Here's a personally narrated video from our new video-log.
This is us at the Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Studio/House Museum, in Mexico City.
This is a pretty neat house. It kind of reminded me of Venice in LA, except it was built in 1929.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Evil Days
“At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off....when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s eath shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds... Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.”
--Thoreau, “Walking”
--Thoreau, “Walking”
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Geckos
The gecko sits under the eaves and keeps to himself and eats bugs that enter the home. He is a true friend of the working man. But the call of the gecko disturbs people. The gecko is quiet for long stretches but will periodically emit an uncanny chattering sound, like a bird with no music, a very dry chuckle. It’s a distinctive, staccato bark. It travels long distances on a quiet evening, but more often than not it startles you by coming from immediately over your head. You believed you were alone! This trick, this phantasagorical announcement of arrival, must be where the gecko gets his reputation as a vehicle of the spirit world.
This shot of two geckos in an intimate embrace I took in Pijijiapan, an engagingly charmless little town on the southern coastal highway, where we spent a night in order to see the Pacific Ocean.
We decided afterward that it had been worth the trouble, even though we didn’t get to swim. A mini-bus dropped us at the hamlet of Chocohuital, where a couple youths were lolling under an awning at the riverside. To get to the ocean, you have to cross a mangrove estuary which stretches a good long way down the state, kind of like on the coast of Florida. For ten pesos you clamber into a motorboat with one of the kids, and he pilots you out on the channel (or whatever you call this body of water) with a roar and a puff of gas fumes, and as you get nearer and nearer to the other shore, the buffer of land a hundred yards wide that’s supposed to defuse ocean storms, you can make out that there’s almost nothing on this spit of land in either direction. As you climb out onto the sagging dock the kid asks you when you want to be picked up again.
We spent about three hours. We walked down the beach for a while in a westerly direction, watching the waves come pounding in, meeting a cross-angles, ripping and sweeping. Later we learned a hurricane had struck up in Acapulco. The only signs of life anywhere down the shore were the ghostly little crabs cruising out in the downbeat of the tide, and a washed-up pufferfish, which was probably dead.
Then we went back to the one inhabited site we’d seen. A pleasant older woman was running a kind of beach hut, under a big awning. Three sunburnt drunks, a women and two men, were sitting around a table well in from the tide, serving themselves from the family-size beer bottles called caguamas and brooding like Furies. We sat in the sun for a while and let ourselves be hypnotized by the vast glassy tubes rolling in and the surf beating up like mist. When I went to use the bathroom, the older, less-intelligible of the two men approached R and asked her to write her name on his leathery arm in ballpoint. Then he wrote his own name and made a heart around it! What a funny guy! The kid who was scheduled to pick us up never actually showed, but we realized if we stood on the dock and waved across to the mainland, another of the lolling youths would come sputtering over with a motorboat. On this trip we noticed the junior ferryman was sitting next to a bulky black garbage bag and I asked what was in it. “Lifejackets,” he said. I feel like a part of me is still trapped on that spit of land, watching the crabs and nodding to the wheedling drunks, waiting for the boatman.
Out on the patio here, ants are on to the remains of a bird-eaten cockroach. I see the six scattered legs, the wing covers, and the discarded stump-end of an abdomen--the ‘roach’ as it were. A very pretty little bird is singing and I wish I could identify it. I can see it clearly, there are fine white stripes on its cheeks and on the underside of its tail. It is probably a White-Cheeked something. White-Cheeked Warbler, I bet.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Why Is There An EZLN? pt 3
So how did the latest, well-organized armed uprising come to pass? Why do some of the region’s Tzotzil-speaking peasant communities herd sheep and sell trinkets, while others wear ski masks and carry rifles? Maybe the question to ask is, outside of a handful of rebellions, why was Chiapas so calm for most of its history?
Collier offers 1974, the date of a nationwide conference on Indian self-determination, as year zero for the radicalization of indigenous groups. In coalition with a team of government anthropoligists and social workers, a commitee of Chiapanecan Indians drafted a long list of grievances, which became a flashpoint later as commitee heads began to get involved in the time-honored system of corruption and patronage, and began to clash with radical interlopers from nationwide peasant alliances and workers’ unions. By the late eighties there was a critical mass of educated rejectionists in the countryside, and many of them had already experienced bloody turf battles with enemy peasant factions and with ranchers and their enforcers. Under the leadership of some charismatic metropolitan intellectuals, this peasant army went undergound and started gathering maps and weapons. In May of 1993, the Mexican army raided an EZLN garrison in a remote outpost called Corralchen in the eastern Chiapanecan wilderness, and the government was forced to play down rumors that a sophisticated guerrilla headquarters had been captured, complete with scale models of towns and army bases. The president was afraid any homegrown terrorism would scotch the looming NAFTA treaty, which at that very moment his American counterpart was working so hard to get the US Congress to ratify.
Although the Zapatista leadership chose January 1, 1994, the date NAFTA took effect, to become a full-fledged militant uprising, this coincidence has been understood as a “p.r.” decison. The movement’s critical catalyst had actually come in 1992: the quasi-legal suspension, under President Salinas, of the ongoing process of land reform called for in Mexico’s constitutionally-enshrined Agrarian Code. This bitter decision was a reaction to the debt crisis Mexico was facing in the wake of its oil bust. The international banking community, that shadowy archvillain, demanded that the Mexico Congress ram an austerity program through which would cut off the subsidies and price controls that peasant farmers had depended on. This was the moment at which the Zapatista army decided that all their training and plotting, under the dark cover of the jungle canopy, had gone on long enough.
Land reform, which is very hard to understand and, let’s be honest, kind of boring to read about, had been on the books for a long time, and worked well enough, for enough of the populace, that it outflanked peasant uprisings elsewhere. But owing to the unique development history of the state of Chiapas, there were some major fuck-ups here in the land reform area. The struggle to get land claims acknowledged by the government was drawn-out, bureaucratic, and arbitrary, and ended up alienating a lot of farmers with nowhere else to turn. And the issue goes back a long time.
Just like we’ve seen in these last couple years, the world financial crash of 1929 scared capital out of developing countries, and Mexico was suddenly drained of a lot of foreign investment. The federal government, under Lazaro Cardenas, had to change its development strategy in order to focus on nationalizing industry, and to emphasize agrarian reform. Now, instead of exporting food, Mexico was going to produce tons of it for cheap domestic consumption. All the under-used commercial estates would be turned over to large-scale peasant collectives called ‘ejidos’, which would turn out cheap food for the urban workers, thus keeping wages low enough to encourage the growth of industry AND building a market for industrial goods out of a population of former subsistence farmers.
Throughout its history as an independent republic, Mexico has made a lot of fuss over land reform. The right to land is one of the pillars of the constitution and a cherished legacy of the Revolution, and land grants have been one of the main sources of peasant support for Mexico’s long stretch of one-party rule. The state and its agencies have always been torn between giving land to the poor to farm, and trying to make this same land as productive as possible. Historically the federal government has rejected the indigenous peasant’s style of farming: leisurely growing food for one family or one village over a tremendous amount of acreage, with none of the bone-scraping efficiencies of scale or the costly technical expertise that characterize modern agribusiness.
Cardenas’s reforms worked well for several decades. By the end of his term, a big chunk of Chiapas had been given over to ejidos.Nationally, a power base had been created for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who with broad peasant support continued to govern Mexico into the ‘90s. You still see their stickers on certain pickup trucks and Range Rovers. Land grants were one of the reasons the federal government decided to annex the states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo once and for all, and now they’re home to thousands of resettled farmers.
So when the United States entered World War II, Mexico became a breadbasket again. American demand and commercial investment put the country back on track exporting produce and textiles on a big-business level. Land reform stopped and in some places regressed. But now to keep wages down and industry booming, Mexicans’ meals had to stay cheap. That was a problem for farmers, who had become accustomed to buying factory-made plowshares, which were rising in price faster than food, and the farmers started moonlighting as low-wage commercial farmhands when they were done subsistence farming.
To integrate the far-flung Indian growing regions into Mexico’s agricultural economy, the federal government drew on its newly-established National Indianist Institute. The INI trained indigenous leaders to act as community leaders, in charge of implementing all the clinics and sanitation networks these regions needed, as well as managing innovations in farming and telling the ejidos what crops to grow. These leaders became local power brokers. They were also the front line of a government campaign to emphasize the Indian identity of these communities, which ended up dividing Indians from the other peasants who shared their ‘class interests’. And as each community tried to maintain ties with the federal authority to get their land claims recognized, they were forced to compete with other communities in the same region.
Although peasants now control much of the land in eastern Chiapas, haven’t historically controlled the local government. That was down to the ranchers and plantation directors. Unlike in the central highlands, where the Indian townships were awarded patronage, representation, and self-determination for their political loyalty, as well as land grants, in the rough-and-tumble east it was the crooked ranchers who controlled elections.
The rich in these towns have been getting richer, through a variety of means. And with the concentration of wealth and power come opportunities for entrenchment: land can be hard to come by if you cross the wrong people. The agrarian reform authority can give you and your group brand-new land to farm, if you meet certain conditions. However, this land is sometimes occupied by ranchers or landlords in a position to dispute the reassignment of their hectares. The ranchers often have a ‘buffer’ of friendly peons on the fringes of their property: small-time farmers loyal to the rancher and grateful for the land he’s already sold them. After an initial spasm of violence of 1994, when the newly-militant Zapatista guerillas, “lightly-armed”, as they’re invariably described, managed to occupy San Cristobal and five other towns for a day or two, the EZLN retreated to their far-flung pockets of isolated autonomy in the rugged hills and in the inhospitable Lacandon rainforest, to live by the sweat of their brow.
In the highland Tzotzil communities that remain loyal to the federal government, life seems pretty nice. Men and women have their distinct roles, religion is very strong, if highly idiosyncratic-- to the point of attracting international tourism. (The Catholic church considers these groups “traditionalist”, and abandoned them around the time anthropologists were moving in to study them as living exemplars of Maya religious practice.) Once a month, the women queue up in the town square, where a couple of government workers guarded by armed soldiers sit behind a makeshift desk and pass out a bright little pile of Mexican currency to each woman, in exchange for her thumbprint on a distribution record. It’s like something out of the occupation of Afghanistan. The men farm or work jobs in the cities, the women weave and cook and make crafts. The food is lean and organic and the pace of life is pleasantly slow and punctuated by feasts and rituals. The life expectancy in these areas is 75 for women, 71 for men.
While the highland Tzotzil manage to buck the government and the civilization it represents in a variety of poetic ways--for example, not observing daylight savings time, or the sacrament of marriage--these communities stand more or less safely integrated into the modern Mexican polity.Tribute by peonage is replaced with tribute by ballot box, with the rewards of free cash and public works replacing the ancient blessing of absolution and holy communion.
Collier offers 1974, the date of a nationwide conference on Indian self-determination, as year zero for the radicalization of indigenous groups. In coalition with a team of government anthropoligists and social workers, a commitee of Chiapanecan Indians drafted a long list of grievances, which became a flashpoint later as commitee heads began to get involved in the time-honored system of corruption and patronage, and began to clash with radical interlopers from nationwide peasant alliances and workers’ unions. By the late eighties there was a critical mass of educated rejectionists in the countryside, and many of them had already experienced bloody turf battles with enemy peasant factions and with ranchers and their enforcers. Under the leadership of some charismatic metropolitan intellectuals, this peasant army went undergound and started gathering maps and weapons. In May of 1993, the Mexican army raided an EZLN garrison in a remote outpost called Corralchen in the eastern Chiapanecan wilderness, and the government was forced to play down rumors that a sophisticated guerrilla headquarters had been captured, complete with scale models of towns and army bases. The president was afraid any homegrown terrorism would scotch the looming NAFTA treaty, which at that very moment his American counterpart was working so hard to get the US Congress to ratify.
Although the Zapatista leadership chose January 1, 1994, the date NAFTA took effect, to become a full-fledged militant uprising, this coincidence has been understood as a “p.r.” decison. The movement’s critical catalyst had actually come in 1992: the quasi-legal suspension, under President Salinas, of the ongoing process of land reform called for in Mexico’s constitutionally-enshrined Agrarian Code. This bitter decision was a reaction to the debt crisis Mexico was facing in the wake of its oil bust. The international banking community, that shadowy archvillain, demanded that the Mexico Congress ram an austerity program through which would cut off the subsidies and price controls that peasant farmers had depended on. This was the moment at which the Zapatista army decided that all their training and plotting, under the dark cover of the jungle canopy, had gone on long enough.
Land reform, which is very hard to understand and, let’s be honest, kind of boring to read about, had been on the books for a long time, and worked well enough, for enough of the populace, that it outflanked peasant uprisings elsewhere. But owing to the unique development history of the state of Chiapas, there were some major fuck-ups here in the land reform area. The struggle to get land claims acknowledged by the government was drawn-out, bureaucratic, and arbitrary, and ended up alienating a lot of farmers with nowhere else to turn. And the issue goes back a long time.
Just like we’ve seen in these last couple years, the world financial crash of 1929 scared capital out of developing countries, and Mexico was suddenly drained of a lot of foreign investment. The federal government, under Lazaro Cardenas, had to change its development strategy in order to focus on nationalizing industry, and to emphasize agrarian reform. Now, instead of exporting food, Mexico was going to produce tons of it for cheap domestic consumption. All the under-used commercial estates would be turned over to large-scale peasant collectives called ‘ejidos’, which would turn out cheap food for the urban workers, thus keeping wages low enough to encourage the growth of industry AND building a market for industrial goods out of a population of former subsistence farmers.
Throughout its history as an independent republic, Mexico has made a lot of fuss over land reform. The right to land is one of the pillars of the constitution and a cherished legacy of the Revolution, and land grants have been one of the main sources of peasant support for Mexico’s long stretch of one-party rule. The state and its agencies have always been torn between giving land to the poor to farm, and trying to make this same land as productive as possible. Historically the federal government has rejected the indigenous peasant’s style of farming: leisurely growing food for one family or one village over a tremendous amount of acreage, with none of the bone-scraping efficiencies of scale or the costly technical expertise that characterize modern agribusiness.
