From the mountains of the Mexican southeast

I set out on Thursday, Sept. 29 on the all-day journey to El Conejo at 6:00 a.m., taking the combi to the city at the jungle's edge. There is a longer wait than usual to fill the van since pirate taxis keep pulling up alongside and luring away passengers, promising more comfort on the two-hour ride for 35 pesos ($3.50) instead of 30 pesos. The combi stops to drop off passengers at a crossroads just before the city, where signs proclaim a Zapatista restaurant and stationery store. Just a few yards away, four Army trucks and two humvees are parked, the helmeted soldiers milling around by the roadside--the contradictory coexistence of the rebellion and counterinsurgency.

I hike across town for my bus ticket, go for coffee and return to wait for the bus driver to show up. Passengers start loading their things, and one older Tzeltal man asks where I'm going, bemused to see a kaxlán on this route. The pastor who was my seatmate on a previous trip boards, and he greets me like a long-lost friend. This trip I'm seated next to a young woman, so it will be a quiet trip, as local indigenous custom dictates that a man and a woman don't converse unless they are relatives or married to each other (and even then apparently only sparingly).

We head out, the pavement ends, and passengers start to nod off to the bouncing of the ancient bus. An old man pulls up a bucket to sit by the side of the driver and entertain him with stories, including a long tale about a truck that recently plunged off this road into a river, floating 400 meters before coming to a stop, and one of the bodies was found a week later by a kid who saw an arm tangled in the vines on the riverbank. The driver listens impassively. The cheery storyteller gets off, and now the quiet is broken only by a child who lets out a piercing shriek for no apparent reason every few kilometers.

It rains the entire second half of the 6-hour trip. Manuel, the driver, is a serious man who concentrates hard on keeping the bus upright as we plunge through the mud and craters and ruts and fallen tree trunks and branches. He has evidently been at this a long time, and as we stop to load and offload along the way, people greet him, consult him, and give him messages and articles to drop off along the way. As the driver of the one bus a day along this road, he is a social institution. We stop in the pouring rain behind a small truck that is stuck in the mud, blocking the road. After the crew's efforts to get traction with rocks and branches fail, Manuel pulls the bus up to the back of the truck and pushes it out of the mud, and we're on our way again.

The bus stops at a little village to load up buckets of Coke and prostitutes for the Army base down the road. Manuel gets off to run an errand and his assistant wanders off to pick guavas, leaving the bus idling in the middle of the road. Later we pull up outside the army base to offload the women, soda, and a 40-gallon jug of gas, and a soldier in dark glasses holds up two fingers to signal to his buddies how many painted ladies have arrived.

Further down the road we pass through a village where a family stands by the side of the road and the driver slows down, thinking they want to board. The man calls out, "Don't you want to buy a turkey?" Manuel ask how much, and the seller, running alongside the slow-moving bus, says 250. "Is it big?" Manuel asks, as he brings the creaking bus to a stop to check it out. "It's big!" the vendor insists, though the driver's assistant who has a view out the bus door is making a face to indicate otherwise. Driver and assistant dismount for an inspection and negotiation, returning empty-handed a few minutes later. As we lurch forward the assistant remarks, "Maybe if he were asking 180...," and the driver replies, "Maybe by December..." But the seller probably needs cash now for medicine for a sick child, the typical reason for selling an animal before its time.

I get off at Trébol just before nightfall and inquire about the truck to El Conejo. One of the priístas lounging around snorts, "Who knows, they don't have a schedule, they go whenever they want to." Another asks, "Why would you want to go to El Conejo? There's nothing there, it's pure jungle!" I think about the teacher training school in El Conejo that serves the whole county, the library, the clinic under construction, the beautiful mural on the new municipal building, and I smile to myself.

Another young man is also heading to El Conejo, and after a short wait for the truck we decide to start walking. As night falls and it starts raining, the truck comes down the road. The driver says they have to run another errand and will be back for us, so we take shelter under the eaves of a nearby house, where the owner is blaring a tape of an evangelical sermon over the boombox. I chat with the other traveler about his corn and coffee crops and his adventures seeking agricultural and construction work in Ocosingo, Palenque, and as far away as the port of Veracruz.

