beta launch

[two of two] the eyes behind the mask

In the first couple of days of my time in Oventik, the few people who were there were busy preparing for the week to come.    Structures still needed to be erected, food had to be hauled in, and spaces needed to be cleared for the thousands of guests soon to arrive.

The chango and I, on the other hand, didn’t have shit to do.  The Zapatistas turned down our offers to help.  Emphatically.  They had their own way of working, and it sure as hell was a lot faster than if we had tried to help and had gotten in the way.  So we did what our group is used to doing: we sat around, drank coffee, and talked.  One by one, the usual suspects arrived: the Chilanga and her English boyfriend, the Tia, and many of the Karavanistas. 

As we munched on avocado, cheese and sweet bread, the caracol grew from quiet pueblo to bustling town.  Three days before the start of the Encuentro, Comandantes Zebedeo and Tacho, in their pasamontañas and trademark caps, hurried around the caracol before everyone arrived, without the swirling crowd of security.  The next day, we played with the young daughter of one of the comandantas.  And while we finished off the last of the avocados on the day before the Encuentro, the rest of the Zapatistas put on the final touches and the famed pasamontañas.

Something changes when they put on their masks.  I don’t exactly know how to describe it, but my first reaction was to say that wasn’t fair. 

It was different with the Subcomandante.  I had spent enough time at his feet to learn his expressions.  But these Zapatatistas…  you can’t see their mouths.  Words appear as ephemeral.  Their eyes float unanchored, detached from their faces.  Everyone looks the same.

How do you speak with a person without a mouth?  With whom would you be speaking?  With one person, or with thousands, simulataneously?

Maybe the most thorough answer is “both”.  The pasamontañas is a symbol of what the Zapatistas are, as a community—as a whole of individuals forced to wear masks to protect themselves against retaliation, in a struggle with a world that would rather see them gone.  The pasamontañas are “para todos todo, y nostros nada” incarnate—“For everybody everything, and nothing for ourselves.”  The individual becomes the community, and the community the individual. 

It was difficult to see the people behind the masks, but it helps now to see the Zapatistas take them off again.

[one of two] the eyes behind the mask

Oventik, Jan 3

I can’t sleep.  Most of the caracol is gone except for us, the few, the ones who stay up until the wee hours playing guitar and singing along to the music.  I tried to fall asleep before my companeros started playing, but I’ve been rolling around in my sleeping bag for the last two hours instead.  The music is really good.

I arrived in Oventik by myself, by way of Puebla, after being stranded by holiday traffic, Palenque, where I met up with two good friends from Arizona, and San Cristobal, where my meandering relationship with a woman from Mexico City deteriorated unto death.  I was upset and unhappy when I stepped off the combi, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Across the entrance to the caracol, a sign read “You are entering Zapatista territory, where the people command and the government obeys”.   And at the caracol’s gate were the people themselves:  two women in pasamontanas guarding the gate to rows of buildings, one the left and the right, along a street that pitched down the mountainside.

I had arrived to the International Encounter of the Zapatatistas with the People of the World (the Encuentro Internacional) days early, the scene looked relatively desolate, and for a moment I didn’t know what to say to the Zapatistas.  For a moment.  And then I saw the chango.

God, I was so happy to see him.  I had spent weeks at his side in Mexico City and later, in San Cristóbal.  He had warned me about the girl.  I should have known better.  But it didn’t matter as I handed my passport over to a masked man in Bruce Lee t-shirt.  The women opened the gate, (Comandante?) Brus Li took my name and number, and the chango and I walked from building to building, cooperative to cooperative, mural to mural, in an arms-flailing-above-the-head “wow”. 

Descending into the caracol was like entering into a womb, or re-entering, I suppose.  It’s an activist-revolutionary wonderland, and it’s easy to get caught up in.  I’ve been here for a week, I think.  Maybe more.  I’m not quite sure.  There has been a lot to take in.

