Mexico was my final stop before leaving Latin America, and the end of the solo part of my solo trip. Over the roughly seven weeks I spent there I saw the widest variation of any location on the trip: I had perhaps the best single week of the whole trip, but also some chunks of suck.

Gotta take the highs with the lows.

Chiapas ¶

I spent the majority of my time in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico, arriving only days after it was described as a powder keg that can explode at any moment. But first, I had to get there.

The Worst Border Crossing in the World ¶

When we left off, I’d just set out into Mexico in pursuit of my group and shuttle. Chuckling old men sitting on doorsteps pointed me down random side streets and back alleys and I did, much to my surprise, find the group again. They were loading into a new minibus because some genius decided the Mexican immigration office should be 5 km in from the border.

We got there, and our driver decided that this would be a good time to tell us that we needed:

1. a photocopy of our passport;
2. a printed copy of our onward travel ticket;
3. a printed booking reservation for where we were going to be staying; and
4. a printed copy of our bank balance.

Obviously, 5 km into the Chiapan countryside, none of us had any Internet signal and we’d left all our portable photocopiers at home. My email app. wouldn’t let me access my emails offline (because that’s disabled by default, and I hadn’t changed it on my new phone), and my banking app. wouldn’t show my balance without an Internet connection; I also learnt that day that my banking app blocks taking screenshots of it. Also, I had my phone language set to Spanish, just to further compound the frustration.

We found one place that did make copies if you emailed things to them, but they didn’t have any Wi-Fi. We found another that also did copies, but was staffed by the world’s slowest man: it took us no less than 40 minutes to get from asking for the password to getting it. Eventually I got everything printed off (I had to get someone else to take a photo of my phone with the bank app. open), and the guy charged me 20 pesos; I only had Guatemalan quetzales and some US dollars, so I ended up giving him $10.

This whole ordeal had taken the best part of two hours. As I walked across the road to the immigration office I spontaneously started singing a little ditty of my own creation: I hate Mexico, Mexico is shit. The immigration guy didn’t even look at most of the papers, only the flight booking, which he initally misread as June 23 rather than July and was about to only give me a twenty-odd-day visa. Then he realised and acted like I was el dumbass. He gave me fifty-five days instead: three more than I needed, but whatever.

Next, I had to fill in a customs form. Then he sent me back to fill in more of it, because I was obviously supposed to repeat all of my details in the second section, under the section marked official use only. Then I had to go to the bank next door to pay the ludicrous £30 entry tax—and I thought Nicaragua took the piss!

Finally I was done, but I realised that 20 pesos was the equivalent of around $1.15. I was in no mood to get scammed on top of everything else, so I marched back to the photocopier and demanded my money back; I must’ve looked like I meant business, because he gave it back.

We set off for San Cristóbal de las Casas, and I treated myself to an early night. First thing in the morning I lodged support tickets with my bank and email provider telling them that they could sod right off and that I would be looking at alternatives the moment I’m back home.

Not an auspicious start…

Starting in San Cristóbal ¶

I stayed at Fandango, a cheap as chips hostel with an ideal central location (though not so central that you can’t easily walk to non-tourist-priced eateries nearby). The dorms and private rooms were arrayed around a central courtyard, which occasionally hosted dance classes and fiestas. The actual dorms were elaborate MDF constructions, with coffin-like capsules along the ground floor and larger double bed spaces above:

We’d been told to be wary of the water, due in large part to a massive Coca-Cola factory on the outskirts of the city that has poisoned the water supply. I did a bit of shopping and attended a hip-hop fundraiser gig at La Enredadera calling for the release of Manuel Gómez Vázquez, a Zapatista supporter.

Who are the Zapatistas? On January 1^st, 1994—the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into force—armed guerrillas of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) stormed government offices across the state of Chiapas in protest. Predominantly comprised of indigenous people, they fought against the exploitation of their traditional resources that had been happening ever since the Spanish arrived, and which was about to get a big ol’ US-style turbocharging.¹

People around the world watched—largely via the then-novel Internet—as the Zapatistas battled the Mexican military and associated paramilitaries. 100,000 people protested against the repression in Mexico City. After 12 days, the Mexican government declared a ceasefire. Negotiations were held which resulted in the San Andrés Accords, which promised autonomy and recognition to the indigenous peoples. Then they were ignored. The Zapatistas learned that they could not trust what they call the mal gobierno and would have to do things by themselves.

Over the intervening decades, the Zapatista movement has grown to encompass large swathes of the state of Chiapas. The Municipios Autónomos Rebeldes Zapatistas (MAREZ), as their communities are known, have an autonomous system of direct democracy through the juntas de buen gobierno. They also run their own autonomous health system, education system, and more. The Zapatistas still exist in conflict with the Mexican state, which does not formally recognise their autonomy. Even now, roughly one third of the Mexican Army is stationed in Chiapas.²

Photo by the author

Things have been relatively peaceful since the murder of a Zapatista teacher in 2014 (in an attack that left 15 others wounded), but since the start of the pandemic they have witnessed an uptick in paramilitary violence; on the same day that I arrived in Chiapas, an attack on a Zapatista community to the north-east left 7 dead and 3 wounded, and just last week a Mexican newspaper warned that Chiapas is a powder keg that can explode at any moment. The Zapatistas are no fans of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the current president, who is keen to build a train line for tourists through their territories. On top of that, they face off against anti-Zapatista paramilitaries, drug cartels and other unsavoury characters.

Many of the paramilitary groups were set up by the government of the ’60s–’80s during a period known as the Mexican Dirty War (no prizes for guessing which large neighbour of Mexico’s the murderous right-wing government was backed by). There’s evidence to suggest continued government involvement and direction of their activities since then, and given that it’s Mexico and at least one of the most prominent current drug cartels were formed by former Mexican Army commandos it’s clear that the line between the state, the paramilitaries and the narcos are somewhat blurred. Given that AMLO has staked his reputation on getting his train built, the timing of the increase in violence certainly seems suspect. Though the period of armed conflict seemed to have ended during the 2010s, the Zapatistas never disarmed. They used to joke that their guns were merely sleeping.

They also paint a damned fine mural.

CELMRAZ, Week One ¶

All that talk of paramilitaries and sleepy guns is beyond my pay grade, though. I had two big things on my to-do list for Chiapas, and the first was intended to set me up for the second: attending a language school to improve my Spanish. By this point on the trip I was solidly conversational, but hadn’t actually had any formal schooling. I’d heard about the Centro de Español y Lenguas Mayas Rebelde Autónomo Zapatista (CELMRAZ) from another Volcano Day volunteer, after we went to the beach and I asked him where he got his tattoo of a snail wearing a ski mask.

So I was in Chiapas to visit the caracol of Oventik, sometimes referred to as the Zapatistas’ de facto capital, and one of the few Zapatista communities that are (relatively) open to outsiders.

