Worldschooling in Guatemala: Why Color Still Matters
Concrete is gray.
That is one of the first things you notice when you arrive in Guatemala. Cinderblock is everywhere. Houses go up in concrete blocks, walls are built in concrete blocks, retaining walls are concrete blocks, and plenty of buildings seem to spend years in the strange unfinished state where you can still see exactly what they are made of. If you arrived by plane, drove out of Guatemala City and headed toward the rural communities around Lake Atitlán, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a country with a serious commitment to gray.
Then you notice where people have painted.
Rooms are turquoise, doorways bright blue, orange or lime green. A house gets painted yellow, pink, or some color that seems to have been chosen simply because the person who lives there likes it. The concrete is practical, but once the practical part is finished, there is still room for somebody to make the place their own.
That difference has become increasingly noticeable to me after five years of living here.
North America has become very good at neutral.
Gray, white, black, beige, and the increasingly sophisticated combination of all four that requires its own vocabulary. Greige. Apparently, gray and beige have now been combined into a single color because even our neutrals are becoming more efficient.
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We have built full subdivisions in which every house looks like it was selected from the same page of a catalogue, and we have become so accustomed to the aesthetic that a bright purple wall can feel rebellious. The houses can look beautiful and clean it, but they also look remarkably prepared for somebody else to buy them.
There are perfectly reasonable explanations for this. Neutral houses are easier to sell. Neutral furniture is easier to photograph, and a neutral kitchen is less likely to offend somebody’s taste when they come through an open house with a mortgage broker and a phone full of saved minimalist Pinterest photos. If you are building something as an investment, it makes sense to think about what somebody else might want someday.
But there is a subtle difference between building a place to sell and building a place to live.
Here, you see that difference everywhere.
A family builds a concrete house because concrete is practical, and then they paint it the color they like because they are not particularly interested in whether some future buyer will think the shade is tasteful. They are living there. They are raising their children there. They might be there for decades. Purple and pink cease to be liabilities.
There is a kind of permanence in that, and permanence gives people permission to express themselves.
You see it in the clothing, too. Sometimes you will see a woman walking down the street wearing a beautifully woven skirt with a blouse that, to a North American eye trained on the careful coordination of neutral tones, seems to be having a disagreement with the skirt. Patterns beside patterns. Colors that we would have been told don’t go together. Embroidery, stripes, bright reds, blues, purples and greens all occupying the same general area.
At first glance, some of it can look almost ridiculous.
Then you start to wonder whether the ridiculous ones are actually us.
Imagine how we must look to somebody who grew up surrounded by this much color. Black pants, white shirt, gray house, gray car, gray office, white kitchen, beige sofa, black metal fixtures. We must look like walking Lego people who ran out of colors.
The more time you spend here, the less strange the colors become and the more strange the absence of them begins to feel.
That is especially interesting when you consider what those colors can represent. Maya textiles are not simply bright pieces of fabric designed to make an outfit more interesting. The traditions of weaving, clothing and pattern vary between communities, and clothing can carry information about identity, place and belonging. A person who has grown up around those traditions sees things in a textile that a tourist can easily miss.
The same is true of language.
Guatemala is home to 22 recognized Maya languages, along with Garífuna and Xinka, and in many communities Indigenous languages continue to be spoken alongside Spanish. A person can grow up speaking a Maya language with their family, Spanish in wider Guatemalan society, and perhaps English with foreigners who come to visit.
That is a remarkable amount of cultural and linguistic territory for one human being to carry around in their head.
And yet it is not unusual for a tourist to speak English to somebody who does not understand it and walk away thinking that the person must not be educated.
It is an almost perfect example of how easily we confuse unfamiliarity with deficiency.
The person who doesn’t speak English may be operating comfortably in two or three linguistic worlds. The tourist simply happens to have arrived in the one where their own language isn’t useful.
Living here has made me much more aware of how often we mistake our own cultural assumptions for universal rules.
We do it with language, and we do it with clothing, and we do it with houses.
We do it with children, too.
Give a child the freedom to choose their own clothes and most of them have very little interest in the principles of neutral design. They will put on the bright red shirt, the pants with dinosaurs, the sparkly shoes and whatever ridiculous hat has somehow survived in the back of the closet, and if you let them continue, they will probably add something else that you had completely forgotten existed.
Children don’t begin by worrying about whether everything coordinates. They begin with, “I like this.”
Somewhere along the way, adults introduce the other questions. Does it match? Is it appropriate? What will people think? Is that too loud? Is that something you will still like next year?
There are good reasons to teach children social awareness and consideration for other people. I am not suggesting we send them into the world wearing a superhero cape and Crocs to every wedding they attend.
Traditional clothing of San Pedro, La Laguna, Guatemala.
But there is a difference between teaching a child how to live among other people and teaching them that their natural impulse to express themselves is something they should gradually grow out of.
We underestimate how much of childhood happens through the environment adults create around children.
That is part of what makes the current movement toward neutral everything so interesting to me. It is not simply an interior design trend. It reflects something larger about what we value.
