All that and more about Mexico City. Now I am in San Francisco, the overall best big city in the US, though I have to tell you it has been hard to get once again used to buses that only come every 10 or 15 minutes, which is what we are used to here but would be considered very shabby in any Mexican city. You pretty much never have to wait more than 2 or 3 minutes for a bus or train in Mexico City. 15 minutes would be considered a catastrophe. Civic unrest would erupt.
I have been attending the Ecocities 2008 World Summit conference here in SF. My first time as a full attendee at a conference of this sort. I see now their usefulness and limitations. On the one hand, an overflowing cornucopia of presentations by all kinds of luminaries in the field of positive urban transformation, but the flip side is that no single presentation can be all that in depth, so it really just ends up being a series of fairly brief overviews. Nevertheless lots of idea exchange does go on, and people network a lot. If nothing else it is heartening to know that so many people are doing real and effective work in changing the way our lived environment is built and works. And talk about timely. The fuel crisis, the mortgage crisis: together these are catalyzing the end of the post-WWII pattern of urban/suburban development. Right now, today, exurban McMansion neighborhoods across the country are being abandoned house by house, even as urban neighborhoods with access to transit are thriving and still increasing in value. I read a news story from NPR the other day about this phenomenon. Home prices across the nation are plummeting with no end in sight in suburban communities with no access to public transit, but holding steady or even still increasing in close in neighborhoods with transit access. Surprise, surprise. There is a sea-change going on in the conventional wisdom of what is desirable in housing, transportation, and material lifestyle. The biggest obstacle anymore to building what people want (walkable, human scaled, broadly speaking neo-traditional) is policy. Specifically the post-war zoning, transportation, and finance policies that led very intentionally to the automobile dependent suburban dystopias that are considered normal in North America. At this point, better NO zoning than codes and zoning that disallow anything truly functional. It is generally illegal in most US cities (some central city areas notwithstanding) to: build directly up to the street; not provide parking; mix residential, industrial, and commercial uses all together; build multi-family dwellings with shared kitchens; flush a toilet with anything other than drinking water; and the list could go on and on. My view is that sheer economic pressure will trump outdated zoning in many places, and that in the next decade there will be an exuberant growth of "under the radar" accessory dwellings in older neighborhoods (ask me for tips on how-to) and probably out and out shanty towns. Because make no mistake: this economic thing going on right now is no ordinary little "recession." Call me alarmist, but I'm pretty sure this is the start of something unprecendented in the lifetime of anyone under 70. Second Great Depression, call it what you will, but the next decade is going to be a very interesting and challenging time. The upside is that it will be a great opportunity to try out all kinds of practical grass roots solutions that have heretofore just sort of eked along at the edges. And with enough of both public demand and political will, we *could* start to make the policy changes and infrastructure investments that could really facilitate the building of a real ecocity/town/ and village world.
Mexico City is huge. Mexico CIty is magnificent. Mexico City is horrifying. Mexico City is the ultimate city, the largest city in the world, a world capital and Great City by any definition, an ecological catastrophe (there used to be a huge lake teeming with life where now this vast metropolis sits), everything both good and bad that a city might be. It is hard to compare it to other cities. It is 25 times larger than Portland. It is all big-city in all directions, as far as you can see. The subway trains are 9 cars long, run every 2 to 3 minutes, and are yet nearly always full. Everything seems to be monumental in scale, including the monuments. The climate is very pleasant. On a non-smoggy day you could see two great snowcapped volcanoes, but there is hardly ever a smog free day. Mainly when cold fronts sweep down from the northlands. It happened about a week ago but I was in Oaxaca (it did really open up the mountain views there though.) Mainly I have been going to museums. There are dozens of major museums here. Tomorrow I will visit the houses of Frieda Kahlo and Leon Trotsky.
Maybe I was badly educated. Maybe I am a willfully ignorant American. But before a few days ago I had never even heard of the city of Puebla, Mexico. It is a city of 2 million people. Furthermore, it is more architecturally beautiful and well preserved than any US city. Imagine the old-town part of a US city, but 50 times as big and entirely intact. Add pastel colors and colored glazed tiles to the facades along with the red brick and wrought iron balconies, and dozens of ornate baroque churches, some tranquil but active leafy plazas and a long pedestrian street alive into the night.
