Baptism of Colours
Baptism of Colours
Mexico #2: Further Adventures in San Cristobal de las Casas
The artisan market beneath the church of Santa Domingo, in San Cristobal, was perhaps my first real sensual rush, of many in Mexico. Exquisite colours and design details in the range of fabrics and clothes on offer. Blouses and dresses and beaded earrings and headbands and blankets, and also wonderfully vibrant sombreros and soft toys, flowers everywhere in the decor. Here was my first hint, too, of Mexican biodiversity, a treat I was still unaware of. I fell into an official exhibition a day later at an arts centre, of local artists, and was blown away at the range of tones, textures, mixing of media and themes. It's almost as if with such a high standard of 'everyday' design, fine artists have to stretch the limits of beauty, variety and individuality to make their case. Apparently full scale support from the authorities doesn't hurt either though. I realized I was dealing with an unusual country: when you ask global citizens who they think of when given the name of a nation, most of the time it's a famous politician or possibly a sports star or popular entertainment figure (it was nice to see a quote from Madiba translated into Spanish on one stylish San Cris mural). Mexico's most famous international icon is, of course, a female painter. Frida clearly didn't emerge from an empty canvas.
Nearby were dulcerías selling enticing looking sweetmeats in a range of forms and rainbow shades. Mexicans definitely have sweet teeth, perhaps a major downfall (like in equally colourful India, where diabetes from modern refined sugar has been a major issue for decades). Colas and other refrescos are drunk way too much in México. It was probably one of those things I only spotted because I started looking out for it, but there seemed to be an awful lot of dentistas being advertised! Though there was a political-capitalistic reason being proposed on the street walls too: companies buying up rights to the ageing water system, not treating it properly so that drinking water needed to be bought in plastic urns, and tempting colas weren't much more expensive.
San Cristóbal de las Casas is up in the mountains - the temperatures were only slightly higher than a Cape Town winter, this far into the tropics, and there was regular rainfall around, so it definitely wasn't drought causing the water saving everywhere. In fact this question of the water supply was true in most of the bits of Mexico I visited, even if I never got to the bottom of the politics involved (I have however signed enough petitions against Nestlé's worldwide theft of local water supplies to trust that somebody is up to no good). Luckily I'd been tipped off to use a travel water bottle with a built-in high-grade filter, so I never personally bought any water with plastic bottles during my trip.
Water is a big issue for all of us, and yet in the forested mountains it shouldn't be too far away. Romeo, the engaging head of my language school, took me off on a personal hike into the hills, to see the little patch of land he owns, or at least has some kind of leasehold on, for property ownership round Chiapas seemed a somewhat moveable principle. We hiked past fresh looking maize, plenty of lively birds, new avocados he'd planted, and up loose paths onto the ridge, which was a shortish clamber over rocks and under indigenous oaks. There seemed to be a real range of these, just as there are a variety of squirrels in Mexico - not the classic Eastern grey squirrel from further north, that has set up camp after importation into Cape Town. Somehow south of the tropics, evolution bursts into greater variety on the theme. This was also my first glimpse of bromeliads, small epiphyte plants which explode into millions of wannabe seeds, and occasionally make a successful landing on a branch or trunk (or even the ground). While they use nothing from their host but a landing perch, they turn the trees themselves into what I began to see as Dr Seuss plants: giving them frills worthy of an operatic diva. Later I learnt that they flower once in their twenty year life cycles: their looping, long flowers and colourful surrounding leaves an occasional forest sight: simply because there are so many of them, someone is bound to be blooming.
There were medicinal nuts, and vultures soaring over the peaks, and also the remnants of scarring industrial tracks into the forests. None of the trees around us were old growth, because the area was razed by the timber hunters a century ago, though it's lovely to see the effects of the regrowth. As we left, this cosmopolitan urbanite turned to give his gratitude for the woods, sharing that this was what his grandparents had taught him to do. We weren't very far out of town: fireworks were still audibly cracking in the distance. But it was enough: sitting and sharing our packed lunch in the wooden cabin he was putting finishing touches to, I felt our camaraderie, similar ages, similar senses of what really matters.
The next day I hummed along heartily as the school celebrated his birthday, with a colourful (of course) and deliciously moist Mexican cake (another local artisan skill I needed to add to the list), and a song that was far more elaborate, and much more beautiful, and hence sung with more gusto than most South African versions of Happy Birthday/ Mini emnandi kuwe. I couldn't help feeling we've missed a trick, just carrying on with this overused US pop number rather than coming up with some numbers of our own (Veels geluk is a bit better in Afrikaans at least). The Mexican song is called Las Mañanitas if you want to find out more!
