M E X I C O     2

San Cristobal is the second town in the state of Chiapas, poorest state in Mexico, and highland home to dozens of indiginous communities. San Cristobal hit worldwide headlines in 1994, since it was at the centre of the Zapatista uprising in 1994. Things are a bit calmer now, and its a truly fascinating place to visit, especially if you have the time to take a trip to one of the the indigenous Zapotec villages, such as Chamula. Here you can read about our encounters with shamanistic healers and the courageous woman from Zincantan who left her cruel husband

San Cristobal de las Casas late afternoon, view of abandoned convent.	San Cristobal de Las Casas, to give it its full title is a small city in the middle of the Chiapas highlands of Southern Mexico. This region, like Oaxaca has a high proportion of indiginous peoples, the Zapotecs. We stumbled off the bus from Oaxaca at 7am with raging hangovers. There was a bit of debate as to whether we should get some breakfast first or whether we should find a hotel first. I was for breakfast, since I've always found a hearty breakfast to be a good cure for a hang-over, but Katie wanted to be rid of our heavy packs. We walked up calle Insurgentes towards the centre of town.
It was sunny but pleasantly cool due to the altitude (1700m). It was a long walk to the centre, or at least it seemed so with a blinding headache. We found a room at the Hotel Posada Real, just off the Zocalo, dumped our bags, then headed out for a reviving breakfast. I had Huevos Rancheros, a Mexican speciality. Basically it's fried eggs with chile sauce a couple of tortillas and refried beans of course!
In the afternoon, we explored the city. The centre is compact and unspoiled by the blight of fast food restaurants nd chain stores. There are many indigenous people on the streets, looking very colourful dressed in hand-woven clothes. From the colours it is possible to tell which village they come from, since each village has it's own style worn by all the women. Most of the men seem to have abandoned traditional dress for 'ropas Americanas', i.e. jeans and T-shirts. Many of the indigenous peoples here in San Cristobal are desperate people, cast out from their villages by their own people, most commonly for having converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, but for other reasons too. Some of them sit on the street corners selling hand made trinkets, others just beg. In the Zocalo, some enterprising Indian women were capitalising on the publicity surrounding the Zapatista movement movement and selling handmade dolls of their leader Marcos, complete with rifle and distinctive black ski-mask. Others were selling cigarette lighters emblazoned with the words "Viva EZLN Cabrones", which roughly translates as "the EZLN lives, you bastards".
I decided to allow a grubby urchin to clean my shoes in the Cathedral square. As soon as I sat down, crowds of other urchins flocked around like pigeons. A fight almost broke out over who was going to clean my shoes. The losers then pursued Katie demanding to clean her shoes - but she was only wearing sandals, and they weren't leather. "No matter! No matter!" they cried, and Katie hopped about from foot to foot amongst them.
In the evening, we went to bed pretty early, still suffering from the excesses of the previous night, but we didn't sleep. We couldn't. Our American neighbours came in drunk, and then there was lots of grunting, panting and moaning. "Ah, ah ah. Nooo you're hurting me." pant, pant, "please, oh oh oh, please" grunt, grunt, long scream "ow ow ow, oooh" It sounded like the wildest orgy ever. Curiosity got the better of us, and we got up to see if we could see through their curtains. We were disappointed though. It wasn't an orgy, just a bit of late night martial arts - you know - normal after a night on the town.