Cardenas’s reforms worked well for several decades. By the end of his term, a big chunk of Chiapas had been given over to ejidos.Nationally, a power base had been created for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who with broad peasant support continued to govern Mexico into the ‘90s. You still see their stickers on certain pickup trucks and Range Rovers. Land grants were one of the reasons the federal government decided to annex the states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo once and for all, and now they’re home to thousands of resettled farmers.
So when the United States entered World War II, Mexico became a breadbasket again. American demand and commercial investment put the country back on track exporting produce and textiles on a big-business level. Land reform stopped and in some places regressed. But now to keep wages down and industry booming, Mexicans’ meals had to stay cheap. That was a problem for farmers, who had become accustomed to buying factory-made plowshares, which were rising in price faster than food, and the farmers started moonlighting as low-wage commercial farmhands when they were done subsistence farming.
To integrate the far-flung Indian growing regions into Mexico’s agricultural economy, the federal government drew on its newly-established National Indianist Institute. The INI trained indigenous leaders to act as community leaders, in charge of implementing all the clinics and sanitation networks these regions needed, as well as managing innovations in farming and telling the ejidos what crops to grow. These leaders became local power brokers. They were also the front line of a government campaign to emphasize the Indian identity of these communities, which ended up dividing Indians from the other peasants who shared their ‘class interests’. And as each community tried to maintain ties with the federal authority to get their land claims recognized, they were forced to compete with other communities in the same region.
Although peasants now control much of the land in eastern Chiapas, haven’t historically controlled the local government. That was down to the ranchers and plantation directors. Unlike in the central highlands, where the Indian townships were awarded patronage, representation, and self-determination for their political loyalty, as well as land grants, in the rough-and-tumble east it was the crooked ranchers who controlled elections.
The rich in these towns have been getting richer, through a variety of means. And with the concentration of wealth and power come opportunities for entrenchment: land can be hard to come by if you cross the wrong people. The agrarian reform authority can give you and your group brand-new land to farm, if you meet certain conditions. However, this land is sometimes occupied by ranchers or landlords in a position to dispute the reassignment of their hectares. The ranchers often have a ‘buffer’ of friendly peons on the fringes of their property: small-time farmers loyal to the rancher and grateful for the land he’s already sold them. After an initial spasm of violence of 1994, when the newly-militant Zapatista guerillas, “lightly-armed”, as they’re invariably described, managed to occupy San Cristobal and five other towns for a day or two, the EZLN retreated to their far-flung pockets of isolated autonomy in the rugged hills and in the inhospitable Lacandon rainforest, to live by the sweat of their brow.
In the highland Tzotzil communities that remain loyal to the federal government, life seems pretty nice. Men and women have their distinct roles, religion is very strong, if highly idiosyncratic-- to the point of attracting international tourism. (The Catholic church considers these groups “traditionalist”, and abandoned them around the time anthropologists were moving in to study them as living exemplars of Maya religious practice.) Once a month, the women queue up in the town square, where a couple of government workers guarded by armed soldiers sit behind a makeshift desk and pass out a bright little pile of Mexican currency to each woman, in exchange for her thumbprint on a distribution record. It’s like something out of the occupation of Afghanistan. The men farm or work jobs in the cities, the women weave and cook and make crafts. The food is lean and organic and the pace of life is pleasantly slow and punctuated by feasts and rituals. The life expectancy in these areas is 75 for women, 71 for men.
While the highland Tzotzil manage to buck the government and the civilization it represents in a variety of poetic ways--for example, not observing daylight savings time, or the sacrament of marriage--these communities stand more or less safely integrated into the modern Mexican polity.Tribute by peonage is replaced with tribute by ballot box, with the rewards of free cash and public works replacing the ancient blessing of absolution and holy communion.
Why Is There an EZLN? pt 2
Chiapas in one of the poorest states of the Republic and has the highest concentration of indigenous people and the lowest literacy rate. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived, they had to make do with what they found: no gold or silver, only timber and farmland. The timber regions and the farmland regions went on to experience very different fortunes. All of what follows I learned from reading Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, by the anthropologist George Collier. I read the first edition, from Food First Books, published 1995.
The charming mountain city of San Cristobal was founded in 1528 by one of Cortes’s generals, a guy called Mazariegos. Using Indian slave labor, Mazariegos and his lieutenants constructed San Cristobal as the region’s colonial center of power. The plan was to grow cotton and sugar in the lowland jungles, farm European livestock in the temperate foothills, and produce crafts in the urban highland. But the lowland Indians (Collier calls them Indians) got smallpox and measles and died, and the Spanish decided to bring more people to the towns and ranches, and so went around press-ganging more Indians. The Indians and mestizos who worked trades in the towns were integrated into colonial society, but the Indians who worked for the ranchers were still slaves.
The Spaniards divided up the people and resources of their empire according to a system they called encomienda, which laid the groundwork for modern politics all over Latin America. Under encomienda, one well-connected encomendero gets a royal concession to use a parcel of land along with the labor of a group of peasants tied to it, and in return is supposed to make sure the peasants live as Christians.
The Indians and the ranchers of Chiapas have a long and colorful shared history, passing through many iterations of what was always a peon vs. patriarch dynamic. There have been uprisings.There was a statue of Mazariegos in the courtyard of the main church until 1992, the anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of everybody here, when a crowd of indigenous demonstrators tore it down and dragged it through the streets.
By the 1700s San Cristobal was a humming colony, with farmers, laborers and artisans all paying ‘tribute’ to the Crown in the form of goods or labor. Each of the Indian townships around the city had its assigned specialization: sheep, leather, gunpowder. But the Indians in the towns became bourgeouis and distinct from the Indians who did plantation work. And rebellion brewed in the encomiendas. In 1712, a Tzeltal community called Cancuc mounted the region’s first Indian uprising, mostly directed against the abuses of the creepy Spanish priests. The colonial authorities summoned troops from Guatemala and put it down.
In the wake of the Spanish empire, North American and European firms swept in to re-monopolize native assets. Think of all the fancy finery the Western world enjoyed in the nineteenth century: in particular, the mania for mahogany furniture and for coffee, two important Chiapanecan products, as well as all the arithmetically-increasing commercial farmland that fed the world’s exploding populations. In 1824, three years after Mexican and Guatemalan independence, the state of Chiapas was annexed to Mexico. But Chiapas hadn’t been developed to the same degree as the rest of Mexico, and remained a mysterious, inaccessible backwater full of romance and ruins.
Geography remains to this day a fundamental socioeconomic divide in Chiapas: in the western part of the state, the development of commercial plantations kept pace with economic and infrastructural development, and produced a lot of rich landowners and a nuanced social fabric. In the eastern part, towards Guatemala, the rainforests were strip-mined by foreign developers who kept Indians as slaves in their logging camps, never bothering to build any of the roads, schools, or hospitals that plantation owners counted as a cost of doing business.
In the 1860s, the ascendant Liberals started selling poor Indians’ land to private ranchers. Indians had to work on the ranches to live. Under Porfirio Diaz, who ruled Mexico almost continuously from 1877 to 1911, this trend accelerated. The Liberals were in favor of business and modernization and attracting foreign investment in order to expand the Mexican economy. Maybe they thought it was a shame that the Indians had to lose the rights to what had once been their land, but they figured this was the way to bring them into the future and secure for them the benefits of modernity. And this is still a major point of contention for the EZLN: not all indigenous communities have equal access to modern conveniences. In their 1994 agenda for negotiations, besides land, schools and hospitals the Zapatistas demanded televisions, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines.
Then in the 1890s, Guatemala decided to build a cross-country railway to connect its coasts and facilitate its coffee exports. The Mexican government worried that the coffee growers of coastal Chiapas would try to secede, so they built a Pacific railway so all they and all the ranchers in northwestern and central Chiapas could send goods back and forth to central Mexico. (I found it helpful to look at a map at this point.) Eastern Chiapas was forgotten and remains mostly undeveloped to this day. It’s where the EZLN are the strongest.
There are exceptions: the forest-dwelling Lacandon people, one of the last Mexican tribes to be brought into the matrix of modernity, continue to occupy mostly undeveloped rainforest preserves, set aside by the government, where they live off the land, make crafts out of seeds and feathers, and nurture a growing eco-tourism industry. We took a tour of their forest, and we loved it, but even at its edge you’re several hours from modern conveniences.The soil sucks here and so do the diseases. Nevertheless: a lot of peasants were happy just to get some land of their own. The government relocated a lot of farmers to claims in this area, and a lot more came to wait for the formal claim process, while doing what they could to farm the land in the meantime. All found serious obstacles: ranchers, other peasants, a daunting scarcity of cities, roads, public services. By way of example, to get to the fabulous ruined city of Yaxchilan, you have to take a two-and-a-half hour ride from the nearest large town and then a motorboat up the Usumacinta river: fun for a tourist looking for jungle wilderness, but an unforgiving land for the small farmer. This is where the Zapatistas recruit, and also the evangelicals and the various political affiliations.
Like Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Antonin Scalia, the Zapatistas are constitutionalists. They believe the abstract promises of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, like agrarian reform and television for all, will never be upheld under the present system of government, and they call for a new constitutional convention.
The charming mountain city of San Cristobal was founded in 1528 by one of Cortes’s generals, a guy called Mazariegos. Using Indian slave labor, Mazariegos and his lieutenants constructed San Cristobal as the region’s colonial center of power. The plan was to grow cotton and sugar in the lowland jungles, farm European livestock in the temperate foothills, and produce crafts in the urban highland. But the lowland Indians (Collier calls them Indians) got smallpox and measles and died, and the Spanish decided to bring more people to the towns and ranches, and so went around press-ganging more Indians. The Indians and mestizos who worked trades in the towns were integrated into colonial society, but the Indians who worked for the ranchers were still slaves.
The Spaniards divided up the people and resources of their empire according to a system they called encomienda, which laid the groundwork for modern politics all over Latin America. Under encomienda, one well-connected encomendero gets a royal concession to use a parcel of land along with the labor of a group of peasants tied to it, and in return is supposed to make sure the peasants live as Christians.
The Indians and the ranchers of Chiapas have a long and colorful shared history, passing through many iterations of what was always a peon vs. patriarch dynamic. There have been uprisings.There was a statue of Mazariegos in the courtyard of the main church until 1992, the anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of everybody here, when a crowd of indigenous demonstrators tore it down and dragged it through the streets.
By the 1700s San Cristobal was a humming colony, with farmers, laborers and artisans all paying ‘tribute’ to the Crown in the form of goods or labor. Each of the Indian townships around the city had its assigned specialization: sheep, leather, gunpowder. But the Indians in the towns became bourgeouis and distinct from the Indians who did plantation work. And rebellion brewed in the encomiendas. In 1712, a Tzeltal community called Cancuc mounted the region’s first Indian uprising, mostly directed against the abuses of the creepy Spanish priests. The colonial authorities summoned troops from Guatemala and put it down.
In the wake of the Spanish empire, North American and European firms swept in to re-monopolize native assets. Think of all the fancy finery the Western world enjoyed in the nineteenth century: in particular, the mania for mahogany furniture and for coffee, two important Chiapanecan products, as well as all the arithmetically-increasing commercial farmland that fed the world’s exploding populations. In 1824, three years after Mexican and Guatemalan independence, the state of Chiapas was annexed to Mexico. But Chiapas hadn’t been developed to the same degree as the rest of Mexico, and remained a mysterious, inaccessible backwater full of romance and ruins.
Geography remains to this day a fundamental socioeconomic divide in Chiapas: in the western part of the state, the development of commercial plantations kept pace with economic and infrastructural development, and produced a lot of rich landowners and a nuanced social fabric. In the eastern part, towards Guatemala, the rainforests were strip-mined by foreign developers who kept Indians as slaves in their logging camps, never bothering to build any of the roads, schools, or hospitals that plantation owners counted as a cost of doing business.
In the 1860s, the ascendant Liberals started selling poor Indians’ land to private ranchers. Indians had to work on the ranches to live. Under Porfirio Diaz, who ruled Mexico almost continuously from 1877 to 1911, this trend accelerated. The Liberals were in favor of business and modernization and attracting foreign investment in order to expand the Mexican economy. Maybe they thought it was a shame that the Indians had to lose the rights to what had once been their land, but they figured this was the way to bring them into the future and secure for them the benefits of modernity. And this is still a major point of contention for the EZLN: not all indigenous communities have equal access to modern conveniences. In their 1994 agenda for negotiations, besides land, schools and hospitals the Zapatistas demanded televisions, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines.
Then in the 1890s, Guatemala decided to build a cross-country railway to connect its coasts and facilitate its coffee exports. The Mexican government worried that the coffee growers of coastal Chiapas would try to secede, so they built a Pacific railway so all they and all the ranchers in northwestern and central Chiapas could send goods back and forth to central Mexico. (I found it helpful to look at a map at this point.) Eastern Chiapas was forgotten and remains mostly undeveloped to this day. It’s where the EZLN are the strongest.
There are exceptions: the forest-dwelling Lacandon people, one of the last Mexican tribes to be brought into the matrix of modernity, continue to occupy mostly undeveloped rainforest preserves, set aside by the government, where they live off the land, make crafts out of seeds and feathers, and nurture a growing eco-tourism industry. We took a tour of their forest, and we loved it, but even at its edge you’re several hours from modern conveniences.The soil sucks here and so do the diseases. Nevertheless: a lot of peasants were happy just to get some land of their own. The government relocated a lot of farmers to claims in this area, and a lot more came to wait for the formal claim process, while doing what they could to farm the land in the meantime. All found serious obstacles: ranchers, other peasants, a daunting scarcity of cities, roads, public services. By way of example, to get to the fabulous ruined city of Yaxchilan, you have to take a two-and-a-half hour ride from the nearest large town and then a motorboat up the Usumacinta river: fun for a tourist looking for jungle wilderness, but an unforgiving land for the small farmer. This is where the Zapatistas recruit, and also the evangelicals and the various political affiliations.
