March 16, 2008

I arrived in San Cristóbal de las Casas around 7 am on Wednesday, February 27. It was almost like being back in BC – cold and wet. It was a real shock to my system after hot, sunny Puerto Escondido. San Cristóbal de las Casas is in the Chiapas highlands, surrounded by mountains, at an altitude of about 2100 m (6890 ft.). Because of the altitude, even though it’s in the south of Mexico close to the Guatemalan border, it can get pretty darn cool. Fortunately, it’s also pretty cool in the sense of being chido.

I spent my entire first day at Hostel las Palomas. Wearing several layers of clothing, and wrapped in a blanket, I drank lots of coffee and talked with Gaby, the owner, for most of the day. She has been such a fount of information about San Cristóbal de las Casas in general, and about the particular things I’m most interested in. That first night, she provided me and the two other women in the dorm with extra blankets. It was so cold! The weather here is definitely not a part of the magic of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

After sleeping like a baby, I awoke to a glorious morning. Warm sun was streaming into the courtyard, and there were coffee and sweet rolls on the table. I got to talk with the women who share the dorm with me, and hear about their travels. We agreed that hearing about other travelers’ experiences often gives you better and more up-to-date information than the guide books – because things like the conditions of things, like beaches and hostels, can change quickly. For example, a woman I met a few days ago, who had just come from Puerto Escondido, said that those gelatinous creatures that were fouling the beaches when I was there are still there. She swam in the ocean, which was filled with them, and got an allergic skin reaction. This is important information, and you can’t get it from a guide book. Hearing something like this, you might decide to by-pass Puerto Escondido until conditions improve on the beaches. Or someone may have discovered a newly-opened hostel that is not yet listed on hostelworld.com, but has a lot to offer at good rates. Good hostels tend to have a family feeling. Other travelers are like members of your extended family with whom you cross paths every so often to share news in one of the many family homes. (The women in my dorm and I crossed paths in Oaxaca at Hostel Paulina in December.) Reunions are happy occasions, with everyone eager share their experiences, observations and recommendations and to talk about their home countries. One of the women in my dorm is from Slovenia, and the other from Croatia. I saw pictures of Slovenia, and was amazed at how beautiful it is. Still, I don't envision traveling to Europe in this lifetime (the only one I'm sure of).

I ventured out into the centre of San Cristóbal de las Casas around noon. It is the most beautiful city I’ve seen in Mexico. Most of the sidewalks are narrow, only one person-wide. (When pedestrians approach one another, one or the other must press against a building or step into the street to allow the other to pass.) They are made mostly of huge stones, worn to a high polish by hundreds of years of footsteps. They are slippery, wet or dry. In some places they are made of medium-sized rounded stones, giving one a bumpy walk over them. The pavement often drops away where there are steps from a front door to the street, or rises to form cement ramps for cars between the street and an inner courtyard. As I’ve found everywhere so far in Mexico (except for Puerto Escondido, where the streets are wide enough for pedestrians to walk in them, and in small pueblos with dirt roads, where there is no distinction between “street” and “sidewalk”), San Cristóbal de las Casas is made for cars to get around, but not people.

Most houses have red-tile roofs, and many are painted in bright colours -- shades of blue, turquoise, green, yellow, magenta, pink, purple and orange. The Roman Catholic Church was very generous in its distribution of church buildings in Mexico. The churches in San Cristóbal de las Casas and in the towns around the city range from the grandest to the most humble to the strange – strange, that is, to one who expects a church to be a church.

Over the next few days I visited Agua Azul and Misol-Ha, with their beautiful cascades, and the Mayan ruins at Palenque, where howler monkeys roar and bark from the trees in the surrounding jungle. I wandered into the jungle there, and heard a bird cry that I hadn’t heard before. I looked up and almost directly above me was a toucan. It was an unforgettable sight. Unfortunately, the battery in my camera had died with the last photo I took of the ruins.