[three of three] Posadas

I think about Emiliana’s grandmother and aunts, and one of her aunt’s sons.  Her grandmother is a monolingual Nahuatl speaker who understands Spanish.  The family asked her to join them in Cuernavaca, but she doesn’t want to leave.  The aunts speak Nahuatl and Spanish, but sticks almost entirely to her mother tongue.  I imagine that they will stay as long as the grandmother will.  Her son is just learning to speak.  He is at the beginning of it all. 

Emiliana’s second cousin will probably grow up like a lot of the Oapaneco boys that I know—bilingual, but with a preference for Nahautl.  I wonder what will happen when he is older and his grandmother perhaps isn’t around.  Will he join Hugo and the rest of his family in Cuernavaca or Oapanecos in other parts?  Will his mother and his aunt come with him?  Will he make the trip up north? 

I just don’t know.

I have so much respect for people in Oapan—how generous they are, how hard they work, and the extent to which they center their lives on food and family.  Xmotlali, they say when you enter a home.  Xmotlali.  Sit, eat, get fat.  I remember the Sunday morning after I first arrived in Oapan, years ago.  I woke up to firecrackers and roosters.  When the first went off, I almost shit my pants.  I thought that someone was firing a gun at the house.  Now, in some ways, Oapan is a paradise for me. 

There are people on the periphery of Oapanecos’ lives who would rather wash them away from the face of the earth—from the land that they work and the river in which they fish.  The Mexican government’s position has been that they would be good laborers in other areas of Mexico—a little post-colonial “fuck you” to one of the relatively few indigenous communities that remained after the arrival of the Spanish.  Even in their own community, there are people who steal from them, with no right or recourse. 

Perhaps this is convoluted, but I see Oapanecos as real people with real fights and real issues.  Many are just trying to get by.  I have respect for them, I identify with them, and almost involuntarily, I tell people that Oapan is where I am from. 

Oapan is home.

[two of three] Posadas

Posada #2: Oapan, a stop-in at Jeremias’ aunt’s house.

After the Attack on Ameyaltepec, the second Posada was considerably more peaceful.  Jeremias, Emiliana and I stopped in at Jeremias’ aunt’s house, where the scene was similar to the day before:  

Jesus, the Virgin, and some other saint were on a platform with shoulder mounts, with lanky candles at each corner.  The three figures wore flower wreaths, and offerings of food lay at their feet.  Someone had clipped pesos and dollar bills to the saint.  Probably a dozen people sat around the scene, praying in a drone and a shrill.  They were coughing on the smoke from the komal in the center of the room, until someone brought in fans and opened windows.  We left after a few minutes.

Jeremias.  Jeremias is my age, 25, and has become a good friend.  He says that he’s going to give himself three years in Oapan.  He wants to do something about the trash and pigs in the street.  These seem like simple issues to take care of—create a landfill and resources for trash-pickup, pen in the pigs and clean up the shit.  But no one has taken the chore realistically.  The roads are disjointed and full of potholes, where filthy gray water sits in pools, along with the pigs.  Oapanecos are accustomed to a culture of waste—they throw their garbage in the street or, worse, the river.  The water supply is extremely contaminated.  According to a water specialist whom Jonathan brought in, the water shouldn’t even be potable.  But it is.

The quality of public health in Oapan isn’t good, and people know it.   

I get the feeling that Oapanecos are waiting for the local government to do something about the situation, but I imagine that they already know that the government never will.  The idea that the government will provide trucks to haul trash, for example, is far-fetched, to say the least.  There is really no infrastructure in the town, other than a community health center. 

It’s common knowledge that local officials have extravagant homes in both Oapan and the more uban Iguala, and there are perennial questions regarding the allocation of town funds.  What perplexes me is that some of these leaders apparently arose in the early 1990 enfrentamiento with the federal government, when the government attempted to build a dam and that would have effectively wiped out the indigenous communities in the Balsas River Valley, including Oapan.  The same people who once brought hope are now quietly extinguishing it.

