Rebels with a Damn Big Cause

Last Sunday I got to see a new side of Chiapas when we visited the headquarters of the closest one of five Zapatista Caracols, Oventic. ('Caracol' means snail and applies here to the largest groupings of Zapatista collectives in Chiapas.) In 1994, when NAFTA went into effect, groups of indigenous rebels, led by the erudite and famously non-indigenous Subcomandante Marcos and Comandantes Ramona, David and others. The Zapatistas managed to take the major cities of Ocosingo and San Cristobal, relinquishing them to army battles in later days. In peace talks, they managed to gain autonomy over their own lands and shaky control over certain natural resources. To this day, they survive without any support from the Mexican government, relying on money from NGO's and selling various handicrafts they make.

Since Oventic was established after the nineties uprisings as a new center in a swathe of agricultural lands, it is somewhat small and lacking in life. At the gate we were greeted by a small woman with a bandana covering her nose and mouth. She took our id's and came back to lead us into an office where three ski-masked men bumbled over some forms that were our "permits". We ended up behind the desk of another ski-masked man who sermonized to us about the Zapatista tenets of Marxism, and anti neo-liberalism and capitalism. It was all in Spanish, but I managed to get his gist since Spanish was his second language (after the indigenous language that was his mother tongue) and he spoke in sweeping generalities about his egalitarian and purist ideals. He got a bit muddled when we asked him specific questions about places and technology, and it became a bit creepy to be paying such rapt attention to a man whose mouth was merely a bulge under a black ski mask. Afterwards we took a walk around the village. We were not allowed to photograph people or vehicles, but I took pictures of some incredible murals decorating the buildings there.

Bird in a Bucket

In Mexico, if you have hot water at all, you have to turn it on so that the gas you buy in canisters (to use for the stove and oven too) heats it up. When G was turning off the hot water this morning, he went out back to the switch, and found a bird drowned in a bucket. It's been raining a ton so the bucket kept back there was full and when I went out to see the bird, I saw a gray thing, floating, with it's little orange claw-feet curled underneath. My thought was to throw it away, but G said we should bury it. I let him do it, with a wooden spoon we use in the kitchen, and I hope he put the dead thing deep enough under the surface of our garden soil.

I have been following this whole Iran thing online. Crazy how the NYTimes has been following the blogs and posting Youtube videos. Crazy the new Google Translator. Of course it's not accurate, but damn if it's amazing they just put it up. And for this. In my mind, Tehran is something like a mix of Beirut and Damascus, but with even more rules. How must it be to live in a place where in public a woman must basically be invisible. Covered up and quiet. Or maybe that's not what it's like. And now the streets are a war-zone, with fires and clubs and people chanting their battle cries. I am intrigued by the use of such nomers as "The Supreme Leader" and "The Guardian Council." Makes it all seem a bit like Star Wars. And I can take it as ironically as I want, but of course to a good number of people it's just not. And I can barely begin to grasp whether there might be irony in the physical reality of being there.

Been away from San Cristobal for more than a week and it's good to be back "home." Why the quotes? Because this is a temporary home, because the word "home" is problematic in its definition. For me. Meeting so many new people, I have been getting asked a lot where I am from, where "home" is. And because it's most often Spanish and my Spanish is limited at best, I don't give the long explanation I would in English, but I simply say "Estados Unidos" and "Virginia" and, often "circa de Washington." That's it. Yes, we were gone to the lovely university city of Cholula, and then Mexico City, and then Cuernavaca. Since these are all G's places, I met a lot of G's people, including a drama student putting on a play that he'd worked on with poor kids in a nearby town and a group of his drama friends, one kid a drummer living in an apartment with sloppily spray-painted walls; three sisters in middle age who danced flamenco to the mariachi band that showed up as a surprise for G during a lunch in his honor--minus the dancing they reminded me of my mom and her sisters; a woman who has recently opened her own weight-loss clinic using a technique that employs body-sculpting through massage; a woman who had just come back from a landscaping job in Canada; a half-slav, half-British English teacher who has lived in Mexico for decades and made us a desert that involved berries and cointreau and chocolate and cream, as well as her translator-husband who had good stories about Obama and the Queen of Denmark and her basketball-playing daughter; an Mexican anglophile, living in an apartment with modern furniture and lounge-bar lighting; a Basque woman living with her father in a beautiful apartment in the embassy neighborhood of Mexico City; a Basque guy who just got his urban design degree in Berkeley and is about to go back and look for a job; a proudly out (kind of hard here) conservative gay man living in Mexico City's "La Zona Rosa," a neighborhood that surprisingly has a lot of Korean restaurants; a group of artists planning an arts festival in the skeleton of a house on the property where they live, south of Mexico City, in the neighborhood that claims Frida Kahlo; the woman who runs the pulqueria in San Pedro and has been selling pulque more than forty years and was going on and on about it's health properties; and many, many more.

