The second best thing about Chichicastenango is its name, a long, Mayan
utterance whose suffix alone reveals its disassociation with the Castilians.
Thus is Central America, where the previous world bequeathed its greatest gifts
in the form of language. In El Salvador, it's the proliference of Petls and
Peques in the place names that reveal the presence of a people before the
Spanish, and in Nicaragua it's the Galpas and Tepes that evoke Mezoamerica's
children (in the latter case, the Nahuatls, whose influence on language extends
to hundreds of words in use today): in Guatemala it's the Nangos that
proliferate in place names like this one.
There's a market in the village of Chichicastenango that draws a crowd of
travelers from the four corners of the earth, and if you can get past the
throngs of foreigners, it's an awfully impressive event. By most accounts, it's
the first and greatest thing about this Guatemalan village. Handicrafts of all
sorts line the streets and wind up in "World Markets" across the hemisphere.
My favorite were the wooden flutes, unchanged in their technology for
generations. I wound up taking one home with me, and when I blow across it, I
hear the winds whispering across Lake Atitlán, and the even thinner whisper of
the Mezoamericans, long gone, who left us treasures like the word
Chichicastenango: delicious on the lips.
