by Dwight Wayne Coop

With his long silver hair, neckbending specs, baggy pants and furious bike peddling, Dr. Gerardo Barreno could easily pass for a young-as-I-feel Panajachel gringo on a fast commute between a reiki massage class and a capuccino break.

In fact, he personifies an ideal: professional-class ladinos who embrace — often literally — their Mayan neighbors and their Mayan patrimony with enthusiasm. Observers have said of him that he is on a “culture trip — major league.”

Dr. Barreno’s parents hardly shielded him from culture. As a precocious nineyear- old, he discovered Jules Verne, the French imagineer whose novels ultimately spawned science fiction. ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ and other proto-sci-fi novels excited his early interest in science and, indirectly, medicine. It was enough to make the artist in him — as he got older — see the human body as an “elegant, vastly complex work of art.” Curing a sick body is therefore like restoring a beautiful painting — something he does not do himself, but certainly understands.

He went on to devour Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dante, Cervantes, García Márquez, Isabel Allende and Guatemala’s own literaty titans, Asturias and Monteforte. But even while growing up in Pana- Pediatrician Gerardo Barreno delivers more than babies jachel, he hoped to become a physician — and a musician and an artist as well, thanks to his cousin Enrique Anleu Días. The nationally famous Anleu Días is a versatile creative genius, gifted in violin, composition and the visual arts. Enrique became the artistic mentor to Gerardo, nine years his junior.

“But as much as music interested me,” the doctor recalls, “and as good as Enrique was at it, I turned out to have no talent in it. So that was out.” The pull of medicine ultimately prevailed, due “largely to my love of kids.” Yet even while earning his M.D. at San Carlos University, he was tutored in painting by Cousin Enrique, who himself would go on to win a professorship at the prestigious Escuela de Artes Plásticas (painting, architecture, sculpture). The young healer returned to Pana in 1980 where, today, the man who cannot stand to see kids suffer is Pana’s pediatrician. He lives modestly — as well as he can for a physician whom the poor know they can go to for a Q10 consultation.

This doctor does not play stork just to babies, but to artists’ careers. Although an amateur artist himself, he is better known as Panajachel’s most ardent arts patron. City Hall has long engaged in on-again/off-again official patronage, but in the off-years, the responsibility has depended on one man — Gerardo Barreno — for its continuity.

What in other houses is a garage is — at the Barreno residence — a gallery of Atitlán masters, some pro, some on their way, and some merely hoping to be discovered. This garage is today a “Casa de Cultura,” an institution found in every self-respecting Central-American town. A few artistic careers have already been lauched from this very spot. Dr. Barreno provides space while the city provides funds and civic support — especially since the 2002 ascencion of Enio Urizar, a pro-active culture promoter, to the mayorship.

But when there was no such help, the doctor was as faithful to his artist-clients as he was to his patients. In 1990, the previous Casa de Cultura, located elsewhere, sunk into moribundity when the city yanked its support. Dr. Barreno assumed the thankless position as its director, which he held until 1997. In 1994, he found in himself another artistic bent, this time for writing and editing. So equipped, he launched a cultural magazine for Panajachel, which has traditionally been the capital by default of the cultural flyover between Antigua and Quetzaltenango.

El Aj’Achel (taken from the name of a fruit) is today a glossy magazine annually reborn on the eve of Pana’s October Feria, which, in the doctor’s words, “nourishes our spirit and integrates our community life.” It is not the ring-toss and video-game element that he emotes over, but the excitement of the Fiestas Octubrinas: distinguished visitors, sporting matches, costume parades, poetry readings and the election of two queens. For Dr. Barreno, the premier event is the city-sponsored painting contest with prizes up to Q3000. Last year’s bronze medal is still on display — and for sale — in the “garage.”

All this is not to say he disdains the kiddie aspect of ferias. “Let’s share with our children,” he writes in El Aj’Achel’s introductory editorial, “the joy of eating cotton candy, crazy corn and churros ... and of playing darts or games of chance, or riding the Ferris Wheel.”

Why is all this so important? Why does a community need culture — both popular and aesthetic?

“Without it no national consciousness can form,” he writes in the same editorial. “... our traditions define who we are and enable us to transmit that identity to our progeny, [that they may know where they came from] … humans as social beings depend on these, for without them we have nothing shared.”

One is struck by Dr. Barreno’s utter lack of racial smugness. To the extent that indigenas live on the mountain and ladinos in the valley —“to paraphase a character from Cry the Beloved Country [by South Africa’s Alan Paton]” — it is not the fault of people like himself. The ancient Maya are rightly revered as the most advanced civilization in the Americas, but Dr. Barreno reveres their descendents as well. To do anything less would — for him — be a form of self-hatred.

“The Maya are the mother of Guatemala,” he explains. “So their relation to me is maternal.” It is perhaps for this reason that he honored the Maya by giving his daughters Mayan names. He and his wife of 24 years, educator Araceli Golindres, have four girls — two away at university, two still at home. Each also has a ladino name; two in honor of the parents: Araceli and Geraldina. There are also Amanda — and Indira. Indira?

“For the great Indira Gandhi, of course,” he explains. “A strong woman who made a huge mark on history. A mother to her country.”

The girls’ Mayan names come from the Popul Vuh, the Mayan creation myth: Ixmucane, Ixquic, Ixbalanqué and Ixchel. Each has a special significance for the Barrenos. Ixchel, for instance, was the deity of medicine.

Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú is another of Dr. Barreno’s heroines. Unlike many of his compatriots, who make Rigoberta jokes, the doctor is unrestrained in his praise for “that brave woman who, like Indira Gandhi, was not a quitter.” He laments that Rigoberta is read in universities around the world but is reviled in Guatemala — “a prophet without honor in her own country.”

Parked on his desk — the same one he sits behind as Mayan women describe their children’s ailments — is an ancient typewriter dating from Guatemala’s Political “Spring” (1944-55). His daughters, he says with a touch of melancholy, prefer compus personales. But he favors this antique for his regular correspondence, for writing El Aj’Achel, and for everything else but his prescription pad, on which he uses a pen.

“This typewriter is a beautiful old thing,” he says. “Like our traditions, it’s a link to our past. And it comes from an era of democratic experiment, when many reforms were carried out.” Not surprisingly, Dr. Barreno welcomed the Peace Accords of 1996, which ended the 31-year Civil Conflict. That war, in the opinion of many Guatemalans, was a consequence of the dismantling of the reforms of the Political Spring.

“But perhaps,” he says with finite optimism, “it’s Spring again in our country.” •