Ya Basta! The Zapatista Rebellion
San Cristobal hit World headlines in 1994 when a makeshift army of a few hundred Zapatistas took over the town, unfurled banners and made a series of demands on the Mexican government. Fed up with repression, low standards of living and harrassment from the authorities, the Zapatistas or EZLN decided to raise the stakes and make their cause known to the world. It was a huge gamble, since the risk of heavy retribution was high, but they hoped that with the world's gaze upon them, the Government would not dare to be too heavy handed. The tactic worked, more or less, causing huge embarrassment to the government. Negotiations took place over the following month, and for a while it looked as if the Zapatistas had won some major concessions from the government. However, in the final stages, the government negotiator was killed in mysterious circumstances. The talks broke down, the EZLN freedom fighters disappeared back into the hills and ever since an uneasy truce has existed. Nowadays, the Mexican army has a huge presence in the region. Independent estimates are in the order of 50,000 troops. Tourists are advised to stay in main towns and on the main roads.	Things have hotted up this year. Since the uprising, its alleged that the government has been using CIA-style tactics to undermine the guerrillas' power base, funding and arming groups of paramilitary thugs to terrorize villagers suspected of sympathising with the EZLN cause. Beatings There have been numerous beatings and recently a number of killings within sympathetic villages. The villages now claim to be in a worse state than before the initial confrontation in 1994. Foreign aid organisations find it difficult to operate, and in Easter this year around 200 foreigners were expelled from the area for interfering. Many of those expelled were acting as unofficial observer or worked for aid organisations,	Sub Commandant Marcos and their expulsion was widely thought to auger some nasty fate in store for the villages concerned. When we visited, everything seemed pretty peaceful, but only a couple of weeks after we left, six people were killed and many were injured by paramilitary thugs. Prospects for a peaceful settlement look poor.
	You can visit the EZLN's website for more information on the conflict. The EZLN use the internet extensively as a means of communicating what is happening in the Chiapas highlands, neatly circumventing police imposed crackdowns on journalists entering the region.

Indigenous Villages
Today - 20th May - we took a tour into some of the indigenous villages in the hills around San Cristobal. This may seem voyeuristic, but the villages welcome a certain degree of tourism, provided it is controlled and relatively low key as an additional source of much needed income.

Undoubtedly the best tour on offer is with Mercedes Hernandez Gomez, a charismatic Zapotec woman who simply appears at 9.30 each day in the Zocalo with a large golfing umbrella, you can't miss her. She grew up in one of the nearby villages and has a deep and intimate knowledge of the villagers and their culture, which is what makes her tour exceptional. She was one of very few villagers who actually managed to obtain a decent education, and left the village to work in the city. Eventually she returned to her roots and is now running sensible trips into the villages. We and eleven other gringos on the trip all piled into two shambolic VW minibuses sent from the villages to collect us.

The first village we came to was called San Juan Chamula. This is a fairly disparate village, spread across a patchwork of fields, a collection of shacks connected by dirt tracks. A chamula is actually a Zapotec word meaning a collection of small communities. The village is dominated by its church painted in the village colours, dark and light blues.

Peasant girl in Chamula village, Chiapas

All the women in the village wear these colours too, laboriously hand woven on back-strap looms. Some of the menfolk still wear traditional ponchos, but most are now opting for scruffy jeans. Many of the men we saw were totally useless slobs, sprawled out in doorways, poleaxed through drink. It's the women who seem to do most of the work, slaving from dawn til dusk to keep house and home together.

Mercedes invited us in to one of the huts, a one room dwelling with a split door, like a stable a straw roof and earth floor. The owner was a special man in the village. He had been on a waiting list for the past eight years to be allowed the privilege of looking after one of the village's patron saints for the year. To this end, he had dedicated well over half of the living area in his hut to a shrine made from palm leaves and altar which housed a somewhat vulgarly dressed statue of the saint for whom he was responsible. The local religion in these villages is nominally Catholicism, but in practice it is a bizarre mix of Catholicism and ancient pre-Columbian traditions. All of the Christian saints have pre-Columbian counterparts, old Indian gods, such as Mother Earth the God of Rain etc. The locals believe it is necessary to appease these gods throughout the year by feeding them spiritually through prayer, lighting candles, song, dance, and Coca Cola. They used to use holy water, but such is the might of the Coca Cola marketing machine that they were able to convince the villagers that Coke had special powers that were even better than holy water. Can you believe it! So the poor owner of this house was obliged to buy lots of coke for his statue over the course of the year. At the end of the Mayan year there are 5 spare days which are used for one holy MF of a fiesta with firecrackers, 24 hour drinking, dancing and revelry. (Mayan months only have 20 days - leaving 5 spare at the end of the year). This chap had the honour of leading the processions in the fiesta and the pleasure of funding the celebrations. Well funding a five day party doesn't come cheap, especially when the entire village is your guest. Basically, this man was going to kiss goodbye to ten years of savings in five nights. Yet he was proud to be doing this. It is considered an enormous honour, and enormous prestige is heaped on these guardians of the saints for the rest of their lives.

