Zapatista Encuentro, Ahoy!

Hi Everyone! Well, sorry this has been a while coming. I haven´t really had much access to the internet as of late, so there you go.

I´m currently in the town of San Cristobal de las Casas, in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. I took a couple of buses up here from Guatemala the day after Christmas so I could attend the Zapatista Women´s Encuentro con las Mujeres del Mundo, being that I am, in fact, a mujer del mundo (woman of the world).

So I got into San Cristobal around 4pm on Wed, the 26^th, after an arduous 9-plus hour journey from Xela, and flapped around in frustration for a bit while I tried to get SOMEONE to give me change so I could use the phone to call the girl I was potentially supposed to stay with. Nobody but nobody was trying to help me break the 100-peso note that the ATM had given me, not even the people inside the bank when I eventually gave up on the shops and stood waiting in the line to talk to a real human teller. Now I´m no expert, but when someone at a BANK tells you that there is no way they can possibly make change for what is the equivalent of a $10 note, you know that something is seriously amiss. As it turns out, this was an important introductory lesson to Mexico, as I have now come to expect the look of shock and sweeping panic that appears on the face of any vendor I approach with any money worth over $1. It´s as if there´s a national conspiracy to Not have change, and just about everyone is in on it.

Anyway, so eventually the parents of a friend I had ridden the shuttle there with suggested that I try to just use the phone in their hotel, or at the very least try to get change for the phone there. So I did, and after much misunderstanding the guy finally gave me the denominations I needed to make my phone call- hooray! But success was not yet to be mine: I very rapidly then discovered that actually, none of the phones here take change- they only work with a card you have to buy, for a minimum of 30 pesos. Well. We all know that I have sort of a pattern of ¨harsh landings¨ when I get to a place, so I tried to bear this in mind as I then eventually went back to the evil tourism office that had originally been the first to deny me the change, and after much ado managed to use one of the phone booths there to make the call. And… nobody answered. At this point I decided that it was time to give up and move on, so I consulted my little list of potential places to stay, got a free map from the evil tourism place and headed toward the cheapest hostel on the list that looked close.

I never actually found it, but I wound up at a different one for the same price (60 pesos, about $6US) and just stayed there for the night. I managed to email my friend Rahel (who I had met at Spanish school and who I was supposed to meet up with to go to the encuentro) and so I spent the rest of the evening kind of wandering around San Cristobal and then taking out my extensions and redying my hair (it was looking bad). The showers were hot and again, I just have to express my extreme joy at the very concept of hot showers. I slept well.

In the morning I got up and was making breakfast when Rahel turned up, right on time at 10am, so we sat and ate and then headed straight back out to the buses from there. She was a real trooper considering that she had just spent the entire night before on a bus from Punto Escondido, a 13-hour bus ride away from San Cristobal. We caught a collectivo to Ocasingo and from there, by sheer chance, ran into a couple of punks from Spain that were able to direct us to the pickup that then shuttled us another 2 hours or so to the caracol of La Garrucha, where the encuentro was being held.

The pickup ride was kind of an adventure in itself, since there were 13 of us herded into the back of the truck with a big wire frame all around it. 3 of us sat way on top the whole time (I wasn´t one of them- not so much for lack of interest as lack of spots on top) and the rest of us either stood or sat on top of a backpack or pile of blankets for the bumpy, dusty ride. Those of us who were sitting couldn´t really see anything, so when the truck stopped for the last time and I stood up to look around, it was kind of a really funny surprise when the first thing I saw were the ski-mask-covered faces of about 15 traditionally dressed indigenous women looking up at us as we stood and began to jump down from the truck. They were the ¨registration committee¨, and once we had finally all provided our names and personal details, we were escorted past various mural-covered buildings to the large concrete room beneath a giant stage that would serve as the main bunking quarters for all those of us who did not have tents for the remainder of the encuentro. The middle of the space was slung with at least 20 hammocks, all diagonally tied side by side like a line of cars in a parking lot. The rest of us had to stake out spaces on the floor all around the perimeter, and those unfortunate souls who came too late had to stash their stuff in a corner and then try to sleep on the floor under the hammocks once it was time to go to bed. I wasn´t really sure what the policy was on taking pictures, so I erred on the side of caution and resisting the urge to shoot all of the amazing murals and signs that were covering nearly every outdoor surface. My favorite was the handwritten sign that was posted in various places, stating (in Spanish, of course): In this Encuentro, men are NOT allowed to participate in: relating, speaking, answering questions, translation, or talking of any kind during the meetings. Men are ONLY allowed to assist with the following tasks: Sweeping and cleaning the areas, especially the latrines; cooking and preparing meals; caring for the children; and washing and cleaning whatever needs to be cleaned. I thought it was super interesting, then, that so many men were there anyway, ostensibly to support their ladies (or, perhaps, to meet one?) At times, in fact, it looked like there were more men than women, though in actuality the numbers were probably about even since a lot of times the women were off in meetings somewhere, leaving the guys to kind of mill around in the center and hang out with each other.

Soooo, the meeting(s): Wow. I came having no real idea of what to expect, since I have never before been to a Zapatista caracol (the word means ¨snail shell¨in Spanish, and is used to indicate an opening or portal to outsiders by the Zapatistas- there are five different caracols, each one the ‘center of government’ so to speak for a respective community) or meeting. The day I arrived was actually the day before the encuentro officially began, so we kind of wandered around and tried to find some food or a kitchen to cook in, eventually locating the one tienda that had black beans and tortillas ready to eat and turning in for an early night. We made friends with the folks sleeping in the spot next to ours, two students from D.F. (Mexico City) named Carmen and Jorge. They were super nice, and patient with my bad Spanish. They, too, had not been to a caracol before and we all speculated a bit on what the next couple of days would be like.

