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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)