Photo by the author

Day One ¶

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The first day at the school began sat under a tree, talking (in Spanish) about the concept of work. The promotor explained the relationship between two words in Tsotsil Mayan: a’mtel and kanal. A’mtel refers to work that is performed for oneself, for the benefit of one’s family and community. For example, the promotores de la educación at the CELMRAZ are not paid for their work: their efforts are recognised as being valuable for the community, and so others in their village look after their fields during the alternating weeks they spent there with us. Kanal, on the other hand, is work done to benefit someone else, be that a boss, tyrant or the mal gobierno; it is a corruption of the Spanish ganar that came from the experience of having their labour exploited by the Spaniards for several centuries.

As someone with a wildly eclectic CV, who has regularly devoted more time and effort to voluntary work than paid work and who has been self- or un-employed for about a year now (the line is fuzzy), I like this distinction. In English, when people ask me what do you do, the implication is always what my paid job is, but that’s never been particularly well-defined nor interesting to me. I shared a line that I like from poet Kahlil Gibran: work is love made visible.

Obviously, complaining against wage labour is one thing, but people gotta eat. In capitalism, that means they gotta work to get money to not starve. Any attempt to build an alternative system needs to provide a solution to this. For the Zapatistas, as a rural movement composed predominantly of subsistence farmers, this can partly solve itself: people grow what they need, and eat that. Excess is produced and shared with those who can’t produce for themselves, and responsibilities are shared and rotated to allow people time to attend political meetings, produce crafts, babysit us, etc.

The other part of the Zapatista economy, and probably more relevant to we non-farmers, is the prevalence of cooperatives and collectives. Co-operatives are a worldwide phenomena and a surprisingly large one at that: there are some 3 million co-ops in the world and roughly 12% of the world’s population work with them. In co-ops, worker-members simultaneously work for the co-op and own it, ensuring that the benefits of success accrue to those responsible for them. There are no bosses and no extraction of surplus value. Co-ops also usually provide a range of other social services for members, such as low- or no-interest loans for times of financial difficulty.

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There are several caracoles (Spanish for snail) within the MAREZ. They serve as a sort of meeting place-cum-social space-cum-interface with the outside world; when they were first created in 2003, they were described as being like doors which allow entry to communities and which allow the communities to exit; like windows so that people can look inside and so that we can see outside; like megaphones to project our words into the distance and to hear the voice of the one that is far away. But above all to remind us that we should watch over and be responsive to the totality of the worlds that populate the world.

Photo by the author

Both the snail and spiral iconography are important in the Mayan culture, I was told. For one, the traditional way to convoke a meeting in a Mayan community was to blow on a big spiral horn, with the number of blows corresponding to the message being sent: one meant a meeting of all the men, two meant a meeting of everyone, three meant danger, etc. For this reason, the shell shape has become a symbol of communication. Snails also carry their homes on their backs, and can retreat into them when danger appears. The caracoles are similar; when danger threatens a community, the caracoles become a place of safety and refuge.

He also told me that snails are inoffensive animals that don’t attack others. Similarly, the Zapatistas have no interest in conquering others or forcing people to join the movement; one of their core principles translates to to convince, not conquer.³ This can obviously be a slow process, and the promotor said that some criticise the Zapatistas for moving slowly. To that they say they go at their speed, like the snail; neither quickly nor slowly. Lastly, the spiral shape of the snail’s shell represents the Mayan conception of time as circular, rather than linear. Capitalism’s (and, I should mention, Marxism’s) notions of time as a march of progress towards some objective contrast with the indigenous view of it, which makes sense for agrarian communities dependent on the passage of the seasons and still living in ways similar to how they have for the best part of a millennium.

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The caracol itself (formally Caracol II, as it was the second to be constructed) is built on the side of a hill. Oventik itself isn’t residential, but it houses offices for several Zapatista projects. There’s a long, steep road down the centre with the various project offices off to either side. At the bottom is a clearing with a stage (and basketball court) for outdoor events, and off to the side is the autonomous secondary school that also houses the CELMRAZ. And another basketball court; the Zapatistas really like basketball. On a ridge overlooking the school is an auditorium, which hosts political events, film screenings and more. There are consejos autónomos (sort of the legislative bodies, and generally only gathered together when something needs discussing) for two of the nearby communities, and the office of this municipality’s junta de bien gobierno (sort of the executive body, and permanently staffed).

Caracol II is in the community of Oventik (or Oventic, but they prefer the Mayan spelling), which is in turn one of 44 communities within the rebel municipality of San Andrés Sacamch’en de los Pobres. That, in turn, is one of 7 municipalities in Zona Altos de Chiapas, which is one of the 9 zones that make up the MAREZ. The MAREZ comprised around 360,000 people in 2018, but it’s worth nothing that each of those municipalities also contains settlements that aren’t formally pro-Zapatista, but are either largely sympathetic or still make use of the services provided by the autonomous government.

Later in the day we had another conversation about how we first learned about the Zapatistas, followed by a discussion of the history of Panama and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.

We ended the day with a documentary, Oventic: Construyendo dignidad, about the construction of the caracol we were in. Construction began in late 1995, and was completed a couple of months later on December 31^st. The work was all done by hand by a huge group that brought together a range of different indigenous groups (many of whom lacked a common language), and continued in the face of constant harassment by the military. In the documentary we saw the community down tools and line up along the road to hurl abuse at the military convoys that drove past every day for the duration of the construction. Details of each vehicle popped up on screen, including their armaments and countries of origin: France; Switzerland; the US.

In a lot of the world, globalisation and foreign investment looks like a French-made tank tread rolling through your fields or a hunk of shrapnel with Made in the US on its side hurtling towards your face.

Day Two ¶

Photo by the author

We started the day with a hike up into the mountains so we could look back down on Oventik and place it into its geographical context. Then we spoke about the Other Campaign and did an activity around it, each taking on the role of a different part of the Other sector and describing how capitalism affected us, after which the others had to guess which group we were.

The Zapatistas emerged from the struggle of indigenous people in southern Mexico for their rights and autonomy, and for the first decade or so following the uprising it remained an insular movement. Even so, foreign support for and continued interest in the movement served as a form of protection that dissuaded the the Mexican government from getting too heavy-handed (generally). But in 2006, the Zapatistas launched the Other Campaign. Mexicans voted out the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the 2000 elections, marking the first time the opposition parties had won an election since the Mexican Revolution almost a century prior. Mexican presidential terms are 6 years long, and so 2006 marked the next election.

There was an atmosphere of excitement, opportunity and political ferment. The Other Campaign represented the Zapatistas’ realisation that their struggle was not unique, and they did not struggle alone, but was instead one battleground of many in the fight against capitalism and the state system. In the Other Campaign, they sent their de facto spokesman on a tour of Mexico, meeting with hundreds of groups representing other such marginalised and exploited groups: workers; women; gender, sexual and relationship minorities (GSRMs); students; and more. Together they identified the similar (and unique) ways in which the system affected their lives, with the goal of forming networks of support and solidarity and pressuring the Mexican government to reject capitalism and neoliberalism.

