I grew up in Guatemala City. However, I didn’t live in the same house my whole life. We moved around quite a bit as a family. We didn’t own the properties we lived in. We rented each house. The longest we lived in one house was just under eight years. I had just turned seven when we moved to Zona 8, and I was about to turn fifteen when we moved out.
The house was located in a more or less dangerous area of town. We were one block away from one of the main arteries of the city. It was was also about four blocks from the biggest market of the city, La Terminal. There were gangs and pickpocketing crews that would gather not too far from our house. I remember knowing that my siblings and I were not supposed to go beyond a certain street on our own.
The neighborhood was gritty. The concrete facades of the houses were crumbling. It was an old barrio. Some of houses were at least fifty to sixty-years-old and built with adobe bricks. The streets had potholes, and there was a little pack of stray dogs that would hang out right outside our house.
On one occasion, I remember coming out from buying some tortillas from the corner store, and I saw a group of young men chasing a teenage boy. They were yelling words I couldn’t understand. They were just far enough for me to not be able to hear with clarity. I stood there, on the street, seeing what was happening while holding piping hot tortillas inside a small kitchen towel. One of the young men involved in the incident suddenly stopped, pulled a gun out of his pocket, and opened fire in the middle of the street. It was all very quiet after the gun shots. I don’t know if he killed or wounded somebody. I couldn’t see around the corner towards where he was aiming his gun. Once everything was calm, I walked the remaining fifteen steps to the front door of my house.
My parents did a good job in keeping us safe during that season of life. They sheltered us as much as they could from the violence of our city. They couldn’t protect us from everything, though. My sister got mugged a few times coming back from school. I was chased a couple of times by thieves walking home from the bus stop. We had a few break ins while we were asleep at night. We even had a total stranger sleeping in the laundry room for who knows how long before my mother found him. He was comfortably tucked in under several blankets in the linen’s closet, just outside the door to the back patio.
My parents also made sure that we knew that the violence surrounding us was the reality for the vast majority of people in our city. In a way, my parents mapped the city with us and taught us not only where not to go. They also taught us a geography of suffering. They allowed us to see, experience, and serve along their side in the margins of our city. As a pastor, my father visited more regularly the most vulnerable families of his congregations. My mother, who was a theology scholar, made sure that the kids from our street had outlets to have fun during our school breaks. She ran VBS type of activities out of our garage for several weeks every year. We were there serving our neighbors together, loving the most vulnerable.
Now that I look in retrospect, I notice that my parents did not serve with a savior complex. I think that they knew deep down that we were also a vulnerable family. We did not have medical insurance, we lived paycheck to paycheck, and we experienced violence and disffunction in our home. We walked the razor’s edge between being low-income and loosing everything. But even with all of their imperfections and trauma, my parents planted the seeds that would later flourish in me as class consciousness, loving and serving with people living in poverty, and believing that God reveals Godself in the face of the most vulnerable in our communities.
Remembering this things is making think about how we see our city, how we experience our communities, and how we serve our neighbors. This has inspired me to think and write another short series of essays, in which I will engage the mapping of our cities. We will map the hurt, hope, and heart of our communities. In doing so, I will connect stories, sociology, and theology in a way that will make each essay an interdisciplinary exercise. That is to say that I will bring ideas form different contexts and weave them together in each piece. At the end of each essay, I will leave a couple of questions so we can reflect together in a way that I hope will foster communal action, reflection, and discernment. Hopefully, that will liberate us to love our city and seek its peace.
Reflection Questions
What do you love the most about your city?
What do you dislike about your city?
Where do you see God in your city?
It can be difficult to see the positive in our upbringings--but you did a beautiful job finding God's leading through your parents. Thank you for sharing this.
Answers to Reflection Questions:
What do you love the most about your city?
I love the rise in diversity and seeing different people experience the same struggle in different languages and contexts and responding relatively the same even though they don't know it.
What do you dislike about your city?
It stinks of religion--it's not a loud obnoxious smell but a quiet undertone that makes you wrinkle your nose ever so much and keeps you quiet; a stale smell that if anyone raises a question towards it nobody else claims to smell it.
Where do you see God in your city?
I see God in the bodies of my neighbours and the shoppers and friends. In the offer to allow someone to skip a que, or offering up their spare change to the elderly woman who is 6p short for her shop. I see God in quiet catch-up conversations and in people witnessing one another's humanity.
Thank you for responding to the questions. I love seeing the different ways in which you see your city. Thanks for sharing.