The Difference between San Cristóbal and Oaxaca

4th
Jun. × ’10
By Sarah

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For two cities who share so many of the same elements – indigenous people in the streets, selling embroidered blouses and friendship bracelets; an impervious and snottily racist upper-middle class in overly tight clothes and too much makeup; tourism of the quaint-colonial-Mexico type and the revolutionary-Thai-fisherman-pant type – San Cristobal de las Casas and Oaxaca could not be more different.

Reading nearly any article about the Zapatistas, one of the classic stunners you’ll come across is that as late as the 1960’s, Mayans had to step off the sidewalks of San Cristóbal to let white Mexicans pass.  Perhaps somewhat like Mississippi or Johannesberg, other places where racism smells like raw meat in the streets and is still advertised in slightly more subtle (but hardly ashamed) displays of disgust with the other and pride in one’s own, San Cristóbal wears its racism on its sleeve.  It is easy to think after going there that Oaxaca is somehow “better,” but that would be to fall into the old U.S vs. South Africa or Mississippi vs. Chicago argument that simply because something is buried or repressed it is somehow less present.

Still, after traveling to South Africa and after traveling to San Cristóbal, I have come to believe that there is something to be said for social norms that stipulate against public rants against “the blacks” or “the indigenous.”  There is a different, less charged, less hateful social vibe.  San Cristóbal’s streets contain a strange energy of estrangement and prickly, cautious mutual avoidance.  People keep to their own place – their own race – and those places and races are much more clearly marked than in Oaxaca.

On our first morning in San Cristóbal, we had a number of experiences that become symbols, useful metonymically to get a larger representative picture of the place.

Taking advantage of the wireless at The Italian Coffee Company, a soulless Starbucks replica with even worse coffee and blaring techno at 8 a.m., I grabbed an outdoor table and caught up on emails.  Across the street, a woman in a dark, cramped store selling indigenous goods – woven sarongs and leather belts, bright scarves and blankets – talked about “the indigenous.”  “The indigenous this, the indigenous that” – I couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying about them, because her voice rose on “indigenous” and fell afterwards.  What was obvious was that she was not one of them, with her smooth white skin marked by a slightly olive tone, and neither was the man she was talking to.  Later, we’d find out that the main pedestrian street in San Cristóbal, Real Guadeloupe, used to be devoted nearly entirely to shops like this, run by mestizo San Cristóbal merchants who bought up indigenous goods at cutthroat prices and sold them for much more.  Now, it’s overtaken by European-style restaurants and groceries, wine and tapas bars, cafes, tiny shops selling Zapatista postcards and jewelers with big glass cases of amber and jade.

We were all skeptical of San Cristóbal at first, with the possible exception of Mauricio, who had already lived and worked in Chiapas and was more familiar with the vibe or more inured to it, having spent much of his time in nearby Zapatista communities.  Susy, Jorge and I had all come briefly and had the same reaction – get me the hell out of here.

Meandering uphill towards the church perched on a cerro on the city’s northern flank, I stopped for an orange juice.  A vendor was tucked into a corner of an intersection, his cart piled with oranges and rinds and small plastic cups.  I ordered a ten-peso cup.

Just as the man began to slice the oranges in two, several cops came rushing up out of nowhere.

“No, primo, ya te dijé, no puedes estar aquí, no tienes permiso para estar aquí,” said one, a fresh-faced white guy with freckles and the self-righteousness of an American city councilman.

“Ya, ya me muevo,” said the vendor, trying to placate the cop, “dejame hacer esto y ya me muevo –”

- but the cop was having none of it.

“No, primo,” he said, “ya, vamos, vamos,” his hand on the corner of the man’s cart, already starting to push, “sabes que no puedes estar aquí.  Vamonos.”

We watched in shock, never having observed such a thing in Oaxaca, whose streets are filled with orange juice and elote and tamale and coffee vendors in the morning.  The man began pushing his cart and I walked onwards, putting the ten pesos in my pocket.

“That,” Susy said, “is why I don’t like San Cristóbal.”

We shook the incident off with a bit of incredulity and continued climbing gradually up towards the church.

Later, in early afternoon when the sky was getting hazy and the hungover hippies were crawling out of their haunts in search of bagels, we began searching for a bar to watch the soccer game between Mexico and Holland.

A few inquisitive rounds of inquiry pointed to the Tequila Zoo (pronounced by the locals as one word totally indistinguishable from the two separate English words:  “tay-kee-laaaah-so”) as the ideal futbol-watching joint of San Cristóbal.

There, we settled in with a round of beers and limes for what promised to be a devastating match, with Mexico advancing towards the goal and then fumbling around for twenty minutes before ultimately taking a paltry shot straight into the goalie’s arms.  It didn’t end up being quite as bad as it appeared in the first half, when the bar was feel of groans and shouts and hair-pulling as Holland took shot after shot, but it was stressful, with us going through plate after plate of limes with our nervous squeezing.