Jeremias and some of his friends are going to make a presentation to municipal authorities to try and create some awareness of the contamination.  They are going to try to educate.  Oapanecos should be able to enjoy their own resources, a greater standard in public health, and a higher quality of life.  To that extent, Jeremias’ work is important, here and now.  But the cynical part of me wonders what San Agustin will be like in fifty years—if anyone will be around to enjoy a healthier Oapan, or if they’ll just be travelers passing through, house to house, enjoying the respite of another posada.  

[one of three] Posadas

12-26

Christmas came and went, as did not one but two posadas. 

Posada #1: The Attack on Ameyaltepec

Jonathan is off talking with a 107-year-old woman, leaving Jeremias, myself and the anciano behind, at the house of a friend.  Fortino, I think.  We eat.  We spend an hour drawing fake tattoos on the arms of legions of six-year-old boys.  The Posada begins and we all scatter off, marching behind the procession.  Men carry a mounted Jesus and Virgin Mary at the front.  In the back, a man launches homemade fireworks—gun powder attached to tree limbs that zoom into the air and explode with a crack.  The procession chants in prayers, accompanied by the electronic chirping of Christmas jingles from Christmas lights.

We walk down the mountain, and the procession enters another home.  We are in what amounts to a callejon—an alleyway wedged in between two single-story, flat-roofed houses. 

Upon the roof of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, children toss candy and sweets down to the kids and the three of us in the callejon. 

It starts nice enough.  Cute little girls in their mandils sprinkle down small, hard candies—the equivalent of jolly ranchers.  The callejon kids squirm around, squealing in delight.  Even Jeremias joins in the action, scooping up handfuls of candy.  The anciano slowly pegs his way back up the alley with his cane.

The stakes get a little bit higher.  The rooftop kids stop lofting the candy, instead peppering the callejon kids with a bit of zip.  Then the candy becomes oranges, and unsuspecting grapplers begin to get pelted in the face.  We all become a little bit more wary in the callejon.  I am watching the girls, and I see that they are smiling as a child below rubs his head frantically, an orange at his side.  I also see kids scuttle up to the rooftop across the callejon. They are now armed with oranges.  I inch my way back up the hill to the anciano.

Candy and oranges rain down a few moments longer, and then some genius introduces jicama—sweet, fist sized, and really hard. 

All hell breaks loose.

I see flashes of white jicama and green oranges dart from rooftop to rooftop.  Boys join the girls on the roof of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and vice-versa on the other side.  Kids are ducking, running about the rooftops.  The callejon kids launch their own counter-offensive from below, chucking fruit and vegetables skyward.  The height has the advantage, however.  The callejon kids are pounded in the fervor.

The three of us have long since gone before the Posada-turned onslaught of edibles ends.  The kids are red with laughter and welts.  As we scurry past the houses to the street, I see dozens of jicama on the ground.  These armaments will not be eaten.

where the language is, the people are

12-18, Dec. 2006

I didn’t see Moises or go fishing with Pepe yesterday.  I went to Ameyaltepec instead, with Jonathan (my former instructor), Jeremias (another good friend), and an anciano (whose name I don’t recall).  

The town sits at the head of a mountain spring, to the north of San Agustin.  We made our way up the winding, dirt-pack road, and immediately upon arriving, Jonathan’s role in the community became clear.  Children ran up to him, and smiling residents greeted him as he walked from house to house.  His face lit up.  I’ll have to write about the posada and the “Attack on Ameyaltepec” later, but Jonathan was as welcome a traveler as any other this holiday season.

Ameyaltepacanos are drawn to Jonathan. If I were to guess, I would say that some see him as a source of money and others an object of curiosity.  Here he is, a white man from New York who comes into their village speaking fluent Nahuatl.  He lives in Oapan, and he speaks, in their tongue, of building community centers, investing in computers, and saving a dying language. 

