Article

The Will To Survive

By SEAN LUO
September 18, 2004

In the sky he planted stars and in the forest he planted trees.
There is only one group of stars and only one source of trees.
When a tree falls, a star also falls.

                                    CHAN KIN, Viejo del Naja, Lacandon Rain Forest

Rivers rise and retreat.  The freezing highland raindrops wink at the red crown and the yellow walls of the Cathedral in The Zocalo, in San Cristobal de Las Casas every day.  Clouds cover the top of the green mountaintops like whipped cream, just as they have been, always, centuries after centuries.

Beneath the sky, lived a group of people, forgotten and neglected, persecuted and oppressed, died and insurrected.  Most of all, flourishing, beatific, iconoclastic.  If American Indians are still alive today, they live in the Mayas.

“My grandfather lived in a purely Indian community a hundred and fifty kilometers south of here,” Cesar told me, “but it was too poor and too crowded, so he moved out and married a metizo woman.  So, I am a metizo too.”  Cesar spoke softly, with an unassuming Mexican accent that mixed the Js with the Ys.  He was a short man, wearing an unkempt combination of t-shirt and pants.  With a pair of spectacles, he reminded me of an absent-minded professor, and my thoughts often wandered off during his long and passionate monologues, much like when I was sitting through a lecture.  In an alternate space-time, he might have been standing behind a podium, in front of a group of malleable preppies.

But in this life, he’s simply an underpaid tour-guide for a small independent company.

The cambis rambled for but twenty minutes out of the city center.  A large bienvinido banner was suspended over a bridge, informing the visitors that Chamula had arrived.  Getting out of the car, I found myself standing on the top of a large vacant lot, looking over a strange little village sitting inside a graying valley.  Plastic bottles and other imperishable trash spread all over, like weed.  A cemetery was nearby.

“The blue crosses are for young people and children.  The black ones are for the old.  Relatives are buried together.  Look over there across the road.  That’s where people who died of unnatural causes, accidents, and so forth were buried.  People here want to keep them separate.” Cesar went on, “the blue and the green crosses are the same, because they don’t differentiate green and blue in the indigenous languages.”

I couldn’t help but notice the large number blue crosses.  Hovering over the small crosses, green hills were topped with giant blue crosses, which were here before the Catholics arrived.  Crosses were sacred in Maya culture, for they believe it represents the maize, through which all people were born into the world.   

The tour group meandered through a dirt road to the village center, where the church was.  A wrinkly woman wearing colorful dresses showed us how they beat wool from sheep clippings.  Cesar seemed to know many people in the town, even though he insisted that people here were distant and he was often not welcomed as an intruder.  “Don’t take pictures”, he said, “especially not in the church, because they’ll take away your film and destroy your camera.  And don’t take portraits of people without their permission.  They’d believe you had taken a part of their soul away.”

Although the Chiapas Highland Indian communities are often called villages, they cover vast areas and comprise of large populations, and have been growing rapidly recently.  San Juan Chamula contains a ceremonial center, but most of its residents live in clutches of houses and fields called parajes.  They have been also active in immigrating into San Cristobal recently.  Mexican government never knew what to do with these natives.  With a 65% illiteracy rate, it’s hard to even communicate the simplest policy instructions.  Their village political leaders, separate from the spiritual leaders, were chosen by yelling and throwing of rotten vegetables.  We walked pass a congregation of people waiting for the distribution of government subsidy in a mass-hall, and everyone looked exhausted and frazzled.  Men wore plain shirt and jeans, wandering aimlessly.

“People in San Cristobal don’t like the Chamulans,” Cesar said, “they blame the Chamulans for all of the city’s problems: crime, sanitation.  They think Chamulans are lazy and pushy, and promiscuous sexually.  Zinacantan, the other village, has a much better reputation.  You can identify the different villages easily by the sort of clothes they wear.” 

In front of the church, Cesar talked to one of the other friends he knew.  He was a guard for the church, and Cesar shook his hands.  I wanted shake his hands too, but he retracted the instant he touched my fingers as if he were electrocuted.  I saw his uncomfortable face, and I wondered if I had broken some unspoken taboo.

Inside the church, the atmosphere was one of intense religiosity.  The spiritual and ceremonial center of Chamula was a dark, almost antagonistic place.  The idols of the saints wore mirrors, a path that led to another world.  Many candles of various colors were lit on the ground, right next to the Coca-Cola bottles and eggs.  The white candles were foods for the gods.  The floor was mostly covered with pine needles.  As I walked through the narrow corridor, I saw healers twisting the neck of a living chicken, rubbing the chicken over a small boy’s body.  The healers then made the boy drink Coca-Cola and uttered gibberish.  Finally he rubbed the boy with eggs and a cilantro looking batch of plants.  The healers learned of their roles from their dreams and they were paid for by their patients.  Candles burned on as tourists stalked and stared, talked and pointed.

