In July, 2019, I once again undertook that most joyous of rituals, boarding an international flight. My ultimate destination was San Cristobol de las Casas, a magical and storied town in Chiapas, Mexico. I was joining a delegation of gringos to a small but highly-credentialed human rights NGO operating in Chiapas; the organization would facilitate interviews with local victims of government corruption and abuse, as well as advocates and activists, including representatives of the Zapatistas.
Once aboard the plane to Mexico City, I was about to pull a bandana over my eyes for some sleep when a young American woman next to me struck up a conversation:
“Are you going to Mexico for vacation?”
“I have friends there,” I said to spare us both the long explanation. “You?”
“I’m a missionary,” she said, somewhat bashfully.
I’d noticed them in the airport. They traveled in groups of one or two dozen, all from the same organization or church; they often wore identical clothes, as a sort of uniform.
“I see,” I said.
“Are you staying in Mexico City?”
“I’m going down to Chiapas.”
“Oh! Will you visit the infamous Chamula?”
“I might,” I said.
She leaned closer and murmured: “Be careful if you do. The people there practice voodoo. They even murdered one of our missionaries a few years ago.”
I had never heard of Chamula, but my curiosity was certainly piqued.
I spent a week in San Cristobol. It was an incongruous experience, living in a charming, well-preserved colonial-era neighborhood with upscale tourist boutiques while listening to gut-wrenching testimonies of arbitrary arrest, extortion, and murder at the hands of both the local police and the federal government. As usual, the poorest had it worst, which in Mexico means the indigenous people. And, as usual, they were fighting back, in the courts and the streets and the media. Our delegation was part of their public outreach.
The director of the sponsoring NGO was a German woman we’ll call Julia. On the fourth day of the program, she suggested the delegates take a day off from the interviews to see some local sights. My colleagues went off together to Tonina. I had planned to remain in San Cristobol until Julia suggested a ride into the countryside together; where would I like to go?
“I’ve heard about Chamula,” I said.
“Ah, yes! Good idea.” So I figured a visit was, at least, not suicidal.
It’s just a twenty-minute drive through the mountains from San Cristobol to Chamula. On the way, we stopped at a red light in a small town and were immediately approached by indigenous children in their traditional clothes. They’d been waiting along the sidewalk.
Julia, who was driving, spoke to them through the window as we waited at the light. I tried to follow the conversation, but the children peppered their Spanish with their own Tzotzil language, entirely alien to me. The light changed and we pulled away.
“They invited us to their home,” said Julia. “They’ll feed you, dress you up in their clothes, take pictures of you in them…for money, I mean.”
“Puts a slant on cultural appropriation,” I said. Not that I minded; I understood the economics involved.
We reached the outskirts of Chamula, seven thousand feet in the mountains. The town itself has a population of about 3,500, with another 70,000 in the dispersed villages of the surrounding highlands. Julia was driving very carefully.
“I have to make sure I don’t hit any sheep,” she explained. “They’re sacred animals here. And they wander into the road.”
Chamula is different from the rest of Mexico. It’s almost not a part of it. The population is nearly entirely indigenous, specifically the Tzotzil Mayan people. Their town has such a long history of resistance to colonization and enforced religious conversion that it won the right to a certain autonomy – no Mexican police or military forces are allowed in the town. It has its own police force, under local control. The Tzotzil retain their own language and culture, and Spanish is rarely heard here. But their autonomy has other consequences as well.
Julia pointed out several homes standing apart from the usual humble white-painted concrete houses and businesses. They were larger, more expensive, but badly lacking in architectural taste. One sported front steps and patio faced with what appeared to be white bathroom tile, with bannisters that looked like chrome-plated towel rods.
“If you see an expensive house here,” said Julia, “it’s ten to one it’s a drug lord.” Close to the Guatemalan border in a town with no state police? Just might be.
We parked on the street in front of a small farmacia and headed for the main point of interest in town, the San Juan Church. We walked across a wide cobblestone square and were met by barefoot women selling handwoven blankets, jewelry, and little handmade dolls of Subcommander Marcos. I had already learned in San Cristobol that buying from one would attract all the others, so I politely declined and walked a bit faster. This brought us to the front of the famous church.
The blue-trimmed white exterior was well-maintained but unexceptional; the building was not particularly grand for a town of this size. We bought tickets outside the doors, and Julia informed me that it was very, very important that I take no photographs while inside. This forbidden act would cause the locals to forcibly eject me, not just from the church, but from the town itself, perhaps after a brief stint in the local jail. In fact, it would be best to simply turn off my phone and leave it in my pocket. This I did, and I doffed my hat and stepped between the large wooden double doors.
Inside, it was too dark to see, though I could smell pungent incense burning – copal, a resin used by the ancient Mayans. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but it wasn’t this.
There were no pews in this church; people sat on the floor in small groups here and there. The place was lit by candles set on the floor in puddles of melted wax. And the floor was covered in small mounds of pine needles; I thought these were to sit on, but someone told me that pine needles also have a spiritual significance in the Mayan religion.
