Travel notes — what do the unfinished dreams of the descendants of the Maya look like?

What do the houses of the descendants of the Maya in Guatemala look like? Read the latest note from the anthropologist Radan Haluzík's Neuron Expedition in the footsteps of unfinished houses and dreams.

From the Latin American south, millions of hands eager for work set off for the rich north — to the USA. "You simply slog twelve hours a day, six days a week, five-ten-fifteen years, just to send home at least some money," I hear all around me. The money earned on American building sites, fields, factories and restaurant kitchens flows back to the homeland. For the poor regions of Central America it is often the most important source of income. And it helps not only to feed relatives at home but, here in the mountains of Guatemala and the south of Mexico, to develop whole economically backward and, until recently, discriminated against and marginalised Indian-Mayan regions.

Like mushrooms after rain, not only new trades and services but above all enormous family houses are springing up in Indian mountain villages and small towns. Where ten or twenty years ago there were little houses of mud brick with thatched roofs, there are now villas "in the Californian style" as far as the eye can see. Their façades shine with bright colours and bear local jaguars and cosmopolitan Nike symbols, the Guatemalan heraldic bird the quetzal and American flags...

Many think ahead, so on the ground floor there is a grocer's, an ironmonger's, a haulage garage or, better still, a workshop, whose task is to produce a profit this time directly here on the spot... Into some houses the owners invite me themselves and proudly show me round; with others it takes a long time to gain trust and get in. Others are permanently locked, because their owner and his whole family are earning for them up there in the north, abroad...

I learn that many do not finish their dream house, because they have no building plans and do not even know how. Some finish their dream but never furnish it, because they simply run out of money. And all of them together are afraid that "now, under President Trump's new migration policy, the migration flows are starting to stop". The globalised world is not an easy place to live.

Radan Haluzík