Like Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Antonin Scalia, the Zapatistas are constitutionalists. They believe the abstract promises of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, like agrarian reform and television for all, will never be upheld under the present system of government, and they call for a new constitutional convention.
At the Mall
The dramatically different legal landscape here makes for some memorable scenarios: some personally dangerous to me the traveler, like automobile traffic, some dangerous only to those voluntarily assuming risk, like the kids in bungee harnesses in this video. This is an ordinary mall entertainment in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas state.
I sometimes picture civil society as this kind of living tissue, punctuated with the bruises and scars of tort law and legalese and binding disclaimers wherever the conflicts between agents colliding on its surface have built up too violently. Wherever there's a puncture wound in the surface, the law has to well up like blood or antigen to knit the tissue back together. What's interesting are the different grades of dings or scrapes or gouges that different societies seem able to tolerate without forming the 'bruise' of liability law.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Animalitos
All day long and late into the evening, the streets in the center of town are full of urchin peddlers.
They ward off the mountain chill in heartbreakingly dirty sweaters with frayed cuffs and they flop along in mis-sized sandals. They’re mostly boys, and all seem under the age of ten. Some are having a good time, some are anxious and hungry-looking, depending on the day. The luckier ones tote ancient shoeshine boxes (my shoes are real scuffed and I am a magnet for these shoe-shiners), or wear wooden trays of cigarettes and gum strapped to their little torsos. But most of the street kids carry baskets full of animalitos: little clay sculptures of whimsical beast-like forms, hand-painted in white, black and red patterns, fabricated who knows where. The fixed routine for the vendor of animalitos is to wander over to the table where you’re drinking your coffee and draw out the different animal sculptures one by one, setting them in a row on your table and pronouncing their names. It is cute and you enjoy the show the first time but you don’t need any animalitos.
“I don’t need them,” you say.
Now they must draw on their limited sales patter and their narrow but effective repertoire of pitiful gestures. They make bug-eyed moues.
“You need them,” they answer, with conviction borne of desperation. They are adepts of the hard sell. They’re poor street children, after all. With their baskets of animalitos, they scrape together whatever they can to help their families. Or are they merely foot soldiers in some unscrupulous con’s grand enterprise? I don’t know.
Someone told me the kids can sell forty animalitos on a good day, during the height of the tourist season. How many animalitos do we need?
They demonstrate to us how you can buy two, a jaguar and one that looks like a dog, and then you can make them fight. No, we still do not need any. They’re incredulous. It depresses you. Each one has his own markings and sculpted, bright little face: I have started to think of the urchins themselves, metonymically, as ‘animalitos’.
Then there are also a handful of beggars who make the rounds, wearing the iconic beggar dress of colorful rags cinched in odd places. These are very traditional beggars whose means and afflictions have changed little down the centuries: blind, deaf, halt, or simply snaggle-toothed and crazy, they croon a simple phrase and twitch their upturned palm plaintively, like personifications of human want and misery. They are eternally picturesque. They don’t bother me. It’s all the people in their twenties and thirties who are able-bodied and reduced to desperately shining shoes and desperately selling gum or hats that you feel for. There is some tragic air around the gum salesmen, who are always impeccably dressed and combed, like something out of Walker Evans.
They ward off the mountain chill in heartbreakingly dirty sweaters with frayed cuffs and they flop along in mis-sized sandals. They’re mostly boys, and all seem under the age of ten. Some are having a good time, some are anxious and hungry-looking, depending on the day. The luckier ones tote ancient shoeshine boxes (my shoes are real scuffed and I am a magnet for these shoe-shiners), or wear wooden trays of cigarettes and gum strapped to their little torsos. But most of the street kids carry baskets full of animalitos: little clay sculptures of whimsical beast-like forms, hand-painted in white, black and red patterns, fabricated who knows where. The fixed routine for the vendor of animalitos is to wander over to the table where you’re drinking your coffee and draw out the different animal sculptures one by one, setting them in a row on your table and pronouncing their names. It is cute and you enjoy the show the first time but you don’t need any animalitos.
“I don’t need them,” you say.
Now they must draw on their limited sales patter and their narrow but effective repertoire of pitiful gestures. They make bug-eyed moues.
“You need them,” they answer, with conviction borne of desperation. They are adepts of the hard sell. They’re poor street children, after all. With their baskets of animalitos, they scrape together whatever they can to help their families. Or are they merely foot soldiers in some unscrupulous con’s grand enterprise? I don’t know.
Someone told me the kids can sell forty animalitos on a good day, during the height of the tourist season. How many animalitos do we need?
They demonstrate to us how you can buy two, a jaguar and one that looks like a dog, and then you can make them fight. No, we still do not need any. They’re incredulous. It depresses you. Each one has his own markings and sculpted, bright little face: I have started to think of the urchins themselves, metonymically, as ‘animalitos’.
Then there are also a handful of beggars who make the rounds, wearing the iconic beggar dress of colorful rags cinched in odd places. These are very traditional beggars whose means and afflictions have changed little down the centuries: blind, deaf, halt, or simply snaggle-toothed and crazy, they croon a simple phrase and twitch their upturned palm plaintively, like personifications of human want and misery. They are eternally picturesque. They don’t bother me. It’s all the people in their twenties and thirties who are able-bodied and reduced to desperately shining shoes and desperately selling gum or hats that you feel for. There is some tragic air around the gum salesmen, who are always impeccably dressed and combed, like something out of Walker Evans.
The Cult of the Wanderer
from Isabelle Eberhardt - “The Oblivion Seekers” tr. Paul Bowles
"In our modern society the nomad is a pariah ‘without known domicile or residence’. By adding these few words to the name of anyone whose appearance they consider irregular, those who make and enforce the law can decide a man’s fate.
To have a home, a family, a property or a public function, to have a definite means of livelihood and to be a useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem necessary, even indispensable, to the vast majority of men, including intellectuals, and including even those who think of themselves as wholly liberated. And yet such things are only a different form of the slavery that comes of contact with others, especially regulated and continued contact.
I have always listened with admiration, if not envy, to the declarations of citizens who tell how they have lived for twenty or thirty years in the same section of town, or even the same house, and who have never been out of their native city.
Not to feel the torturing need to know and see for oneself what is there, beyond the mysterious blue wall of the horizon, not to find the arrangements of life monotonous and depressing, to look at the white road leading off into the unknown distance without feeling the imperious necessity of giving into it and following it obediently across mountains and valleys! ...
There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit."
Eberhardt, the illegitmate Swiss daughter of a Russian aristocrat, converted to Sufism and became a hardcore vagabond and adventuress in North Africa. She drowned in a flash flood in 1904 in Ain Sefra, Algeria, after escaping from a Foreign Legion hospital where she was convalescing from malaria.
"In our modern society the nomad is a pariah ‘without known domicile or residence’. By adding these few words to the name of anyone whose appearance they consider irregular, those who make and enforce the law can decide a man’s fate.
To have a home, a family, a property or a public function, to have a definite means of livelihood and to be a useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem necessary, even indispensable, to the vast majority of men, including intellectuals, and including even those who think of themselves as wholly liberated. And yet such things are only a different form of the slavery that comes of contact with others, especially regulated and continued contact.
I have always listened with admiration, if not envy, to the declarations of citizens who tell how they have lived for twenty or thirty years in the same section of town, or even the same house, and who have never been out of their native city.
Not to feel the torturing need to know and see for oneself what is there, beyond the mysterious blue wall of the horizon, not to find the arrangements of life monotonous and depressing, to look at the white road leading off into the unknown distance without feeling the imperious necessity of giving into it and following it obediently across mountains and valleys! ...
There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit."
Eberhardt, the illegitmate Swiss daughter of a Russian aristocrat, converted to Sufism and became a hardcore vagabond and adventuress in North Africa. She drowned in a flash flood in 1904 in Ain Sefra, Algeria, after escaping from a Foreign Legion hospital where she was convalescing from malaria.
Money
The bank ATMs give you large denominations and few merchants will accept them. There is a change shortage in this society. Nobody will change anything larger than the equivalent of five dollars unless you give them a withering stare or really twist their arm, and then they’ll act like they’re doing you a huge favor. And maybe they are, because now you have a fistful of useful coinage jingling in your pocket instead of some abstract, plastic-y bank note dressed up with a lot of suspicious runes and calligraphy.
The coins are always falling out of circulation and getting re-vamped. There is a variety of sizes and cuts to the denominations, from nice thick soild ones you can rap on a table to an adorable one introduced recently that fits through a pop-top and looks like splendid dollhouse money. I like the thick coins because they’re easy to pick up if you don’t have fingernails. The tenner, with its golden outer rim, is one of my favorites of all the coins I’ve had to handle in my long life of petty commerce. It has exactly the heft it should and it gleams with promise. It’s almost as pleasing as the British pound coin. It’s the largest coin and it makes a worthy tip for cafe service. The satisfaction in this one coin. I also like the 20 note because it’s a nice shade of blue. But I’d rather have two of the coin than the one paper. Is it atavism?
I went out in a very light rain to a beer-and-stuff shop on the next corner. The woman who ran the shop was a Tztotzil and she had two little boys in the shop with her. An iron gate kept me out in the road and her in the store and I asked for the things I wanted so she could pass them out through the hinged trapdoor in the gate. I ordered a bag of spicy potato chips.
The boy said something in Tzotzil. I looked at him and he said it again in Spanish: “Those potato chips are too spicy.” He was warning me with baleful eyes.
“You don’t like them?” I said. But he only looked solemnly up at me. The smaller boy came to the gate giggling and craned his neck back to look at me. He was still giggling as I left to walk back up the cobbled hillside. The rain was light and the hummingbirds were still out, but not the lizards. There is also a cat I like: a slinky black one with a white chest who keeps the other, noisier cats out of the garden. We always had a plan to buy this cat some treat and keep it hanging around while we were here, but we never did and now we have to move on. The potato chips were spicy and delicious.
The coins are always falling out of circulation and getting re-vamped. There is a variety of sizes and cuts to the denominations, from nice thick soild ones you can rap on a table to an adorable one introduced recently that fits through a pop-top and looks like splendid dollhouse money. I like the thick coins because they’re easy to pick up if you don’t have fingernails. The tenner, with its golden outer rim, is one of my favorites of all the coins I’ve had to handle in my long life of petty commerce. It has exactly the heft it should and it gleams with promise. It’s almost as pleasing as the British pound coin. It’s the largest coin and it makes a worthy tip for cafe service. The satisfaction in this one coin. I also like the 20 note because it’s a nice shade of blue. But I’d rather have two of the coin than the one paper. Is it atavism?
I went out in a very light rain to a beer-and-stuff shop on the next corner. The woman who ran the shop was a Tztotzil and she had two little boys in the shop with her. An iron gate kept me out in the road and her in the store and I asked for the things I wanted so she could pass them out through the hinged trapdoor in the gate. I ordered a bag of spicy potato chips.
The boy said something in Tzotzil. I looked at him and he said it again in Spanish: “Those potato chips are too spicy.” He was warning me with baleful eyes.
“You don’t like them?” I said. But he only looked solemnly up at me. The smaller boy came to the gate giggling and craned his neck back to look at me. He was still giggling as I left to walk back up the cobbled hillside. The rain was light and the hummingbirds were still out, but not the lizards. There is also a cat I like: a slinky black one with a white chest who keeps the other, noisier cats out of the garden. We always had a plan to buy this cat some treat and keep it hanging around while we were here, but we never did and now we have to move on. The potato chips were spicy and delicious.
More on the House
Hanging above the fireplace is a heavy mahogany ox-collar. On the mantelpiece, a small framed photo of the couple that owned the house. After their deaths, their ashes were scattered in the garden. There are two stone memorial tablets at the foot of a big tree at the bottom of the yard near the wall, just visible over a carpet of flowers. I also found a little wooden sign under some bushes that said “In Memory of Our Cats.” And still today there are cats that roam in and out of the property looking for food and sex, and still there are people moving in and out of the house to read the couple’s books and look at the mountains and enjoy the quiet. (I don’t like the noise the cats make.)
I have their ancient comprehensive English-Spanish dictionary laying open on a wooden trunk in the corner of the living room. I went to look up something and lifting the front cover I found a green lizard curled up underneath in the inch of space afforded by the thickness of the book’s spine. The lizard took one look at me and bolted down the side of the trunk and under a bookcase. I first spotted this lizard in the house about a week ago. I don’t know how it got in the house or how to get it to leave, but it seems healthy enough. There are plenty of bugs inside to eat. Older paperbacks all show the dainty lace-patterned boreholes of book-eating pests around their ‘gutters’ and the bottom edges of their pages. Flies are always getting in and banging at the windows. The other day, I found a dead bee on the floorboards that was bigger and also yellower than any I’d ever seen.
This morning I noticed a spider dangling from the ceiling of the cloister, outside the bedroom door. It twirled comically on its thread like a bridge-jumper at the perigee of his plunge. It had iridescent green markings. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a spider that color.
Metric:
At the mall I got on a machine that tells your height and weight. Wearing shoes, I am 1.84 meters tall and 81.6 kilograms. These measurements feel alien and clinical but they pertain to me in my intimate corporeality, my very substance. It turns out that just like a fallen meteorite or some giant species of river fish, I am measurable in metric units.
People are always asking me how many kilometers to this or that. In the Lacandon jungle there was a group of villagers sitting on chairs in the grass near the one store, and as I walked back to the camp an old guy tried to get my attention and was asking me how many meters I was. I said I didn’t know how many meters. Apparently in earnest, he asked me if I was too tall to sleep in hotel beds. “Do you need a special bed wherever you go?” The villagers looked at me appraisingly. “Yes,” I said, “I always need to find a special long bed.” The old guy looked grave and nodded and turned to the others, like, “What did I tell you?” Then I had to laugh and admit that I was just kidding and I slept in regular beds. The villagers all thought that was a riot and they gave the old guy a hard time. People are always asking me how many kilometers from this or that. “Look,” I shrug, “Just be happy I’m learning Spanish. Give me a break with the kilometers.”
