IDEALS

By Matthew Killby
Feb. 25, 2009

I woke up and got ready for the day. I still had 'Lynne's stomach' but I no longer had a headache or chills. I ate just bread for breakfast and it turns out old habits die hard. I'm not as adventurous with food as I am with other aspects of my life. Up until this point in the trip I'd been trying everything and finishing everything. After I got sick I reverted to my old ways. I still did not want to waste food so I just stopped eating food that was foreign to me. Even food I had tried, like Sopas were no longer appealing. I had difficulty bringing myself to eat the food.
Subconscious 1 Conscious 0
We boarded our bus and began the drive to Cuentepec. The bus was bumpy and I began to feel nauseous. We couldn't get to Cuentepec fast enough and I felt as though I was going to puke as soon as the bus stopped. Instead, stepping on to solid ground I felt better than ever. I don't usually get motion sickness, but perhaps it was because of the tight corners, the speed bumps, the driving habits of Mexicans, my being sick the previous day or a combination thereof.
The houses in Cuentepec are mostly made out of rocks and stones, but occasionally there were cinderblock houses and sometimes there were houses made out of cornstalks. Everywhere was garbage, but not the plastic and aluminum garbage of the urban landscape. This was rural garbage. Eaten cobs of corn discarded for the dogs or the chickens and ashes from fires.
Cuentepec is home to a group of women artisans who are part of a co-op that connects local villages with fair trade organizations. The clay group of men holding hands around a pot, called a danza, that you can buy at Ten Thousand Villages was probably made by these women.
We met the facilitator of the co-op under a small tarp that provided the only shade. We were shown around the area. We saw some beautiful clay sculptures of women sitting cross legged. They were in the shade drying before they were sent to the kiln. The kiln was a small cinderblock wood kiln, and the pieces would be covered in manure for a low-heat firing process. We also saw some of their corn being stored. The corn is what we would call a heritage variety in Canada. No cross breeding or genetic manipulation. Loraine said it was quite possible that the corn we saw was a variety that was thousands of years old and passed down from generation to generation.
Now came the fun part. We were joined by some of the women who helped us make our very own danzas out of clay. We did not speak Spanish, and they only spoke a few Spanish words, as their native language was Nawat. Most of our communication was through hand gestures and laughing. Such as the laughter at my failed attempt at making one of the clay women. I found out that we wouldn't be taking our sculptures home as it would take to long to dry and fire them, so I switched to the easier danza sculpture. The first man I made came out cracked and when I held it up to one of the women to see if it could be fixed, she smashed it into a ball. I eventually got the hang of it and put my first man down on the table.
A hand reached across to grab him and I yelled out “No, you'll ruin it!”
Then another hand reached across from Michelle's direction.
Again I yelled “No, you'll ruin it!”
Imagine my embarrassment when I looked up and saw it was one of the women. She began to smooth out the cracks while the rest of my group laughed at me.
Perhaps the biggest laugh, from both us and the women, was when Caila put her mould together backwards and ended up getting a clay man with his head attached to his ass. That is probably something the women won't soon forget. Once I had all my men finished, I had to attach their arms. Apparently I am not very good at making arms since mine were long and droopy. Everyone laughed at my danza, but it was mine and it was finished. By this point we had found out that we would take our sculptures home and we could let them dry out there so I was disappointed I hadn't continued with the clay woman. One woman asked me if I would like some help. Thinking she was going to help me smooth out the cracks I accepted. She then proceeded to rip off all the arms of my clay men and began re-doing it. I feigned a shocked face but also found it amusing and began remaking the arms as well.
I found it humbling, that while we came in with our high-tech cameras and our college education, it was these women, who probably had never been to school, and rarely saw a camera, who were the experts, and we their students. They found the task routine and we, the educated westerners, were struggling. Everyone has something to teach and we can all learn something new.
We all shared a meal that had been prepared by the women, and food that we had brought that the nuns had prepared. It had only been a few hours, but the stew of meat and cactus that the nuns had prepared had already gone bad and was rapidly fermenting. That just goes to show how difficult it can be to feed your family even if you have access to food.
The dogs were laying in the dust, in the shade, looking almost dead with their protruding ribs. Some of the group wanted to give the table scraps to the dogs, but I already knew the answer. You don't give food to the dogs when there are starving people. Someone asked why they have dogs if they can't afford to feed them, but these people don't really have access to, or funds for, a procedure to spay or neuter the dogs.
The table was rushed when the women were told they could keep the leftovers.
As we drove away, I wondered “If this is fair trade, then what must regular trade look like?”
Back at the abbey, we got a talk from two social activists about the Zapatista movement. The Zapatistas are a group of autonomous governments within the state of Chiapas. They are indigenous groups that have essentially broken away from Mexico. Communal lands were guaranteed to the indigenous peoples in Article 27 of Mexican Constitution. When Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement they had to remove the article, since the agreement stated that there must be the free flow of goods, including land. Communal lands and private property are pretty much mutually exclusive concepts in this case.
At the stroke of midnight, January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas armed and NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas do not want to separate from Mexico, they only want to continue to live on communal lands as they have for generations. Lands that were guaranteed to them in the Mexican constitution. The move to arm the moment NAFTA took effect was symbolic as well as utilitarian. Since the move was so prominently linked to NAFTA, it attracted the attention of the international media. This coverage probably saved their lives, since without the attention of the international community, it would be easy for the government to wipe out an entire indigenous people and call it a rebel uprising.
There are always two sides to a story, and in the case of the Zapatistas, one can make the argument that with individual ownership, the choice lies with the indigenous people whether to sell their land or not. The problem with this is that the land is managed as a community, and when you make ownership private, you take away the power of the community to do what's best for the whole community. How can one expect someone to put the best interests of the community and their own future ahead of their starving children when a multi-national company is offering them a few thousand pesos for their land? The land is the Zapatistas heritage, and no one can own the land. We are of the land. You can not take the land with you. A Canadian can not buy land and bring it back with them to Canada, so how can that Canadian own that land? Ownership is impossible in many indigenous cultures.
We learned a lot about this concept of land ownership later in the week from a man named Nacho.
The province of Chiapas is the most heavily militarized province in Mexico. Considering how much military presence I saw in Morelos and Mexico City, I can only imagine what kind of presence there must be in Chiapas. There are 54 major army buses and two special engineer bases in Chiapas, mostly surrounding Zapatista communities. The army trains civilian groups and then pays them to fight with the Zapatistas, though the government denies it. Gary has been to Chiapas and says he gets stopped by the army on a regular basis. The armies dump oil from vehicles on the ground, poisoning the water table. They are followed by brothels which have a heavy influence on the children in the area. The activists told us there is a network that tracks the military movements, and all indications are that they are preparing an attack.
The Zapatistas are named after Emiliano Zapata, the man who led the Mexican revolution of 1910. Zapata took the land from the elite and gave it to the poor who worked the land. The entire mentality of the country changed at that point and Zapata is a national hero.
The social activist, in his red Che t-shirt said “In 1910, the coin of the Mexican revolution was tossed. The revolution never reached the indigenous peoples. We are still waiting for the coin to fall.”