In 2003 San Cristóbal de Las Casas was officially declared to be a mágico pueblo mexicano by then-President, Vicente Fox, as a part of the Mexico's' Secretariat of Tourism's' cynical turismo marketing strategy. But what does the Mexican government know about magic? San Cristóbal de Las Casas really is a magical city, and the magic is the indigenous people (mostly Maya) who make up about a third of the population. They have so far managed to hold on to customs and traditions that have ensured their survival to this day, and yet the Mexican government has reduced them to folkloric artefacts. The people are elements of the “magical” atmosphere that pervades the city, and yet to the government, they are mere tourist attractions.

Of course, tourists come expecting the people to be poor (and they are not disappointed), but they have no idea just how unromantic this poverty is. The smiling women chatting with each other as they embroider blusas and string beads, with their dirty (but smiling) children in their ragged clothes playing in the narrow walkways of the market as if tourists didn’t exist; the old woman with her eyes completely clouded over with cataracts holding out her hand for a few pesos as you pass; the hungry-looking (and not smiling) little boy with his little shoeshine kit, shining shoes for 10 pesos, never once looking up into his customer’s face; the ever-present little girls selling chicles, belts, bracelets and Zapatista doll keyrings – these people are all part of the advertised “magic.”

During 500 years of extreme exploitation and brutal repression, the Maya have continually created meaning in their lives by maintaining their cultural and religious practices within the structures of the dominant society. Getting to know them as incredibly strong people, determined and intelligent (despite being severely deprived of educational opportunities), has affected me profoundly. Seeing the ways they are organizing themselves against an uncertain future, primarily through the work of the Zapatistas, has drawn me into their struggle.

Originally settled in 1523, San Cristobál de las Casas was named after Bartolomé de Las Casas ((1484-1566), the Dominican priest who was its first bishop. He was called “The Defender of the Indians” when he spoke out against Spanish colonialism after witnessing the brutal destruction of the Taino Indians in Cuba. For English-speaking, non Spanish-reading history buffs, an English translation of his book, is available online from the Gutenberg Project at Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies). El Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, colloquially known as “Frayba,” is named after him. Frayba is one of the organizations that continue to try to protect the “Indios.” The struggle has a new, modern face, but it is the same struggle.

The following day I traveled with a tour to Zinacantan, a municipality of Tzotzil-speaking Mayans located a few miles from SCLC. There was a pre-arranged stop at a home where we watched a woman demonstrating the technique of weaving on a back-strap loom. She made it look easy. (Fortunately, we weren’t given the opportunity to show how difficult it is.) The weavers of Zinacantán produce some of the most beautiful weavings I’ve seen yet – fantasy flower designs in blues and greens, accented with silver threads. In the dark little room that is their kitchen, the women cooked tortillas on a metal plate over a wood fire. Taco fillings were arranged on a small table and we were invited to make our own with frijoles negros, aguacate, salsas roja y verde, goat cheese and ground pumpkin seeds. They were the best tacos I’ve ever tasted.

After that, we drove a short distance to Chamula. San Juan Chamula is a Maya municipality that keeps its ancient religious practices alive in the form of a syncretistic Roman Catholicism. We first walked through a cemetery full of crosses in black, white, blue and green, sometimes two or three crosses at the head of each grave. These crosses are not Christian crosses. They symbolize the Ceiba tree, the tree at the centre of the Maya conception of the universe. The colours each have their own significance. Our guide, Charly (Carlos Gallegos of Tierra Maya Tours) said that the white crosses mark the graves of children. Green may either mark the grave of a young boy, or symbolize good luck and protection. Blue crosses are for young girls. Black crosses are for people who were between 40 and 60 years of age when they died, and grey crosses are for the graves of people over 60. A few graves have two or three crosses. These are indicators of the importance of the person. Charly explained the hierarchical social structure of Chamula, including the fact that one of the richest men in town has the Coca Cola franchise. The relationship between the town and the Coca Cola company, as well as between the town and the Catholic Church, and between the town and the government of Mexico is a fascinating and, to me, a disturbing one. Once the complexities are sorted out, one begins to glimpse some of the structures of domination that keep this part of Mexico so desperately poor and so socially fractious.