My next trip out of town was to hot springs. Now, Mexico has a lot of active volcanoes - giving some hint of the geology below the surface - and so this experience wasn't quite what I'm used to in our SA thermal baths. We drove out past a gorgeous canyon that reminded me of the Garden Route, and was rather bizarrely adjoining a training area for the Mexican navy, somewhere extremely far from any coast they might be claiming to protect. And we found this place, dedicated to Carmen, one of those Spanish saint figures that turns up a lot (it took me till the end of the trip to really unpack her historical role, as Catholic saints and mystics often have almost as many faces as Hindu gods). While the guide was keen on a lukewarm pool near an interesting spring, I was determined on a bit more heat elsewhere, and fairly soon others in the group joined me. The volcanic aspect brought a lot more sulphur, which combined with calcium meant surprisingly blue water, quickly tarnishing my silver necklace (baking soda is the cheap solution for this), and a mild hint of rotten eggs. We seemed to have stumbled on a location for local tourism, as it was really all aimed at what I was beginning to realize was a huge domestic travel market. There was a range of 'street' food and drink possibilities and I had an elote: basically a mielie cob but as it was local corn it was tasty and chewy and came with some spice and salt and cheese on the side. I sat in the pool, chatting for the first time to a bunch of international tourists like myself, and trying out a little English for the first time in a while. An intriguing bunch, at a time when mainstream news is mostly telling people to stay out of Mexico. A regular traveller from California and a young and earnest one from elsewhere in the US; an engaging French woman and a Breton I'd encountered in a bar the previous week: he had interesting thick metal piercings above his lips that looked, probably deliberately, like a Celtic Obélix moustache, and actually neither of them were really travelling: San Cris was home, and both of them spoke great Spanish. There was a Dutchman based in the city too, one of the digital nomads who are filling Mexico up and probably driving up property prices, as us global types cause inadvertent gentrification wherever we tread.
I did have a good few Spanish chats though to the Mexicans and the Argentinian in the party. The simple fact is that Spanish is the second most spoken home language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, and most of the speakers are in the Americas. (Around 100 million more first language speakers than English.) And Mexico has more of them than anywhere else, almost as many as the next three países hispanohablantes - Spain, Argentina and Colombia - put together. So Latin American tourists have a huge range of countries to speak their language in without travelling too far, even if there are some curious variations. Colombians use a lot of 'usted' - the formal way of saying ‘you’; whereas Mexicans don't. And European Spaniards use 'vosotros' a lot, which is an informal plural ‘you’, like 'ihr' in German, that nobody else uses outside of Bible classes (so perhaps it’s a bit like a Yorkshireman using ‘thou’). And Argentinians turn "ll" which normally sounds like 'y' into 'sh'. 'Pasa la toasha' is presumably their way of confusing people in hostel shower rooms.
Our day didn't end in the public pools though. We crossed a bizarrely warm river and ended up in a hidden (and even more blue) pool in the forest, used mostly by locals. Beautiful nature, under the trees with birdsong, and with a gentle shallow kind of quicksand at the bottom of the pool and a natural jacuzzi on one side. I felt I was really breathing out at last, grateful for this day, even with the bumpy ride back to town.
A different kind of baptism experience awaited on my other weekend outing. I headed to San Juan de Chamula, a pueblo up in the mists outside San Cristóbal. We stopped first at the cemetery, where it was obvious that the honouring of ancestors was next level, each mound surrounded by local pine branches. To start with I saw pines through a South African lens: prosaic products from plantations, originating in much colder zones. I had to revise this in relation to Mexico, because it turns out a large number of the world's varieties of pine tree are endemic to Mexico, particularly the temperate forests of the southern mountain zones. We moved on to the home of a majordomo, one of the church elders, from a local village culture that practices polygamy so his chief wife was there too. The home was full of copal and other incense, fresh forest plants lined the altar of a local spirit, and pine needles lined the floor to allow a soft landing for praying knees. And pox was being handed around - pronounced 'posh', a sacred and possibly mildly psychedelic maize-based ferment, which locals claimed was rather better and more dangerous than tequila.
The church was more remarkable still as a site of ancient compromise, its outside decorated in multiple nature-exuding borders. Baptism in water was as important to Mayans as to Catholic Spaniards. So John the Baptist became the saint of the local church, getting pride of place way ahead of Jesus at the altar. No priest was allowed to run things, no services were held apart from baptism: and the many highly decorated statues of saints all were equated with a traditional god and redecorated accordingly from time to time. Some of the men present wore traditional elaborate furry jackets to mark their status. Many women and men were inside, praying on the pines, lighting candles as they sang their blessings. Here was more of that syncretic blending of belief, in action.
