Maria Vazquez Gomez

Maria Vazquez Gomez is forty years old. She was 27 years old when the massacre in Acteal, her home community, occurred on Dec. 22, 1997. Included in the 45 people that were killed were her husband, her mother, her sister and her son. Her nephew, orphaned by the massacre, is the same man, Manuel, left mentally stunted, whom recounted the story of the massacre to me and was able to create humor amid pain, as I recounted in a previous blog post. Left without a family, Maria has had to attend to the cafetal (coffee farm) and the milpa (the garden where maize, beans, squash and other veggies grow) by herself for the past 13 years.
After the massacre, a plethora of missionaries, NGO's, and caring individuals came into the area to provide solidarity and support. They organized a women's group, which was put in control of a small 'tienda de abarrotes,' or kind of like a corner store, and of making crafts to sell nationally and abroad to provide some extra financial assistance through the rough times. Although there were twenty women at first to help out with the cooperative store, there remains only two, Maria and another, because the rest of the women found it too difficult to balance their time between their duties at home and at the store. As fierce storms and heavy rains erode the soil on the steep cliff on which the store is perched, the floor has begun to crack and fall. The store seems truly precariously perched.


Yesterday afternoon, I had the opportunity to visit with Maria outside her store. Sitting in the shade provided by the laminate roof, she recounted to me her history, and her feelings about being involved in the cooperative Maya Vinic as a single woman. She spoke of the difficulties of producing coffee to sell - being shorter and physically weaker than a man, much of the work that her husband would have done she now has to pay workers to do. This includes clearing the brush, collecting and constructing composts for the natural fertilizer, chopping firewood with which to cook every day. Her involvement in Maya Vinic, which is committed to growing organic coffee, means using chemical fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide to clear the land is out of the question. As most of the women have left the store cooperative, she spends much of her time there, selling pasta, snacks, drinks and any other small daily items to passer-byers on the street. This she does, constantly wondering when the floor is going to collapse and she will lose half of her store.
As I finished up my interview, I couldn't help but feel sympathy for Maria. I wondered what I could possibly do to help her situation. I have committed some time to her next week to do some work on her cafetal and chop some wood for her. In the meantime, I told her I might try to sell some of crafts that she sews and knits by hand. Below are some examples of shirts and bookmarks that Maria makes. She told me she would need around 3000 pesos to get the resources to rebuild the store. The shirt with the complex border sells for 150 pesos (US $15) (see picture, below), the one with the less complex border 100 pesos (US $10) (see picture, above); the bookmarks sell for 10 pesos (US $1) each (see picture, below). If you think you might like to purchase a shirt or bookmark, let me know and I will put in the order and bring them home with me when I come home. If purchasing a shirt, please specify whether this is for a women, man, girl, boy, baby, dog, cat. Any specific requests in color can be obliged. All is made with cotton. As the fair trade middle man, I will give absolutely all proceeds directly to Maria. For all the businessmen/women out there, I have absolutely no problem with resale - buy 100 bookmarks and sell them at a local bake sale or outside your place of worship. You can send the money via the paypal link provided on the side of my blog. Thank you for your generosity!