These laundromats shrunk the legs on all my pants. My ankles are always exposed. And my favorite t-shirt is falling apart at last: the light green one with the compIetely faded insignia on the breast that I lifted from Eric and always assumed was from his days as a lifeguard on some beach I’d never heard of until he told me it was mock-vintage Abercrombie. When it’s cold, I wear a heavy red and blue heavy flannel with a quilted lining. It looks appropriate in the pine forest. We went hiking with some other foreigners and they said as much. Does that flannel give you special knowledge about the trail? No, not special knowledge--just confidence. With the right outfit you feel more prepared in every respect. I like to wear green t-shirts in the jungle and plaid in the pine forest. White at the beach, and also in Merida, “the white city”. The Zapatistas wear black balaclavas, or “mountain-passers” in Spanish, and the women of the Tzotzil town of Chamula and its environs wear long skirts made of unspun wool, dyed jet-black, so that they look, to me, sort of fake, like part of a gorilla costume. They love these skirts and wear them every day. You can see them in the pastures, sitting on the ground near their sheep and combing out wool for new dresses. There is a hierarchy of quality for the skirt material, but I don’t know it by sight. They tend to wear sporty synthetic-fiber backpacks, too, which make a strange accessory. It’s a look. The sheep are funny to watch because they get pegged into place to graze with a length of neon-yellow nylon rope, and when they literally get to the end of their rope, they reach way out with their necks and their three untied legs while their left hind ankle is tethered. They look like idiots.
Sheep watch you when you come close, like they’re waiting to see what you’re going to do. Maybe untie them? No, sorry. If I had to sit on a hill watching sheep all day, I think to myself, then...what?
In the foothills and on the edge of the mountain highway there are cattle fields. ‘The cows in the field’: they’re always right there, available for a rhetorical contrast with some higher function of humanity.
"Conspicuous figures of Zinacantec dream life, cows are always creatures of unrestrained, unpredictable evil power." (Robert M. Laughlin, The People of the Bat: Mayan Tales and Dreams from Zinacantan)
I have their ancient comprehensive English-Spanish dictionary laying open on a wooden trunk in the corner of the living room. I went to look up something and lifting the front cover I found a green lizard curled up underneath in the inch of space afforded by the thickness of the book’s spine. The lizard took one look at me and bolted down the side of the trunk and under a bookcase. I first spotted this lizard in the house about a week ago. I don’t know how it got in the house or how to get it to leave, but it seems healthy enough. There are plenty of bugs inside to eat. Older paperbacks all show the dainty lace-patterned boreholes of book-eating pests around their ‘gutters’ and the bottom edges of their pages. Flies are always getting in and banging at the windows. The other day, I found a dead bee on the floorboards that was bigger and also yellower than any I’d ever seen.
This morning I noticed a spider dangling from the ceiling of the cloister, outside the bedroom door. It twirled comically on its thread like a bridge-jumper at the perigee of his plunge. It had iridescent green markings. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a spider that color.
Metric:
At the mall I got on a machine that tells your height and weight. Wearing shoes, I am 1.84 meters tall and 81.6 kilograms. These measurements feel alien and clinical but they pertain to me in my intimate corporeality, my very substance. It turns out that just like a fallen meteorite or some giant species of river fish, I am measurable in metric units.
People are always asking me how many kilometers to this or that. In the Lacandon jungle there was a group of villagers sitting on chairs in the grass near the one store, and as I walked back to the camp an old guy tried to get my attention and was asking me how many meters I was. I said I didn’t know how many meters. Apparently in earnest, he asked me if I was too tall to sleep in hotel beds. “Do you need a special bed wherever you go?” The villagers looked at me appraisingly. “Yes,” I said, “I always need to find a special long bed.” The old guy looked grave and nodded and turned to the others, like, “What did I tell you?” Then I had to laugh and admit that I was just kidding and I slept in regular beds. The villagers all thought that was a riot and they gave the old guy a hard time. People are always asking me how many kilometers from this or that. “Look,” I shrug, “Just be happy I’m learning Spanish. Give me a break with the kilometers.”
These laundromats shrunk the legs on all my pants. My ankles are always exposed. And my favorite t-shirt is falling apart at last: the light green one with the compIetely faded insignia on the breast that I lifted from Eric and always assumed was from his days as a lifeguard on some beach I’d never heard of until he told me it was mock-vintage Abercrombie. When it’s cold, I wear a heavy red and blue heavy flannel with a quilted lining. It looks appropriate in the pine forest. We went hiking with some other foreigners and they said as much. Does that flannel give you special knowledge about the trail? No, not special knowledge--just confidence. With the right outfit you feel more prepared in every respect. I like to wear green t-shirts in the jungle and plaid in the pine forest. White at the beach, and also in Merida, “the white city”. The Zapatistas wear black balaclavas, or “mountain-passers” in Spanish, and the women of the Tzotzil town of Chamula and its environs wear long skirts made of unspun wool, dyed jet-black, so that they look, to me, sort of fake, like part of a gorilla costume. They love these skirts and wear them every day. You can see them in the pastures, sitting on the ground near their sheep and combing out wool for new dresses. There is a hierarchy of quality for the skirt material, but I don’t know it by sight. They tend to wear sporty synthetic-fiber backpacks, too, which make a strange accessory. It’s a look. The sheep are funny to watch because they get pegged into place to graze with a length of neon-yellow nylon rope, and when they literally get to the end of their rope, they reach way out with their necks and their three untied legs while their left hind ankle is tethered. They look like idiots.
Sheep watch you when you come close, like they’re waiting to see what you’re going to do. Maybe untie them? No, sorry. If I had to sit on a hill watching sheep all day, I think to myself, then...what?
In the foothills and on the edge of the mountain highway there are cattle fields. ‘The cows in the field’: they’re always right there, available for a rhetorical contrast with some higher function of humanity.
"Conspicuous figures of Zinacantec dream life, cows are always creatures of unrestrained, unpredictable evil power." (Robert M. Laughlin, The People of the Bat: Mayan Tales and Dreams from Zinacantan)
Flyer
I translated this myself. It’s a flyer from a march against “impunity”, one of the buzzwords used by opponents of the drug war: it refers to the regime’s free hand in declaring emergencies, detaining suspects, and carrying on like a police state. This march was organized by the Zapatistas and their fellow-travelers, sometimes known as The Other Countryside. The march was timed to coincide with a nationwide demonstration against the war. All the Zapatista villagers came down from their bases in the hills and converged on the city square in near-perfect silence. It made quite the spectacle and there was a lot of press coverage.
Felipe Calderon’s war against narco-trafficers has been a total fracas, having for its result 40,000 dead, of which the majority were innocent youths, poor, children, workers, women, peasants, who had nothing to do with organized crime. Of these 40,000, how many were criminals? And the more than a thousand murdered children, were they also killers belonging to organized crime?
This so-called war has promised that drugs would not arrive in the neighborhoods and schools, but the statistics say otherwise: the violence and the consumption of drugs has increased. These facts prove the complicity between the 3 levels of government, the police, the military, and organized crime, as the true criminals continue enjoying their liberty, power, and fortunes while the sacrifice of the lives of millions of Mexicans continues to grow day by day, filling the streets with terror and drugs.
And mustn’t our northern neighbor have a stake in this war? Does the United States win with this “local” war? The answer is: yes, notwithstanding the economic gains and the monetary investment in arms, bases, hardware, (we don’t forget that the USA is the principal provider of all this to the two contesting sides: the authorities and the “criminals” - the war against organized crime is a two-way business for the North American military industry), that there is, as a result of this war, the destruction/depopulation and reconstrucion/reorganization that they favor.
The war of Calderon, in reality, is only a justification for the militarization of the streets and communities and the criminalization of the anti-capitalist social struggles. This war is against the people who cry: “Enough already with dispossession, exploitation, contempt and repression! For this, the adherents of the Other Countryside in all the country have decided to make a national silent march this 7th of May against the war of Calderon and against impunity.
No more blood!
We’ve fucking had it with capitalism!
Up with the Other Countryside!
The march ending up starting several hours late, I think because a very expensive wedding had been scheduled to take place in the square at that same time. The wedding went smoothly, as far as we saw. There was a big marimba ensemble in the square and about twenty bridesmaids. It was the other country.
Felipe Calderon’s war against narco-trafficers has been a total fracas, having for its result 40,000 dead, of which the majority were innocent youths, poor, children, workers, women, peasants, who had nothing to do with organized crime. Of these 40,000, how many were criminals? And the more than a thousand murdered children, were they also killers belonging to organized crime?
This so-called war has promised that drugs would not arrive in the neighborhoods and schools, but the statistics say otherwise: the violence and the consumption of drugs has increased. These facts prove the complicity between the 3 levels of government, the police, the military, and organized crime, as the true criminals continue enjoying their liberty, power, and fortunes while the sacrifice of the lives of millions of Mexicans continues to grow day by day, filling the streets with terror and drugs.
And mustn’t our northern neighbor have a stake in this war? Does the United States win with this “local” war? The answer is: yes, notwithstanding the economic gains and the monetary investment in arms, bases, hardware, (we don’t forget that the USA is the principal provider of all this to the two contesting sides: the authorities and the “criminals” - the war against organized crime is a two-way business for the North American military industry), that there is, as a result of this war, the destruction/depopulation and reconstrucion/reorganization that they favor.
The war of Calderon, in reality, is only a justification for the militarization of the streets and communities and the criminalization of the anti-capitalist social struggles. This war is against the people who cry: “Enough already with dispossession, exploitation, contempt and repression! For this, the adherents of the Other Countryside in all the country have decided to make a national silent march this 7th of May against the war of Calderon and against impunity.
No more blood!
We’ve fucking had it with capitalism!
Up with the Other Countryside!
The march ending up starting several hours late, I think because a very expensive wedding had been scheduled to take place in the square at that same time. The wedding went smoothly, as far as we saw. There was a big marimba ensemble in the square and about twenty bridesmaids. It was the other country.
Pertaining to alms or charity
"Chiapas, bordering on Guatemala, is even more an off-beat traveler-and-craft-hunter's paradise. There are the various Indian groups--Chontals, Chamulas, Tenejapans and Zinecatecans--do primitive weaving, leatherwork, and make interesting gold jewelry. Due to its remoteness Chiapas has scarcely changed over the centuries. You will delight over the absence of a tourist-souvenir industry. Not many people in Chiapas have had a chance to get a close look at vacationers, and very few of them have any idea at all of how easy an eleemosynary nut we tourists are to crack."
--James Norman, A Shopper's Guide to Mexico, 1966
--James Norman, A Shopper's Guide to Mexico, 1966
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Adventures
I just ate a half-teaspoonful of an exotic flavoring agent.
We were at a tiny, amazing hole-in-the-wall place where the menu changes every night and they love to offer weird traditional ingredients like rootbeer plant. There were fish quesadillas, with something spice-like sprinkled on the fish cuts before searing: tiny brown and yellow granules that resembled very fine cornmeal. They told me what it was and I had to ask again because it sounded like: “Fly eggs.” But it was fly eggs.
Cooked onto fish, they make a delicious seasoning. They’re harvested in lakewater, somewhere out in the jungle where they do things like that, and dried in the sun. I tried tasting a little pinch by themselves. They had a fascinating flavor: with just a few in your mouth, you can’t taste anything, you only get a little mealy crunch, but with enough of them spread over your tongue you’re hit with an unmistakable strong rich savor of ponds and fish and mud and algae and stagnant, fragrant water, such a savor as maybe you’d be advised to forgo, but totally worth trying once. Though afterwards you will want to rinse. R was afraid the flies would hatch inside our bodies. I said not to worry, because of course they won’t!
I’ve had infection lately that I picked up somehow the day after we went to a mezcal tasting at a little art gallery, which you can do here if you like stuff like that: yoga, slow food, dance, meditation, all somewhat casual and seat-of-the-pants. The pain started in my throat and I was hacking a lot and now it’s migrated on to my inner ear, and I don’t know whether to be relieved that I beat it out of the throat or alarmed that it’s persisting in my ear. With every new location we are collecting new complaints, and hopefully forging new immunities. The idea is to grow more resistant to the opportunistic bacteria and more susceptible to the virus that is language. I tried gargling with tequila, which is a folk remedy that actually seemed to do the trick and also felt adventurous.
We were at a tiny, amazing hole-in-the-wall place where the menu changes every night and they love to offer weird traditional ingredients like rootbeer plant. There were fish quesadillas, with something spice-like sprinkled on the fish cuts before searing: tiny brown and yellow granules that resembled very fine cornmeal. They told me what it was and I had to ask again because it sounded like: “Fly eggs.” But it was fly eggs.
Cooked onto fish, they make a delicious seasoning. They’re harvested in lakewater, somewhere out in the jungle where they do things like that, and dried in the sun. I tried tasting a little pinch by themselves. They had a fascinating flavor: with just a few in your mouth, you can’t taste anything, you only get a little mealy crunch, but with enough of them spread over your tongue you’re hit with an unmistakable strong rich savor of ponds and fish and mud and algae and stagnant, fragrant water, such a savor as maybe you’d be advised to forgo, but totally worth trying once. Though afterwards you will want to rinse. R was afraid the flies would hatch inside our bodies. I said not to worry, because of course they won’t!
I’ve had infection lately that I picked up somehow the day after we went to a mezcal tasting at a little art gallery, which you can do here if you like stuff like that: yoga, slow food, dance, meditation, all somewhat casual and seat-of-the-pants. The pain started in my throat and I was hacking a lot and now it’s migrated on to my inner ear, and I don’t know whether to be relieved that I beat it out of the throat or alarmed that it’s persisting in my ear. With every new location we are collecting new complaints, and hopefully forging new immunities. The idea is to grow more resistant to the opportunistic bacteria and more susceptible to the virus that is language. I tried gargling with tequila, which is a folk remedy that actually seemed to do the trick and also felt adventurous.
Mateo
Mateo is the gardener. He could be sixty, seventy, eighty years old, I couldn’t say. He’s small, with short arms and legs and heavily creased brown skin. He makes very little noise and you can run into him in the garden sometimes when you hadn’t known he was there. He most courteously declines to shake my hand because his palms are covered with garden dirt. He wears a cowboy hat and seems as light as a feather. He sounds perpetually on the verge of laughter, with his broad grin and his high, thin voice, and I have to lean down close to him to hear him while he looks up into my face from under his handsome white hat. His teeth are big and white and full of tartar.