What a varied world we live in. May the bird rest in peace. And hoping some good comes from what's going on on the streets of Tehran.

Does your sex therapist wear a veil and talk Quran?

Talking about sex is taboo, haven't you heard? Especially in the Middle East. An interesting article about how that might be changing a little bit, in today's Times.

Surprize sexism

So I started going to the gym last January and I got pretty serious about it, going pretty much every day. I didn't want to lose the habit so one of our first quests here in San Cristobal was to find a gym. Our first visit to the closest gym to our house ended in a yelling match. Then we walked around the city aimlessly looking for one, asking people who looked like they might patronize a gym where they go. Then we ended up at PSAS, a close bike ride on the other side of the river south of downtown. It's pretty nice, and we got a good deal. We'd have to pay a lot more money to use the cardio machines you plug in (the elliptical and treadmill) so, thrifty me, I've gotten into using the bikes, with G. Generally most of PSAS's customers stick to the weight areas, grunting and groaning away. The cardio room is on the top floor, with big windows looking out over the neighborhood, showing some lovely churches and mountains in the distance. I block out the overhead music with my ipod and go, go, go. It's an idyllic moment, but inevitably I look up at the walls around me, where there are sun-worn pin-ups of extremely muscular men and barely clad women using gym machines. It's weird and kitschy and funny and also a little demeaning. The pictures are all over the gym and apparently all over most gyms in Latin America. The pictures of the women and for the men's enjoyment and for the women to feel insecure, and the pictures of the men are somehow for the men as well, for them to idolize and perhaps feel insecure too. Today in the women's locker room I spotted a poster that breaks out of that mold. "A hard man is good to find," it says, under a black and white picture of a man with a sculpted, bare, hairless chest, his jeans suggestively unbuttoned at the bottom of the frame. No one that picture is for but the ladies.

of the millions of words

One of my projects here in Mexico this summer is that I'm reading "Ulysses". I'm about a third of the way through. It's intense! There's a lot more to say but I have to save that for my own notes. Some quotes to whet your appetite:

"The eternal qualities are the imagination and the sexual instinct, and the formal life tries to suppress both."
--James Joyce, according to Andrew Powers

"In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and war someone is."
"Love loves to love love."
"And says he [Bloom]:
--Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God."
--James Joyce, Ulysses

Old, sad white guys

So G is way more into the movie-watching thing than I am, and since I've been in Mexico with him, I've watched three movies in three weeks, which, I swear, is a record for me. Thing about those three movies is they all revolve around an old, sad white man character. It wasn't on purpose that we watched those three movies; it just happened. G had wanted to see "Grand Torino" for a while. I think I actually fell asleep on that one twice before he got me to see the whole thing. "The Visitor" had been suggested to me by a number of friends. And "Crossing Over" was a random choice; something about the movie poster and the plot description drew us in--maybe, too, something about Harrison Ford. No matter how silly his movie's get, he's hard to resist. So "Grand Torino"--directed by and starring Clint Eastwood--and "Crossing Over" had the whole aging famous leading man thing going for them. Clint Eastwood was certainly my favorite of the three movies' respective protagonists, playing the very gruff and blunt yet somehow still intriguing Walt Kowalski, a man with a wife newly dead, a family that has a hard time loving him, and also abandoned by his old neighbors to face the Hmung immigrants now living next door. Less interesting by far is Harrison Ford's character, a very sympathetic ICE officer who gets way too wrapped up in his cases. "The Visitor"'s sad old white man is a university professor played by Richard Jenkins (unknown until viewing and definitely lacks the sex appeal of Clint or Harrison). University politics force the widowed Walter Vale to leave Connecticut to attend a conference in New York City. In the apartment he keeps there he finds an illegal immigrant couple who has been living there a few months, paying rent to some fake landlord. And this gets me to the other similarity between all these movies: the abandoned, sad, old white men in them are each changed, in some way, by new immigrants. I won't get too much into the individual plots but to say that "Grand Torino" was most satisfying as a story. "Crossing Over" was sort of in the style of "Crash" or "Magnolia" in which snippets are told of vaguely intersecting lives, and so you are following a few stories as once. It's a risky story-telling strategy because it's likely that one of those stories is stronger than the others, leaving the viewer uncaring about the rest, as in a book when you skip the italicized sections or the flashbacks. "Grand Torino" was also least cheesy of all of these movies. The worst cheese-factor award goes to "Crossing Over" in which the whole proud to be an American thing is slapped at you over and over at the end. "The Visitor" was disappointingly lacking in any real substance beyond the devices of the international/hot-topic plot. And Haaz Suleiman, playing Tarek, the drumming Syrian, was definitely hot. Most of the relationship developments here were a little hard to believe, and I wanted more more more. Another similarity between the three? They all made me cry. But I'm easy like that.

