to his lucky break. Thus, my great-grandfather joined Pancho Villa’s nomadic army.
I like to think my great-grandfather had conversations with Pancho Villa. What would a Mexican caudillo and a young Czechoslovakian have in common, besides being soldiers? Maybe they shared a fondness for tobacco and alcohol? I say this because the men in my family have unfortunately enjoyed overindulging in earthly vices with little to no self-control. Perhaps they exchanged views on the meditative solitude of the countryside and the rapid transformation of the modern industrial city? Well, that may already be a bit of an exaggeration, considering that my great-grandfather would have been under 18 when all this happened. And I doubt that my grandfather spoke any colloquial or conversational Spanish by then.
The skirmishes in Mexico continued. The Revolution officially ended in 1917, although the political violence lasted until 1924. Family oral tradition says that Vaclav deserted Villa's revolutionary forces to escape to Guatemala by land via Tenostique. He headed towards the town of Flores, in Petén, a remote province in the north of Guatemala whose allure for having been the birthplace of the Mayan civilization is only surpassed by its political and geographical isolation in the heart of a virgin rainforest.
The Guatemalczechs.
My great-grandfather began his life in Guatemala in a remote town, in the middle of a green ocean, without one peso in his pocket.
Upon arriving in Flores, Vaclav initially tried his luck as a tailor, a trade that would never prove lucrative. What kept him in the small town of Chaltunhá (known today as Lake Petén Itzá) was his general store, La Barata. It carried what any general store would: sugar, rice, lamp oil, jewelry, alcohol. By then, locals had already nicknamed him el Checo. Near La Barata, he built a two-story house out of wood with a zinc roof on the lakeshore.
He often visited the neighboring colony of British Honduras, known today as Belize, to pick up stock for La Barata. Among his most successful purchases was a coffee roaster. He stocked up on beans and the aroma that they gave off when they were ground attracted customers from neighboring towns that started to pop up across Petén.
After saving enough money, Vaclav set out to return to his native country with the goal of finding a Czech woman who would be daring enough to cross the Atlantic with him and settle in the middle of the rainforest. Before sailing to Czechoslovakia, he contacted his friends and relatives to inquire about the possibility of finding "a fellow countrywoman."
His relatives wrote back that there was an orphaned teenager, a girl with the last name Živnůstkova, living in the town of Chinieves with her aunts.
Her name was Helena, a young peasant woman unequipped to make a decision of such magnitude. An agreement with the family was made after el Checo offered her riches and abundance in the middle of the jungle once they were married. He offered Helena servants, fine silverware—anything and everything needed to convince someone to venture into the unknown without any guarantee of fortune or satisfaction.
The couple’s return from Europe was also by boat, a 30-day journey across the Atlantic. They passed through Cuba, where they were quarantined because of the 1918 Flu pandemic. An ever riskier leg of the journey awaited them in Belize, where they would begin their expedition by mule to Flores, Petén. They spent nights in makeshift shacks, slept in hammocks while tigers roared and monkeys howled, and endured the cold at night when they slept outdoors in the mountains. Helena did all of this while pregnant, on a diet of tortilla and beans.
After the transatlantic odyssey and the exhaustive journey through the dense Peten jungle, the newly-married couple was able to finally settle in their home amid the incessant and deep song with which doves and turtledoves court their partners. With a large garden that was suitable for raising geese, my great-grandparents started a family in Guatemala.
Anchor Babies
Vaclav and Helena's four children were born in Peten and constitute the original batch of Guatemalchecos. All were born in Flores and studied in local public schools. Jorge, the oldest, left for the United States at an early age. He completed an aviation course and became a pilot in the U.S. Air Force. His job was to carry cargo and personnel during the Korean War. He became part of a military cohort that NASA would train for its space program, but eventually, he would end up piloting commercial flights. He had three children with a Chicana from McAllen, Texas and his descendants now live in Dallas. Margarita, the second, would follow a path similar to Jorge's, although she would distance herself from the family, finding her place in New Orleans. There, Margarita would manage a small boarding house for visitors of the French Quarter, in addition to running an independent printing press. The third daughter, Reneé, would become a PanAmerican flight attendant. Inheriting the recessive genes that Pancho Villa referred to when he first saw Fortunato Contreras—fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes—Reneé, known as Panchita, would travel the world. Today, she lives in Guatemala City, a polyglot octogenarian who shared with me the photographs of her parents and siblings in Petén.
