ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century, men, mostly young men first leaving home to search for enough land to feed their own families would walk down the river path from Jacaltenango and paths from other towns as many as six hours away. Though the first Jacalteco known settlers came at least several decades earlier and perhaps millennia as the artifacts found there reveal, most of the families trace their beginnings here in Río Azúl only back to the mid-1940s. The imagen of San Gabriel, Río Azúl's patron saint, had to be left behind during the Violence. Don León, a local curandero and catechist in several refugee camps explained that San Gabriel was taken to another aldea for safekeeping. The residents of that Jacaltenango aldea placed Gabriel in their own church until he could be returned. Certainly new histories have been added to those the saint carried from Spain.
