“We are very busy with our continuous and great work in the conversion of the infidels of whom . . . over a million people have been baptized, five hundred temples of idols have been razed to the ground and over twenty thousand images of devils that they adored have been broken to pieces and burned... Many of these children, and others who are older, know how to read, write, sing... They watch with extreme care to see where their parents hide their idols, and then they steal them and faithfully bring them to our friars. For doing this, some have been cruelly slain by their own parents, but they live crowned in glory with Christ”
- Juan de Zumárraga, First bishop of Mexico in a letter to the king of Spain, August 27, 1529
I could smell the sweet scent of burning pine and the marble floor was strewn with green needles. There were no chairs. Instead, families were circled around candles melting puddles onto the stone. Bottles of coca cola and liquor were being used in the rituals. Along the side stood rows of tables with saints and more candles and at the front of this dark cavern was a huddle of men and women. Yessica and I stood quietly to the side to watch.
The congregants were praying, chanting in indigenous Tzotzil, and in no time they had hoisted statues of the local saint and the virgin mother on their shoulders and were filing past us, stooped and wary, some bent under the weight of the statues, others holding aloft brass incense burners of billowing grey smoke, passing us like a fragrant, human steam engine.
It was syncretism at its purest. The religion here is a pungent brew of Catholicism mixed with Mayan customs, fermented by five hundred years over the cultural fire of colliding civilisations. Medicine men. Live chickens sacrificed, occasionally.
Out onto the plaza they went. I was extremely conscious of being looked at with narrowed eyes, a sense that never left me at any point in Chamula in this little corner of the Mexican state of Chiapas. We watched as a man marched over to the only other gaggle of tourists and made them prove that they had deleted the photos they had taken. I’ve read that sometimes they smash cameras if they don’t trust you. The column made a slow circuit of the plaza and re-entered the church. I felt like I had arrived in this place on my final warning and had to be on my best behaviour. We moved off, watched all the way.
Just outside the low walls of the church plaza, doubly grey under a cloudy sky, there was a market. People looked pleadingly at us. A row of expressionless vendors on plastic chairs had heaps of live snails for sale. There were children everywhere. Immediately some of them asked us for money. It was early Friday afternoon. School hours.
From the market, we walked the few hundred desolate yards of main street to the car. On this grey afternoon rubbish was strewn everywhere, piled up against the curb, kicked out of the way by the fruit sellers squatting behind their mangoes and papayas spread out on tarpaulins. I couldn’t see anyone smiling.
A Brief History of Violence
The first contact between the Europeans and the people of Chiapas came in 1522, when Hernán Cortés sent tax collectors to the area to collect the tribute owed to the now-subdued Aztec Empire. What an introduction. You send as the emissary of your civilisation a tax collector. One wonders what they made of that poindexter. Those original inhabitants, who gave the state its name, have mostly disappeared, melting into the wider population thanks to intermarriage and assimilation.
Because pre-conquest Mesoamerica had a tradition of labour duty and tribute, the Spanish parcelled out existing political units to individual conquistadors as encomiendas, onto which the natives were herded and from which the European encomendero received the tribute that would have gone to the previous indigenous empires. The idea was that the indigenous subjects would be provided for, be taught Christianity and would in return give some amount of labour.
In effect these were estates in which the natives lived in bondage, working in the mines and mills as the Spanish sucked what wealth they could from the land, leaving behind piles of Indian bones. Over the course of that century, waves of smallpox, typhus and measles broke over the indigenous population. Though population numbers subsequently recovered, many communities and ethnic groups disappeared completely.
It should be said, however, that the picture is complicated. After a European presence that in its earliest years was little more than slave-raiding, there very quickly began a virulent, activist Catholic resistance to the mistreatment of the natives. “Never before in the universal history of conquest had men argued so heatedly about the moral and theological implications of their enterprise,” Mexican historian Enrique Krauze writes. The debate was real and fervent and not simply a sideshow in the history of the colonies. It’s most famous participant, the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, crossed the Atlantic ten times pursuing justice for the indios.
It extended as far as the clergy refusing to conduct sacraments for those conquistadors who mistreated ‘their’ Indians. Down here in Chiapas it got so bad that the Dominicans had to run for their lives from the local Spaniards. However, as these things go, tensions were calmed and the Catholic orders were able to return to peacefully destroying indigenous temples and idols.
The Spanish Crown gave “complete and conclusive support to the position of Las Casas”. Laws were passed. Indigenous customs were to be respected. They could own their communal lands. But it was also true that, from an ocean away and sensitive to the precariousness of controlling a satellite of marauding and semi-loyal adventurers and mercenaries, the Spanish crown could do little. The destruction of the indios continued.