I feel duped somehow, or that the US culture and conventional wisdom instilled in me has somehow kept from me the fact that Mexico, MEXICO! Has cities that are more beautiful, well preserved, alive, human, civilized, and even modern in the best sense, than most of the cities of the US. (Did I mention that their transportation system down here pretty much kicks ass all over the US's?) Not that they don't have plenty of both poverty and sprawl. But the essence (both architectural and human) of the cities down here is something that has long since been lost in the urban centers of the United States.
I have realized now the pilgrimage destination of this trip, although I had never even heard of it before the other day: the Great Tree of El Tule, Oaxaca. "El Arbol Venerable del Tule." It is *the* largest tree, by far, that I have ever seen. Some kind of ancient cypress. All other trees have led to this one. It sits in front of the church in the village of El Tule (outsizing the church by far), about 10K south of Oaxaca City. I took a local bus rather than go as part of a package day trip, which was good because I ended up spending 3 hours there just sitting comprehending it and sketching different parts of it. You can't get it all in one frame. It will show up later in a series of paintings that I am starting to conceive.
Oaxaca has cuisine. Fabulous cuisine. Also a terrible graffiti problem, but lets stick with the food for a moment. Why does Central America largely NOT have what one could fairly call cuisine, but just a bit north into Mexico, bam, really good local food. Go to any comedor (diner, more or less) in all of Central America and what you will get is the same plate of rice, beans, and either chicken, scrambled eggs, or shoeleather beef. No flavoring apart from a bottle of picante sauce. But go into a comedor in the market in Oaxaca City and have your choice of half a dozen or more exquisite local specialties, including Mole Negro, the darkest and most complex (16 separate spices and ingredients besides the ground cocoa) Mole in all of Mexico.
Part of the answer probably lies in the varied mix that is Oaxaca's culture and history. It has the most indigenous groups of any state in Mexico, and their cultures and struggles are very much a part of the contemporary scene. Their continued calls for greater autonomy are seen as a grave threat by significant elements of the Mestizo and Spanish-derived ruling class. How do I know this? Because I picked up one of the local papers this morning and read about two recent events that vividly demonstrate a division that if not carefully attended to will, I think, erupt into widespread unrest in Oaxaca in the perhaps not too distant future. I'll start by simply translating (to the best of my ability) an article on the front page:
Headline: Military Occupies Matias Romero (Oaxaca newspaper "Noticias" 12 Abril, 2008.)
"The Union of Indigenous Communities of the North Isthmus Zone (UCIZONI) denounced that more than 500 soldiers of the Mexican Army occupied the municipality of Matias Romero, installing barriers and undertaking activities of hostility against UCIZONI, to prevent a march in support of the workers of the IMSS-Oportunidades Hospital.
Despite the military presence, several thousand members of UCIZONI, of the Section 22 of SNTE [not sure what stands for] and health sector workers, managed to march through different streets of Matias Romero to demand better service in the IMSS-Oportunidades Hospital.
UCIZONI representative Carlos Beas Torres condemned the use of military force in work appropriate to the police, as well as the violation of the Federal Constitution, and the lack of preparation by the military, leaving vulnerable the constitutional guarantees of the human rights of the civil population.
Earlier, more than 500 members of the Mexican Army occupied the population of Matias Romero, installing a barrier and questioning the neighbors about the activities of UCIZONI.
The military barrier was installed several meters from the offices of UCIZONI.
Furthermore, the locals complained about the intimidating treatment by the military, who questioned and interrogated them in a coarse and forceful manner.
Later , around 1:00 PM, a group of 20 soldiers established a checkpoint in the street that accesses the UCIZONI offices during a meeting of those affected by acts of the Federal Electrical Comission, a situation that generated a climate of fear and tension for those attending.
Nevertheless, said Beas Torres, inspite of having practically militarized the city of Matias Romero, several thousand people achieved their march.
-------------------------------------------------------
Anyway, just trying to give an idea of the division that exists between indigenous and ruling class Mexico. The army, in this case, was quite obviously being used as a tool of intimidation on behalf of those who do not like anything that smells remotely of indigenous empowerment. Why? many the reasons, economic and racist both.
And when using the army to quash otherwise benign protests doesn't seem strong enough to put the "Indios" in their place, what do you do? You kill.