In the late 1970s, Jonathan spent two and half years in Ameyaltepec.  To many, he is a brother, a son and a godfather.  A part of the community, he will forever be apart from it.  Villagers look at him with what I can only describe as strangeness, not unlike they do me.  This isn’t irreconcilable.  It’s just a fact.  If anything, I think that it indicates that Jonathan lives in more than one world.  Perhaps he needs to be all the more considerate in his responsibilities to both.

Jonathan knows more Nahuatl than many of the people of Ameyaltepec and Oapan.  He learned from the elders, and the collective memory of their words exists in Jonathan’s dictionary, a contemporary resource for the language that he has been developing over the last thirty years.  More and more, the younger generations are speaking Spanish.  They are forgetting their Mexicano.

Jonathan says that Nahuatl will effectively become extinct within two generations.  Roughly one million people speak Nahuatl in Central America, although “speaking”, Jonathan says, is a term used by governments that tend to inflate numbers.  “Speaking” could mean to say a working knowledge of the language—knowing it, but as a little-used second tongue. 

Hugo, Emiliana’s seven-year-old brother, for example, “speaks” Nahuatl.  He lives in Cuernavaca, and his Oapan-born mothers and sisters speak to him in their Mexicano.  He can respond in the language as well, but by his admission he doesn’t want to.

There are many others like Hugo in and around San Agustin.  Let’s say that there are approximately a thousand families in Oapan and that each family has five people.   Jeremias says that, on average, one person in every Guerrero family lives and works in the United States.  This leaves us a 1000 stateside, 4000 in Mexico.  Let’s also say that half of the families native to Oapan don’t actually live in Oapan, or that some family members move back and forth to a neighboring city like Taxco while the rest stay.   This leaves us with 2000 people in Oapan at any given time, and another 2000 people living and working in other parts of Mexico. 

My former host family is fairly representative of this sort of movement.  Their immediate family is nine: the parents, Sixto and Eulalia, and their seven children, Olga, Ulyses, Edith, Sonia, Daniela and Anayali.  And of course Pepe.   Sixto has worked in the States.  The oldest, Olga, lives in Guanajuato.   This last trip to Oapan she took Anayali with her.  Ulyses and Edith currently live with an uncle in Puerto Escondido. 

I know that they have family in other parts as well: the tourist hub of San Miguel Allende, for example.  I’ve met other Oapanecos in Cuernavaca, selling their famed neon-colored amate art in a Cuernavaca church square.  Emiliana said that she recognizes many locals there as well.  The mandil, or apron, common to the women of the area is a big tip-off, as is their art. 

The last time that I had seen Ulyses, he was set to finish secondaria (the equivalent of middle school in the U.S.) in a year, although he spent the majority of his time painting ceramic pieces that their family would distribute to vendors or sell themselves for a pittance.   Those pieces are easily recognizable.  Most often they include some sort of animal, are brightly colored, and are accented by clusters of painted dots.  I’ve seen the pottery in Acapulco, Mexico City, Nogales, Tijuana: you name it.  And where the art is, the people are.

Like Sixto and Eulalia’s family, like Jonathan, like me, it’s important to remember that the people come back as well.  Oapan is becoming increasingly permeable.  Within a year, the road into town will be almost fully paved, and Oapanecos will come and go with greater ease. 

The community is already changing.  Some families have X-Boxes.  Others watch American movies on television.  My friends adapted my name, “Power”, from the “Mighty Morphing Power Rangers”, a Japanese action series repackaged in the States and redubbed in Mexico. 

Two generations ago, people spent their entire lives along the river next to San Agustin and upon the mountain in Ameyaltepec, and everyone spoke Nahuatl.   But times are changing, and there’s a new language for it. 

six big pigs, 12/16/06

12-16, Saturday

I have forgotten most, if not all, of my Nahuatl, but it doesn’t matter.  My friends and family are as happy to see me as I am them. 