We moved on to the church. Outwardly this looks like any other colonial style church, but the religion practised here is a only vaguely related to any European concept of Catholicism. A priest visits just once a year to perform mass baptisms, the only Catholic sacrament practised. The rest of th time, it is given over to the real religious authorities in the village, the Shamen. The shamen are not a techno pop group on tour, rather they are powerful religious figures in the community, a kind of hybrid priest, doctor, therapist and best pal all rolled into one. The main activity in the church is a ritualistic healing ceremony conducted by the Shamen. (when they're not playing a gig). The Shamen are very powerful figures in the community.

Chamula's Church

Outside the church it was hot in the square, and we watched the headmen of the village strutting out from a meeting - the only men we saw in ponchos. They looked very self-important - a bit like local councillors back home! Children of the village scurried up to us trying to sell us their handicrafts, woven belts, dolls, bracelets. It was hard to refuse them. One of our group bought a bag full of mangoes for lunch, but most of these disappeared into the mouths of the kids.

Zincantan - The woman who left her husband
We moved on from Chamulas to a second village, Zincantan. This was Mercedes home village, and she was warmly greeted. We went into the house of a young woman who lived with her mother. She had been abused and beaten by her drunken husband, and had had the guts to leave him. Most village women put up with it. She was unlikely to get married again. Village men are very particular about marrying virgins. The marriage process here is formal. If a man likes a girl he will pay an arranger to make an initial approach to the family. If accepted, he goes through a lengthy courtship, visiting the family each week or so with gifts, such as cooking pots, chickens, corn. The best girls are those who can weave and cook and look after their husbands needs. Girls therefore parry unwanted advances politely by claiming to be too inferior in the requisite skills for such a man. This girl lived in a tiny mud hut with mud floor. They day's meal of beans was slow cooking over an open fire in the middle of the room. There was no real furniture to speak of, apart from a small religious altar. It reminded me of the dens I used to build with my brother out of old junk we'd found in hedges.			Katie with Mercedes in Zincantan

This village is relatively affluent. They have advanced from subsistence farming into flower growing. Flowers from this village are sent to the southern states of the USA. They also have fine weavers - who exhibit and sell their wares to tourists. It was great stuff, but we didn't have any room for it in our packs, so we skulked around feeling guilty and trying not to look conspicuous, then we took the collectivos back to San Cristobal.

A look at the Gringos
In the evening we ate at a restaurant opposite our hotel with many of the people we'd met on the tour. Many of them were a bit oddball, like Alex the German who hated Germany and Germans, and was travelling the world to find his nirvana. So far he didn't like anywhere very much, apart from Cuba - but then we found out he'd got laid there, which kind of explained why. There were also some bleeding heart English girls who found it hard to cope with Indian's lifestyle..... "My gooooord, it's so awful. Why doesn't somebody doooo something," they wailed when confronted with the emancipation of women in the villages. Why don't you do something if you're so concerned, I thought, but I suspect they'd forgotten all about it as soon as they boarded the next tour bus. Then there was the Chinese Californian waif man, who looked like he needed a good meal. The bus had to stop so he could throw up. We were sympathetic to his food poisoning until we discovered it was a hangover He was dressed in combat fatigues, and looked like a renegade from the Vietnam war. I should imagine he scared the shit out of the local villagers. The only normal people were Tim and Michelle, a couple from Nottingham, making their way north to the US where they planned to buy a campervan and tour round the US for four months. They were planning to go to Palenque next, like us, and we looked forward to seeing them there.

You are reading the story of Adrian and Katie's travels through the Americas between May and August 1998.
Adrian and Katie put the rat race on hold for a year to travel the world.

                           

Adrian & Katie's World Tour News - Mexico 2                                         Last Updated: 8 September 1998
Web Page by Adrian Ball  (email: adrian.ball@virgin.net)