The truck finally returns and a half hour later we're in El Conejo, where I make my way through the dark to the meeting room of the municipal authorities. There I find Rafael from the council, who gives me a cheerful greeting and opens one of the student-teacher dorms for me to stay in. I tell him I'm interested in visiting other communities in the municipality, and he says he'll talk to councilmember David and they'll let me know. While we're trading news, a Greek couple whom I had met before at the Caracol stop by, along with a Catalán man. Rafael has to get back to some other business, so I stay up drinking coffee and talking with the other foreigners.

The Greeks, whom I'll call Cirrus and Elmyra, are working on construction of a kitchen/dining hall as part of the solidarity collective that supports the school project. Roque, the Catalán, is a young schoolteacher from Barcelona who has been working on numerous projects throughout the Zapatista territories. We talk about the different phases of the military occupation of Chiapas, currently in a low-profile mode, and Roque recounts a funny story that he heard in the Caracol at La Garrucha. It seems one of the clueless young Army recruits changed into civilian clothes, sneaked off base and walked into the Caracol, asking the astonished Vigilance Commission if he could join the Zapatistas because he heard they paid better. Trying to keep a straight face, they explained to him that that was not what their movement was about at all and sent him on his way, then had a good laugh. Being foreigners, we also compared insect bite and immigration stories. I was once again glad I had renewed my visa in the anonymity of Mexico City, since Cirrus had done his in the state capital of Tuxtla Gutiérrez and had to answer a lot of questions about his travels and activities.

It rains all night, and I wake up to a rare morning rain. Later I would learn that this was the after-effect of Hurricane Stan that hit El Salvador. A man stops by to visit and asks where I'm from, which triggers a series of questions about whether the U.S. is still at war in Iraq, whether the war is being fought on U.S. or Iraqi territory, if Americans are dying as well as Iraqis, if the U.S. is as big a country as Mexico, and if we have milpas (cornfields) there. I tell him about the protest march of 300,000 the previous weekend in Washington, and he comments that mass protest was the only thing that halted the government's military offensive here in 1994. He tells me he hopes to build a small store next to his house, maybe to sell Coke and crackers and soap. Today he won't go to the milpa because it's too rainy, so he sits and jingles a handful of nails that will eventually form part of his little store.

After breakfast of crackers and coffee, Cirrus and Elmyra and Roque take off for an overnight trip to a nearby community, since construction on the kitchen is halted until the master builder returns from a nearby village. I reluctantly decide to stay behind, since David from the municipal council is supposed to return today and I don't want to miss the chance to schedule my travels to surrounding communities. I can foresee a lot of waiting, so I put on some rice and beans to cook and settle in with a book, an ethnographic study of the Tzeltal concept of the soul (ch'ulel).

It rains on and off in short bursts all day. David turns up in mid-afternoon, serious and reserved as ever. I offer him some rice and beans, and we talk as we eat. Rafael didn't catch up with him, so I explain my interest in visiting various communities and interviewing coordinators of projects (health, education, etc.), as well as elders who can recount the history of each community's formation and its integration into the movement. He draws me a map with a half dozen nearby communities, and we discuss logistics and timetable for a round of visits over the coming week. Some involve a one- to four-hour walk, others require catching a truck at Trébol or another crossroad. It's not clear to me how to discreetly find the Zapatistas in the divided communities, but David assures me he'll communicate with them and alert them that I'm coming.

Saturday morning is clear and sunny, and everyone seems relieved to have a respite from the rain. Several people stop by to chat with me in what turn out to be some of the more informative conversations I've had since I've been here, not as formal interviews. I guess I just have to hang around patiently to become a familiar presence, and realize that formal interviewing is not the only or best way to learn about people's experiences.

David comes for me at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday and I accompany him back to his home village which I'll call San Felipe, to begin my community visits. It's a four hour hike straight up the mountain, lugging food and water and hammock. David of course barely breaks a sweat, and is amused when I have to take a break to catch my breath. At one point he asks, "Can you cross a hammock?" It turns out he means a hanging bridge over a river, made of cables and planks, swaying precariously and with nothing to grab onto. It's not so bad if you don't look down, keep moving forward, and hop lightly over the missing planks. He is a bit more talkative as we walk, telling me more of the history of the community and how he got involved in the struggle initially through "the word of God." Liberation Theology organizers had a major impact in the '70s in the jungle canyons, preaching social justice in place of the old theology of resignation, a change which would eventually empower people to take the next step of organized action to confront injustice. I learn that San Felipe was founded 6 years ago when the government built a road through El Solar, destroying a number of houses and fields without paying any compensation, and the displaced Zapatistas moved down the road here to start over again.

