Growing Up Guatemalan

Growing Up Guatemalan: A Memoir is an intimate account of childhood and youth shaped by the streets, neighborhoods, family tensions, and political upheavals of Guatemala City in the second half of the twentieth century. From modest homes and crowded tenements to smoky cantinas, Catholic rituals, public washing tanks, marimba music, and the first television sets that brought distant worlds into local living rooms, the memoir reconstructs a social world that has largely disappeared.

Set against the aftermath of Guatemala's democratic hopes and the long shadow of military authoritarianism, the book traces how ordinary life unfolded amid fear, inequality, migration, and resilience. It is the story of one family - their struggles, aspirations, silences, and contradictions - but also of a city and a country where political violence and everyday tenderness often coexisted. Through neighborhood friendships, folklore, religious devotion, humor, family conflict, and eventual exile, identity and social consciousness slowly take shape.

More than personal recollection, Growing Up Guatemalan preserves family and collective memory while exploring how historical forces are lived before they are understood: in homes, streets, schools, and relationships. At once deeply human and political, the memoir connects the textures of everyday life to larger questions of power, belonging, and justice.

Although the story closes with departure and exile - both physical and symbolic - it leaves open the possibility that memory itself can resist erasure and sustain the hope of another future.

This world existed. I came from it.