Still, the most interesting phenomenon in the Tequila Zoo wasn’t la Seleccion Mexicana but the table to the left of us.  It was full of serious fresas – not the kind with the cheap heels sipping watery margaritas at cheesy bars in Oaxaca, but the kind with thousand-dollar Gucci bags and some real cash rolling in somewhere.  I tried to imagine where.  Cattle ranches on the Chiapas-Guatemala border?  Coffee plantations?  Drugs?  All of the above?  Was these the “San Cristóbal arrogancy” Carlos Monsívais mentioned in his essay on the Zapatistas?

They dominated the waitstaff, who fluttered nervously around their table and ignored the rest of us entirely.  They ordered Coca Light after Coca Light, sometimes a Manzana Lift, with a fresh glass each time.  No booze, which was creepy.  Then plates and plates of overpriced botanas, which they nibbled at.  A girl with the smooth pasty skin of the rich arrived and kissed a man with slicked-back hair and designer sunglasses.  Who were these people?  How did they coexist with the Mayans in the streets and the dreamy travelers with dreads and ambar necklaces?

I asked an anthropologist friend of Susy’s later, but she shrugged and said she didn’t know.  She threw out the possibility that they were from Tuxtla; apparently, San Cristóbal is becoming a boutique destination for Tuxtla’s monied classes, and one potential plan for the city is to turn it into a walled-off gringo/wealthy Mexican compound akin to that of the horrendous-sounding San Miguel de Allende.  Lots of people from Tuxtla flood San Cristóbal on the weekends to eat pricey European-style pasta and shop – but this game had been on a Wednesday.

The fresas at the Tequila Zoo were one of the many jarring things that both seemed to fit and seemed utterly bizarre about the city and about Chiapas overall.  There, travelers on a circuit of revolutionary, impoverished, romantic Latin America work up some righteous solidarity with the oppressed, sip their fresh-squeezed beet juices, roam the town in huaraches, hob-knob at outdoor European cafes (“European boutique,” an Italian friend called San Cristóbal with ironic disdain), drink, and work on their gnarly down-with-the-people white dreads while the impeccably dressed, light-skinned San Cristóbal elite seem to continue much as they always have, probably in collusion with the enormous military presence in Chiapas, running their ganaderos (cattle farms) and coffee estates and drug operations (a detested lawyer convicted of collaborating with drug traffickers, recently kidnapped and still unaccounted for, has a ranch in Chiapas) and the Zapatistas, whose proud metaphor for themselves is their movement is that of the slow-moving snail, abide their time, inching forward and back, forward and back.

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San Cristóbal grew on me this time around, but it still makes me itchy.  European boutique chic, revolutionary tourism, classic colonial repression, and indigenous uprisings make for an odd and vaguely nauseous mix and one that, in spite of the mesmerizing power of the nearby hills and their quiet pine forests, of the fog in the mornings, of the humbling and compelling presence of the Zapatistas who continue to calmly defy the constant attempts to commodify, cheapen and co-opt their movement, I still can’t get comfortable with.  So I return to Oaxaca and its maddening politics, its annihilating light and roasting dry heat, its macho construction workers, its unparalleled food and familiar faces, with relief.

Posted in Place, Politics, Trips | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Facebook Narratives and High School Reunions

21st
May. × ’10
By Sarah

collageI got an email the other day about my ten-year high school reunion.  Ten years since Grandview Heights High School, skipping Mr. DiSabado’s gym class every day for two weeks without the buff, classically dense P.E teach ever catching on (just ran right out the side doors during one of the obligatory laps at the start of class and jogged home to a two hour lunch); since walking to school in the morning thinking about College, that Sacred Institution where life would suddenly open up (it did); since sulky nights at Short North coffee shops with Hannah and Ellen, cynical as black eyeliner and so wise to the ways of the world; since my wounded pondering over why Dustin Smurdon liked Jessica Krynovich even though I was the witty one in French class; since Mr. Bibler, after all of my daily harassing-flirting with him, sighed one day and said, “Sarah, you’re an old soul” and left me carrying that thought around like a badge of honor; since Rachel Brown’s valevictorian speech in which she said, “someday, when Leslie is a famous actress in New York, and Nick Erwin is designing spaceships for NASA, and Sarah Menkedick is writing for The New York Times…”

Well, here we are, ten years later (ten years later!) and all those narratives have shot off like runners eager at the start line.  I got an email from Kris Mehling – now Kris something-German-sounding-with-an-L.  She spelled my name without the “h” and I remembered the seven Sarah’s in our class of 2000 – of the seven of them, I only knew Sarah Hinkle, thin and distant and frighteningly hipster long before I knew what hipster was, and Sarah Weese, my old friend from snow days who was the exact opposite of the word bashful.  I never wrote Kris back, but then I was hit with a sudden onslaught of Facebook invites from vaguely familiar people, the kind of people you run into at a pizza shop on some trip home to Ohio saying afterwards “oh my god, was that really Kristin Parker?” and then thinking about French class and how you listened with purposeful melancholy to Sarah Machlaclan and lay awake at night talking on the phone with your feet propped on the wall: high school. Instead of accepting the invites, I spent a haunted evening perusing the profiles one by one, looking at pictures of husbands and kids, of likes and comments and the Pollack-esque splattered stories of wall pages; the modern collages of personal identity.