“Oh yes,” he says, “It will rain today.”
The weather has become difficult to predict, month to month, in these last years, as worldwide weather patterns of long custom crumble and dissolve in the general flux, and there hasn’t been much rain in the city this rainy season. Everyone says, Today it will rain, but then you find it doesn’t. Clouds mass up and thin out again and blow on. It gets hot in the afternoons. Mateo likes to eat avocados: a tree in the garden bears what must be ‘natural’ avocados, the pre-Columbian variety that people cultivated into the big pear-shaped ones. These avocados are shiny and round and look like black billiard balls dangling from the branches. They don’t taste that great. There’s also a grapefruit tree, but Mateo doesn’t like these on account of their bitter taste. He doesn’t remember the Spanish word for the fruit until I remind him, he calls them something in Tzotzil. His Spanish is as tricky for me to make out as mine must be for him. He can’t make the “fr” in ‘fruit’ or ‘frio’--he says ‘ruita and ‘rio--or the hard ‘g’ in ‘gusta’, or a bunch of terminal vowels, the endings of his words are more like consonants. There is also a birdlike warble or whistle just beneath everything.
Mateo wanted to know about what kinds of fruits and vegetables grew in New York. He was curious about just how far away the United States were. He was totally taken with the idea that I’d flown to Mexico on an airplane. “With the airplane, you don’t have to go all around, back and forth. With the airplane, you come straight there!” There are plenty of people in this town for whom the state capital of Tuxtla Guiterrez represents the effective edge of the world. Anyway, Mateo was right. Around six o’ clock it started pouring in thick, distinct drops from low and heavy clouds, mountain rain. The umbrella vendors prowl up and down the tourist area with their brightly-colored umbrellas and everyone tries to get a taxi. The rain lasts an hour or two, then passes on for the lowlands. The streets flood, the steeper ones becoming like salmon rills, the houses in the bottom-most parts of town having to be bailed out. The hills outside the city are safe as long as all the pine trees grow, but every year they clear-cut and develop more and more of the hillside. You can see these vast rectilinear swaths where the timberland looks like it’s been peeled away, and sown with colorful concrete cubes. The city-sized valley where we live was named by the Spaniards after a type of indigenous architecture where you use mud to plaster over a framework of thin sticks and then thatch the roof and paint a waterproof limestone paste over the mud walls. There were once so many examples of this type of Mayan house that you would naturally call the valley after them, but now all the houses are concrete and no one really remembers the fine art of the mud-and-thatch house. It’s still possible to find disintegrating mud edifices in the center of town, pocked with age and grafitti and with all the crumbled parts reenforced first with brick and pinewood and finally with industrial concrete.
“Oh yes,” he says, “It will rain today.”
The weather has become difficult to predict, month to month, in these last years, as worldwide weather patterns of long custom crumble and dissolve in the general flux, and there hasn’t been much rain in the city this rainy season. Everyone says, Today it will rain, but then you find it doesn’t. Clouds mass up and thin out again and blow on. It gets hot in the afternoons. Mateo likes to eat avocados: a tree in the garden bears what must be ‘natural’ avocados, the pre-Columbian variety that people cultivated into the big pear-shaped ones. These avocados are shiny and round and look like black billiard balls dangling from the branches. They don’t taste that great. There’s also a grapefruit tree, but Mateo doesn’t like these on account of their bitter taste. He doesn’t remember the Spanish word for the fruit until I remind him, he calls them something in Tzotzil. His Spanish is as tricky for me to make out as mine must be for him. He can’t make the “fr” in ‘fruit’ or ‘frio’--he says ‘ruita and ‘rio--or the hard ‘g’ in ‘gusta’, or a bunch of terminal vowels, the endings of his words are more like consonants. There is also a birdlike warble or whistle just beneath everything.
Mateo wanted to know about what kinds of fruits and vegetables grew in New York. He was curious about just how far away the United States were. He was totally taken with the idea that I’d flown to Mexico on an airplane. “With the airplane, you don’t have to go all around, back and forth. With the airplane, you come straight there!” There are plenty of people in this town for whom the state capital of Tuxtla Guiterrez represents the effective edge of the world. Anyway, Mateo was right. Around six o’ clock it started pouring in thick, distinct drops from low and heavy clouds, mountain rain. The umbrella vendors prowl up and down the tourist area with their brightly-colored umbrellas and everyone tries to get a taxi. The rain lasts an hour or two, then passes on for the lowlands. The streets flood, the steeper ones becoming like salmon rills, the houses in the bottom-most parts of town having to be bailed out. The hills outside the city are safe as long as all the pine trees grow, but every year they clear-cut and develop more and more of the hillside. You can see these vast rectilinear swaths where the timberland looks like it’s been peeled away, and sown with colorful concrete cubes. The city-sized valley where we live was named by the Spaniards after a type of indigenous architecture where you use mud to plaster over a framework of thin sticks and then thatch the roof and paint a waterproof limestone paste over the mud walls. There were once so many examples of this type of Mayan house that you would naturally call the valley after them, but now all the houses are concrete and no one really remembers the fine art of the mud-and-thatch house. It’s still possible to find disintegrating mud edifices in the center of town, pocked with age and grafitti and with all the crumbled parts reenforced first with brick and pinewood and finally with industrial concrete.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
On Peanut Butter
They don't eat peanut butter here!
How wild is that? They don't even seem to have an accepted term for it: most people call it 'peanut cream' (which is disgusting admittedly), but I've heard variations. I've tried to visualize myself into the state of finding peanut butter disgusting. I guess it's like taking something you're supposed to eat in a solid form, and making it into a mealy paste.
How wild is that? They don't even seem to have an accepted term for it: most people call it 'peanut cream' (which is disgusting admittedly), but I've heard variations. I've tried to visualize myself into the state of finding peanut butter disgusting. I guess it's like taking something you're supposed to eat in a solid form, and making it into a mealy paste.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Rompe-Cabezas
I was talking and looking down and thinking about something and watching the traffic and coming down some tricky concrete steps set in the sidewalk when I came suddenly to a jutting concrete overhang and struck the main part of the roof of my skull, the part right in front of the crown that you’d use to headbutt someone with, and fell down in the dust and dropped my waterbottle in the road. Across the street some little kids laughed. I rubbed it ferociously and tried to walk it off. There was a tiny bit of blood from where the concrete had scraped my scalp but I was ok and I knew, even as I winced my way down the open road eschewing the sidewalk that it would not be the last time I hit my damned head walking and I could only hope it would be as inconsequential next time. You always have to watch your footing on the sidewalks because there’s a lot of undesirable matter underfoot, in this town especially there’s dog shit everywhere, and you also have to watch out for cars coming around corners or coming up near the curb, because the sidewalks are so narrow, and if it’s not a car it might be a motorcycle coming along the gutter or an unwieldly bicycle with a bunch of people and luggage loaded on it. You might be in a Frogger-esque scenario where it’s you, a bicycle, a motorcycle, two-way traffic, and then a group of pedestrians behind you and some more ahead of you coming the other way carrying children on their backs, plus a street dog weaving through, and maybe a vendor squatting or breastfeeding and up ahead there might even be a passed-out drunk, good luck to them. You have to very carefully dance around the people who are eating the corn-on-the-cob with mayonnaise, and you oughtn’t to kick any children or HIT YOUR HEAD. I am pretty tall and so that’s one more risk factor, because in the densest parts of your typical Mexican city you will find all kinds of rusty metal rods and awnings and concrete overhangs and brutal corrugated iron edges jutting through the airspace layer that begins about at five and a half feet off the sidewalk and gets especially deadly up around six feet, just above my eyeballs but well within striking distance of my skull. There’s also the ubiquitous home security system whereby you top off a cement boundary wall with a sparkling assortment of multicolored freshly-shattered glass shards in the wickedest possible formations. I’ve seen this before in the US but only in pretty rugged neighborhoods. Here this design accent seems to top off the outer walls of even the ritziest compounds. If you are tall enough that you might be in a position to peer on tip-toe over a wall, in low light, in a state of distracted anticipation, woe unto you. The cities are full of glass-topped concrete and in the country, it’s all barbed wire, rusty barbed wire everywhere in the most dangerous permutations: low, high, half-sagged, obfuscated, buried in the dirt. There are also the dogs that run around peoples’ properties in the country. These are more savage and more frightening than the street dogs, who hardly ever bark or threaten. There are wonderful things in the woods, though, too: shacks where woodcutters live and drink beer, mountain streams with cute bridges, weird ugly isolated concrete mansions that look like Bel Air by way of Dubai, or, as if somebody had done with AutoCAD what urban party promoters do with InDesign. The hills around San Cristobal are full of new construction. It’s all silent pine forest up there, like 60s Lake Tahoe, and the only roads are the desire paths of pickups and Hummers. You must hear the cap-blasting all day from the gravel quarries. Cap-blasting and birdsong. I am happy where I am with the lizards and butterflies and just today the little victory parade down our street with a bunch of kids wearing blue luchador masks decorated with the gold puma-head logo of a popular university soccer team. Every day I learn something new in Spanish and forget something else, but maybe the trick is to keep piling on new things and see which ones stick. It’s all supposed to be good for your brain, at any rate.
Once you’ve grasped a few basic rules, you can reliably produce torturous words like “metonymy” in the target language, but just like long ago when I tried to learn French, I can never remember the word for ‘Thursday’, and so I blunder on, judiciously skirting the vast chasms of my ignorance and occasionally ascending these rare Greco-Roman lookouts, making odd impressions on my conversation partners. ‘Pedagogy,’ I’ll say; ‘Ah, or teaching?’ ‘Yes, teaching, of course.’
What is it about Thursday?
Once you’ve grasped a few basic rules, you can reliably produce torturous words like “metonymy” in the target language, but just like long ago when I tried to learn French, I can never remember the word for ‘Thursday’, and so I blunder on, judiciously skirting the vast chasms of my ignorance and occasionally ascending these rare Greco-Roman lookouts, making odd impressions on my conversation partners. ‘Pedagogy,’ I’ll say; ‘Ah, or teaching?’ ‘Yes, teaching, of course.’
What is it about Thursday?
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Birding
This morning a Tzotzil woman knocked on the door with 15 bags of soil for delivery. She had been supposed to come yesterday while the gardeners were working. I couldn't understand what she wanted at first but she wore a gorgeous electric-turquoise head-wrap and she had her kindergarten-age daughter with her. We got the affair sorted out and she and her daughter proceeded to hump the 15 bags at speed across the courtyard and down to the garden, where the owners of the house are carrying out a long-term open-ended landscaping project.
For now, the courtyard itself suffices. I take my book and I sit on a low chair-like relic made of animal skin stretched in an S-shape. You sit under the eaves of the Spanish tile roof and look between black wood columns to the blooming flowers and skinny drunken-looking cacti in the middle of the open courtyard. The street we live on happens to be one of the last cobblestone pavements in town and cars avoid it, so there's nothing to hear but the occasional wandering dog or drunk or sometimes by night marauding mariachis. Today it rained in the afternoon while the sun shone, so that you could watch shining against the courtyard's cool shadows the sunlit raindrops falling while rufous-necked sparrows needled the grass and the hummingbirds whirred down from wherever to suckle the blossoms.
They're white-eared hummingbirds, very tiny and dear and sophisticated, like expensive avian gadgetry. We've been fortunate to see so many improbable birds in this country but who can resist the garden hummingbird with its urgent metabolic extravagance? As if set in invisible slots, they slide from point to point and halt abruptly. They take one good slurp at a time and slot over like someone's clocking their waypoints with a stopwatch. Some effect a flat tuneless chirp while feeding. For little whiffs of things they're violently territorial and you can see them charge at each other, buzzing in like dive bombers and whacking the vegetation, and these little dogfights and the tuneless calls and the riverine murmur of treetops blowing were the only sounds in the courtyard while I read. One at a time the raindrops would spot the sun-warmed clay tile, where they disappeared instantly and spotted down again elsewhere.
For now, the courtyard itself suffices. I take my book and I sit on a low chair-like relic made of animal skin stretched in an S-shape. You sit under the eaves of the Spanish tile roof and look between black wood columns to the blooming flowers and skinny drunken-looking cacti in the middle of the open courtyard. The street we live on happens to be one of the last cobblestone pavements in town and cars avoid it, so there's nothing to hear but the occasional wandering dog or drunk or sometimes by night marauding mariachis. Today it rained in the afternoon while the sun shone, so that you could watch shining against the courtyard's cool shadows the sunlit raindrops falling while rufous-necked sparrows needled the grass and the hummingbirds whirred down from wherever to suckle the blossoms.
They're white-eared hummingbirds, very tiny and dear and sophisticated, like expensive avian gadgetry. We've been fortunate to see so many improbable birds in this country but who can resist the garden hummingbird with its urgent metabolic extravagance? As if set in invisible slots, they slide from point to point and halt abruptly. They take one good slurp at a time and slot over like someone's clocking their waypoints with a stopwatch. Some effect a flat tuneless chirp while feeding. For little whiffs of things they're violently territorial and you can see them charge at each other, buzzing in like dive bombers and whacking the vegetation, and these little dogfights and the tuneless calls and the riverine murmur of treetops blowing were the only sounds in the courtyard while I read. One at a time the raindrops would spot the sun-warmed clay tile, where they disappeared instantly and spotted down again elsewhere.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Why is There an EZLN?
Resentful of the pale young Europeans who breeze in for a week of backpacking and seem to drop fluently into whatever is the language of the moment.
“It’s practically the same language,” laughs the cosmopolitan Frenchman, dismissing and simultaneously crowing over his proficiency (It’s not!). Meanwhile his Dutch or German counterpart is carrying on a long conversation in plain perfect English--the instinctive English to which we had supposed our own claim was secure.
The Italian is right at home, able to keep pretty well within the boundaries of his own native idiom and still be passably understood, as though it were only a question of minding your ‘b’s and ‘v’s.