Oapan is as I remember it: the same bumpy dirt roads, the pigs sauntering through the streets, the komal smoke lingering in the air.  It smells the same.  The tortillas are as thick as they were before, warm and inviting.   They taste good. 

Pepe hasn’t grown so much up as he has out. He has filled in.  I almost didn’t recognize Daniela.  She had grown so much that I thought she was her older sister.  It was a memory of her a foot shorter and entirely quiet that put her out of my frame of reference.  She existed once again.

Eulalia looks older.  You can see it in her face.  Sixto looks the same.  He greeted me with a bare chest, in his athletic shorts and huaraches. He knows me as “Power” here, as does everybody.  Of the few things that I understand in our conversations at times, I understand my name.

When I arrived at the house of my former host family, I tried to give Eulalia a hug.  That didn’t really work.  They don’t really give hugs here.  She pointed to Sonia and said, I was told later, that “when she marries, the family is going to slaughter six pigs at the wedding.”  I understood things a bit differently, however:

“Sonia’s a pig?”

“Sonia’s a pig.”

“Why is Sonia a pig?”

“She’s not a pig.”  Eulalia flashed her digits in indication. She’s six pigs.”  And her eyes grew wide.  “Six big pigs.”

Later I went to see Moises and his family, but he wasn’t there at first, so his sons and I mumbled through a quiet conversation.  When Moises arrived later from work, he spoke of Pablo, my former classmate and friend.  He had returned earlier that summer and had learned to speak Nahuatl extremely well.  Moises told me that Pablo wasn’t like me: he was smarter than me.

“Well,” I said in Spanish.  “Pablo has been studying Nahuatl since we left.”  I had spoken only words and phrases in random encounters since.  “That must have helped.”

“No,” he responded.  “He’s just smarter than you.”  Moises is a good man.  He invited me across the river tomorrow to watch him work.  I will also go fishing with Pepe.

The women have gone to bed here at Emiliana’s home.  I need to sleep as well.  Lights out.

to oapan, 12/15/06

Dec. 15, 2006

I’ve left Mexico City.  After two weeks, Ursula’s has become a home away from home, and I’m off to another: San Agustin Oapan, where I had spent a summer studying Nahuatl.

I’m in Cuernavaca now, with my good friend Emiliana.  We’ve kept in contact on and off over the last two and a half years over email.  She met me at the church today, and I barely recognized her.  With her hair cut short and streaked with blond, she had evolved.  Her smile stayed the same, though.  I will always be able to recognize Mili by her smile.

I’ll be sleeping in the bed, alone, that she and her sister usually share.  Tomorrow I’ll have a space in her grandmother’s house in Oapan, and there I’ll share in their food as I did here today.  I am so fortunate, so humbled by these people, my friends.  I can only hope to be so good to my guests in the future.

They remind me of so many people I met with the Otra and vice-versa.  They are of little means but invite you to their beds, dinner tables and lives.  They ask for nothing in return, except to enjoy their company.  Anything less (and especially more) is an insult.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow.  I am excited to go home and not the least bit nervous about speaking Nahuatl.  Sometimes words don’t matter as much as presence, showing up, and being human.

To Oapan.  To people who understand struggle, land, good food, how to treat and take care of each other… to my Oapanecos.

about this caracol, 12/12/06

Dec 12, 2006

“Creo que su modo es mirar con los oidos y escuchar con la mirada.”

“I believe that our way is to see our ears and listen with our eyes.”

“Yo camino contigo de la mano y te muestro lo que ve mi oido y escucha mi mirada.  Y veo y escucho un caracol, el ‘pu’y’…”

“I walk with you hand in hand, and I show you what my ears see and my eyes hear.  I see and hear a snail, a ‘pu’y’…”

--La Treceava estela, 2003, El Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

I was wrong.  I wrote one time that the Subcomandante speaks with his eyes, rather than with his words.  I didn’t consider that his look was an act of listening, rather than speaking.