Julia quietly related the local history as we explored the church as unobtrusively as possible. Ever since Chiapas’ halfhearted acceptance of Christianity in the wake of the 16th century Spanish invasion, religion in Chamula had been a syncretic blend of Catholicism and the original Mayan religion. In the 1970s, Chamula won another form of autonomy, in that the San Juan Church no longer obeyed the national Catholic institution, but was instead considered independent. This ended Catholic attempts at conversion in Chamula as the Church apparently took the best deal it could get. At least the town’s patron saint, San Juan, was on the altar under a canopy of pine boughs – with Jesucristo off to one side, indicating that things were a little different here. I heard that a Catholic priest from San Cristobol visits once a month to maintain the tenuous connection to the Vatican.
Some groups of worshippers, all Tzotzil, prayed to painted wooden statues on long wooden tables. The statues were recognizable Catholic saints, but were dressed in indigenous clothes. Julia murmured that, to the Tzotzil, they represented both Christian saints and Mayan gods. And these statues, and those of The Virgin, all had small mirrors hung around their necks. I later learned that the mirrors facilitated the sacrament of confession in the absence of a priest. You gaze into the mirror and confess your sins to the most impactful judge of all: yourself.
Other congregants were engaged in healing ceremonies. The curanderos (healers) diagnose diseases, both physical and spiritual, and prescribe various treatments. Sometimes posh, a traditional alcohol made from sugarcane, is the treatment; at other times, simple Coca-Cola is used. I also saw eggs, feathers, and other implements I didn’t recognize.
“Sometimes they sacrifice a chicken,” said Julia.
“Right here?” I asked.
“Yeah. The chicken absorbs the evil spirits, then they kill it.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Yeah. It’s. . . undramatic. They just twist the chicken’s neck and lay it on the floor. Done.”
We then stood by the doorway for a short presentation by one of the mayordomos (spiritual leaders) of the community, a tall middle-aged man in a traditional black sheep’s wool coat. He quietly explained in Spanish that, once a year, a new applicant can become one of the dozens of mayordomos of the town, though the waiting list to do so is about twenty years long. The applicant – always a male, as far as I could tell – ascends to leadership by personally funding all the religious festivals in the town during the year, which include much food and alcohol, as well as paying to maintain the San Juan Church. This responsibility requires the equivalent of about ten thousand US dollars in a state where the average annual income is about three thousand. The men must save for years to accomplish this; but a high position in the church hierarchy is the only path to social status in Chamula. The secular presidente (mayor) comes and goes every three years, but church leaders are for life.
Having seen everything I wanted to see in the church, Julia led me on a short walk across town to a large building; at the top of the stairs was a rooftop restaurant named El Mirador. It was a much nicer place than I’d expected to find, on par with anything in San Cristobol, and the view across the town to the misty mountains was splendid. I figured it was aimed at tourists who came to look at the church.
They brought us a giant bowl of guacamole that could have been an entire meal.
“Fascinating town,” I told Julia.
“Isn’t it?”
“There’s something I don’t understand. . .”
“That’s understandable. . .”
“How do the drug lords manage to stay? I thought the indigenas hated the narcos.”
“The narcos make big donations to the church. Some of them do the year-long service and become mayordomos.”
“They follow the local religion?”
“Sure. You have to be a member of the church to live here.”
“What happens if you’re not?” I asked.
“They used to kick you out. They evicted people back in the seventies and eighties. Tens of thousands of them. By force.”
“Who was getting evicted?”
“Protestant evangelicals. They’ve grown a lot since the 1960s. Missionaries came through and you suddenly had all these Tzotzil who wouldn’t practice the local religion. Said it was devil’s work. The traditionalists hate them.”
“Do they still evict them?” I asked.
“I don’t think so, but there’s still a lot of tension and sometimes a murder.”
“I thought the Mexican constitution guarantees freedom of religion?”
“It does. But it also gives the indigenous the right to run their communities according to their own customs.”
“Including religious ones. . .”
“Right. Remember, the missionaries weren’t from the community. The Tzotzil felt like their way of life was under attack again by outsiders. When people feel attacked, they dig in. Get more conservative. If you go against the religion, you go against tradition. Against your tribe, as they see it. They think you’re a traitor, that you’re in with the colonizers. And they killed a lot of people in those evictions.”
“I see.”
“I had wanted to give you a day off from all this,” she said.
“It’s alright. Maybe you needed one, too?”
She chuckled. “You got me.”
“By the way,” I asked, “have you ever heard of an American missionary being killed here?”
“No, I’ve never heard of any American killed in Chamula. Mexican missionaries? I’m sure that’s happened.”
Lunch arrived and we ate in silence. I’d ordered shrimp in a flavorful garlic sauce. As in San Cristobol, I had that hollow, dissonant feeling.
When we finished, I asked Julia if she had time for a stroll through the streets.
“Sure. We just need to be out of town before sunset. I don’t think they want gringos sticking around after dark.”
“Okay.”
A sundown town with the colors reversed. As a straight white male, the prick of discrimination felt foreign and belittling. But the Tzotzil have suffered five hundred years of racism and abuse that smolder in their collective subconscious. I’d probably be a little prickly, too. But I was also long gone when the sun went down on Chamula.
Photo: “San Juan Chamula (Mexico), church, August 2006” by Raymond Ostertag. Unedited. CC BY-SA 2.5.
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