The concept of narrative is fresh in my mind recently; it’s emerged in so many different ways and places that it has the distinct, intentional feel of fateful intervention.  In novels, in marriage plans, in high school reunions, in conversations with MFA grad students, narrative has come up: the way a narrative goes spooling out over the years and connects different versions of people at different times, connects goals and dreams and tendencies, like a patient ball of string unrolling and enveloping trees, cutting across lawns, tracing the edges of rivers and slipping downstream. Annie Cusack married Todd Lovegrove.  The bitchy popular girls got fat and became hairdressers.  My friends are poets and lawyers.  People are married and have kids, or they’re struggling artists or tall glamorous architects; I’m incredulous to see them in these cheery photos on suburban lawns graced by fall leaves, on manicured patios, in baseball stadiums, in New York coffee shops doing exactly what I would have imagined years ago – it seems impossible that they’d actually be there, (relatively) grown up, doing what Hannah and Ellen and I invented in hypothetical, ironic, invented narratives.  It seems as if they should’ve disappeared after high school, been frozen in the wax museum of Grandview Heights High School as Bitchy Mandy Davis or Innocent Kristin In Her Gap Overalls.  It seems so improbable that they would go on, grow up to be trashy laundromat owners or well-mannered sandwich-making moms.

But these narratives, once you stumble onto them, are alternatively unbelievable and satisfying and reassuring.  The realization of all those imagined narratives reminds me that my own narrative is not a far departure from what I once imagined it might be, that it has gone on and grown up and also remained linked to the themes I would’ve laid out for it a decade ago.  There is congruency between that 15 and 17-year old self and the Facebook Sarah Menkedick of today, and I think the girl on either end of that decade bookended by graduation and reunion can be pleased with her other half, glimpsed over the arc of those years.  She can see the veined tributaries connecting her former and future self.

Facebook facilitates all of this story-searching, urging us to go sniffing down these narrative pathways of the past, and in doing all of this online voyeurism of high school people I finally came to understand the obsession with the site.  Peter Hessler, in a recent New Yorker piece about his return to the United States after more than a decade in China, talked about the American fixation with narrative.  Americans love to tell stories and they appreciate the satisfaction of a good story.  They relish the narrative form and the way it illustrates changing personal identity.  Hessler contrasts that to the Chinese, who are far less likely to tell dramatic personal stories but far more curious about the wider world than Americans.

So what better outlet for the personal narrative than Facebook?  What clearer expression of this story of one’s identity than Facebook?  There has been much written about the rise and the domination of Facebook, mostly about the lack of privacy and the supposedly disturbing transformation of meaningful social relationships into bite-sized updates and the whimsical decision to “friend” or “unfriend.”  One piece in The New York Review of Books analyzed how Facebook confirms French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that we define ourselves by the “capital” – social, cultural, symbolic  – that we accumulate and advertise in social spaces, and that our aesthetic preferences are shaped much more by the need to position ourselves in certain groups and classes of people than they are by some inherent artistic value or appreciation.  Hence we are the pages we like, the articles we link to, the pithy witticisms we share – and our listed quotations and authors and television series aren’t so much about our discerning or rebellious tastes as they are about positioning ourselves as we’d like to be seen and adopted by certain groups.

It’s an interesting theory and one I can get on board with, but I think it misses the point that Facebook also allows us to scratch what might be a fundamental American itch: telling our stories.  The U.S is perhaps the most individualist country on Earth.  Be yourself.  Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  Follow your dreams.  Take your own path.  Listen to your heart’s desires.  Help yourself.  Yourself, yourself, yourself – and your stories.  Your individuality matters; in fact, it matters far more than many other things, such as, say, “group harmony,” that most Asian of values.  Facebook encourages that prided American individuality in the safest of ways – you choose the photo that exemplifies you, you choose how to define yourself in the appropriate likes and preferences and connections and concise summaries, you get to tell your own, individual story.  And then you get to read that of others.

So it was nearly one in the morning and, not tired, I was sprawled on the bed poring over Facebook profiles, indulging in a sort of narrative addiction.  Facebook thin-slices, to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell, the most critical information and makes it representative of the whole in a way that surprisingly resonates, that has you saying, “yes, of course, that’s Bethany Powell.”  Married, in Columbus Ohio, two kids, a house in the burbs, a family photo, the appropriate wall posts about the 4th of July.  Or the shot of the prom queen in a bus in some far-off corner of the world, just off-beat enough to be slightly interesting, but still with her “Elle Style” page and the same hardened cheekbones, still, presumably, with the frozen smile and practiced giggle and dull isolating knowledge that beauty precedes all.  The Facebook profile confirms what we’d like to believe, gives us just enough of the narrative to send the rest of it gushing back like a huge headache of memory.

