Travelers to the Other World : A Maya View of North America [1 ed.] 9780826348906, 9780826348883

Citation preview

A n t h rop o l o g y / L at i n Am e r i c a

Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, now deceased,

“ Robert Laughlin is a distinguished anthropologist who, among other things, is the author of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, a project

Project, one of the best known long-term field research

that he accurately describes as “the most comprehensive dictionary of a native

projects in anthropology. Robert M. Laughlin is curator

language in the New World” and which took him fourteen years to complete.

emeritus of Mesoamerican Ethnology of the National

Tzotzil is the language of the Zinacantec Maya and, in 1963, in connection

Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

with his dictionary research, Laughlin decided to invite two of his Zinacantec

Carol Karasik is a poet, writer, and editor who has

collaborators, Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, to accompany him to the

worked on books and films in the fields of anthropology,

United States—a place no Zinacantec had ever been.

art, ecology, and educational philosophy. She lives in Chiapas, Mexico.

“This was the equivalent of asking two of his non-Maya colleagues to travel with him to the moon. . . .   Laughlin flipped the conventions and made Teratol and Péres the observers and himself the informant.”—Foreword, “Visits to the Underworld,” Peter Canby “This book is filled with the varieties of human experience and expression as they are seen, heard, and felt by two innocents abroad, the first Mayas to describe the United States, Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres. Impelled by the wicked desire to change masks with my companions, so that I would become the superior native and they the unwitting and incredulous ethnologists, I invited Romin and Antzelmo to describe ‘gringoland.’ They show us another world, so familiar to us, so strange to them, where their fears were allayed by their spirit of high adventure and exploration, by their ready appreciation of the sometimes ridiculous, sometimes beautiful sights that awaited them. Of course it was they who had the last laugh as they placed in my hands a Mayan mirror, in which is revealed the curious,

Antzelmo and Romin flanked by B. N. Colby (left) and Robert Laughlin, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1963.

scary, and bizarre behavior of their host and his countrymen.”—Robert Laughlin, Travelers to the Other World

Lore Colby.

Tra velers  to the Other World

were important participants in the Harvard Chiapas

Teratol and Péres

Tra velers  to the Other World A M aya Vie w o f  No r th Am e r ic a

Jacket photo by Helga Gilbert

unmpress.com

Jacket design by Deborah Flynn Post

800–249–7737

other cultures, has long been a tradition in the English-speaking world. This book turns the

tradition on its head and records what is surely the first Maya literary exploration of the United States. The authors were Tzotzil-speaking Zinacantec Maya who accompanied Robert Laughlin, the compiler of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, on two trips to the United States. These were action-packed journeys. On the initial voyage, in 1963, they were in the United States for the assassination of President Kennedy. “The murderer had never met the President. He never had spoken a single word to him. He didn’t even know him!” one of the Zinacantecos reports. They also met Margaret Mead at an American Anthropological Association meeting and flew on their first plane, which they referred to as a “buzzard machine.” They also visited the Navajo and Zuni reservations. On the second trip, in 1967, they stormed the Pentagon with a protest march and met the Mexican actor Cantinflas, who had just had a facelift, in New York City. It took Laughlin several years to persuade his

Romin Teratol and

companions to write about their travels. Laughlin notes

Antzelmo Péres

to Zinacantán, “If I tell people what I saw, nobody

that Romin Teratol confided to him before returning will believe me.” Published here with Laughlin’s more

isbn 978-0-8263-4888-3

University of New Mexico Press

T

 r avel writing, the literary exploration of

academic account of his introduction to life among the

™xHSKIMGy348 83zv*:+:!:+:!

Zinacantec Maya, these remarkable travelogues shed light on both Maya and American societies. Translator and Coordinator, Robert M. Laughlin

Editor, Carol Karasik

Travelers to the Other World

• • •

Tr avelers to the Other Wor ld A Maya View of  North America • • • by Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres Translator and Coordinator, Robert M. Laughlin Editor, Carol Karasik

University of New Mexico Press

•

Albuquerque

© 2010 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Torre, Domingo de la. Travelers to the other world : a Maya view of North America / by Romin Teratol ; translator and coordinator, Robert M. Laughlin ; editor, Carol Karasik. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-8263-4888-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Tzotzil Indians. 2. United States—Description and travel. 3. Zinacantán (Mexico)—Social life and customs. 4. Torre, Domingo de la—Travel—United States. 5. Peres Peres, Antzelmo—Travel—United States. 6. Laughlin, Robert M. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax. Spanish & Tztozil I. Karasik, Carol. II. Title. F1221.T9T67 2010 917.30409’046—dc22 2010013695

Selections from Travelers to the Other World: A Maya View of North America first appeared in “Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax: Sundries from Zinacantán,” by Robert M. Laughlin. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 25. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980.

• Let them not fall below the road

Or above the road.

Let nothing afflict

Or assail them

Behind

Or before.

Put them on the green path,

The green road.



—The Popol Vuh

Contents Acknowledgments 9 Tzotzil Maya Pronunciation

11

Visits to the Underworld by Peter Canby

13

First Steps

23

Innocents Abroad and Back Home

57

Voyager’s Prayer

69

Part I: Journey to the American West

71

Part II: Journey to the American East

165

Afterword 225 Literature Cited

239

Photos Follow Page

242

Acknowledgments

a

t a time when everyone spoke of the disintegration of the

American family, it was remarkably heartening and strange to participate in the welcome extended to my friends Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres as they traveled across the United States and were invited into the homes of my family members, of my wife’s family, and of my friends and their grandparents, parents, mothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts.1 Romin and Antzelmo never commented on our clan system, but it must have seemed familiar. My deepest thanks, then, to those who opened their doors and warmed our souls with spirits, regaled us with lively talk, and supplied us bountifully with bed and board: the Cancians, Colbys, Colliers, Davises, Laughlins, Merrills, Vogts, and Wolfes. Other friends who extended their hospitality were Sally Barksdale, the late Concepción Bermejillo de Cuevas, Victoria Bricker, Jane Geer, and John Haviland. Genaro Quintana of Pojoaque, New Mexico, whose voice I have heard but whose face I have

9

Acknowledgments

never seen, included Romin and Antzelmo in his family’s Christmas celebration. To all of these and others whose names I do not know, but who welcomed my friends to the world that lies “beneath their magic mountain,” I express my gratitude. Marcia Bakry and David Pentecost aided in the preparation of the illustrations. Peter Canby’s “Visit to the Underworld” provides the general public with a strong bridge to the Mayan vision. Seldom mentioned by my fellow travelers, who characteristically take their wives for granted, was my wife, Mimi, who provided us with a home and lifted our spirits when at times they sank so low. She, too, is an invisible presence in all the English words that follow, sharpening their edges and polishing their faces. This book is Romin and Antzelmo’s; I hope that the voice I have given them is nearly their own. They have quickened our lives and taught us to see anew. —Robert M. Laughlin Note 1. I have employed the Tzotzil names for my companions rather than the Spanish, Domingo de la Torre and Anselmo Pérez Pérez.

10

Tzotzil Maya Pronunciation

f

or those game enough to pronounce the Tzotzil words, the

vowels are a as in father, e as in gem or a in fame, i as in safari, o as in cold or the au of caught, u as in the oo of moon. The j is h, as in Na Chij; tz is ts, as in Tzotzil; x is sh, as in Xun. An apostrophe (’ ) signifies a constriction of the throat, as in “uh-oh,” Brooklynese “bottle,” and the Tzotzil proper name Petu’. Apostrophes following the consonants ch, k, p, t, and tz indicate glottalization, which gives the consonant an explosive quality, as in K’obyox. Stress is on the final syllable unless marked with an acute accent.

11

Visits to the Underworld Peter Canby

y

ears ago, I spent a period of time in the remote Maya high-

lands of Chiapas and Guatemala. What I found in there was, to me, a seductive revelation—small houses with high-peaked thatch roofs and the smells of wood smoke and damp lanolin suffusing the air; tiny colonial-baroque chapels inside which the vacant eyes of saint-effigies peered through incense-heavy gloom. Like other visitors, I developed the powerful sense of having been transported into a parallel universe, a universe charged with a moral significance long vanished from my own. On more occasions than I can readily count, however, this reverie would be shattered by villagers seemingly determined to find out how I’d arrived in their particular hamlet. In response to their interrogations, I’d motion towards the far horizon and, in an area over which jets seldom flew, explain that I’d come from the north by plane. “And how much did that cost?” they’d demand triumphantly as if I’d already confirmed their worst suspicions.

13

Visits to the U nderworld

“Three or four hundred dollars,” I’d answer, halving the actual cost. “Ah ha!” they’d respond, as if I’d just resolved their ongoing debate. For a while, I took these encounters to be part of the inevitable result of coming from a rich region to a poor one, but they were persistent and similar enough that I gradually came to understand them as underlain by something else. Traditional Maya such as the Zinacantec, whom Bob Laughlin so vividly and sympathetically portrays in Travelers to the Other World, exist in a universe dominated by the sun, whose daily progress across the sky is made possible only by careful ritual conducted by intricate hierarchies of religious elders. These elders, however, must also manage the underworld, whose teeming forces are the source of the earth’s riches. In the Maya world, the underworld is all those places in which the sun doesn’t hold sway: caves, nighttime everywhere and, on a diurnal basis, along the horizon where the sun’s influence is weak. By waving to the horizon to explain my provenance, therefore, I was merely confirming what my interrogators already suspected: that the pale-skinned person before them, untutored in the proper ways of the Maya and able to spend extravagant sums to travel from the northern horizon, was in fact an underworld creature—rich, untutored, and potentially dangerous. By now, it’s no longer unusual for pale-skinned people from the north to descend on remote Maya hamlets. Nor is it unheard of for

14

Visits to the U nderworld

Chiapas and Guatemalan Maya to make the perilous trek to the United States, where they have learned to mow the lawns and clean the offices of the underworld people who live there. Despite these confluences, the Maya world and the world of what one Mayanist, Linda Schele (confusing her cardinal directions), sometimes referred to as “the West,” remain far apart. Among other things, the traditional Maya vision of the underworld continues to be surprisingly robust. This is perhaps because it works so well as metaphor. After all, what have the pale-skinned people ever brought the Maya but danger, trouble, and disruptive wealth? And now that the influence of the pale-skinned underworld people has become so much greater, the need for the Maya to successfully manage it has become more important than ever. Travel writing—the literary explorations of other cultures—has long been a tradition in the English-speaking world. The great virtue of Robert Laughlin’s Travelers to the Other World is that it turns this tradition on its head and records what is surely the first Maya literary exploration of the United States. Laughlin is a distinguished anthropologist who, among other things, is the author of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, a project that he accurately describes as “the most comprehensive dictionary of a native language in the New World” and which took him fourteen years to complete. Tzotzil is the language of the Zinacantec Maya and, in 1963, in connection with his dictionary research,

15

Visits to the U nderworld

Laughlin decided to invite two of his Zinacantec collaborators, Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, to accompany him to the United States—a place no Zinacantec had ever been. This was the equivalent of asking two of his non-Maya colleagues to travel with him to the moon, but the original intent seems innocent enough: Laughlin wanted both unbroken time with his collaborators and also access to the linguist Lore Colby, who was then in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working on a Tzotzil grammar. But the undertaking also seems to have been something of a rebellion on Laughlin’s part against the methodologically rigid conventions then dominant in anthropology. Laughlin refers to a “wicked desire to change masks.” Instead of his playing the “unwitting and incredulous” ethnologist and his Zinacantec collaborators playing the traditional role of the “superior native,” Laughlin flipped the conventions and made Teratol and Péres the observers and himself the informant. In the end, there were two trips, the first—to Santa Fe, Zuni, and San Francisco—in 1963, and the second—to Washington, D.C., and other parts of the Northeast—in 1967. Laughlin alludes to the fact that by undertaking these voyages, the Zinacantecs were certain they’d die and never return to Zinacantán, but they said farewell to their families and went ahead anyway. Once in the United States, Laughlin’s newly deputized anthropologists had a lot to observe and carefully noted details from the bizarrely pedestrian to the historically significant. On the initial voyage, they were in the United States at the time of

16

Visits to the U nderworld

John F. Kennedy’s assassination, met Margaret Mead at an American Anthropological Association meeting (they were unimpressed), and flew on their first plane (which they refer to as a “buzzard machine”). On the second trip, they ate in an Internal Revenue Service cafeteria, stormed the Pentagon (as part of a protest march), and met, as they ran to a New York bus terminal, the Mexican actor Cantinflas—just back from a facelift. In relating their experiences, Teratol and Péres are both goodhumored and clearly terrified. Since the United States is, for them, underworld—a place where the conventions of normal Maya conduct do not apply—they often fear, when meeting new people, that they’ll be murdered, robbed, or abducted. But it is in their casual asides that the strangeness of their situation is best revealed. Note, for example, Teratol’s description of a trip across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel: “One highway passed over the ocean, but three times we reached the ocean floor. That’s where the highway went, along the firmness of the earth on the ocean floor. When the road went up to the top of the ocean again, the ships went under it. When the road went down to the floor of the ocean, lights were shining at the bottom of the water. Traffic cops were standing at the bottom of the ocean.” Or note Teratol’s description of anti-Johnson banners in the Pentagon march: “Some had brought pictures of a baby carried by his mother. They said this was a picture of the president, because the president was still a baby. He didn’t know right from wrong yet, he did

17

Visits to the U nderworld

anything he pleased, because he was a baby, he still sucked his thumb. When they gathered by the statue of Lincoln, people shouted over a loudspeaker. They told about the president’s way of thinking, that he had no reason in his head.” Laughlin notes that Teratol confided to him, before returning to Zinacantán, that “if I tell people what I saw, nobody will believe me.” And it’s a bit difficult to gauge what the effect of the voyage had on the two travelers. Laughlin says it took several years to persuade Teratol and Péres and to sit down and write their accounts of their travels. When he was finally successful, we are somehow not surprised to learn that the actual writing took place in Laughlin’s colonial house, which had been restored by the poet W. S. Merwin, in San Cristóbal de las Casas—the capital of highland Chiapas. Romin Teratol died in 1977 after an affair with an American artist and after repeated bouts of drinking (excessive alcohol consumption is not unusual among religious officials in Zinacantán). Antzelmo Péres also struggled with alcohol and died in 1997 at the age of fifty-five. But in many ways the legacy of their epic voyage to the New World has played out in the next generation. In 1982, Laughlin helped Antzelmo Péres, along with Romin Teratol’s son, Xun, form a writers’ cooperative called Sna Jtz’ibajom, or The House of the Writer. In 1989, Sna Jtz’ibajom created Teatro Lo’il Maxil, or Monkey Business Theatre,

18

Visits to the U nderworld

and began producing original collaborative plays. Laughlin coaxed Ralph Lee, the director of the Mettawee River Theatre Company and founder of the Village Halloween parade in New York City, to direct the group, which he did for the next ten years. Both Sna Jtz’ibajom and Lo’il Maxil have won numerous awards including, for Sna, the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes: Artes y Tradiciones Populares, Mexico’s highest award for Indian cultural achievement. But Laughlin chooses to end his account with another series of trips back into the underworld. On three occasions in the 1990s, Monkey Business Theatre was invited by a migrant workers’ organization to perform before an audience of migrants picking fruits and vegetables in Immokalee, Florida. Immokalee is part of a region of Florida characterized by widespread debt peonage and referred to not long ago by a Justice Department official as “ground zero for modern slavery.” In their audience, migrant workers—including a number from Chiapas and at least one who addressed them in Tzotzil, told them about the horrors of their conditions: “We suffer a lot here, because we came as wetbacks. We have to cross deserts, hide in sewer drains, because if the immigration officers see us, they send us back where we came from. They look for us on horseback, on motorcycles, with airplanes, with dogs. When a plane passes over, we cut down a tree and hide under it or we use the tree as an umbrella.”

19

Visits to the U nderworld

Others told of buying clothes that were infested with fleas, of being forced to drink water contaminated with pesticides, and of sleeping with cockroaches and rats. “Many return in a coffin,” one of the Maya dramatists noted of the Immokalee migrants. “Others lose their lives without anyone knowing their names.” Laughlin notes that the trips to Florida made a great impression on the dramatists. In Immokalee, they were referred to as “Zapatistas” and threatened by the ranchers’ men. To the delight and amazement of the migrants, they marched down main street in their native costumes. During one of their nighttime productions—lit by automobile headlights—someone threw a bottle that struck one of the actors. The show went on. In Immokalee they also, according to Laughlin, began recording the voices of the undocumented workers and producing Immokalee-specific plays including Trabajadores en el Otro Mundo (Workers in the Other World). Laughlin observes that in doing all this, the dramatists were effectively completing a circle set in motion when Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres made their original voyages to the underworld, that the members of the second generation were becoming not “objective anthropologists” but “advocacy anthropologists”—in other words, that they had transformed themselves from being the objects of academic studies to being the initiators.

20

Visits to the U nderworld

But it might be just as true to argue that the dramatists were learning to do what Maya religious elders had always done, to use their art to manage the teeming, unruly, and dangerous world around them.