There have been several recent assasinations in Oaxaca of people speaking on behalf of indigenous rights, the most recent just 6 days ago when the two hosts of a radio show called Radio Trique "The Voice That Breaks the Silence" were ambushed and assasinated. Three other indigenous leaders have also been murdered in the near past in Oaxaca. It is widely believed that the radio hosts were killed by "pistoleros" in league with the PRI political party, which if true makes the murders an act of state sponsored repression.
A group of 26 organizations, as well as municipal and community authorities has condemned the "climate of repressive violence suffered by the population of Oaxaca" as part of a political instrument by the government of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (the governor.)
My point in all this is just that all is very much not well in the land of Mariachis and Mole. Oaxaca (and Mexico,) like much the rest of Latin America is a place where the ruling element never quite seems to learn that you can't fuck with people indefinitely without causing an eruption of violent discontent. Oaxaca is beautiful, and well worth visiting. But its history (going way back and also including the much publicized teacher protests a couple of years ago) and these recent events indicate that just as much as Chiapas (see previous entry), it is a volatile place that could soon be a bellweather of upheavel throughout the Americas.
Whole books have been written about the Mexican state of Chiapas, especially its recent history and the Zapatista movement. Anything I might add would probably not be original. But it is a fascinating place, even just visiting it for a few days. I am staying in the colonial city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, atop the central highland plateau at an altitude of nearly 7,000 feet, surrounded by pines and Mayan villages. The central part of the city is very beautiful and also very touristy. But overall the place is very real, probably more than Antigua, Guatemala. People come here for the usual spanish colonial architectural beauty, but moreso for a vista of the Mayan people and perhaps some understanding of the situations and conflicts that led to the Zapatista movement. It is all very complex. There is no black and white, even for Western lefties who might want to simply lionize the Zapatistas.
The best place to start is probably with the highland Maya themselves, in particular the two groups that live near San Cristobal, the Tzotziles and Tzetzales. Like the various Maya groups of Guatemala, most of them do not live in the main city, but come into it to sell goods or work jobs. In Chiapas not only the women but the men usually wear their traditional clothing. Every group's (even every village's ) dress is a bit different across the whole Mayan region of Central America and Chiapas, but nevertheless aways identifiabe as Mayan. Usually there are bright woven patterns to the tops, sometimes to the skirts or pants too. The men here tend to wear either white cotton tunics or amazingly patterned big colored vests (bright pink and red in one of the nearby areas!), and the women woven or intricately embroidered tops with simple black skirts of either cotton or (more spectaculalry) rough black sheep wool. This dress is emblem of identity, both between themselves and the outside world and between individual villages. When you see someone wearing this kind of clothing, you can know that bright and imaginative though it may be, the person belongs to a group and culture that is profoundly conservative. But culturally conservative moreso than economically or politically, because the same person could be either a prosperous local capitalist who practices agribusiness and at least implicitly embraces the neoliberal policies of NAFTA and the recent Mexican governments, or a hardstrapped laborer who sympathizes with or (depending on which community he or she lives in) belongs to the Zapatistas. Or neither, just an ordinary Mayan shmoe who wants to end the day with a nice bottle of cane liquor, or a woman who has never given a second thought to the fact that she will take care of the kids, hand wash the clothes, make the tortillas, and sell the garden surplus at market, every day for the rest of her life. But even the latter two are probably very aware of the issues at hand. They couldn't not be. Whatever your view of it, it really is true that Chiapas has been for almost 15 years now the epicenter of what has been called the first "post modern revolution" and indigenous rights movement.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I should describe something more of what I have actually seen. Of course in Guatemala I saw and interacted with indigenous Mayan people in many different locales, and visited a coffee finca owned and run by a band of erstwhile leftist Mayan guerillas. The thing that really stood out during my too-short stay in Chiapas though, was a guided day trip I took to a couple of nearby villages to see and get some small understanding of their religous and medical traditions, and by extension the Mayan indigenous worldview. Most Maya are nominally Catholic (and in some areas more and more evangelical or Mormon) but their adherence to the rites and policies of Rome varies greatly from place to place. Sometimes they are fairly straightforward (if even more than typicaly Saint-loving) Catholics. But it ranges from that into the far reaches of very thinly veiled animism with only a cursory nod to Jesus and sometimes not even that much toward Church doctrine.