High school relived at 1 o’clock in the morning, age 27: writing that speech for the Rotary 4-Way Speech Contest that compared (in front of a room of old, pot-bellied, church-going Rotarians) the persecution of homosexuals to the holocaust and won, beating bored diatribes against the evils of marijuana and teen pregnancy.  The inside jokes – so many, Mr. Kegley’s remarkable lack of personality that earned him the moniker “The Egg”, Madame Craddock’s hatred of cat-killing Mr. Richards.  The small hurts and wounds and worries, the sound of so many footsteps in a narrow hallway between classes and the metallic clang of lockers; the ecstatic-sad feeling of seeing the barren lockers with squeaky swinging doors, emptied out with only the scruffy hints of stickers on their walls, in the early days of June.  The sly thrill of being an honors student and getting to work in the guidance office, swiping gold slips from Mr. Conners’ desk drawer when he went to the bathroom and using these slips with substitute teachers to get friends out of class (“I’m sorry, Hailey Stroup is needed in the guidance office 5th period”).  Bantering with Mr. Woodland, the woodsy biology professor with a mustache I always had a thing for; the way he said, “Alright, Menkedick,” with a grudging genuine laugh when I’d bantered him out.  Mr. Kilbourne’s 11th grade history class, two hours long, the bulk of the afternoon – Kilbourne, a retired American University professor, telling us stories about hanging out with CBS CEO Bill Paley at D.C. parties and falling in love with a girl called Amanda but being too cocky to realize she was the one; making us read Zinn and Todd Gitlin and Doris Kearns Goodwin and write real critical papers instead of Mr. Ballinger’s bullshitty regurgitations and me staying up ‘til 3 a.m. writing a haughty, bellowing, worshipful paper about “The People’s History Of The United States” and all of its little-known and hideous injustices; the way Kilbourne relished the vocabulary words he gave us and recited them, trenchant, bellicose, gerrrrmmane, like a purr.

That was high school, those and many other things.  And those narratives – the bantering with teachers, the mischeviousness, the swelling sense of right and wrong and injustice, the geeky love of history – continue on up through today, to the email from Kris Mehling-now-something-German-with-an-L in my inbox that said, “Your address: Grandview high school reunion.”

And again I think, there is something comforting about that.  There’s always a certain shudder involved with the past and the who-I-was, but there’s a reassurance to that narrative, too.  Browsing all those Facebook profiles, so many wall postings and links and photos, was the comfort of narrative itself, the comfort of a story unfolding with underlying themes as opposed to the floating isolation of the here and now.

In last night’s The Wire episode, D’Angelo speculated that The Great Gatsby’s main point was that you can’t try and get too far from who you’ve been in the past; that ultimately, it’s what’s made you and to attempt to forget or fly in the face of it leads to tragedy.  In his context that’s both a damning and a resignedly reassuring analysis.  And forgive me for the whiplash like-shift from The Wire to Facebook, but I think Facebook strikes a hypnotic balance between the damning and the reassuring, and gives us just enough of the narratives we want to read and create to keep us coming back.  It dangles stories from high school, from other places and times and loves and mindsets, in front of us and also lets us create ourselves as separate from and linked to these places.  It tells us our story in snippets and boxes, and allows us to fill in the details late at night in bed, remembering the past, tracing the narrative.

Posted in identity | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Writing About Writing

10th
May. × ’10
By Sarah

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I’m sorry, but it has to be done.

I have to write about writing.

I have avoided doing this because it’s always the take-it-to-the-meta-level copout when you can’t write anything that’s really down there on the ground and meaningful.  But it must be done.

I am in a rut.

Everything I write feels the same.

Everything I write feels stale and lifeless, like it was coughed up by a machine making greeting cards.

Everything I write comes out stilted, and I want to smash every sentence after it comes out; they say kill your children, but I don’t think they mean that.  Only a few keystrokes, fingers flowing rapidisimo over the keys, and then I’m abruptly backspacing.  Damnit.

I have the benefit or the misfortune of consulting a photographer about such issues.  And a calm, laid-back photographer at that, the meadow to my tornado.  And his response is to dismiss the old logic – the write every day write constantly write for practice advice that’s religiously dolled out in every essay and book about writing – and to say, wait it out.  Step back.  Read. Walk.  Ride in the backs of trucks, in clankety buses.  Listen to music.

But I can’t.  I feel like I’m missing something, there’s a hidden vein of precious metals coursing underneath the damn house and I’m missing it, I’m just not tapping into it somewhere.  They’re fundamentally different ways of seeing – the photographer who sees inspiration in the moment, the flash, and the preparation time as a sort of seed bed fed by water and calm and relaxation and some theory and plotting found in books, and the writer who thinks it’s gotta be constant, that yes, there’s the fertilizer of books and experience, but really, it’s not going to be a flash, it’s going to be what comes up after clawing through two pages of frustrating hideousness and hitting the vein, with black gold spurting up in your face.  Oh, you think.  I really wanted to write about Cincinnati.

It often takes the battle to get there, right.  So you can’t simply sit back and wait – you have to find your way there, you have to go swashbuckling through the stuck feeling.

Or do you?  The other night cooking pasta in the kitchen, chopping garlic and slicing the florets from the broccoli stem, we talked about writing and photography.  I was worried about not living enough.  Not observing guerrillas in Chiapas or drinking mezcal in a dusty pueblo in la Mixteca, not having these glorious adventures in the stories I’ve been reading on Glimpse about driving across Swaziland and dodging marriage proposals or playing the bagpipes in a rural Scottish pub.  Was that why I was in this block?  Because I was reaching into the scraped out depths of my own identity and coming back with nothing, with the same old stories and tone?  And Jorge said that anything – the broccoli, the cramped kitchen and our conversations, the dog and her tennis ball – could become subject matter, right?