21

First Steps

l

ong before Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres accompanied

me to what was for them the mysterious other world of the United States, we had already shared a wealth of experiences, become deeply involved in one another’s lives. When my wife and I took our first steps to Zinacantán forty-five years ago, Romin, and later Antzelmo, served as guides, teachers, collaborators, friends. In those days, anthropology students from dominant societies set out to observe the customs of people who were no longer called “primitive” but were minorities whose ways of life were enveloped in mystery, creating what we considered exotic behaviors. Some field researchers thought it their job to track down willing “informants” and submit them to batteries of questions. Many anthropologists chose to preserve a hierarchical, superior stance, while others, like myself, committed themselves to adapting as best they could to the native society, which meant learning a language whose very name—Tzotzil Maya—was

23

First Steps

unknown to the general public. The strategy I followed was to become, as much as possible, a genuine part of Zinacantec society so as to make an “objective” report of it. My impulses stemmed from childhood. As a boy, I had a map of Indian reservations over my bed. When I was seven, James R. Garfield, son of the president and former secretary of the interior, entrusted to me a beaded belt that he said the Navajos had given him. With the passage of years, I devoted my summers to bird-watching, first at the Smithsonian Institution’s Barro Colorado Center in Panama, then under Alexander Skutch in Costa Rica, and finally at Rancho Grande in Venezuela. But seeing that a career in ornithology would demand the collecting of birds and measuring their feathers, I decided that this was not the life I wanted to live. During a summer with the Friends’ Service, building a school in a little town in the state of Puebla, I became fascinated with the very different way of life of Mexican campesinos. I decided to begin my career as an anthropologist at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City, where I had the great fortune to be a student in the last class of Miguel Covarrubias. But the endless “sympathy strikes” and graying hair of my Marxist classmates convinced me that it would be years before I could attain a degree. I then served briefly as a volunteer for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) among the Mazatec in Oaxaca, who were forced to abandon their homes before they were covered by the waters of the Miguel Aleman Dam. There I witnessed the Mexican government’s

24

First Steps

cruelty to the Indians. People were living in rock fields and in towns where it was said that even the fleas had died. Then I returned to my country to enroll in Harvard University. After a year of course work I landed in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, in September 1958, a graduate student in search of a thesis topic in a Tzotzil Maya community. To mark my sympathy for the Indian people, I took my first steps clad not in shiny shoes, but in handmade huaraches. When I arrived in the hamlet of Chilil, my sandals were noted with surprise and commented on approvingly. Nevertheless, the appearance of a stranger was not welcome in this community. A few weeks before, residents had accused their shamans of witchcraft and slain every one. When I asked if someone could provide me with a meal I was told, “We don’t sell tortillas.” Finally, a family agreed to my request, but as I sat in their hut no one would speak to me. Indeed, when a neighbor called to the owner, he shouted back to him at length through the closed door. To this unfriendliness was added days and nights of pouring rain that left the floor of my quarters in the one-room, empty clinic under inches of water. Dispiritedly, I returned to San Cristóbal. There I borrowed a room in the INI, where, in the late afternoons, I was able to chat in Spanish with three men from San Lorenzo Zinacantán who worked as puppeteers. At these gatherings I tried to learn as much as I could of their culture while they assailed me with their questions. “Did you come alone?” “Is your mother alive?” “Is your father alive?” “How many are

25

First Steps

there in your family?” “When are you leaving?” “Is your country hot or cold?” “Does corn grow there?” “How long does it take to get to the United States?” “Does the sun reach there?” “It’s true isn’t it that you in the United States eat babies?” “Do American men only have sex at the full moon?” “Who do you pray to, who are your gods?” Emboldened by their friendliness, I decided to walk to Zinacantán even though I was warned against it by the Ladinos, non-Indians, of San Cristóbal, who told me with relish how a poor, bearded German had gotten lost wandering in neighboring Chamula and who, when he stopped some women and tried to ask the way, was hacked to pieces with machetes. I set off boldly on the muddy path, which seemed to be leading me to Chamula. I branched off into a cornfield where I came upon a Chamula cutting down weeds with his machete. “Zinacantán?” I asked with my heart in my throat. Indifferently, he pointed his machete in the direction I was going. As dusk was falling, I reached Zinacantán, nestled under Muk’ta Vitz, the “Great Mountain” where I had been told resided the ancestral Father-Mother gods. The green valley was dotted with high-peaked thatch roofs that protected the wattle-and-daub or adobe walls of the one-room houses. At the town hall, to my great relief, I spotted my first Zinacantec acquaintance, Romin Teratol, who gave me directions to the house of our friend Chep Xantis: “You go past the three crosses and take the trail to the left up the hill.” The trail snaked up the hill through the heavy green growth of corn plants that towered over my head,

26

First Steps

forming a canopy that obscured the twilit sky. With trails branching off in every direction, the hillside became a maze. As I leaned clumsily on one foot, my huarache pulled off by the mud, a white-haired woman stood eying me. “Chep?” I asked. She nodded upwards. When I called out to him, no one answered. Suddenly there he was, gun in hand, sure that I must be a robber. I asked if I could spend the night in his house. Astonished, he urged me to go down to the clinic. No thanks. At last he ushered me into his house. On the hard-packed dirt floor stood three hearth stones, a round clay griddle on top, a metate and metate platform to one side. Strips of dried meat hung from a wire over the fire. Chep’s wife, holding her child, sat on a petate (a straw mat), her legs drawn under her. Their faces were lit by the kerosene lamp. In one corner stood a single pole and board bed, a double board bed, no mattress. Chep explained there were no cushions because of the rats. There were three tiny chairs, a table, two chests, and a broken fiddle with two horsehair strings. There were many clay pots of all sizes, one of them four feet tall. Chep’s wife served me scrambled eggs in a bowl and offered salt and a bunch of tortillas, which to my annoyance crumbled in my hands when I tried to use them, Indian fashion, as a spoon. While Chep and I talked, his wife, who knew no Spanish, asked if I, so outlandishlooking, with blue eyes, could be a Lacandón Indian! Chep, laughing, told her not to worry, I wasn’t nearly that dangerous.

27

First Steps

After supper, Chep laid a petate on the floor for me to sleep on and gave me a blanket. It was so peaceful, the sound of falling embers, quiet snores, and the home enveloped in cricket song. At four thirty in the morning, Chep’s wife rose, and soon I heard the corn being ground on the metate while smoke from the fire filled the room. A single pencil-thin beam of light shone down through the roof peak, announcing dawn. When I left, Chep exclaimed with pride that I was the first American to sleep in an Indian’s house in Zinacantán, in his house! Just before All Souls’ Day in November 1959, I returned to begin my year of fieldwork, followed three weeks later by my wife, Mimi. We spent our first days in an apartment on the main square of San Cristóbal with linguist Lore Colby, my Chiapas Project predecessor, poring through her word lists and devising the first correct alphabet for the Tzotzil language. Following my advice, Nick and Lore Colby hired Romin, then twenty-five years old, to be their principal collaborator. Though Romin had only three years of schooling, he became a sacristan, accumulating a great store of ritual knowledge. Unsuccessful years of corn farming were followed by roadwork and finally his position as puppeteer and agent of INI, where he gained a perspective on the regional differences among the highland towns of Chiapas. Curious about the outside world, he agreed to work for the Colbys. Even then he was inquiring about the cost of papers to enter the United States. Romin risked public ostracism by taking us into his family compound at a time when most Zinacantecs regarded anthropologists as

28

First Steps

pale apparitions from the underworld. We moved into the household of Romin’s compadre, Maryan, and his family. When sober, Maryan was very affectionate with his wife, Xunka, and his two little sons. The boys, using sticks and a rope, played at carrying loads of kindling, and when they tired of that game, raced their prized toy car. In the evenings Xunka groomed her husband’s and boys’ heads, catching and scrupulously chewing with a bite each nit. Never before had I seen nit-picking. But when Maryan, in a drunken rage, threw chairs at his wife, Mimi and I were forced to escape. We stayed most of the time in Romin’s mother’s house together with an ancient aunt as well as Romin and his wife, Matal, who laughed uproariously at everything I said. Only Romin knew Spanish. “Dumb as any stone,” my eyes weeping from the smoke, I sat in his house, recalling with misery my professor Clyde Kluckhohn’s injunction to commit to memory seventy-five words a day, as streams of unintelligible and unpronounceable sounds swirled around my feet. When a family dog came through the open door someone would shout, “Lok’an,” which Mimi and I thought was the dog’s name, not “Get out!” In desperation I would point to the plants surrounding the house and ask their names. At first Romin’s mother criticized him for telling me beliefs, but finally she did so herself, remarking, “Plant names—he knows everything!” One of the core beliefs that was totally new to us was the assigning of temperature to foods and to sicknesses and their remedies. We soon learned which were considered to be “hot” and which “cold.”

29

First Steps

Mimi, now suffering from morning sickness (“hot”) could not stomach cabbage soup (“cold”) for breakfast. Every morning the dogs would wait for her to run out the door, following right behind to receive their breakfast. She found it difficult to wrap the food in a crumbly tortilla before putting it in her mouth. One night, unable to swallow one more bit of tortilla, she secretly poked it in the fire. Smelling the smoke, the family rose up in alarm. “Who did that to the corn?” Privacy was another problem. We would go into the cornfield surrounding the house to try to brush our teeth without the neighbors’ kids spying on us as we carried out this strange operation. The cornfield was also the bathroom, but Mimi was seldom alone because it was the custom of the women to crouch down together to pee. For more serious business we discovered that geranium leaves were a soft, fragrant substitute for toilet paper. Rather than being cooped up all day in Romin’s mother’s house, we asked Romin if we could take a walk in the pine and oak woods that covered the slopes. This request was greeted with amazement. “For a Ladino to walk in the woods? Only murderers do that!” Hearing the beautiful ringing of the church bell, I asked about a visit to the church. “Visit the church? No one would want me to accompany you foreigners to church!” Trained in graduate school that the best way to start fieldwork was to get to know the people by paying them visits, I finally made that suggestion to Romin. He sat back and laughed hilariously,

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“Why in the world would you do that, what for?” My preposterous plan was met with, “We don’t visit someone just to see the face!” Mimi enjoyed going off to the countryside with Romin’s ancient aunt, Pil, whose nose was covered with wrinkles from always sitting on the smoky side of the fire. With her inscrutable expression, she practically never spoke and certainly never asked a question. Pil would sit quietly, chewing on twigs, baaing and clucking as she talked to the sheep grazing on the grassy slopes. In three weeks I was able to muster enough Tzotzil words to begin communicating. A neighbor offered to be my teacher. His first word for me to learn was the Tzotzil for vagina, telling me how much he liked it! Later, little boys loved to test me to see whether I knew the Tzotzil for penis. The passage of a month seemed to mark an important stage of my attempt to enter Zinacantec society. My teacher, Romin, now would make a show of laughing at my mistakes in Tzotzil, then firing questions at me ferociously and rapidly. The people’s constant repetition about important events boosted my language learning. At last I was hearing, “You aren’t a gringo, you can talk.” I set in motion my determination to become a Zinacantec by assuming a Tzotzil personal name. Unlike today, there were no Indians with the name of Roberto, and noting that in borrowed Spanish words the letter r was replaced with l, I decided to assume the name of the patron

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saint, San Lorenzo, becoming Lol. For her name Mimi chose the Tzotzil for Magdalena, Matal. I then translated Laughlin into what I thought was its Gaelic meaning, “Little Lake,” Bik’it Nab. And so, since that time I have been known as Lol Bik’it Nab. At this time, too, I began the process of adopting Zinacantec clothing by borrowing a neckerchief from Romin. When we walked together through town, people would stare at us so intently that Romin protested to me, “But we haven’t stolen anything!” With the greatest sensitivity and tact, Romin guided me through thickets of linguistic and cultural perplexity, sharing my excitement in the solution of intellectual riddles and my pleasure in the partial mastery of formal Zinacantec behavior. My teacher insisted that it was of prime importance that Mimi and I learn the complex system of etiquette: the greetings on the trail, the bowing to an older person and receiving a pat on the head, looking aside and speaking in a nasal falsetto. If you shook hands, you never grasped the other person’s hand, but simply slipped your hand into the other. Paying a visit, you slowed your footsteps when you entered a person’s yard and called out to ask first if the owner, the woman of the house, were there. The act of walking with another person had its rules, too, laid down by the men of Zinacantán, who walked first, followed by the women, both according to age. Mimi was appalled by this practice, as was my mother when I returned home and, without thinking, strode in front of her on the Princeton sidewalks! Once we found small wax Zinacantec

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figures. When we showed them to some of the men, they quickly lined them up with the males at the head of the line. Mimi then moved the women to the front and the men froze, then laughed. After awhile we realized that the common expression, “Mi li’ote?” “Are you here?” was questioning not the person’s presence, but rather whether they were in a mood to talk to you. All meetings of the religious officials required a pattern of formal speech, in couplets, accompanied by the necessary bowing. I noticed one official bowing and praying to another thirteen times, before advancing to the next official. My learning to bow and pray appropriately won their approval. Now I could join in on the endless joking at which Romin was a master. One day he accused me of being a witch, a thrower of sickness. “Why?” Holding his hands way out in front of his stomach, he said, “Look at your pregnant wife!” Romin’s wife, Matal, usually silent, could not resist imitating her husband when he arrived home drunk. Telling us that he had the eyes of a bull, but walked like an armadillo, she rolled her eyes enormously and stuck her wide tongue out sideways (something “never done” by women). Mimi had fewer opportunities than I to practice Tzotzil. On one occasion, when she met a Zinacantec woman in the park in San Cristóbal and they sat together on a bench conversing, she drew a crowd of curious Ladinos and Indians; at that time a foreign woman who spoke Tzotzil seemed to them to be nearly extraterrestrial.

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By then I had decided on a subject for my doctoral dissertation: the collection of folktales and myths, which I hoped would give me a reason for paying visits. When I proposed this to Romin, he thought it over and then named Manvel K’obyox, father of Maryan. Manvel was an old man, the husband of a shaman. Romin informed me that Manvel would always accompany his wife to her patient’s house and receive his due of cane liquor, which he enjoyed immensely, so there would be a good chance of us finding him tipsy and willing to tell a tale. Romin was quite right. As I listened to the Tzotzil streaming from Manvel’s mouth, it dawned on me that I was listening to the exploits of none other than Brer Rabbit. Now began my serious work. The tape recorder amazed and amused everyone, who expected it to talk back. Men sat on their haunches, watching me type on my portable Olivetti. I found that when a boy looked at a photograph of a bull, he wondered why one horn was shorter than the other; like most Zinacantecs, he could not recognize perspective. Their unfamiliarity was probably due to the fact that the priest reportedly had declared that a person whose picture was taken would lose his soul. It is believed that every individual has a soul divided into thirteen parts. Every man and woman also possesses a companion animal spirit, which the ancestor gods watch over in a corral within the magic mountain, Muk’ta Vitz. When Christmas came, Romin decided that we were ready to enter the church on Christmas Eve. As we walked on the floor, strewn with

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pine needles, the fragrance of the forest enveloped us. Men were kneeling on the left side of the church, women on the right. Old men knelt on their platter hats. On the high altar, the saints were draped in streaming, brightly colored ribbons that gave them the startling appearance of quetzal birds with human heads. In the side chapel stood the créche, a work of art the size of a small house whose walls were made of cypress boughs, the door flanked by fan palms, banana trees, and sugarcane. Yellow sedum, red geraniums, green palm leaves, and crimson bromeliads decorated the roof. Above rose a cross woven of white and red strips of paper tipped by a red “ear of corn” bromeliad. Inside were four pine trees laden with fruits of many kinds. On the altar, covered with moss and sporting a large red amaryllis, lay two Christ Children. While the church rocked with the sound of turtle shells being struck by corncobs, a dazed young American Jesuit from Baltimore performed his first mass. Attending mass was a spiritual trial for Mimi, who had gone to Catholic school while growing up in Costa Rica and had been branded by the nuns as something of a devil. She had determined never to cross the steps of a Catholic church, but as always she rose to the occasion. We had already learned that there were two ways of doing things, down to the finest detail: our way, which was “chopol,” wrong, and their way, “lek,” right. Every opportunity became a challenge, with the risk that we would be humiliated, but with the possibility that we would win their approval. I was gratified when told I was the

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first foreigner to be included in some activity. If this activity seemed to me to be physically or emotionally stressful, I could claim, at least to myself, that my endeavor was heroic. While Mimi was fascinated with different cultures, she did not anticipate being asked to try to become a Tzotzil. Not an anthropologist, not dedicated to charting native beliefs and behaviors, not in the process of advancing a career, she nevertheless met the demands of fieldwork with a doubly heroic response. I have postponed until now discussion of a major element of Zinacantec society in those years: pox (pronounced “pawsh”), or cane liquor. Drunkenness was rampant. While it did lead to violence, which was considered a lesser crime if the person was drunk, most often it brought forth shouts, screams, sobs, singing, and dancing. No matter of consequence occurred without the imbibing of pox. Every visit, almost every encounter with another person, particularly among men, required a bottle, whose contents in a formal situation were poured into a shot glass that was offered to everyone present in order of age and gender. If a younger man did not carry an extra bottle in which to pour off his drink, he had to down the pox. Great thought was put into measuring the significance of the occasion and one’s part in it, lest one be criticized or humiliated. The size of the bottle or bottles, their number, and the strength of the pox were taken into account. Even in the church where the priest had forbidden liquor, religious officials could be seen secretly satisfying their need.

