From the mountains of the Mexican southeast

Back in the comfort (if not quiet) of San Cristóbal, I'm now caught up on sleep and recaffeinated with the wonderful product of the surrounding highlands. This is the old colonial capital, once known as the "Royal City" (or Jovel to the local Tzotzil Maya population), with narrow cobblestone streets and adobe houses with red tile roofs and spacious interior patios. It has changed significantly over recent decades, first with the influx of indigenous people pushed out of their communities by the rural subsistence crisis affecting Mexico generally and moving into the swelling colonias on the edges of town, so that the total population now is more than 100,000 of whom probably more than half are indigenous. The local ladino (non-indigenous/mestizo) population, known as coletos, are in denial about this, as they always seem to be trying to hold back the tide of history. Fiercely proud of their colonial heritage and with a sense of hereditary privilege dating back to prerogatives granted by the Spanish crown, the coletos nursed a feeling of aristocratic superiority when new entrepreneurial elites were economically elevated by the Liberal reforms of the 1800s and moved the state capital to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, today a congested and graceless city of industry and local bureaucracy an hour and a half away by winding mountain road.

Many coletos today are no longer landowners but owe their living directly or indirectly to the tourist trade: the "Ruta Maya" in Chiapas has long been a favorite of the backpacking crowd (since it lacks the luxury infrastructure that the government invested in Cancún and the rest of the "Riviera Maya" on the Yucatán). And since the 1994 rebellion, there's an additional layer of "Zapaturismo," with enterprising indigenous people now selling little woven cloth Marcos dolls on the street corners. All of this seems an indignity to the coletos, who struggle mightily to keep up appearances, even when the zillions of little posadas (inns) and restaurants in town depend on this new tourist influx. Like the ladinos of neighboring Maya-majority Guatemala, the coletos whose economic position has slipped below what they consider their natural station in life repeat the mantra, "We may be poor but we're not Indians." The coletos are still in shock from the day in 1992 when a group of protozapatista indigenous marched into town from the jungle canyons to the east (which they had been colonizing since the 1950s to relieve the land pressure in the highlands), tied ropes around the statue of the local Spanish conqueror Diego de Mazariegos, pulled him off his pedestal and dragged him through the streets in a counter-commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the "discovery of America."

With all this seething tension, most tourists pass through this beautiful town unaware, admiring the colonial churches and the beautiful weaving and embroidering for sale in the artisan marketplace. The weather here 2,000 meters above sea level is sunny but cool and pleasant, and the food is fresh and delicious for those with incomes. I enjoyed my fresh papaya with lime and highland coffee from 20 miles away for breakfast this morning.

Over breakfast I chatted with my housemates. One had just done a story about the EZLN/civil society "encounter" last weekend for Free Speech Radio News (www.fsrn.org), pointing out that this was Marcos' first public appearance in four years after a long period of what the Zapatistas call "strategic silence." They were chuckling over the fact that he's put on weight. I've been thinking about the silence strategy in a new way since reading a sociolinguistic study of the Tzeltal culture by a social scientist who works with a human rights center in the jungle region, who describes how silence has a sacred significance in the Tzeltal and Tzotzil cultures. I wonder how many other signs and symbols are read in radically different ways by people inhabiting different cultural worlds. We also talked about today's headlines in La Jornada about the July 2006 presidential campaign which is already in full swing. The reformist PRD candidate López Obrador has refrained from responding to Marcos' jibes, but a few second-tier perredistas couldn't resist the temptation to lash back. One injured politician was quoted as saying that they never signed any agreement with the EZLN, so Marcos had no business calling them traitors. But that sort of missed the point that political actors do have a responsibility to the people, in this case to the PRD's electoral base, who were strung along with promises before the party cut a back-room deal with other parties and voted for the 2001 indigenous counter-reform law.

The other news item of note was that the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda cannot run as an independent candidate without a party. I'm not clear on all the ins and outs of the legal arguments, but the judiciary enjoys little independence here, and the Supreme Court gave up on the concept of judicial review when it ruled that it was not qualified to hear the constitutional challenges to the 2001 indigenous rights counter-reform law. Castañeda, a political scientist (I'm ashamed to say) and darling of the U.S., is an elitist and opportunist who has long tried to cultivate an image of intellectual superiority over the fray of partisan politics, sort of Mexico's Henry Kissinger. He likes to tout his youthful flirtation with the left, now that he is older and wiser (and has written a kiss-and-tell memoir about that). He later formed a little clique of political pundits, mostly reformists on the liberal fringe of the PRI, called the San Angel Group after the posh Mexico City neighborhood where they hung out. Then he made known his availability as statesmanlike consultant for the PAN, and became Fox's foreign minister. He resigned when the wind blew the wrong way and his effort be the star of an immigration accord with the U.S. crashed in the post-9/11 environment. Now he's trying to be reborn as a dark horse independent presidential candidate, maybe hoping the two leading contenders--López Obrador of the PRD and Madrazo from the dinosaur wing of the PRI, both old warhorses from the state of Tabasco with a history of personal enmity--will destroy each other and leave an opening. It's going to be a colorful and nasty campaign year.

Anyway, back to the reflections on race and class and culture, another interesting thing I read recently was a book manuscript by a U.S. political geographer who spent time interviewing landowners in the northern zone of Chiapas. There have been few studies of the landowning class, and he did a really excellent job giving a fine-grained portrayal, with a specific focus on trying to understand why an historically reactionary and violent group mostly decided to abandon their lands to "land invaders" and accept government buyouts after the 1994 rebellion. Interestingly, most of the land invasions (or "recoveries" as the indigenous claimants prefer to call them, perhaps with more historical accuracy) were carried out by non-Zapatistas who simply saw an opening and took it. Indeed, most of the gains that indigenous and poor people have achieved in the wake of the Zapatista rupture of business as usual have not accrued directly to Zapatista support-base communities, perhaps in keeping with the EZLN's modest slogan of "Everything for everyone, nothing for us." One might even argue that the Zapatista rebellion contributed to the 2000 electoral toppling of the long-ruling PRI, though that transition is still ongoing and I think it would be premature to call Mexico a democracy. Anyway, this manuscript attempts to give an empathetic hearing to these landowners, who are not a haughty absentee landlord class but rather scrappy pioneers in muddy boots who learned Tzeltal and seemed genuinely surprised that "their" indigenous peons turned on them. The author cites the fading feudal order portrayed in the classic Italian novel The Leopard, and his portrayal also seems reminiscent of the Civil War-era U.S. South or the Boers of South Africa, or the lesser-known case of Nicaragua's burguesía chapiolla (homespun bourgeoisie). There is a literary sense of tragedy in the work, and it's a good reminder that things are rarely black-and-white. Which also makes me think about the complex and shifting dynamics between "Zapatista" and "priísta" indigenous people, often closely related to each other by culture and experience if not by blood, in the so-called "conflict zones" of Chiapas. But more on that after I've spent more time out there.