For no doubt completely unrelated reasons, the winner of the 2006 election ended the year by sending the Mexican Army into Michoacán state to fight against the drug cartels there (though the homicide rate in Mexico had actually been dropping since 2000). This was the first such deployment and is generally regarded as the start of the Mexican drug war that we all now know and love. Communities were disrupted, violence rose sharply and the Mexican state massively increased its military and paramilitary presence in much of the country. But despite the best efforts of the state, many of the links formed during the Other Campaign have endured and it remains an important moment in the history of both the movement and Mexico.

Later I had a grammar lesson, focussing on pronominal verbs. Spanish has some verbs where the meaning changes depending on whether there is a reflexive pronoun (e.g., myself, yourself and ourselves in English) is placed before it or not. For example, duermo (from dormir) means I sleep whilst me duermo means I rest or I let my guard down. This being a radical language school, this was taught using sentences like los zapatistas no pueden se dormir por el mal gobierno.

Lastly, for the conversational part of the day, we talked about health and the Zapatista healthcare system. There’s a hospital and a clinic within the caracol, complete with a couple of ambulances, and the work of the promotores de salud is endlessly inspiring. Like with all responsibilities in the autonomous government, the role of promotor is an elected role, unpaid and reassigned on a rotating basis.

The Zapatista system attempts to combine the advantages of modern medicine with the long-standing traditional medicine of the communities. The promotor explained that traditional Mayan healthcare recognised four distinct areas of expertise: the curander@; the hueser@; the parter@; and the yerbater@.⁴ For centuries, those were all that were needed; between them, the societal support networks and the strong sense of community, everything just worked (though I suspect life expectancy stats and the like don’t exist for much of this time).

Photo by the author

Capitalism, and the damage it wrought on those traditional community ties, introduced new conditions, as well as the supposed solutions to them. For example, he said that Coca-Cola was often promoted as having medicinal properties. As a result of this deception (Chiapas has the highest rate of Coke consumption in Mexico, the country with the highest rate in the world) rates of diabetes have skyrocketed. People were then sold pharmaceuticals that would alleviate their symptoms, whilst the underlying issue went unaddressed. This coincides with what I was told at Hospitalito Atitlán, where (though they were by no means radical in their analysis) they identified sudden and relatively recent changes in how people lived (i.e., from outdoor work to more sedentary living) as a major force behind the epidemic of diabetes. Zapatista healthcare services are open to all, and apparently many non-Zapatistas nonetheless prefer to use them over the state alternatives.

I pointed out that modern medicine can also claim many genuine successes, such as the eradication of smallpox and polio. He agreed, and said that the Zapatistas were by no means against modern medicine in general; only its elevation above all other forms of healing, and its separation from the community as something other, specialised and impenetrably technical. The Zapatistas, he said, view health as comprising much more than just bodily health, but also mental health, social relationships, a sense of purpose, etc. They also focus on preventative work as much as possible; I attempted to translate the phrase an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure into Spanish (and the metric system).

I also told him about Shit Life Syndrome, the idea within the more radical parts of the UK/US healthcare sector that many conditions that are on the rise in those countries—depression, suicide, reduced life expectancy—are inseparable from the socioeconomic conditions in which people are living, and that treating them in isolation without also working for political change is pointless. He told me about the Mayan concept of ch’ulel, which broadly seems to be some sort of life force (like the Chinese idea of qi, or the Austin Powers concept of mojo, baby) that they believe can be diminished by things like kanal and regained via a’mtel. People lacking ch’ulel drink a lot of Coke or a lot of alcohol as a substitute, he said; recognising capitalist ideology for what it is is both a result and cause of increased ch’ulel.⁵

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In the (poetic, beautiful, often hilarious) writings of the Zapatistas there is a recurring character called Defensa Zapatista: a precocious, radical young girl who spends her days playing football and hanging out with a cat-dog, a one-eyed horse and several others. When we went up into the mountains to discuss the Other Campaign, the promotores’ young kids came with us. That gave me the opportunity to snap this, which I think sums up the magic of Zapatismo: a six-year-old girl taking time out of her busy schedule of looking for bugs to sit and listen to a bunch of adults criticising capitalism. Then, back to the bugs.

Mayan child-rearing practices are periodically highlighted in Western media, and they were interesting to observe in Oventik. From their earliest age, children are encouraged to observe household chores, their parents’ work, etc. and to try and help. Play for Mayan children largely consists of miming chores, rather than imaginary space adventuring and transmogrification. There is no age segregation in community life, and Mayan children attend events with people of all generations. They even get involved in the muralling.

Photo by the author

We also played a board game (how did they know how to laser-target my interests so well‽) that was designed by the collective of promotores here at the language centre. It was a bit like a radical Candy Land, as the players take turns rolling a dice to see how many squares they’ll move with the goal of reaching the nuevo mundo in the centre of the snail’s shell. Along the way they land on squares that have them explaining Zapatista organising principles to the group, retreating back to the nearest caracol, obeying tasks decided by the rest of the group (I had to play ditty on guitar one time, and only the fourth one I tried was actually in tune), etc.

Day Three ¶

My grammar lesson revolved around two forms of the pretérito past tense. Spanish is a funky language, with a bunch of tenses that are functionally the same but which differ in what I can only describe as the vibe. For example, hablé is the simple past form of hablar and used for factual information, whilst hablaba is also I spoke but has some hard-to-define sense of being more sensual, or subjective (and so now I keep thinking of the preterite perfect as the sexy tense). Truth be told, I’m not sure the distinction is something that’ll ever be clear as a non-native speaker, but we had an interesting conversation and I even wrote a short story to practice.

For the conversation part of the day, the promotor explained how Tsotsil has two different words for we: jo’utik and jo’ukutik. The former refers to a collective body, whilst the latter refers to a sub-component of that body. For example, within a family jo’utik would refer to all of the family members whilst ju’ukutik would refer to just you. When talking about your community, however, jo’utik would mean the community as a whole whilst jo’ukutik would refer to your family within it. So on up for your municipality/community, zone/municipality, state/zone, country/state. And ditto for the other way, in theory, for you/your cells, your cells/their chemical components, etc. (although obviously there aren’t many situations where you would be referring to your cells in the second person). All this reminded me of a book I read some time ago and its idea of the holon.

Photo by the author

He asked me to describe the relationship that I saw between the Zapatistas and the flowers nearby. I talked about the need for the latter to break up the monotony of a grass field; about the large root systems invisible under the surface; and the fact that each plant has many flowers, and one being cut off doesn’t spell the end for the plant. I asked about the pre-Spanish history of the Maya, about which I knew pretty much nothing. He said that Mayan society had been highly hierarchical 1,000 years ago (from when many of the ruins that remain today date), but the people eventually decided that they had had enough of kings and rulers, and so moved out of the cities and into tiny rural communities during an event known as la disperción (I did a little looking around online after this, and this would seem to be around the time of the unexplained ‘Classical Maya collapse’). When the Spanish arrived some 500 years later, they were shocked to find communities without chiefs or soldiers, who routinely rotated roles between themselves.

