Mexico Travels

Traveling

When you travel in Mexico, you want to be apart from the crowds of acquisitive gringo tourists who infest the place. You are one of them, but you want to have a different experience, one that brings you in contact with people, so that you can see and hear from them what it's like to be a Mexican in Mexico. You can achieve this, mainly, by knowing someone. Then you have a way in.

I managed to travel this way to some extent but also, at times, as an ordinary (if low-budget) gringo tourist.

Some Places

Mexico City: If you are at all socially conscious you can't help but see conquest, revolution, and upheaval throughout the story of Mexico. Mexico ("so close to the U.S...") has had some really violent, nasty, and long-lasting wars.

The Spanish Conquest killed more indigenous people through disease than by murder. An indigenous population estimated at 15 million was reduced by two thirds in the first century of conquest.

Some of the pre-Columbian civilizations in Mexico made a practice of sacrificing human victims. They would put children, women, and captured warriors to death on special occasions such as the beginning of the construction of a new pyramid. On the New Year they would sacrifice a warrior and build a fire on his remains. The Spanish were disgusted by this and abolished sacrifice -- along with abolishing the better part of the indigenous population and their culture.

Then the U.S. took half of Mexico in 1848, and occupied Mexico City for a while. Benito Juarez reformed the country later in that century. He rid Mexico of some of the vestiges of colonialism, loosening the iron grip of clericalism. He was followed by the 30-year dictatorship of Diaz.

Someone said that the 19^th century in Mexico was one of the most disastrous for any country in history.

Diaz was ousted at the start of a ten-year-long revolution in the early part of the 20^th century, in which leaders changed sides and fought each other, and the best and worst were assassinated. One of the few real heroes, apparently, was Zapata. By the end of that war one eighth of the population had been killed. Meanwhile, in a hundred years foreigners invaded Mexico several times, usually through Veracruz. The regime that eventually achieved power in Mexico, calling itself the "Institutional Revolutionary Party" (go figure) held sway for around 70 years.

You see much of this in the murals by Rivera, Siqueiras, and Orozco, located in prominent places around town. Once, Diego Rivera went up to New York City to paint a mural at the Rockefeller Center. When Rivera was done, Nelson Rockefeller had the mural destroyed because Rivera refused to paint out the image of Lenin. What I wonder is why Diego Rivera didn't know that he would have problems with Rockefeller, and why Rockefeller didn't foresee having disagreements with Rivera. The re-painted mural now stands at the Casa de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Speaking of Russian heroes, my Bosnian fellow traveler, from a land where globalization is not so prominent, saw a billboard for Colonel Sanders and thought it was a picture of Trotsky.

Oaxaca: This city is a special place for visitors. The streets are overflowing with colorful crafts on sale. The ancient Zapotec ruins of Monte Alban loom on the heights outside the city. Diaz was from this region, Juarez (a Zapotec) too. Diaz ended up not being popular with much of anyone in Mexico, but curiously, perhaps because he was a native son, a main street of Oaxaca is named after him. It intersects with streets named after those who fought him.

Semana Santa (Easter week) in Oaxaca is filled with sights and activities. Be ready for plenty of religion, Catholic/indigenous-style. The churches display Jesus in particularly graphic representations, lots of blood, wounds in new places, creative positions, original expressions, statues dressed up in fabric. Here and there a Black Jesus. On Easter day there's a long procession of floats carrying statues of Jesus, each float from a different church. Some floats are followed by men in bright purple Ku Klux Klan-like gowns and hoods, representing those who persecuted Jesus.

On Good Friday my friend got mugged in the church of Soledad, a good place for a robbery because there are no cops around. Someone squirted or wiped mustard on her coat when she wasn't looking, and someone else came up sympathetically and started to wipe it off. Soon my friend was clean, but her wallet was gone. Beware the mustard trick!

Tehuantepec is a good place to stop on the way from Oaxaca to Chiapas. Maybe it was because of the April heat, but there were no other gringos there. There was a rollicking post-Easter carnival, complete with shooting galleries, kids' rides, much street food, and bingo played with corn kernels. Vendors were selling from heaping displays of pots and pans, clothing, and cheap tools. Folks rode around on three-wheeled flatbeds that served as taxis. A dusty dog yawned. All this took place around and under the archways of an old colonial municipal building.