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For a young anthropologist wishing to adapt to the culture, this was a serious problem. I could not participate in any activity without eventually becoming drunk. Only ten days after my arrival I went to the wedding of a neighbor of Romin’s. Plied with liquor, I was asked, “Will you dance? Dance!” Singing, I returned to my home, apparently leaving Romin’s compadre to spend the night in a ditch. I remember walking down a marine-like trail where all the trees waved to and fro like seaweed. About 7 p.m. Romin woke me up. I was sitting on a chair before the fire, but how I got there and how I got past all that seaweed was a mystery to me. Following another encounter, I noted in my journal that after downing ten shots “I walked somewhat unsteadily.” When I was in a cantina one afternoon and felt I had drunk all I wished, I told my companions that I was going home. They protested strongly, “Chickens and turkeys go to roost early, but we are men!” An intimate part of any religious ceremony hosted by a member of the religious hierarchy was the sharing of drink. In order to participate as an observer I was required to accept all drinks. Unfortunately, the following morning I could recall little of what I had witnessed. At least a tale teller only required a coke bottle of pox, shared by the two of us, to accompany his story. Whenever Mimi was met by a Zinacantec woman, she was nearly always asked a single question, “Does your husband beat you?” I never did, but on rereading my field notes for this introduction I was

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astonished to see that there was hardly a day that ended without me being drunk. On nights when we were staying in San Cristóbal, Mimi thought it more than reasonable that she should drive me home. But this would have been the height of humiliation for a Zinacantec man. Though there was seldom another vehicle on the dirt road from Zinacantán to San Cristóbal, it seems miraculous I never had an accident. Then I faced the ordeal of trying to slip into our flea-ridden sleeping bag. Emerging from our cocoon in the morning required supreme dexterity on both our parts. When we were spending the night in a Zinacantec home, they laughed over our helplessness, exclaiming that if the house caught on fire we would never get out alive. After seven months’ exposure to what Dr. Johnson termed “the boundless chaos of a living speech” and with frequent recourse to Lore Colby’s dictionary, I felt sufficient confidence to begin recording the folktales and myths that I hoped would reveal the wisdom of Zinacantec life. Though my expectations were not so easily satisfied, I returned to Harvard after a year with reels of tape whose words later appeared in print in English and Tzotzil (Laughlin 1977). I learned that Mayan time is cyclical, that history was a series of repetitions of similar events, with no concept of progress. Traditional knowledge would be applied or adapted to current events. But this could cause confusion. When Romin’s mother talked about the Mexican Revolution, he asked if that was when the trees danced to stop the soldiers from advancing up the trail to Zinacantán—a question that

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took his mother by surprise as she reproved him for his ignorance, informing him that that had happened long ago. A key figure in the mythology is the Earth Lord or Thunderbolt, god of the wilderness and provider of rain, who often is envisioned as a Ladino plantation owner. When a new house is built, prayers are addressed to him, thanking him for the use of the construction materials, which then were his trees and mud, and requesting his protection. Parents warn their children not to run, for fear they will fall and lose their soul to the earth. Witches sell an enemy’s soul to the Earth Lord, who puts the soul to work in his cane fields, telling the soul that it may only return to the upper world when the soles of its sandals have worn down, but the sandals he provides have iron soles. If someone suddenly became wealthy, it was assumed that the money was a gift from the Earth Lord, who, in the event that the person grew arrogant, would transform himself into a snake and put an end to that person’s life. No sooner would a storyteller conclude an account of Cinderella than he or she would regale me with the trials of a man who became fascinated with a beautiful flower that spoke to him, confiding that she was the Earth Lord’s daughter. Testing his bravery, she invited him to her home. One night, unhappy over his behavior, she turned her back to him in bed and became a huge snake. One of my principal tale tellers was Tonik Nibak, who had rebelled against the traditional patriarchal system and worked as a promoter for INI, thus bringing accusations against her for sleeping with the

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male promoters. She and Mimi became fast friends. Her tales were spoken with a grammatical, literary sophistication far exceeding that of the men. Amazingly enough, these were the first tales of an American Indian woman to be published (Laughlin 1977). Her hex against an unfaithful husband recently appeared in Incantations by Mayan Women (Past 2005). Mimi had hoped that we could write children’s books using some of these tales, but as Robert Burkitt, a collector of Mayan tales in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, observed in 1916, the end of a particular tale “became of a nature not adapted to ears polite” (Danien 2005: 10). In today’s schools they would be rated “R” for violence, sex, and obscenity. Relying on my personal observations and these tales, I conceived my Ph.D. thesis, “Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on Zinacantan Courtship and Marriage” (Laughlin 1963). Unlike today’s pattern of frequent elopement, courtship was an arduous affair usually lasting two to three years. When a young man decided whom he wanted to marry, after receiving his parents’ permission, they would make a surprise assault on the girl’s house. There, on their knees, and with the customary offering of pox, they would ask the parents for their daughter’s hand. If they accepted, the boy would pay the brideprice: frequent visits, always bringing gifts of food and drink, especially on every fiesta, and eventually a year of bride service, helping his future father-in-law in his corn farming. A year or two later the houseentering ceremony took place in the fiancée’s home, where all the

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relatives became compadres and the two families together chose an “embracer,” or wedding godfather, who, in times of difficulty between husband and wife, would serve as mediator. For the wedding, the groom was bedecked in velvet knickers and turban, while the bride, in a white huipil decorated with chicken feathers, was draped in so many shawls her face was barely visible. Following a church wedding, the groom’s family held a great celebration requiring huge amounts of food and drink. Here, everyone at the banquet became compadres. The godfather counseled the couple and then the men and women danced in two lines, the men in front and the women behind them. At a two-day wedding, I witnessed one man after another, and then one woman after another, drop in a drunken stupor. The traditional marriage, where the girl had no choice in a partner, has provoked a demand for change among the women of the rebel Zapatista movement. By elopement, however, the opportunity for the two families to become well known to each other, and for the god-​ father to carry out a mediating role, has been lost. Turning from wedding tales to dreams, I soon discovered that in Zinacantán, as in all American Indian cultures, dreams were of vital importance, a medium for communication between humans and the gods. Dreams could be positive, promising a good harvest or confirming the power of an individual to become a shaman, or they could be negative, warning of future dangers and mishaps. Frequently Romin would wake Matal in the middle of the night to tell her of his latest

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dream (usually a nightmare). Unlike our dreams, these were replete with long conversations and even prayers. My skepticism of the value of dreams was shattered during the Spring Festival in San Cristóbal when, after watching from our apartment window a group of Zinacantecs ride the Ferris wheel, the ribbons of their hats flying in the air, we fell victim to the late-night noise invading our sleep. I awoke the next morning, trembling. It seemed that I had seen Romin’s neighbor, Antun Montixyo, a shaman who when sober could be charming, but when drunk very aggressive, claiming he was a witch. Years later, indeed, he was castrated and murdered by a shaman at Kalvario, the principal mountain shrine of Zinacantán. There was Antun in my dream, holding aloft his axe and pointing it at my head as he approached. He became smaller and smaller while his axe grew larger and larger until he disappeared and his axe blade touched my forehead. That morning I returned to Romin’s house. His mother and aunt rushed to the gate. They conspiratorially ushered me inside. “Do you know what Antun did last night? He came out of his house, very drunk, and waving his axe, he walked over to your car, threatening to cut up its tires.” And so, after collecting tales, I decided to collect dreams. After ten months Romin refused to answer me in Spanish, or would use Spanish for just the beginning words of a sentence. I marked the increase in my ability to master Tzotzil by donning Zinacantec men’s clothing, piece by piece. First the neckerchief, then the shirt, then

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the pink tunic, the white shorts and red sash; for the Fiesta of San Sebastián in January, the wide-brimmed, beribboned woven palm hat; and finally, for the Fiesta of San Lorenzo in August, the black robe and high-backed ceremonial sandals. As we walked to the house of a weaver whom we would commission to weave the robe, before we offered her a bottle, Romin listed all the possible reasons to tell the weaver why she should lower her price. To commission a sandal maker in Chamula to provide me with sandals that had the proper thirteen-leveled soles, I had to present and drink a liter of pox. I came home and slept for ten hours. For me, the acquisition and wearing of native clothing was an adventure. For Mimi, dressing each day in the costume worn by every woman in the community was a denial of her identity. She chose to be among the few Zinacantec women who no longer walked barefoot. Of course, we could never look like Zinacantecs. The most influential elders attended fiestas wearing shabby old clothes in a futile effort to seem inconspicuous. In church we loomed like giraffes, a head taller than anyone else. When I wore shorts, people laughed at my skinny legs “as white as a corpse.” My long stride brought laughs, too. I discovered that parading in ceremonial sandals required a special high-stepping gait. Most striking for people were my blue eyes, denoting me as being a “Younger Brother Thunderbolt.” Trying to prove I was a man who could walk, I agreed to join Romin who was going to buy corn in San Lucas, 2,000 feet below Zinacantán. Leaving before dawn, we trudged through the shrubs,

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down the rough trail, I watching every step. The last drop was very steep, the trail winding back and forth in hairpin bends. The mules preceded us, “doing what horses do.” This they did with a frequency not easy to imagine, combined with the cloud of dust sent up by every hoof and huarache beat. After endless bargaining, we made the purchase and climbed halfway back up to sleep under the trees, nourished by tomato soup and raunchy jokes, particularly about my sharing a blanket with Romin. At 3 a.m. we downed a cup of coffee, chased the horses, and continued upward in the moonlight, under the stars, my companions pointing out to me Venus and the constellations. Romin spotted raccoon tracks. Everyone (myself excluded) delighted in hurling rocks at a hapless pig whose squeals brought peals of laughter. We reached home at 8:30, with every step an ache. On the way, Romin confided that his Matal was three months pregnant. In March, peach trees in bloom across the valley, we moved into Chep Xantis’s house where I had spent my first night in the town. After consuming my gift of pox, Chep agreed to rent me the house for ten pesos a month, then eighty US cents. Mimi had to learn to cook on the open hearth. In the fashion of Zinacantec women, she carried water from a distant well in a heavy clay jug strapped to her back. On one water trip a man asked her “to go to the woods to talk for a minute.” In our desire for fruit, we took the only Zinacantec vehicle, a truck, to the market in San Cristóbal, but frequently we had to make the four-mile,

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two-hour walk down the mountain. When I accompanied Zinacantecs on foot to San Cristóbal, I was obliged to run with them downhill the last half of the trip. Our neighbors never visited us. Why would they? Only Chep’s ancient mother came to inspect her home. Mimi watched as she picked up a bottle of vinegar and took a big swig, coughing uncontrollably. Suppressing her laughter, Mimi bade Chep’s mother good-bye. This was her last visit and yet, afterwards, she always greeted us as if we were one of the family. One morning we watched a strange man going from house to house below us. Then Romin rushed in, announcing the rumor that we had joined an American archeologist who wanted to make a survey of the magic mountain to steal its treasure. The man was collecting money at each house to hold a ceremony “to close our eyes.” Romin scuttled off while we waited anxiously. Soon we could hear the shamans’ voices rising and falling at a nearby cross shrine as they intoned the couplets to close our eyes. For a week we stayed home. I planted corn. Descending the trail, I asked one of the friendlier neighbors if we could go into town. “Why not?” When I explained our fears, he assured me that all had been forgotten. Our apartment provided a respite, but it also made us clearly aware of the racist nature of San Cristóbal. Indians were prohibited from walking on the sidewalks. Coming to town, still wearing our Indian clothes, we were pushed into the gutter. We saw how Indians were forced to sit

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at the back of the bus and how they were cursed, slapped, and thrown bodily through the back door. Incredulously we watched Ladinas waiting at the entrance to town grab the Indians’ produce, giving them practically nothing in return. Indian women never smiled in the city. When leaving their spot on the ground, we saw them sweep up their baby’s soul with their shawl. Ladino merchants deliberately mispronounced the little Tzotzil they knew. Indians complained of the “sour” food in the restaurants—food that was fried rather than boiled, Indian style. Even when a restaurant owner treated her Indian clients kindly, she would ask a tableful of men, “Do you want more, boys?” That we would not treat Indians with scorn was considered subversive by the Ladinos. Occasionally Romin and Matal would spend the night in our apartment, sleeping on the rug. Once our landlord, the mayor of San Cristóbal, a very decent man, perhaps the only honest mayor in the city’s history, who also owned a coffee plantation employing Indians, arrived at our door. As he came in, Romin extended his hand. Don Polo looked at Romin’s hand, paused, and then shook it. Soon the apartment became a sort of office where Zinacantecs felt much less anxiety reporting to me on their culture. In San Cristóbal, Mimi learned how differently Mexicans, or at least local Ladinos, judged a woman’s beauty, for when she became noticeably pregnant the Ladinos whistled at her. Romin told me he had heard that Tonik Nibak, no longer a young woman, had bound a piece of petate around her waist so that she would appear “redondita.”

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It was a mixed blessing to have the use of the Harvard Land Rover. Zinacantecs would line up constantly at our apartment door requesting rides to their hamlets. For many women this was their first ride on wheels and their car sickness was frequent. In fact, vehicles were such a novelty that when I drove up the rough rocky road, approaching a hamlet, the shepherdesses, their children, and their sheep darted into the shrubbery. Once when we had left the car in Zinacantán a man exclaimed, “The car must be weeping, all alone there.” There were constant requests for our Coleman lantern to light the way on a curing ceremony. One of the most persistent questions was, “What did it cost?” This was asked of everything imaginable, but especially clothes. Rather than buy a readymade neckerchief I decided to put one together myself. The corners of the neckerchief were adorned with red pompoms. “How much per ounce did the dye for your pompom cost?” And then, “Will you sell me your jacket?” “Will you give me a tostón (a fifty-centavo coin)?” But most tedious of all was the statement, “I want to talk to you,” which invariably was followed by the request for a loan, which customarily would be given to religious officials without interest. In this markedly patriarchal society, the complementarity between husband and wife was emphasized by the requirement that both be present to decide together whether to give the loan or refuse it. Bottles planted at our feet, men and women on their knees, the visits would last four hours until we finally gave in and received a bottle in our hands. This

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was the first step, which was marked by a hangover, then the second step, the request for an extension, marked by a hangover, and then the final deadline, marked by a hangover. Coming from a money economy, we did not expect that corn was often used as a substitute for money, but there was a major difference between the Indians’ and Ladinos’ attitude toward corn. When Zinacantecs at the market poured their corn with great care out of tin cups, it sounded like the lapping of waves on the seashore. To their great consternation, they would see Ladinos spilling corn and stepping on the fallen kernels. With amazement I watched a Zinacantec lick up atole that had spilt on the floor of the Land Rover. Customarily, when Chamulas were hired to clear, hoe, weed, or harvest in the cornfield, they would be paid with corn. After returning from a trip to his lowland cornfield, a man declared that having left his wife to stay at her mother’s, she was not given even a kernel of corn to maintain herself. When I told people that we were vegetarians because we did not want to make the animals suffer, one asked, “Doesn’t it hurt you to eat corn?” Families so valued the help of their sons in raising corn that when the subject of schooling was introduced they would respond, “Do you think you can eat paper?” At first, school attendance was required only for boys, so when teachers came to the house searching for eligible students, the parents dressed their sons in skirts. While Zinacantecs are very pragmatic, they are also very religious. Most conspicuous in Zinacantán are the religious officials who

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serve the saints in a four-level hierarchy of stewards, ensign-bearers, prefects, and alcaldes. It is they who command the most respect in a town where to be p’ij (smart) means to provide community service. Bedecked in heavy black woolen robes, red turbans, chaplets dangling a small silver cross, large silver coins alternating with red ribbons, they carry heavy staves or fine staffs of office. Greeting one another, they bow and kiss the other’s chaplet. They can be seen in procession, filling the churches or sitting lined up on benches before the church door, behind their rows of pox bottles. Here is a scene from the Middle Ages. We had never dreamt of the existence of a Mayan Catholicism where the saints are gods, Christ is the sun, and Mary, the moon. Processions are led by a flutist and two drummers, one with a large drum and one with a small drum. At the end of the procession a trio of fiddler, guitar player, and harpist march and play. When I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Romin and Antzelmo, I bought a 45 rpm record of Taos Christmas music. To my astonishment I heard the “Bolom Chon,” the signature piece of these trios in Zinacantán and other highland Maya communities, proving that this was a Spanish matachines melody dating back to the sixteenth century. With equal astonishment I discovered that the ensign-bearers’ black felt hats were marked on the inside rim “Kennel Club Hat, New York.” I was the first non-Indian to go to the Upper Cemetery where no priest had ever been. When I saw a coffin being carried to the cemetery

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and asked who had died, I was told, “San Antonio.” By this they meant the Steward of Saint Anthony. As the coffin was brought up the hill and laid to rest, the sacristans prayed in Latin. When I asked Romin’s Matal what she believed the afterworld to be like, she shook her head bemusedly, reprovingly, and asked, “Who do you know who has come back to tell?” At religious ceremonies or on formal occasions, the host accommodated our vegetarian diet by giving us, as a substitute for the chicken soup, two or three hard-boiled eggs and nothing to wash them down. I found it gratifying when the officials insisted I join them in their dancing and one of the gray-haired men would remove his ceremonial robe to place it over my head. It was less pleasant when they involved me in their off-color joking bouts, firing their double entendres, challenging me to respond appropriately. On one occasion I felt so ashamed at my inability “to be a man” that I ran out of the house sick to my stomach. Romin’s Matal thought that was a very understandable reaction. Every ceremony was punctuated by sky rockets that shot high into the clouds and released a blast that could be heard throughout the valley, informing everyone of each stage of the ceremony: the arrival of the officials, the beginning of the banquet, the end, and the departure. Occasionally a falling rocket would set a house afire. The highest, most costly, and cherished position in the first level of the hierarchy is that of the steward royal. As I became f luent in Tzotzil,

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the rumor spread that I was going to ask to be named steward royal. For years afterward it was believed that I had indeed served in that position and not reached old age “a leftover man.” I did not feel left over because another rumor, widely believed, was that my wife was an expert at making tortillas. Another activity that brought me further into Zinacantec society was my attendance at curing ceremonies. These rituals, often lasting all night, were held in the patient’s house, in the churches and the mountain shrines, where the shaman, acting as a lawyer, pleaded to Christ the Sun, Mary the Moon, the saints, the Father-Mothers, and the Earth Lords for the defense of the patient. During family visits to the sick, bursts of tears would alternate with gales of laughter shared by patient and visitors. Laughter was an integral part of all work, indeed of every activity. Despite the great stress on etiquette and ceremony, I frequently saw both children and adults acting out exaggerated greetings, mocking religious officials and shamans, and making fun of the most deeply held social and religious beliefs. It was when I witnessed a curing party kill a moth because they believed it to be a spy for their enemy, that I realized I could never be a true Zinacantec. It was difficult for me to believe that all the saints had emerged into the world from caves to become mankind’s protectors. My faith in herbal medicine was strained by the “cold” cure for mumps—salt and green tomatoes rubbed on the neck while a machete

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blade was drawn across and down the neck to reduce the swelling. But I was never so skeptical of traditional belief as some Zinacantecs who claimed that shamans were “only good for eating all the chickens” that they received in payment for their service. One day I was in our house in Zinacantán when Chep’s mother appeared to find me sorting plants. “What are they for?” I lied outrageously, explaining that they were for my wife’s delivery. She then wanted to know if they were boiled or not, if they were drunk or used just for bathing. She presented me with two gladiolus blooms to take back to Mimi. When I left, she sent her best wishes and wanted to know if we would bring the baby back to her house. When I said “yes,” her eyes gleamed. She kept repeating, “Who knows if it will be a boy or a girl.” After our daughter, Liana, was born in July, in a hospital in the capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, my mother insisted that Mimi have an infant care advisor. Miss V arrived at the apartment, speaking not a word of Spanish. For two weeks she hid from all Mexicans, who seemed to her to be a palpable menace. When Indians appeared, she quickly sought refuge in the bathroom where she had hidden her bottle of gin. Once, when she needed the bathroom’s services and it was occupied, she climbed downstairs, and though very much a Catholic, sneaked into the church courtyard across the street to do her business as fast as she could. Upon Miss V’s departure, we took Liana to our home in Zinacantán where a bread basket served as her cradle.