I finished by asking about the Zapatista approach to justice. He described how the autonomous government and the official government overlap in many places, and explained that when an issue is only internal to the movement, it is dealt with solely by the autonomous government, but when an issue arises that affects others, or is otherwise relevant to them, the autonomous government will work together with the official government, the church and whomever else has an interest. Ultimately, he said, a problem in the community is not just a problem for Zapatistas; it’s a problem for the community and that the ultimate judge is the community. Todos somos policias, he added.

I asked what happens in cases of violent crime and robbery. Murder was the highest crime, he said, and would result in the most severe punishment available: expulsion from one’s community, with the message passed on to all others to deny entry to the offender. The expellee’s possessions are then redistributed amongst the community. Similarly, working for a paramilitary would incur this sanction, as would sexual crimes after a third offence. The Zapatistas do not allow the death penalty, but they also have no faith in the Mexican justice system. The promotor told me about a paramilitary attack in Santa Marta a couple months earlier after which the government declared it would not be able to find the perpetrators; the community flew into action and rounded them up shortly thereafter. He also said there had been many cases where the government would make a big show of arresting the paramilitaries, stick them in jail for a few weeks and then quietly release them back into the community to cause more damage.

For less serious offences (for example, assault), the attacker would be made to pay for any medical expenses for the victim, as well as to work their land for the duration of their recovery, and whatever else the community deemed necessary to make amends. I’ve also read of instances where the community has decided to impose a part-time sentence so that the accused could continue to work their own land to feed their family, on the grounds that if we simply put them in jail, those who really suffer are the family members; the guilty just rest all day in jail and gain weight, but their families are the ones who have to work the cornfield and figure out how to survive. There may be a requirement to attend educational events, particularly in the case of offences against women. The Zapatista justice system, then, aims to be restorative rather than punitive. They do have a police role, but like all roles it is unpaid, elected and undertaken on a rotating basis.

Day Four ¶

We started with another grammar lesson, continuing to focus on those two past tenses and dabbling a little with the subjunctive mood.

For the conversation, I started by asking what makes people decide to join paramilitaries and fight against Zapatismo, when it seems like it’s going against their own interests. The promotor told me about his own uncle who had decided to start a small paramilitary that began causing issues with Zapatistas in the local community (but that the community correctly identified them, rather than the Zapatistas, as the source of the problems, and now the uncle is banished to San Cristóbal). As for the motivation, he explained that there are five political parties in Mexico, and each promises (and in some cases even provides) their supporters with money, food, a social safety net and the opportunity to climb the ranks and gain power. They succeed by dividing the people, whilst Zapatismo succeeds by uniting them, and therein lies the irreconcilable conflict.

I was also curious about what would happen in the event of a bad harvest within the MAREZ, given how agrarian the movement is. He explained to me that the promotores put a lot of effort into providing workshops where people can come to learn ecological techniques for farming without pesticides, or for co-planting different things to promote better soil health. He told me about some new coffee weevil that had arrived at some point in the last decade that was quite a problem, and about traditional techniques of leaving root systems during harvest and dividing plots into thin strips with fencing, which retain and catch soil in the event of heavy rain (as most plots here are on the side of a hill). At first I thought he had misunderstood or evaded the question, but then I realised his answer made sense in the context of focussing on prevention rather than the cure, which we had discussed the day before.

Lastly, he told me about the system of organising responsibilities, or a’mtel patan in Tsotsil. All of the various cargos—from the promotores of heath and education, to media work, to the administration of the juntas de buen gobierno to community policing—rotate regularly, without regard to age (provided they’re an adult), gender, sexual orientation, etc. All roles are voluntary and require the support of the community; similarly, someone can withdraw at any time. If someone is shown to be manifestly unfit for a role, the community that elected them can also withdraw them, and they can then try their hand at something else instead (in this respect it’s not too dissimilar to being a UK Cabinet minister). The roles are unpaid and taking them imparts no special privileges.

The promotor compared this to the imposed government of the state (ajvalil in Tsotsil), which rotates roles between a small privileged group. The root of that word—ajval—means chief/boss/sir, and within Chiapas often refers to the twenty-five families who dominate the state politically and economically, all of whom trace their lineage back to the Spanish conquistadores (or, as the promotores regularly stressed from their own perspective, the invasores).⁶

Photo by the author

We finished the day with a documentary about the 1997 Acteal massacre—Acteal: Estrategia de muerte—which the promotores framed against the recent upsurge of paramilitary violence as part of a continual campaign of repression coming from the Mexican government. On top of the deadly attack on the village of Polhó last week, one promotor also told us about a police chief from his home village who had been killed the week before, though by whom no-one was certain.

The Zapatistas are well aware that the strategy of the mal gobierno, especially under AMLO at the moment, is to stir up trouble within the various communities in order to try and provoke the EZLN into responding, which would then be used as justification for a massive military response. This, they reckon, is why the recent spate of attacks have not just targeted Zapatistas and their families (as in the past), but the communities in general, regardless of allegiance: the government just wants to sow chaos and discord, and insinuate that the Zapatistas are to blame. This is borne out in the government messaging, which talks constantly about intercommunity conflicts and conflates the EZLN with the cartels and paramilitaries that operate within the state.

It seems to be working, to an extent, and the promotores said that their communities, which had previously been supportive of their work with the movement and understanding of their need to divide their time between the community and the movement, were starting to apply more pressure on them to choose between the two obligations. That is an incredibly difficult position for them to be put in as, from their perspective (and, I think, pretty evidently from what I’ve seen) their communities benefit greatly from the work of the movement, but one should never underestimate people’s willingness to act contrary to their own interests when frightened.

The Zapatistas, and the EZLN in particular, are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place: not responding becomes increasingly difficult as attacks increase in number, scale and blatancy, but any action will be seized on to ramp up the repression and violence. Their best bet is to draw international attention to what is happening as much as they’re able, which is why they had called an global day of action for that first week I was in Oventik. The hope is that by highlighting the actions of the Mexican state and keeping foreign eyes on the region, they can deter any escalation.

Will it work? I don’t know. I think that if the government really wants to pick a fight (and its commitment to several megaprojects in the region suggests that it does) and it can’t provoke the response it wants, it’ll find a way to conjure up some other excuse. I think the present moment may be amongst the most perilous that the movement has faced, not least of all because AMLO is currently subject to a love-in from much of the international Left. But the path the Zapatistas chose to take all those years ago has never been easy to walk, and their success never guaranteed. But they’ll keep organising, as they have done all along, undaunted by the danger because (to quote Subcomandante Marcos) the heart lies below and to the left.

Photo by the author

Day Five ¶

In the grammar lesson we focused on my pronunciation by singing a song—La mar estaba serena—with the lyrics changed to reflect some sort of US–Latin America fishing dispute from the 1970s. La mar estaba serena / Serena estaba la mar became Los yanquis quieren robarnos / Doscientas millas de mar. Then we worked on reflexive verbs. One of the greatest difficulties with Spanish is that many verbs have many different meanings, and at their most complex these meanings can even be opposite to one another and dependent on context, whether you’re using the transitive or reflexive form of the verb, whether you have a pronominal pronoun, etc. For example, just check out this list of possible meanings for levantar.

