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.