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But back in the apartment Liana would drive us so wild with her bouts of crying that we would take her down and leave her in the empty apartment below us. Invariably the black-shrouded Ladinas would call up, “Your baby is crying!” For the birth of Matal’s first child, the midwife gave her, after fourteen hours in labor, sulphur and gunpowder to warm her stomach and speed delivery. Six months later, when Matal told Mimi of the death of this little girl, she shook Mimi’s hand for the first time. Just before Romin, Antzelmo, and I set off on our trip to the eastern United States, Matal blessed our journey with the birth of her third child. It was not easy to be a mother, in Zinacantán or San Cristóbal. Shortly after Liana was born, she refused to nurse. Our aged compadre Xun Vaskis, a shaman who claimed to be over a hundred years old, offered to cure her. He knew she was suffering soul loss, which could be restored by prayer. First he passed an elderberry branch over her, and then he asked me for an egg to rub over her body. “Hard-boiled?” I asked. He laughed with astonishment and said, “That would kill her.” The next morning Liana nursed. Later, when we went to a person’s curing ceremony in Zinacantán, Liana just cried. Trying to be helpful, our hosts passed her from woman to woman, mother to grandmother, to nurse, but this was to no avail. Seeing that Mimi needed a baby shawl to cover Liana, Matal offered her one and showed her how to tie it.

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First Steps

In August I decided that Romin should be Liana’s godfather. This was a revolutionary act; although Indians often chose Ladinos to be compadres, Ladinos never chose Indians, since a major role of a compadre was to give a financial hand when needed. I called on Chep Xantis’s mother to ask for the key to our house. “Why do you want it?” “For pox.” “For whom?” “For Romin.” “Why? Who is going to be the godfather of your child?” “Who knows.” “Ha, I’m sure you’re asking Romin.” Sharp old gal, didn’t miss a trick, ever. It was amazing to see how fast the news spread in a town where privacy is valued so highly. After I, an Episcopalian, assured the priest that we were Catholics and he baptized our daughter Liana as Filomena, in Tzotzil, Pil, we offered a thanksgiving meal to our compadres, including Romin’s father. To our consternation we were told that we had not set the table East-West, the tablecloth was folded at the wrong end, the bottle was the wrong size and set at the West instead of the East, the hand-washing gourd was too small for communal washing, there was no salt offered, corn on the cob is a snack, and the eggs were fried in olive oil and not lard. As Romin’s father concluded with resignation, “Their customs are different. This is not a meal.” I concluded that it was a Mad Tea Party. Though the necessities of life forced me to be Romin’s employer, we became close friends. Our families remained in touch during births and deaths as we witnessed the early years of each other’s married lives. It was very rare for a Zinacantec woman to confide in anyone

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First Steps

outside the family, but Romin’s Matal greatly enjoyed telling my Matal about her life crises and about her own culture. For her children, Mimi became in their minds almost a second mother. In those days Romin seemed to have such strong diplomatic abilities we thought he would make a marvelous Mexican ambassador for human rights at the United Nations. Later, when I realized that I would need a Zinacantec to accompany me on a trip to the United States, Romin was the logical first choice.

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i

n my grand plan to compile a dictionary so comprehensive

that it would confound the Ladinos and my own people who still deny Indians a language, granting them to be only speakers of “dialects,” and wishing to have a third party to sharpen our wits, Romin and I chose Antzelmo Péres. A strikingly handsome bachelor of twenty-one, Antzelmo had made a lasting impression on me after I had witnessed his being hauled into court for “talking” to an unmarried girl. His selfdefense before the magistrate and justices of the peace was so eloquent and his self-assurance so manifest that he seemed a natural choice to join the word hunt. Antzelmo’s father had died years before, so he, too, lived with his mother, together with his younger brothers. His three years of schooling were followed by the usual corn farming and road-

work. His mental alertness was dramatically proven when, after a little over a week of training by Romin, he learned to write Tzotzil almost

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flawlessly. Unbeknownst to us both, Antzelmo had also initiated his career as a shaman. Romin, Antzelmo, and I began our endeavor to create a dictionary. Because the majority of Tzotzil roots are monosyllabic (CVC, consonant, vowel, consonant), I started at the beginning of the alphabet, tacking on suffixes to each possible combination, asking if there were such a word. Frequently they answered, “No, but there is another word. . . . ” And so I would also learn one new suffix after another to be tried out with the roots I thought I had covered already. Even in the first days after my arrival in Zinacantán, I had realized that Tzotzil was rich in onomatopoetic vocabulary, but I was not prepared for the enormous number of those words that we were to disclose, such as in the phrase, “the pig was walking here and there making chomping sounds (eating peach pits),” or words for “clip-clop,” “cocka-doodle-do,” “smash,” “crack,” “the sound of a woman peeing.” There were affective verbs used in narratives; for example, “sucking breath in and out after eating chili,” “whooshing (corn when its bag tips over).” For every intransitive verb entry, I asked Romin and Antzelmo to give me possible subjects, and for transitive verbs, both subject and object, such as “beat (drunken husband)/wife.” I asked for referents for adjectives, such as “clinging (sand in eye of waking person),” “stiff (penis, canvas, mud-covered clothing).” Then we added numerous sentence examples. I devised a system of speech classification: “polite speech,” “denunciatory speech,” “ritual speech; prayer,” “baby talk,” “female

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speech,” “male joking speech.” To alleviate the boredom, Romin and Antzelmo served up endless examples of male joking speech, mainly off-color expressions. My botanist friend, Dennis Breedlove, insisted that we gather plant names, so we hired teams of plant collectors who gathered over three thousand specimens. The impact of group dynamics upon the choice of plant names was terrible to behold. Of paramount importance was the social standing of the collector within the team, such as his age or bonds of friendship. Social position and temperament often determined who would align with whom in assigning which names. Efforts to prevent collectors from influencing their colleagues’ decisions frequently were unsuccessful. Even so, there was substantial agreement on culturally significant plants. Until we came to corn. I hung up twenty ears of highland and lowland corn to be identified by five people. They produced forty-seven different names. To our relief, later study explained this variety, proving the reliability of their responses. A test I imposed on college students, showing them the pictures of ten cars, produced a similar variety of names, but in this case, many identifications were just plain wrong. In a second test for undergraduate informants, I had them identify eight breakfast cereals, resulting in fifty-three names! For one informant they were all “shit.” I did not want to follow the path of a student with the Harvard Chiapas Project who, in his ethnozoologic study, included unen sonso mut, “stupid little bird.”

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During the creation of what was to become The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán (Laughlin 1975), what I hoped would be an audible photograph of the Zinacantec world, I wanted no interruptions, but I knew that the tediousness of linguistic interviewing demanded special compensations. I sprung my plot—“Would you be willing to travel with me to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work for three months compiling a dictionary?” I had chosen Santa Fe for two reasons: (1) to avail myself of the advice of Lore Colby, who was finishing her dissertation on Tzotzil grammar there; and (2) because Santa Fe seemed the closest that the United States could come to replicating San Cristóbal de las Casas, providing a Spanish-speaking environment that would not be threatening to my collaborators. Their affirmative responses projected us into weeks of tense activity as we strove to secure blessings from relatives and documents from bureaucrats. No Zinacantec had ever been to the United States. The name then and now prompts the question, “If I went there, would they eat me?” Setting off for Santa Fe early one morning in my Willys jeep station wagon, I was in high spirits anticipating the cultural surprises that loomed for my companions. They did not share my sentiments, but after the first day they regained their composure, viewing every new, unimaginable sight with aplomb. Even the anxieties and problems were discussed openly, with laughter. Once we reached Santa Fe we worked six days a week, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., sitting in an office of the Museum of New Mexico.

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With such intensity, we proceeded through the first half of the alphabet, generating six thousand words by the end of our stay. I made every effort to vary their experiences and to offset the daily drudgery. When Romin and Antzelmo returned to Chiapas with their bank bags of silver dollars to adorn the saints, and I returned to Washington with my file boxes of vocabulary cards for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” I believe we all felt we had made a good wager. But before returning home, Romin confided in me that, “If I tell people what I saw, nobody will believe me.” For periods during the next four years, we continued to work together on the dictionary. Once again I asked Romin and Antzelmo to join me in the States. Despite their earlier fears, they accepted without hesitation and came to live in my home in Alexandria, Virginia, for six weeks, working at the Smithsonian Institution on the advancement of the dictionary. The primary task was to locate over eight hundred Tzotzil place names for the accompanying maps. My own jigsaw-puzzle approach in trying to piece together a series of aerial photographs, with their distortions, shadows, and blurs, proved far less accurate than Romin and Antzelmo’s mental retracing of their steps along mountain trails. When they could relax, sitting on chaise longues on my porch overlooking the Potomac River, they invented a Tzotzil term for their chairs—“foot-watchers.” Our visit to Mount Vernon would have seemed more relevant had I known then that our home was situated at the northern point

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of George Washington’s Neck Plantation (formerly Clifton’s Neck) where, on 2 March 1787, Washington reported he “rid into the neck with my Compass to ascertain if practicable the outer boundary of My land . . . . and I run a straight line accordingly; and fixed Stakes for my fencing thereon.” With Romin and Antzelmo at my side, at home and abroad, we compiled the Tzotzil vocabulary of Zinacantán. At the time of its publication in 1975, our volume, containing thirty thousand entries, was the most comprehensive dictionary of any native language of the New World. A model for later dictionaries of Maya languages, it also became a vital tool for epigraphers deciphering the ancient Maya hieroglyphs. This, despite hitting the National Enquirer, inspiring Senator William Proxmire to confer upon the Smithsonian Institution its only Golden Fleece Award, “for the absurd waste of federal funds,” which gained me a promotion denied previously for failing to have “a national reputation.” In 1963, once we were settled in Santa Fe, I had asked both my companions to write a diary. Antzelmo confided to Romin that he saw no point in it. Only at the very end did he inject any personal flavor. When I read over their impressions I was so disappointed that I shoved them in my desk drawer and watched them yellow for eight years. On the second trip I made no such request. In 1971, I suggested that Romin and Antzelmo write down in Tzotzil their recollections of both trips. They camped out in W. S. Merwin’s

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magical house in San Cristóbal where I was living and wrote page after page, stopping only occasionally to ask each other or me the names of places they had visited or to check the sequence of events. I sat at the same table trying desperately to translate their pages as fast as they were filled, but when I collapsed in the late afternoon, they continued on triumphantly late into the night. Their momentum only increased. These later descriptions, composed with thought and feeling, were so much livelier. The startling accuracy of their memories put those of us to shame who feel we must rely on the written word. It is not easy to fathom the effects of these odysseys on my companions’ psyches. Romin maintained in precarious balance his quest for two worlds, serving in the Mayan Catholic religious hierarchy as Mayordomo (Steward) of the Sagrado Sacramento and Alférez (Ensign-bearer) of San Antonio, while acting as the major consultant of the Harvard Chiapas Project. A master of diplomacy, Romin introduced numerous anthropologists and their students to his culture, explaining with great perception the subtle nuances of words and deeds. But his affair with a talented American artist was accompanied by ever more frequent drinking bouts. Suffering cirrhosis, and ignoring his doctor’s direst warnings, Romin virtually decided that it was time to die. On 27 November 1977, as the Zinacantecs say, he “reached the mountaintop, reached the hilltop,” where his cross overlooks the valley of Zinacantán. No one’s conscience is easy.

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Antzelmo, whose words are printed in boldface, seemed to be outwardly untouched by his travels to the other world, though his exposure to modern technology may have influenced his decision to serve as director of municipal improvements in Zinacantán Center. During 1977–1978, he worked in San Cristóbal for INAREMAC, a local research institution, writing a Tzotzil history of the Mexican Revolution. Following this, Antzelmo, Maryan Lópes Méntes, and Romin’s eldest son, Xun, were aided by the poet Ámbar Past, her friend, the Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, and his brother, Juan Sabines, governor of Chiapas, in forming the Sociedad Cultural Indígena de Chiapas. They published two bilingual booklets. When their funds were exhausted, their office lights turned out, Antzelmo pleaded their cause at a conference, “Forty Years of Anthropological Research in Chiapas.” He argued that now that the younger generation was going to school and learning Spanish, they thought they were so smart, but they didn’t know a quarter of what their grandparents knew about their own culture. He and his colleagues wanted to put on paper their customs and their view of the world so that their children and grandchildren would not forget what it was to be Maya. In 1982, with funding from Cultural Survival, Inc., Sna Jtz’ibajom (The House of the Writer) was born. As a founding member of Sna Jtz’ibajom, Antzelmo contributed to many of the association’s bilingual booklets on customs and folklore. As an actor in the group’s theatrical productions, he took many

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roles; disguised under the nickname Lencho, he performed the part of his patron saint, San Lorenzo, in Sna Jtz’ibajom’s play and video, Who Believes in Spooks? As a puppeteer he made two more trips to the United States and was also invited to the Science Museum of Man in St. Paul, Minnesota, to bless a thatched roof Zinacantec house. Antzelmo gave the blessing after he repaired the museum staff’s faulty construction. Now a seasoned anthropologist, following the inaugural banquet he asked me what was the ritual significance of the glasses of wine on the table. In addition to documenting Maya culture, Antzelmo was active in the spiritual life of Zinacantán, as sacristan, then as a member of the religious hierarchy, first as cantor, and finally as Alférez de La Virgen de Natividad. At the age of twenty-one he became a shaman, eventually reaching the highest position. During the Persian Gulf War and at the outbreak of the Zapatista Rebellion, he, with the other chief shamans, prayed for peace in the churches and mountain shrines of Zinacantán. When the members of a Boston TV station came down and begged Antzelmo to perform a curing ceremony, Antzelmo thought it over carefully before acceding to their request. “I have a solution so that the gods will not bring down their wrath on me for tricking them. I will intone just a short prayer, then they will know that this is not real—that it is theatre!” So he enacted a ceremony for soul-loss to their satisfaction.

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One of the pioneer members of  The House of the Writer, Diego Méndez Guzmán, Mexico’s first Maya novelist, recalls Antzelmo’s counsel: When the imagination puts your feet on the ground, you have to prepare the soil first. With great care your hands deposit the seeds. When the plants germinate, grow, flower, and die back, they provide more seeds to plant for the whole Maya nation. For many centuries our history was unknown. Not one of us could write the name of the seeds. Only anthropologists existed who cultivated the seeds, studying, writing, and spreading abroad our culture, the daily life of our people. With the creation of Sna Jtz’ibajom, and under Antzelmo’s wise and courtly guidance, many Tzotzil and Tzeltal writers and actors will be remembered for planting their own seeds for the Maya people of Chiapas. Antzelmo shared Romin’s struggle with liquor, which most probably contributed to his sudden death, at the age of fifty-five, on 10 December 1997. His neighbors believe an evil spirit released Antzelmo’s nagual, his animal spirit, from its corral in the sacred mountain. Why else would he die so young? This book is filled with the varieties of human experience and expression as they are seen, heard, and felt by two innocents abroad, the first Mayas to describe the United States, Romin Teratol and

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Antzelmo Péres. Impelled by the wicked desire to change masks with my companions, so that I would become the superior native and they the unwitting and incredulous ethnologists, I invited Romin and Antzelmo to describe “gringoland.” They show us another world, so familiar to us, so strange to them, where their fears were allayed by their spirit of high adventure and exploration, by their ready appreciation of the sometimes ridiculous, sometimes beautiful sights that awaited them. Of course it was they who had the last laugh as they placed in my hands a Mayan mirror, in which is revealed the curious, scary, and bizarre behavior of their host and his countrymen.

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Voyager’s Prayer God, Jesus, Christ,

My Lord,

San Lorenzo,

Santo Domingo.

Grant a little pardon,

Grant a bit of pardon,

For the splinter of my lowly torch,

For the shaving of my humble candle,

That I offer beneath Thy feet,

That I offer beneath Thy hands,

To beg holy pardon,

To beg divine forgiveness.

Will I turn back unharmed,

Will I return unhurt,

Beneath Thy feet,

Beneath Thy hands,

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Wherever I walk,

Wherever I journey,

Where I climb down,

Where I climb up,

I, who am Thy lowly orphan,

I, who am Thy humble pauper,

Thy lowly ashes,

Thy humble dust?

Favor my back,

Favor my side,

I, who am Thy child,

I, who am Thy offspring.

Circle, Shine, All the holy gods,

All the holy saints.

May Thy faces shine in unison,

May Thine eyes shine in unison,

In unison, watch over me,

In unison, regard me,

My beauteous Mother,

My beauteous Lady of the Rosary.

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Part I

Journey to the American West • • •

Journey to the American West

l

et’s inform you, let us chat with you a word or two about how we

took a trip to gringoland long ago. I, Antzelmo Péres, will inform you. We left our home in Zinacantán Center on the nineteenth of October, 1963.

I, Romin Teratol, went far away, to the United States, as they say, –l] who lives there, took me.1 because my compadre Lol, [pronunced Low My compadre Lol arrived to pick me up on Saturday afternoon, the nineteenth of October. He arrived at five o’clock in the afternoon. When he arrived at my house, he found me drunk. When he arrived at my house, he found me asleep. I thought I was supposed to meet him early Sunday morning in Na Chij, because I was going to pass by Stzellejtik to talk to my mother-in-law. But no, he arrived to pick me up on Saturday. That’s why I wasn’t ready. And also because I had gone to pray to Our Lord. I left Saturday afternoon, and I never said goodbye to my father.

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I got ready in a rush. While I was getting my things ready, Maryan Kachu arrived with two cokes, because he wanted me to buy him a pistol in Mexico City. Then we left in the car. I was feeling a bit tipsy. We went to drink some cane liquor at Antun Chayna’s store. After we left Antun Chayna’s store, we met the mayor coming out of the house of Old Palas Jmulinero, the miller. It was during the magistracy of Chep Telakrus from Paste and Old Palas was one of his constables. “Where are you going, Lol?” asked the mayor. “I’m going to San Cristóbal,” Compadre Lol said. “Well, I’m going to San Cristóbal with Old Palas. Won’t you be so kind as to take us along,” said the mayor. “Then please bring us back to the Ventana Pass. I’m going quickly to get my robe.” “Well, I guess I can,” my compadre said. Chep Telakrus went to get his robe and then we drove to San Cristóbal. It was already dark. I asked the mayor why he was going to San Cristóbal. “Ah, we’re going to talk to Daniel Sarmiento,” he told me. I didn’t ask him anything more. The mayor and his constable were going to talk to a lawyer, because that was when they were quarreling with Old Yermo from Na Chij, and Chep Nuj and Maryan Komis. As for us, me and Compadre Lol and Antzelmo went to the ranch to leave a few things there. Then we went to my room in San Cristóbal to pick up my fiddle and Antzelmo’s guitar. After that we took the

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mayor back to the Ventana Pass. He paid us ten pesos for the ride. When that was over, we returned to Compadre Lol’s house and spent the night. I was still a bit drunk.2 We spent the night in San Cristóbal. Early the next day we left at six o’clock in the morning. I left my home on the twentieth of October.