The strange juxtaposition of Coca-Cola with everything else was not simply a result of the postmodern, neo-liberal invasion of American cooperate hegemony.  The satellite TV dish on the top of nice apartments and the ubiquitous cell phones were indeed what they were, but the carbonated soft drinks actually had an added spiritual significance: the villagers believed burping got rid of the evil spirit, and therefore they welcomed commercialized burping inducing agents with an open embrace. 

We found our way into the leaders adobe.  Cesar seemed as if he knew the leader quite well and we sat around in a circle in front of a shrine of a Catholic saint.  The shrine was covered by straw.  Traditional Indian ritual costumes were hanging around, almost haphazardly.  The spiritual leaders rotated every year.  Only residents with a fortune (around twenty thousand US dollars), often earned elsewhere in the country, could fulfill such a position and move into the center of the city.  They must purchase fireworks for the frequent rituals, coal and resin for the daily ceremonies, an inordinate amount of candles to burn, and best of all, gallons of liquor which they distilled themselves.  The Mayas believed, as many other civilizations in the world did, that alcohol was magical—it was a sacred liquid through which human beings could communicate with deity more directly and more freely.  Around the circle, we all had a little sip of the liquor.  It had a mild cinnamon taste.  The leader was a plump, smiley, worldly looking middle-aged fellow.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he made his money in Mexico City, or even had connections to the US.  He put on his headdress and danced and sang a little for us, with complete ease.  I was a bit weary.  A man so exalted among the locals was almost obsequious to the tourists, always eager to please.  He probably assumed we had money to spend.

We left Chamula to go to Zinacantan around noon.  The market was almost over.  Textile selling young women offered to let me take a portrait for ten pesos.  I declined, remembering Cesar’s advice: “don’t give them money, or they’ll never go to school.”  I stared blankly at the gargantuan red, white and blue Pepsi signs in a distance, fuzzy in a dewy, midday fog.  The clock tower was an hour off—Chamula even had its own time.  It was a shriveled, hybrid world, mysteriously gloomy, wantonly isolated.

The van stopped unexpectedly in front of a house.  We walked out and were greeted by a group of women who were dressed in beautiful purple robes of sorts.  Zinacatan, only seven kilometers west, was remarkably different.  The women smiled pleasantly and talked to us with great hospitality.  They invited us into their kitchen hut, which had nothing in it except a shabby looking primitive stove and a small medicinal shrine of sorts.  They offered us tortilla shells and cinnamon powders.  One of the hostesses showed us how she made these textiles with an old fashioned wooden device.  She put belt on and moved to and fro.  I suddenly had a Freudian epiphany.  She wasn’t just working.  She was making love to her work.  In my mind’s eye, she faded into thousand cotton gins humming—through which we are desexualized, like cattle.

Cesar was indefatigable in inculcating us the myriad Maya stories.  Apparently there were five different colors of corn, each represented something different—the red corn was used only for ritualistic purposes.  He summarized some of the more arcane practices of Maya medicine, such as breaking a rather arbitrarily chosen chicken egg and see if there were “evil eyes” (bacterial dark spot). 

“How many of you believe these practices actually have some merits?”  He asked, insisting on a hand raising poll.  Everybody said yes, or maybe, which shocked me.  I guess peer pressure trumped all in the end.  I told him that I always thought herbal medicine must have had efficacy or people would’ve got rid of it through trial and error.

“What about the chicken rubbing and the Coke drinking?” he smiled, “you know, I’ve talked to psychiatrists, and they say it is probably the placebo effect.  When my mother married my father, she couldn’t get pregnant.  So she went to a healer.  The healer said her body was too cold, she needed to eat something that’s warm.  What is warm?  An opossum.  Do you all know what an opossum is?  She listened to the healer and ate an opossum.  And…”

“There we have you!” echoed someone.

“Right.  And once I got a huge cut on my arm, and I was going to go to the hospital, but my mother said, wait, wait.  And she ran to another room and got some spider web.  She put it on the wound and the bleeding stopped instantly.”

He grew quiet to collect his thoughts.

