I arrived in freezing cold San Cristobal de las Casas last week, and it was just too cold for me. Even after wrapping myself in a metre of polarfleece bought from a haberdashery shop the chill was making me miserable, so less than 24 hours later I was on a bus to Palenque, a small town in the Chiapan jungle. This is Zapatista territory, and the military checkpoints were the first of many reminders that the tensions here between the indigenous paramilitary group and other factions — government supporters, capitalists, and Protestants, for example — have not dissolved as years pass.
I’ve never seen more beautiful, fertile country. Verdant hills roll on and on and on, filled with bananas, coffee, and palms for ethanol production. It is obvious that although a scandalous number of people here are living in abject poverty, this part of the country is rich. As well as a great proportion of national agriculture, the state of Chiapas produces almost half of the hydroelectric power in Mexico, and the majority of the country’s oil. Travelling with a Minnesotan farmer who lives half the year in Oaxaca assisting a coffee growers’ collective was great; I had private economy, history and agriculture lessons on tap!
We were not received there with anywhere near the kind of welcome I’ve come to expect in Mexico. There was a distinct anti-tourist vibe, and I felt very out of place. I’m not sure how much of this is due to the type of traveller that goes to that particular area — there were swarms of doped up hippies floating around the place — and how much is due to long-passed and more recent history and Zapatista ideology, which placed indigeneity squarely at the centre of, well, everything. It’s very complicated, Zapatista-ism, and I doubt that many of the aforementioned hippies who profess to stand in solidarity with the indigenas of Chiapas and idolise Subcomandante Marcos have much of an idea of just how complex the movement and its goals are. Yesterday Jason and I jumped on the back of a ute and headed out to see a cave about half an hour out of San Cristobal (the ruins and jungly scenery were gorgeous, but two nights in Palenquewere enough), and on the way we had a chat with a local guy, a campesino (peasant farmer) who raises rabbits. He told us that although he is of 100% indigenous ancestry, his small farm was taken by the Zapatistas in 1994… raised in the city of San Cristobal, he never learned any of the local dialects, and wasn’t considered “indigenous enough” to keep hold of his land. He’s also a Protestant, and I’m sure that that had a lot to do with his expulsion during the first wave of the uprising. Evangenlism has been making great inroads here in Southern Mexico, but converts are often shunned by their communities and occasionally cast out. There are new non-Catholic villages springing up in hitherto untended lands where these exiles take refuge. One of the villages least tolerant of conversion is San Juan de Chamula, home of the most beautiful and eerie church I’ve ever been to.
Aleta and I arrived around midday and huddled together as we fought the wind and rain to get to the large white, blue, pink and green facade. Inside, the floor was covered in pine needles. Statues of various saints in glass boxes lined the walls above thousants of devotional candles on long tables, and on the far wall, where the altar would usually be, stood a huge display of Christmas lights and decorations that almost obscure Saint John the Baptist’s image.
San Juan is held in higher regard than Mary or Jesus here. The church has no pews, and the town’s residents sit in small groups on the floor, setting up rows of candles in various configurations, chanting, and drinking Coca Cola. Apparently before the conquest a religious rite involved imbibing herbs that caused vomiting, and now Coke is seen as a bit holy because of the burtping it produces! We thought that we might see a chicken sacrifice — there were quite a few of them tied up here and there — but (un?)fortunately we seemed to have arrived a bit too early for that. No photos were allowed, and I was surprised that we are let in there at all. I suppose the $2 entry fee must be of use to someone…