For the conversation part of the day, I asked the promotora what Che Guevara, whose face adorns many of the walls in the caracol, means to her and to the Zapatista movement as a whole. She recognised that whilst many of the things that he fought for (as a Marxist–Leninist) are antithetical to the objectives of the Zapatistas, they can nonetheless learn from his mistakes as they do all past revolutionaries, never simply accepting them uncritically.

Then we talked about the intergenerational nature of the struggle. She had been brought up by Zapatista parents and attended an autonomous secondary school the moment one was set up, and the other promotor (her husband) had spent his childhood in the mid-’90s taking food and other supplies up to the guerrillas in the mountains during the initial uprising. This, the promotora said, was a reflection of the way the indigenous communities have always worked: intergenerational households were the norm, and it was traditional for someone to live together with their parents and children and to jointly manage their shared plots of land.

She said that this was the case with her husband, and the two lived with his parents and their two young children. I asked if it was always the case that the wife moved in with her husband’s parents and she said it was; I commented that that must be difficult for parents who have only daughters, and she agreed. The fight against such traditions that disadvantage women is the struggle within the struggle, she said. For example, it was traditional for parents to split their lands between their children when they died, but daughters would receive a much smaller share (though, she added, there were practical reasons for this, as women are less physically able to work the land and so are traditionally relegated to home-making, cooking, childcare, etc.). However, in Zapatista communities, inheritance must be split equally between sons and daughters. This was just one example of the efforts of the movement to improve the lot of women, dating all the way back to its founding and the Women’s Revolutionary Law.

We then spoke a bit about how the communities had experienced the coronavirus pandemic. She said that it had been very difficult, as poverty and lifestyles mean many indigenous people already have several health conditions, diabetes chief amongst these. In addition, she said many had refused vaccination, in part due to misinformation they had found online or in the media and in part due to a (pretty understandable) distrust of the mal gobierno. The promotores de salud were working to educate people around this, and to provide a more trusted source for medical information for a deeply sceptical community, but it was an uphill struggle.

For the final activity of the week, we took turns sharing stories and legends from our own areas. I shared the legend of Hereward the Wake, and then the story of the 1974 East Kilbride Rolls-Royce factory strike that grounded half the Chilean Air Force following the fascist coup under Pinochet the year before (dry summary here; song version here). The others shared tales of man-eating wolves, Mayan spirits and a bison herd off the coast of California. And just like that, my first week at the CELMRAZ was complete.

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Studying at the CELMRAZ costs money, which all goes to the junta del buen gobierno to spend on its various projects. In the afternoon, we all headed over to pay for the week just past. After some waiting, we were beckoned into the gloomy, warm room. With a huge drawing of Subcomandante Marcos lighting his pipe looking over us, the three guys behind the desk took a look at our accreditation papers and took down the details. Then came the payment; the junta del buen gobierno take administrative matters very seriously, and the three guys (all of whom were, as with all Zapatista cargos, unpaid volunteers who would be rotated for others after a couple of weeks) meticulously double- and triple-checked everything, including running calculations separately on different calculators to ensure that they all agreed on how much change we were due. The caracol had also been without power since about midday the day before, and one of the guys had been impressed by a chargeable lamp that one of the other students had brought, from which one could also charge phones and suchlike. She said she had several and asked if they wanted some for the caracol; the guy said he would ask the others on the junta what they thought. No decision can be made unilaterally, it seems.

San Cristóbal es Mi Casa ¶

Me and the other language students returned to San Cris and went out for a night of craft beers, mezcal and pox. Amongst the many street salesmen of San Cris, the strangest I saw was a man who seemed to be flogging bells to couples seated outside cafes, which I can’t imagine is a very successful gambit. At one point we heard a commotion in the streets and looked out from the balcony of our bar to see a parade of partidistas—I think for MORENA, the party of AMLO—banging drums and blowing trumpets. Just as with Guatemala before it, and Arizona long before that, I’d managed to arrive in the midst of election season.

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I found out, seven months after applying, that I hadn’t got the job in Antarctica I’d been waiting to hear back from. The mild disappointment was tempered by the relief from being finally able to plan my post-return activities. The main activity of the week was a pair of workshops on the political situation in Chiapas, delivered by the Espacio de Lucha Contra el Olvido y la Represión (ELCOR), which were a pre-requisite to my post-CELMRAZ plans. I also settled into a daily food routine that saw me visit Las Carmelitas for their desayano del día offer, and then La Esquina del Chaparro in the mid-afternoon for their large (and filling) menú del día; through these, I think I had a good sampling of Mexican and Chiapan (and Oaxacan) cuisine.

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I stayed at Fandango again, and found that pretty much everyone who had been there before my week at the Centre was still there. The place was rather odd: there seemed to be a sizeable contingent of long-term residents (one guy referred to the money he was paying for accommodation as rent) and some of the inhabitants were a touch kooky. My favourite was a guy who perpetually wore a crop top string vest, along with anywhere up to seven bags and pouches dotted around his body (including, at one point, a utility belt with a small bongo attached). Of course, he also wore a fedora complete with decorative steampunk goggles, and offered people massages apropos of nothing. I started my week-long stay back in the MDF coffins, but soon promoted myself to the MDF castle above:

I took advantage of the weekend salsa lessons at the hostel, and met up with a couple of the CELMRAZ crew back at La Enredadera for a documentary screening of Lupita, followed by a Q&A with the woman herself.

CELMRAZ, Week Two ¶

After my week off, I headed back to Oventik for another week of Spanish study.

Day Six ¶

We kicked off the first day of my second week here at the CELMRAZ by running through the geopolitical situation in Chiapas again, for the benefit of the handful of the new students: we are up to eight from five in my first week. In the grammar lesson, we clarified a couple of near-synonymous words (e.g., aún and todavía for still), but mostly just ended up having a conversation about Chiapas’ history (it was originally part of Guatemala). I immediately missed my one-on-one tuition from the first week; there were three of us in my Spanish class now, plus the promotor.

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In the conversation we talked more about Zapatismo and the movement. When you say ¡ya basta! there are consequences, said the promotor. He talked about how there are no plans, only the people in constant rebellion. I asked about the agrarian nature of Zapatismo, and how much it applied to urban society. We talked a bit about how the largely agrarian EZLN originated within the more urban Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN) in the ’70s, and the many disappearances during the Dirty War in Mexico. Whilst Zapatismo certainly has a lot of support in San Cristóbal, the promotor said that la ciudad es mas cerca la bocas del lobo and was dangerous.

We watched a documentary in the evening called Storm from the Mountains: The Zapatistas Take Mexico City, about their march on the capital in 2001 to found the Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI). It’s a real shame that it’s not available anywhere online, because it was full of fantastic Subcomandante Marcos speeches and incredible scenes, chief amongst them an extended sequence in which a huge crowd of unarmed Zapatistas storm a military barracks, getting into fistfights with bayonet-wielding Mexican soldiers without a care in the world (though you can at least get a sense of the speeches from the trailer linked above). Plus, the soundtrack absolutely slapped in a deliciously early-2000s way.