In the village of San Juan Chamula they kicked out their last priest in 1969 after he was accused of raping a local girl. They send no money to the Vatican. They removed the pews from the church and now it is essentially a latter day Mayan temple. The walls on the left side as you walk in are lined with various saints in glass cases with small mirrors on their fronts. Most of the saints including the patron San Juan Baitista (John the Baptist) have a larger and a smaller version, the smaller one being labeled "el meynor" (the younger.) At the head of the church is San Juan Bautista and San Juan Bautista el Meynor. There is no Jesus. The floor is entirely covered with a layer of fresh pine needles and hundreds of long tapered candles laid out in rows that are always multiples of three. The worshipers and healers stand or sit and chant long monotone mantra-like orations to the saints, as well as burn incense and drink soda pop. The rituals are conducted for an individual by a healer/shaman (known literally as a "pulse reader") of either sex who uses various objects including eggs, incense, and sometimes dead chickens, and chants, while reading the pulse of the patient/worshipper/supplicant. It is hard to really describe what is going on except to say that after seeing it in person, and also seeing a demonstration later, it appears very much (both superficially and I think in its essence) like certain forms of Asian and also contemporary Western energy medicine. Except that of course it has no apparent historical connection with either of those (though to touch for a second on a wide tangent, some people (including the late Joseph Campbell) have speculated an ancient pre-Columbian connection between the Mayan civilization and East Asia.)
There are ritual houses also, one of which we visited. They are maintained by ritual leaders ("cargos") who serve for one year. These men are not themselves healer/curanderos. Rather they serve for the honor and priveledge of it, and it is not an inexpensive role. There are many items to continually buy: bags of pine needles, the leafy branches that make up the ritual enclosures in the houses, loads of incense, case upon case of soft drinks, moonshine alcohol, fireworks (they light off deafening explosions outside the church on a regualr basis), the hiring of musicians for ritual processions, etc. Thus even to serve as a leader once in 20 years requires economic status; they must be essentially rich in their home villages. So there is an intertwining of religous and economic status and control.
They use the soft drinks to burp and expel bad spirits. Pre-Coke/Fanta they used corn-drink from corn of the various colors which now coorespond to various soft drinks: brown- cola, red- berry Fanta, yellow/orange- orange Fanta, etc.
Their crosses are green and are also pre-Columbian (as evidenced by crosses extant on Mayan temples at Palenque, Chiapas.) All around the altars and outside the church and the ritual houses they hang long strings of pattern-cut rectangular colored paper flags that look very like Tibetan prayer flags.
Certain regular rituals occur every 20 days, which is the "month" in the Mayan Calendar. The Mayan Calendar really is still in use after all this time. It is not simply an artifact of archeaology.
We also visited the nearby village of Zinacantan. In Zinacantan the Vatican still excercises enough control of the church building to disallow the use of chickens in it, but there is a ritual altar atop the hill next to town. I saw a number of such outdoor altars last year in Guatemala too. Atop a hill or mountain is the most usual, but next to sacred lakes like Laguna Chicabal is also common.
So here in Chiapas remains the fabric of knowledge and practice of an ancient civilzation. But there are still onslaughts, a latter day conquista by the combined forces of the world economy and Evangelical and Mormon religion. In San Juan Chamula they actually kick out community members who go Evangelical (and completely disallow Mormon missionaries.) Whole neighborhoods of these "expulsados" have sprung up on the poor fringes of San Cristobal. The women still wear the traditional outfits, but the worldview is jettisoned altogether.
But whether Catholic, animist, or Evangelical, the Mayans of highland Chiapas face more pressures and challenges than you and I can probably imagine. In simplest terms they have always been treated like shit by the Spanish-derived ruling class. They are the largest group but own the least land. Traditionally they have been forced to work as laborers for landed gentry who truly did not see them as fully human. There is a lot of history that I can't do justice to, but the salient point is that conditions were fully ripe for the rise of the Zapatista movement in the 1990's.