Over the years, as more Europeans and mixed-blood Mexicans (known as mestizos) moved in, the indigenous were pushed off the best land. The large estates expanded and conditions remained miserable. While Mexico changed, won its independence and periodically swung towards and away from political liberalism, down here in the south, where most indigenous lived and still live, conservative landowners opposed any changes, every step of the way. Chiapas was left behind to wallow in feudalism. For centuries after colonisation, much of indigenous Mexico continued to live completely apart, separate and autonomous. What that meant, for much of indigenous Mexico, was centuries more of a peasant existence.
The Zapatistas
After Chamula we drove further uphill. The road now wound up and up through small farms and dry dirt fields with rows of dried maize stalks. Cinderblock houses hung off the slope, surrounded by closely cropped pastures. There were big cages of chickens built onto the sides of dwellings and occasional flocks of sheep or goats, tended by a small man or woman, or a child. Now and then a youngster would emerge from the trees straining under a load of firewood. School still hadn’t finished.
We reached San Andrés Larráinzar in the late afternoon. After walking up and down the main street, past the families corralling children and the meat gathering flies on butcher’s counters, we found a tiny, dark pocket of a restaurant on the far side of the plaza, inhabited by a loose constellation of drunk men, and shared quesadillas and a bottle of coke. We paid thirty pesos for both of us (US$1.50). I’ve never paid less for food in Mexico.
Walking back towards the car we were stopped to talk by a couple of men on the fringes of the little band of drunks. After a short, friendly exchange they asked us for money. We gave them excuses and walked on.
San Andres, this little town of plaza and church, isn’t famous, but it lent its name to one event, when this small, backward corner of Chiapas captured the world’s attention.
On January 1st, 1994, the world woke up from celebrating the New Year to the news that Mexico was in rebellion.
That morning 3,000 mostly indigenous militants led by a balaclava-wearing, horse-mounted, pipe-smoking, poetry-writing leader who went by the name Subcommandante Marcos emerged from the jungle, declared the president of Mexico illegitimate and took over several towns. They called themselves the EZLN, or the Zapatistas, named after a folk hero of the Mexican Revolution, a peasant martyr way yonder at the other end of the twentieth century.
They occupied San Cristobal, nowadays the pleasant colonial town that sits in the bowl of the hills below Chamula, popular with tourists and resettled European expatriates, with hostels and Thai restaurants and French bakeries. The Zapatistas took over the municipal building and read their proclamation to the world. They raided a military base, seized weapons, broke open jails, released 180 prisoners, and held a former governor hostage, sentencing him to forced labour.
The world was transfixed. Media from across the globe descended on Chiapas. Marcos spread their message on the then-new Internet. He gave interviews in a balaclava, puffing on his pipe, and read poetry. It was called the world’s first ‘post-modern’ revolution. They became the darling of the post-Cold War left.
“An Indian rebellion in Mexico, in the age of NAFTA,” Krauze wrote, “Inconceivable.”
In Chiapas the situation had been dire for as long as anyone could remember. Much of the land was concentrated in the hands of a few families. Two thirds of the state’s residents didn’t have sewage facilities or electricity and half did not have potable water. Over half of the schools only went until third grade. Years of explosive population growth had left the peasants with smaller and smaller plots of land and now, with the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement, they were threatened by the opening of Mexico’s markets and a drop in price of their only cash crops.
The whole rebellion lasted about two weeks. The world was following it, mesmerised, and the Mexican government hesitated. Instead of bringing the full force of a modern military down upon this peasant army, they let the rebels escape back to their villages, watching them all the way. It’s stayed like that, for twenty five years. To this day there are half a dozen small communities that the Mexican government doesn’t control.
Apparently Marcos was hoping that this initial spark would ignite a national rebellion. Though it didn’t, what they got instead was the San Andres Accords, signed in this little town where we were talking to the drunks, enshrining a somewhat watery set of constitutional amendments into the constitution, along with some expansion of indigenous autonomy.
From the plaza, following the muffled sounds of a public gathering we ducked under an archway and found ourselves outside a church where another ceremony was being conducted. Inside, the familiar pine smoke floated up to the dark roof. At the front was a semi-circle of men, chanting. After some moments they shuffled off and were replaced by women. Then a man tapped Yess on the shoulder and asked us to move our car.
This was nothing like Chamula.
We had parked outside the church where now stood a collection of men in long knitted sleeveless smocks that looked like woollen aprons, all wearing brimmed hats out of which sprouted coloured ribbons, like technicolour fountains. Some of them wore white fabric tied around their heads like du-rags, so when they took off their hats they had the appearance of wrinkled indigenous rappers.
After shifting the vehicle we came back to ask them what it was all about. With smiles they gave us each a bottle of coke and seemed happy to talk. While others listened, the two or three that could speak good Spanish explained to us how these communities worked.