Even our corporations have been moving in the same direction. In fact, it’s them setting the trends, and we accept them with open hands!
Think about the fast-food restaurants many of us grew up with. They used to be almost aggressively recognizable. McDonald’s red and yellow was practically part of the landscape. You could spot the golden arches from the highway and know exactly what you were looking at before you could read the sign.
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Many of those restaurants have since been redesigned with darker facades, muted colors, wood, gray, black and minimalist interiors. There are perfectly sensible business reasons for that evolution, and I am not suggesting that McDonald’s has secretly declared war on childhood color. (Or am I?) The visual shift is real, and it is part of a much broader movement in which companies that once relied on loud, unmistakable colors have gradually adopted the same restrained aesthetic that has taken over our houses and offices.
There is something funny about this when you step back far enough.
We have become so good at standardizing everything that we can travel halfway around the world and find the same visual language waiting for us.
A beautiful place gets discovered, tourism grows, investment follows, and before long there is a shopping center where there used to be something else, a chain restaurant where somebody once sold food from their own kitchen, a familiar coffee shop, a familiar fast-food sign, a familiar supermarket and a parking lot that could just as easily be in Texas or Toronto.
Taco Bell. Wendy’s. Walmart. The same signs, the same parking lots, the same fast food, the same polished bathrooms, the same coffee cups, the same chain stores.
There is something parasitic about the larger pattern when the machinery of multinational tourism discovers a place precisely because it is different and then gradually begins replacing that difference with the same collection of things tourists already know.
We fly across the world to experience another culture and then become delighted when we find the same hamburger, the same shopping mall and the same coffee cup we could have bought at home.
The irony is almost too obvious.
Gaspar of Local San Juan Tzutuj Qajom Band in traditional dress.
The thing we traveled to find is often the first thing we start replacing.
And this is where I think the conversation about worldschooling becomes much more interesting than simply talking about taking children out of school and traveling.
We have spent a lot of time talking about the benefits of getting children away from screens, giving them more community, letting them explore, teaching them another language and exposing them to different cultures. All of those things are worthwhile, but there is another benefit that is harder to put into a brochure.
Children get to see other ways of being human.
They see people who have not necessarily organized their entire lives around the same assumptions about efficiency, appearance and financial return. They see someone spending hours making a textile because the pattern matters. They see somebody paint their house a color because they like it. They hear a Maya language being spoken between people who don’t need to explain why they are still speaking it. They see clothes that don’t match according to the rules they have absorbed at home, and they begin to understand that the rules were never universal in the first place.
They see people dancing.
Not performing for tourists. Not necessarily creating content. Not checking whether the photograph is going to look good on Facebook. Just dancing because there is music and people are happy and dancing is something people do.
There is a looseness to that which I think children recognize immediately.
It is not perfection. Guatemala has plenty of poverty, inequality, political problems, discrimination and very real hardship. Living here has never made me romanticize those things, and anyone who does is probably seeing Guatemala from a hotel room.
But the fact that a place has problems does not mean it has nothing to teach us.
There is something worth learning from a culture that has managed to carry its languages, clothing, traditions, music and visual identity through generations of enormous change. There is something worth learning from people who still make beautiful things even when the beautiful thing isn’t necessarily the most efficient thing to make.
There is something worth protecting in a world that is becoming increasingly good at making everything look the same.
And THAT is one of the reasons rural Guatemala has become such an interesting destination for worldschooling families. They aren’t necessarily coming here because they believe Guatemala has figured out the perfect way to raise children. They aren’t coming because North America is some terrible place that needs to be escaped.
Many families come because they want their children to experience something different while it is still different.
They want their kids to hear another language spoken around the dinner table. They want them to see how people live when the things they make still carry the marks of the people who made them. They want them to understand that a house doesn’t have to be beige to be beautiful and that a shirt doesn’t have to match the pants to be worth wearing.
Most importantly, they want their children to grow up understanding that there is no single correct way for a life to look.
That is a lesson we should not underestimate.
The world is getting very good at telling us what things should look like.
Our houses should look a certain way. Our clothes should look a certain way. Our businesses should look a certain way. Our photographs should look a certain way. Our children’s bedrooms should look a certain way.
Everything can be optimized, standardized, photographed, packaged and sold.
There is nothing wrong with beautiful design. But who have we allowed to define beauty? There IS a fundamental problem when every decision is made with efficiency and dollars as the bottom line.
On the flip side, there is something so refreshing about walking through a village where a person has decided that their house will be bright blue because they like bright blue.
There is something beautiful about a shirt that doesn’t match.
There is something beautiful about a language that survived because people kept speaking it.
There is something beautiful about a child who chooses the loudest, strangest combination of clothes in the house and walks outside completely unaware that anyone might think they look ridiculous.
We don’t need to teach children to tone all of that down quite so quickly.
Guatemala tells me these kids are on to something!
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After all, the world they were born into has plenty of gray already. They might as well add a little color.
Owen Dargatz
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