Day Seven ¶

We started by heading back up into the mountains along with 25-odd students from the autonomous secondary school (there were about 40–50 at school that week, so the caracol was a lot less tranquil). There we sang songs (me and the two Americans contributed an all-baritone rendition of the Diggers’ Song) and danced a conga line in the forest: in Zapatismo, everything is possible.

For the grammar part of the day, we played a game invented by the Surrealists in which pairs of cards forming conditional sentences (e.g., if wishes were fishes and we’d all swim in riches) are divided up and mixed and we each took turns drawing them to form new sentences: some profound, some funny, some meaningless. We ended up talking about co-operative board games and the way the autonomous secondary school uses Monopoly to teach the students about how capitalism works. We also looked at the history of Mayan resistance stretching back to 1712 uprisings and rebellion of Jacinto Canek against the Spanish. We were taught the term el mandón, which means something akin to the bossy one. The people of Chiapas have called many things el mandón over the centuries: in 1994, el mandón was neoliberalism; in 2005, el mandón was capitalism. All of this, said the promotor, went back to the cultural memory of the Mayan collapse and the new forms of living that had to be developed following it.

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To start our conversational practice, we were told to go off and find something—a space, a tree, a plant, whatever—and to have a conversation with it for ten minutes. I found a nice clearing with a little abandoned house and sat listening to the birds, the insects and the wind whilst wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing. When we got back together, the promotora explained that Tsotsil does not have any word that is the equivalent of things, only existencias. This is because the language apparently doesn’t have the concept of a grammatical object; the closest I can get to explaining how this works is to say that rather than saying I write with my pen on this notebook, you would be saying something like Me, the pen and the notebook together write.⁷

We also looked at the concept of ch’ulel again, with the promotora explaining in the context of what we’d just learnt that it is the result of the mutual recognition of existences (so maybe more like the inner light in Quakerism than Austin Powers’ mojo). She explained that in Mayan culture, one would ritualistically speak to a tree before cutting it town in order to ask its permission (I’m not quite sure how you’re supposed to gauge that the tree is cool with the chopping, though). But ch’ulel also seems to mean something like conscience. She said that it is always present, but sometimes only very small; I asked whether paramilitaries have ch’ulelito, which got a chuckle.

Day Eight ¶

We started the day off clearing vegetation from the coffee field, and as I’d done very little physical activity recently I ended up sore for the remainder of the week.

In the grammar lesson we played the Surrealist game again, but with cards we had written ourselves. I mentioned how anthropologists have described Mayan kids as not taking part in imaginative play as much as their counterparts in places like the US, and the promotor explained how the children here live in close connection to nature and within the Mayan cosmovision, so they don’t need to invent unicorns. We also looked at a few Spanish idioms, because I was keen to transition from talking good English-with-Spanish-words to actually speaking Spanish.

In the conversation the other two students asked a bunch of questions about how the cargos and juntas de buen gobierno work, which I had already covered in the first week. Week one was definitely the better of the two.

Day Nine ¶

For my penultimate day at the school, I wanted to find out more about the theoretical side of the Zapatista movement. The EZLN Wikipedia page describes them as Marxist (amongst several other things) and I’d already had a conversation in my first week about why there were so many pictures of Che Guevara’s face. The promotor said that Zapatismo is a practice, not an ideology, philosophy, doctrine or theory. He talked about how the symbolic references for a movement depend on where it is, and talked about how Latin Americans often comprehend things sensually, rather than rationally. He quoted Surrealist Andre Breton who, upon arriving in Mexico and seeing a cow walking in front of a cathedral, apparently declared that This is Surrealism!

We also talked about Zapata’s agrarian reform and the Mexican Constitution, and discussed how land ownership and work distribution work in Zapatista communities, delineating collective work (i.e., the necessities of the community, like building schools), communal work (e.g., seed planting) and co-operative work (e.g., the shops in the caracol, which operate to generate money).

The distinction between the grammar classes and the conversations was pretty fuzzy all of this week.

In the actual conversation part of the day, we talked about the concept of buen vivir (literally living well, or more idiomatically the good life). The Zapatistas recognise that this is the goal of any liberatory movement and that it will look different in very culture, person, etc. The promotor talked about industrial society as new and superficially nice-looking, but in reality it creates perceived needs that everyone got along fine without before, and creates new problems that it claims to be the solution to.

She talked about health problems in this context, pointing to the increases in diabetes and cancers. Diabetes (as I’ve talked about before) is pretty clearly linked to lifestyle changes, but increasing cancer rates are generally related to people living longer and thus having more time to develop them. On this note, I asked her whether there is a similar concept of buen mourir, because there are certainly people who argue that just living as long as we possibly can is missing the point. She talked about the Mayan approach to death, seeing it as a passing to another dimension or place, and the Zapatista idea of a dignified death within the struggle (not necessarily in combat).

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Lastly, we talked about the next generation of Zapatistas, currently studying at our very location. I had heard elsewhere that some 90% of young people in Zapatista communities choose to get involved in the movement, and they were certainly enthusiastic singing the songs up in the mountains the other day, but financial realities and the deteriorating security situation are also leading to a lot of young emigration to the US for work.

Day Ten ¶

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My final day at the CELMRAZ began with a conversation session. I asked about how the autonomous secondary school works, and what a typical day looks like for the students. The promotora explained that the students board for two weeks each month for around 2–3 months at a time, and are split into groups who take it in turns to be responsible for communal tasks (cooking, chopping wood, etc.). They attend classes from 9 till 5 (although sometimes we would be woken up around 5:30 by them playing basketball or guitar, because they’re used to getting up at the crack of dawn back home). From 3 till 5 they’re free, and then they get back together for a group activity between 5 and 7.

She said that some of the promotores were barely older than the students, and would often get involved in basketball, etc. too. After three years of secondary education, the students then choose an autonomous project to get involved with, be that with the health system, education system, media collectives, etc. In theory they could go straight to work for the junta de buen gobierno, but she said they usually start with something smaller unless they have a lot of experience already.

The classes provided include maths, history, humanism, social sciences, natural sciences, physical education, art, languages and health (which includes sex education, which is traditionally never addressed in most of the communities). Students sleep in gender-segregated rooms, but the school is otherwise co-educational. Men and women were traditionally prohibited from working together, so this is another way in which the movement is changing people’s perceptions: things are always improving poco a poco.

Whilst this is the only autonomous secondary school for the whole zone (hence the boarding; students came here from all different municipalities), the autonomous primaries are dotted around every municipality and students don’t board at them. She said there was no strict starting age for those, and that kids were welcome to start attending whenever they wanted, or even to attend specific subjects if that was all they were interested in.

Photo by the author

Then we talked about how food production works in the MAREZ. Our zone, Zona Alta, struggles due to having little fertile land. Fertiliser is a necessity, and the promotora said that the bad government provides chemical fertiliser from Monsanto along with seeds. These are bad for the land, but people need to make enough food; she said this one of the primary drivers behind emigration to the US. Other zones within the MAREZ, though, produce all they need and even a bit of surplus.