The Spaniards, of course, like the conquerors they still must deeply long to be, seem to fetishize the small differences that set them apart from their country cousins, lisping like teakettles at every opportunity and comporting themselves as blondly and as affluently as possible.
Rich Europeans in general you can hit here with a thrown stone, cavorting in richy-rich restaurants and calling for all the celebrated vintages, while freezing out the many vendors, beggars and street children who prowl up wide-eyed to their tables like so many stray dogs begging for scraps. You could do an ethnography on the restaurant culture here: once it was rugged young Italians who washed up and opened modest pasta places, then French yuppies with their pastry shops and Belgians with their waffles and chocolate, then the flush Argentines came with their upscale churrascarias, and now it's a veritable polyglot paradise of unwashed, dreadlocked fellow-travelers and the rich tourists who pity them.
I've found a place with enough books here to last me.
There are evident categories of interest in the collection:
Psychoanalysis and creativity
Jewish, Lesbian and Jewish-Lesbian heritage
Nature writing
Regional folklore and ethnography, with a heavy dose of serious anthropology from Harvard (the Chiapas Project) as well as some botany and a variety of local history, many of these warmly inscribed
Cooking
General academic stuff that looks unread (seems like gifts left by guests, many are inscribed)
Travel writing, especially by and about famous women adventurers: Jane Bowles, Josephine Herbst, Isabella Bird.
Classical music, including half a shelf on Mozart.
Everybody who comes to live in Mexico is looking for downtime and so you end up accumulating books, or you did until it became so simple to get English-language movies and television, but not everyone seems to accumulate books out of sheer love of reading. If more than half of your books are books about the exotic locale where you’ve chosen to live, you may not actually be a reader. Here, they pass the test. Most of the stuff is sterling literature in weathered editions: Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, a whole bunch of ragged Henry James, a more or less complete collection of Woolf including all four volumes of published letters, well-worn, and a bunch of scholarly works, there’s Colette obviously, some Anais Nin, Katherine Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor, Isaac Babel, Camus. Things you like to see and rarely do. There are newer books, recent American stuff like Richard Powers, a handful of Jeanette Winterson. There are relatively few books in Spanish, considering, but there’s of course a lot of Rosario Castellanos in the original: trifecta there of female heavyweight, modernist, and local author.
There’s cool stuff.
I found a slightly crumbly saddle-stapled edition of “Pomes Pennyeach” which might be worth some money. For photography, there are heaps of grand tomes, recent and classic, Mexicana and otherwise. Also right here are all the classic Mexico books I hoped to come across somewhere without paying for: the gentleman explorer John L. Stephens’s ‘Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan’ and the Scottish expat noblewoman Frances Calderon de la Barca’s ‘Life in Mexico’ (both 1843), right up to ‘Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas’ by the anthrologist and old Chiapas hand George Collier. Evidently a friend of the house, Collier inscribed this copy on January 1st, 1995, and there’s also a thanks in the book’s acknowledgements. The story around this book, combined with the frisson of having EZLN bases so close by, drew me in and I made a little study of it.
“It’s practically the same language,” laughs the cosmopolitan Frenchman, dismissing and simultaneously crowing over his proficiency (It’s not!). Meanwhile his Dutch or German counterpart is carrying on a long conversation in plain perfect English--the instinctive English to which we had supposed our own claim was secure.
The Italian is right at home, able to keep pretty well within the boundaries of his own native idiom and still be passably understood, as though it were only a question of minding your ‘b’s and ‘v’s.
The Spaniards, of course, like the conquerors they still must deeply long to be, seem to fetishize the small differences that set them apart from their country cousins, lisping like teakettles at every opportunity and comporting themselves as blondly and as affluently as possible.
Rich Europeans in general you can hit here with a thrown stone, cavorting in richy-rich restaurants and calling for all the celebrated vintages, while freezing out the many vendors, beggars and street children who prowl up wide-eyed to their tables like so many stray dogs begging for scraps. You could do an ethnography on the restaurant culture here: once it was rugged young Italians who washed up and opened modest pasta places, then French yuppies with their pastry shops and Belgians with their waffles and chocolate, then the flush Argentines came with their upscale churrascarias, and now it's a veritable polyglot paradise of unwashed, dreadlocked fellow-travelers and the rich tourists who pity them.
I've found a place with enough books here to last me.
There are evident categories of interest in the collection:
Psychoanalysis and creativity
Jewish, Lesbian and Jewish-Lesbian heritage
Nature writing
Regional folklore and ethnography, with a heavy dose of serious anthropology from Harvard (the Chiapas Project) as well as some botany and a variety of local history, many of these warmly inscribed
Cooking
General academic stuff that looks unread (seems like gifts left by guests, many are inscribed)
Travel writing, especially by and about famous women adventurers: Jane Bowles, Josephine Herbst, Isabella Bird.
Classical music, including half a shelf on Mozart.
Everybody who comes to live in Mexico is looking for downtime and so you end up accumulating books, or you did until it became so simple to get English-language movies and television, but not everyone seems to accumulate books out of sheer love of reading. If more than half of your books are books about the exotic locale where you’ve chosen to live, you may not actually be a reader. Here, they pass the test. Most of the stuff is sterling literature in weathered editions: Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, a whole bunch of ragged Henry James, a more or less complete collection of Woolf including all four volumes of published letters, well-worn, and a bunch of scholarly works, there’s Colette obviously, some Anais Nin, Katherine Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor, Isaac Babel, Camus. Things you like to see and rarely do. There are newer books, recent American stuff like Richard Powers, a handful of Jeanette Winterson. There are relatively few books in Spanish, considering, but there’s of course a lot of Rosario Castellanos in the original: trifecta there of female heavyweight, modernist, and local author.
There’s cool stuff.
I found a slightly crumbly saddle-stapled edition of “Pomes Pennyeach” which might be worth some money. For photography, there are heaps of grand tomes, recent and classic, Mexicana and otherwise. Also right here are all the classic Mexico books I hoped to come across somewhere without paying for: the gentleman explorer John L. Stephens’s ‘Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan’ and the Scottish expat noblewoman Frances Calderon de la Barca’s ‘Life in Mexico’ (both 1843), right up to ‘Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas’ by the anthrologist and old Chiapas hand George Collier. Evidently a friend of the house, Collier inscribed this copy on January 1st, 1995, and there’s also a thanks in the book’s acknowledgements. The story around this book, combined with the frisson of having EZLN bases so close by, drew me in and I made a little study of it.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
A Different Prada
The culture here, meaning language, customs, mores, is a little weird and a little foreign and difficult to grasp, but the rest of daily life is just a little more direct and real. When it rains, the streets flood. When something breaks down, you open it up and tinker with it. If a dog is following you, you pretend to throw a rock at it.
If you want to eat an animal, you have to plan ahead several years and graze and water and vaccinate the animal and keep it in a safe place with a rope tied to it. Electricity itself, which you think you’re so used to, seems more primal and potent here, more nature than technology. You can see an eager spark leap any time you plug in an appliance. When the load gets heavy, the grid shudders, and you see the lights dim and glow again like an animal taking a breath. When it’s down, it’s down. There’s always a certain part of town, where the plant is, that’s roped off and managed by a federal authority. Columns of rickety-looking transformers carry the wires up and down the hillside, in and out of valleys, across mountaintops. The lines are always draped vegetally down to individual houses, from whence an unscrupulous neighbor might steal your power like it was your daily newspaper, and inside your house you probably have more lines running around from your main connection, threading out to your light fixtures, your appliances. Where we live, there are several extinct outlets that were installed long ago and then repealed, taped over, possibly burned out or hazardous. There’s one under the couch, for example, cut right into the ancient and gorgeously worn hardwood floorboards. (You need wood on the floor because it gets cold indoors.)
Utility-wise, gas power is the biggest adjustment to have to make. Some homes have wood-burning fireplaces, but in town everyone uses individual tanks of gas to heat water and to cook with. Just as there’s only one company that sells gasoline, there’s one company that sells heating gas and the guy comes to your door to pick up your empty tank and sell you your full one. To harness the combustion power of this big old crusty tank, you have to hook up some different nozzles and adjust some valves and hoses, and you’ve got to light the pilot light in the water boiler. (The cooking range you start up with a match, as needed.) This is the part that scares me. While the blue pilot light’s going, there’s a lever that controls the volume of gas feeding its flame, and you turn it up when you want to heat water for your shower or whatever. It makes a whooshing noise like a blowtorch. Begging your pardon if this is something everyone is familiar with. I remember, growing up, when I discovered that there was such a thing as a pilot light, burning away underneath the water heater in our basement, regulated not by hand but by an ingenious thermostatic system beyond my comprehension, and I thought, My god, there’s an open flame down here, all the time? When you’re done heating water, or when you leave the house, you ideally remember to turn down the flame of the pilot light. When the stove won’t light, it means you’re out of gas. You can go outside and knock on the tank and hear the emptiness ringing. Where they get all this gas from and how it finds its way into these crusty tanks, I don’t know. The guy comes in his truck and he swaps in a fresh one.
There are a number of itinerant vendors who bring all these staples to your door as needed. They all have their theme music. Since a lot of people don’t drink tap water, there’s a guy who drives the water truck, selling garafones, or water-cooler size plastic jugs of filtered and ozone-purified water. His truck plays the “Mission Impossible” theme. The 90s techno theme, from the movie with Tom Cruise. I won’t sit here and lie to your face via blog by telling you that I don’t like that song. There are other companies selling purified water in other parts of the city, announcing themselves with different theme music, but nobody else has anything as catchy as the 90s “Mission Impossible” theme. The country is a rights-management nightmare, by the way. I noticed there are agencies that download movies and tv all day on their high-speed connections and for five pesos each will upload them to your USB drive. Even the brand-new high-end zoo we went to in Merida was bootlegging the theme from ‘The Lion King’ as bed music for a loudspeaker announcement. One case I’d be interested to get to the bottom of is the clothing retailer Prada, who have boutiques in various of the malls we’ve been to. No, not that Prada: this is a different Prada.
If you want to eat an animal, you have to plan ahead several years and graze and water and vaccinate the animal and keep it in a safe place with a rope tied to it. Electricity itself, which you think you’re so used to, seems more primal and potent here, more nature than technology. You can see an eager spark leap any time you plug in an appliance. When the load gets heavy, the grid shudders, and you see the lights dim and glow again like an animal taking a breath. When it’s down, it’s down. There’s always a certain part of town, where the plant is, that’s roped off and managed by a federal authority. Columns of rickety-looking transformers carry the wires up and down the hillside, in and out of valleys, across mountaintops. The lines are always draped vegetally down to individual houses, from whence an unscrupulous neighbor might steal your power like it was your daily newspaper, and inside your house you probably have more lines running around from your main connection, threading out to your light fixtures, your appliances. Where we live, there are several extinct outlets that were installed long ago and then repealed, taped over, possibly burned out or hazardous. There’s one under the couch, for example, cut right into the ancient and gorgeously worn hardwood floorboards. (You need wood on the floor because it gets cold indoors.)
Utility-wise, gas power is the biggest adjustment to have to make. Some homes have wood-burning fireplaces, but in town everyone uses individual tanks of gas to heat water and to cook with. Just as there’s only one company that sells gasoline, there’s one company that sells heating gas and the guy comes to your door to pick up your empty tank and sell you your full one. To harness the combustion power of this big old crusty tank, you have to hook up some different nozzles and adjust some valves and hoses, and you’ve got to light the pilot light in the water boiler. (The cooking range you start up with a match, as needed.) This is the part that scares me. While the blue pilot light’s going, there’s a lever that controls the volume of gas feeding its flame, and you turn it up when you want to heat water for your shower or whatever. It makes a whooshing noise like a blowtorch. Begging your pardon if this is something everyone is familiar with. I remember, growing up, when I discovered that there was such a thing as a pilot light, burning away underneath the water heater in our basement, regulated not by hand but by an ingenious thermostatic system beyond my comprehension, and I thought, My god, there’s an open flame down here, all the time? When you’re done heating water, or when you leave the house, you ideally remember to turn down the flame of the pilot light. When the stove won’t light, it means you’re out of gas. You can go outside and knock on the tank and hear the emptiness ringing. Where they get all this gas from and how it finds its way into these crusty tanks, I don’t know. The guy comes in his truck and he swaps in a fresh one.
There are a number of itinerant vendors who bring all these staples to your door as needed. They all have their theme music. Since a lot of people don’t drink tap water, there’s a guy who drives the water truck, selling garafones, or water-cooler size plastic jugs of filtered and ozone-purified water. His truck plays the “Mission Impossible” theme. The 90s techno theme, from the movie with Tom Cruise. I won’t sit here and lie to your face via blog by telling you that I don’t like that song. There are other companies selling purified water in other parts of the city, announcing themselves with different theme music, but nobody else has anything as catchy as the 90s “Mission Impossible” theme. The country is a rights-management nightmare, by the way. I noticed there are agencies that download movies and tv all day on their high-speed connections and for five pesos each will upload them to your USB drive. Even the brand-new high-end zoo we went to in Merida was bootlegging the theme from ‘The Lion King’ as bed music for a loudspeaker announcement. One case I’d be interested to get to the bottom of is the clothing retailer Prada, who have boutiques in various of the malls we’ve been to. No, not that Prada: this is a different Prada.
Aruga
Doing like fifty on the carreterra, we edged past an equally swift vehicle in the shape of a giant road-ready caterpillar (aruga). It sat on six wheels and was clad sumptuously in lacquered green molded plastic, like a carousel horse, with bright orange antennae. Above its headlights it grinned an enormous caterpillar grin. A sign on its flank said “Rent Me For Parties”! It was an open-cab style caterpillar, no doors or roof, and the driver was pretty young and he was leaning back with one hand on the wheel.
