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Between the Volcanoes
| Article
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12064 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
5,362 Words |
| Author
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Billie R. DeWalt
Billie R. DeWalt is chairman of the Department of
Anthropology, professor of anthropology and sociology, and in
the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of
Kentucky. He has written extensively on agricultural change
and peasant communities in Mexico, Honduras, and Costa Rica.
In addition to his teaching and administrative duties, he is
also one of the general editors for a series, Food Systems and
Agrarian Change, published by Cornell University Press. Names
of people in the article are pseudonyms. |
In 1981 when I first began research in the tiny Central American nation of Honduras, I made inquiries in the capital city, Tegucigalpa, about the region of the south coast. A common response was that few people ever went there because "going to the south of Honduras is practice for going to hell." While such a remark may be partially attributed to regional chauvinism among people who live in the relatively comfortable central highlands, I soon discovered that the climate itself merited the analogy to hell. Parched by intense tropical sun and rarely cooled by ocean breezes from the Pacific, temperatures of about 40 degrees Centigrade (1040 F) are common in March and April; minimum temperatures are seldom lower than 160 (600 F) at night, even in the coolest months of December and January.
The current climate is a modern-day reminder of longer-term geological processes that have affected the region. The southern coast of Honduras is a sixty-mile-wide area winding around the Gulf of Fonseca and pinched between Nicaragua and El Salvador. The gulf and the narrow strip of lowlands that surround it were formed by a major tectonic fault traversing Honduras from north to south. The major geological feature of the south, however, is the volcanic highlands, a range of hills formed by lava from eruptions some 12 million years ago. Although active volcanoes in El Salvador and Nicaragua can be seen from high points in southern Honduras, the last volcanic eruption there occurred in the nineteenth century. The inactive volcanic mountains rarely reach altitudes of 1,400 meters, but they are extremely steep and have numerous isolated narrow valleys. Many small rivers and seasonal streams feed the four major rivers that drain into the gulf.
Between these volcanoes live a hardy group of small farmers who eke out their living cultivating the steep hillsides, still pockmarked here and there by outcroppings of lava. Visiting one of these villages gives the sense of arriving in a place where time has stood still--where life goes on much as it has for centuries. Houses are made of local materials like adobe or wattle and daub and are roofed with thatch or tiles. Few villages have electricity or piped water; most can be reached only on horseback or on dirt roads that are frequently impassable in the rainy season. The primary tools used by the farmers are a short machete with a crescent-shaped blade (machete de taco) and a long slender digging stick tipped with a metal point. The former is used or the bulk of work in the fields--cutting down trees and weeding while the digging stick is used to punch holes in the earth, into which a few seeds are dropped during planting. The evident simplicity of tools is matched by the people,
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