San Juan Chamula faced an undermining of its authority when Protestant Evangelicals began to recruit from among their members. Converts to these other religions no longer engaged in the Maya rituals, which are a source of income to those in power. They no longer sought out the shamans and no longer bought the candles and the Coca Cola that are essential in the local religious exercises. Chamula’s local culture is intimately connected with these practices. The defection of a significant number of people from the religious practices that virtually define the town caused a serious disturbance among the leaders of the community. It also upset the local economy, of which a large portion includes payments to shamans and curanderos / curanderas, as well as purchases of candles, incense, chickens and Coca Cola to supplement the drinking of an extrememly potent, locally-produced alcoholic beverage called pox (pronounced "posh") in the traditional religious practices.

The religious tensions caused by the introduction of new religious practices into the town’s life were “solved” by expelling the converts from town. Over the past 25 years up to 35,000 people have been expelled from Chamula, most settling in shantytowns around San Cristóbal de las Casas. (A side “benefit,” from the perspective of the town’s leaders, has been the reduction of pressure on the land, which cannot support a population much beyond the more than 50,000 inhabitants who currently reside there.) These expulsions have often been accompanied by violence. According to a Wikipedia article on Chamula, “For years, government officials ignored the violent dispute and even threw the expelled evangelicals in jail at the request of the caciques, who then delivered 100 percent of the Chamula vote to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) every time an election came around.” As a result, the municipality of Chamula is fairly prosperous. Charly told us that in Chamula the rich people have seven cars; the middle class have four; and the poor people have two.

The “church” in the centre of town, El Templo de San Juan Chamula is the centre of the town’s religious and social life. Although there is a small tile at the foot of a cross outside the templo picturing Pope John XXIII and the Blessed Virgin and proclaiming “Hace un milenio reafirmamos la fe” (A millennium ago we reaffirmed the faith), and the citizens are nominally Roman Catholic (and thus, are counted in the Roman Catholic Church’s official census of its adherents), el Templo de San Juan Chamula is definitely not a Roman Catholic church. The cross itself is not a Christian but, rather, a Mayan cross decorated with pine boughs, which are elements in Maya worship. No Catholic masses are celebrated there. As you enter the templo, on the left hand side the first three statues of “saints” you see have had their hands cut off, according to Charly as a punishment for not serving the people well. In the very front, where the altar would be, is a statue of John the Baptist, the main “saint” in this form of Maya worship. (The many different groups of Maya differ in their beliefs and customs while retaining their essential Maya identity.) As you face John the Baptist, to your left is a smaller (and much less important looking) statue of Jesus. There are no pews. Instead, pine needles cover the floor. Small groups kneel on the floor and pray in front of groups of candles in various colours, placed on the floor in a specific order. Each colour signifies a different kind of situation to be addressed through ritual. The only “priests” there are local shamans (who can be either male or female, and can be quite young as well as very old) and curanderas or curanderas who assist people in exorcising bad spirits and calling upon the “saints” – actually representative of Maya deities – to answer their prayers. Sometimes the problem is believed to require the use of a chicken, which is thought to be able to absorb bad energy from a person. In this case, the chicken is ritually passed over the person seeking help. When the chicken has absorbed the bad energy, it is killed by having its neck wrung. Unless the problem has been caused by black magic, it will later be eaten. However, if black magic has caused the problem, the chicken is buried.

I had the great good fortune to visit Oventik, one of the Zapatista caracols (centres of good government). There is so much to say about Oventik and about the Zapatistas that it deserves its own dispatch. I am in the process of writing it, and hope to post it from my next destination. As I am retracing my route in preparation for the end of my Mexican journey, that destination will probably be Puerto Escondido – although there is no guarantee that I will find a place at Hostal Shalom, since this is Santa Semana (Holy Week), a time when Mexicans traditionally flock to the beaches. Time for the full moon is coming around again.

feral@renegaderesearch.org