The next day, at six o’clock in the morning, we left San Cristóbal in Compadre Lol’s car. We stopped a while in Naben Chauk. Compadre Lol was going to talk to Lol Romin, but he wasn’t there. Then Old Xun Vaskis passed by. “Where are you going Romin?” he asked. “We’re going to Tuxtla,” I said.3 “Lord, you may never know where you’re going to die!” he said.4 “Perhaps God doesn’t want that to happen, sir!” I said. “Well, take care of yourselves, then. Please bring back what I asked for. Compadre Lol will tell you all about it.” But my compadre Lol couldn’t remember what it was he was supposed to bring back for Old Xun Vaskis. “We’ll talk together just before the Fiesta of San Sebastián.5 Take care!” I said. We took to the road. Me, I was feeling terrible from the hangover. Now at that time there was a tiny cantina below Rejino’s house, below

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Sek’emtik. I told Compadre Lol that I was feeling awful. He waited for me while I bought a quarter pint of cane liquor. After I drank the quarter pint I felt a little better, because it warmed me up. We passed through Chiapa de Corzo. We crossed the river beyond Chiapa. Yes!

We arrived in Tuxtla. We ate there. We bought ourselves some sandals. After we finished eating, we took to the road again. When we arrived at La Ventosa we ate again.6 We all drank beers, because it was so hot there. The windows of the store were closed up tight because the wind was so terribly strong. It felt as if the car was nearly blown away.

• We saw lots of cattle. We saw many horses. We saw many donkeys. We saw beautiful forests. We saw many rivers. We saw many towns.

We passed through many small towns. People there raised goats and cattle. They didn’t grow much corn because the land was bad. There weren’t many springs. And there weren’t many people living where there was no water. There wasn’t anything to live on. And half the land had no trees. We passed through one little town called Yanhuitlán. It had a beautiful church. They were in the midst of working on it. Inside the church was a huge bell. And there was a skeleton—the entire skeleton

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of someone of long ago—but who knows why it was there. The church was very old.

• We arrived in Oaxaca at six o’clock in the evening. It was nighttime, it was hot, and I still had a hangover. I couldn’t stand the pain in my heart any longer. I simply woke up my compadre Lol. He gave me two aspirins, and they worked. The swelling stopped. The pain calmed down. And then I fell asleep. The next morning we went to Monte Albán, to see the ruins of the ancestors’ houses.

The ancestors’ houses were on the top of a hill. The buildings weren’t very big. But they were guarded. The price to see them was two pesos apiece. There we saw the ancestors’ saints, the letters that they had written on stone, and representations of their money. The images of the ancestors were carved in rock. Ooh, they were really beautiful. Yes!

• We crossed a bridge. Ooh, we continued on! We saw lots of goats on the way. We saw organ cactuses. Ooh, they were really beautiful. We saw lots of beautiful mountains. We drove through a great many towns. Yes!

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Part I

We came through mountain passes. There was an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the cliffs. Yes! We saw many pine forests on the way. Yes! The forests near Puebla were very beautiful. Yes! The lights in Puebla were beautiful. There were a great many cars. Yes!

• We arrived in Cholula at seven o’clock at night. But we couldn’t find a hotel there. We simply went on to Puebla. We spent the night at a hotel called the Panamericana. The people there stared at our clothes. They had never seen anything like them. On the morning of the next day we returned to Cholula. We went to see a church that had been built high on a hill. But it wasn’t a hill. The church was perched on top of the ruins of the ancestors’ houses. Yes!

The ancestors died ten centuries ago. After the ancestors were killed, their houses were covered with dirt. Now when the Spaniards started digging the foundation for their church on the hilltop, they noticed the ancestors’ houses. But they built the church anyway. Later, some archaeologists carefully opened up the ancestors’ houses so that they could see well what it was like underground, and how many rooms there were inside. The building was a pyramid. It was as big as a large hill. That’s why a church could fit on top.

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After we looked at the church on the hill we went through a door in the ground. It cost two pesos to enter. Inside the cave there were electric lights to see by. They had dug out loads of rooms. It was 145 meters from the entrance to the top of the excavation, but they were 20 meters short of reaching the church. The hill was 165 meters tall and 100 meters across. We climbed stairs inside the cave and we walked the width as well. The inside of the cave was really beautiful. It was decorated everywhere. There were pictures of the ancestors on the walls. There was writing and everything. It was very beautiful inside their building. Yes!

Next to the ruin was the grave of a king and princess. Both of them had been buried in a single coffin. It is said that they loved each other very much. When they were alive they made a pact. “Whichever of us dies first, the other can be buried alive.” They had discussed it. “If one of us dies, let’s not leave each other behind.” They say that the woman died first and the man threw himself into the grave.

The man made the tomb and got into the grave with his dead wife. They lay across each other. The bones were still sticking up in the grave. They were enclosed in glass so that everybody could look. One had his head to the west and one to the east. Their bowls were there, their tortilla gourds, their salt cellars. All their things were with them in the grave. Yes!

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Part I

We could buy postcards of it, too. There was a new museum nearby. They had gathered together all the ancestors’ belongings, whatever they had dug out of the ground: censers, metates, potsherds, broken water jugs. Everything they had found inside the ancestors’ houses was assembled there, their pots, their plates, their cups, their spoons. Their bowls and cups were beautifully decorated. Everything was better long ago. Yes!

• There are two roads that begin in Puebla, the old road and the new road to Mexico City. When the highways cross each other, one goes underground and the other goes on top. We took the new road. On the way we saw lots of goats. There were cows. There were horses. Organ cactuses grew in some places. In other places there was just open land.

In the distance, we saw two volcanoes. The tops were covered with snow. One volcano is called Popocatepetl. They say he is a man. The one called Ixtaccihuatl is a woman. Its summit is flat, but it is white, too. Popocatepetl is steeper and smoke comes out the top.

•

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Coming into Mexico City, there were so many cars. The cars went under the overpasses. Yes!

When we arrived at Mexico City it was five minutes after twelve. We arrived at a hotel called the Parque Villa. We arrived at Mexico City past one o’clock. We went to visit a woman who lived a block from our hotel.7 She gave us wine to drink. After we drank the wine, we ate. After we ate, we left. We went to meet Compadre Lol’s wife, Mimi, at the airport. She came by plane, we came by car. We were already at the airport when she arrived.

That night we went up a tall building in the very center of Mexico City. We weren’t aware that we were going up. We were lifted up inside the building. And we came down the same way. The building was forty stories high, so we could see the whole expanse of the city.8 We reached a height where all of Mexico City could be seen clearly. Ooh, Mexico is terribly big. We couldn’t see the edge of the city. No! The lights could be seen far off in the distance. Part was very beautiful, part was ugly. But it was terribly cold and windy on the top of the building. It seemed as if we might fall. But we didn’t fall. We were just scared. And we were scared coming down, too.

At nine o’clock on Wednesday the twenty-third of October we went to the United States Embassy to get our visas so that we could cross the

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Part I

border. They checked the papers that had been issued by the governor in Tuxtla. We signed our names on our pictures and left them there. Then we went to another crowded office to pay for the papers. The papers cost thirty-eight pesos. After that was over, we went to visit the palace, also on a hill. All the ancient peoples’ things were there, along with their pictures and their gods. As for the ancient peoples’ things, they were all made of silver and gold. Yes!

Chapultepec Castle is where the earlier government officials held court. It was the former house of President Porfirio Díaz and the Emperor Maximilian. The carriages of Porfirio Díaz and Benito Juárez were standing there, drawn by two white horses.9 All their things were collected there: their beds, their tables, their portraits, their watches, their pistols, their cannons. You could see how they waged war against the Americans. Long ago, before the war of 1840, they used to meet at the castle to make the laws. After they fought with the North Americans, the former Mexican government officials were killed.10 And so it has been called the Castle ever since. Everybody still lines up to look at it. Then we went to see the animals below Chapultepec Castle. The place where the animals are kept is called the Jardín Zoológico. Four elephants danced to music. The huge animals understood how they were supposed to dance.

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Every kind of animal was in the garden. Some were pretty much like horses, except that their necks were so long. There were deer, monkeys, mountain goats, lions, jaguars, coyotes, porcupines, ducks, herons, sandpipers, camels, elephants, bears, paroquets, parrots, peccaries, tapirs, macaws, armadillos, foxes, buzzards, hawks, eagles, turtles, iguanas. There were crocodiles, raccoons, snakes, and king vultures. There were bright orange fishes. Ooh, every single kind of animal that lives in the world was there. Yes! Then we went to see what the suffering of the poor people long ago was like. There was a building built for it.11 Everything to do with the ancestors was there: how they fought, how they worked, how they ate, how they ground corn, what their axes were like, their machetes, their billhooks, their metates. We saw the Indians’ costumes from every town in Mexico. Ooh, there was so much. Yes! In one room it looked as if the people of long ago were killing each other. They were in the midst of a war. Some had bows and arrows, others had pistols, and some fought with rocks. Yes! There was a grave of a king of long ago. He was lying in his coffin.12 The king of long ago had gold rings and a gold belt. He had a necklace made of gold. All his things were of gold. His head was beautiful. His head was sparkling. Yes! In the next room the people of long ago were standing. The ancestors were smaller, different. The people of long ago were naked. Some

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of them were very hairy. They were really ugly. They looked like devils. Yes!

That evening we went to watch a dance in the Teatro de Bellas Artes. They showed how the ancestors celebrated fiestas. The fiesta was wonderful. And we never had to pay! After we had amused ourselves, we returned to our hotel. Antzelmo and I slept in one room, Compadre Lol and his family slept in another room on the second floor. It was still a bit light when we returned to the hotel. As for me, I went down to amuse myself on the floor below. Now an American woman saw me. She beckoned me to come to her room. “Come here, young man! Come in, let’s go to bed!” said the old woman. “No, I don’t want to,” I said. “Come here, let’s have a little drink!” she said. “I don’t want to,” I said. I simply went out the hotel door. Well, the old woman followed right behind me. As for me, I started running. The old woman started running, too. I fled as far as the corner. I was scared to go further, because it wasn’t my town. I simply ran back to the hotel. I was upset about the way the old woman chased me, so I went to tell my compadre Lol about it. He told me that I’d better just stay in my room and not go down to the ground floor. So I simply shut myself up in the room with Antzelmo. Who knows if she was a bad woman or a crazy person or what. She looked as if she was drunk, too.

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“She’s probably crazy!” we said to ourselves. When we saw that she had gone back to her room, we went out again. Then we met two Ladinos on the street.13 They asked us where we were from. “We’re brothers!” said one of the Ladinos. “I came from Chiapas long ago, too. I came to get a job here. I am a marimba player here. If you want to speak to me when you come back, you should look for my house.” He gave each of us a tiny piece of paper with his address on it. We went to have a drink with them. When we reached the cantina, they bought some wine. We kept drinking until late at night. When it was time to return to our sleeping place we were scared because we didn’t know where we were going. But we went straight to where the hotel was. Thanks to God, we didn’t get lost.

The next day we went to a lake at the edge of Mexico City. The place is called Xochimilco. The boats were decorated with bowers and flowered arches over the roofs and doorways. You could pay to get in a boat and amuse yourself on the lake. There were restaurants on some boats and marimba bands on other boats. Our boat moved terribly slowly because it was only for fun. Along the lakeshore bald cypresses and cabbages were planted, because Xochimilco is in a cold climate. And elderberry and peaches grow in Mexico City.

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The next day we picked up our visas. Then we went to visit the Basilica of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. We arrived in the middle of Mass. Each of us bought four candles apiece. We offered our candles in another room, because they couldn’t be left inside the large church. They gave us two pictures of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a pamphlet. There was another building where pictures of Our Lady of Guadalupe were sold. I bought two pictures of Our Lady and two tiny crosses. After we crossed ourselves we went to another church. The Virgin was in four churches there. Yes!

Later we climbed a hill to see where the Virgin appeared long ago. And there, next to where the Virgin appeared, was a tank of clean water filled with shells. The pool of water was wonderfully clear. The pool had coins in it: fives, tens, twenty-centavo pieces, whatever people wanted to toss in. The coins were thrown in on purpose.

People tossed in money, probably so that the Virgin would give them more money. After we visited the Virgin we took a taxi back to the center. We couldn’t go on foot because there were so many cars. On the way I saw three statues, one standing with her hand pointing to the sky, one on horseback, and one standing with both arms spread wide. We went to see all the good things for sale downtown. But the market was packed with people. It seemed as if you’d get lost. Walking was

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terribly difficult. People kept shoving each other. We couldn’t make our way through. Notes 1.  In Zinacantán, the system of compadrazgo or ritual kinship extends very widely. Compadres and comadres are those male and female adults who have officially shared in a baptism, a postbaptismal visit, a confirmation, or even a wedding celebration. After such occasions, they no longer address each other by first names, but always use the term “compadre” or “comadre.” Romin was my daughter’s godfather and, therefore, my compadre. In those days there were no Zinacantecs named Roberto, so I assumed the name of their patron saint, San Lorenzo, and became Lol. 2.  Romin speaks of the people he happened to meet on his last day in Zinacantán as if it were the last time he would see them. 3.  Tuxtla Gutiérrez is the state capital. 4.  Xun knew very well that Romin was going with me to the United States. 5.  This is one of the two major fiestas of Zinacantán, occurring on 20–22 January. 6.  La Ventosa is near Juchitán, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. 7.  The late Concepción Bermejillo de Cuevas, granddaughter of former Mexican president Porfirio Díaz. 8.  The Torre Latinamericano. Romin was so frightened as he reeled from the elevator onto the windswept, narrow balcony that he flattened himself against the nearest wall.

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9. Porfirio Díaz was president of Mexico from 1876 to 1910. The French Emperor Maximilian reigned from 1863 to 1867. Benito Juárez was president of Mexico from 1867 to 1872. 10.  The Mexican casualties of the defense of Chapultepec Castle in 1847 were, in fact, six teenage cadets. 11.  The National Museum of Anthropology. 12.  The reconstructed tomb of the Maya king, Pakal, in the Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque, Chiapas. 13. A Ladino is a mestizo or non-Indian Mexican. The term is sometimes extended to non-Indian foreigners.

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s

aturday the twenty-sixth of October, at around noon, we

took to the road again. We stopped at a restaurant in Tepotzotlán. “What do you want to eat?” Compadre Lol asked us. “Eggs with tomatoes, or beef, or chicken?” My compadres ordered eggs. I asked for beef, because I wanted to eat a good meal. I was starved. We were served what we had asked for. When I dunked my tortilla into my food it tasted awful. I don’t know what kind of meat it was, whether it could have been horse or some other kind of animal. I simply didn’t eat. I left it sitting on my plate. I just ate the bread. I felt sick to my stomach. It tasted so horrible.

• We passed Queretaro. We took the road to San Miguel de Allende. We were stopped on the way by people who asked for money to fix the road that we were riding on.

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Trees were planted by the side of the road. The planted trees were beautiful. We saw nothing but mountains. The mountains were beautiful. We continued on a long ways. Yes!

• Just as we were about to reach Guanajuato, we ran into fog on the road. The fog was terribly thick and we had a hard time seeing the road. The streets were crooked and narrow and full of sharp turns. The houses were attached to the cliffs. The governor lived in Guanajuato, because there were mines there. That’s why none of the streets were straight. You could easily get lost. If we took a street we just arrived where we had started. We walked on foot for a little while to see where the street went. When we returned to get the car, we had a hard time finding it, because we forgot where we left it. With difficulty we found the car. We watched where the road went. We found a hotel. We were overjoyed. After we ate, we went for a walk. People stared at us. They didn’t know who we were.

We went downtown to have some fun. Some kids were playing in the street. When they saw us, they ran off screaming. They were scared, since they had never seen clothes like ours. They probably thought we were bad because our clothes were different. We didn’t have long pants. When they saw us, they fled. They went off crying.

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Lord, we almost got lost. The paths were so narrow. They seemed to wind along cliffs. We didn’t see where Compadre Lol went. We fell behind a little ways. We took another path and landed someplace else. “But where did our compadre go?” we said to ourselves. Then we heard the sound of a fiesta. “Could he have gone there?” we asked ourselves.

A record player was blasting away. They were celebrating La Fiesta de San Miguel. There were two groups of musicians. A Ladino was shouting through a bullhorn. Some were dancing, others were fighting. “Lord, let’s go back! We’ll just get beaten up,” we said to ourselves. We went back to where we had gotten lost. Then it started raining. But it rained very hard. We leaned against a wall and waited for the rain to pass a bit. Then Compadre Lol found us. We returned to the hotel sopping wet.

On Sunday the twenty-seventh of October, we went to visit Our Holy Father, Cristo Rey. Christ the King was standing on top of a mountain. And the mountain was very high. We had a hard time getting up it, and the car had a hard time reaching it, too. The road up the mountain was packed with cars. It was the very day of the celebration of Our Holy Father, Christ the King.

As for us, we climbed on foot. The path was very steep. We reached a level crest. Our Lord’s bells were ringing there.1 They had erected a pediment and the bells hung from cables. They couldn’t hang where Our Lord was, because Our Lord wasn’t set inside the church.

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Christ the King was standing alone on the mountaintop. He had no house. He was simply standing alone out in the open. “Why doesn’t he have a house?” we said to ourselves. Our Holy Father had no clothes. He was naked.

He had clothes, but they were part of him. His robe wasn’t worn separately. Our Lord was huge and his arms were long. And the entire body of Our Lord was green. There was a church beneath his feet. And the priest was holding Mass beneath where Our Lord was standing.

The inside of the church was terribly narrow. It wasn’t possible to dig a bigger place for the church because the mountain was pointed and very high. Only a few people could kneel where the priest was celebrating Mass, because the Christ and the altar were surrounded by glass. Right next to the church door they had built a little room for the cripples to leave their canes, those whose legs couldn’t heal until they were cured by Our Lord. They left their canes behind and returned home well. The wrappings for their legs were simply stiff from all the blood and pus. It looked as if their legs had been rotting. The people got well, it is said, because Our Lord was very much alive. Long ago, the Zinacantec shamans dreamt that Our Lord was going to come and settle on the top of our holy mountain of Muk’ta Vitz. He wanted a high mountain to settle on, they said. Who knows why he didn’t come. If he had, Our Lord would be living in Zinacantán.