We arrive in the 8-family village and David points me toward the river, but I'm too tired to bathe so I crash in the one-room schoolhouse, stretching out on a bench. David returns an hour or so later with the community education and health promoters, both teenage girls, and I have an interview by flashlight. David and the teacher interpret from Tzeltal to Spanish for the health promoter, who is only 3 months into the 2-year course and speaks limited Spanish. She receives health care training at a village reached by a 3-hour hike and then a 2-hour ride on the bus that passes once a day. She says the government clinics treat them badly, give them expired medicines, and never explain anything; whereas the Zapatista health promoters are taught to incorporate community knowledge such as herbal medicine and bone-setting as well as midwife training. The two young women speak excitedly about autonomous health and education, contrasting their patient and flexible and community-relevant approach to the arrogance and manipulation and disdain they used to experience at the hands of the "bad government." We don't have money for books, they explain, but we are rescuing the culture and history and knowledge of the elders of the community, so the people are our book. After they take their leave, I go buy a candle at the "store" (a house where a few items are sold). David stops by to bring me dinner of roasted bananas and sweet coffee that tastes like the smoke from the kitchen fire. We talk for awhile longer before he bids me goodnight, saying he'll stop by early in the morning with a couple of people who are walking to the next village of El Solar and can show me the way.

Sunday morning I get up with the roosters and go down to the stream for a bath. It's a little cooler here than El Conejo because of the higher elevation. Without electricity, there are no sounds except the crickets and birds and occasional snort of a horse. Daniel comes down and bangs two pieces of iron together, summoning the villagers for church. A túnel (deacon) leads the service in Tzeltal, a mixture of prayers and short Bible readings and a kind of open discussion period in which people take turns speaking what's on their mind, with a brief summation or sermon by the túnel. Afterwards David invites me to his home for pozol (a kind of gruel made of fermented corn mass and water) and gives me a summary of the sermon: We are poor and exploited, the bad government wants to do away with us, we are in resistance, and we pray that they won't be able to finish us off.

My guide arrives and we walk to El Solar, a half hour away, then wind our way through the muddy labyrinth of paths to the house of a man I'll call Lucas, who will be my host. The house consists of two simple thatch-roof structures with dirt floors, one for the cooking fire and one with wooden planks for sleeping. His wife, who speaks no Spanish, offers me a meal of fried eggs, tortillas, coffee and water. Lucas turns out to be a wealth of information, and he also introduces his 75-year-old father who was one of the founders of the community some 40 years ago. Don Alberto tells me about the five years he spent trudging back and forth to Tuxtla (back when there were no roads and it involved a two-week journey by foot), plus four trips to Mexico City to get legal rights to the land under the agrarian reform. His eyes shine as he gestures dramatically with his hands to indicate the size of the stack of tortillas he had to carry for those journeys.

I learn that the government has lavished resources on the pro-government side of the village of El Solar, including payments last year of 80,000 pesos each ($8,000, probably over ten times the average annual income around here) to 120 families. The payments were supposed to allow them to purchase more land for production, but Lucas says most of the priístas spent it on consumer items like vehicles and booze. The government also installed electricity, but the priístas refused to let the 9 Zapatista families connect to it, demanding a payment of 1,500 pesos per family, which was totally out of reach. He notes that the flood of government money has led vendors to jack up prices, hurting the Zapatistas who refuse the government funds.

I ask Lucas if I can meet with the education and health promoters, and he says "Don't you want me to call an assembly of all the Zapatistas in the community?" Not wanting to take everyone away from their labors, I say that's not really necessary, but he insists, and eventually I realize that the embattled Zapatista minority is happy to have an occasion to come together. One of the young education promoters enthusiastically interprets for me at what turns out to be a lively town-hall style meeting. They are beleaguered, but clearly proud of their resistance. They also question me closely about what I'm doing and why, a sign that they are not a passive bunch, and I seem to pass the community test. Afterwards Lucas shows me down to the road to catch the truck back toward Trébol, but it doesn't show up by dark, so he suggests that I spend the night at their house and set out in the morning. His wife kindly offers me fried chayote (a prickly green vegetable) with tortilla and coffee, and we all crash early on planks in the one-room living quarters. Unfortunately I don't get much sleep, between the babies crying and the stomach infection that catches up with me after all the gallons of untreated river water that I've been politely accepting to drink.

