A Year in Mexico: Chiapas

My trip to Chiapas deserves so much more than the short entry I am going to devote to it, but the truth is, tomorrow I am going to start accumulating more experiences to write about, so last semester needs to be finished before then!

Chiapas is the southernmost mexican state, bordering Guatemala. It is legendary for its beautiful natural scenery and for its indigenous population, including the Zapatistas- the indigenous resistance group that on January 1, 1994 (coinciding with the day Mexico signed NAFTA) staged a small rebellion in San Cristobal de las Casas to fight for their rights. The Zapatistas still exist, living in self-sustained, autonomous communities throughout the mountains of Chiapas. It has been a dream of mine to visit Chiapas while in Mexico, so when the opportunity to go presented itself, I jumped at it. The opportunity came back in October when Jenna and I went to a meeting of immigrants’ rights organizations that her professor invited her to. At the meeting, we learned there was going to be a huge conference on immigration in Chiapas in the beginning of December. I emailed the guy who was in charge of the conference and he told us it was free and that we were more than welcome. And since it was an educational experience, we got the program to pay for our bus tickets, which was a huge help, since they came to around $120.

It was kind of tricky figuring how long we wanted to stay in Chiapas and what we wanted to do and who wanted to go, but in the end, it was Katy, Cassie and I who went. It's about a 12 hour bus ride to San Cristobal de las Casas, which is the city where the conference was, and the buses only run over-night, so we left wednesday evening in order to get to the conference on thursday morning. As we were taking the bus to the bus station, I could help but wonder what we had gotten ourselves into. We'd traveled on our own before when we went to Veracruz, but that was only for the weekend, it was four hours from puebla, we were a group of 10, not three, and I hadn't really had a direct hand in the planning. For this trip, it was up to the three of us to figure out how to get where we needed to go, judge safety, book hotels etc. But everything pretty much went smoothly, and anything that didn't we were able to take in stride.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the bus ride to San Cristobal. The seats were huge and reclined almost all the way back, so I slept pretty much the whole twelve hours. We got to San Cristobal around 7am, so we took our taxi to the hostel we wanted to stay in. We couldn't check in yet, but we dropped off our stuff and headed out to check in at the conference. Although we were tired and gross from the bus ride, the morning in San Cristobal was enchanting. There were women in different types of indigenous dress with baskets on their backs, setting up their crafts at the market, people eating steaming tamales and backpackers everywhere. The city itself reminded me of a combination of Puebla and Cuetzalan. The streets were cobble stone and the side walks were so narrow we could hardly walk two abreast, never mind all three of us in a row. The buildings were no more than two stories high, and each one was a different bright color. And as we walked to the site of the check in, the early morning light was glistening off everything.

I was honestly pretty amazed when we showed up at our destination and there was actually a conference going on. All we had been going on was the one vague email I received back in October, and in the back of my mind, I wondered if there might have been a miscommunication, but now, the conference actually did exist. We registered and sat through the fist session before we sleepily headed back to the hostel to relax and recuperate a bit. That afternoon we attended some more discussions, had some tasty vegetarian food (both Katy and Cassie are vegetarians, but that worked out well because san cristobal caters to the crunchy, backpacking, vegetarian type). That night was a lot of fun because the hostel we were staying in was full of young people from all over the world, and there was a bonfire in the courtyard of the hostel where everyone gathered around. We talked to people from Spain, Canada, Holland, Australia, Norway, and England. It was really neat to hear the stories of the backpackers who have either taken a semester off or are just not going the traditional path and instead are wandering the world. There was something very attractive about the idea of having nowhere you needed to be for a few months and just exploring at your own pace.

The second day the conference was held at site just outside of san cristobal. To get there, we had to take a taxi, and at first, our taxi driver didn't even know where we going, but after driving along a dirt road through a neighborhood of tiny concrete block houses with chickens in the front yards, we arrived at a tiny agricultural college.

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Ok, all the above was written the day before I left, but I am now back in Puebla and ready to start updating you all on a new semester. So the short version is Chiapas was amazing. In San Cristobal, we divided our time between the conference and exploring San Cristobal. We went horse back riding to a small town where all the women and girls wear wool skirts that look like black-faux fur tied with wide embroidered belts. We went to a church that was nothing like I've seen- a true mix of Catholicism and indigenous religion. The ground was covered in pine needles, there were no seats, just people kneeling before rows of thin candles melted to the ground, air filled with incense and chanting, and the music of 6 or 7 harpists. We rode through the mountains with crazy guides who liked to make our horses go fast and saw women washing their clothes in streams. We ate lots of long meals (actually not lots- we did lots of snacking and strategically planned our meals to save money) and did lots of shopping to spend the money we saved on meals. We met a cool anthropologist at the conference who is just a few years older than me, and is doing her research on the mexican- Guatemalan border and invited us to stay sometime if we don't mind cots.

We took a five hour bus ride to palenque after the conference which was the worst bus ride I've ever taken. It was pure mountain curves for five hours straight- even after dramamine I felt sicker than I ever had in my life. In palenque we stayed in cabanas in the jungle and ate pizza in the humid night air, surrounded by huge brilliant green leaves. We spent hours at the ruins of palenque, exploring at our own pace, refusing to pay a guide and using our lonely planet photocopies instead. They were the most beautiful ruins I've seen yet, and one of the most beautiful places I've seen period. We remarked that we could understand how the rulers of palenque believed themselves to be gods as we stood on top of the pyramids over looking miles and miles of lush jungle. We also visited two stunning waterfalls, Misol Ha and Agua Azul. At Agua azul, we bought tiny bananas from a little girl and shared them for a snack. The bus ride back home wasn't quite as pleasant since we stopped at nearly every town between palenque and puebla, and also had to stop for migration officers looking for illegal guatemalan imigrants. But over all, it was an amazing trip. I was very proud of the three of us for sucessfully pulling off such a big trip by ourselves.

After we got back from Chiapas, we only had a week left of the semester, so time flew by. My birthday was that Tuesday that we got back. I slept all morning and then at lunch, my family acted like it was just a regular day, and then surprised me with a cake for dessert. After dance class, we went out to a bar to celebrate my new legality which wasn't quite so new, and afterwards, everyone came back to my house for hot chocolate and the rest of my birthday cake. In the next few days, I took an anthro exam, wrote a research paper for my dance class, and practiced like mad for our dance performance at the goodbye party on friday. We were all really nervous about the performance since we never practiced with all the elements- the high heeled shoes, the skirts, the music, the rocky patio, our partners- and we were still learning choreography up to two days before the performance. But miraculously, we somehow pulled it off and actually had a good time doing it!