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After Mass was over, we went to see what was for sale. There were pictures of Our Holy Father hanging on the cross. I longed for an image of Our Holy Father because they were really beautiful. The picture I bought was exactly like the way Our Holy Father was standing on top of the mountain. Four people were sitting outside the church. They were dressed in elegant clothes and feathers. We had never seen anything like it. We thought they looked wonderful. “Where could those people be from?” we asked Compadre Lol. “Those are Indians from my country. I don’t know if they could have come from there or if they have just bought the clothes,” our compadre told us. “Could that be the way the Indians in your country dress?” we asked. “No, just when they celebrate a fiesta,” he said. “Ah!” we said. It was a wonderful fiesta.

• We arrived in Zacatecas around five thirty in the afternoon. We spent the night at the Hotel Cristina. The governor lives in Zacatecas. They have mines there, too. We took a quick walk to see what the town was like. I just saw cliffs. There weren’t any good flat places for people to build their houses. No! All the houses were built on cliffs.

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• The next morning we continued on again. But we had some trouble on the way. Our car broke down on the road. Yes! A Ladino passed by in his car. He was going to fix it, but he couldn’t fix it. He just looked at it and drove away. We were left behind. Yes! We were standing around. It was already pretty late. Then two more Ladinos came along. They looked at Compadre Lol’s car. They were able to fix it a little. We went on another stretch. Then we reached a gas station. A group of mechanics looked at the car. “It’s fine now,” they said. They asked sixty pesos for the repairs. Yes! We gave the money to them, but they didn’t know how to fix it. No! The car was just as bad. They just stole the money. We continued on in the dark, but the car was pretty sick. We were able to reach the town nearby. We spent the night there, in Ciudad Jiménez. Well, the next morning we simply took the car to a garage. Another group of mechanics looked at it. “We’ll fix it. We’ll see what’s wrong,” they said. Then it was fixed properly, but the sun had set by the time it was fixed. It cost ninety pesos to fix the car. The next morning we went on again.

•

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We passed a town called Aguascalientes, and another town called Ojo Caliente. We passed a place called Torreón and a place called Gómez Palacio. We spent a night there. On the morning of the next day we took to the road for another stretch. Then we reached another town. When we were eating breakfast we met a gypsy family. They wanted to chat, but we couldn’t understand what they were saying. They stared at us so much. They were critical of us, it seemed. Maybe they don’t see many short-panted people there.

• We continued on a long ways. Ooh, the land was flat. Beyond Mexico City people just raise goats. That’s all I saw on the side of the highway. I saw a few cows. I saw a few sheep. What there was most of was goats.2

• We passed Chihuahua. That was the last big city in Mexico. Before we came to the border Compadre Lol told us that the soldiers wouldn’t let us cross over if we had our shorts on. “It’s better if you put on your long pants,” he told us. “All right,” we said. We put on our long pants. We dressed up like clowns. After we changed our clothes, we continued on.

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We arrived at the Mexican border. Ciudad Juárez was the name of the Mexican border town. It was already nine thirty at night. The soldiers, the immigration officers, as they’re called, stopped people. There were two groups before we reached the border. There were two groups at the bridge. And on the other side of the river there was another group for the United States. When we reached the border, the Mexican soldiers looked at our permits. After they looked at our permits, they looked at all the things we were taking along with us. After the Mexicans finished looking at everything, we crossed over.

We crossed a big bridge. And on the other side of the river, the American soldiers searched our things. They rooted through all our clothes to see if we had brought pistols or liquor. They say there is certainly a fine for bringing those things into the country. They rooted through everything. And besides, they looked at our passports, to see if our passports were all right or if they were faulty. They looked at our permits to see if we had hidden the truth about where we were from, if we weren’t fugitives, if we weren’t robbers. But our pictures were stuck on our passports. They said they were fine. They asked us if we had been vaccinated. They asked us what we had come to do.

Those soldiers also asked us where we were going. Me, I was a bit scared, because I might say the wrong thing. “If I say the wrong thing

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now, what if I have to return all by myself,” I said to myself. But no, I didn’t say the wrong thing. My story was all right. “You should return at the end of December!” they told us. “All right,” we said. We crossed over. On the outskirts of El Paso we took off our clothes. “Take them off now! It’s all right now,” Compadre Lol told us. With short pants we crossed over to the other side. We spent the night on the American side of the river. Yes!

The next morning we changed our little bit of Mexican money. As for me, I had brought fifty pesos to buy things to eat. I asked them to change it for me. But I hadn’t realized that our money would lose value there. When I saw the change for my money, there were only four dollars. Me, I had twenty-five pesos. When it came back, I hardly had any money left. It just vanished.

“Where’s the rest?” I asked when I took the change for my money. “But that’s complete, like that,” they told me. We asked Compadre Lol how much each little coin was worth. “There are fifty-cent pieces, there are quarters, there are dimes, there are nickels, there are pennies.” He showed us what the money was like. “Ah!” we said, since we are dumb Indians. We didn’t know about the money of the white gents. We didn’t know that the gringo’s money is different.

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The fifty pesos of my money came to four pesos now. I had thought I would use my money to supplement the food for my stomach, in case my stomach wasn’t kept full. But how could I eat since it turned into four pesos? The money was used up on soft drinks. It never reached the place where I was going. The money just shriveled up on the way. Early on Wednesday the thirtieth of October, I wrote a letter to my father. I told him that I had crossed over into another country. Notes 1.  “Our Lord” is Christ, who is also the sun. 2.  The idea of raising goats is incredible to Zinacantecs, who consider them to be kin to the devil.

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w

e arrived in Santa Fe on the eleventh day. Yes!

We arrived at the place where Compadre Lol had decided to get

rid of us in Santa Fe. Compadre Lol’s wife was waiting for us. She had arrived first because she went by “buzzard machine.” We made a quick turn by Compadre Lol’s apartment and then he left us at the hotel.

Antzelmo and I went to live at the Hotel Montezuma. We lived there for the whole time we worked there. “You will live here, don’t worry. You probably won’t be scared now,” Compadre Lol told us. “Probably not, just if they come and talk to us, since we certainly won’t understand what they say,” we told him. “No, the owner knows Spanish. Tell him if you need anything.”

We ate at the hotel, because they knew Spanish. We could go there by ourselves to buy our meals. The trouble was, they served smaller meals. So, we tried out another restaurant to see if the meals were better.

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We sat down in the restaurant to wait for our meals. The woman handed us the menu to find out what kind of food we wanted. But it was all in English. We didn’t understand it. We simply stood up. “Never mind, we won’t eat,” we said to ourselves, because it was already time for work. But there was a man standing there who knew Spanish. “What do you want?” he asked. “We want our meal, but we don’t understand English,” we said. “I’ll ask for it myself,” said the man. “What do you want to eat?” “We want beans and meat,” we said. The kind old man quickly asked for our meal, but by word of mouth not by looking at the paper. And then we ate. If that man hadn’t been standing there, we wouldn’t have eaten before work. He did us the favor. The next day we didn’t go looking for meals in other places. We only ate at the hotel where they knew Spanish. We didn’t change around at all anymore. The trouble was, they never eat tortillas. That’s the way it was for the rest of the trip.

• In the museum where we went to work the people were doing wonderful things.1 They were mending broken pots, pieces of wood, and so on. They had collected the ancestors’ pots, their bowls, their spoons. They

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had collected all the ancestors’ potsherds. They were washing them carefully. After they washed them, they mended them.

The workers fit together all the broken pieces and they were able to turn them into whole pots. That was their work on the floor below. In one room they had a model of an Indian town. They showed how the ancestors celebrated fiestas. The dancers were dressed as deer. They wore antlers on their heads. They used canes for the deers’ forelegs. I thought they were beautiful. Yes! “Let’s go see what’s in that room of the museum!” Compadre Lol told us. “All right,” we said. There were stuffed deer heads, bigger than the deer in Chiapas. They looked exactly the way they do when they are alive. And there were human scalps with hair. Yes!

Who knows if it was the skin of a woman’s head, because the hair was long. The scalp was nice and round. The top of the head was cut off. Maybe that’s the kind of punishment the people of long ago gave each other. On the floor below they had a machine for soft drinks: Coca-cola, orange pop, and everything. The machine was underground. Yes! That’s all I saw. The sun set. I didn’t see anything else. No!

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That night I went to Nick Colby’s house. He was a friend of ours from Zinacantán. It was Halloween. I was sitting, daydreaming, when a bunch of kids arrived. They all wore masks and carried huge bags. The bags were to put their presents in. Nick gave each of them a handful of candies, and they left quietly. If they aren’t given their presents they will throw something at the door.

• The museum where we worked was awfully hot, because the building was heated. We simply sweated and sweated. While we were working, we saw the snow fall. It looked like drizzle but it was white. We watched every place. The mountains turned white immediately when the snow fell. But it was terribly cold outside. It was only warm inside, since there was a heater. If it weren’t for that we’d have probably died of the cold.

On Saturday afternoon we drove into the mountains to see how deep the snow had fallen. So much snow falls there! The trees looked dead. All their leaves had fallen off. The snow was simply growing on the trees. The earth looked as if it had been whitewashed. The small pines were completely white. “How white the stumps are!” I said. “Those aren’t stumps, that’s snow!” Compadre Lol told me.

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“Who would believe that?” I said to myself. The trees were standing like saints. They had arms, they had legs. They were standing up straight in their white clothes.

Where there are big gullies, where there are huge rocks, when the snow has fallen deep, we can’t see where the water flows. The place looks as if it’s absolutely even. We can’t see where the rocks are, how deep the gully is. And our feet are simply buried in it. Where the snow was soft, it crunched underfoot. Where it was hard, it was terribly slippery. If your foot slipped, you would fall.

It looked deep, but it still wasn’t the season for heavy snows. They say people come to slide down from the top of the mountain, because the snow is packed tight. The day we went there weren’t any sportsmen. But the machine, the cables were strung up there. They play around with the snow, besides. They make it into balls, they make it the size of a person, they stand it up. When a lot of snow falls, they put chains on the car tires. It’s up in the mountains where the snow falls deeper. In the town there’s just a little snow. Even so, our feet sink in it.

• After that, we went to see the town. We had a good time on the streets. The stores sold lots of silver that was made into rings, buckles, and crosses. There were beautiful things for sale in the stores.

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The markets were very big, but they weren’t like the markets here. The sales people—the pants sellers, the shirt sellers and so on—were lined up together. They weren’t divided into separate buildings like the markets in San Cristóbal. We passed a garage where new trucks were sold. Lord, we saw that they were very cheap. There were trucks for five thousand, trucks for ten thousand. A very expensive truck went for twenty thousand. Thirty thousand was the most expensive! We asked Compadre Lol why they were so cheap. “Is that the price or not?” we asked. “That’s the price, but in dollars. In Mexican money who knows how many thousands it would be,” he told us. “Ah, yes, you’re right, this money multiplies more,” we said. We went to Nick’s house for a visit. After we had eaten, we took a trip in his car. “I’m building my new house. Let’s go see it!” he told us. We went to see his house. “How is it built? Do you pay the workers yourself or is it on contract?” we asked. “No, I pay them myself by the week. They work better that way. On contract their work is worse,” he told us. “How much do they earn a day?” we asked. “Masons get fifteen dollars, helpers get ten dollars,” he told us. “The same as in San Cristóbal or Tuxtla then,” we said to ourselves.

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The next morning, Monday, we worked the whole day. The next morning, Tuesday, we worked the whole day. The next morning, Wednesday, we worked the whole day. The next morning, Thursday, we worked the whole day. The next morning, Friday, we worked the whole day. The next morning, Saturday, we worked during the day. In the evening we went to the movies.

• After we finished working, on Sunday afternoon, the tenth of November, we took a trip to Indian country. The place was called Tesuque. We just saw what kind of work people did to earn their meals. They made rings. They made bracelets. They made silver belts. They made crosses. They made earrings. They are very clever.

The Indians looked like Ladinas and Ladinos. The men had long hair that they wore in a braid at the back of their heads. The men’s hair was as long as the women’s. You could only tell they were men by their pants. On Tuesday, the twelfth of November, we returned to Tesuque to watch a dance. The Indians wore hats made of feathers. Young and old, men and women, had painted their faces. Some were naked and others wore animal skins. And they danced to drums. After the dance we went to an Indian’s house. The man of the house was good-hearted. He gave us a meal. Who knows what kind

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of wild animal they had killed to give us to eat. The animal had very long canines, but the meat tasted delicious. But the bread tasted like rotten wood. They grow corn, but they only eat young corn and ripe corn on the cob. They never eat tortillas. Later on in the afternoon we went to a town called Jemez. They were holding a fiesta for Our Holy Father, San Diego. The performers danced wonderfully. They were beautifully dressed in embroidered clothes. Some wore necklaces made of dyed corn kernels and some wore necklaces made of fine silver and blue stones.

All the men were wearing feathers. Instead of stockings like the Ladinas here in San Cristóbal wear, the women had bound their legs with white cloth. Their shoes were made of thin leather. And they carried little metal rattles like the Great Players do during our Fiesta of San Sebastián.2 Young and old, men and women were celebrating the fiesta. Me, I was standing around pretty far off and as I was standing there an Indian man came up to me. “Let’s go, friend, let’s go and eat!” he said. But he had to convince me to go, because I was afraid of going alone. I went into his house and sat down, but I was scared because the man was drunk. “Stay a little while!” he told me. “Eh, I don’t know, because my friends may go. I may be left behind,” I said. But he was just having a good time. He gave me a cup of coffee. While I was drinking the coffee, a young girl arrived. She had just finished celebrating.

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“Sing!” he told me. “I don’t know how to sing,” I said. “Sing, and if you sing I’ll give you my daughter.” “Well, thank you, but I can’t stay, because my home is far away,” I said. “We’ll talk together again in just a minute, because I’m going to look for my friends.” Thanks to God, my friends hadn’t left. They were still standing there watching the event. When the fiesta was over, everyone got drunk. Even the young girls and women were drunk. They simply didn’t care. But all the people seemed good-hearted. It is said that the Indians’ gods are different, but the Indians also enter the church. All the Indians have cars, too. It isn’t just the Ladinos who have cars. The Indians’ cars were scattered everywhere.

• There is an art school for Indians in Santa Fe. We went to see what kind of work they did. They created lots of beautiful things. They had drawn pictures on paper. They were weaving and carving. They were making rings of silver. They were making pitchers and pots out of clay. They were making statues of everything in the world out of clay. Yes! We played some music for them. They gave us a meal. Yes!

•

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We went to watch a movie one evening. I thought the movie was wonderful. There was a girl. She committed a crime. The girl’s arms were bound with rope. She was taken away to jail. Then a shoeshine boy came along. He was about to defend the woman. “As for you, what business is it of yours?” the guards told him. “If you defend her, it’s you we’ll take away!” We understood what they said because they spoke Spanish. The shoeshine boy gave up. He was following right behind, but he wasn’t talking. He was just carrying his tiny box with his brushes and rags for shining shoes. The girl was holding a white handkerchief. She dropped it. The shoeshine boy quickly picked it up and handed it to the girl. He had just been told, “Don’t pick it up for her!” But he didn’t listen. The girl arrived at the jail. The jail was terrible. There were thick ropes stretched out and hanging down from the ceiling. The ceiling was two stories high. They seated the girl on a wooden chair. She was asked if it was true that she was guilty. The girl didn’t answer. She wanted to cry. You could see that her heart was breaking. When the girl was being spoken to, the shoeshine boy climbed to the second story. There he found two Ladinos chatting. “Shall I shine your shoes?” he asked. “Shine them!” he was told. He set down his box where the ropes were tied. He shined the shoes.

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The poor girl had both her arms bound and her eyes blindfolded so she couldn’t see what was being done to her. They brought a piece of metal as long as a machete. They tied it crosswise from the ropes. There was a button in the jail that could be pushed. If they pushed the button, the piece of metal would come rushing down and cut off the girl’s head. The shoeshine boy was keeping an eye out. When he saw them go to push the button, he quickly cut the ropes. The instrument to cut off the girl’s head was ruined. The jailers looked about. They didn’t know what had happened to the thing they were going to kill her with. They let the girl go. “Not until tomorrow!” they said. That’s how the girl was saved. When the girl was freed, the shoeshine boy took the girl by the hand. He led her from the place where she was seated to have her head cut off. The guards looked as if they wanted to hit him, but they didn’t do anything. The girl was overjoyed. “Well, I was able to defend you, but the reason I defended you was because I want to marry you,” said the shoeshine boy. “All right, fine, but we ought to get married right away, today,” said the girl. She was terribly happy. “I never loved the other one at all, that’s why they were going to kill me.” The girl said she had nearly married the man she didn’t love. When she was just about to marry him, another man arrived. He grabbed her by the hand. That’s what

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she said made her guilty. She was taken away. They were going to cut off her head. That’s what I saw at the movies. Notes 1.  The Laboratory of Anthropology. 2.  The Great Players are six officials of the top three levels of the religious hierarchy. The Great Players consist of three costumed couples.

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m

y compadre Lol took me, Romin Teratol, on a trip to San

Francisco. The anthropologists were holding a meeting there. They came to San Francisco from all over the United States. They met at the Palace Hotel. The anthropologists gathered together to read aloud about the things they had seen during the year of 1963. They told about the things they saw and the work they did in each country.1 We left Santa Fe at one o’clock on Wednesday the twentieth of

November. Antzelmo brought his guitar along and I brought my fiddle. We went as far as Albuquerque by bus, and then we caught a cab to the airport. We worked for a while. We drank some coffee. Then we lined up in front of the airline official. He looked at our tickets and weighed our suitcases. We boarded the plane at a quarter to five. We flew over the mountaintops. The peaks were covered with snow. They were white even though it was growing dark. The plane

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sat in Las Vegas for half an hour.2 We went on again. We were given a meal inside the plane while it was flying. We drank some coffee, too. And we were given a small pack of cigarettes. We arrived at the airport in San Francisco at seven o’clock at night. It gets dark there one hour later than in Santa Fe. Otherwise we would have arrived at eight o’clock, because the plane flew for two and a half hours and, in addition it sat for half an hour in Las Vegas. It gets dark two hours earlier in Zinacantán Center than in San Francisco, California. It gets dark one hour earlier in Santa Fe than in San Francisco, because San Francisco is further to the west. San Francisco is a very big city. It seemed as if we were lost. All the gringos had cars. Hardly anybody walked. Probably it’s because they have more money and they say cars cost a bit less than in Mexico City. Besides, they pay each other more and those who get a job earn more money. In San Francisco there is a kind of bus whose wheels are fixed to an electric wire. That’s how it runs. The electricity pulls it. They say that is the only town where there is a bus like that. It doesn’t exist in any other place. We arrived during the rainy season. There were lots of thunderstorms. The climate was terribly cold.