We were continuing north to Villahermosa for two reasons. First, we wanted to see those famous Olmec relics that anthropologists call “the colossal heads”. Second and perhaps more pressingly, because we planned to take the long way around and back up to the mountainous heart of Chiapas, using the graded highway of the western approach instead of the abominable one to the north. When you go north out of San Cristobal down to the town of Palenque, you take curve after punishing curve down from its 7,000 feet, you probably spend half the voyage traveling in the opposite direction from your destination, and you thread these curves along inclines so steep and roads so narrow it seems impossible that they’ll accomodate your bus, let alone traffic in the opposite direction, and because this road connects all the many mountain villages and hamlets, there are also men, women, and children leading animals or carrying bundles up and down the side of the road, edging along the cliff or against the steep hillside. It’s classic. For the protection of these villagers and their livestock there are hundreds of speed bumps and ‘vibradores’, and we duly registered each one. Most of the four-hour ride down I was covering my face with my hands, trying to think of the least nauseating things I could. We were ill for the rest of that day. We sat ourselves in a cafe and felt the earth heaving and shifting.
It was while taking the long way back that I was moved to give thanks for just how far the theory and practice of road-building have come.
Just as the jungled-under ruins of ancient Palenque make such a dreamy contrast to the greasy modernity of contemporary Palenque-town, the screwy road from highland Chiapas down to Palenque is so wonderfully juxtaposed with the dead-shot, black-top four-lane highway west to Tuxtla Guiterrez, the capital of Chiapas. Instead of winding up, down and around every peak and gulch, it bores right through them like justice itself. We crested a hill and I saw the road for miles ahead framed at the base of a deep and perfectly symmetrical ‘V’ of dynamited rock, more beautiful to me than any of the corbeled arches of Palenque itself. The road cut like a canyon. It flowed like a river. This is how you build a road, I thought, straight and flat and still affording big blockbuster views, a swooning red hazed-out sunset on our right as we crossed the neck of an immense mountain lake. Colossal tractor-trailers barreled by on either side. Some were carrying new cars. What a luxury, I thought, a road big enough for a truck big enough to carry a bunch of cars! Bring it on, I smiled, there’s room for all! Fiat, a strong hand, eminent domain: the land calls out for an iron will to bind it! At Tuxtla, the bus station is actually incorporated right into the mall, so you can hop off and grab a Cinnabon or watch ‘Thor’ or get your name engraved on rice in the name of progress.
We were continuing north to Villahermosa for two reasons. First, we wanted to see those famous Olmec relics that anthropologists call “the colossal heads”. Second and perhaps more pressingly, because we planned to take the long way around and back up to the mountainous heart of Chiapas, using the graded highway of the western approach instead of the abominable one to the north. When you go north out of San Cristobal down to the town of Palenque, you take curve after punishing curve down from its 7,000 feet, you probably spend half the voyage traveling in the opposite direction from your destination, and you thread these curves along inclines so steep and roads so narrow it seems impossible that they’ll accomodate your bus, let alone traffic in the opposite direction, and because this road connects all the many mountain villages and hamlets, there are also men, women, and children leading animals or carrying bundles up and down the side of the road, edging along the cliff or against the steep hillside. It’s classic. For the protection of these villagers and their livestock there are hundreds of speed bumps and ‘vibradores’, and we duly registered each one. Most of the four-hour ride down I was covering my face with my hands, trying to think of the least nauseating things I could. We were ill for the rest of that day. We sat ourselves in a cafe and felt the earth heaving and shifting.
It was while taking the long way back that I was moved to give thanks for just how far the theory and practice of road-building have come.
Just as the jungled-under ruins of ancient Palenque make such a dreamy contrast to the greasy modernity of contemporary Palenque-town, the screwy road from highland Chiapas down to Palenque is so wonderfully juxtaposed with the dead-shot, black-top four-lane highway west to Tuxtla Guiterrez, the capital of Chiapas. Instead of winding up, down and around every peak and gulch, it bores right through them like justice itself. We crested a hill and I saw the road for miles ahead framed at the base of a deep and perfectly symmetrical ‘V’ of dynamited rock, more beautiful to me than any of the corbeled arches of Palenque itself. The road cut like a canyon. It flowed like a river. This is how you build a road, I thought, straight and flat and still affording big blockbuster views, a swooning red hazed-out sunset on our right as we crossed the neck of an immense mountain lake. Colossal tractor-trailers barreled by on either side. Some were carrying new cars. What a luxury, I thought, a road big enough for a truck big enough to carry a bunch of cars! Bring it on, I smiled, there’s room for all! Fiat, a strong hand, eminent domain: the land calls out for an iron will to bind it! At Tuxtla, the bus station is actually incorporated right into the mall, so you can hop off and grab a Cinnabon or watch ‘Thor’ or get your name engraved on rice in the name of progress.
Villahermosa
Once the only thing I knew about the state of Tabasco was that Tabasco sauce was not invented there. Then I read Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” which was actually called something else in the original UK edition and now I forget what. It may be my favorite Graham Greene, it’s got everything. In his Mexican travelogues you get the impression that Greene did not like the people very much at all, but in “The Power and the Glory,” (or whatever) he uses the wickedness and fallenness of 1930s Tabasco, when a new revolutionary regime dedicated itself to purging the state of all traces of Catholicism, to dramatize the wickedness and fallenness of everybody, and the possibility of grace. Vintage Greene!
The infernally hot and literally God-forsaken landscapes of “The Power and the Glory” stay with you, so I was thinking about that during the ride. It was pleasant, though. It was one of the top bus rides I’ve had so far. After the wildly nauseating cliff circuit coming down from highland Chiapas, and then the travelling saunas that shuttle fourteen sweat-drenched tourists at a time, always at capacity, between the archaeological sites near the Guatemalan border, we were reluctant to get back on a bus, but it was pleasantly cool, everyone was chill, and the driver played lovely subdued traditional music without any cowbell in it.
With my most recent spate of stomach trouble having come and ebbed, my guts were still feeling hollow and fluttery. Also our limbs were covered with insect welts from the jungle, and I’d developed a heat rash on my neck. I’ve never had one of these before! I think it had something to do with the abrupt transition from cool weather to sultry 105-degree weather. The skin was textured and I couldn’t stop touching it.
I got my legs arranged around the seat in front of me and contorted my upper body so as not to press the damp back of my shirt against the seat back, and I gave in to the easeful sweetness of the ride and watched the countryside rolling by evenly in the late morning sun.
By bus it takes two and a half hours to travel from grimy Palenque to Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco and the commercial headquarters of the 1970s Mexican oil boom. The parts of the state we saw do not look like too much from the road. The landscape kind of reminded us of the endless flatness of the Yucatan, but with a lot more ripeness and greenery and some distant mountains. There is an element of wrack and ruin. Black bald-headed vultures sit in the trees by the road and also circle in flocks over the fields.
There is a lot of green and a lot of white heat, but naturally you have a lot of rot, a little poverty, the simple brutality of cowboys and cattle farming and slaughter, the complex brutality of the cement-block factories: the giant conglomerates that tear apart the mountains to gather the raw materials of the construction industry, and the rough and ready peasant houses all made of cement blocks. Some of the houses are the color of cement, but some are pretty fluourescent shades. Often there are optimistic bundles of rebar sticking out of the roofs, waiting for a second storey that may just arrive some day. In the context of the torrid sun and the fecund woodland, the exposed rebar bundles seem like rooftop plantings: ugly but unkillable vegetation, like the monstrously stricken banana trees along the road, with their wracked, flanged fronds drooping, the bare vines with their withered segments looking just like columns of stripped and sundried vertebrae. Wherever the trees have been removed to make a pasture, the grass grows high, thick, green. Now and again you spot a tire-track trail leading off the highway and out to a house or hamlet or farmstead. There are roadside foodstalls with handpainted signs. There was a barbecue place with a vast grill outside billowing white smoke and a big sign that said "DIOS ES AMOR" in bubble letters with a cartoon pig next to that.
The infernally hot and literally God-forsaken landscapes of “The Power and the Glory” stay with you, so I was thinking about that during the ride. It was pleasant, though. It was one of the top bus rides I’ve had so far. After the wildly nauseating cliff circuit coming down from highland Chiapas, and then the travelling saunas that shuttle fourteen sweat-drenched tourists at a time, always at capacity, between the archaeological sites near the Guatemalan border, we were reluctant to get back on a bus, but it was pleasantly cool, everyone was chill, and the driver played lovely subdued traditional music without any cowbell in it.
With my most recent spate of stomach trouble having come and ebbed, my guts were still feeling hollow and fluttery. Also our limbs were covered with insect welts from the jungle, and I’d developed a heat rash on my neck. I’ve never had one of these before! I think it had something to do with the abrupt transition from cool weather to sultry 105-degree weather. The skin was textured and I couldn’t stop touching it.
I got my legs arranged around the seat in front of me and contorted my upper body so as not to press the damp back of my shirt against the seat back, and I gave in to the easeful sweetness of the ride and watched the countryside rolling by evenly in the late morning sun.
By bus it takes two and a half hours to travel from grimy Palenque to Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco and the commercial headquarters of the 1970s Mexican oil boom. The parts of the state we saw do not look like too much from the road. The landscape kind of reminded us of the endless flatness of the Yucatan, but with a lot more ripeness and greenery and some distant mountains. There is an element of wrack and ruin. Black bald-headed vultures sit in the trees by the road and also circle in flocks over the fields.
There is a lot of green and a lot of white heat, but naturally you have a lot of rot, a little poverty, the simple brutality of cowboys and cattle farming and slaughter, the complex brutality of the cement-block factories: the giant conglomerates that tear apart the mountains to gather the raw materials of the construction industry, and the rough and ready peasant houses all made of cement blocks. Some of the houses are the color of cement, but some are pretty fluourescent shades. Often there are optimistic bundles of rebar sticking out of the roofs, waiting for a second storey that may just arrive some day. In the context of the torrid sun and the fecund woodland, the exposed rebar bundles seem like rooftop plantings: ugly but unkillable vegetation, like the monstrously stricken banana trees along the road, with their wracked, flanged fronds drooping, the bare vines with their withered segments looking just like columns of stripped and sundried vertebrae. Wherever the trees have been removed to make a pasture, the grass grows high, thick, green. Now and again you spot a tire-track trail leading off the highway and out to a house or hamlet or farmstead. There are roadside foodstalls with handpainted signs. There was a barbecue place with a vast grill outside billowing white smoke and a big sign that said "DIOS ES AMOR" in bubble letters with a cartoon pig next to that.
Flies
I now know what is meant by the expression “flies as big as dogs”. It sounds like hyperbole but it’s a poetic truth. Just as there are stray dogs that prowl idly in the open streets, there are stray flies, chrome green and the size of Christmas tree bulbs, that prowl the open surfaces in enclosed and sunny spaces like my garden and sniff their way around, heads down, one paw at a time, dragging their brilliant bulk along with every expectation of courteous treatment as fellow idlers.
They’d be impossible to kill without remorse but I draw the line at letting them palpate my skin or taste my food, and as politely as I can I wave them on like a policeman does a foreigner.
They’d be impossible to kill without remorse but I draw the line at letting them palpate my skin or taste my food, and as politely as I can I wave them on like a policeman does a foreigner.
The World's Game
The bar is stone and worn to a dull shine. The air is still but not unpleasant. The doors around the corner stay open. You get the sounds of the cars, mixed with the clinks of stacked bottles and glasses and the rustle of ice and relaxed conversation and friendly profanity and occasional cell-phone melodies that linger in your head. There is usually no music but occasionally there is shouting. In the corner of the ceiling across the room from the bar, there is a single color television bolted which broadcasts soccer and soccer only, and the soccer stretches out so that pre-soccer lasts fully as long as post-soccer, while the soccer itself, the playing of it, seems to embrace the natural life of a man in its compass, a journey of generations, like space travel, during which a file of scrubbed and smiling boy heroes degenerates into a roving band of filthy old bloody-minded cripples, driven insane by the blast of airhorns and the logorrheic drift of all the hieroglyphics everywhere enclosing the field of play. As in the game of life itself, there are well-dressed men calling the shots from the sidelines, and also as in the game of life it is impossible to be sure where any one competitor stands or what the stakes are in the final accounting. One of the artists I know is a soccer fan and he once tried to illustrate a match structure for me, but the napkin he was drawing on ripped and we gave up. He was contemplative for a while but eventually was back to shouting again. Someone else tried to explain to me how the game of soccer developed organically from an ancient and proud ritual involving voluntary human sacrifice, which seemed to me to go without saying.
Human sacrifice is a topic one learns to tiptoe around. People seem to have a complex about this having (supposedly!) happened and deny that it represents something intrinsic or endemic in the old culture. If it happened, it was a product of exogenous forces, extenuating factors. Famine. Ice age. Meteor. You sense their culpability and how it might terrify them, though it’s hard to come out and say, “Of course I appreciate that *you* were not responsible and would never condone any such thing.” I try to contribute as little as possible to discussions on this theme, and yet, it seems like it turns up often: in cinema, tv, music, body art, tasteless political cartoons.
Human sacrifice is a topic one learns to tiptoe around. People seem to have a complex about this having (supposedly!) happened and deny that it represents something intrinsic or endemic in the old culture. If it happened, it was a product of exogenous forces, extenuating factors. Famine. Ice age. Meteor. You sense their culpability and how it might terrify them, though it’s hard to come out and say, “Of course I appreciate that *you* were not responsible and would never condone any such thing.” I try to contribute as little as possible to discussions on this theme, and yet, it seems like it turns up often: in cinema, tv, music, body art, tasteless political cartoons.
Zoological Correlative
I miss the insects of the north: the praying mantis, the delicate diamond-needle, the spotted ladybug. There are ladybugs here but they have no spots, like the ghostly plastic action figures, sold loose in the market, run off as mold testers by Chinese fabricators and left unpainted. If you know what you’re looking at you can identity Batman (the ears) or the Terminator (sunglasses, the ragged flesh around the hydraulic arm) in these smooth blue or green or gray simulacra, like Platonic forms of Hollywood properties. The bugs here are larger and hungrier and while there are some truly beautiful specimens, like the butterfly as big and bright as a tennis ball, they are mostly skulking beasties. There are invasive nightgoing scorpions, serpentine centipedes, heavy-duty grasshoppers a little too eager to become locusts. These kick so powerfully at the touch that I was reminded out of the blue one day of that ‘field goal’ sequence in the classroom-desk game of paper football. There are also the amazing little herps that prey on them. The geckos run the gamut from little-finger length to about six inches and eat their young. They will crawl under doors and behind picture frames. Their cardinal virtues are secrecy and patience. The skinks in the garden are territorial and only come together to mate (I understand). Caught by the tail they cut their losses and leave it thrashing like a cool special effect. Then there are the bats, who skim the plunge pool at dusk for drowning bugs, dropping from palm fronds and describing figure-eights. They are as big as pigeons and fly as low. As with the sign-painters I get an unrequited thrill being near them.
