Oventic 2

We left Oventic last week. It has been an inspiring month. The class structure was that we had Spanish class five times a week, academic class twice (held in the Oventic café), and various activities throughout the week such as song night, where all of the group would get together with the five promoters and sing all of the revolutionary songs, like the Zapatista Hymn and De Colores.
Every Wednesday was a field trip of sorts. During the second week we visited Magdalena de la Paz, a local Zapatista Community. We happened to visit during a festival celebrating the patron saint f the town. These festivals are quite a spectacle. We walked around the town for an hour before lunch (the local junta insisted that we had to let them treat us to a lunch) and saw the various traditions. In one, local men dance around in a circle with all sorts of instruments and wearing all white clothing with ribbons of every color draped from their hats and sashes. This performance was punctuated by two very intoxicated men coming up o us and asking us who we were, and telling us how appy they were to receive us, and yet acting quite strange, and asking us over and over who we were there with and what we were doing. We found out later that only half of the town, at most, is Zapatista, and the other half, the Priistas, aren’t too happy with their presewnce. Apparently our two hosts were aware that most of the foreigners who visit the town are their to meet with the local Zapatista junta, which is a government that operates alongside the official Priista government.
Not long after this encounter we had the opportunity to meet with this Junta. All twenty of us piled into this simple yet brightly painted building, decorated inside with all sorts of Zapatista posters and hand written signs on cardboard reading “Democracia, Libertad, Justicia,” and illuminated by bare bulbs hanging from the open rafters. We were greeted by the whole junta, men and women of all ages, who represented all of the posts within the junta, and were welcomed with a traditional song on Mayan instruments, all twenty of us bouncing up and down and shaking maracas for what seemed like fifteen of the best minutes of my life. Every three or four minutes the song would stop, we would all look around, and for whatever reason the same song would start right back up again. This seemed so emblematic of the whole experience of interacting with the locals, where there seemed to be such a cultural divide that it was all we could do to grin and bear it and stop wondering why we never knew what was going on.
Our talk with the junta was another good example. The twenty of us were surrounded by the fifteen or so members of the junta, and we were told to give any questions we might have, so most of us managed to come up with one or two reasonably intelligent questions, which the junta dutifully wrote down and began to answer, but only after asking several times if we were sure we didn’t have more questions. There is, however, a particular style in which many of these questions are answered. First, the question is discussed in Tzotzil by the whole Junta, many of whom speak less Spanish than us. Then the spokesman answers, but in a very roundabout yet exhaustive manner.
Finally, after three hours of explication, we finished our original group of questions, and then the spokesperson began exhorting us to ask more questions, because that’s why they were there after all. However, more and more of his answers began to have references to our long-awaited lunch in them, and so finally Jennifer, one of the teachers, took this as a hint to stand up after another half hour of answers to suggest that we adjourn the meeting and go to lunch, upon which she instantly realized that she had not mastered the art of Mayan manners, as the spokesman looking totally insulted, apologized if he had wasted our time and begged us to forgive his long-windedness.
So then we went to lunch, which was served between to ramshackle huts a couple of blocks away, and we ate our soup with beef and tostadas as one of the junta members told us what a big deal it was to eat meat in this community, and how they normally have nothing more than some hot water with a bit of chile and lime in it, totally mortified that some members of the group had made a big deal out of the fact that their wasn’t a vegetarian option.
Luckily the next trip was much smoother. We visited another municipality, which was a last minute substitution for a visit to Polho. Polho is basically a refugee camp, home to some seven thousand displaced Chiapanecans who have been exiled from their communities, almost always by the local PRI government as retribution for their affiliation with the Zapatistas. They now live in this refugee camp, a sort of purgatory where they haven’t been able to start new lives, for the lack of land, but still feel they face to much repression to go back to their communities. To put it in perspective how much this affects the local communities, Oventic, as the local Zapatista center, containing all of the aforementioned programs like free healthcare and school, spends seventy percent of its budget every year supporting Polho. When the news came that we were not able to visit Polho, because of security concerns, we weren’t entirely sure if this was a bad thing. 16 de Febrero, the town we visited instead, is a serene little town at the base of the mountains where few speak Spanish, accessible only by foot, and they are just beginning to see what they can achieve themselves with the help of the Zapatistas. It was obviously not accustomed to foreigners, as everywhere we went there were local kids peering out from behind doorways and windows with their mouths agape. On a more personal note, 16 de Febrero’s most recent addition is a brown leather wallet, stuffed full of money and cards with the name Brodie Lewis emblazoned across them, tucked away somewhere in the dense foliage along the side of the road.
The day after this trip, we packed up our stuff, cleaned our little dormitories, and said good bye to the stray dogs and dog-sized spiders that had been our housemates, as well as the promoters, who informed us that they had wanted to come into San Cristobal with us, but had determined that the security risks didn’t warrant a frivolous trip into the city.
Living in a Zapatista community did a great deal to demystify Zapatismo to us, to show us the true faces of those fighting for something different, and to understand it without a veil of flowery language or romantic photographs. Interestingly, it did nothing to dissuade any of us from our adoration of the movement, and if anything all of us now feel a deeper truer connection to the movement having had this experience. There is a phrase that they use, caminar preguntando, which means, more or less, to ask questions along the way, to always question yourself, and your struggle. Seeing people who had dedicated their lives to struggle, such as the promoters who, while they have free room and board are provided with no other stipend, and have to ask the junta for things as small as toothbrushes and toothpaste, to see these people, so intimate with sacrifice, step back and actually listen to our questions and critiques, as a bunch of privileged american kids, was amazing. They internalize their ethics of rebellion to an extent that is almost unbelievable.
We are all sad to have to reenter the real world.