This isn’t just a case of nonverbal communication.  This is an example of conversation on a profoundly human level.  Marcos’ eyes search not only for information or understanding, but for soul—for the humanity behind the gaze that encounters his own.

We are all involved in this act of discovery, although many of us do not know it, or forget.  We are dynamic and interconnected beings.  Some prefer to see the self as individuated, but I do not know how they go about living.  What does it mean to live when your senses are already dead?  What is a life without a soul? 

For now, I think that it’s enough to live, to listen and, at times, to speak.  And perhaps I’ll let this great teacher of a Zapatista bring me along for a while longer, hand in hand.  It sounds like a good start.  About this caracol…

live and late-breaking, from 4/06

SUVs and H2s, trucks, jeeps and sedans.  A VW Bug and a copper star.  Red and blue bars.  Support Our Troops.  These Stripes Don’t Run.  Never Forget.  The American flag.  The American flags.  Legal Observer, parachute, canopy.  The black man.  Camouflage paint and combat fatigues.  Sidearms.  Hip straps, harnesses, and thigh holsters.  A lawn chair, a floppy hat, and binoculars.  Pineapple 6.  Radio. Gray Deacon.  Radio.  Scorpion, Too Tough and Liberty.  Radio, radio.  Search, Rescue and Sovereignty.  Alpha, Beta and Charlie lines.  Night-vision goggles.  Thermal scopes.  Spotlight.  Never Forget.  The American flag.  The American flags.  Radio.  Two-man tents and their motor homes.  Winnebagos.  Fox News.  CNN.  Documentary.  Student, print, international, exposé.  Radio.  Tonight at 6:  The Real Minutemen:

These f___ing Mexicans. They will kill you. They don't give a f__k.  And once you shoot a couple of these son of a b____es, they'll think twice.  We don't have no by-laws.  We don't have nothin'. We go out in two-man teams and we hit them like we did 40-years ago in Vietnam.

More Thoughts on Sensenbrenner-King, 4/14/06

30,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. 50,000 in Phoenix. 100,000 in Denver. 300,000 in Chicago. 500,000 in Los Angeles. 

It seems as though the global economic vehicle piloted by the United States is giving way to something new, inspired and driven.  That "something" might very well be a genuine human rights movement that transcends barriers and calls into question the United States as a partner, rather than profiteer, in social and economic development.  What might develop is a redefinition of what it means to be "American"—what defines the character of the diminishing middle class and what tenets we can still cling to within an equally diminishing "American Dream".

The turn-out isn't a surprise: it's a wake-up call.  If 500,000 people were going to come out in support of immigrant rights, it was going to be in Los Angeles, the city with the second-highest population of Mexicans, even if outside of Mexico.  The religious, social and political left came out in full stomp, galvanized by the Sensenbrenner-King bill. The pundits report that a "massive immigrant civil rights struggle" is emerging, almost in dialectical opposition to the "vast right-wing conspiracy".

With propositions 187 in California and 200 in Arizona, immigrant rights advocates coalesced to opposition, but nothing like this. Rumor has it that the organizers behind the demonstrations are also planning a general strike next month.  One has to question whether or not organizers will be able to take the energy from these marches into a strike and beyond, and avoid the ineffectiveness of similar actions before the invasion in Iraq. Half-million marches assure that protesters' voices will be heard on the street.  Only a sustained effort will translate those voices into actual legislation.

We can expect changes in the halls of Congress, U.S. neighborhoods, villages throughout Latin American, and even with the next presidential seat. But the greatest change will be in the responsibility of the next generation of leaders: to unify both Latino and non-Latino communities alike. Within forty years, the ethnic makeup of the United States will be substantially different than it is now.  Latinos will be the majority, and this will demand a shift in how we all relate, think and act as a global community.

The "American Dream" might become a "Pan-American Dream".

donkey