HUGE ENTRY. Last day in San Cristobal

Yesterday was our last day in Oventic. It was pretty sad but the promotores framed it as exciting that they would have more "luchadores" (fighters) in Los Estados Unidos now. Pedro said something inspiring to me about keep fighting capitalismo.

This week in Oventic there was a large group of high school students from Montana, led by their very radical (anarchist/Wobbly) Spanish teacher named Jay. It was pretty inspiring to me that he got tenure desite the overt nature of his politics and the way he instills them in his students. He told me that it is easiest to be an overtly radical teacher in fields other than history, because you have to do a certain amount of teaching about culture; he encouraged me to follow my plan to be an art teacher because I could frame art history as related to revolutionary movements and contextualize it in fighting capitalism or supporting it, etc. So that was good. The Montana kids were nice to have around because it was inspiring to see youth in the US adopt revolutionary ideals, except they were also very distracting from learning Spanish since most of them could only speak English and wanted to hear all about New York. Jay had me explain to them the whole dynamics of the Jewish community surrounding Israel and Palestine. I wish I knew more about the issue to explain it to them but I think I did alright. It's great that they are staying for two more weeks. Imagine experiencing 3 weeks of Zapatismo when you were 16! I wonder how that would have influenced my decisions for organizing and whatnot if I came to Oventic so early.

Other things:
-I am getting a little tired of Mexican food and have fallen in love with four-cheese-penne at this Italian place.
-I gave myself a haircut today. Glad I brought those scissors. I had to stand on a chair to see the mirror. I guess Tom hung the mirror... there is no way in hell it is low enough for the Zapatista women that stay in the house when they work at the women's collective store in Cafe TierrAdentro
-I ran into some high school kids from LA who are on the same program Max was on last year. They'd been in Oventic but I saw them on the street in San Cris and yelled "LOS ANGELES" and was like "Do you know my friend Max?" teehee they thought our band name was funny.
-We made a friend named Anne Marie who is travelling through. She briefly worked at Carlos's bookstore in Guatemala. Last weekend I walked into TierrAdentro and found Anne Marie and her friend being lectured by a super drunk guy about the Selva Lacandona (The Lacandon Jungle). Very entertaining, until he made sexual advances on us, and then got bored and left.
-On Thursday I had spanish class on the roof of the bibleoteca. We had an amazing view of the mountains! I didn't get a picture because I was in class.
-Yesterday before we left, the Promotores sang a song that a student had written about Tom, our professor, the chorus of which was "Pinche Tom, Pinche Tom, Pinche TOM TOM TOM!" (Fuckin Tom) LOLzz. It is now stuck in all our heads.
-A direct quote from Tom: The person who finished the water jug without replacing it should be hung" WTFF?? he was so mad at us about that. How were we supposed to know where to get it?
-today Jorge, Pablo and I watched the "Thriller"music video on a TV in a little hole in the wall restaurant over a round of cokes (which are way better outside of the US, by the way.) It was hilarious and amazing. RIP MJ

A photo of the students at the secondary school in Oventic... How's this for a class photo? So badass in their paliacates and pasa de montañas (bandanas and ski masks).

Pablo with his amor, Penguino Zapatista. I'm going to miss both of them a lot. Supposedly Subcomandante Marcos named a rooster "Penguino Zapatista" because it looked like a penguin and therefore was a metaphor for the Zapatista struggle. Not sure.

Me and el Penguino. (Behind this door was where I slept the first two weeks, before the Montana kids got there.)

One of the murals in our room the third week. "We are equal because we are different." How hilarious is the picture of the lesbian? She is the only barefoot one, and also too freethinking to look at the viewer.

This stencil that is in the second room says "Green is the color of hope". For a while I thought that "esperanza" meant both hope and spring so I thought it was like "DUH green is the color of spring..." but it is way more badass than I realized.

Some of the folks from Montana in Cafe TierrAdentro, our home away from home in San Cristobal. This week I had the pleasure of cutting Katie's hair (in the middle)... it had been past her shoulders or so before. Pablo says that I shouldn't have tried to indoctrinate her into the Ideology of Dykey Haircuts despite the oohs and aahs from her and the other Montana girls. Whatever, at least now she can brag that she got a free haircut from a real live New York Jewish Hipster Dyke. Katie is going to stop by SLC on her college tours and maybe stay over! Perhaps she really will be indoctrinated into New York radical or hipster or dyke culture.

