Team Guate 2011 in La Antigua, Guatemala

This is the dude who makes photocopies of your important documents at one of the many Aduanas (customs offices) in Mexico. Like all good bureaucratic agencies in Central America, they require copies of everything, and this guy is basically the on-site Kinko’s. Anyway, he’s obviously enjoyed a bit of downtime to be able to build some terrific little model cars, trucks and campers. Some even double as jewelry boxes. Here’s a detail of one of his works-in-progress:

Miss Newmaya strikes a rare pose at Venice Beach.

We started our drive from Oakland to Guatemala today, first stop: Venice Beach. Tomorrow we go to Phoenix and then we cross the border at Nogales over the weekend. We’ll be posting up photos, words and videos every day – stay tuned!

You always think you’ve made it past certain places in your life that like points on a grid, create lines deep inside you etched in skin, sweat and memory. Your being winds around the labyrinthian turns that you took for straight lines, endless and at times wide stretches of possibility that in fact could explain how curiousity killed the cat, simply by inviting him in towards his disbelief. And so I think about the imminent departures, the living out of a car, old childhood drawings locked up in basement storages deep under kitchen utensils, favorite books sold out of garages, family photos wrapped in blankets; I think of my wedding dress shrink wrapped for the next three years, frozen in time, grandpa’s gold watch unwound. In unburying I bury again, the journal from my childhood moving from town to town, the daughter of an immigrant, of a coyote, finding crevices to pour herself into, shadow puppet freedom. But that was then and yet it is now, now by choice, re-creating it with the pompousness of ostrich feathers at full bloom. Not I, this time. I find myself not alone in this recasting, more troubling in a way for the responsibility;  I step into that terrain with husband in tow, to test the lines, like a spider’s silk fibers suspended above the earth. “Hay un precio para todo,” mi mama reminds me. There is a price for everything. “Everything?” I’d ask. “Sí, para todo.”