Subcomandante Marcos (the guy with the mask and the pipe) is probably a white guy, but the other leaders and the Zapatistas at large are an organization of Mayan peasants. In January 1994 they marched fully armed, out of total obscurity and into San Cristobal. Since 1997 they have deliberately not engaged the Mexican Army with arms. While it is quite true that they would probably be mercilessly crushed if they attempted further armed attacks, their strategy of being armed but not using the arms has paid off in that for some years now the Federal government has been unable to justify using the army (or paramilitaries, which for a time it did use) to attack Zapatista controlled territory. Attempts by the army to roll in and assert control in these autonomous municipalities in the late 90's and early 2000's were met with crowds of Mayan peasant women linking arms, shouting insults, and stopping the tanks and bewildered soldiers in their tracks. Who's going to open fire on a crowd of indigenous ladies in their traditional dresses, as press cameras look on? Not gonna happen. So large swaths of highland and also eastern jungle Chiapas are governed not by the Mexican Federal Government and the State of Chiapas, but by local entities called "Juntas de Buen Gobierno" ("Commitees of Good Government.") Much of their funding for infrastructure, schools, and clinics comes from sympathetic foreign (mostly European) organizations and individuals rather than the federal government.
I'll finish with an extended quote from Bill Weinberg, a writer for the World War 4 Report (WW4 Report, 1 Dec. 2006.) He is responding to an incident shortly before in which a settlement of Zapatist Maya in the Lacandon Jungle of eastern Chiapas was attacked by a group that they claimed were Lacandon Maya but which most observers believe were a paramilitary group out to sow further discord between two besieged groups. The Lacandon Maya are a tiny group of jungle natives whose historically large territory has been, since the 1960's, settled upon by tens of thousands of highland Maya in search of more and better land, as well as the pressures of oil drilling, lumbering, and Evangelical conversion. The Zapatista movement started and developed in this area among the many dispossed and discontented highland Maya, but their relationship with the Lacandons (Hach Winik) has never been really cordial, and in fact the groups often find themselves directly at odds with one another over issues like land title and local governance.
"The Zapatistas' refusal to return to armed conflict (since 1997) despite both intransigence and provocation has allowed the rebels to maintain the moral high ground in the eyes of Mexican and international civil society. Therefore, hardliners in the government, who would like to crush the movement with armed force, have been effectively restrained. The rebels' zones of control are tolerated, and provide a working model of the kind of indigenous self-government that their proposed constitutional changes would instate nationwide."
"The EZLN's (the Zapatista National Liberation Army) autonomy program is explicitly "pluri-ethnic." The dilemma of the Hach Winik (Lacandon Maya) poses the greatest challenge yet to this ethic of radical multiculturalism. If the Zapatistas are going to maintain their voice of conscience on Mexico's national stage, they will have to maintain vigilance against an ethnic conflict erupting on their own turf- the jungle frontier which they have posed as liberated territory."
So it is all very complex. Even leaving aside the the question of whether it is hypocritical for peacenik pacifist Westerners to be enamored of a group like the Zapatistas, who are at base a literal army. When they marched into San Cristobal all those years ago now, it wasn't with flowers. It was a show of arms. And their deliberate non-usage of arms since the late 90's is still specifically predicated on the threat that, if provoked or attacked, they would use them again, and it wouldn't be a pretty scene for anybody, least of all a Mexican government that fancies itself humane and westernizing.
But if you have been to Latin America, you know that arms are a ubiquitous presence and a basic part of the culture. For better or worse, there are guns (and machetes!) absolutley everywhere. It is disconcerting, but no amount of liberal handwringing will change it. That's one of the big difference between North and Latin America. Down here, the left is armed, and sometimes they even stage armed insurrections or coups. Hugo Chavez, most notably in current affairs, is a General, and a man who never wanted to be anything but an army soldier and officer. He is a leftist, sure, but he is also a militarist to the hilt, and in some respects could fairly be called a reactionary. Or at very least an egomaniac whose sympathies for the people will ultimately take second stage to his own vanities and Big Ideas. Trust me. But I'm getting off track again.