If you're down that way and want to go to the Oaxaca shore, forget Salina Cruz. It's not horrible, but you can't swim there (bad surf) and only a few other people were there. I was frisked for weapons upon entry. I did have the thrill of spotting a couple of pelicans as they flew by, their long beaks hanging down. Go to Mazunte or Huatulco.

Go to Juchitan too. There's a very pleasant Zocalo (main square), where children were riding plastic rented go-carts, a school art class was drawing under the trees, and some teenagers were practicing their breakdancing moves. The teeming market all along one side of the square was memorable for its pleasant displays of colorful textiles, produce, and all kinds of crafts.

A Holy Place

Chiapas: Oaxaca has the highest indigenous population of any state in Mexico, but the Maya of Chiapas are quite prominent as well. We went to San Cristobal de las Casas, colonial capitol of Chiapas, to visit Ambar. Ambar is an American woman with more roots today in Mexico than in the U.S., which she left behind some decades ago. In San Cristobal Ambar works at a place called the Taller Leñateros. A taller (pr. "tie-AIR") is a workshop, and leñateros are people who work with products from the forest, including firewood cutters. This connects to the folks at the Taller because they use plant products to make hand-made paper, among their many other crafts.

The Taller is a collective enterprise in a rustic old house and courtyard, bustling with creative activity. There, people make paper from palm bark, publish journals and magazines on an 1895 printing press, print poems by women of magic, explore the culture of their region and other parts of Latin America, and nurture their Mayan heritage. I consider them cultural revolutionaries. The Conquistadors tried to deprive the Mayans of their literacy, and the Taller is part of the 500-year movement to restore it.

Ambar told me that the Mayans, pre-conquest, had more books than Europe. The Spaniards in their Inquisition burned all but four of them. But they taught Mayans to read and write in the new language, and some of the books were recovered from memory. The Mayans wrote about how their ancestors were created from corn meal, mixed with the blood of a couple of gods who were willing to sacrifice themselves for this creation. Today there are still healers who dream and share their visions, the product of a miraculously un-interrupted line of dreamers and seers across the centuries.

The Taller published one of its journals in 1998, Incantaciones (Incantations), in a bi-lingual Spanish/Tzotzil edition. On that occasion Subcomandante Marcos celebrated the publication with the following lines he sent to the Taller:

"We have our incantations too.

and although we are not allowed to drink,

We have our own drunken songs.

We don't only sing about suffering and injustice,

But also just because it's morning,

Especially in the morning, that's when we sing the most."

Ambar explained to us how Mayan healers consider words to be powerful, and they study the way words can heal the afflicted. During a healing ritual they will hold the forearm of a patient and pray words that go into the patient's veins and fight with the evil words that may be residing there. Then the good words and the evil ones will go up into the air and fight, erupting into a ball of flame.

Ambar showed us a massive avocado tree she planted in the courtyard of the Taller thirty years ago. She has been interviewing shamans and healers. Once she went and taped an interview with a woman in a village, and the tape turned up blank afterwards. She went and re-taped the interview with the willing healer twice more, each time the interview becoming more and more rich and detailed. But each time the tape came out blank. So she wrote a fourth interview by hand and transcribed it into her computer. Then the computer de-formatted the lines of text, and the genders of the articles in the Spanish language switched around and played games with her. Her techies couldn't fix the computer. So she called a shaman who prayed to the computer and passed a live chicken (a powerful article) over it, making incantations. That cured the computer. Now, when the techies find a problem they can't solve, they call that woman.

Curanderas (healers) with chickens don't only fix computers. Ambar showed me a photograph of a woman passing a chicken over a coke machine. Coke, like liquor and other drinks, is another article of power -- in this case because, among other things, when it makes you burp, you are expelling a bad spirit. The woman was praying words of power to the Coke machine, exhorting it to lend support to her son who operates a local store, so that he may sell more Coke and thus prosper.

We went out to Chamula, a village not far from San Cristobal that dates back to pre-Columbian times. Chamula offered strong resistance to the Conquistadors, and more recently has kept up its strict adherence to tradition by expelling many local converts to evangelical Christianity.