Yes, I said, but the spark of inspiration, of something more that really gives life to a story, that’s the elusive thing.  It might be in the story of the dog chasing the tennis ball and slip-sliding all over the room on her paws, but I can’t seem to access it.

I have often found that it’s not necessarily the experience that makes the story, that provides the inspiration.  There can be great stories in an experience, getting lost in the jungles of East Africa or drinking cow’s blood or meeting the Queen of England, but the story can be muddled and stale if it doesn’t strike that place in you that needs to process something and get it out; if it doesn’t tap into something deeper and more enduring.  There are times on a 5 p.m. walk with the dog when a whole essay blooms suddenly and I have to go home and write it out, or there’s a development like Copala and an urgency overtakes me because I have to write about it.  I have to get something that’s stewing inside of me out and I feel tremendous relief once its over.

It’s that I search for – the sensation that there’s really something there that must be expressed or it will be lost, and the loss will be important; it will be the loss of something true but only half-formed, something which could have been worked into a tangible consideration that people think about when they sit down to dinner or look up for a second from opening a letter or turning a corner; something that exists and is present in the world, that tames all those half-formed thoughts and their posses of abstractions into something graspable and meaningful.

In these times when I have to write I need to get every sentence of it right, and that is a satisfying feeling.  It requires complete concentration and focus but the reward is seeing your experience mirrored and deepened on the page.

I had that with the short narrative I wrote for David Miller’s writing contest last week – one ordinary encounter on an ordinary walk that contained the truth of a certain type of experience here, and that fit the parameters of the contest perfectly.  Two narrators, two perspectives, same place and experience.  It was a tremendous relief to feel I wasn’t writing simply to write but was rather expressing, as close to the bone as possible, an experience and its truth in the world.

In the meantime, I have been doing this every morning, these writing exercises that run in circles around something I can’t get to.  Here’s one about teeth:

I was writing and then I had a sudden epiphany about teeth.

I was writing about teeth and then I revealed profound truths about life in general, in a subtle, enticing way at once unique and universal.

I was writing about teeth while drinking a cup of coffee.

I was writing about teeth while remembering a night in Italy several years ago and how I awoke from a drunken spell of complete non-feeling, only air and blackness, to feel my face bleeding to the slow creep of pain. I wailed “hopîtal, hopîtal!” in an Italian plaza to the churning of the crowds, felt the night swooning around me in fireworks and booze and laughter and sweeping movement that went so fast it seemed slow, and an eternity later, I was led by the hand to a hospital and set on a cot, where doctors came and went touching some part of my face and then leaving to drink champagne; after having slammed my African-American boyfriend up against the wall for supposedly beating me (“No, I fell!” I wept, “No, I fell!” and it made no difference), the doctors seemed satisfied and through with work for the night and I was alone when midnight came and the faint rise and fall of cheers came from the street.

I was writing about teeth while my brain raced and skipped along the dozens of other possibilities of what-I-could-be-writing while I was writing about teeth, because I hadn’t planned to write about teeth and Natalie Goldberg’s writing prompt encouraged me to do so.  A copy of “Wild Mind’ isn’t far these days, when I am searching for writing like a squirrel searching for the last acorns of the season, searching in a way that feels sparse and wanting, as if I have waited too long and missed something critical.  How much does timing matter in these things?

I was writing about teeth while the dog slept at my feet and the kitten, having forgotten what she was so caught up in, fell asleep on the arm of the big slick chair that evokes 70’s disco, swirly and vinyl.  I wonder how cats manage to do that – simply forget what they were so intently focused on and what they’d directed one hundred percent of their energies to planning on doing and instead let their eyes blink, and close, and the warmth of the room fall over them and their small bodies pulse with the rhythm of gentle breaths in sleep.

I was writing about teeth when I started to freeze up, my muscles tensing with the rebellion against writing the same old thing for the same old places.  My shoulders stiffened and my body clenched, the words coming out already stilted like the puffs of a machine that’s belching and chugging irregularly, confused, a hairball somewhere in its tubular interior.

I was writing about teeth when I felt comforted by their regularity and their irregularity; both of these qualities are essential to teeth.  They all come in two lines, their places so fixed that dentists give them numbers.  “Cavity in number D82.”  I know this because I have had lots of teeth issues.  My favorite dentist in Oaxaca used to pretend to be the tooth, acting out whatever was wrong with him/it.  I saw him once at the movies and he pretended not to notice me – I think I made him nervous.  He had gray hair and was a born dad, with the timeless dad qualities of goofiness and kindness and a protective, comforting air.  But I still made him nervous, maybe because my mouth came with so many traumas.  My teeth are highly irregular in that way – they’ve been bashed into plazas and drilled and braced and chipped and broken and they’ve had canals dug into them.  But still, they have their numbers and their names that any dentist, on 5th Avenue in Columbus Ohio with Sunny 95 playing in the background (Sun-NY NineTY-FIVE!  Jingle jingle – “and Iiiiiiiiii will alwayyyyyyys loooooveeeee youuuuuuuuuuu”) or in a stark office on a periphery road in Aix-en-Provence under the shadow of a beautiful olive-skinned doctor with deliciously clean-shaven skin and a pleasant smell of mint and lavender who made me nervous every time he leaned over me to do some work on my mouth, or in Oaxaca with the goofy dad-like teeth impersonator, my teeth have their numbers and their names so that they can be identified.  There is something comforting in this, and perhaps a lesson to extrapolate from it about humanity.  There is a baseline sameness, regularity, behind all the jagged edges and dents and ridges and jumbles and gaps?