Most indigenous communities have at least some degree of self-government, including the authority to enforce customary law, one of the effects of the San Andres Accords. The men we were talking to were the police officers, chosen every year or two, to serve as the watchmen of the community, so long as their wives consent. The other group of colourfully festooned men in smocks standing nearby handled the financial affairs. The Mexican government, essentially, drops the money off with them to use how they see fit in the community, and doesn’t come in. They’re not allowed.
With the afternoon turning to evening and feeling splendid after two generous shot glasses of pox (pronounced ‘posh’, the local spirit) that they had offered us (as well as the bottles of coke), we smiled and thanked our way out of the group to head back down the hill. It was all so convivial and lovely and sincere. Undoubtedly one of the best experiences I've had in my six months of living here.
This was indigenous Mexico, it seems.
The Mayans
Mid-morning two days later we found ourselves climbing uphill through the trees that cover the ruins of Palenque. It was one of those fresh Sundays where the sunlight feels clean as it filters through the leaves and vines. Some of the ancient structures have been re-built, stones piled on top of each other and left to settle, now covered in stray dirt and leaves, some remained unexcavated, big piles of stones sleeping under a blanket of jungle.
At the top the trees open up into the main palace and temple complex. A neat path slowly conveying gaggles of sightseers winds between ancient ball-courts and undulating lawn (grass, incidentally, didn’t exist in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus). Hawkers, all indigenous, sit in front of trinkets laid out on blankets in the shade and call out to the European and Mexican tourists as they pass. From the top of the temple you can see out across the jungle tree tops until the horizon disappears in the haze.
At its zenith, the Mayans had writing, calendars and large cities. They traded extensively with other parts of Mesoamerica. Sitting on the top of one of these structures I couldn’t help thinking to myself, ‘It would have been a gigantic pain in the ass to get these rocks here’. But get them there they did, and carved them with symbols and stories, in a feat of social organisation that is astounding.
And then sometime around the year 900 nearly all the Mayan cities were abandoned and their complex civilization faded back into the trees and the unknowable darkness of history. When the Europeans arrived the social organisation of the region had fragmented back into small units and simple social structures. We don’t know why.
Then the Spanish arrived, and five hundred years later the descendants of this civilisation are mired in poverty.
Chiapas, the southern state where I live and which we were now exploring, also has one of the highest proportions of indigenous Mexicans. It is the poorest state in the country, the lowest ranked on the Human Development Index, and has the highest poverty and fertility rates.
What is true for Chiapas is even truer for the indigenous all over the country. Indigenous people are more likely to live in rural areas and live shorter lives. In every single state of Mexico they have higher infant mortality, sometimes as much as double the non-indigenous population. Almost half of them are illiterate, three and a half times the national rate. The average Mexican person attends 9.1 years of school. The average indigenous Mexican attends 3.8. Teenage pregnancy is rife, and child marriage is still practiced in many communities. Of the million indigenous language speakers in Chiapas, a third don’t speak Spanish.
That afternoon we went swimming. After leaving the ruins we took the road east into the afternoon before turning south along a road that lay across the countryside of jungle and maize like a ribbon that had gently fluttered to earth. The maize was planted right up to the side of the highway. In many places it stood flush with the tarmac. You could practically reach out of your car-window and grab a cob, if you wanted a dislocated shoulder and a handful of corn. I thought to myself that these farmers must really be in need, to use every crumb of space like that.
After parking in a field and paying the man who spends his days watching, we lunched on catfish barbequed whole and rubbed in coarse salt and eaten with the fingers, served with a charred onion and sliced chilli and tomato. Chickens pecked around our feet. Then we walked down the gravel and under the trees to the waterfalls.
The cascadas of Roberto Barrio tumble down in steps. Aqua coloured water pouring off ledges under overhanging trees clad in vines. A path weaves down through the trees, popping out every so often at a pool of astonishing beauty. Local families lunch at picnic tables. We found a deep round pool and with the late afternoon sun casting a golden light in the jungle haze we had the place to ourselves. The water was warm and it was a Sunday afternoon, the swimmiest part of the week, and we were alone, waterfall behind us, swimming in the forest.
Mexican Blood
The next day we were driving home. It took us two more hours than what Google Maps promised us, due to the innumerable potholes that appear unexpectedly in the concrete like artillery craters, and the speed bumps installed by communities on their stretches of highway, on their own initiative, to make you slow down and buy their plastic bags of sugarcane or fried plantain from the stalls on the roadside.
We were making slow time and I was beginning to feel anxious about getting back in time to teach my first class when we glided around a corner and up there on the road ahead was a roadblock. Slowing down we saw sheets painted with slogans. I recognised the initials: EZLN. The Zapatistas.