Chiapas does not lack for fertile land, but the bulk of it is held by the large-scale rancheros and finceros; we again returned to the twenty-five rich families that appropriated that land under the conquistadores and continue to dominate state politics now. The promotora also acknowledged that life was not perfect before the Spanish conquest, but that a lot of conservative practices that they are fighting in the communities were not originally Mayan, and instead were introduced by the Spaniards (see also, the role of women in the British Isles pre- and post-Normans).

For the final grammar lesson, we actually did a bit of grammar! We touched on conditionals, the subjunctive mood and various irregular verbs, as well as how to pronounce the ü that occasionally appears in Spanish words. Then we all reviewed a piece of homework I’d been given over my week off, in which I practised two types of past tense by writing about my main man Albert Camus. Given that I was in a class with the Franco–Belgian couple, that led to a final conversational digression on the subject of French and Belgian colonialism. We finished with one last song, La hierba de los caminos, which ends with the following stanza:

Lastly but by no means leastly, we spend a chunk of time in the afternoon learning how to make tortillas.

It Was the Worst of Times… ¶

I spent the Monday of the following week at the first of two more preparatory workshops for my next activity in Chiapas. In them we covered… the history and geopolitical context of Chiapas! For like the third or fourth time now!

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I was very hungry at 12, even hungrier at 1:15 when we finally broke for lunch and so hungry by the time the others had finished nattering at 1:40 that I shouted when I was told that the guy leading the workshop wanted to join us after picking his son up from school, so we wouldn’t even be ordering until 2. In any case, he arrived late.

We went to a vegan café that my compa suggested; they didn’t have any choice, it was the menu of the day or bust. The meal on the board actually sounded great—stuffed plantains—but that was yesterday’s meal: we got a thin broccoli soup and a meal I could best describe as appetiser-esque. I tried to get some money out, but I think it was some sort of social service payout day and there were queues around the block for every cash machine.

We returned for more workshop, but no more Spanish was going into my brain at this point. Back at the housing co-op I was staying at, they had a house assembly that evening. Despite my best efforts and the fact I was only staying there for four nights, attendance was mandatory (I was not told about any of this before I arrived). Already cranky, I had to sit and listen to a bunch of people I barely knew and wouldn’t have the time to get to know check in with their biggest adventure of the week and discuss housing matters that had little to no relevance to me.

One of the housemates had been ill, and I’d picked up her cold so spent the night spluttering on my own sinus juice instead of sleeping. By the following morning it had gotten worse, and I only had so many sachets of Lemsip. I spent what little time I had that morning playing musical showers because none of them had hot water.

I went to collect the laundry I’d left at the launderette on Saturday, and which I’d been told would be ready by the Monday just past. They didn’t open till 9, so I went out for a breakfast of (cold) scrambled eggs. When I came back, they said they wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, and that they closed at 2: based on the previous day’s experience, I wouldn’t be back in time to pick them up, so I took the unwashed clothes and settled into day 3 of my current pair of pants.

The cash machines still had massive queues that morning, so no money for me. The cold was doing my head in, and on the walk back to our place for a long lunch break I smashed my toe into the kerb and had to walk halfway across the city with my flip-flop getting increasingly sticky with blood. I got back in time to have collected my laundry, had I left it at the launderette.

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Of course the pinche washing machine in the pinche house was only for the pinche housekeeper. And of course the pinche housekeeper left 20 minutes before I was told that, so I couldn’t ask her for a favour. And of course the only pinche launderette that was open charged me six times as much as the original one to get my clothes done by that pinche evening. And of course it took me a pinche hour to find a pinche cash machine that hadn’t been drained that pinche morning.

Sometimes you have a period of time where everything is pretty shitty. I was two days into one, and if I hadn’t have vented (on my tracker) I’dve screamed. I was excited to be rid of San Cris the following day.

BriCO Boys ¶

The next morning, I headed out with a German compa (who, coincidentally enough, I had met at the CELMRAZ my second week there) to the hamlet of Acteal. We were to spend two weeks there as a two-man team of human rights observers, as part of the Brigadas Civiles De Observación (BriCOs) (original Spanish here; English version here).

Acteal itself isn’t a Zapatista community, but it’s run by a sympathetic Christan pacifist group called las Abejas who are organised similarly, with health and education promotores, rotating positions, etc. The settlement itself sits slap-bang in the middle of the multi-directional Chiapan conflict that I’d been learning about for the past few weeks. Nearby villages have received an influx of people displaced from other villages in the region (such as Polhó), cartels and other criminal groups funnel drugs, arms and humans through the area and a suspiciously well-armed autodefensa militia recently appeared in the nearby town of Pantelhó, who nobody seemed to trust. There was also some sort of other armed group in the area that didn’t have a name and nobody knew much about. On top of this was all the usual murky involvement and harassment from the police and military. The Abejas’ dogged campaigning finally resulted in the Mexican government admitting responsibility for the massacre in 2020, but they continue to push for the then-President (and several other intellectual authors of the crime) to be tried in court.

We were in Acteal to document any human rights abuses or security issues and to keep the organisation that was sending us—the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas—informed about the developing situation. We were stuck within the small camp pretty much the whole time—the road outside was considered unsafe, as was just about all of the surrounding area—so I loaded up my e-reader with books, my laptop with films and my luggage with a guitar.

Our arrival coincided with a multi-day fiesta for San Pedro, the patron saint of this region. We were treated to a brass band, fireworks, chicken soup and locally-made coffee, and drinking the water here (although after it had been boiled) didn’t seem to do us any harm. Most importantly, I finally found myself elevated off the ground in a hammock the way the good Lord intended, for the first time since arriving in Mexico. Things were looking up.

The Abejas run Acteal kind of like a Zapatista caracol; there were a couple shops there (including Lupita’s own corner store), but only a couple people living there semi-permanently. It is mostly used for gatherings, events and (during the time we were there) as a place of refuge. It’s run by a group called the mesa directiva who are elected and vaguely analogous to the junta de buen gobierno, but with longer terms and more authority. But the Abejas are still primarily an indigenous organisation fighting (peacefully) for their rights, land and autonomy; they aren’t Zapatistas, but they’re cut from the same cloth.

Whilst we were there, a new armed group appeared in Pantelhó (up the road) and may or may not have taken over the town hall. They demanded that the Army come in and kick out the self-professed autodefensa group El Machete, who they accused of being a criminal group and responsible for several disappearances, or they’d do it themselves. Only the Mexican and local news covered the events, as far as I can tell. The government were saying everything was under control, and from what we could gather there were a lot of cops and soldiers in Pantelhó and the roads leading up to it.

In terms of Mexican DEFCON levels this seemed to be somewhere above an ¡ay-ay-ay! but below a ¡Dios mío!; in the British system that’s somewhere between a kerfuffle and an oh dear oh dear. Other than receiving occasional updates on that conflict up the road, our time passed uneventfully.

