To anybody who received an email from my parents over the past two weeks wondering where the hell I was, I'm alive. I managed to find my way to Xela, Guatemala, where I write you now. That's as brief of an update as you get. I've attached a short and sweet quintet of stories from the last few months. Read 'em and weep. I hope that you all are well.
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THE SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS GAVE ME THE FINGER.
Not really. The Zapatista leader gave a lot of us the finger. In mid-November, the EZLN celebrated its 23rd year in existence, and their 13th in public. The Sub, the Comandante Germán and the karavana arrived in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, where it all started.
We celebrated as any good rebels should celebrate, of course, with a big ass cake that said "Feliz Cumpleaños, EZLN". Germán and Marcos took a knife to cut the cake together. They held it, quavering, as they joked with the alternative press corps huddled in front of them. The karavanistas began to shout "mor-di-da, mor-di-da", expecting to plunge the two's faces into the cake with an expectant "bite". The Subcomandante Marcos looked up and gave us the finger. The wrinkles around his eyes suggested a smile, and he walked away.
SO YOUR DAUGHTER'S A PIG.
The Other Campaign wrapped up the tour in Mexico City, and after a stay I made my way to Guerrero to visit some friends. The problem is that the majority of them don't speak Spanish. They speak Nahuatl, and to say that my Nahuatl is rusty is an understatement. Such would assume that there is something left to rust.
I arrived and saw my old host family. I had lived and studied with them two years before. We were all excited to see each other, including the kids. Sonia, one of the older ones, came out to greet me. She gave me a big smile and her mother, Eulalia, pulled her close. "Look," she said. "It's Sonia. She's a pig."
"A pig?", I asked. "She's a girl." In my best Nahuatl, "a good girl."
"No, she's a pig. Many pigs." Eulalia held up six fingers to illustrate the point. I looked at Sonia, still grinning, and I reluctantly conceded.
Later my Nahuatl-speaking friends told me that Eulalia had said that "when Sonia grows up and marries, the family will sacrifice many pigs in her honor because she is so beautiful."
"So she's not a pig," I told them.
"No," they said. "She's a good girl."
ZAPATISTAS, PRÍISTAS AND MACHETES, OH MY.
I still can't tell you exactly what happened, because I'm not entirely sure. I woke up one morning to shouting in La Realidad, one of the Zapatista caracoles, or international meeting places. I was in my tent in the middle of a field enclosed by a school and other buildings. On my left, I heard "this is our land. You already have a school." On my right, shouts rang in response: "we fought in the war of the land as well. We are entitled to it." "We will solve this with dialogue," one group said. "We will solve this with force," rallied the other. I stayed in my tent, blind and listening.
Soon the crowd calmed down and I crawled out. The director of a movie production company approached me. He and his crew arrived to film, of all things, a Zapatista love story. "I can't believe that you were in the middle of all that," he said.
"What do you mean?", I asked.
"You know. With the machetes."
The ex-Zapatista Príistas had taken over the school, one of the filming locations, in a successful attempt to delay the movie. They had done it with a show of machetes. The Zapatistas grabbed theirs in return, and I was in the middle of it all, alone and too dumb to get away. I left the next day.
LA LUCHA SIGUE Y SIGUE... THE WAR RAGES ON...
The first time that I played basketball with Zapatistas it was in Oventik, another caracol about an hour away from San Cristóbal, the capital. I played one-on-one with a man a littler older than I, and he nearly blanked me eight to one. So the second time 'round, in the jungles of Guadalupe Tepeyac, I decided to give these Zapatistas my best passing, shooting, scoring Steve Nash. I was a man born unto the best team in the NBA, and these rebel farmers were going to know it.
After our first-game win in double elimination, I quickly realized that I, surprisingly, was no Steve Nash. Nor a Boris Diaw, Amare Stoudamire or Raja Bell. I thought that I might have had a chance at Shawn Marion, but that would have meant that I would have played well, which I didn't. Instead, the Zapatistas benched me by halftime, the lone player of a six-man team riding the pine.
After the narrow win, I decided to bounce back and play campesino style (it was then that I also realized how inappropriate the term "jungle ball" was). I rebounded, played defense, ran the court and otherwise hacked, fouled, scratched and clawed until I regained my spot in the rotation. I knocked over a row of giggling teenage girls after diving for a loose ball. The town mayor-sheriff told me to stop pushing him. A teammate looked at me through his one good eye as we were sprinting back on defense. "You're beginning to understand," he said. And I was. I should have learned the first time. Zapatistas know basketball.
We lost the last two hard-fought games by two points a piece. We all played our pasamontañas off. Bruised and battered, none of us could walk the next day.
CROSSING THE BORDER. THE OTHER BORDER. INTO GUATEMALA.
I had thought that I knew enough about borders and crossing borders to make my way into Guatemala without a problem. I soon discovered that I was, on the contrary, the white-skinned American equivalent of a two-pound succulent hunk of prime rib, and everybody was just licking their lips, waiting to eat me up.
And so they did. The Mexican government got me for a twenty-dollar exit stamp, a cash changer weaseled a smooth thirty-percent interest out of our transaction, and a bus driver, well, the story goes something like this:
I was trying to get to Xela to visit a friend, Carolyn Beal, in the Peace Corps. To get there, I had to go through Huehuetenago first. I asked the bus driver if his route went straight through on to Xela. "Sure," he said with a laugh. "It just costs more." About four times as much as everybody else was paying. Not thinking the man to be a cunniving, backstabbing chicken bus bandit, I handed over my forty quetzales (about five bucks) and trusted him even after everyone else had exited the bus. I thought that I was weird when he asked me to step down from the bus and wait on the curb for moment, but I did it. And as I watched the bus pull away, I thought to myself what a dipshit I am.
Later a security guard in Xela laughed at me when I couldn't find a working ATM. I was 0 for 4 on the day until he fished two quetzales out of his pocket so that I could hop on a combi and find another one. 1 for 4, I called it a day. Welcome to Guatemala.
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THE POSDATA
Thus I arrive in Xela, leaner, meaner, a basketball-playing fool with a revolutionary edge, a Spanish-squawking Arizonan with an ear for conversation and an eye for disaster. I'm good here, and coming home soon. Among the indigenous, the mainstream and the international, this is one of the most diverse and welcoming cities that I have ever been in. An organization back home has even decided to fund me my stay for another few weeks. I'll be studying at a local Spanish-language school to tune up my linguistic war drum, and rumor has it that they're going to connect me with a local human rights organization that works with migrants.
I have more friends coming in town soon, the weather's great, and I'm chasing after an amazingly nice, beautiful and wonderful girl from Denmark. The world's an oyster, and I'm slurping it up.
See you all stateside soon.
With much love, peace and rebeldía,
Your Cyclist for Social Change who left the bicycle two countries behind
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