I was writing about teeth when I started to feel better, to take the morning into account and the fact that it was Friday and the soft light of the sun getting stronger was pressing against my curtains.  I started to hear the high-pitched flutes of the birds’ chatter, the strong throb of cicadas that’s taken over Oaxaca in the past few days and that reminds me so vividly of summer in Ohio (sprinklers, the smell of pools and wet sidewalks); I felt the morning rising and emerging, my favorite part of the day.

There is always life – life is always there – even when you can’t write.  The morning still grows up and then turns into the flat and long afternoon with its annihilating light, and later soars to the brilliant gold-blues of evening while we settle down to read or gather with micheladas around the soccer game in the bar, and finally the light hunkers down again into night, and again tomorrow morning emerges pale and chilly.  So I’m not writing about teeth anymore, I’m writing about writing.  And maybe getting closer, closer, to what I want to say.

This is when I circled around to arrive at the reluctant conclusion I came to above – I’m going to write about writing.  I am still, after two years of doing this full-time, figuring it out.  I can hear the chorus of resounding laughter from writer ancestors lounging in tunics in the clouds; yes, yes, I know it’s probably something you never “get,” you never “know” completely and that’s why you keep doing it, you idiot.  Because you can never totally tame and master it any more than you can tame and master that rising and peaking and falling day.  So you just keep going through those moments both when it’s flowing out of you in a rush and you can’t type fast enough to keep up with it and those moments when it’s heaving dry coughs and sputtering and limping along, about to pass out from lifelessness at any moment.  You keep going and feeling it out.  Writing is a life (I hate the word “career” – it evokes 6th grade career fairs when nice men and women in suits from Marshall Fields handed out glossy packets about corporate office parks and agricultural engineering and dentistry) that involves feeling, and constantly being aware of feeling, and I have come to think that is why I chose it.  It is the cleansing exit ramp for all that excess feeling I have for the world.  But it also becomes so intensely personal, and navigating its needs – for writing, I believe, has its own needs, its own interior compass where it directs its energies – can be exhausting, and can draw up that taunting question – “Is it me, or is it you?”

Writing, perhaps it is both of us.  There is my hope of this natural divine inspiration that will shoot up like a geyser in front of me, and I’ll sit down and start flying over the ol’ keyboard I mastered (90 wpm!) in 4th grade with Mavis Beacon Teaching Typing, and then there’s the awareness that you’re always there, writing, and I have to get around to you even if the geyser isn’t terrifying and stupefying and slamming me into a rush of prose.  So I go on hoping that even on those mornings when it doesn’t come and I’m pounding on about teeth something will come up, the faint scent of a trail, and I will sniff my way along it until I reach a nest in the woods with a couple of warm eggs in it and finally I’ll just be writing without the constant nagging voices and uncertainty and hinging around dead-end sentences; I’ll be writing in that one illuminated spot in the woods with the warm eggs in the nest and that will be where I’ve wanted to end up, all along.

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San Juan Copala

3rd
May. × ’10
By Sarah

On Tuesday, April 27th, a caravan of human rights observers, activists, and journalists was set to enter the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala.  They had been invited to the village by its Triqui population, which since the beginning of the year lacked water, food, electricity, medical care and basic supplies, as paramilitaries blockading the village refused entry to any aid caravans.

The Triquis, one of the most marginalized and impoverished indigenous groups in Oaxaca, declared San Juan Copala an autonomous village in 2007, and attempted to detach themselves from the state institutions that both neglected their needs and exploited their resources (mostly, an abundant supply of timber in the surrounding forests).  The response of the PRI government and its state head Ulises Ruiz – the most unabashedly violent and repressive governor in Mexico’s last decade – was to warn that the village wouldn’t have the resources or support to last on its own, mock the declaration as “a spectacle” and then promptly employ the paramilitary group Uníon de Bienestar Social para la Regíon Triqui (Ubisort, created by the PRI government in 1994 to keep the Triquis in line) to threaten Copala back into submission.  Ubisort is recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a paramilitary organization.

The Triqui’s selected their own authorities in a two-month-long electoral process that re-established the traditional Triqui system of usos y custombres, in which decisions are made in communal assemblies with the consultation of a council of elders.  Not surprisingly, the state government in Oaxaca City did not recognize the legitimacy of the Triqui government, and San Juan Copala has been a target of paramilitary violence ever since.

In one of the most tragic incidents, two young, female Triqui journalists who reported for San Juan Copala’s radio station “La Voz que Rompe el Silencio” (the voice that breaks the silence) were assassinated en route to a conference in Oaxaca City in April of 2008.  Paramilitaries surrounded their car and opened fire, killing the two women and wounding a man, woman and their three-year-old child.  Felicitas Martinez was 21; Theresa Bautista, 24.  The Director-General of UNESCO called their murders “a heinous crime which undermines the whole of society.”

