A Chiapas Moment

Chiapas has a reputation for bloody mindedness. The state has a long history of demanding help from the government and getting none. So the locals protest. They block roads and levy tolls of passing travelers or they make demands and close roads at random to make their irritation felt. 

“What’s going on?” The nice lady asked after she approached us and made sure we spoke English, which we do after a fashion. 

“A road block,” I replied.

We had almost summited the mountain upon which sits San Cristobal de las Casas, overlooking distant Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital and our starting point that morning. Traffic had ground to a halt and at first we hoped it was the usual Casa de Cobre back up…or a police checkpoint…or on a sliding scale of misery an accident maybe? No. It was the usual road closure by irritated citizens of Mexico’s poorest state.

Collectivos and taxis peeled off up a rather ruinous looking dirt road.  Nothing tried nothing gained I swung our 21 foot 9300 pound Promaster in line ready to give it a go. That effort died an agonizing death. The cars ahead of us got stuck in the dirt creating a secondary traffic jam and before we got too committed I made a quick u-turn and went back to carry on up the cuota 190D to the inevitable road block ahead. 

And there we were pondering our options when the nice lady walked up and asked if we knew what was what. Rusty had the right attitude for coping with uncertainty. 

“Only one way to find out,” I said. I left Layne in charge of Rusty, or the other way around, and took a trudge up a long line of parked trucks. 

The first barrier was a selection of smallish rocks staffed by a couple of dozen people a few carrying sticks and all of them wearing masks. I introduced myself as the foreign fish caught in their net and asked what was happening.

They were in a fight over water rights, is the short version as told to me by them. The mayor of San Cristobal sold water rights to a businessman who was now telling the farmers they have to pay a million pesos to irrigate their fields and they were taking this state of affairs rather badly. The road would stay closed until negotiations were completed and victory was theirs. One angry protestor said the road wasn’t opening that night and might open tomorrow. And he looked angry enough that I hardly felt like contradicting him. I did ask for a photo and that set him off. No photos he yelled and looked like thunder. Okay I said. No problem. Not even with your masks on? The cubrebocas had slipped a bit in the conversation. No he said. The guy I had been speaking to intervened and said to the angry man I was cool and if I said I wasn’t taking pictures I wasn’t. Hence the sole long distance shot of the blockade from a long way away that I have attached above. There were dozens more protestors behind the front rank. The highway was filled. We strolled back down. 

Layne and I talked after the nice lady went back to her husband and they decided to turn back. They are winter residents at Lake Chapala, an enclave of gringos and they were driving to meet friends in San Cristobal.

We decided to go back to Tuxtla Gutiérrez and regroup. We turned around went down the hill. We paid another three bucks in tolls to get out of the hill climb that we had already paid three bucks to go up. A group we saw on the way down working on a side road. Or blocking it. Who knows? 

The Guardia Nacional checkpoint waved us through on the way down as they had on the way up. City traffic was ghastly, a tight slow commute back to the Hilton. 

Rusty was disgracefully delighted to be back at the hotel sitting by the door and wagging his tail at the prospect of a night sharing a large soft bed. Layne plunked down 5,000 more points for room service and WiFi. Tacos and a hamburger for dinner while we drank beer and licked our wounds. 

Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow we’ll have another go. I hope the water talks are settled otherwise Layne will lose her desire to go van mountaineering with me on the Guatemalan border. That would be a shame. I think.

Tuxtla Gutiérrez

 I have been hesitating to write my first impressions of Chiapas for a number of reasons. Principally I am conflicted, secondarily I hesitate to pass on my sense of conflict. In coming to Chiapas I was intellectually aware of what we were going to be seeing but being here and living a gringo life for. couple of days has forced me to confront those demons that travelers must face up to. I am speaking of poverty.

Most Americans (ie: People from the US and Canada) have an uneasy sense of unfairness when it comes to Mexico. Internet forums are filled with people asking if Mexico is safe, and what they mean isMexico safe for a rich American like me to travel in? The perception is that Americans (from the US and Canada if I have to repeat myself) are at risk because we have more money than most Mexicans. Wealthy Mexicans feel the same way too, worrying about their safety outside their gated guarded communities.

On the whole I argue that perception is mistaken and when considering this separation between haves and have nots I look back at my own childhood when I spent the school year as a child of privilege in an upper class English school for the very wealthy and my vacations mucking it up with very poor Italian farm kids who had no idea how I lived in that faraway country filed with privilege and ease. I played with children who had outhouses and no hot running water, who made rather than bought toys and had no expectations beyond a life of manual labor.  How I separated the two I cannot say beyond the fact that children have an astonishing capacity of acceptance and it is a skill I am forced to summon in Tuxtla Gutierrez. 

Yesterday in the Plaza de Marimbas a 14 ear old boy charged me 75 cents (15 pesos) to clean my sneakers, a job I last had done in the zocalo at Uruapan in Michoacán. "No school?" I asked him once we had established I don't speak the dialect and he would have to talk to me in Spanish, and he said no, smiling. We gave him 20 pesos and he lost interest in US as quickly as a street dog whose hunger you have satisfied.

His buddies waiting for trade took time to do to Rusty what they would never do to their own street dogs and they made a fuss of the former stray who eats all he wants and sleeps on a hundred dollar bed from Costco. Yes, I struggle with contradictions hereabouts.

Can you imagine what "extreme poverty" looks like in Mexico? Chiapas is a border state and in the early days after Spain was vanquished in 1810 and new governments were blossoming Chiapas sought independence from both Guatemala and Mexico who argued over ownership until they signed a treaty in the 1820s and created the modern border between the countries. If you talk to Mexicans here they look at Guatemalans he way Americans look at Mexicans. The poverty rate in Guatemala is such that the Central Americans emigrate illegally to Mexico to look for work. The ironies in these parts mount up.