My grandfather Vaclav was born last. Elena, his mother, had suffered from malaria during her pregnancy. She treated the mosquito-borne infectious disease with quinine, which caused her son to be born at 14 pounds. It was a natural birth.
I know little of my grandfather’s childhood. What I do know is that at an early age he showed an interest in agriculture and nature. He was enrolled in the National School of Agriculture (ENCA), where he spent much of his adolescence and met several of his friends, who still remember him today.
At 16, he met Maritza, who would soon become pregnant with their first daughter. However, given that my abuelo had to travel for work, the relationship didn’t progress. He always had a close relationship with his daughter.
Given his academic background, he worked for several agrarian companies, one of which owned large wheat farms in the west. At one point, he was sent to supervise one of the harvests near Quetzaltenango, where he met my grandmother. My grandmother was two months away from getting married to another man, but she left everything for him.
My grandfather's life was marked by his heart attacks as much as by the birth of his daughters. The first one he suffered because a partner cheated him in a business deal. The second because a large corporation illegally confiscated a large swath of land from him. And the third, after working his entire life to regain the losses, because they stole time away from him. He survived all three attacks but was left weak, and finally, his lungs gave out when I was 6 years old.
My memories of him are sparse but vivid. I remember he shaved at dawn every day. The only bathroom in the house is shared by four people, so my grandfather always had the first turn. He usually left his mouthwash in the sink. On Sundays he made pancakes, spelling my name (also his name and that of his dad) on the skillet with the batter. I enjoyed going to bed on Saturdays, knowing that Sunday breakfast had a personal touch. He was a fan of refried beans and fried plantains; he would add hot sauce on everything. I do the same now.
I also remember that he liked to watch history documentaries at night in his gray fabric recliner, especially about the Second World War. He listened carefully to the narrators, who would use maps and audiovisual material from the era to explain the military strategy of the Allied offensives. His curiosity was contagious. My grandfather's remarks on the historical footage were concise. "Those Germans made a deadly mistake by invading Czechoslovakia," he said, alluding to the annexation of Sudetenland in March 1939. "My dad’s luck, for having left early." I didn’t understand anything, but I enjoyed his soliloquies without understanding the context of the words he spoke to the black and white images.
It was the macabre spectacle of war and my grandfather's reactions that kept me entertained before my bedtime as a child. I suppose that's why the raucous vans speeding down Calzada Roosevelt—and its myriad Mexican restaurants with live music open until dawn—were a suitable lullaby at night.
My grandfather Vaclav died after his third heart attack. He was 63 years old, relatively young. Family oral tradition says that he had smoked since the age of nine. He only stopped for my mother and grandmother when I became a noisy tenant in his house.
I remember one January morning when I tried to wake him up. That Monday I didn't hear his electric razor at dawn. I remember I shook him and he didn't wake up. I remember the mourning; my grandmother wore black for thirty days.
Masek Sanchez family. 1985.
The Same House As Always
Upon moving back to Guatemala City after meeting in Quetzaltenango, my grandparents found a place in Zone 7: a three-room house located at the end of a roundabout. The neighborhood is called Colonia Utatlán, whose etymology lies in the Nahuatl translation of Gumarcaaj, the name of the ancient capital of the Mayan K'iche' kingdom. Today, Gumarcaaj is an archaeological site that was declared a Pre-Hispanic National Monument in Guatemala. It is surrounded by ravines and sites that make its topography resemble that of a peninsula.
Utatlán is the vulgar hispanicization of the name of the historic city where Pedro de Alvarado arrived in 1524. Aided by the Tlaxcalans and the Mexicas, the Spanish conqueror burned the city and its inhabitants. After the massacre, Pedro de Alvarado would become governor of Guatemala. Holding the title of Captain-General, de Alvarado took control of the five provinces of that Spanish colonial entity, which covered Mesoamerican territory from Chiapas to Costa Rica. Despite being supposedly protected by its status as a National Monument, the historic Gumarcaaj National Park is now in a severe state of decay. It has repeatedly been looted by smugglers and the park’s surroundings are now used for agricultural that has depleted some of its mythic greenery. The final irony is that I have never been to Gumarcaaj; it’s not that popular of a archaeological site.