Closeup. Note the sideburns. I'm proud of those.

My new Zapatista shoes. They have a special EZLN stamp on the side. Badass.

A mural. BM=World Bank, ALCA=Free Trade Area of the Americas (?), and FMI= International Monetary Fund.

More murals, and a small Milpa of cilantro, corn, etc.

Bye for now! Must go eat dinner.

Last weekend's update

So now I've been en Mexico for about 2 weeks. During the week we've been in Oventic, at a Zapatista Caracol. Caracol means literally "snail", to symbolize the Zapatista idea of "we are walking slowly because we are going far". Basically a Caracol is a Zapatista center... Oventic, which is Caracol II, has a secondary school ("Zapatista Autonomous School In Rebellion" with about 120 students), a junta (which is a participatory and weekly-rotating government structure), a language school (which is how my program fits into it), Zapatista stores like the Womens' cooperative and the bootmaking collective, etc. Every day there are a few tourists who come through, usually Spaniards (you can tell by their fashion mullets). There is pretty tight security at the Caracol though, and not everyone who comes through can stay there for that long. So anyone who eats with us and takes classes at the language school is much more committed to learning about Zapatismo and the movement for autonomy as well as learning Spanish for political work that they're doing back home. The entrance is at the top of a huge hill that the Caracol sits in, and is guarded by folks with the Pasa de Montaña (ski mask) so that they are not easily identifiable. People only really wear them up on the top of the hill... down by the escuelas no one really wears them but we are not allowed to take pictures of people unless their faces are covered. So essentially, all my pictures from Oventic are only of these really beautiful murals, nature, and gringos. hahaha. However I am able to remember the faces of a select few through drawing portraits.

Last week there were 3 other students at the language school besides the other 4 on my program. We all became pretty close and had at lots of political discussions over really great Mexican food that the food cooperative/ Tienda made for us. We try to speak in Spanish as often as we can but it's hard when me and our friend Paul don't speak it well enough to have extended meal-type conversations in Español. However, I am getting to the point where I can understand the majority of what's going on, and even laugh at jokes people make in Spanish. I am very proud of this but my week definately followed the "two steps forward, one step back" saying about learning languages. It can get very frustrating. However, I'm really glad I didn't back out of coming on this trip just because I didn't know Spanish. It is not offensive to the folks at the Caracol because now that they know me they know how much it frustrates me and they understand how important la lucha (the struggle) is to me and how it's going to affect and improve my organizing work back in Nueva York. Also I think lots of folks are pretty entertained by me and my crazy "Jew-hawk" as our other gringo friend Pablo ("Paul" in California) calls it. Also after seeing my tattoo, they have taught me how to say “bat” in not only Spanish but also Tzotzil (“murcielago” and “sots”, respectively.)

One thing about Oventic is that all the gringos go by their Spanish-ized names if possible. It would be really awkward to call Carlos "Charlie" or Pablo "Paul" or Jorge "George". In Oventic, I am "Bet" since it is hard to pronounce the “TH”.

Anyway that brings us to my Spanish class... the teachers and other folks who work in the Caracol are called "Promotores" (promoters, duh) which is sort of awesome. My promotore, Pedro, is really insiring. I am his only student because I am at such a lower level than the other 4 on the program... its so awesome because I get much more instruction. Usually what happens in class is that Pedro teaches me about Zapatismo and Zapatista history, and he asks me about dynamics and the history of social movements back in the US… my sixties class is very much coming in handy. It is perfect because not only am I learning about things that I care about and came here to learn about, but also he's asking me questions that I really really want to be able to answer, which is motivating. I've actually gotten pretty weepy and moved in class before. For example, this one time he was showing me photos from a book about the Zapatistas and he asked me which was my favorite. I picked the picture of Zapatista women resisting a government army with their hands, strangling these huge men... it was so moving because the look of fear on the soldier's face showed how much the sheer will of the mujeres was so much more powerful than the expensive weapons the men were carrying. Pedro said "Los militares tienen arma pero no tienen dignidad." (The soldiers have guns but they don't have dignity.")