“When I was young, my mother would always do things like that.  Then I grew a bit older and I gradually stopped believing all this stuff.  I always tell my mother, mom why are you growing corn in the backyard, all this corn and chicken and ritual are just all ridiculous superstitions.  But my mother just keeps doing it every year.  Then I left San Cristobal and went to Cancun and learned English.  I began to understand her a bit more, slowly, why she did what she did.”

Someone asked him if he was religious.  “No, I’m an atheist,” he said, “I don’t really know if god exist or not.”  Someone corrected him that he’s not strictly an atheist, but an agnostic. 

On our way to Zinacantan’s church, I saw Cesar picked a pine needle off a tree, chewed on it.  He often wiped his eyes with his hands.  Zinacantan had a population that was 5% Zapatistas, unlike Chamula, which had 0%.  Its streets were clean.  Its market was organized, quiet and I could see young people playing basketball in a high school court.  I wondered if the revolutionaries’ utopia vision had not been almost realized in this town, as tranquil as a Monet painting. 

The church itself was equally pretty.  There were no hordes of fanatic worshippers, dirty chickens or magnanimous healers.  A few dwellers quietly sat on typical Catholic wooden benches and prayed.  The healing rituals were carried out on the top of the sacred mountains instead.  Cesar sat us down in a small side chapel.  He talked for a while about the town’s history, and started to wander off to tangents.

“So you think the Zinacantans are pretty backward?  You know their life expectancy is in the seventies—not bad?  I always thought if I got old I’d come here to live.  You know who the real bad guys are?  The fundamentalist Christians, they come here and they don’t understand the culture and the traditions and they say, this is all crap, and you can’t keep doing this or you’ll go to hell.  They scare everybody.  They try to convert everyone.  My mother was a Mormon.  They convert everyone then they make a mess then they take their little plane and jet away.  What happens to the Indians?  They couldn’t move back to the villages anymore.  The community doesn’t want them…They even got killed.  The catholic church is pretty backward isn’t it?  But you know what happened…The Bishop of Chile wrote a letter to Jimmy Carter to not send guns to Mexico government, and he got murdered the next day.  The bishop of San Cristobal was part of a committee to establish Liberation Theology.  Have you heard of it? (Nods)  Yes, and when the Zapatistas took over San Cristobal, he took their side.  When the government army drove in and tried to look for the Zapatistas in the nearby jungle, people in San Cristobal snickered and pointed to The Cathedral, and said, isn’t Subcomandante Marcos and his crew right there in the Cathedral?”    

I was sitting there, flabbergasted, big crowds of migrating Monarch butterflies flapping all over my stomach.

“You know sometimes I get American tourist revved up, and they say, we support our president.  But I say, I’m not trying to make a judgment, I’m just giving you the facts.  Some people say the Christians had associations with the CIA.  And they were trying to force the Indians to capitulate to an authoritarian government.  And now they are attacking Iraq?  And with all the human rights abuse…it’s really not fair.  I mean, the Indians were already subjected to one Christian conquest.  And now they have to suffer through another.  It’s really unfair.”

His voice trailed off.  It reminded me, I don’t know why, of Chris Gibson, the Scottish tour guide maverick who were constantly delighted in telling us that we could be working in Glasgow, or London, or wherever else.  But instead, we were here.  And it was part of this world, our world, right now. 

I sat there quietly amused, watching Cesar figuring it all out about life, death, and the pain and the struggle over the courses of a thousand years.  He finally ended his rambles and went back to his lecture.

“The Mayas have a strange belief,” he said, looking at a bronze statue of a dog nearby.  “Everyone has a representative animal, a bird, a dog, a cat.  Legend has it, a man got sick in the village, and he went to the healer.  The healer told him that someone was using black magic against him.  The healer said, ‘if you see a black dog roaming around your house, kill it.’  He went home and saw a black dog and killed it.  The next day, the word came out that someone died in the night.  He subsequently recovered.”

Where was my representative animal?  Is it flying somewhere, living vicariously because I couldn’t but wish I could?  Is it being spoilt and petted by a maudlin brat like a textbook case of postindustrial dreariness? 

The sky was still blue.  Justin Timberlake still floated out of the windows of a restaurant like clear liquid exudates out of an almost healed wound.  I share something with the highland Mayas—deification of Coca-Cola.  The Statue of Virgin Mary looked comforting, shimmering, even miraculous, but a full bottle of that brown liquid looked like an insurmountable power, the power of stasis, the power of illusion overcoming reality, the power of plastic yet primeval bliss.  It looked like it was going to last forever, longer than all creeds, cultures, nationalities combined.