Another kind of site awaited us in neighbouring Zinacantán, where part of the church was smashed in the Chiapas earthquake of 2017, and rapidly and impressively reconstructed by community-driven effort. Like volcanoes, earthquakes are part of the culture here: for all the drama it definitely is something Mexicans universally know might happen. That famous Mayan belief in the destruction and rebirth of worlds is pretty obvious when you have such experiences around you regularly. The beliefs in Zinacantán are ostensibly rather more Catholic than in Chamula, but still the men of the town were meeting this Sunday morning, wearing jackets with prescribed coloured stripes, to sort out their local issues. Other men were rearranging flowers for their saints, and playing music, and passing round pox (which you were supposed to accept, but could pour out into a personal container if you felt you shouldn't actually have any more. These containers were small yellow former engine oil bottles!) Local women were absent from the chapel (not the church). Sex roles are still pretty strongly divided in many indigenous cultures, though one shouldn't automatically assume men 'have the power'. Famously, the Iroquois Confederacy that inspired the forefathers of the USA, only allowed men in government positions. But they also only allowed women to vote for them! Women being seen as too busy to do take on these community positions, but rather wiser to decide which men should be allowed to do it. The Founding Fathers ignored this part of the Iroquois social contract.
In the church there were small wooden animals representing spirit guides, as well as the incredibly decorated saints and a Jesus in something like an Elton John dressing gown who was wielding his cross like a guitar or microphone. The Christian cross just happened to have the same form as the symbolic indigenous tree of life, again allowing each side to claim victory in the war over spiritual beliefs. In these towns the crosses were mostly green and elaborately decorated. I did wonder in both places about the 'authenticity' of the experience when so many tourists were passing so often. In San Juan we weren’t permitted to take photos inside the church, because “we would be capturing people’s souls”. Actually we often try to ban photos at festivals in our Waldorf schools, for what I think is probably more the heart of the reasoning. Photos take us away, often, from sacred presence. This was a thought I was going to need to work with often on this trip! Yet it was also obvious that these cults were both constantly evolving and still rooted in something deeper that kept community together. The saints/gods all wore mirrors, to remind the devotee that their prayer was ultimately to the best version of themselves. Intriguing too that two pueblos so close had so many differences in their practices. I was reminded of what I knew of the Mesoamerican city states of the ancient Mayans, never forming one empire, but more feeding in culturally to each other, as in their medieval Italian near-contemporaries.
There were many more reflections on ancient Mesoamerica to come, and on the Mayans. Sometimes it's odd to think of Italian ancestors as Romans - a people who cooked weird things, long before Mexican tomatoes or Chinese noodles made it to Italy, and who spoke in fairly serious and plummy English accents, if the 50s Hollywood version of the Romans is true. Equally, here in Chiapas (and in Guatemala to the east), the Mayans never disappeared, even if they’d left their ancestral temples, and later been slaughtered by Spaniards and decimated by European disease. Pretty much everyone I met had a 'Mayan' background. But who were the Mayans? People with shared culture to some extent, and great variety in other aspects, seems obvious (though we have to be very careful with the ‘obvious’ bit). The anthropological aspect of this question includes looking at many living languages. While the world may know about ‘first nations’ within the USA, the truth is the top eight indigenous American languages still spoken in North America (by numbers of speakers) are Mexican, out of dozens of widely spoken indigenous languages in the country. And many of these are spoken in Chiapas. A few Mayan languages - Tzotzil, Tzeltal, and to a lesser extent Chol - are the most widespread of these; bookshops in San Cris featured trilingual children's picture books. There's an interesting balance here: Spanish has been so dominant for so long; English is the lingua franca lots of people pay to get access to; yet restoring the thought processes represented in indigenous languages is also incredibly important. We have some of the same issues in South Africa, though I do think we suffer a little by focusing only on English and indigenous languages, rather than formally including access to an international third language (at least one spoken widely in Africa, like French or Portuguese). Languages are a kind of currency and helping people access them is a delicate task, between necessary re-rooting and re-discovery, and gaining an 'international perspective'. (In fact, there would be a similar picture at work, in my opinion, with a healthy economic system: different currencies for different levels of currency use, in concentric circles a little like a permaculture design. At the core, local currencies in which every day transactions took place, with strict rules emphasizing spending over saving to keep the local economy dynamic. Then, with controls, other currencies at regional, national, international levels to facilitate exchange where that's genuinely valuable, rather than leading to cheap imports and currency hoarding. Thoughts for another article!)
One night I sat and spoke in enthusiastic but probably inaccurate Spanish with a Swiss woman to discuss an ecovillage she was part of up in the mountains. We bounced ideas of how to make these sustainable: bringing international people in to work with locals that had never left Chiapas or even travelled much within it. I felt then that membership of the wandering tribe I'm part of; I'll never be a man with a deeply rooted historic culture in the land, for that's been smashed long ago (probably starting with those Roman types); perhaps my grandchildren will find something like it again. I can only try to find those who will help me connect to it, and some of them are those whose ancestors suffered so much, but still have open hearts and a willingness to share.
Even so, I sometimes feel the need to join in that global comfort zone. Later the same evening I drank a Mexican craft beer in a bar where the final soccer match of the season was on TV, between Monterrey and America (a team from Mexico City). And the commentator was speaking in rapid fire Spanish which I now pretty much understood. The contradictions continued, even as the daily learning unfolded!