#15: Riddles of San Christobal – San Christobal de las Casas …

By: Daniel Wallace

Riddles of San Christobal
Monday, 27th October 2003

San Cristobal is a strangely hushed place – maybe it is just because
is it so high up in the mountains. The people walk quietly, letting
you pass them on the pavement, rarely meeting your eye – the air is
fresh, unlike the car fumes of Oaxaca, and it gets pretty cold in the
evenings. Even when music was playing or cars honking their horns,
sounds always seem localized, rather than pervasive, easily ignored.

San Cristobal is actually no higher up than Guanajuato, but feels
much more so, because it isn’t shielded by surrounding highlands.
There is something peaceful, something spiritual about the city, I
and many other visitors agree, though what it is I am at a loss to
diagnose. The people of the city go about their working, shopping,
begging, dwarfed by all these tourists, but somehow it seems they
know something about the world we don’t, or maybe something we forgot
a long time ago. Or perhaps it was all just the cold and the sense of
being on the edge of Mexico.

The streets of the city are long and straight, but it is easy to get
lost, buildings are low and out of the centre are generally simple
and uniform, with few large windows. It gets very quiet at night, but
seems safe enough to wander around in the dark, despite what some
Mexicans from other states had been telling me. The poverty in San
Cristobal is much more thrust in your face than in Oaxaca – a NO is
rarely enough, children and adults follow me down streets, hands or
weaving outstretched. Perhaps there just weren’t so many tourist
police here to keep everyone under watch.

So many unanswered questions about San Cristobal and Chiapas. You can
buy little woven dolls of Zapatista fighters, complete with assault
rifle and balaclava – either singly or two to a horse. Zapatista and
Che Guevara t-shirts were everywhere. What did all the political
grafitti mean? I couldn’t read it. What did I think about all the
people in traditional dress who spent all day begging, what did I
think about visiting Indian villages as a day trip – I don’t know.

Seeking more information, I got into a long conversation with the
managers of the city’s historical museum, and some things became
clearer. San Cristobal had been founded by the Spanish, and over time
Indians who had been expelled from the surrounding villages came to
live on the barrios surrounding the city centre. Over time, in a
process that would have been fascinating to know more about, the
centre and the barrios became one city, the entire population mixing.
Now San Cristobal is the centre for the movement for the rights of
the indigenous people of Chiapas.

Perhaps some of my questions had been too direct, one of the museum
guides turned to face me full on, and said with some feeling, in
English, “What do you think about the problems of Chiapas, are they
are a true or false problem?” I sensed I could be on dangerous ground
here, and offered the excuse that I had only been in the state for
two days. But a real answer was clearly required, so I said something
along the lines of “Everyone would like the peoples of Chiapas not to
be poor, but also everyone would like their lives not to change, and
getting both was clearly difficult.” They all nodded thoughtfully –
this had been a good answer, fortunately. So I reversed the question,
and he said he thought that the Indians didn’t want to work, weren’t
interested in studying, just sat expecting help from the government –
who had no business helping them out. Hmm.

More time than I was willing to spend was needed, but perhaps even
that wouldn’t have been enough. In my hostel I met two German
travelers who had spent eleven days in one of the Indian villages –
something that impressed me greatly. It had been a boring but amazing
experience, one of them said, these were Indian refugees from elsewhere,
seemingly reliant on government aid for their sustenance, but she
didn’t know for sure. “Didn’t they talk to you then?” I asked. Yes,
they were happy to talk, but they asked such strange questions, it
was hard to communicate anything. The villagers apparently had never
heard of Germany, and found the idea that these girls spoke German at
home impossible to accept. They asked questions like, “How long would
it take to walk to Germany?” The experience impressed me even more,
and seemed more valuable, now that I saw something of it’s failure:
to have come all this way, learnt a common language, researched the
right place to go and to have invested the time, and then visit
people so different that understanding wasn’t really possible.

This was a place, I felt, requiring much time to gain some
understanding, and I wasn’t really willing to do that. I had been in
Mexico since the start of September, and I wanted across the border
to Guatemala, and resolved that a few beautiful, wintery days in this
hushed place would be enough for me. I spent an evening reflecting on
all the experiences I had had in Mexico, and the next morning took a
bus to Guatemala.

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