Monday morning I'm feeling a little better and start the four-hour hike back, with Lucas insisting on accompanying me. I try to tell him it's not necessary, that I can follow the road, but in fact he knows several shortcut paths down the mountain that shorten the trip. On the way out of town he greets every single person we encounter on the path as "brother" or "cousin" or "godmother" in the elaborately courteous Tzeltal way, stopping to exchange a few extra words of greeting with the elders. He's a talkative and curious man, and our conversation along the way wanders into areas of culture and language. I ask him whether people in El Solar still adhere to the traditional beliefs such as the concept of ch'ulel that I've been reading about, and he says the majority no longer do; though they still have a ceremony in the mountains every May 3rd to pray for good rains, and prayers in their milpas at planting time. When we get to Trébol I tell him I can find my way back to El Conejo just fine, but he insists on waiting until the truck is repaired and he's sure I have a ride. Back in El Conejo I suddenly realize I forgot my raincoat, which Lucas had offered to carry for me in his backpack along with a bunch of bananas. This could be a very soggy week. I trudge off to the river for a much-needed bath, and by the time I return my raincoat and the bananas have appeared: Lucas had remembered, and found a missionary who was heading out this way and asked him to deliver them to the tall foreigner.

I gratefully accept a bowl of rice that Roque has whipped up, then I take the opportunity to talk with the 18-year-old education promoter of El Conejo, a woman I'll call Maricarmen. She tells me about how she suffered in government schools until the fourth grade, appalled that the teachers hit the children and prohibited them from speaking their language and "never explained the objectives of their lessons, taught history without explaining what it means." She says this is what motivated her to enter the Zapatista alternative education track, to make a difference in the lives of young indigenous kids. As we talk, children file up to her to hand in their math problem which she gently corrects.

Rested now, I start the two-hour hike to the next destination, which I'll call Valle de Caoba. Cirrus is down with a stomach bug, but Elmyra is bored and comes along for the adventure.

Valle de Caoba has the look of a new settlement, with recently-cleared fields. We approach a house and ask the woman there where to find the education promoters. She speaks no Spanish, so I try out my limited Tzeltal and newly acquired word for teacher, nopteswanej (which literally means something like "one whose work is to be approached by others," a kind of accompaniment on the path to knowledge). We are directed to the schoolhouse, where kids are sent scurrying to round up the grown-ups for another town meeting. This is an all-Zapatista community, so the atmosphere is relaxed and even festive as people banter and joke while waiting to everyone to assemble. The 28 families here are squatters on national land which they farm as a collective, and although priístas from a nearby town occasionally make threats and fire shots in their direction, they refuse to be provoked or dislodged. The education committee representative speaks decent Spanish and interprets for the meeting, and there is lively participation as they describe their precarious subsistence economy and community efforts to create their own education and health care. They want to feed us dinner, but Elmyra and I prefer to start our hike back while it's still light out. Two men escort us back on the two-hour walk, even though they must be bone-tired from the day's work on the milpa, and we finally convince them halfway that they can turn back while it's still light out and we'll be fine.

Tuesday morning I catch a 5:00 a.m. ride on a truck heading in the direction of the last two communities I'm scheduled to visit on this trip. Roque and Cirrus are on the same truck, heading further down the road to catch another ride to where they'll get transportation back to San Cristóbal. After a few impromptu truck repairs along the way, I'm dropped off at a crossroad where I catch a ride to a town I'll call La Cigüeña. It's a fairly large town and I don't have a clue how to find the Zapatistas, so I have to take a chance and ask someone in the street where to find the education promoter. They direct me to a house, where I quickly realize the occupant is a teacher for some kind of religious school. Oops. They are very gracious however, and send one of the children to guide me to the right house. It seems that the folks here didn't get the word I was coming, and I learn that school is not in session because the Zapatista teachers had to ask for a week off to do some harvesting in their cornfields.