It is really amazing this "dignidad" of the mujeres... even the very young girls in the secondary school have a much higher level of confidence and life purpose than girls in the US. There is one dude on my program from Yale (we have an abbreviation for his ignorant statements... "TSY"="That's So Yale") thinks that the secondary school is narrow and propaganda. There are many problems with this idea, one being that the Zapatistas teach in a critical pedagogy format (like Pablo Friere, for those of you who are familiar with "Pedagogy of the Oppressed") and facilitate towards critique and many voices, but also I diagree with this dude because even if it is propaganda, it is so much more healthy of propaganda than the shit we're fed in the US. Tom says that the US has a much longer time for identity formation than there is indigenous culture, which ends the identity crisis around age 13. Many Zapatistas don't get to go to the secondary school because of needs in their home communities (it's a boarding school) and also there is no high school. So students really go straight into training for their professions.

There is something us gringos call "Zapatista time" which is basically the principle that the Zapatistas generally operate on a different time schedule than people in the US. This is even more tramatic than any other subculture joking that they are always late to things. Tom, the director of my program and my politics/Mexican history teacher, says that indigenous culture generally privileges "contento" or contentment, over punctuality and efficiency... a really cultural way of resisting capitalism. It did not take long after he said this for us all to notice how present this concept acutally is at the Caracol. Last Friday I started feeling like I had a pretty bad cold, and by Sunday I realized that it was a really full blown throat/chest infection. Anyway Pedro couldn’t find me before class because I was taking a nap, and I overheard him and Carlos talking and Pedro said it was better that I kept sleeping… Another time Pedro decided that we should take an hour an a half break so that he could do an errand in San Andres, but then he was 40 minutos late and when he came back we just resumed class like it was no thing. I am really tempted to stay here forever (don’t worry, they probably wouldn’t let me), if nothing else, for the sense of time and contento. It’s great to have the mutual respect with teachers where you can just adjust your schedule according to your personal needs.

Today for class, me and all the other gringos and the promotores worked in the milpa, which is a plot of farmland that grows corn up on the mountain. It was pretty fun to take a break from intellectual work and do something concretely, physically productive for la lucha. It is also always fun having informal time with the promotores because we always end up teaching them what American pop song lyrics mean and it is hilarious when Inez says things in English, since she just does it to be funny in this really dry way… none of the Zapatistas speak English (they are already bilingual in Tzotzil and Spanish) so it’s just her fucking around with us and making fun of how gringo we sound. Anyway we ended up having an abbreviated class later where we learned about the Revolutionary Law of the Zapatista Women, which was essentially their women’s caucus’s list of demands. We were pretty engrossed in eating cookies (and laughing at the exaggerated way Inez pronounced the word “cookie” LOL.)

The other class we have is the one with Tom, which is in englsih and for which we have to do lots of readings about Marxism and Neoliberalism and Mexican politics etc. All my teachers at SLC have prepared me really well for this class, so at least if I am the student who is more behind in Spanish I am less behind on the political side. On Fridays we have the “emotional check in” with Tom during which we also have the opportunity to do “Criticism/Self Criticism” which is a technique of revolutionary groups and left organizations in lots of countries. Today was a good learning experience in how it works, because as I was confronting another student about condescension and respect, he got defensive, and Tom took it as an opportunity to talk about the technique’s history and use, and how people are not allowed to respond to their criticism. It ruled also because the student had just insinuated that I was “touchy” around him (aka hysteric woman stereotype with illegitimate feelings) and Tom defended me with a deeper contextualization.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was the group projects we’re working on with the Secondary school students. My group has 3 students and until yesterday also Carlos, a Nashville native who in his middle age up and moved to Guatemala to do volunteer work with an organization that fights for folks who work at the garbage dump, and to run a small used bookstore there, which he uses for organizing. He is an incredibly kind and fun person (who really reminds me of Irene from SLC’s community partnerships office!) and I’m glad I got to draw a very finished portrait of him before he left. Our group’s subject was the 1997 Massacre at Acteal, where a paramilitary (armed by the government) attacked a church where a few dozen Zapatistas were praying, and brutally murdered tons of people including children and pregnant women. We decided that for our final presentation that I would do drawings explaining the story of the event and the kids would describe it. It is turning out to be a lot of work trying to figure out what this church looked like… but it was cool to learn that Diane had actually been there when she was on a different abroad program in 2006. It is really fulfilling though to do some really nice drawings for the Zapatistas about their history. Many of the murals at Oventic are by students who’d been on my program so I guess this is my way of making art for their struggle as well. Here’s a wikipedia entry about the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acteal_massacre
Anyway we had a group meeting right after Carlos left so the age dynamic shifted and what ended up happening is that I drew a bunch of portraits of the students and let them keep it after I took a picture. I didn’t give Pedro the one I drew of him but now I am regretting it so I think I’m going to give it to him for a goodbye gift.