•

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On Thursday morning we went to the Palace Hotel to see what the anthropologists were doing.3 Later, Compadre Lol’s father-in-law came to pick us up in his car. Compadre Lol stayed behind at the meeting.

When we were in California we took trips with Compadre Lol’s father-in-law. First we went to look at the ocean. Some of the houses sat on wooden pilings at the edge of the water. There were three big bridges that crossed the ocean. Their posts were stuck in the middle of the ocean, but the posts were made of metal. At the edge of the ocean there were lots of fishes that had been caught. There were crabs and so on. I’d never seen big crabs like that.

There were lots of boats. Some of the boats were very big and some were small. There were boats that went with the wind. And there were warships with flags and cannons. The big boats that went to other countries had motors. They say that Japan is on the other side of the ocean and it takes boats three weeks traveling on the ocean to reach there.4 In addition we went to the aquarium. There they had assembled all of fishdom. They were in the water, enclosed in glass. There were big ones, little ones, pretty ones, ugly ones. There were blue ones, yellow ones, red ones, white ones, black ones. We saw beautiful fishes with blue stripes, white stripes, and yellow stripes. There were fish with yellow sides, black backs, and red stomachs. There was a fish that looked like a branch. There was a fish that looked exactly like a snake. There was another fish that had spines like a caterpillar, only its spines were longer. We saw another kind,

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but it was really horrible, indeed. I swear to God it had spines all over like a porcupine, but it was a fish. We saw one kind of animal that was like the ground. It looked as if it wasn’t there. There was an animal that looked like a blade of grass. It couldn’t be seen in the weeds because it was like the weeds when they are good and green. And there was a very beautiful animal that looked like a white rose. Yes! There were turtles there. There were crabs there. There were all the kinds of animals that live in the ocean. They were all alive. Yes! After we saw the fishes we went to look at the animals that live in the woods. There were bears, monkeys, jaguars, lions, elephants, tapirs, goats, buzzards. But they were all dead. They were just representations. Yes!

At night we went to eat at a restaurant with Compadre Lol, Nick Colby, and Old John Vogt, the Professor.5 We went together for the meal. Compadre Lol left his car in a parking lot. The parking lot was underground, because cars can’t stay on the earth’s surface. All the cars went down into the underground with their lights on. It was just like a paved highway, except that the road made turn after turn. The cars were simply lined up in rows. Our car was hard to find because so many cars were lined up underground. Old John took us to his room. We played music. We drank liquor and wine. When we finished playing music in Old John’s room, we went to play music in Nick’s room. We got drunk because we drank

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everything they gave us. The drinks we drank were white ones, black ones, yellow ones. Yes! That’s why we got drunk. My compadre Romin said he was still a little bit aware. As for me, I couldn’t remember going to our hotel.6

• On Friday the twenty-second of November we went to the meeting. We were there when the late president of the United States was assassinated. It was then that he and the governor were shot in Texas. Compadre Lol turned on the television and we saw the dead president. He had already been put in his coffin. You could see crowds of people. The television spoke, but we couldn’t understand. Then Compadre Lol told us, “They say that the bullets came from a window while the president’s car was moving. He was in the car when he was struck by bullets.”

We were far away, but you could see well on television how the late president was shot, from how many floors the bullets came down. The president lived for half an hour and then he died. They tried to treat the president but he didn’t survive. We could see how he was put in the plane for the capital. It could all be seen clearly on television. When the president fell from the bullets, people saw who fired the shots. The shots came from the fourth floor. Then the police went to catch the murderer. When they caught the murderer, he killed another

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soldier, too. The murderer was very dangerous. They say the murderer’s wife was from Russia. When they stuck the murderer in jail, another man came up and shot him! We saw it clearly on the television. It was too much!

The president died in the State of Texas, in a place called Dallas. And it was one o’clock in the afternoon when he was shot. When he died, they quickly installed a replacement for the president. It was just the “syndic,” as we say, the assistant mayor. The murderer had never met the president. He never had spoken a single word to him. He didn’t even know him!

When the president’s soul departed, they quickly took him to the capital in Washington. They planned to bury him on Monday. They were waiting for the Russian leader to come to bury him. When he was alive they were enemies. But when one dies they bury each other.

• On Friday afternoon we went to the ocean. We got into a boat, but the boat was rolling badly. And it was terribly cold on the ocean, too. There was a little hill standing in the middle of the ocean and there were houses built on the hill. “That’s where they put the most evil people,” Compadre Lol told us. “Ah, so that’s what it’s for!” we said. We certainly did see it.

It used to be a jail for murderers, but they aren’t imprisoned there anymore, because it was too terrible a punishment. They say one

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prisoner escaped by swimming, but he drowned in the middle of the ocean. When the murderers went to prison, there no question of how long they were to be jailed. They were gone for good. While we were traveling along in the boat, Compadre Lol took pictures of the city. He took pictures of the prison, because the place looked very beautiful.

• The following afternoon we visited the house of Compadre Lol’s fatherin-law’s father. We crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge. The poor man was terribly old. His house was beautiful. He was very rich, but he had no wife. We found him there alone.

The old man was all by himself. He only had his maid to take care of him. His maid was a black woman. She wasn’t a real “spook,” it’s just the way the people are.7 The old man was delighted when we arrived. He offered us chairs. He gave us a drink. While we were drinking, he and Compadre Lol chatted. Compadre Lol asked the gentleman how old he was. “He says he is eighty years old,” Compadre Lol told us. “Why doesn’t he have a wife?” we asked. “His wife died long ago. He never found anyone to take her place.”

The old man, they say, is ninety years old. First, he gave us some beer to drink. Afterwards we ate our meal. When we were about to eat, the maid said a prayer over the meal. She said they were pleased that we had come to visit them.

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• When we returned to the Palace Hotel, they celebrated the end of the meeting. The men and the women began to shout and dance. Some of the anthropologists had come to hear about one another’s work, but others were just there to have a good time. They were holding a fiesta in their rooms. I call it a fiesta, but all they did was drink liquor. We drank, too. But no one waited to be served. Let them grab their own drinks, it didn’t matter.8 After the liquor ran out, we kept looking for more. We searched and searched from floor to floor. We searched in every room, but we couldn’t find it anywhere, because there were too many people. Everybody was going crazy looking for it. That’s how the meeting ended.

• On Sunday morning we left San Francisco at nine o’clock. We crossed the ocean again. The first time we passed over the Golden Gate Bridge. This time we crossed on a different bridge.

We crossed over to the other side of the ocean because the train passed by there. What’s more, we went to visit Compadre Lol’s fatherin-law. His house sat on a wooded hill. The porch was entirely enclosed with glass. After we finished visiting Compadre Lol’s in-laws, we went to meet the train. Old John, the Professor, came back by train with us.

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We arrived at noon at the train station. The sun was already dipping down when the train came.

There were tiers of beds inside the train. We were able to sleep a little. Concerning the places where we went, we went underground. It was entirely pitch black. Only because the train had lights could we go underground. We traveled a long ways underground. We slept one night in the train.

Notes 1. The Sixty-second Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. 2.  Here Romin and Antzelmo quickly bought silver dollars to take home to decorate the saints. 3.  I recall Romin and Antzelmo during the first day of the meetings sitting nonchalantly in a Louis XV settee in the lounge, watching the anthropologists rushing about greeting one another. They were introduced to Margaret Mead but were not very impressed. 4.  After the trip to San Francisco Bay, my father-in-law, Reese Wolfe, took Romin and Antzelmo to the Press Club for lunch, only to learn that it was strictly against Press Club regulations to permit individuals wearing their “underpants” into the dining room. Not until my father-in-law had made an eloquent defense of Zinacantec national costume did the maitre d’hotel finally relent to serve them.

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5.  Evon Z. Vogt. “Old” is a term of respect for anyone older than oneself. In Maya culture, age is considered to convey wisdom. 6.  Romin and Antzelmo had bought watches and clocks to bring back to all their relatives. In the middle of the night, the pitch black of our hotel room was shattered by the rude jangling of an alarm, exclamations, another alarm, exclamations, another alarm. Expressions of disbelief and concern were voiced in rapid Tzotzil as they protested vehemently, “But we synchronized every one!” 7.  J’ik’al or “spook” is a black demon that may be a composite of runaway slaves, black ranch foremen, the Maya Bat God, and the Maya God of Death. These supersexed and cannibalistic creatures are still believed to haunt wild places. 8.  To a Zinacantec it would seem bizarre that, rather than being served liquor ceremoniously in exactly equal measures, people would help themselves to as much as they wanted.

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a

t eight o’clock the next morning, Monday the twenty-fifth

of November, we arrived at a little town called Gallup. That was the day the late president was put in the grave in Washington. They buried three people on that same day: the president, a policeman, and the murderer. The murderer of Oswald was still in jail. Two of Old John’s brothers-in-law were waiting for us at the train. They took us in two cars to Old John’s mother’s house. She lived on a ranch near Ramah, next to the Navajo Reservation. There weren’t many houses. The houses were very far apart. The houses were at a great distance from each other.

We went to talk to a Navajo Indian who was a good friend of Old John. But they had to be convinced to let us in. I thought it was because our clothes were strange. They probably had a different way

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of thinking. When they recognized Old John they invited us in and gave us a little bit of coffee. That was all. We went to visit another friend of his. The house was at the foot of a cliff. When we arrived at his friend’s house we weren’t invited in because we found that there were only women there. The Navajo man had four wives. However many sisters as the first woman had he married them all. Whether they were older or younger he had them all. He built a house for each of his wives, because all his wives had children. That’s why the man didn’t have just one house. He had so many wives, it didn’t make any difference which house he went to. The houses weren’t on streets, the houses were under the trees. Their houses are like woodpiles. Their houses have six sides. Their houses looked like pigpens. They were made entirely out of clay. Instead of tiles they just put dirt on top. Yes!

It is said that the Indians there used to suffer terribly because they didn’t have any water nearby. But when I was there they had been favored by the government. Pipes went to each house. The governor treated them well because the people were suffering so. The reason there wasn’t any water was because so much snow had fallen. Our feet just sank in it when we walked. When the cars don’t have chains, the snow makes us go off the road because the snow piles up and the road is so slippery. The frost simply turns into glass. I can’t stand the cold climate because the frost falls so much heavier than at home. The fields and the woods look dead.

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It seemed the people had a very hard time making a living. But the women there know how to weave and they weave all their clothes. They even sell their weaving. They buy cars when they sell their work. “These people are very different from the people in Zinacantán,” Old John told us. “In what way?” we asked. He told us all about them. He said that when someone dies, they simply tear down the house. If they don’t want to tear down the house, they dump the sick person in the bushes.1

It is said that they are still alive when they go to be buried. They believe that the sickness is contagious and is left behind with another person. They say that the sickness will grow in our hearts. They go looking for a gully far away so that the sickness won’t return. Those who don’t want to bury them when they are still a bit alive leave the sick person in the house. All alone their spirit departs. Old John says they don’t bury them alive, they just dump the patient in the bushes. After he has died, then they go and bury him, of course. If the sick person’s soul departs inside the house, then they tear down his house.

They burn the dead person’s house so that the dead person’s soul won’t stay there, and so that the sickness won’t remain. They build a new house right away because otherwise the dead person’s soul will stay in their bellies. They get rid of them right away and burn the house. Then the family and their close friends share in building a new house.

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After that we went to Zuni. There is a lake on the plains near Zuni. It used to have salt long ago. Then the people came to do whatever they were doing. The soul of the salt fled. It went to a lake further away. And now the Zunis go there to get their salt. The ancestors of the Zunis used to live on a beautiful ridge. When the Spaniards arrived, they waited until the Indians came down to the foot of the cliff to draw water from the lake. Now when the women came down to draw their water, the Spanish leader stopped them at the foot of the mountain, because, it is said, he desired a Zuni woman. They went to enjoy each other next to the lake on the plain. After he had finished giving it to his mistress, little by little the lake dried up. The water was offended that they went there to contaminate it. It simply disappeared. It simply changed places. It went to the other side of the mountain. Gradually the people became discontented with their water being so far away. They simply came down from the ridge to the foot of the mountain, because the water was nearer. But it was a different spring, of course. It wasn’t the water they used to drink when they were living on the ridge. Now the Indians live on flat ground. And they have stayed there ever since.2 The Zuni houses are made of piled up stones. The roofs of their houses are simply flat. The ovens for their bread are out in the open. They don’t have buildings for them. Their saints live inside a cave.3 They don’t let them be seen.

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Before we left Zuni, they told us we ought to come to their Shalako festival. That is the fiesta for their saints.4

• We went to eat at Old John’s brother-in-law’s house in Ramah. Before we ate we drank a little liquor and then we played our instruments. The meat we ate tasted like venison. The animal Old John’s brother-inlaw killed was like a deer. We slept at another brother-in-law’s house in Fort Wingate. We drank a little liquor there, too. The owner of the house gave us each a ring. They were very good-hearted. On Tuesday the twenty-sixth of November we left Fort Wingate at six o’clock in the morning and arrived at the airport in Albuquerque at eight thirty. Old John boarded a plane for his home in Boston. As for us, we went on to Santa Fe. Notes 1.  Upon hearing this, Antzelmo exclaimed to me, “They certainly couldn’t have been baptized!” 2.  This reinterpretation of Zuni history shows strong Zinacantec influence. Corn Mountain was a refuge for the Zunis not only when Coronado arrived in 1540, but again in 1680 when the Zunis killed the priests and poisoned the springs. They were found there by Ponce de Leon in 1692. In 1696 they descended to the plains but fled again to their mountain refuge in 1703, where they remained for three years. According to “Old John,” when Zuni men had intercourse on the

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shores of Blackrock Lake, the Salt Woman was incensed, so she went through a hole in the side of a nearby mesa and moved to Zuni Salt Lake, located in a volcanic crater some forty-five miles south of Zuni (E. Z. Vogt, personal communication). According to Frank Cushing, the Zunis were salt traders in aboriginal times (like the Zinacantecs). Because Zuni Salt Lake was a two-day walk from Corn Mountain, the Zunis descended from their cliff dwellings and settled along the trade route (Cushing, 1876: 352–355). 3.  This is not really a cave, but a kiva. 4.  The Shalako Fiesta is the high point in the Zuni ceremonial calendar. The Shalakos are believed to be messengers of the rain gods.

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d

uring the time we were in Santa Fe, I saw lots of those who

don’t worship God properly. We went to their church to see what they did.1 After everyone who belonged to that church assembled, they waited for their priest to come. When the priest arrived, he celebrated Mass.

A row of young girls and a row of young boys lined up on either side of the altar. They played what seemed like a piano and the children sang. All the worshippers read books that were lying on their seats. They said that by looking at the books they made confession. Their sins were taken away just by reading in the book. Then they knelt in front of the altar. But there was no god and there weren’t any saints on the altar. There wasn’t a single saint standing in that church. There were just pictures of the saints portrayed in the windows.

There was just a tiny cross in the center of the altar. There was just a Christ standing on the altar.

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The Mass was fine. What seemed kind of bad to me was when they took communion. They took the host in their hands. They themselves stuck it in their mouths. I certainly thought that was strange!

They took the host in the palms of their right hands. And then they stuck it in their mouths by themselves. After they had swallowed the host, they were given one sip of wine from the chalice, probably to wash down the host. Everyone in the church took communion. In the middle of the prayers they collected money, the way the priests always do. But when the priest took it, he showed the money on high to Our Lord. The priest gave a sermon, too. And they sang inside the church. When the Mass was over, we shook hands with the priest at the church door. We met a girl who spoke to us in Spanish. She invited us to her house for a meal. “What will we say? Shall we do what she says?” Romin asked me. “I don’t know. Maybe she’ll lose us,” I said. I talked to Compadre Lol. “I don’t know, compadre, this girl says she wants to take us to her house. Do you think we ought to accept? I don’t know if she won’t kill us.” “Do you think so? She probably won’t lock you up!” he said. “We’ll go, then. You’ll hear the story about us if we disappear,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you back from the cave,” he told us.2 Compadre Lol went back to the church. As for us, we went visiting. The girl asked where our home was, what we had come to do, if our trip was just for fun or if we had come to study something. She knew Spanish well, that’s why we understood what she asked.

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After she had asked us questions, she gave us a meal. “Well, thank .

you for coming to visit me,” she said to us.

• After the meal we went to visit Our Holy Father of the Sanctuary. Our Holy Father was in the little town called Chimayo. Our Holy Father of the Sanctuary was hanging on a cross. There was one hanging on the cross and one seated on the altar. They were really beautiful. I’ve never seen saints like that. I thought the saints there were the very best. That’s why I bought pictures of them. Yes!

The little church had two rooms. In one room there was a hole in the floor, dug down like the places where clay is dug for pots. People were scooping up the dirt. They had made a real pit, digging up the dirt. “Why would they have dug up the dirt like that?” we said to ourselves. “There is a paper that says what it is for. The dirt is medicine. That’s why they’ve dug up so much mud,” Compade Lol told us. I dug out a little mud. “I’ll use it for medicine if I get sick,” I said to myself.

It is said that we will recover from sickness because the dirt is blessed by Our Lord. I scooped up three handfuls. I brought it home.

•

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On Friday night, the twenty-ninth of November, we went to see pictures of Venezuelan Indians. The pictures were like a movie except that they were silent. In the movie there was a woman who was terribly sick. First she was treated by a shaman. The shaman had no success. A doctor came, but he didn’t cure her, either. Then a man came who wasn’t a doctor or a shaman, he just knew about medicine. He gave some medicine to the sick person. And the thing that was killing her came out of the patient’s belly. “Look at what was killing you! This is what was biting your stomach!” said the person. A worm came out of her belly. He showed her the worm.

