Project Steev

Reflections on a Snail

So I am back from Oventic as of 6pm last night, and back in San Cristobal. Here I will write about my week out in the country at one of the Caracoles, the seats of the Zapatista autonomous 'Buen Gobiernos'. My alter-travellerego-doppelganger Jacob has already written a lot more than I think I will about his experiences in the same place, about a month before me. He had a slightly different take, of course, but he described a lot and took lots of photos (as did I, but he has put more online than I want to take the time to do now), so if you haven't read his blog entries about it already you should now to get a more complete idea of the place...

(brief interrupt: In this cybercafe a table away is a REALLY dorky looking gringo with a straw porkpie hat, flipflops and Docker shorts drinking a can of Dos Equis as he surfs the web. One of the employees is whistling along with 'Dark Side of the Moon' playing on the stereo. outside the strains of a live mariachi band filter in from the street. Ah, its good to be back in San Cristobal.)

So, a brief primer on the Zapatistas: After their 12-day armed insurection in January 1994 and the ensuing armed counterattack by the Mexican military as it chased them through the jungle for months, destroying indigenous villages just for being in the way, things sort of settled down into a tense and long series of peace talks that started and stopped and finally in 1996 resulted in the San Andreas Accords, an agreement which the government never actually followed through on. President Zedillo actually never even submitted the treaty to Congress, much less made the legal changes neccesary to realize the accords.
Eventually new President Fox did submit them to the legislature but still things have not exactly moved forward too fast.

The Zapatistas didn't wait around for what they call the Bad Government to do what they demand, what the Accords demand. They went ahead with their part. Even before the accords were signed, they had set up what they called the Aguascalientes, which was a center of Zapatista effort and where talks and meetings with civil society would happen. The army destroyed it and the villagers there became refugees in their own country. Later the Zapatistas in response built 5 more Aguascalientes (they're named after the town in central mexico where the revolutionary forces met after the Mexican Revolution to finally get together and cooperate to bring order back to the country). Oventic was the first. Each Aguascalientes corresponds roughly to one region and one indigenous group. Oventic for example is Tzotzil. In La Realidad, another Aquascalientes, in 1997 ( i think) they had the first Encuentro, a massive meeting of people from all over the world to talk about how to fight neoliberalism and get the 3 things the Zapatistas are always demanding: democracy, liberty, and justice.

In 2003, the Zapatistas made news again by changing the Aguascalientes into 'Caracoles.' 'Caracol' means 'Snail,' and the community is modelled on the snail, in a way that I dont fully grok. (see the photo above, and 2 others I uploaded to my flickr page. just click on the photo) Its important to them and the Mayan worldview though, that a society is comparable to a snail. Each of the 5 Caracoles would be the seat of a Junta de Buen Gobierno. Each Junta has elected representatives from the municipalities that are clustered around that Caracol. Each municipality, really itself a cluster of villages and towns, has its own local government with 50 elected officials, presided over by a Consejo. They're elected by a huge general assembly ever 3 years or 1 1/2 years where people vote by voice.

Back in the Caracol, the representatives that form the Junta follow the will of the people to get things done in the community. There's a great saying they have, you see it on signs a lot, that translates to 'Here, the people order and the government obeys.' Whenever theres something that has to be decided, people go to the Junta house. Someone goes out and gets a quorum of Junta members and they go to the house and put on the Zapatista ski masks (no, people dont just wear them all the time in Zapatista land) and then let whoever needs them come in.

For example, when I got to Oventic, an hour ride in a collectivo (like a taxi but you share it with others and it only goes to predefined places, so its cheaper) away from San Cristobal, I had to wait 2 hours. Finally I was let into a building with 2 masked Zapatistas. They were from the government of the immediate municipality where Oventic is located. They asked me some questions and looked at the letter from the Mexican Solidarity Network and then let me move on to the next house, the house of the Junta. There were 6 masked people there. They asked me more questions and then gave me a stamped form and told me where the school was. So then I hauled my pack down the hill to the school, and met Efrain.

Efrain is the head teacher of the Oventic Language Academy. He's an amazing man, not only a language teacher but a philosopher poet mystic wiseman. He's also friends of a filmmaker friend of mine, Alex. When I first got there Efrain look at the form the junta had given me and got confused. It said 'Esteban', because the Junta seemed confused when I told them my name, like many spanish speakers seem at my name. So often I tell them Esteban. The Junta all nodded and said, 'ah, Esteban es mejor' (Esteban is better (than Steev)). But Efrain had 'Steev' written in his list of incoming students. Well, we got that straightened out and I found a place to sleep in the little dorm room full of other students (mostly from North Carolina), and then I and the other new students watched a little video about how the Zapatistas built the Oventic Aquascalientes (now Caracol). The video shows tons of army tanks and troops driving past the village and the people shouting angrily at them.

The point is that the Mexican government wanted the Zapatistas to sit around and wait for them to do nothing until the problem just went away. But the Zapatistas went ahead without waiting for handouts or some profound change in Mexican society or politics. They went ahead and started building the kind of society that they wanted, in their territories that the peace accords had ceded to them. And the Caracoles are where most of that is happening. The Caracoles are the space set aside for Civil Society (Civil Society? what's that, you ask, maybe, since even in the 'first world' the idea of civil society has mostly atrophied. Isnt there just the Executive, Judicial, and Legistlative, and then the mob of people that vote every 4-6 years, and that's it? no). Civil Society is the national and international group of people which the Zapatistas appealed to from the start in their uprising. If it wasn't for Civil Society, the Zapatistas surely would have been crushed by the Mexican Army's overwhelming armed force. But the people of Mexico and the world spoke up and said, no, we want you to stop fighting and settle this matter peacefully.