Last year the violence escalated.  In June, paramilitaries opened fire on the pueblo of Copala for nearly two hours using high-caliber machine guns, killing a 13-year-old boy and gravely wounding his 16-year-old sister.  On the 28th of November, Ubisort denied the Frente de Pueblos En Defensa de La Tierra entry to Copala; soon after, the state government began a disinformation campaign in Oaxacan newspapers declaring alternately that the autonomous pueblo was nearing its end, that it had been disbanded, and that it had mounted an armed attack and failed, despite consistent evidence and statements from the Triqui government, still installed and still making decisions, to the contrary.  On November 29th the paramilitaries attacked the municipal government and also shot up a children’s shelter, where one boy was killed and two others were wounded.  They then set up a blockade in a nearby community called La Sabana, the same place where the peaceful caravan carrying the journalists, activists and human rights observers would later be attacked.

On the 10th of December, 2009, Ubisort, heavily armed with weapons supplied by the government, took over the municipal government and kicked out the Triqui authorities.  They shut off all access to Copala, and the village had no electricity and lacked water and basic supplies.  Children were not allowed to go to school.  Assassinations were frequent.  On March 10th of this year, women and children tried to take back the municipal government; the response of the Ubisort paramilitaries was to shoot freely out into the community, injuring a 64-year-old woman.  It is speculated that at least 19 people have been killed in Copala since January of this year, and hundreds more in the previous year.

This was the setting for the aid caravan that was to enter Copala last Tuesday, April 27th.  The caravan made public its intent to enter the village at the invitation of the Triqui authorities and community there.  It’s intent was to deliver food and blankets, to observe the situation in the pueblo (Belgian, Finnish and Italian human rights observers accompanied the caravan) and to express solidarity with the people.  Before entering Copala, the caravan held a press conference in Huajuápan de Leon, the capital of the Mixteca region, announcing their intention to peacefully enter the pueblo in the hopes of avoiding any unpleasant surprises.  Ubisort warned that they would not be allowed to enter Copala.

When the caravan was just outside of Copala, near La Sabana, they encountered a rock wall blockade.  When the first truck in the caravan began to back up, paramilitaries hidden in the nearby hills shot out the tires.  The truck tried to back up again and couldn’t.  The paramilitaries opened fire on the vehicles and fatally shot Alberta “Bety” Cariño.  She was sitting next to a Finnish human rights observer, Jyri Jaakkola, who attempted to come to her aid.  The paramilitaries approached the car and shot him in the head.  Meanwhile the remaining members of the caravan fled into the woods under gunfire.  Five people were wounded; one, Mónica Citlali Santiago Ortiz, a student at the UABJO (the autonomous university of Oaxaca) was gravely wounded with a gunshot wound to the back.  She was picked up later with the two dead and taken to a hospital in Juxtlahuaca, where she’s being treated.

Some of the caravan members were captured by the paramilitaries, questioned, issued death threats, and later let go.  One group was captured by several paramilitaries no older than twenty, who held them, questioned them, and ultimately released them with the warning that they would be consistently watched, as the organization had far-reaching power in Oaxaca City.  In a press conference held the 28th of October, survivor Gabriela Jimenez recounted the whole experience and explained that these young Ubisort paramilitaries told her and her fellow hostages  that they were going to take over Copala and “kick people out of their houses”, identified their leaders as the leaders of Ubisort and MULT (the other paramilitary organization fighting the autonomous government of Copala) and said, directly, unabashedly, that they had the support of Oaxacan governer Ulises Ruiz.

Two reporters from the Mexican magazine Contralinea, Érika Ramírez and David Cilia Olmos, and two activists, David Venegas Reyes y Noé Bautista, were meanwhile stuck in the forest and surrounded by the roving paramilitaries.  They made a video in which they explained their situation and what had happened to them so that there would be testimony in case they were assassinated.  One of the reporters, Cilia Olmos, had gunshot wounds in the leg and the ribs and was unable to walk; another, Bautista, had gunshot wounds in the butt and the shoulder.  They spent days in the forest, amidst speculations that they were dead or being held, frightened of moving for fear of being captured and shot.  Ultimately, they reached an agreement in which Noé Bautista and David Venegas Reyes left in the middle of the night with the hopes of reaching Huajuápan de Léon.  They made it eight hours later and presented their video to authorities.  David Cilia Olmos’ father, the director of Contralinea, and a small group of police went in search of the journalists and ultimately rescued them.

If the two activists hadn’t produced the video and been able to rally up support for the journalists, it’s arguable that the latter would have either been hunted down and killed or left to die.  Gabriela Jiminez, the aforementioned survivor, said that when she and the other caravan members held with her were finally released, they went to the police to tell them that there were still people missing.  The police answered that they wouldn’t go into the zone because they’d be shot at.  (Indeed, when an ambulance went to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded, it was shot at and forced to flee).  No one would deal with the situation.  It took the scandal of the dead Finnish foreigner to force the Oaxacan government to act, and even then it is most likely that only the video proving that the two reporters were still alive and explaining where they were and what had happened to them saved their lives.

