"It's Not About You, Hipster! Now Keep Clapping!" (or, "The Great Chiapas Rundown")

When you first step off the bus in San Cristobal de las Casas, you might find yourself under the impression that you are in a lovely, colonial town in Latin America. It is imperative to your survival in Chiapas that you do not let yourself be entirely swayed by this impression. I've probably mentioned the pre-recorded marimba music playing from loudspeakers hidden in trees, I know I've griped about the hippie zapatourists, and all that whatnot.

There are a few things to talk about when you talk about southern Mexico, and maybe you know these things, because I guess I sort of knew these things, but it is different to know things and see them, so there.

A street in San Cristobal

So, for starters, Oaxaca and Chiapas, despite holding vast amounts of Mexico's natural resources, are basically the two poorest states in Mexico. This coincides with the fact that they also hold the highest percentage of indigenous populations in Mexico. There are sixteen "most common" indigenous dialects in Oaxaca alone, if that gives you any idea of the scope of it. Many of the folks living in Chiapas, even in a largely tourist-y area like San Cristobal, don't speak much Spanish at all. This is maybe the first thing that made me feel "weird". I had to confront a lot of my ideas about why the Mexican government would ignore the needs of such a large number of people, while simultaneously realizing that, just like all over Latin America, it's easy for us mestizo folks to push the indigenous communities to the back of our minds, because, after all, they could come down to the cities and conform to acting like the rest of us.

So, while that was "hard" or whatever, I felt even worse for thinking that it was a big deal at all, because no matter what my little crisis of emotions was like, it's nowhere near the issues many people in the small communities in Chiapas have to deal with.

At the same time, amazing things are happening. Collectives for artisans and coffee growers are forming and growing. We got to sit in on a meeting for a coffee collective in Simojovel (a small town I mentioned earlier). It took three hours to get there. We had to take a taxi up curvy mountain roads to a certain stop where a bus would pick us up. At the stop, we waited in the cold at a store where taxi drivers were taking breaks, joking around in a language I couldn't understand while eating shrimp Cup o'Noodles with tortilla chips.

When we got to the collective, the whole meeting was in Tsotsil, in a warehouse full of sacks of coffee, with delegates from each community sitting or lying on top of these sacks. Even though I couldn't grasp most of what was happening, I appreciated the indigenous tradition that we would experience a couple more times, of not ending a topic until everyone who wanted to speak had spoken. Consequently, the meeting took forever, but we still got to speak to the president of the board for a few minutes, and we bought some of their delicious coffee (which is that "Mind, Body, and Soul" stuff you folks buy from Equal Exchange back in the States). In small communities in Chiapas, they drink coffee with most of their meals. They make it kind of weak and black but very sweet, and it's delicious hot with a bowl of black beans, their insanely spicy hot chile salsa, and a big pile of homemade corn tortillas (they don't even bother giving you utensils): the meal we ate most often.

Also in Simojovel, we went to the amber museum, which I thought was mostly boring. The man working there offered us some terrible fruit-nut thing called cacate. The nut inside the shell starts out tasting deliciously nutty or chocolatey, and then becomes horribly bitter. We asked about the health benefits of amber and he said that was superstition, and that only Jehovah really knows things. Then, he added that a thing that isn't superstition is that pregnant women lose the ability to fry chicharron adequately. He has seen this, and he knows it to to be true.

I know I hated on the zapatourists a whole lot, but the truth is that many of the people who come to Chiapas from elsewhere are doing important work. In the wake of government injustice and pretty blatant violence against small autonomous communities, many people come from all over the world to do human rights monitoring and "accompaniment" with the people in the communities. Many people in the community that we stayed in, Tzajalchen, seemed grateful just to know that people in the world knew about them and cared, just to know that they are not alone. On that note: in Chiapas, "autonomous community" does not mean that a community has chosen to side with the Zapatistas. Many indigenous communities have simply not wanted government intervention for many years, finding that the government's help is often insufficient and politically motivated. Instead, many are finding ways to do things like build the schools and clinics the government has failed to provide on their own. In this undertaking, only some communities have fully embraced the Zapatistas. Many, like the one we stayed in, sympathize with the EZLN but don't believe in taking up arms.

However, declaring your community autonomous and nonviolent makes you somewhat of an easy target. The government has had a ceasefire with the Zapatistas since almost right after their uprising in 1994, and although it has violated terms of their treaty many times, outright conflict hasn't restarted. Instead, there is low-intensity warfare all over Chiapas (Mexico is second in number of delegates sent to the SOA every year, Colombia is first). And there was the massacre in Acteal.

The new church at Acteal (the first church still stands)

In 1997, a community in Acteal populated by a prayerful nonviolence group called las Abejas ("the Bees") found themselves terrorized by a paramilitary group. Men, women, and small children, many of whom were in their tiny wooden church at the time, were shot at for six hours. No help ever came. The survivors identified many of the murderers as members of neighboring indigenous communities, presumably payed off by the government to do this terrible thing. Now, the government is slowly releasing the killers, arguing that due process was not followed in their trials. However, the "intellectual authors" of these crimes have never been prosecuted. Now, the murderers want to return to their homes among the community members, and they are scared.

They aren't fighting back, though. Some say that if it is the will of God, then we have to be okay with the killers coming back. When the leader of the board of the Abejas explained to us the origin of their name, he said, "Bees work, and their are reigned over by a bigger bee. We too work, and we live in the reign of God. Like bees, there may be a bigger, busier world outside of ours, but we live and work here, with God."

And that's that.