July 6
I want to see the world from inside a Club Med. I want to fly to Paris and refuse to go more than a mile away from the Eiffel tower. I want to go on a pub crawl in Athens that’s only open to Americans. I want a cultural experience in Central America without the dirty parts, or any guilt for not wanting these people in my country. I want to see the native peoples in their silly clothing from the window of a tour bus. I want to drink Starbucks in Chiapas. I want to eat at a Hard Rock Cafe in Africa. I want to stay at a Hilton on every continent. I want to give spare change to beggars in China and feel really good about myself for it. I want to pay a series of tour guides $150 an hour and feel slightly ripped off. I want to do a weeklong meditation retreat in Thailand and tell all my friends how it changed my life. I want to repeat the same sentence in English 5 times to an Egyptian street vendor in the hopes he’ll understand me if I just talk LOUDER and slllllooooowwwwwwerrrrr. And when I come home, I want to tell all the pretty rich girls how I just went on the craziest adventure ever.
July 5
I got word that my friend Johnathan at Albergue Jesus de Buen Pastor tried to kill himself. It’s like this: he’s from Honduras, and he’s gay. In Honduras, this is not acceptable. He had to leave home when he was 13 years old, for precisely this reason. He lived on the streets of Tegucigalpa for several years, working as a male prostitute to support himself. Again, this started when he was thirteen.
Following a stretch in jail and a very short stint in the army, he was able to get a job at a Pizza Hut, which afforded him enough money to live in a motel, which I assume was almost as nasty as living on the streets. When he could no longer bear to live this way, he decided to go to Mexico City to look for a better job. Since Mexico has pretty much the exact same immigration policy as the U.S. (and views Central American immigrants through the same racist lens that we view Mexican immigrants) he could not enter Mexico legally, and opted to take the train. Meaning ride on top of the train.
Descending from the train, his leg got ran over, somewhere around Mexico City.
At the hospital in Mexico City, they told Johnathan that they would have to amputate his leg below the knee. He cried and begged them not to do it, until he visited a psychologist that was missing three limbs, who basically told him to man up, and gave him some anti-depressants. He decided to let them amputate his leg.
Let’s stop and think about this for a second: he’s twenty years old now. Basically still a kid. In the middle of a country he’s never been to, where he knows no one. And he has to make the decision whether or not to let them cut his leg off.
After the amputation, he was transported to the south of Mexico, but the immigration authorities figured it would be a pain in the ass to haul a one-legged kid all the way to Honduras. So they deposited him at the Albergue, which functions as a kind of independent immigration detention facility. He’s awaiting an operation to revise his leg so he can get prosthesis, at which point he will be sent back to Honduras.
Where he has nothing waiting for him.
So he tried to overdose on his psychotic meds. They found him in time, thank God, and he’s still alive.
And still at the Albergue, waiting for his operation.
In Caracol Oventic, a Zapatista community where I studied Spanish for a week, I heard two parables about the differences between capitalist society, and the way of life of the Tzotzil, the indigenous community of the region. Here’s one: A man is winding a clock on the outside of his house. Another man sees him, and laughs and laughs at this silly, monotonous task. Returning to his house, this man decides that he also wants a clock for his wall.
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Instead of buying a clock from the store, this man puts an artichoke on his wall. He counts time by pulling a leaf off the artichoke whenever he feels like it, and keeping track of how many leaves are gone. In this manner, he always knows the exact hour.
As my compañero de clase said, by way of interpretation: “Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, do stuff when it needs to be done.”
San Cristobal de Las Casas, in Chiapas, is a yuppie’s dreamworld. Around the zocalo, there are several streets blocked to cars that are extremely clean and modern, featuring Burger Kings and expensive foreign restaurants. The Chiapas coffee is even better than Seattle’s. Cheap, stereotypical indigenous goods are abundant. You can venture a little bit away from the zocalo and see streets that begin to look a bit third-world, and yet are extremely safe.
Another, much more interesting way that San Cristobal is like a dreamworld: no matter how sure you are that you are walking towards your destination, you are wrong. It does not matter how many times you have walked this route before.
Useful Spanish phrases to know if you find yourself in Tapachula, Chiapas:
Hace calor. – It’s hot.
Mierda, ¡hace calor! – It’s very hot.
¡Carajo! ¡Qué calor! – Excuse me, sir, could you kindly take me to the nearest medical facilty? It seems my eyeballs have literally melted out of my face.
Here’s the other parable regarding Tzotzil life. It’s more of an anecdote, than a parable, actually.
My teacher told us about the Tzotzil education system versus what we would think of as the “normal” education system. In our system, when a student excels, the teachers and the school administrators do everything possible to help them excel more. Think advanced classes, skipping grades, etc.
In the tzotzil system, when a student excels, they make sure to not teach him any more until everyone else catches up. His purpose until that point is to help the other students.
No one is supposed to advance too far ahead of anyone else, because this would not help the community to advance.