Laid out across the road were slabs of wood driven through with nails, and in the oncoming lane was a long line of traffic, stopped by the road block. We glided up to the spikes.
Three men were standing between the lanes, with a much larger group of perhaps thirty further back on the side of the road. One of them rapped at the window with his knuckles. Yessica tentatively wound it down and smiled. None of the men smiled back.
They demanded fifty pesos. Fifty pesos to continue down the road. After some equivocating we scratched around and came up with a twenty peso note and some coins. They shoved a cheaply photocopied page of propaganda at us through the window.
Yessica, sitting next to me, is Mexican. She is, like most Mexicans, what used to be called mestizo, or mixed race. Mexican history is complicated.
Mexico’s two most important political leaders, Benito Juarez and Porfirio Diaz, men who together did more than any other individuals to shape this land, were both indigenous. Juarez, a Zapotec from Oaxaca, is probably the single most important man in the country’s history. He was an orphan from an indigenous community, who didn’t learn Spanish until almost in adolescence, who grew up to be president, win a war against the conservatives, lead Mexico against the three year French invasion and then lay the foundations for modern Mexico.
He is the only Mexican whose birthday is a public holiday. The country’s main airport and the capital’s metro station has his moniker. He’s on the 20 peso banknote, and since 2018, the 500 peso one as well. At least ten towns and cities worthy of Wikipedia pages, and roads and streets in thousands more, are named after him, as is former Italian dictator and famous stud Benito Mussolini. You can’t open a public toilet in this country without naming it, ‘Los Baños de Benito Juarez’. And no other country in Latin America got an indigenous president until 2001.
Mexico, despite those shrinking areas where the land’s original inhabitants lived in isolated pockets, over the centuries became a giant miscegenation machine: A society of racial mixing that created a nation of mestizos.
The blood of the conquistador rapists shares the same veins as the blood of the raped. And so does the blood of the native collaborators, who couldn’t have known the part they were playing in the transformation of their hemisphere when they allied with the outsiders against their tyrannical (native) overlords. There is the blood of the motley European migrants who were sucked across the ocean by the economic vortex of the silver mines at Mexico’s centre, and the East Asian immigrants arriving on the galleon ships from across the Pacific, and the couple of hundred thousand African slaves that came to replace the indigenous labour. This is Mexican blood.
Perhaps more than any other, this is a nation where the oppressors and the oppressed have cohabited together for so long that they have blended together. The average Mexican today is mostly European, slightly less than a third Native American, and about 4% African. Krauze again writes, “This process of mestizaje (“racial mixing”) is absolutely central to the history of Mexico. No other country in the Americas experienced so inclusive a process.”
Unlike in other parts of Latin America, indigenous customs were imported into the emerging mainstream culture. Over the centuries, especially after independence when the Spanish criollo class lost so much of its status in society, the stigma attached to a mixed race person weakened. After centuries of interbreeding almost everyone, after all, is mixed race. The flag displays the symbol of the Aztecs. Towns and villages have dual Spanish and indigenous names. The food is, to a significant degree, native food (mole sauces, pozole stews, cornmeal tortillas).
Social oppression of the poor has been deep and widespread, racism relatively less so. In comparison to other Latin American countries, while there were certainly deep class distinctions and prejudices, there was not true ethnic hatred.
Except, of course, here in the south. It was here, in this Mayan belt spreading from the tip of the Yucatan peninsula south across the isthmus to the Pacific Ocean, where Mexico’s only real deeply ethnic conflicts would occur. Walls of suspicion separated the Mayans and the Europeans. Cultural isolation has meant both preservation of ancient traditions and being left adrift as the rest of Mexico has become, in essence, a middle-income country, middle-class in outlook.
Here in the south a small frosted layer of white colonialists exploited the natives, who were not even allowed to walk in the streets of the cities. I’m told that up until the 80s and 90s, in the same Chiapa de Corzo where I live now, the indigenous weren’t allowed on the same sidewalks as whites, or into banks.
Sitting next to me behind the wheel, Yessica doesn’t know her family history beyond the generation of her grandparents. She is Mexican, and her flesh is made of the history of Mexico, in all its horror. A lot of people in Mexico are like that. Except here, in the last remaining pockets of the Mayans, and in scattered, isolated and desperately poor communities across the rest of the country.
The men sullenly accepted our small change. Over their shoulders more men glared at us, leaning against a wall. The man in the middle of the road dragged the spikes out of the way and motioned us through. I may never have felt so menaced, been so transparently threatened with thuggery, all communicated through a malevolent leer. I resented how menacing and bullying they were.
Then again, after being ground into the dirt for five hundred years, maybe I would be too.
