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Every year in Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala, the Mayan townspeople throw the local equivalent of a harvest festival. Except it's not the average harvest festival: Harvest festivals don't usually involve drunken horse races where villagers cry, bleed, puke, and pass out wasted on the streets. They don't normally end in dislocated shoulders, or broken collarbones, or people trampled to death on the racetrack. That's how they do it in Todos Santos, though. The local women say a racer's death is good for the next year's harvest.
Last October, I flew from New York to Guatemala, set on making it to Todos Santos in time to drink and race with the locals. I prepared for my trip by taking exactly one horseback riding lesson in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
The festival, locally known as Skach Koyl, memorializes a hero from a dark part of the town's history. In the early 1500s, the Spanish conquistadors swept through Guatemala, slaughtering or enslaving the Mayans in their path. The conquistadors had swords and chain mail; the Mayans didn't even have wheels for their carts. They died fast, by the conquistadors' hand or by diseases brought from Spain.
When the conquistadors finally made it to Todos Santos around 1525, they planned to do what they had done to every other Mayan town. But this time, according to local legend, a brave villager stood up against the colonialists. He stole one of their prized horses and raced it around the mud streets until he was caught and killed. On November 1, every year since he died, the villagers honor this unnamed horse thief's memory. They drink and race and sometimes die—but they die with their freedom, as he did.
Todos Santos, 8,000 feet up in the mountains, is just 100 miles from Guatemala City, but the trip can take an entire day depending on the mode of transportation. You can rent a car and drive yourself, but good luck following road signs—there aren't any. You can waste hours trying to find your way through the streets of Huehuetenango, the town at the base of the Cuchumatanes Mountains. The directions to get through Huehue read like a cheat code you're supposed to mash into a Game Boy Advance: left, two rights, another left, right again, and so on.
On October 31, near the outskirts of Guatemala City, I paid a few dozen quetzals—less than five dollars—to squeeze myself onto a northbound bus of smiling locals holding chickens on their laps. These chicken buses, as the locals refer to them, are retired school buses brought over from the US. Wild DayGlo and pastel stripes cover the faded yellow paint jobs. They look like something the Merry Pranksters might have driven if Ken Kesey had never come back from Mexico in the mid-60s.
A kid I met in Guatemala City told me to look for buses with the most chrome detailing on their rims. If the owner could afford all that shine, the boy said, he could probably afford working brake pads too.
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