In contrast, Colonia Utatlán in Zone 7 is in one of the busiest commercial enclaves in Guatemala City. Surrounded by ice cream parlors, motels, acupuncture salons, tortillerías, evangelical churches, Catholic parishes, and the entire range of fast-food restaurants that exist, Zone 7 is vibrant and chaotic. It is an amalgam of the so-called “informal” economy that lines the sidewalks with street vendors. All this combined with the excessive visual contamination of billboards, and the carbon monoxide that emanates from the millions of vehicles that daily pass through Calzada Roosevelt, the busiest strip of asphalt in Central America.
Now, Colonia Utatlán in Zone 7 is the epicenter of the Korean community in Guatemala City, so the tortillerías share a parking lot with barbecues that offer soju and bibimbap.
I always found amusing the neutral, maybe even subtle negativity that connotes the street where my house was: 0 Calle “B”. A small house located at the bottom of a roundabout identified by a street without a number that, in addition, was considered secondary. The "B" for bueno, bonito, and barato, my grandparents, owners of the house where I grew up, used to say.
Masek Sanchez girls.
My three aunts and my mother were raised in the same house where I grew up. While students organized protests against fraudulent elections throughout Latin America, gringos landed on the Moon, the war in Vietnam raged under the auspices of JFK, Che in Cuba and Bolivia, and Africa slowly beginning to decolonize, my three aunts got married: two with medical doctors and one with a cardamom farmer. We are now 12 cousins, counting those from my grandfather's first marriage.
My mom was the only one who did not get married; a single mother with an only child. I was baptized with the name of her father, and probably his father's father (I'm sure my great-grandfather was also called Vaclav, although I can't confirm it with certainty). Technically, that would make me Vaclav Masek V, even though the Roman numeral seems antiquated to me.
During this time my grandfather established a sustainable poultry farm business, though the concept was not yet popular. He set up galleys which he filled with hens and supported the family with eggs. In addition, in his personal laboratory on the same farm, he produced vegetable-based concentrates and other edible grains, which he also sold to neighboring farms.
Each month, the embassy of the Czech Republic organized get-togethers where representatives of the few Czech families in Guatemala (six in total, as far as I know) met to watch videos promoting tourism in their homeland while drinking Jélinek and Becherovka. These were one of the few social gatherings where the family name was warmly received and not met with suspicion.
The Ones That Remain
Vaclav IV is Paul, my oldest cousin, and the oldest of the third generation. Paul was born during a curfew enacted by General Efraín Ríos Montt, the bloodthirsty military officer whose religious fanaticism was broadcast on national television every Sunday for seventeen months between 1982 and 1983. The spiral of violence in Guatemala reached unimaginable levels during his regime. Ríos Montt had come to power through a coup d'état by a military junta he led. During just the first eight months of his term, ten massacres were recorded each month.
Paul told me that his mother, who was also the oldest of the four sisters, had him when she was 18 years old. During delivery, my grandfather covered her mouth with his hand so that her screams would not alert the military police patrolling the street near the hospital. Vaclav is his middle name.
The third generation of my family thus began during the height of the armed conflict in Guatemala, the wounds of which have not healed. I still find it hard to believe that nothing happened to my family during these 36 years of civil war. The subject has always been taboo because it quickly becomes morbid. Suppression of civil rights, random arrests and extrajudicial executions, disappearances, kidnappings, torture. Ríos Montt died on April 1, 2018—the same day as my birthday—without having to face sentencing for his atrocious acts.
I was born on Good Friday. Guatemala is a fervently Catholic country, so the streets were deserted, shops were closed, and the hospital was empty. My incubator was the only one turned on in the maternity ward, the echo of my high-pitched cry serving as the hospital soundtrack. The war had already lost intensity, but it would be two more years before the country officially made peace.
In such uncertain times, where existential crises become part of our daily lives, it can be overindulgent to think about whether a name can have such relevance in someone's life. But in looking over the ups and downs of my ancestors and the memories that resurface, one’s name can refer to any number of things, such as the sacrifice parents make to satisfy the basic needs of their children; or a single referent within a certain context, such as the Czech diaspora in Guatemala. Vaclav is all that to me.
I wonder if there are stories that my family would rather not tell me for my own good. I wonder if my great-grandfather kept from us stories of his time as a soldier, hostage, nomad, tailor, husband, father, grandfather. In the end, our identity is nurtured in the same way from what we know and what we ignore about our ancestors. Which makes me think about which of my stories won’t be passed down to future Vaclav.
Vaclav Masek is a doctoral student in Sociology at USC. Living abroad for 7 years but always returns home to Guatemala.