The next day was pretty mellow for the most part. I had been expecting that there would be more opportunities to kind of jump in and help stuff like setting up, childcare, or whatever, but there really wasn´t much they seemed to need done, so eventually I jumped in and painted a couple of signs for the latrines encouraging the ladies to not throw hygiene products into them, but rather into bags that were provided. This was about the extent of my active participation, I´m sorry to say, but it soon became apparent that that´s just kind of how this gathering was going to be. The food situation was interesting, too, cause rather than one or two kitchens serving everyone like I´m used to at big outside events, there were a number of tiny eateries that had been set up by various families, each with a set menu of basically either rice and beans (15pesos) or chicken in soup w/ veggies (25pesos). Later a few started offering empenadas, some of which were even vegan (just beans or potatoes inside a fried tortilla), much to my delight. There were also little stores selling everything from bottled water and toilet paper to cookies and other junk food, so rather than pay a donation or fee to attend the whole gathering, we kind of just paid for what we needed as we went along.

Okay, yeah, but so I still haven´t even started talking about the meetings… geez I talk (write) a lot… I just hate leaving out details, and actually I usually already am anyway so just remember, this is all in the interest of giving you a clear idea of what I´m up to!

The opening meeting kicked off in the early evening, and began, as all the other meetings would begin, with a blast of insanely loud Mexican polka as the Compañeras, in balaclavas and grouped by caracol (indicated by different colored ribbons on top of their ski masks), walked single file across the main field and into the auditorio, a rough wooden building that had had the front (back?) removed to allow more benches to be placed there for people to sit and listen. After the Compañeras were arranged either on stage or in their seats in the audience, the rest of us women would file in and locate a seat on one of the benches. The first two days of talks were mainly about the differences many of the women had observed between their lives as women now as opposed to before their uprising in 1994. In Zapatismo, women are unequivocally granted the same rights as men, which is actually something extremely significant in many of the cultures these women come from. Many shared stories of how women were treated `worse than animals’, being deprived of the right to an education, to choose whom or whether they married, how many children they had, or the right to expect any sort of assistance from their husbands in household tasks, including raising the children. They spoke too of how alcoholism had decimated many of their communities and oftentimes there was no money left for food because their husbands had spent it all on booze (which made me think of several of my grandmothers´ experiences). There is no drinking permitted on Zapatista land, and people who are considered Zapatistas are generally expected to be clean and sober, so this, too, has been a significant improvement. Various women described the efforts they´ve made to build their own schools, clinics, and other forms of infrastructure free of the government, and of the profound difference it has made to simply have something as basic as a clinic to treat infirmities that for most of us wouldn´t be a big deal but that for poor campesinos with no access to treatment, were often deadly. It is difficult to comprehend the extreme level of neglect that the indigenous people of Mexico had been facing prior to their uprising, but hearing about it firsthand made it all the more incredible to me that in the face of so much need these folks were able to pull together and form a movement powerful and cohesive enough to not only force the government to pay attention, but to grow and thrive in the face of brutal governmental backlash, stronger now fourteen years later than they could have imagined when they started.

So although it seemed to me at first that a lot of the speeches were more overviews and a bit heavy on the dogma, I still think that for what it was, it was incredible. I do wish that the format had been more open, because basically the structure was very “us” & “them”, not really allowing for much actual interchange or discussion. On the last day there was time for various visiting groups to get up and talk for 5 minutes each, and at the end of each session of speeches there was a 5 minute period allotted for the reading and answering of questions that the audience had written down, but a lot of these went totally unanswered if the women didn´t really know what to say or didn´t like the question. So it definitely wasn´t perfect, but again, for what it was, it was certainly worthwhile.

Anyway, aside from getting totally bedridden-ly ill on the third day of the conference (I was totally incapacitated with a winning combination of nausea, diarrhea and menstrual cramps- what fun!), I don´t really have much more to report. It was nice to spend the New Year there, in a totally sober environment for once instead of being surrounded by people who are totally wasted, like most New Years. I danced a lot to the Mexican polka with my friends, and they even played a couple of songs that were NOT Mexican polka, so that was cool too.

The trip back to San Cristobal on New Years Day was sort of miserable, since it was raining and by the time we got from La Garrucha to Ocasingo, all the collectivos back to San Cris had left for the day, leaving us to try to find our own way out. It was only a few hours til dark but we (me, Rahel, and our new friend Spike) decided that we had to at least try to hitch a ride, and after about 25 minutes of unsuccessfully attempting to get to the nearest gas station, an already full pickup stopped and offered us a lift all the way to San Cris for 50 pesos each, only a dollar more than the collective would have been, so we apologized to everyone already in there and hopped in, shoving our bags as best we could into the already huge pile of luggage. Poor Rahel spent the next 3 hours perched on the tailgate, trying to stay warm and dry as best she could as the rest of us just dealt with being super crammed together.

Eventually, though, we made it back, and after several attempts managed to find a hostel with some space where we spent the next few days. Now I´m at a place called La Finka (the farm), though why it´s called that I don´t really know since it´s totally urban. I guess they have some houseplants that look pretty good… Anyway, there are tons of hippies but it´s okay. Okay, I´m gonna post this now cause I´ve got one minute left on the computer! Bye! Love me