Come Sunday last week it was already time for me to move out of the school. I spent the bulk of that afternoon just packing everything back up and talking with Jose Luis, my school's director. He lived in the room right next to mine and we hadn't really gotten to talk much since I arrived a week earlier. By the time I left it was evening and we decided we'd get together, after I secured a hostel, to have wine and talk about work possibilities for me in town.
The hostel I got was cheap but empty. $60 pesos for the night ($5 USD) with internet, but no one seemed to be there. I went back to Luis' and I learned much of his story both in business and his personal life. Turns out he'd traveled all over the US, Europe, and some of Asia. He'd had some restaurants until the Zapatista take over of San Cristóbal in '94 put him out of business. The business went under only because no one wanted to visit the city under Zapatista hands rather than the Zapatistas themselves running him off. In fact, I heard the EZLN gave the city an apology for the damage their take over was doing to local business but reminded them "this is a revolution."
He also dabbled in amber mines, land lording a little, and connecting businesses with each other, like cultural centers to his school, etc. When I first arrived in Mexico on New Years Eve someone had remarked to me about how the Mexican people were far more capitalist than Americans were. Having now moved around a bit down here, I definitely see that to be true in that sense of opportunism. People sell and market themselves for everything here. My director is a testament to that, as is my teacher, Cristian, who teaches at the school and gives tours to Zapatista villages, among other things.
This week I was much more active in getting out into the city more. I think the last week I just needed time to rest and readjust. Monday night I switched hostels to the one my friend Joce had been staying in the previous week. There I met a ton of people. It's one of those places where everyone seems to know each other, and once there's a new guy he seems to be quickly investigated and either welcomed or spit out. I, thankfully, was welcomed despite still having horrible Spanish speaking skills.
Everyone in the hostel spoke Spanish there, which was different from other places. There was a guy, Guillermo, from Argentina who had been on the road 4 years now. Xavier was from Mexico City, and just traveling down here to see if he could find work cooking. He was just sick of the size of Mexico City, 30 million people (2.5 times the size of NYC), and loved the feel and size of San Cris. Murphy was from Idaho, and my only real English speaking connection, though I didn't hang out with him much. He was a firefighter for the forests of the west coast and now that the season was over he's come down here to relax.
These folks were fascinating and great to talk to to practice my Spanish with. The two nights I spent there, though, we ended up going out to a bar called La Revolucion; a locally famous place for its music. On my second night in the hostel I ran into some Danish girls I was friends with from my school, Gael, a guy I met through the Jose Luis Bo had stayed with, and a bunch of his friends. Its a very nice feeling when you're in a new town and you're already running into friends where ever you go, but that's San Cristóbal for you. We all ended up hanging out together, and it turned out Gael had a room for me to stay at for the rest of my time in San Cris.
Wednesday was spent trying to move in to that room. Through miscommunications, and me having no understanding of how my cell phone worked, I wasn't able to get into the room until nightfall. He was very apologetic about only having a room, but no bed, which I told him was fine, but still amusing to see when he opened the door and there was literally just one chair in the entire room. It was a street facing room so it had the ever present din of traffic and people outside, which is actually a plus for me, rather than a drawback.
That night, a friend of mine from Ecuador, Enrique, was also in town with friends. We all ended up hanging out well into the night, despite my morning classes the next day. What was interesting, was around midnight or 1am we were trying to find a place someone knew of and ended up on the main drag. There were a cluster of people getting out of the place we happened to be in front of, and it took no time at all for heavily armed police in teflon vests to walk down the street showing their weapons urging us to move along.
I've been at Gael's since, with about 7 to 8 others that either live here or he's hosting. Interesting differences between American home living and Mexican home living are things like heating and what to do with used toilet paper. The pipes are so old in Mexico that you can't flush paper down the toilet like in the States. Instead, you throw it away in the trash can next to you. The water boiler also needs to be turned on to have hot water for a shower, and this is only in about half the places I've been to otherwise its a cold shower. They are also far more conscious of turning lights off when not using them to conserve energy.
Another thing missing here is heating. Like I said earlier, it gets quite cold here at night. The house I'm in has a front door that opens into an open air space beyond the street facing wall. Rooms our off it, but the main socializing space is either the kitchen indoors, or this open space area outdoors. Waking up in the morning, though, is always tough because there is no heating in the house, so the floors and air are still cold from the night. In the kitchen, its nicer in the evening because usually we've started cooking something. By then someone gets a game of cards or Dominoes going on the table and it is quickly heated with the bodies of 8 or 9 people milling about by the stove.
On Friday I volunteered working at a cultural center Luis connected me with. It is a venue for artists to show their work and mostly contained skultpures and photography. It also invited the kids selling jewelry and things on the street come in and do art for the evening with them which quickly became popular with them.
What I helped out with was an exhibition for promoting art by women. In Latin America in general there is a strong history of women being repressed. What I see a lot of in the NGOs and community oriented projects down here are that they are finally addressing this issue and bringing women up to a more fairly treated state and equal status. There's a long way to go, but progress is certainly being made.
On Saturday my Danish friends from school, Julia and Ronja, invited me to a tour of a Zapatista village lead by my teacher, Cristian. He had much to say on the woman's movement, as its an important part of the Zapatista movement as well. The Zapatista's have somewhere around a 100 or so communities that identify themselves to the government as Zapatista. Each of these communities have representatives for making laws, but in addition to having a representative for the community, there are also representatives for different age groups, races, and sexes.
I had also heard of several other movements for promoting women's rights like Cafe Feminino in Peru, which I intend to visit. The village was really interesting to see since it is literally a government developing, something I've always been fascinated with. Our passports were needed to get into the town, and we required escorts to enter the town.
One of the symbols of the a modern day Zapatistan is the ski mask they wear over their faces. They say, "until justice is done and we are free we will continue to wear our masks". They allowed us to tour their school, gathering spaces, and of course their collectives where they sell shirts they've made, calendars, and little EZLN iconography. There is also a little photo museum showing the progress of their revolution.
I was curious to know what they studied in these autonomous schools as far as history went. Much of their curriculum included the history of social movements past and present, focusing quite a bit on Che Gueverra's ideals, the Cuban Revolution, and Palestinian conflict. On one mural in town it related the EZLN with the Palestinian struggle saying they were brothers in fighting injustice.
While in town we were specifically instructed not to take pictures of people, but pictures of the murals were fine. Also, we were told that if we claimed to be a media person of any sort; photographer, film maker, journalist, etc. we would not be allowed in town. The reasoning being that they have too often been exploited by media in the past, and are very pleased to stick with their own media coverage of themselves.
That tour was pretty much all day Saturday. When I got home again the gang was rallied in the courtyard despite the growing cold. After a bit of bundling while chatting out there, we eventually migrated to the much warmer kitchen. The evening was whiled away that night playing Dominoes, baking cookies, and good old fashioned conversation.
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