La Antigua: Busker Central in Central America

I haven't written much about buskers or musicians in Central America mainly because there hasn't been anything to write about.  Unlike in Mexico where there is a whole mariachi troubador culture on the streets of its colonial cities, in El Salvador or Honduras you can go many days without seeing someone with a guitar or violin.  When you do encounter street musicians, as you do in Granada, Nicaragua, it's somewhat of a pleasant surprise.  And when I do bump into the occasional street band, as I did in Gracias, Honduras, I always donate something to the cause.

But in Antigua we are in a whole different league.  It helps if you can picture the massive crowds here--not only of weekend trippers from Guatemala City and other parts of the country, but also foreign tourists from Europe and North America, high school and college kids from America, and denizens of the large expatriate Western community who now make Antigua their home.  With crowds like these on a typical Saturday, it can pay very well to play on the street.

This city just reeks of cosmopolitan prosperity with its restaurants, bars, coffee shops, hotels, travel agencies, boutique stores, and regular markets.  In a region where bookstores are oases and second hand English language books sell for $10 or more, there are so many books in English available, and for almost nothing,  that I'm close to hyperventilating as I type this dispatch.  La Antigua definitely has anything you could possibly want, especially for someone like me who has come from a markedly much poorer place such as western Honduras.  If you want McDonald's or Burger King or Subway or almost any kind of pizza you desire, it's all here.

With crowds the way they are and with the sort of conveniences you can find here, maybe that's partly why the local buskers can do so well in this town.  And it seems even foreign travelers can hang their hats for awhile and make a living with a song and a guitar, or--as in the case of "Takeshi"--by painting Japanese calligraphy.

Check out the following website from a young  Japanese guy I just saw on Antigua's streets who had a huge crowd around him:

http://takeshi.henjin.com/

Takeshi sings original songs, plays guitar, and sells his CDs, but his main attraction is he paints your name in katakana/hiragana (Chinese/Japanese script) on a strip of white paper for five quetzales (60 cents).  He has a big sign written in Spanish telling of his voyage around the world which encourages donations, and he wears a baseball cap and t-shirt promoting his website.  Flyers ("take one!") are available so you can look him up on the web. . .and link him to your blog!

I can report that the kids loved this guy, and their (mostly) affluent local parents were fascinated by him.  Of course I was pretty fascinated too.

When I think back now to my experiences in France and Switzerland of the 1980s,  I regret that the CD was barely invented then, that there was no such thing as a "world wide web", and that it didn't seem economically feasible to busk one's way around Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, or any other so-called "third world" area.

Now it looks as if maybe "third world areas" are among the only interesting--and lucrative--places left to go as an itinerant troubador in this increasingly homogenized, globalized world.