“Once there was a way to get back homeward…”

Vamos vamos vamos vamos adelante

Para que salgamos en la lucha avante

Porque nuestra patria grita y necessita

De todos los esfuerzos de los Zapatistas

 -Zapatista Hymn

San Cristóbal de las Casas for one week consisted of going to the market everyday for the food Katie and I cooked each night, and going to whatever bar every night to make up for those silly Zapatistas banning alcohol from the autonomous zones. We discovered how very small the community of patronage is for nightlife in small, colonial, tourist paradises with revolutionary undercurrents. We spent the week feeding the different people we met from the encuentro as one by one the spanish mullet/wrapped dred clad encuentro attendees would filter back to their respective collectives in New York City, Mexico City, Spain etc. Last Sunday Katie and I went to Oventic, one of the Zapatista communities where we would be taking classes in Spanish and Tsotsil respectively. We showed up and again, at the entrance, the masked gate keepers and vigilance committee had NO idea why we were there or what the hell we meant by the fact that we would be there for 2 weeks to learn the languages they speak (though for most spanish cannot be counted amongst them). Fortunately we´d been through this process before so we weren´t as flustered by the other spanish students who were tackling the Zapatista bureaucracy for the first time only without the assistance of speaking spanish given that they are there to LEARN it. So once the Good Government Board stamps a little peice of paper with your name mispelled on it, you hoble down the hill to the BEAUTIFULLY painted Autonomous Rebellious Secondary School, and to the dormitory where we are living. 4 wooden bunks with beds composed of 4 wooden planks surrounded by wooden plank walls (covered in revolutionary murals) with strips of tape keeping the wind from coming in through the cracks.

Oventic is exceptional. It is high up in the mountains and when you walk down past all the cooperative artisan stores and good government boards you see enormous jungle covered hills for miles, and sunsets that are as diverse and as breathtaking as the Zapatistas that inhabit those hills. Every evening after a few hours of sunshine, the clouds roll in and by roll in I mean a cloud rolls over the caracol and we spend the afternoon and evening IN cloud, which prompts the same constant stream of observations. “Man is it cloud today.” “Gee it´s hard to know if it is raining when you are IN the thing that precipitates. The nights are extremely cold, but I fixed the zipper on my sleeping bag so its not too bad.

We have a pretty good cast of characters that are students at the school. A 30 year-old alternative school history teacher from Wisconsin with an arsenal of tank tops, tons of rainbow accessories who likes women, but more than that he loves pot, and talks about it constantly; a 22 year-old Wobly organizer who salts at Starbucks, who we affectionately call Growth Spurt because despite having the circumfrence of a broom handle, eats like a maniac. Then there is Xanex (aka Nicolas), my personal fav, a Northwestern Law School student who almost never eats and is never hungry due perhaps to his rather large stockpile of the aforementioned drug. He is hellbent on increasing the appreciation for english in one of our teachers, Inés, by quoting Shakespeare and Keats to her everytime he sees her despite her only english language knowledge being “no english.” I told him he should just learn spanish instead. Then there is a Swiss family of 4. Andrea and Andreus the parents, and their two kids who only speak (i mean YELL) in German all the time, and whose names I don´t remember becuase why bother if we have no real way to communicate. Another unimposing Swiss lady named Corrine, and finally a trio from Temple University, who are seemingly more interested in being in America because they constantly talk about how much they miss REAL food and REAL beds somewhere else. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THIS PLACE IS? FAKE? They don´t like anything, and the girl, Dolores, which means pains in spanish and is hence quite appropriate is made sick by the smell of corn tortillas which makes me wonder WHY THE FUCK SHE CAME TO THE PLACE WHERE CORN WAS DOMESTICATED FIRST IN THE WORLD AND ON WHICH THE PEOPLE HAVE SURVIVED AND THRIVED FOR ABOUT NINE MILLENIA. I have little patience for this. She and Mike the teacher hooked up Friday night once we got back to alcohol. Quite a crew. We should be getting a couple new people this week. Hopefully they won´t make comments about missing Taco Bell.

Then there is Natalio. Natalio is my Tsotsil teacher. We have two hours of class per day and then later we have some kind of communal activity, where I do or don´t get to use a little bit of the Tsotsil I have learned. Natalio is a 22 year old Zapatista promotor (spanish for promoter of education, used by the zapatistas instead of the world “teacher” which implies a one way exchange) who has been teaching tsotsil to gringos like me for 3 years and plays on a Zapatista basketball team. (the zapatistas LOVE basketball. who cares if none of them exceeds 5 foot 3. if they are all short it doesn´t so much matter.) He is beautiful, brilliant, patient, and hopefully not the only reason I´ve fallen so deeply in love with learning the language. Katie calls him dreamlips. He has greased-back jetblack hair with one little piece that falls to the front, and loves to sit around and think and gaze. Whenever you catch his eyes it just kindof knocks you over for a second. I am the only Tsotsil student so our classes are a mix of learning new words and conjugations, and telling me stories that his grandparents used to tell him.

Learning a new language in a language that you don´t speak natively can be hard as hell, but at the same time has been one of the most exciting things I´ve done in a long time. I study more for this than I did for most things in college because he teaches me what I want to know, not what he thinks I should know. One day our activity was to meet with the Zapatistas that took over the government building in San Andres Larrainzar. I introdced myself to them in Tsotsil. Te oyoxuk. Ja´ jvi Xantel. Talemun ta los Estados Unidos. Literal translation. You are here. My name is Andrea. I am from the United States. Natalio told me that because they didnt laugh when I said it that I pronounced it well and they were impressed. Most gratifying thing ever. We also went and asked prices of things in one of the women´s artisan cooperatives. Speaking to an indigenous person in their native language is fucking awesome. One of my favorite lessons was when he was teaching me the numbers, and we are clipping along til he gets to 20, and he tells me that it literally translates to “one man.” He says, “you want to know why?” and he holds up one hand “one two three four five” and then another “one two three four five” and then says the same for each foot. “One man.” Twenty fingers and toes. Sigh. 40 is two men. 60 is three, and 22 is one man and 2 borrowed from another man. Sigh again.

Katie and I had this incredible day yesterday where we went to the market for breakfast to our favorite little stall, and then went to the Mayan Medicine Museum and on the way we kindof tripped into a a little indigenous language book and music infoshop in the corner of a furntiure store, and I spoke to the man running the store in tsotsil and bought a book of tsotsil stories. I thought life couldnt get better until we got to the museum which had a whole room about Mayan birth and midwifery, and a movie of a Mayan woman giving birth. The tradition is for the woman to give birth on her knees with her husbands arms wrapped around her. After that we went to the market to buy food for the night, which everytime feels like the market in Guatemala, and I feel really at home. One more week of Mexico and Tsotsil classes. We head back to Oventic this afternoon.

One more week of singing revolutionary Zapatista songs, and eating delicious corn tortillas, and not quite understanding why I get to do all of these incredible things all the time. Expect a nice little gushy, nostalgic sign off before I´m headed back homeword this weekend. I don´t quite believe that the homestretch is here again.

Tek Oyanik,

Xantel (andrea)