The mosquitos deserve special mention because as rarely as you get a glimpse of them, you feel their presence all the waking day long and then again when they wake you up in bed. They may enjoy the rare tang of furiously boiling blood.They are so hard to get away from that when they are not biting you, you are always conscious of your relief. I have wondered whether it would be possible to plant some weed or spray some elixir or install some electromagnetic field and kill them all to the very last, though if this method existed I assume it would have been advertised to me. In grocery stores I inspect all the products for sale in the anti-insect section, which I once used to do only to remind myself how obliviously wicked and intolerant my countrymen were.
There are two ways to go with repellent: the natural stuff, which seems to attract bugs, maybe as a test to their courage, and the synthetic stuff, which doesn’t actually attract them but doesn’t do anything to stop them and seems like too much to pay for the privilege of absorbing exotic toxins. The strongest synthetic bugspray always comes in a shrink-wrapped aerosol can, because its manufacturers know their customers aren’t worried about the long-term environmental effects of shrink wrap or aerosol propellant.
There are large nocturnal mosquitos and smaller, banded diurnal ones. The day mosquitos are plague-ridden. Dengue is a disease like the flu (which, come to think of it, also has an evocative foreign name), a virus I think, that pirates the mitochondria and causes aches, fatigue, stomach upset, and acute photosensitivity. In my lifetime I’ve had plenty of the first three symptoms, but something about this last intrigues me, and I suspect I could find it in myself to wring some perverse delight out of staying confined all day in a dark room, listening to traffic, aching. An objective correlative. Knock on wood.
The mosquitos deserve special mention because as rarely as you get a glimpse of them, you feel their presence all the waking day long and then again when they wake you up in bed. They may enjoy the rare tang of furiously boiling blood.They are so hard to get away from that when they are not biting you, you are always conscious of your relief. I have wondered whether it would be possible to plant some weed or spray some elixir or install some electromagnetic field and kill them all to the very last, though if this method existed I assume it would have been advertised to me. In grocery stores I inspect all the products for sale in the anti-insect section, which I once used to do only to remind myself how obliviously wicked and intolerant my countrymen were.
There are two ways to go with repellent: the natural stuff, which seems to attract bugs, maybe as a test to their courage, and the synthetic stuff, which doesn’t actually attract them but doesn’t do anything to stop them and seems like too much to pay for the privilege of absorbing exotic toxins. The strongest synthetic bugspray always comes in a shrink-wrapped aerosol can, because its manufacturers know their customers aren’t worried about the long-term environmental effects of shrink wrap or aerosol propellant.
There are large nocturnal mosquitos and smaller, banded diurnal ones. The day mosquitos are plague-ridden. Dengue is a disease like the flu (which, come to think of it, also has an evocative foreign name), a virus I think, that pirates the mitochondria and causes aches, fatigue, stomach upset, and acute photosensitivity. In my lifetime I’ve had plenty of the first three symptoms, but something about this last intrigues me, and I suspect I could find it in myself to wring some perverse delight out of staying confined all day in a dark room, listening to traffic, aching. An objective correlative. Knock on wood.
Elote
From my desk I can hear gentle honking, birdsong, and the passage of buses and automobiles down the through road that crosses the city at its center, a mile to the east. The different engine types sound various chords and harmonies together as these vehicles brake and shift and speed off outside my front door. The sidewalk is narrow. Many times I have gone for a walk and taken an unfamiliar path and wound up where the sidewalk was too narrow to ignore the side mirrors of the oncoming cars, or where sidewalks disappear altogether and give way to trickles of wastewater or tracks of bleached garbage demarcating pedestrian passages alongside elevated dirt roads. The dust outside the city limits is unbelievable: in the days of carriage transport there used to be a team of horse-drawn sprinkler buggies who would wet down the streets in the morning and afternoon, which kept the dust manageable but muddied the wheel ruts, deepening and hardening the narrow troughs of the carriageway so that today automobiles with low suspension get caught and ground against the dirt until they can accelerate, which gives the traffic on the old carriageways an upsettingly violent herky-jerky rhythm and renders lethal any transverse passage on foot.
There are also motorcycles outside my door. Traditional six-cylinder cycles, single-stroke motorbikes, the occasional trundling chromed-out lowrider with banners waving, the single-person scooters that manage to take whole families out for the day and back at night, three people clinging together on a narrow seat with a child under the dashboard straddling the pedals, all four leaning at corners. The man at the nearby motorcycle repair shop, which also sells bicycles although I have never seen anyone ride a bicycle here, tells me that a family of six can fit on one of these scooters, and although I suspect he’s pulling my leg I wouldn’t be too shocked to see it, Junior sandwiched on the seat while Dad steers and Mom cradles the baby, two younger daughters making room for dad’s pedal foot and hanging for dear life onto his pant legs. I have a horror of stuff like this, I can’t bear to watch people pose near the edges of cliffs or in the mouths of lions. I guess I would feel responsible for a tragedy I foresaw: there is no “innocence” in being a bystander, I must evidently believe. I should mention the person driving the scooter will often be drinking a cola or eating a popsicle.
The sun sets around 6:30. We are coming out of the solstice and the rainy season and the days are getting sweatier. The humidity seems to affect my brain the way moisture affects magazines, swelling it up and putting stiff ripples in it. There is a corn-on-the-cob vendor who comes around in the early evening and as the days are getting longer and hotter his cries seem more and more piercing. I thought he was in trouble until my housemate explained what he was hawking. The alien word he repeats rests heavily on my addled mind, it’s so far removed from any cognate I can think of for corn or grain or foodstuff. This word has a suggestive Attic theatricality and for me it has come to connote desperation.
The Ruin is at the corner of a wide street and a narrow street. The entrance and sign face the narrow street, so that to a car passing along the wide street it looks like yet another windowless one-story masonry structure, moldering since the colonial period. A massive wooden stable door with a barred window has aged well and gives an air of crumbled dignity to the otherwise bare facade. There is very little graffiti in the city. The custom in advertising here, whether commercial, civic, or electoral, is to paint directly on the primed walls of buildings in garish, perfectly-ruled letters and symbols, over and over, and so anyone who yearns to decorate the public prospect can always find ready work. I am a conoisseur of these paintings and have my favorites in different categories, and I gawk like a tourist when I spot a painter at work with his delicate instruments.
The Ruin is what you are meant to call a bar-and-restaurant. It serves food to drinkers and drink to diners. Most of the patrons are single men who linger through both phases of custom, and for this reason, it is most accurate and more convenient to refer to The Ruin as a bar tout court.
No one has any idea how long the place has been a bar in the modern sense, because it has transitioned so smoothly from an inn and carriage house to an out-of-towners saloon to a watering hole for faintly upscale locals and some emigre artist types. The ruined part is the old stable building abutting the serving area. From a high window in the wall over the cash register you can see into the darkness of the stables, which once must have reeked with horsiness but are now full of dry and pleasantly cool rubble, with little bugs dancing in the light and stray cats laid up in pregnancy. It’s not sanitary in an absolute sense. It has the very high exposed-beam ceilings typical of plantation-era construction, and in the western alcove where there used to be a separate chamber for who knows what, the handsome rough-hewn stone pilasters on behalf of which the sole conservation attempt made has been the painting of beer logos. I sit in this bar as long as I can, as often as I can. In the world of the Ruin Obama is not the President, nor is Bill Gates the chairman of Microsoft, there are no such things as rap music or shelter magazines, and there is nothing standing in the way of eternity, an endless afternoon purged of the consequential and the determinate, a late afternoon opening onto the moonlit dusk of the truly fortunate survivors.
Despite boasts to the contrary, the artists make most of their living at a craft fair in the north of the city. Every city on earth has a craft fair and I believe the crafts offered vary only superficially from city to city, but I went along one Saturday afternoon...
There are also motorcycles outside my door. Traditional six-cylinder cycles, single-stroke motorbikes, the occasional trundling chromed-out lowrider with banners waving, the single-person scooters that manage to take whole families out for the day and back at night, three people clinging together on a narrow seat with a child under the dashboard straddling the pedals, all four leaning at corners. The man at the nearby motorcycle repair shop, which also sells bicycles although I have never seen anyone ride a bicycle here, tells me that a family of six can fit on one of these scooters, and although I suspect he’s pulling my leg I wouldn’t be too shocked to see it, Junior sandwiched on the seat while Dad steers and Mom cradles the baby, two younger daughters making room for dad’s pedal foot and hanging for dear life onto his pant legs. I have a horror of stuff like this, I can’t bear to watch people pose near the edges of cliffs or in the mouths of lions. I guess I would feel responsible for a tragedy I foresaw: there is no “innocence” in being a bystander, I must evidently believe. I should mention the person driving the scooter will often be drinking a cola or eating a popsicle.
The sun sets around 6:30. We are coming out of the solstice and the rainy season and the days are getting sweatier. The humidity seems to affect my brain the way moisture affects magazines, swelling it up and putting stiff ripples in it. There is a corn-on-the-cob vendor who comes around in the early evening and as the days are getting longer and hotter his cries seem more and more piercing. I thought he was in trouble until my housemate explained what he was hawking. The alien word he repeats rests heavily on my addled mind, it’s so far removed from any cognate I can think of for corn or grain or foodstuff. This word has a suggestive Attic theatricality and for me it has come to connote desperation.
The Ruin is at the corner of a wide street and a narrow street. The entrance and sign face the narrow street, so that to a car passing along the wide street it looks like yet another windowless one-story masonry structure, moldering since the colonial period. A massive wooden stable door with a barred window has aged well and gives an air of crumbled dignity to the otherwise bare facade. There is very little graffiti in the city. The custom in advertising here, whether commercial, civic, or electoral, is to paint directly on the primed walls of buildings in garish, perfectly-ruled letters and symbols, over and over, and so anyone who yearns to decorate the public prospect can always find ready work. I am a conoisseur of these paintings and have my favorites in different categories, and I gawk like a tourist when I spot a painter at work with his delicate instruments.
The Ruin is what you are meant to call a bar-and-restaurant. It serves food to drinkers and drink to diners. Most of the patrons are single men who linger through both phases of custom, and for this reason, it is most accurate and more convenient to refer to The Ruin as a bar tout court.
No one has any idea how long the place has been a bar in the modern sense, because it has transitioned so smoothly from an inn and carriage house to an out-of-towners saloon to a watering hole for faintly upscale locals and some emigre artist types. The ruined part is the old stable building abutting the serving area. From a high window in the wall over the cash register you can see into the darkness of the stables, which once must have reeked with horsiness but are now full of dry and pleasantly cool rubble, with little bugs dancing in the light and stray cats laid up in pregnancy. It’s not sanitary in an absolute sense. It has the very high exposed-beam ceilings typical of plantation-era construction, and in the western alcove where there used to be a separate chamber for who knows what, the handsome rough-hewn stone pilasters on behalf of which the sole conservation attempt made has been the painting of beer logos. I sit in this bar as long as I can, as often as I can. In the world of the Ruin Obama is not the President, nor is Bill Gates the chairman of Microsoft, there are no such things as rap music or shelter magazines, and there is nothing standing in the way of eternity, an endless afternoon purged of the consequential and the determinate, a late afternoon opening onto the moonlit dusk of the truly fortunate survivors.
Despite boasts to the contrary, the artists make most of their living at a craft fair in the north of the city. Every city on earth has a craft fair and I believe the crafts offered vary only superficially from city to city, but I went along one Saturday afternoon...
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Tropical Malady
(The guy's English was great so this is an unfair sentence to pick out but that's what he said.)
What Luis knows familiarly as a chincha, I can only identify, clinically, as a coreid, or leaf-footed bug, member of the class of "true bugs" or hemipterans, etc. You would sort of know one of these if you saw it but unless you were an entomologist you wouldn't have a ready name for it. Luis just looked at these pearly blisters and said, "Ah, chincha." Since noticing them I had been entertaining everything from splashed coffee to leprosy.
Here's a different variety of chincha that we found later that morning in the jungle:
Lie down with chinchas, wake up with little blisters.
Here is a cool picture of a tree that was clawed by a jaguar:
Friday, February 4, 2011
Travel
Some nice stuff:
Some fears:
- There are a lot of Office Depots here, in case we need office supplies. I read somewhere that paper is expensive, haven´t tried to buy any yet
- Fruit bats!
- Locals have a fun accent. It´s kind of lilting and sing-song. Carribean influence?
- The ¨frente frio¨ has arrived, making our transition a little easier and producing all these beautiful clouds
Some fears:
- tropical diseases
- the police with machine guns
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Metaphor for a Gnostic
The right speck of dust falls in just the right spot on the open page and makes a period appear as a colon: that is a metaphor for the gnostic disturbance (also for the impulse to communicate a meaningless crypto-event in one's illegible life, eg via blogging).
The Most Real Thing
The roadscapes of 4-lane commercial drag: they seem to go on forever, the way life seems to go on forever, to Canada, to Latin America: nothing more real than these Dunkin Donuts and Staples and all that furniture and fast food and roadside detritus, yes, it's an experience of the sublime, the polluted sublime of post-modernity, of failure to build anything 'modern'. Cities being just obstacles to the steady expansion of the 4-LANE COMMERCIAL DRAG, one hopes it will wrap both magnetic poles under one bustling belt, unify everybody under the sign of shitty jobs and junk for sale. Wonderful. They tell you not to dwell on it, but--there it is--and you have so much LOVE to give, that you have to love it. What else would you do? IF you could not love it (if it will not speak back your love) perhaps you can go on loving it anyway, to yourself, tragically- that would be a kind of modernity.
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