5. I Am Back | De Regreso

I arrived in Chiapas at night. I had made arrangements the week before for a taxi to pick me up at the airport. As I walked out of the plane, I found myself in a modern airport completed just a few months earlier.

We drove out towards San Cristóbal de las Casa on a new toll road that shortened the time to get to town. Things were very different back in 1994. In the car, I recalled the last time I was here. Our bus was flagged down and searched by heavily armed soldiers. There was dead silence in the bus. Unaware of the uprising early that year, I was trying to make sense of what was going on.

At midnight on January 1, 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, 3000 black hooded Zapatistas - some with Uzi look-alike wooden guns – made their first appearance, emerging from the forest where they had been hiding. They surprised everyone and took over San Cristóbal de las Casa and several nearby towns. Chiapas was the poorest state in Mexico with more than four million people, of which about a quarter were Mayans. Chiapas is rich in oil and water resources, but many people there did not have access to either. Problems of malnutrition, infant and maternal deaths were more serious than the rest of the country. The Zapatista demanded that the Government improve the living standard of the indigenous people and pass legislation to protect their rights. The group also warned the government of the potential impact of the free trade agreement. Although the conflict lasted only 12 days, it succeeded in attracting worldwide attention.

As we drove into San Cristóbal de las Casa, I eagerly looked around.

"I'm back!" I said to myself.

But what I saw disoriented me. I was surprised to hear bursts of pop music. A group of young people standing outside the bar chatting.

Finally, I arrived at the Paradise Hotel. I opened the huge wooden doors and passed candles perched in stands to get to the front desk. I finally settled into the high-ceiling hotel room.

Early the next morning, I woke up at dawn. Sunlight from the skylights cascaded into the room and illuminated the golden orange paint on the wall. The cheerful color glowed and brightened my mood and made me smile. I felt energetic and I hopped out of the bed. Moments later, I was ready to go out. As I opened the French door that was twice my size, the fragrant scent from the wood frame permeated the air and struck me by surprise. I stopped for a moment to let it penetrate my lungs before walking out into the lobby. The hallway surrounding the courtyard was painted in hot orange accented with baby blue. It was decorated with rustic furniture, large overhead beams and plants in terracotta pots. The mix of native and Spanish styles is what makes this country so charming and fascinating.

I headed out for Chamula, a nearby indigenous village, for its Sunday farmers’ market where villagers from the surrounding areas came to buy or sell produce. I zigzagged through the city until I found the old van that shuttled between San Cristóbal and the village. I was joined by some tourists and indigenous people from the city.

The indigenous culture was still strong and alive in Chamula. They called their churches “templos (temples) as opposed inglesias (churches). Every February, tens of thousands of people would come here to watch the carnival. Although anthropologists consider the indigenous in Chiapas Mayan, the term is something unfamiliar to many villagers here. Most of the indigenous people identified themselves based on their village and dialect. Each village has its own unique customs. Chamula was more conservative than some of the other villages. This had resulted in the preservation of their indigenous culture and Catholic influence but also prompted the expulsion of many who converted to Evangelical Christianity.

San Juan Church was the center of the village. Each door and window was embellished with three-tiered arches in blue and green, adding an interesting touch to the white missionary-style church. I was told that blue and green represented the sky and the earth. Most crosses in the village were planted in the ground and painted in blue and green, symbolizing the connection to earth. Well before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Mayans already used crosses as a symbol of the sacred kopok tree which was called ceiba by the Mayans. Ceiba was considered the tree of life. According to the legend the heaven and earth were connected prior to the genesis until a ceiba tree extended upward and held up the sky while extending its roots to the underworld. Some said that three artists created color and life on earth. They were a sculptor, a painter, and a molder, representing each of the 3 points on the cross. Mayans not only had great respect for the forces of nature and life on earth but also worshipped them. There were gods of the trees, corn, wind, sun and many others. I found their legends colorful and romantic which might explain the rich color and strong personal relationships in their culture.

As soon as I stepped into San Juan Church, I was greeted with the fresh scent of pine needles. There were no pews in the church. It was carpeted with pine needles. The villagers and their families came here with soda, used as a replacement for traditional fermented maize drink, and with candles to pray for good health or harvest. They knelt on the ground to show respect in front of the saint that specialized in the areas they needed help in. One by one, they lit up the candles they brought. Different colors of candles were used for different purposes. For example, white symbolized the purity of the mother of earth. Green candles were used to ward off disease. Yellow and orange candles helped expel unlucky spells. Sometimes shamans were invited to the church for traditional rituals with incense or eggs to purify or identify illness.

A wide variety of Catholic statues were lined up along the walls. Mayans had always been polytheism. Maybe the Spaniards believed that they had converted the Mayans but, aside from the architecture of the Catholic church, everything else seemed to be reminiscent of the ancient Mayan culture. In the Mayan mythology, the sun god was beheaded. In revenge, his sons went to the underground and killed the evil. Some believed that the similarity between the Mayan and Catholic father-and-son pairs and their crosses was the reason why Catholicism was adopted widely by the Mayan.

When the Spaniards conquered Mexico, they ruthlessly destroyed most of the Mayan statues, temples and literature. But watching the Mayans practice traditional rituals in the church in front of Catholic saints, I wondered if they transposed their Mayan faith to a Catholic look-alike, to preserve their religion, or if they really converted to Catholicism. Was the transposing a way of distracting themselves from the cultural and political domination by the Spaniards or an expression of their disappointment in the Mayan gods? We may never know the real answer.