I have no big conclusion to draw here, other than to say that what has happened in Chiapas over the last 15 years is a window into the near future for many other areas in the Americas and elsewhere. Central governments (including the US government) are going to find it harder and harder to assert real control over the "provinces" when the latter feel enough neglected and put upon. Two days before my visit there, the President of Mexico Felipe Calderon visited San Juan Chamula and another nearby village. It was the first such visit perhaps ever. Needless to say, San Juan Chamula with its proximity to San Cristobal and its tourist dollars is not a Zapatista locale. If there was any Mayan town that Calderon could visit with promises of Federal goodies and not get spat upon by angry Mujeres, this is it. But he can't buy off every single indigenous village in the country. History is too deep and alive for that, aside from the fiscal impossibility of it. Perhaps the ruling classes of Mexico are ready for a truly changed relationship with the indigenous populations. Time will tell, but read my next entry (from Oaxaca) for a glimpse of current events that I think portend a rocky future of social unrest in Mexico.
Hoo boy, I've been too many places since my last entry to write a really detailed entry about it all. In brief, I entered Guatemala and bused to Biotopo Quetzal, a cloud-forest reserve, spend the night there and took a hike (but saw no Quetzals, the rare and beautiful bird of Mayan legend), then buses onward to and through the city of Coban (not to be confused with Copan Ruinas, Honduras) to the vry remote village of Lanquin. There I stayed at a ridiculous Euro-Gringo hippie kid hostel called El Retiro for 2 nights and took a day long tour though caves and the amazing pools and falls of Semuc Champey. I dove into water more than I ever have in my life. Once from a cliff *inside* the cave into a dark subterranean pool and river, once from a bridge over the Rio Cahabon (30 feet or more high? Anyway, the farthest I have ever jumped), once from the longest arcing rope swing I have ever swung on (again into the river) and once from a 25 or so foot cliff directly next to where the Rio Cahabon comes charging out from underground at the lower end of the pools of Semuc Champey. Between all that and a whole lot of swimming inside the cave, in the crystalline limestone pools of Champey, and in the River, I was spent. By the way, Semuc Champey is worth getting to even if it is a very long way from anywhere. IIf I went again I would stay not at Lanquin but Semuc Champey itself (9 very long and slow dirt-road kilometers further) at one of the couple of places there.
Next night I ditched the annoying Euro-Gringo place and stayed in a local hotel in the village of Lanquin. Much more to my liking. Sometimes I'm not in the mood for 45 chattering 22 year olds and a gringo bar staff. Lanquin was just normal and laid back in a very Central American way. Theoretically it gets lots of tourists but "lots" is very relative (compared to other more central parts of Guatemala) and in any case the vast majority are sequestered outside of town at Hostal El Retiro. A supposed backpacker paradise, but the kind of place that will milk you for your last penny on meals and drinks. Granting however that their Wednesday night barbecue was the best food I have had on this whole trip.
Then back out from that back of beyond locale, and several hours through amazing mountains to another back of beyond place, Uspantan. Rigoberta Menchu is from there. Amazing country, the whole route between Coban and Huehuetenango (or vice versa.) Both the most beautifully mountainous and the least touristed part of the country. This is the part of Guatemala I would return to. It is the real deal Mayan Guatemala, not a tourist handicraft market in sight. The women's dress may be prettier in this region than anywhere in the country, and the men tend to wear huge cowboy hats and carry cute (but definitely don't tell them that) woven man-purses.
In Uspantan I ran into a very friendly Peace Corps volunteer who recently arrived and will be working to help develop low-impact ecotourism in the Uspantan to Nebaj region. Hiking and staying in local people's homes, that sort of thing. Like last year when I did the multi-day trek from Nebaj to Todos Santos Cuchamatan. She wants to get a version up and running based out of Uspantan, for treks heading toward Nebaj. It is a decent sort of ecotourism, as long as they can somehow maintain that balance between viability/benefit, and overkill. When a locale gets too many tourists, something dies. It is definitely a fine balance. The far extreme is places like Antigua and several of the vilages on Lago de Atitlan, which are beautiful and worth at least checking out, but also perhaps irredeemably changed from the real places that they once were.
Now I'm spending an afternoon and night in Huehuetenango before heading north into Mexico. Huehue (pronounced way-way) is a completely untouristed city of about 100,000 at the base of the Cuchamatanes Mountains. People go through the edge of it on their way from Mexico to points south (and vice versa) but rare is the gringo who ventures into and stays in the city center. Nothing wrong with it at all, actually. Busy, bustling, compact, narrow streets, pastel colored, noisy by day, dead asleep at night (I'm guessing in advance), all the usual attributes of a smaller Central American city, minus the tour buses.