Following the example of Jacob, another IMCista blogger from San Diego who is in this part of the world too (and is in fact almost doing the inverse of my itinerary - he was in Chiapas and then went to Guatemala. maybe we'll meet when he comes back to mexico), I am going to blog a bit about what Ive been reading.
Local papers are always a great way to get to know a place and here a great way to practice spanish, so I've been reading Prensa Libre a lot. Its the national, sort of slightly left mostly center intelligent newspaper, as opposed to Nuestra Diario, which is the other big national paper but is almost exclusively lowbrow stories about murders and car crashes and photos of pretty girls. Easier to read, but not too interesting. Prensa Libre is actually very interesting, lots of stories you would never see in a gringo newspaper and a usually good, nuanced angle on the TLC (CAFTA) and other important issues. However according to one of my teachers at the Mountain School, their columnists are all over the political map, several are rather conservative.
Today I took the 730 am bus from Tapachula to San Cristobal. It was 8 hours but pretty comfortable except that I didnt eat anything. I guess I expected the bus to take a lunch stop or that the vendors that are ubiquitous in Guatemala that get on the bus and sell food and drink would provide me with something, but none appeared on this one, I guess because it was too first-class. But it was way better than anything I rode in Guate. a bathroom (which worked, unlike Bolivian buses that have them but they're always broken). Air-conditioning. hardly anyone on it. movies (not good movies, but oh well). The only other problem is that the road up into the highlands was insanely curvey and for the first time since childhood i was getting pretty queasy, i wasnt even trying to read. But that passed.
Anyway, I made it to San Cristobal at about 4pm and found a cheap hotel and bought a leftwing national Mexican paper, La Jornada. Its pretty great, though the trade off is that the deeper the political analysis the harder the Spanish is for me to decode. But the greater the motivation is too.
I've been trying to meet up with people from Chiapas Indymedia but the 2 people I have personal addresses for, Paco and Luz, have not answered lately. I think tonite or tommorrow morning I will just go over to the space they have, which I have the address for, and see if I find anyone. It would be great to get a place to crash while I'm here.
To get back to reading material - when I've not been poring over newspapers or my guidebooks, the last 2 books I read were 'First World Ha Ha Ha!' and '100 Years of Solitude.' The first is an anthology I picked up in Xela that collects short essays by dozens of different writers about the Zapatista uprising. Its a great book and I learned a lot, though its now 10 years old and i'm itching to find out more about more recent EZLN events.
The second aforementioned book is the great and famous novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author. Cien Aņos de Soledad is a long complicated fantastic history of the fantastic Buendia family and the town that Jose Arcadio Buendia helped found. The book traces 5 or 6 generations of this ill-fated clan and their fairy-tale like exploits. Its full of tall tales, subtle commentary on latin american culture, and veiled allegories to actual political events, though the story takes place in some never-named land that borders the Carribean Sea. The characters all have similar names so you have to keep referring back to the complicated family tree diagram at the beginning of the book. There's incest, bestiality, 32 civil wars, a rainstorm that lasts 4 years, mystical searches for alchemical inventions, an insomnia plague, magical gypsies, ghosts of ancestors, and an evil banana company that slaughters thousands of employees. Its a really sad and disturbing yet whimsical and hilarious and profound book. Someday I want to read it in Spanish.
San Cristobal is muy muy amable (very agreeable). Pleasant. There are lots of tourists, but not as many as in Antigua. Theres a big university here too, which locates here a bunch of the most hippyfreaky young mexicans that I've ever seen. And the signs of political radicalism and Zapatismo are omnipresent. There's a hunger strike going on in the Zocalo just down the street right now. I don't fully understand what its about, something to do with protesting the relocation of people here. There are cute little kids in the Zocalo selling little dolls of the Zapatistas. A little girl came up to me a while ago and showed me a little doll of a horse with 2 black-masked figures on it. 'Este es Marcos, y este es Ramona' she said, pointing out 2 of the most well-known figures in the EZLN. The horse and 2 riders was too big to carry around but I ended up buying a little Marcos one just to satisfy her. They're really cute and funny. Each one is holding a tiny wooden rifle, or a piece of wood shaped vaguely like a rifle.
I have the feeling that San Cristobal was already a tourist heavy place even before the Zapatistas took it over for 30 hours on January 1, 1994, but that event and those following provided another rich source of material on which to base more locally crafted souvenirs for foreign purchase. It feels like at least half the gringos here are just normal tourists, here just for the pleasantness, on their way to the Yucatan or whatever, and the rest are more socially concious types that are here specifically because of the political situation.
The army is definitely a constant presence in Chiapas. The police or the army stops buses regularly and searches. Once right after the border on the bus to Tapachula yesterday an army dude searched my daypack. But he didnt search my big pack. Same with the soldiers at customs. What the hell? Why only search my little pack? I could be carrying 20 kilos of coke or 6 submachineguns or a stack of childporn or a suitcase nuke in my big pack, and you're not gonna even open it up? are you stupid? Or is it all just a sham? The cursory search of the one bag is just for show so that they appear to be doing something. Just like security in U.S. airports.
Its all just simulacra.