Getting to Know Chenalho

First Week in Chiapas

(Un-) (De-) Re-education

With the passage of time, in the mountains of Chiapas, bits of local knowledge begin to trickle into my path. With these simple little facts, my understanding of the indigenous culture here continues to grow, and it forces me to question the system in which I have grown up. I begin to un-educate. I begin to de-educate. I begin to re-educate myself.
On Maize. It is widely accepted that maize production led to the settling of natives in Meso-America and to the transition from nomadic tribes to settled communities. The Maya are often called the 'people of maize.' Maize fields dominate the landscape. Mayan legend has their people actually being born as the fruit of the maize plant. This makes sense after discovering that maize takes nine months from the time it is planted as a seed to the time its fruit can be harvested, the same amount of time as a human embryo.
On Language. The more I speak with the associates of the cooperative and the other community members, the more I realize how important language is. Their language, whichever it may be (Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Chontal, Chol, etc...), is a part of who they are. This is not something particular to the region - everywhere in the world, our language gives away our culture. Something I learned recently: When I ask 'how are you?', they do not know how to respond. Rather, in Tzotzil, 'how are you' is better translated 'how is your heart?" For the Tzotzil, answering my questions in Spanish is like not speaking from the heart. This was compared to me telling a lie. When I tell a lie - I am not speaking from the heart. This makes me wonder about all of the information I am gathering in my interviews...
On Development. Beginning with the scientific revolution in the 17th century, progress came to be correlated with fixed natural laws in physics, chemistry, and biology. Progress was the accumulated understanding of these static scientific laws and the manipulation of nature to further human achievement. This sense of progress paralleled a new historical science that gave weight to a linear perspective of time. In this new perspective, life took on a new meaning - something that was situated in the context of past and future events - and one could now regard the past as ‘old’ and the future as ‘new.’ This led to the displacement of the past as a source of authority, meaning that progress was separating one’s current condition from their old condition. Perhaps this had to do with a cultural will to separate from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Here in Acteal, and in many other cultures, this change in thinking never took place. There is no distinction between the past, the present and the future. One can think of the Mayan calendar as a set of gears, spinning against each other, each day, month and year set by the linking of clogs on this ever-revolving, ever-cyclical expanse of time. When the elders tell stories of their childhood, it is in the present tense, as if it is occurring to them at that very moment.
The definition of development as bettering one's condition, progressing, separating from the past, holds no value here. What is important is the now. The rain, the trees, the maize, the family. I wonder if these two vastly different ways of looking at life can coexist. Can the always forward-looking, capitalistic, globalizing economy create a space for these cultures and societies to exist? Can the Mexican government allow these people to retain the control of the land, and use it how they please? Can our Western society survive on the path it is walking with the resources that it already has and has taken, or do we need more? Should the communities change their way of thinking and secede their land and their culture to make way for mega-development projects aimed at specialization, urbanization, and consumption? Are conventional education systems put in place in these communities really a step in the right direction, or do they have their own education systems that have allowed them to exist on this land much longer than we have been here? Can we coexist, or does one society need to change?

Humor Amid Pain

Two nights ago I took the twenty minute walk into the town of Acteal from the Maya Vinic compound, on the outskirts of the same town. The views looking northwest to peak after peak in these highlands of Chiapas were breathtaking, as the sun was going down and the clouds began to alight with various oranges, yellows, and reds. I finally came upon the sacred ground along the main road where the monument to those 45 women and children killed in the massacre of 1997. The monument, as I mentioned before, took the form of a candle, whose melting wax formed the ghostly bodies of those killed. Apparently, it was fashioned after one presented in Tiananmen Square to honor those killed in that massacre in China.
I walked down a steep flight of stairs to a leveled piece of land along the slope. There was an open auditorium, with five or six half-circles of concrete steps/seats, that faced a level surface where there were a couple wooden crosses and some vinyl signs hanging from the wooden frames of the tin roof above. The signs spoke of the struggle for peace and justice. As I approached a small church to the side of this amphitheater, a young man approached me. With the softest of voices and a dazzled look in his eye, he introduced himself to me and shook my hand. He asked what I was doing there and when I responded that I was only exploring and was going to pay my respects in the church, he asked if he could join.
Still a little credulous of who this guy was, I allowed him to come with me and we entered the barren church and sat there in silence for a little while. After several minutes, I got up off of my knees (there were no chairs in the church) and proceeded outside. He followed and asked me if I would like to visit the old church. I said sure, and he took me around back to the edge of the leveled land, behind the new church, where there stood a very small hut, made of wooden planks taken directly from a cut of trees, bark and all, and an earthen floor. Through a very small door we entered and sat there on a pew, taking in the surroundings.
After a little bit, the man, Manuel, began to recount the story of the day of the massacre. He pointed out to me the bullet holes that were still present in the wooden planks that made up the walls. He told me how nine of his family members had died that day. He told me how at the end of the shooting, he was buried under three of his siblings, shot through the head and chest, dying above him. I wondered if the bullet hole sized scar in his forehead was a token from that day, and whether or not this token was what now affected his soft, almost inaudible speech. Manuel told me a story of the last words that his sister spoke to him; of the two things she requested of him: to remember to smile, and to take care of his parents and those in the community. Little did she know that their parents died as well that day.
It had been a long day for me, and the emotion of my day and of Manuel's story got to me - I began to choke up with tears. As we sat there, outside the old church, standing over the beautiful scene of the sunset and the mountains, and this land where the people have been nothing but warm and welcoming to me, I wondered where such pain, misery and evil could possibly come from. Sensing my despair, Manuel pulled me close to him and we embraced for a moment. Holding true to the second favor that his sister had asked, he told me not to fret. He then told me a joke to cheer me up. That Manuel could look back on those moments in his life and have the spirit to encourage and bring cheer to another is something I will never forget. I will never forget that moment, that church, that man. I'm not exactly sure why Manuel happened to be walking in that space that day the same time as I, but I have a feeling it was no coincidence that he was there to touch my heart, and touch my life - and possibly mine his.