Meanwhile, the event has finally blown up in the national and international media, creating an irritation for the Oaxacan government, which has shown once again its remarkable ability for ineptitude, callousness, and ignorance.  Ulises Ruiz’s first reaction to the situation was to blame the attack on foreigners who come to Oaxaca “to cause problems” and to threaten to expel all foreigners from the country.  He then took the opportunity to blame his political opponent, Gabino Cué, for having connections to the APPO and therefore causing all of this violence.  (Never mind that little verdict from the Supreme Court of Mexico, which condemned Ulises for grave human rights violations).

One of the many overlapping tragedies in all this is that it has taken the death of a foreigner to make the situation explode.  Once again, Ulises Ruiz is in the hot seat, irritated that someone who’s not an indigenous woman or a Mexican activist, someone who’s death or disappearence he can’t just make happen with impunity, has been killed by his henchmen.  And yet, as was the case with Brad Will, the American journalist assassinated by Ulises’ government thugs (one of the activists who was part of the Copala caravan was randomly accused of Will’s murder and thrown in jail for a year, and finally released after the government had to admit it had no case against him) surely this murder will go unpunished, and innocent people will go to jail, and/or be tortured, or beaten, or kidnapped.  There is already a call out to assassinate the husband of Bety, the woman killed in Copala, and Ulises has shown absolutely no interest in pursuing the paramilitaries.

The Secretary of Foreign Relations and the European Union have sent a commission to Oaxaca to look into the incident, but, if the cases of Brad Will and of so many other people thrown in jail, harassed, kidnapped and assassinated in Oaxaca are any indication, nothing will happen.

So what do we do?  What can we do?  My heart clenches and tightens and I want to slam my fists on the table again and again and again with the fury of it.  Jyri, the young Finnish activist who was shot in the head, was at my friends’ Susy and Mauricio’s wedding, where he danced all night.  Yesterday Susy and Mauricio told a story of how, at a ceremony at Monte Alban, Jyri – a devout vegetarian – watched a turkey be slaughtered and when he was offered a piece, instead of wincing and turning it down as another foreigner did, said with gratitude “of course, of course I’ll eat it.”  He was working with an organization that helped Triquis and was, according to Susy and Mauricio, an unbelievably peaceful soul, and one who ultimately tried to save the woman beside him and lost his own life in the process.  Their faces were full of confusion and sadness when they talked about him.  They were meant to go on that caravan to Copala and observe, but didn’t because they had planned their honeymoon for that week.

These events are not distant from us.  They are not far away.  They are realities that creep up in black smoke around the edges of our realities and at times suffocate them, and threaten to snuff them out.  And yet they are also The Dominant Realities – those of The Institutions, The State, The Governor, The System.  They are the systems under which we live all the time, only at times uncomfortably encountering their unpleasantness, their innate rottenness, only sometimes smelling the bodies and feeling the terror.

Last weekend, I translated at a conference dealing with violence against female human rights defenders.  There was one Filipina woman who didn’t speak Spanish, and I did my first simultaneous translation ever for her.  I therefore got to participate in a strange vicarious way in this conference of intense, remarkable women.  All but the Filipina, who was doing a fellowship at Rutgers on the topic of human rights defenders and had been sent to the conference, were from Latin America.  They were overwhelming at times in their strength and their conviction, and they intimidated me and adopted me like a stray kitten.  They told stories about the assassinations of friends, about death threats, coups, spies, narcos, gangsters, about what to do when a drug lord’s girlfriend comes to you asking for help, about what to do when the government has tried to kidnap you and you know you’re next on the list, about how to deal with defamation campaigns in the local media and your community calling you a whore, tearing down all the work you’ve done.  Their work seemed impossible, impossibly hard, and at the same time deeply and genuinely inspiring; these are women who, in the face of military dictatorships and torture and the “disappearance” of their coworkers, in the face of threats against their loved ones and their lives and the casual domination of Ulises’ Ruizes in pueblos all over North America and the centuries of systems and institutions and power stacked against them, are doing it.  Are going out every day and doing something about it, and believing in their part, their change, the human rights they fight for.

I left that day after the conference came to a close and walked down the hill from the Hotel Victoria watching the late evening light set the city aglow, watching the playful colorful buildings fan out into the valley and the hills shine gold and green.  I felt hope like a calm center – hope that even though everything can be so bad, that even though these women have so much stacked against them, they are doing it.  And then Copala happened, and the hope was burnt up by rage.

But after so much research into the events, after talking to Susy and Mauricio who were also so shaken by it and were so close to it, I have come back to those women.  They are back in their cities and pueblos now, back to the daily struggle of doing what they do, and they’ll keep doing it, just as Bety Carino’s family will keep fighting for the justice she sought.  I wanted to say “that’s all we can do” – but it’s not “all,” it’s not fatalistic and we aren’t fatalistically doomed to it – it is everything.  The continued belief that we are not doomed to this system and its terrors, and that we can make it just, is everything.  It is hope.  And even if I am filled with anger and frustration and grief for all that has happened in Copala, even if there is so much frustration at how hard it is, I think I owe it to those women with their firm laughing confident storied faces, dedicating their lives to the dignity and the human rights of their fellow human beings, to return to hope.  May Bety and Jyri rest in peace, may this battle for human rights, for dignity and justice, go on,  and may we place our hope with those who are risking their lives to fight it.

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