ok I should probably go... I have to go buy a spanish-english dictionary while I'm still in San Cristobal. I've been borrowing one from the Caracol library but I'm going to have to give it back before I have my homestay in Tlaxcala in a week and a half.

Amor y Revolucion,
Beth

¡La gringa es en San Cristobal, Chiapas!

¡Hola chica hola! I am finally in Mexico!

Yesterday I woke up in NJ at 4am and took 3 flights: Newark to Houston to Mexico City to Tuxla-Gutierrez. It was a huge schlep. I finally got to Tuxla at about 5:15pm (Mexi time, not NYC time). Then, Tom Hansen, the director of the MSN program, found me and three of the other students at the airport. He asked "did you have any trouble getting through customs?" To which I replied, "no just with my own spanish." (This will plague me throughout the trip but I'm already learning a lot.) Then Tom drove us in the MSN van to San Cristobal where the MSN house is (and where I am now). This van ride was pretty crazy for a lot of reasons:

1) I don't believe I've ever been in a car with four straight men before.
2) Tom drives really fast. We went on very windy roads around big mountains... wasn't wearing a seatbelt. There were only two lanes so when trucks and when other slowpokes knew Tom wanted to go faster than them they would sort of just move to the right and he'd have to wait to get around a bend and then he'd gun it around them. Muy interesante.
3) WHATSUP I'M IN MEXICO. I think we were all in shock of how beautiful the drive was that we didn't really talk a lot.

When we got to the MSN house we met Mel, the fifth student (and the only other grrrl here besides one of the teachers). Here are some pics of the house I took today:

I drew the bottom flower area on my syllabus while Tom was giving us an orientation.

The living room. (How great are these tiles?!)

(In this kitchen the only things to eat so far is bread with avocado and hot sauce. also, peanuts. we need to go food shopping...)

After Tom gave us a little schpiel about the house and the city etc., we all walked around San Cristobal zocalo and went out to the Revolucion Cafe/Bar:

We ordered beers as we watched a live jazz band play. Unfortunately I couldn't drink one of my beers that I ordered because without thinking I poured it into a glass with ice in it, as we had just been lectured not to drink ice if we weren't sure it was from the tap water. I felt super dumb in this moment, also because I couldn't remember how to order in Spanish.

3 of the other students are only staying for 5 weeks while me and one of the guys are staying for 8. We will be in Chiapas for three weeks, then we will be in Tlaxcala for two weeks, then in Mexico City for three weeks, where we will meet up with a big group of students from University of Colorado Boulder. There are only 5 of us because 12 people dropped out after the swine flu craze.

We have a final project due at the end, sort of like at SLC, which is really open ended. I'm thinking about doing a portraits series, mostly when we are in Mexico City, for a couple reasons. One, the Zapatistas in Oventic will probably not let me draw them unless they are wearing ski masks, and two, we will be learning about Sex Workers movements when we are in Mexico City and meeting some workers there, so that seems like a compelling project to follow up on both my Sex Workers research this past semester and also my Sketchy Lady project.. I am thinking about doing a show (portraits, installations etc) when I get back to school and having that be part of my final project.

Here are some pics from our walk around San Cristobal today:

(¡Mi colores!)

The church up on the hill that we climbed a really huge mountain to see up close.

A view of San Cristobal

Will y Mel.

The gang! George, Matt, Will and Mel.

Here I am at a muro en la calle. The stencil says "No more sexual attacks in the streets".

The Cathedral in the zocalo area of San Cris.

Burger King.

Another view of la ciudad

Tomorrow we're driving up to Oventic (a Zapatista community) in the morning and staying there through Friday. I have to go do some last minute homework before class starts. Ta-ta for now!