Absolutely No Photos Allowed

Yesterday, we went to a town about ten kilometers from here, a Tsotsil village called San Juan Chamula, or, simply, Chamula, as was painted on the window of the van we piled into along with too many others to get there. We rode at a steady incline up a road that cuts through the hills south and west of here and sloped through some agricultural lands to arrive at a town square covered in stands set up by vendors of various produce and other food stuffs, piles of pants, leather belts in every shade of black and brown. Immediately, it was clear that town was dirtier than San Cristobal, litter scattered everywhere. As we bought condensed milk-drizzled churros I was awed by the sight of a boy start moving on his bicycle through a pile of banana peels. It wasn't an accident either, but something he did as a habit, a commonplace occurrence.

We then went to the dusty tourist office and after a young european-ly stylish blond couple, paid 20 pesos each to gain entry to the church, pictured above. As we passed through the wide, empty courtyard, we saw women and children crowded into a gazebo--getting government handouts, G said. Then two young girls followed us, trying to sell us friendship bracelets. They tugged at our hands and in the end threw a bracelet at each of us, saying it was a gift. As I was running after the little brat that had targeted me, the man taking tickets got my attention, and G and I were subsumed by the church.

The rule for the Iglesia de San Juan Chamula is that tourists can visit and gawk but absolutely no cameras allowed, as in, they will take your camera away and throw you out immediately, G explained. Something seemed odd about it. Sure, I'd been in museums and performances where there was no flash photography allowed, and maybe even places with artifacts that one was not allowed to photograph...but to be disallowed from capturing a live event? Knowing myself, I would likely be too shy to do it anyway, but the fact of the prohibition being and out and out rule was intriguing. So in lieu of the photograph (that I might have never even taken, had I the rules on my side), I made a list of my impressions as I sat inside the church:

no photos allowed
smokey air hundreds of candles burning
chattering chanting
pine needles strewn everywhere, over hard cold floor
scent of pine, the feel of it under the soles of our shoes
the room is lined with effigies of saints
each in his/her own box
each with a mirror around his/her neck
as if we could look at ourselves but they are too high
and only concrete ceiling is reflected
rows of tiny candles lit on tables in front of the saints
rows of tiny candles lit on the floor
where they have been placed melted wax
families (or groups that look like families) gathered to heal
colas and juices liquid in bottles sugar water that heals
one woman chants as she rubs green leaves over anothers skin
behind me they will kill a chicken
i look but the old lady stares back and i feel ashamed
then i look and the man in the furry woolen vest is wringing the bird's neck
but it won't die is still moving and the old woman finishes her off
feathers and flesh lay before them and they are chanting
one empty coca cola bottle and one full sit before them, and chanting
G says a healing ceremony can cost 1000 pesos
children everywhere, the smallest slung on stomachs or backs
the others play with fire, with soda, with each other
what are they saying in that strange language?
like no language i have ever in person heard?
the men drink cane liquor
a man leads a small boy around the room in circles
the child's t-shirt reads "100% Guapo"
all the women here in those heavy, black goat's hair skirts
that old one still staring at me, whenever i look her eyes
the smoke, the incense, the chanted words like liquid all around us
the thousands of tiny flickering points of light
and the smoky air around us glowing

After that, we walked to the graveyard, a litter-strewn expanse of lawn surrounding the ruins of another church, older than the first. Everywhere there were earthen mounds, as if every single grave was fresh. Each mound had at its head colored crosses, in most instances more one stacked against each other, like records, or books or plates.

G and I sat in front of it for a while, in a barely clean patch of green from where we could see the graveyard with the old church, the new church and the town in the distance behind it. To our left, there was a small bar on a side road. Outside of which a young girl in traditional dress huddled on the concrete step sang: "Life is worthless!" I am told by G it is a famous song, and the girl went on and on, singing mournfully, soulfully, off-key and slurring.

(More pics from that day and the one before here.)