Geckos

   There are two mountain ranges in Chiapas. The northern range, which is pine-y on top, gets cold at night and while there are plenty of reptiles active during the day, I never saw any geckos. The southern range, which is a part of the Sierra Madre Occidental, is lush and tropical. In fact, as you climb the northern face of this range, travelling south towards Tapachula and the Guatemalan border, you reach a point just past the crest of the mountains where the landscape flips totally, like you’ve just stepped out of a plane in a distant country, the climate changing abruptly and the steam and cloud coming down and with vivid green and broad-leaved everything. This is Soconusco, and it turned out to be full of geckos. The whole south of the country is full of geckos. As I sit here in this hotel patio, I can hear a gecko barking from behind the Linksys wireless router affixed to the wall of the courtyard, right under a brick overhand.

    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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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