The particular teacher that told us this was not native to this indigenous community. He said when he first came to Oventic, to teach at the secondary school, there was a student that was extremely bright, and instead of encouraging him, they did what we would consider “holding him back.” The teacher said this was extremely difficult for him to accept, but he just had to accept it. I asked him how the student felt about it. “Él entendió” he said. The teacher had problems accepting it, but the student took it as natural.
The teachers in the Zapatista caracoles don’t refer to themselves as “maestros.” They are “promotores.” “Maestro,” they say, would imply that they know more than the students. Their view is that they don’t know more than the students; they know different things. They’ve had different experiences. The promotores, they say, are there to learn from the students as much as the students are there to learn from them.
I think it was the first time a teacher has straight-out told me that they don’t think they’re smarter than me. Which I liked.
June 22
Interview conducted at Albergue Jesús de Buen Pastor del Pobre y Migrante, Tapachula, Chiapas:
Subject is a 27-year-old man who wishes to remain anonymous, hereafter referred to as “Sujeto.” Sujeto was born in El Salvador, and brought to the United States when he was three months old. Lived in L.A. for his whole life. Seven years ago, he was arrested on a firearms charge. According to Sujeto, this occurred when a store he was working at was robbed, and his friend was shot. Sujeto ran to his friend’s car, where he retrieved a pistol, and returned fire. He was sentenced to seven years in prison on an attempted-murder charge.
When released from prison, Sujeto was deported to El Salvador, a country he had not been to since he was three months old, and where he has no family. Immediately upon leaving the airport, Sujeto was accosted by gang members who cut open his shirt to look for gang tattoos, of which he has none. Had they found gang tattoos, they would have killed him.
He made his way north riding on top of a train, which was assaulted. The bandits forced everyone off the train. Sujeto attempted to help an old man off the train, but the bandits pushed him away and kicked the old man off the train. The old man’s head was spun around 180 degrees when he hit the ground, broken neck. The bandits forced Sujeto to the ground and fired a round next to his ear. They took his money, but did not find all of it, and continued on. “Gracias a Dios” that no one else was killed besides the old man, Sujeto says.
Sujeto got back on the train, where he met a man that offered him work. The work turned out to be carrying marijuana and cocaine over the U.S. border. Sujeto refused the job. Sleeping in a park that night, he was accosted and shot in the leg. His assailant told him “you cannot leave this job.”
Sujeto was taken to a hospital, where he was reported to Grupo Beta, the Mexican border patrol. He was taken down to the Guatemalan border, and since he had become sick while in the hospital, he was taken to the Albergue, which provides service to people that are sick or have been assaulted. Sujeto fits in both categories.
So, the moral of the story: deportation can be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Sujeto had never been to El Salvador. It would be like deporting someone born in Albuquerque to Nigeria. He had no contacts there.
In many cases, it amounts to a death sentence. In this shortened version of his story, he is almost killed three times, once within an hour of arriving at his “home” country.
Sujeto had the opportunity to become a citizen, since he had lived in the US for so long. But he passed on this opportunity, since it costs several hundred dollars to apply for citizenship. Never in his 27 years did he have several hundred dollars to spare for the process.
OK, so let’s say he’s a criminal. Admittedly, the story about returning fire is a little sketchy.
But that’s why he served seven years in prison. Deporting him, on top of that, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, by any definition of the word. What would you do if you suddenly got dropped of in the middle of El Salvador?
With luck, you’d make it to Albergue Jesús de Buen Pastor, and live to tell your story.
Think of how many silent voices weren’t that lucky.
June 20
Revolutionary idea: refuse all help from the government. This is the policy of Zapatista groups throughout Mexico. This means they refused to accept materials from the government to build concrete floors and tin roofs for their houses. Many of them sleep on a dirt floor.
It also means they have no running water.
The Zapatista uprising on January 1, 1994, marked the true begging of the Zapatista revolution. Armed rebels attacked and took over government installations throughout the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Many of the rebels were armed with nothing more than sticks.
The rebels rode to war on public busses.
The revolution was in response to hundreds of years of oppression of indigenous people, dating back to the Spanish occupation of what is now known as Latin America. The First Declaration of the Selva Laconda, delivered at the time of the uprising, asked for “independencia, libertad, democracia, justicia y paz.”
Sixteen years later, they now have, at least, independence and liberty. Democracy? The 2004 Mexican Presidential elections were stolen in exactly the same manner as the 2000 Bush election, stopped recount and everything. Justice? The Mexican legal system is even more dysfunctional than the U.S. system, and the government continues its oppressive policies of indigenous people throughout the country. Peace here is a joke – have you seen the news lately? (Although it must be noted that most indigenous communities seem to be well out of the way of what is, literally, a drug war, if not exactly a “War on Drugs.”)
But when I visited a small Zapatista community outside of Chenalho, Chiapas, it was clear that they are independent and free. They farm their own food, build their own houses, and carry water in buckets from the well. All without accepting one peso’s worth of support from the government.
Successful socialist revolution? Well, they still live in poverty. But they lived in poverty before they began refusing government support – it’s not like the government ever helped them very much, anyway. And now their communities are completely free of government intervention, at least for the time being.