La Cigüeña is a town of about 150 families, of whom only about 20 are Zapatista, with an Army post right on the outskirts of town. There are 9 education promoters attending 100 kids. Most Zapatista communities pitch in to tend the milpas of compañeros who are away on community tasks such as teaching, but things are so close to the edge of subsistence here that no hands can be spared from anyone's harvest lest some precious corn be lost, and the teachers are somewhat embarrassed that they had to ask for a week's leave. But they are an enthusiastic bunch, and three of the nine who are from the first graduating class of teacher trainees in the school at El Conejo are taking advanced courses so they can become trainers, so there will no longer be dependence on solidarity volunteers from Mexico City. One of the education promoters invites me over to his house, where his wife and two children and mother and elderly grandma are sitting around on stumps, and they seat me on the only chair and offer me nolbilwah, tamales stuffed with beans. His wife tells me about the sewing cooperative that the Zapatista women have started, and their efforts to build a second schoolhouse with solidarity support from Denmark. I thank them for their hospitality, then catch a ride toward the last village on this round of visits.

I arrive in the early afternoon at the community I'll call Río Revuelto. Once again I'm not sure where to go, so I stop at the health clinic that has a big red Zapatista star on it, but nobody is there. A family joins me in waiting and I chat with the man, who tells me he has been to the U.S. to work in San Francisco, paying the coyote $1,800 for the trip which the labor contractor let him work off without charging interest (a real bargain). I assume from this that he's a priísta, but as the conversation develops it turns out that he is in fact a Zapatista, which means that economic conditions here must be particularly bad, because Zapatistas are generally less prone to resort to labor migration. The health promoter still hasn't arrived, but eventually I'm directed to the house of the comisariado, or person in charge of the ejido (agrarian reform unit). Actually there are two comisariados here, since the community is divided and the Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas make their farming decisions in separate assemblies. In any case the comisariado isn't home, so I try asking at a store that Cirrus had told me was owned by a Zapatista woman. She says go talk to that man in the black t-shirt, he's a good friend of the comisariado. I approach the man and bingo, he says oh yes, we've been waiting for you, come on over to the schoolhouse.

It turns out he's the education committee representative. The two young education promoters talk to me over the din of the schoolchildren's chatter, the one with stronger Spanish interpreting for the other. They confirm that economic conditions are indeed dire, with most community members doing day labor for $4 a day for at least a week or two each year to buy necessities, including a bit of corn when the harvest is bad. Relations with the priístas in the community are tense. They give an example of a recent incident in which the priístas planted a big sign bragging "We're building classrooms for a better life" right in the yard of a Zapatista, who removed the sign, after which some priístas drove by firing shots over the house. The teachers explained that the Zapatista authorities had invited their pro-government counterparts to sit down and discuss their differences, but the latter refused.

The folks in Río Revuelto invite me to stay the night, but I calculate that with a bit of luck I can catch a ride to Palenque and get a bus that same night back to San Cristóbal, so I thank them for their offer and tell them I need to keep moving. Waiting for a ride at the same roadside store where I had asked directions, I strike up a conversation with the shopkeeper. A drunken priísta stumbles up to shake my hand and tries to say something, but nothing coherent comes out. The store owner tells me things in town got even harder three years ago when government agents claimed they had a plague in their coffee plants, which they proceeded to spray. She thinks there was no plague and they sprayed poison, so the trees all died and they lost their main cash crop.

I make all my connections and get back to San Cristóbal around 10:30 p.m. It's been raining day and night here, still feeling the effects of Hurricane Stan which is now flooding the coastal areas of Chiapas, but here in the highlands it just means the streets have turned into rivers. I'm tired but happy, as I finally feel I'm getting out to the communities (not just the autonomous municipal seats and regional government centers), getting more of a glimpse of grassroots zapatismo where the rubber meets the road (or muddy path, as the case may be). Maybe it's a blessing in disguise that I didn't get permission to work in the other region, as I can go more in-depth in examining how these communities deal with the daily dilemmas of living in protracted rebellion. I think I'm going to stay in San Cristóbal for a couple of weeks now, not only because I have a lot of notes to type up while I can still read my handwriting, but also because I want to work on getting some information from agrarian reform officials in the state capital of Tuxtla, to piece together the government strategy that these folks are resisting.