I would argue that a state that requires a Secretariat of Honesty and Open Government is not doing a good job of providing governance but we have the same problems in the US and they are getting worse. Income inequality is a global phenomenon and always has been. I find myself fortunate to have grown up in an era when income equality was the watchword but in my old age the principles I learned as child, watching the Italian peasants move into the middle class in post World War Two Europe are being eroded, and Chiapas is a glaring example of hopeless poverty.

We tried to drive out to see the Sumidero Canyon but access is closed on Tuesdays and we ended up taking a short tour of the areas on the edge of the city where poverty pushes squads of beggars into the streets like a cloud of insects hovering over cars at traffic lights. I got pretty grumbly with repeated gringo moments as I negotiated domes of the most random traffic yet in Mexico. Cars and motorcycles from all angles, pedestrians waving objects for sale and potholed streets devoid of lane markers. It was interesting and what I really mean is that it was messed up and I had a hard time coping.

I don't have answers nor do I seek them, not least because we live in a world that requires acceptance of inequality and lack of opportunity as a way of coping. Overpaying, heavy tipping, solves nothing but it assuages my inner voice that wishes for fairness in a world where I travel in a $100,000 van and sleep for a change in a Hilton Hotel, free on points, where I am treated as member of the ruling class. The contradictions are stark.

Humans take refuge in art and companionship, they build myths and legends to unite themselves ins hared misery and hope. We went to the only open museum we could find, a hidden museum of Artisan Crafts of Chiapas tucked away behind IHOP with an entrance so hump backed I doubted I could get Gannet 2 in, but I did somehow. Here we learned about the indigenous love of art and belief in weird creations stories.

Humans become yellow panthers...

Scary masks banish night terrors...

And crosses symbolized a tree of life's far as I could gather in some celestial juncture of heaven and earth. The museums tell the hostly of a people in harmony with the earth in some idyllic lifestyle interrupted by what is known politely as the cultural shock of 1492.

We are capable as human beings of managing every kind of indignity through art. 

There is a tourist industry here waiting to be exploited. Its frustrating when you consider the beauty that is being created ina state where people are living on the edge of modern life with no access to the benefits. My cynical self wonders who would benefit if tourism were boosted, if Americans could be persuaded to overcome their fear of poverty...but we all know the story of gentrification and the befits going to the few not the many. And yet there is beauty to be seen in Tuxtla Gutiérrez.

I have sent a couple of days pondering the injustice and my own unwillingness to take a hit. I live a life that drifts, and observes, and ponders and when its not enough I move on.

I am grateful to Webb Chiles the eminence grise of travel and observation of my youth and formative travel years. He says going and seeing and reporting back is the purpose and I hope it is. I wanted to see Chiapas for two reasons and neither concerns social justice. The countryside is said to be extraordinary and we have caught glimpses of immense mountain ranges, startling cliffs and jungles and ravines and we've hardly started. The other reason is to see places that have built a reputation as inaccessible owing to the ager of the residents who seek more from the central government. Twenty years ago when we sailed the coast on our way to El Salvador, Chiapas was rife with revolt and protest. Less so now the reputation persists and I want to see for myself what this mysterious angry land looks like.

Our next stop is San Cristobal de las Casas up in the mountains themselves. There are waterfalls and canyons up there, and local people who create roadblocks and ask for pennies in tolls to allow travelers to pass, an irritation that drives Americans crazy. I read of anger at having to pay one dollar to protestors who will throw rocks at you if try to pass and not pay money to people with nothing. I find such anger bizarre and I want to test my own tolerance.

I don't seek advice or reassurance, answers if there are any will come with time. What I seek from myself is the equanimity to be able to cope when these feelings of revulsion rise up, when the thought uppermost in my mind is anger at lack of leadership.

My skeptical nature forces me to the sidelines and to observe the lives I'd like to see improved. I question what progress might actually be or the benefits it might bring. I've seen too much heartache in the Keys where gentrification and increasing wealth has brought displacement and loss to people I care about. I second guess myself and wonder if stable poverty yields continuity. If community trumps gain.

When asked I tell people our van took five years of work to pay for. We have no children and we have no other home. I don't know if that explains to space ship we travel in, a self contained world on wheels with oven fridge and toilet. We park it on the street and visit museums. We leave Rusty inside and here in Tuxtla we've left the roof top air conditioning on for him such is the heat. It seems absurd to treat a dog to luxuries that humans can't afford. Or does it? I have read the saying it's better to be a rich man's dog than to be a poor man. There's a jolt: I'm rich.

Chiapas will only throw up contradictions without answers but we plan to do our best to see what there is to see. We may well end up lost off line as this is a poor state with limited services and we will be driving mountain roads looking for beauty amid squalor and likely with no way to post reports from the edge of experience. I hope that over time I shall figure out some more satisfactory solution to my angst but for now I have spent a little time seek equanimity, some sort of ability to accept and cope, like a middle class Mexican who lives daily with the stark contradictions and glides by. Chiapas is a challenge and I think I can rise to the occasion.

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I mentioned some rather cheap wine from Valle Redondo sold in supermarkets and I don't recommend the stuff as a way to escape reality but I am including a photograph of the three dollar box of the white version. It comes in white red (Tinto) and pink.

And some other pictures I made along the road to where we are now, a place with strong  WiFi! A city of 600,000 people.

The enrage to Sumidero Canyon closed on Tuesdays:

Layne says I urgently need a beard trim. 

The Marimba Museum closed for Covid indefinitely. Marimbas are played in the park Sunday evenings at six. Layne was pissed we missed them.

The red line leads to an escape ramp for trucks with broken brakes:

Chiapas looks like Mexico from 50 years ago:

Beyond the entrance...outside, life is a museum.