There is a cathedral in the center of the town square. It's an attraction to tourists and local worshippers alike. A prominent signpost at the entrance to town admonishes against taking photographs in the church, and Ambar warned us too, saying she couldn't overstate the dire consequences of taking photos, even in the vicinity of the church.

Chamula is higher in the mountains than San Cristobal. You feel the rare atmosphere as you walk through the Zocalo, where there's a produce market and you can buy seeds, spices, thread, ribbon, tools, cd's, drop-spinners for spinning. We got a spinning demonstration. An old graveyard lies above the center, next to a ruined stone church with no roof. Many empty Coke bottles lay among the gravestones.

The women and young girls wear thick wooly skirts with sashes and embroidered blouses. The men wear white wool serapes or black wool jackets with and open space under the arms for cooling, together with a straw "cowboy" hat and boots. Sometimes they carry a cell phone.

Inside the church, the tourists in shorts had their cameras dutifully stored. They were not really paying attention, but wandering and talking among themselves about politics.

The walls were lined with cases displaying statues of Jesus and a variety of saints. There were no pews or any of the other formalities I've witnessed in a church. Groups of people were scattered all around the vast cathedral, sitting on a floor strewn with pine needles. Some were dozing, some were snacking, but most were praying and talking to the deity. Generally a woman healer was in the center of a group, often holding the wrist of a patient. The healer lined up rows and rows of candles and lit them one by one, with different colors representing different afflictions. She passed an egg, a Coke, or a chicken around the head and spine of the patient, praying and taking the patient's pulse.

Off in one corner many babies were screaming; they were dressed in white because it's their baptism day. A small band of musicians came into the church and walked up to the altar: a harp, an accordion, and a guitar with twelve strings spaced about a quarter inch apart, strong with wooden tuning pegs about three inches long. They were preceded by a man carrying a case of Coke. They played a tune with two chords for a while, and then stood around drinking Coke. I witnessed the ritual, but I am sorry because I am ignorant of its exact meaning.

Mexico radiates spirituality. Gringos who stay there a long time start talking to the spirits.

A Few More Places

For me the most holy place in Mexico was Agua Azul, between San Cristobal and Palenque. It is a place with less intermediary interference between me and my meditations.

Agua Azul is a river descending over many waterfalls. You can walk from the entrance of the park to the last waterfall in a couple hours. There are a few places to swim, but it is dangerous, and there are some rope lines going across the river in those places, to prevent people from being swept away.

We were walking up beyond the last waterfall when I noticed a woman with a large can of water following us, and it seemed that she did not want to pass. She caught up and I offered to carry the water home for her. She was smaller than me and it seemed the water container was almost as big as her. She had it strapped to her head, but I carried it on my shoulder through some corn fields, following her. After a while we arrived at a shack with no floor, amidst the corn. There were numerous kids and dogs around. The kids laughed at us, perhaps from the novelty of the event as much as anything else.

We sat and talked a while. It turned out that the mother didn't speak Spanish, only Tzeltal, but a couple of the children went to school. We asked if the elder sister went to school, and the boys said no, because she didn't like school. When we left, five of the kids followed us back to the river.

After visiting the Mayan ruins of Palenque, Catemaco in the state of Veracruz is a good place to stop on the way to Veracruz city. You can walk by the big lake or take a chartered boat trip around and see herons, egrets, monkeys from Thailand, crocodiles. It's a warm lake and the crocodiles don't bother when you swim. The music of the birds floats above you. Catemaco is known for its witches, but we didn't meet any. We did, however, observe a parade of grade-school children marching in favor of literacy.

Still on the way to Vera Cruz, San Andreas Tuxtla is another place you can enjoy being the only gringo. While I was sitting at the main square a very white-skinned old Mexican came up to talk to me. He was 84 years old and told me he was a descendent of the Romans, and not a Spaniard. He said his ancestors came with Christopher Columbus in 1493 "to populate America."

In the cathedral we saw a painting of God, who is not as quite as popular as Jesus in these parts. He resembled Jerry Garcia without glasses, wearing a robe and long hair.

Visit the Taller Leñateros web site: http://www.tallerlenateros.com/

July 2006