Rafaél González y González
By Benjamin D. Paul,
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University,
and Joseph Johnston
Except from Ethnic Art: Origins and Growth of Oil Painting by Mayan
Artists in San Pedro la Laguna: Mesoamerica 36 (December 1998), pp.
423-440.
Somewhere out in the wide world there is a robust appetite for
paintings of Mayan life produced by Indian artists. That appetite is
fed mainly by painters in three of the hundreds of communities that
make up the vast Mayan population of present-day Guatemala:
Kaqchikel-speaking Comalapa in the Department of Chimaltenango, and
the Tz’utujil settlements of Santiago Atitlán and San Pedro la
Laguna on the southern shore of Lake Atitlán in the Department of
Sololá.
In San Pedro a young man named Rafaél González y González
(1907-1996) first produced a painting in 1929. About a year later,
in Comalapa, Andres Curruchich (1891-1969) began quite independently
to paint scenes of local life on the lids of coffee cans, pieces of
wood and flour sacking; twenty years later he was “discovered” by a
wealthy Guatemalan coffee planter who sponsored exhibitions of his
work that brought him wide acclaim (Asturias 1985). The first
painter in Santiago Atitlán was Juan Sisay (1921-1989); he began in
1950 and rapidly became famous. |
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Rafaél González y González in front of the municipal building in
San Pedro la Laguna in a photograph taken by Bejamin Paul in 1941.
Rafaél was one of Paul's better informants of the customs of the
people of San Pedro. Paul did not find out for many decades that
Rafaél was also a painter.
Rafaél González was completely unfamiliar with painting in oils
when a lucky accident led him to discover an alternate way to paint
a picture. With a background of three years of grade school—all that
was available in San Pedro at the time—he was nevertheless
sufficiently competent in reading and writing to be hired as a local
maestro empírico (untrained school teacher) while still in his
teens. One Saturday in a practical arts class he was showing his
pupils how to color strands of pita (homespun twine) with aniline
dyes. They took time off to bathe in the lake. On the way back
Rafaél stopped to collect some of the white sap exuded by the
gravilea trees shading clumps of coffee bushes near the water’s
edge. Rafaél needed the sticky sap to glue pieces of wood together.
Back in the school room, he was too busy with his project to notice
that some purple dye had accidentally fallen into the sap container.
On returning next day he noticed that the white sap had turned
purple (Gomez Davis 1988a) “What’s this!” he exclaimed, “pure
paint!” He tested it on a piece of paper; it worked. He was set to
paint his first picture. He improvised a palette by mixing varied
sap-based colors in separate containers. He painted a landscape on a
piece of flour sacking, using a tight wad of his own hair for a
brush, and fixed the picture onto a board. A passing tourist liked
the painting and bought it for 50 cents, about three times the daily
wage of a laborer in those days. He had discovered a new source of
cash, albeit a very uncertain one.
Cash was something Rafaél needed. Unlike his fellow Pedranos, he
shunned working in the corn field with hoe and machete, and needed
money to buy corn for tortillas and to pay for other necessities.
Teaching was the only salaried job in town, but it paid only a
pittance and was a job Rafaél managed to hold intermittently.
Selling a painting was a relatively rare event in the early part of
Rafaél’s career. Transportation by motor launch had yet to be
established and potential art buyers found it difficult to cross to
the southern shore of Lake Atitlán.
To earn money Rafaél became a resourceful jack-of-all-trades,
serving as a barber and performing a variety of other minor services
for a fee. He was well known in San Pedro and in neighboring towns
for his manifold artistic abilities: lettering posters, painting
saints’ images, decorating chapels and adorning houses of religious
dignitaries at fiesta times, whitewashing sepulchers in the town
cemetery for All-Saints day, and the like.
People in San Pedro believe that a person’s character is controlled
by one’s day of birth. Some men are born to be meek; some are born
to be “strong” and to anger easily. Rafaél’s character is “strong.”
His quick temper often embroiled him in quarrels. In 1942 a
long-running feud with a particularly quarrelsome neighbor prompted
Rafaél to leave town with his wife and children. He accepted a job
in one of the many large coffee fincas (plantations) on the piedmont
belt south of Lake Atitlán. In return for a small salary, living
quarters and a monthly supply of 25 pounds of shelled corn, he
served as a teacher for the children of the colonos (resident
laborers) on the Finca San Rafaél Pamaxan. A few years later he went
to work as a paymaster on the Finca Las Maravillas, a long-lasting
job. Finally he went to work as paymaster and mayordomo
(administrator) on the Finca Chinan before retiring, as the result
of an argument, to live in the town of Chicacao in the coffee area,
after having spent thirty years on the plantations and raised four
sons and three daughters to adulthood. |
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Rafaél González y González and his wife Candida visit with
Benjamin Paul in Chicaco in the early 1990s. Rafaél would visit his
home town of San Pedro la Laguna only one more time before his death
in 1996. That visit was for the festival of San Pedro where Rafaél
was honored.
Photo Ben Paul
To supplement his modest salary on the plantations, Rafaél used
his spare time to make coffins and produce paintings on flour
sacking with sap-based aniline colors. An uncle took five or ten of
the paintings at a time to sell for eight or ten dollars apiece to
American officials working for the United Fruit Company in lowland
Tiquisate. That was in the early 40s. In the late 40s a series of
events completely transformed Rafaél’s painting method and launched
him on the road to national recognition as an important primitivist
artist. He presented a painting to Ernesto Hastedt, his patron
(boss) on the Finca Las Maravillas. In return, Ernesto’s wife gave
Rafaél a gift of oil paints and artist’s brushes. Valentin Abascal,
a painter in Chicacao, showed him how to mount canvas on stretchers
and to make frames. Rafaél was overjoyed and lost no time becoming
an oil painter.
In the 50s, with strong support from the Hastedts and Jorge Ibarra,
a distinguished Guatemalan naturalist, Rafaél exhibited pictures in
various cultural and educational institutions in Guatemala City:
Colegio Americano de Guatemala, Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and
Instituto Guatemalteco Americano. But his hopes of being sent to the
United States to display his works were frustrated by General Miguel
Ydígoras (President of Guatemala, 1958-1963) who objected to sending
a ladino (non-Indian) abroad, asserting that the surname Gonzá:lez
was Spanish, not Indian. Ydígoras did send Juan Sisay of Santiago
Atitlán to exhibit his primitivistic paintings in the United States
(Gomez Davis 1988b). Countering the adage that a prophet is without
honor in his own country, Rafaél achieved a signal honor in 1987
when he was awarded the cherished Cruz al Mérito Artístico at a
special exposition of his paintings in Guatemala City in belated
recognition of his status as the founder of the rapidly rising San
Pedro school of painting. In 1988 he was honored as the originator
of the popular painting style practiced by the Tz’utujil artists of
San Pedro and Santiago Atitlán with a museum show in Guatemala City.
Rafaél died in December of 1996, although due to failing eyesight he
had been unable to paint for a number of years. At least six
painters living in San Pedro la Laguna are directly descended from
Rafaél or siblings. Two of Rafaél’s sons are painters, although
neither one lives in San Pedro.
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