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The big church in the centre of the hamlet was built after the 1997 massacre. At the back of the village was another small church building, which we didn’t see used for anything except storage during the time we were there. Whilst the building itself was new, it was built on the site of the former church where many of the women tried to hide during the massacre; most were killed. The floor of that church is untiled, revealing the bare earth on which the original church stood.

A detailed account of the massacre itself is available here. Even given that it’s a massacre, it’s still probably more harrowing than you expect. However, the reality is not shied away from by the community, even 25 years on; from another article:

There has thusfar been no official effort to hold those ultimately responsible for the massacre to account. The murderers themselves, though initially arrested and given long sentences, were progressively released early back into the surrounding communities. Though the new AMLO government has finally acknowledged the government’s role—from forming and supporting the paramilitaries in the first place to nearby Army forces not responding despite being able to hear the gunfire to then trying to quietly dispose of the bodies—their response was to try and buy the silence of the victims and survivors (and that linked article also includes several quotes from Simón Pedro, later assassinated). Some Abejas took the financial settlement; don’t forget, these guys are by almost all measurements dirt-poor. But the majority have refused anything less than justice being done, and I really hope that one day they get it.

Photo by the author

…It Was the Best of Times ¶

So ended the least exciting two weeks of this whole trip.

Me and my compa had both been ill most of the brigade. I started ill, got a bit better around the midpoint and then either relapsed or got a fresh new cold (or, more likely, COVID-19, as there was an outbreak back at the house in San Cris a couple days after we’d left). We’d also been blowing our way through our toilet paper supplies as tissues and ran out the day before we left. So, when the mesa directiva invited us to a parting coffee on the morning of our departure (before a two-hour-long and very windy drive) I was a bit nervous, but then it turned out there was no coffee: only a nice, non-caffeinated lemon tisane.

The journey was uneventful, and the mountain ranges appeared very strange and alien as we rose out of the valley because I’d decided to listen to Huun-Huur-Tu in the taxi. We gave the outgoing group a quick debrief and then I headed off to my hotel, which turned out to be a much shorter walk than I’d expected.

I was in room #46, but that turned out to only be on the second floor. The shower looked unimpressive until I turned it on and realised it was probably the best I’d had in months. I’d had almost exactly as many pesos as I needed to pay for my hotel room, so I went out to the cash machine and found it with no queue, and it worked first time. I went to Las Carmelitas for their desayano del día, and it turned out to be exactly what I didn’t know I needed after two weeks of mostly rice: enfrijoladas montadas con carne. I also had a carrot cake, because why not.

Later, back in my room, I went to wash my hands and realised there was no soap. I was thinking I’d have to traipse down to the reception to ask for some, when I realised there was some provided on my side table. Then, as I went through my bags, I found another bar hidden away that would do me as a backup for the remainder of my time in Mexico.

I turned on my laptop and realised I hadn’t taken a photo of the Wi-Fi login back at the reception. But then (and by this time I was starting to predict ways things could work out for me) it turned out I can view saved Wi-Fi passwords on my phone. I noticed that the hotel offered a laundry service and it turned out to be pretty cheap, and they said they’d have the clothes ready by the morning.

For dinner I looked up a pizza place someone at Fandango had recommended to me, buy it was a bit far. But, there was another pizza place about half the distance away called La Minerva. I went and got a huge pizza to go, and on my way home realised I had no hot sauce. However, as I had by this point kind of assumed, there was a tub of the stuff included in with the pizza, and it was one of the best hot sauces I’ve ever tasted. Plus, when I got back, the hotel reception told me they’d done my clothes already.

So now I found myself with three nights in a nice swish hotel (read: the cheapest place in San Cris that offered private rooms and bathrooms). We had a final brigade debrief the following afternoon, but we’d already wrote up our report as we went along so it didn’t take long. Otherwise, I downloaded a bunch of games and barely left my room for anything that wasn’t edible.

Sometimes you have a period of time where everything is just peachy. I had several days of one. I was happy to be back in San Cris and I was excited to be wrapping things up soon. With the exception of the church across the road from my hostel deciding that 6am was an ideal time to launch fireworks each morning, my final days in San Cris passed pleasantly. I’d been unsure about whether or not to go to the beach for the end of my time in Mexico, as the weather forecast didn’t look particularly promising:

Screenshot by the author

Prediction: all of the symbols, simultaneously.

However, the weather forecast for San Cris looked about the same, yet I’d seen uninterrupted sunshine since I got back. I decided to throw caution to the wind and book a redeye coach to Oaxaca: storms or no storms, I was off to the beach!

Oaxaca ¶

The bus ran overnight, but I lucked out with two seats to myself for most of it. I did get into a shoving match at one point with one woman who insisted on reclining her seat all the way back whilst I was reaching forward to get something, even after I tapped her on the top of the head and asked her to hold on a moment, but otherwise the ride was uneventful.

My hostel wasn’t far from the bus terminal, so I walked over at 7am. One guy stopped me to ask where I was from (I guess recognising me as a tourist wasn’t too hard, laden as I was with bags), and then followed up by immediately asking whether I had WhatsApp. He said he had moved to Huatulco several years ago (I assume from the US, based on his accent) and likes to help people out. Maybe he was trying to flog me tourist tours, maybe this was a drug solicitation effort uncharacteristically early in the day, or maybe he just genuinely did want to give me tips for the place; either way, I hadn’t had enough sleep to parse what was going on (and had decided to stop in the middle of crossing the road) and it felt a little odd, so I said I’d give him my number if I saw him again and walked on. I never did.

The reports of Huatulco’s raininess had been overstated, but the weather was nonetheless not ideal for beach tripping: it was Honduras-level hot, but humid and not particularly sunny. After a couple days of sweating myself inside-out in an otherwise-empty hostel, where all of the nearby eateries seemed expensive, I decided to book a flight to Mexico City for the latter half of the week. Shortly after doing so, I discovered a bunch of cheap comedores nearby and was joined by a few others in my dorm. One of these was a girl from Veracruz who I told about my goal of visiting a beach in the morning before my flight; she was keen to join, so we made a rough plan.

Come the morning, the sun was out in force like I hadn’t seen all week. We took a taxi to the trailhead and walked for forty-five minutes through forest as the bugs took their several pounds of flesh. Finally, we arrived at Playa Cacaluta: the filming location of one of my favourite films, and an absolutely perfect Pacific beach. We lay in the sun for several hours, listening to the crashing of the (very powerful) waves.

Photo by the author

After getting back to La Crucecita and having lunch, it was off to the airport.

Mexico Shitty ¶

I have very little to say about Mexico City, except that it was shit. In a region full of charmless major cities, Mexico City was the bleakest. In that spirit, the place I stayed—Hostal Ciudad de Mexico—was easily the worst place I stayed all trip, and the only time I felt compelled to leave a review. To top it all off, a launderette stole all of my socks.

The highlight of my not-short-enough stay in the City was getting up at 4am on the Sunday to go to the airport and leave it, thus ending the most divisive part of my trip: the highs were the highest but the lows were the lowest.