So Civil Society has this space in the center of the snail, so to speak. that is where foreigners can come, meet with Junta, and in the case of Oventic, go to school. Also in the Caracol are the headquarters of various productive cooperatives, like a coffee growers cooperative, a weaving one, one that makes really nice Zapatista leather boots, etcetera.

At the school foreigners who pass through the accreditation process run by the Mexico Solidarity Network may study Spanish or Tzotzil. Last week I was there with 7 other students. One was studying Tzotzil and the rest were learning spanish. I was the third most advanced of the spanish students, after Andreas, a guy from Switzerland who is a really cool computer/video geek and who was also spending the week fixing all the Caracol's computers, and Coqui, a young punky activist woman from Asheville, NC. The others were all basically still beginning students who didnt know any of the language at all when they got there. Which kind of surprises me.

The main thing to understand about the school in Oventic is that it's not really a language school. I mean, you learn some Spanish or Tzotzil, but its mostly about something else: learning about the Zapatistas, about the indigenous culture, and the Zapatista/indigenous way of looking at reality. And, its a yet another way to support the Zapatistas - the money you pay helps support the secondary school that the Zapatista kids go to right there in the same complex of buildings.

But if you want to go there just to learn Spanish you'll be frustrated and disappointed. I had learned this earlier, so I knew what to expect, but I was still frustrated sometimes, by this and other related matters. I kept comparing the experience to my experience at the Escuela de la Montana in Guatemala. I wanted to go out and see how these people lived. I wanted to eat in their homes and hike around the area. None of these things are possible. The Caracol is where internationals can be, not in the communities. And you can't just wander around the country, because its dangerous. In a sense the Zapatista people are still in a state of war. The army and the police and the paramilitary groups that they support are still out there doing horrible things from time to time, and foreigners who are suspected of being involved with the Zapatistas can be deported - this doesnt happen much anymore but it is possible, and often the advice you get is to act like you dont know spanish and youre just a stupid tourist if the police or army question you.

So, at the school you're basically confined to a small little area about the size of 2 football fields. One street where the Junta and other buildings are, and the school grounds at the end of the street. So when you're not in class (and class is only 2 hours a day), you just sit around and read, or talk (and the attitude of most of the other students was not very studious, so no one really practiced speaking spanish amoungst themselves outside of class).

I got a lot of reading done, and I listened to a lot of cynical complaining about Asheville, North Carolina, and participated in various conversations comparing Portland's activist scene to Asheville's. And I walked around taking photos of the huge numbers of murals in town. Every day there was 2 hours of class and one hour or more of some activity - watching a documentary, learning and singing Zapatistas songs, and taking a tour of the medical clinic there, and one day we went to San Andreas, the town where the peace accords were signed, and met with the Zapatista government there.

The 2 hours of class were great, especially because I had Efrain for a teacher. I shared the class with 2 other students, so that was another difference from teh school in Guatemala that was sort of frustrating. When you're used to one on one, undivided attention of the teacher for 5 hours and then you get a shared class for 2 hours, its pretty different. Especially when the other students are quite a bit lower level. I'm sure I helped them a lot with vocabulary, at least.

But again, as I accepted quickly, its not about learnign Spanish. In fact, to avoid further surprised and disappointed students in the future, the should stop even calling it a Language School. It should just be called the Intergalactic Zapatista Political Philosophy Academy for Internationals. I'm not being cynical, I assure you. Like I said, I accepted the situation, and I still got a lot out of it. I was happy to be supporting the Zapatistas, and to be learning more about them. and the classes with Efrain really were great, not for the grammar but for the philosphy, because Efrain really is a very profound, smart, wise man who is very passionate about the ideals of the Zapatistas and teaching others about them in a very mystical way, full of riddles and enigmatic discussion.

The fact that I was able to have these conversations reasonably efficiently is some evidence of my progress at Spanish, I suppose. And certainly linguistic concepts were a wonderful springboard into very deep other subjects. For instance, we learned that the Zapatistas always stress using the active voice rather than passive voice in their communications. Zapatistas would never say, 'The village was destroyed.' They would say 'The army destroyed the village.' the passive voice hides the responsible party, the active agent of the action being performed.

We also had an amazingly deep and mindboggling conversation about the subjunctive mode, and why english doesn't make as much use of it as spanish. What does that mean, culturally, socially? We all admit by now that language has alot to do with the culture that speaks it. But is it the chicken or the egg? Is English the language of capitalism by accident, or did England and then the U.S. become 'masters of the universe' partially because of their language, so precise and streamlined and easy to describe cold hard facts and numbers and monetary amounts? Contrarily, As a mexican woman in Livingston told me, Spanish is like dancing. And the mayan languages are even more different. Efrain told us that in Tzotzil there are no direct objects, only subjects. And there's only one pronoun, or something like that.

The point is that we were delving deep into the fabric of reality there. It was great stuff. If I had signed up for that, it would have been that much greater. But I had signed up for Spanish. Again, I AM NOT COMPLAINING. I'm just saying, right now in my life my priority is learning Spanish. Knowing mayan philosophy is not going to help me conduct better interviews with the mothers of dead mexican girls. Spanish will. So, for that reason, I decided one week in Oventic is enough. This coming week I'm going to enroll in for a week at a school here in San Cristobal, where I can get one on one instruction, lots of it, and stay with a mexican family i can practice talking with.

Then my plan is to get a bus to Mexico City, meet some Indymedia 'kids' there (I'll blog more soon about what I call 'the kids phenomenon') and hang out there for a few days. Then head to the coast just to get a couple days of beach time at Mazatlan, and then north to Juarez, by June 15 or so.