July 15th - 17th, 2004

July 15th, 2004

We bus to Oventik once again. The masked government official seems to have had no communication with the people who told us we would have our permission to visit the autonomous municipality waiting. They have not been told who we are or what we want. In spite of their revolutionary principles they stir up that good old frustration with bureaucracy that has been waiting under the surface. Their problems may be understandable to a certain extent because this government has only existed since October 2003. We need to insist and explain and explain our insistence and they fill out an authorization. Next they call a guy who will show us to a village where the coffee coop is active. We take a taxi for not long and arrive in San Antonio Brillante in the afternoon. Our guide leaves us at his brother Alfonso’s house. Alfonso leads us up onto the flat cement roof of his house. A small cubicle size room situated on a corner of the roof is given to us and we are left to our own devices. We eat what food we have and after evening falls Alf leads us down a dark path to the village school carrying our stuff and our inflated sleeping pads.

Twenty-six men crowd into a classroom where we unwittingly sit in the center of the room. We are in the middle of a circle of men and conduct our biggest group interview yet. Alfonso answers almost all our questions exclusively but there are other participants and long pauses in the interview for deliberation during which everyone speaks in Tzotzil. Very interesting to hear them talk. The group tells us through Alfonso that we’re better off not sleeping in the school where it could be dangerous, so his decision is reversed and we head back up to his house carrying our stuff. We eat fried eggs and beans while talking to our hostess Xnka (pronounced Shnka, means Johanne in Tzotzil) and Alfonso until we start to nod and must blink our way off to bed.

July 16th

At 7am Casimiro is waiting to take us to work. We head off down the hillside through the village Bird Mountain towers above us and we can see cultivated patches impressively high up on its steep flank. We’re soon on our knees chopping weeds with machetes. An hour later we’ve cleaned the flat part of his coffee plantation of weeds as well as a couple of baby coffee trees which I’m sad to say I didn’t notice in time. We spend the rest of the morning pruning and cleaning. Casimiro explains many things to us about how his life works. He is twenty years old and cultivates a total of about one hectare of coffee. He is far from rich, as we see he’s run out of beans from last years harvest and doesn’t have the money to buy more. His house is missing roof in some places because they couldn’t afford tin. We are shocked and saddened to see his seventeen-year-old wife with a baby on her back living in these circumstances, she seems somewhat overworked and unhappy to have left childhood behind her. She makes us a small lunch of pasta but we don’t complain about the size.

It’s hard to not feel bad when poor people show unconditional generosity. In the afternoon we meet with women who participate in a work group for the craftswomen’s co-op of this region. They set up in a clearing with “belt looms” and weave while we ask many questions about how organizing has changed their lives. They’re also living quite “un-liberated” in a certain sense although they’ve made progress. For example, women are no longer sold in Zapatista communities and they can now choose their husband. That’s progress but a lot remains to be done. In this community at least women need to ask their husband’s permission to leave the community, this is quite shocking for us to say the least.

July 17th

In the morning we say goodbye to our hosts and head deeper into Zapatista territory on foot. A truck offers us a ride to the next intersection but they want too much money so we keep on walking. Bird Mountain looms high over us as we walk down the road beside tin roofed houses and corn plantations. The local myth about a farm hand who followed the tracks of disappeared animals into the mountain floats through my head. The mountain has a presence that makes it easy to understand why there are so many legends about it. A guy wants to guide us to San Miguel on foot through the valley for a cash contribution saying that the military will stop us a t a nearby checkpoint if we don’t go with him. We decide against his solution and begin to hitchhike.

A pickup truck takes us to San Miguel past the military with no hassles, this is the second such checkpoint in fifteen kilometers, it’s not hard to see that the government is doing its best to control something. We arrive in the small town cut into the side of the valley and ask at the general store for our contact in the honey business. He’s not around for the moment so we wait, drink pop, and play with the village children who are fascinated with photos. Our contact arrives and invites us downhill to his house where we are served a wonderful duck stew. Something is different about this town, the men are all barrel chested and there seems to be more food. Hence the duck. We head back to the store and spend a couple hours as deaf witnesses to a meeting of coffee co-op members. We understand nothing of their conversation but it is fun to watch them talk and we understand one word in fifty which is borrowed from Spanish such as the days of the week, the months of the year, clinic, etc.

The rain begins to pour down but each man who takes his turn to speak stands in the road to speak standing in the road under the falling drops to address an audience that hears hardly at all due to the noise on the tin roof of the store. After the meeting we talk to Ramon about beekeeping and co-ops. We then head off to a new host’s house for dinner. He seems to want to serve us coffee only but dishes out some beans and fried egg. We listen to some horrible music on radio insurgente, just because it was written for the Zapatista uprising doesn’t make it good.

In the morning after breakfast I head down to take a picture of our host’s (whose name I forgot) beehives and we leave town standing in the back of a muddy pick up truck with a bunch of villagers like so many cattle. We head through Oventik to take some pictures and pick up our passports before bussing it back to San Cristobal and our same little cheap hotel.