• On Sunday, the first of December, at twenty minutes to ten, we went on a trip to Las Truchas. Las Truchas is in the mountains. There is more snow there. There wasn’t a fiesta, we just went to see what the town was like. I didn’t see much there. No! There was just a very beautiful church.

We went to another town called Las Trampas. They say that the inside of the church used to be a graveyard. They say that the ancient people used to nail each other to the cross every Holy Week so that their sins would be lost. But some of them couldn’t endure it and they died when they nailed each other to the cross.3

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After that, we passed by a town called Picuris. The church was really beautiful. Indians were living there. We passed by Rancho de Taos. Then we arrived at Taos itself. There are just Ladinos living in Taos. After we ate we went to Taos Pueblo where the Taos Indians live. They asked for fifty cents so that we could go in. We went to have fun, but we didn’t see much. We didn’t see anything at all. We had gone to see some animals that Compadre Lol said looked like cows. They’re called “buffaloes.” The buffaloes were grazing in the meadow. They say they’re very big. But from a distance they looked the same size as pigs.

They say that the Taos Indians use them in their fiestas. Who knows if they eat them or if they cavort with them. Who knows.

• Another time we went to watch a show. A woman from Japan put on a performance. The woman showed what a marriageable girl looks like and what a bride looks like. She showed how a married woman looks, and also an old lady. She showed what a drunk looks like and what he does. She showed what everyone looked like in her country. She showed how they celebrate a fiesta in Japan. She showed everything.

•

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One Sunday Antzelmo and I met up with a friend. He arrived at our room when we were in the midst of playing music. He probably heard us playing and asked permission to come upstairs. He came in, sat down, and started chatting. His name was Genaro Quintana. He spoke Spanish. He asked where we were from and what we had come to do. We told him where we were from. As for what we had come to do, we told him we had come for fun. “Do you want to have a drink?” he asked us, since he had heard that we had just come for fun.

After a minute or two he said, “Don’t you want to go and have a good time at my house? I’ll take you by car,” he said. “What will we decide? Shall we go?” I asked Antzelmo. “I don’t know. Won’t something happen to us?” he said. “It’s better if we make a phone call to Compadre Lol. We’ll see what he thinks,” I told Antzelmo. I made a phone call to Compadre Lol. “Well, see here, compadre, a Ladino has arrived to visit us and he says he wants to take us to his house. I don’t know if we should go because I don’t know who he is,” I said. “Ah, go on, if you want to go. He probably won’t do anything to you,” said my compadre. Then the Ladino spoke to Compadre Lol on the phone. He asked permission to take us with him. Compadre Lol told him he could. We left our hotel at about nine o’clock at night. But just as we were about to get in the car, two soldiers came up to us.

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“Don’t be scared, Romin. The soldiers are my watchmen. It isn’t that you are going to jail, no!” said the Ladino. “I’m not scared,” I said. Of course it didn’t matter if my soul had flipped from the fright. But even though my soul had flipped from the fright, it made no difference because I was strong-hearted. We drove away in his car. Santa Fe was left far behind. The Ladino’s house was a big cantina. He offered me a seat where the people who were drinking were sitting. It was separate from where his barkeepers worked. There were lots of customers. But the place was pitch black. He gave me a glass of liquor with cracked ice. The liquor was very strong. After I finished the first glass he gave me another glass. After I finished it he asked me if I wanted another. I told him I didn’t want any more. “If you want more, drink more because I’m going to take you home in my car. Don’t be scared because there isn’t any quarreling here. I have my soldiers,” he said. Each of the doors was guarded by police. That’s what those police were for who were with him when he came to pick us up. “No, that’s enough,” I said, because I was getting drunk. The other people who were drinking talked to me. The people seemed to be good-hearted. When the time came, Old Genaro closed up his bar. His barkeepers left and then he drove us back to Santa Fe.

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We saw him several times after that. Whenever he came to Santa Fe to drink, he would call us on the phone.

• Another time Antzelmo and I took a walk around downtown Santa Fe. Except we walked a little bit further. We met a man on the way. “Where are you going?” he asked. “We’re just taking a walk,” we said. “Where do you come from?” he asked. “We’ve come from Mexico,” we said. “Well, would you like to have a drink?” “We don’t,” we said. “Let’s go!” he said. “Let’s go, then, but where to?” we said. “There’s a place near here. Let’s go see!” he said. Just nearby we found a bar. We found it filled with people drinking. When they saw us they came up to ask us where we were from. “We’re from Mexico,” we told them. “Let’s have a drink!” everyone kept saying. We were going to accept from one who came to talk to us, but he started to look at us in a strange way. We didn’t like that! Besides, there were some women and girls who had gathered together, too. “Come over here! Come over here!” they kept saying. The women drank separately. The women danced separately. And they played songs separately

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for their friends to dance to. It seemed to be a piano the girls were playing. You couldn’t see very well because the people were crowded in so tight. But they were all girls. As for us, we ran out because there were so many women dancing there. We simply fled back to the hotel. We simply came back to our part of town because it was probably a different section where we had gone. That’s why we were scared. They might murder us. They might be unfriendly. It was on a Sunday, because we always went visiting on Sundays. Notes 1.  This was a Thanksgiving Day service in an Episcopal Church. 2.  According to local traditions, Zinacantecs may be abducted to caves by the terrifying “spooks.” 3.  Las Trampas is a Hispanic penitente town, where, until recent times, the Passion was recreated.

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ell, Compadre Lol took me, Romin Teratol, to the Shalako

Fiesta in Zuni on the fourteenth of December. I, Maryan Péres Péres, went to Zuni on Saturday, the fourteenth of December.1 We left Santa Fe at nine o’clock in the morning.

Compadre Lol and Nick came by the Hotel Montezuma to pick us up at nine-fifteen in the morning. They went to a drugstore to buy medicine for Antzelmo, because he said he had a bellyache. Nearby I dropped a letter in the mailbox for my father. After that, we took to the road. When we arrived in Zuni, the performers were just assembling. But there wasn’t a good fiesta yet. We stood around for a long time, waiting in the snow. Compadre Lol had bought me a pair of long pants. Nick had given me a pair of his shoes to wear because the snow was so deep. But I couldn’t bear the cold. It felt as if my toes would drop off.

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We went for a short walk. We got to know what the streets were like, how big the town was. It was a small town. Some of the people raised eagles in their yards, because their feathers were needed for fiestas. The houses were very beautiful, indeed. Only there wasn’t any church on the earth’s surface. “Where could they be celebrating the fiesta?” we said to ourselves. Then an old Indian man appeared. Compadre Lol chatted with him. Afterwards he told us, “Their gods are underground.” We looked for the entrance to the cave. We never found it. There was a tiny hill in the midst of the houses. We walked around it, but we never found the opening. “How come we don’t see any church?” we said.2

Their church was a little round building molded out of clay. It hadn’t any corners. Its roof was simply flat. And there was a ladder to climb up the back of it.3 The Indians were crowded around the church, dancing. We never entered the cave where they kept their saints. They wouldn’t say where the entrance was because they wouldn’t let us see their saints.

The Indians wouldn’t let anyone see their real saints. Only they could enter their church. The church was guarded by soldiers. The Ladinos’ soldiers and the Indians’ soldiers watched over the fiesta together, because so many people had assembled.

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Then another Indian appeared. Compadre Lol chatted with him, too. He asked Compadre Lol where we were from and what we had come to do. Compadre Lol told him all about our home. The man took us to his house. The house smelled horrible to me. He offered us chairs. We sat down. A great platter of meat appeared, heaped up very high, with seasoning, and a platter of rice. But it just came to see the view!

Their food was just mutton. That’s the way it was with everybody during the fiesta. They just ate mutton. As for us, we never tasted a bite. Only Nick ate a lot. We just felt sick to our stomachs. I certainly thought I was going to vomit. I only ate a bit of rice, but I didn’t eat happily. I just nibbled a bit so that it would look as if I was eating.

When it grew dark, six Shalakos came from the riverbank. The Shalako gods were carried upright. The performers hidden inside lifted the Shalakos high above their heads. The Shalakos were very tall. They were strange. They had beards, but their beards were made of feathers. They wore feathered crests and they had long black hair on their heads.

Their hair was flowing behind them, like women. And they wore narrow white skirts. Their costumes were really beautiful. But that was all. Their faces were covered with masks. Their faces were awful. They looked like devils. Their faces looked like bird’s faces.

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They had long beaks, like birds. Their beaks were very long. Their beaks were probably two hand spans long. Their beaks were made of wood. The paint was black. They moved their beaks when they walked. They made their beaks chatter.

They kept opening their beaks and calling out. They made a horrible clacking sound with their beaks. They were clacking their beaks like a bird does when it’s angry. The Shalakos had horrible hollow stomachs. They danced a little while. After they danced, they divided up. Each of the performers went off to different houses. We stuck behind them wherever they went. We were there the whole night.

We followed right behind the Shalakos. When the Shalakos arrived at an official’s house, they waited at a distance of maybe four meters from the door. Then two men came out. They were practically naked. They just wore tiny pants and tiny shirts. They spread cloths on the ground for the Shalakos to sit on. And they spread cloths down in the house, too. There were more people sitting inside. They were praying as they waited for the Shalakos. Then the Shalakos went inside the house. They were seated next to the altar. The Zunis prayed to them. They say that the Shalakos used to be the saints’ helpers long ago. Now they are treated like saints.

One man passed around a cigarette, but the cigarette looked like a twig. The man who received the cigarette made the sign of the cross with it. And he made the sign of the cross with the match when he lit

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the cigarette. But who knows what that was for. After he had taken three puffs he made the sign of the cross again and returned it. The first man took three puffs, made the sign of the cross, and gave it to another man. Each one puffed on it three times. When the cigarettes went out, they lit them with firebrands. The twig cigarette lasted for one or two people. While one was smoking the others prayed in unison. And after the cigarettes were finished, they prayed in unison. Men were playing drums and the drummers sang. They sang and prayed for a very long time. They didn’t drink any liquor when they were celebrating, none at all. On the altar sat tiny images of the Shalakos. In front of the altar a gourd had been set, and feathers had been put in the gourd. Ground corn and seashells were scattered all around it. There were three deer heads nailed to the wall. And above the altar they had hung lots of clothes and silver. The silver was very shiny. Who knows what the clothes were for, because they didn’t have real saints in their houses. While the Shalako was sitting there, seven people came to the door. They were holding feathers. Their pants were made of leather. And their heads were completely covered with mud.4 I don’t know what they were saying, but people were laughing at it. They looked pretty much like clowns. Yes! The mudhats kept making trips from house to house.

After we watched the first Shalako, we went to see what they were doing in another house. There the men were completely naked. Just

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their asses and pricks and faces were covered. They wore black feathers over their heads. They had beaks like birds. Their faces were hideously puffy, like a screech owl’s.5 They were dancing to drums. And the drummers sang in the same way as they beat the drums. In another house the dancers were wearing deerskins, fox skins, bearskins on their backs.6 They were shaking rattles when they danced, rattles made of deer bones. And they were waving bows and arrows. They held them high when they danced.

They didn’t have just one god in that house. There was the Shalako. There was a rain-giver. There was a sky god. And one impersonated Our Holy Father, Fire.7 He had a horrible conical head. The Fire was naked. He just had short pants, like the mudhats. His shorts had red stripes, yellow stripes, black stripes, green stripes. His whole body was painted in stripes. Even his face was painted. Four old men played the drums. They kept on dancing the whole night. Yes!

All the houses were wonderfully decorated. Coins were strung like chaplets on the walls.8 Ears of corn hung from the rafters. Big red chilis sat on the altars. Clothes were hanging above the altars together with the silver belts. The Indians were very rich. At midnight each group ate in the houses. Each group ate mutton. The whole town ate mutton. But they didn’t give it to the spectators. The spectators ate by themselves.

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We watched all night. We slept for a very short time inside the car. I don’t remember if it was for an hour perhaps, if that much. When we woke up, it was already a bit light. We passed by one house, but it stank terribly. We couldn’t go inside. It stank terribly because they just ate sheep, like buzzards.9 Yes!

When we arrived at the house of another official we found a Shalako sitting inside. A group of performers began to dance. It looked as if there were girls together with the men, but they were just pretending. They were acting out what Navajos do. One of them was impersonating a Navajo shaman. The old man tossed ground corn in front of the Shalako. He also tossed some opposite the door. They say he was demonstrating how he cured his patients. The performers were kneeling in front of the altar. They were rubbing ground green corn on their chests and their foreheads, which is what they do when they watch over a patient. Everybody danced around three times inside the house. It looked the same as when the Lesser Players entertain at the Fiesta of San Sebastián. There were a great many spectators crowded about. The cold was terrific. And dawn came as we spent the night watching. Around seven o’clock we drove to the Navajo Reservation in Nick’s car. We went to visit a Navajo friend of his who was living in the woods. We found him at home, drunk. He and Nick chatted together. His wife didn’t know English. They had done a strange thing to their baby. They had wrapped it up at its birth and bound its arms and legs to a board. It had been tied

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to the board for ninth months. The baby was simply bound to it for good. They carried it around like a tabernacle. They had drilled four large holes for the ropes they used to carry the board. The holes for the cords to bind the child were smaller. They say all the women’s children grow up that way. They grow up bound to a board. Yes!

The man’s house was made of logs piled up like a pigpen. There was just a hole in the roof to let in light. The man raised rabbits, sheep, and goats. The sheep and goats were mixed together in the same corral. All the goats and sheep were the same white color.

The goats had very long hair. The sheep’s wool was short and kinky. There may have been a hundred animals in that corral. They say some of the Navajos raise the kind of sheep whose wool is good for yarn. These sheep were good for nothing but mutton. We went back to Zuni at about noon. A Ladino gave us some chicken to eat. He gave us bread. He gave us chili. He bought milk and everything. He was the one who fed us. Lord, Compadre Lol only bought us an apple apiece! But you can’t get full on one apple. Have you ever heard of anybody getting full on an apple? Lord, I haven’t either. No sir, not ever! After we ate, we went for a walk at the edge of the town. But the place simply stank from the sheepskins hanging on the houses. We circled around. We came to a wide field in the center of the town.

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All the performers gathered together: the Shalakos, the dancers who wore feathers over their heads, the seven others who wore mud hats, together with the one who represented fire. Then all the performers raced, just the Fire stayed behind. There were six holes dug in the ground on either side of the road. Who knows what they tossed into the holes. When the others ran back, the Fire blocked their way. All the racers stopped there. They looked like buzzards racing. Yes!

Each of the Shalakos made six trips. It was similar to the horse races at the Fiesta of San Lorenzo. They dropped feathers in each of the holes. That, they say, brings good luck for the whole country.10 They say that if one of them falls, all the dancers come out and beat the local people. But during the fiesta that we saw, in 1963, nobody fell. The fiesta ended properly. Notes 1.  In his home town Antzelmo was most frequently addressed and referred to as Maryan (Spanish for Mariano). Indeed he was baptized Mariano Audelino, but Audelino seemed so outlandish that it was changed to Antzelmo. 2.  A hidden underground church, or kiva, must have been doubly perplexing for Antzelmo. In Zinacantán, caves are traditionally the domain of the Earth Lord, an underworld supernatural who controls the land, weather, water, and all the earth’s treasures. 3.  This was the entrance to the kiva.

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4.  These were the Koyemshi or Old Dance Men, familiarly known as “mudheads.” They are rain creatures who live underground, much like the legendary dwarves that Zinacantecs say inhabit the center of the earth. The dwarves also cover their heads with mud, to protect themselves from the harsh rays of the sun when he sinks beneath the earth each night to sleep. 5.  These were the Salimopiyas, or Warriors of the Zenith and the Nadir, whose helmets are decorated with a ruff of raven feathers. 6.  The rain gods and Yamuhakto, the Wood Carrier, wear deerskins. The Helashaktipona, or Wood Ears, wear fox skins. 7.  The rain-giver was either Sayatasha, the Rain God of the North, or Hututu, the Rain God of the South. The sky god might have been Pautisha or Kiaklo, the director and deputy director of the Council of the Gods. Shulawitsi is the Fire God. 8.  By “chaplets” is meant the cloth strips decorated with many coins that are hung around the necks of the saints in the churches of Zinacantán. 9.  As we made the rounds of the officials’ houses we blundered into one of the kitchens. Bloody sheep carcasses hung near the great cauldrons of mutton that sent up nauseating clouds of greasy steam. Antzelmo and Romin, gagging, clapped their neckerchiefs over their mouths and hurried out the door. For once they were sympathetic to my vegetarian diet. Although Zinacantecs raise sheep for wool, they abhor the thought of eating their flesh. 10.  The purpose of the race is to bring a plentiful rainfall during the coming growing season.

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ell, I, Romin Teratol, am going to tell a little about how

Christmas passed in 1963. On Tuesday, the twenty-fourth of December, we worked just half a day with Compadre Lol at the museum. Then we went with Compadre Lol to gather pine needles for the birth of his Christ Child. The woods where we went to look for them were far away. But the pine needles were very hard to find. There simply weren’t any good places for find-

ing pine needles, because so much snow had fallen. The needles we did find were short and thick and they were very hard to strip off. The sharp ends of the needles kept sticking into our hands.1 Afterwards we went to a Ladina’s house to buy a romero, a doubleneedled pine tree for Compadre Lol’s Christ Child. He took it home, but he left it up on the roof so that the children wouldn’t see how the Christ Child appeared. The Christ Child is born secretly. It wasn’t until nighttime that they fixed the place where their Christ Child was to be born.

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When we came back from the woods, Romin and I stayed downtown in the park. We were sitting on a bench when a Ladino came along. It was Old Genaro Quintana. “Don’t you want have a little drink? I’ll treat you,” he said. We went to a bar. We drank until it was dark.

He bought a drink at a time, but he bought a great deal. The bar was simply packed with people drinking. And then several girls started to sing because Christ was about to be born. While we were chatting, an old Ladino came over to talk to us. He said he admired our clothes and our hats. Old Genaro Quintana told us in private, “Don’t get mixed up with that man. He’s a homosexual. He loves men.” After we finished drinking, we went back to our room. Old Genaro looked at our instruments. That was when the Ladino made a deal to buy Compadre Antzelmo’s guitar. When we were in the room, Old Genaro asked us, “Would you like to visit me at my house tomorrow?” But we didn’t know if we were to go someplace with our compadre. “I guess I’ll ask him,” said Romin. He spoke to Compadre Lol on the phone. He asked if we were free on Christmas Day. “Yes, go on!” said Compadre Lol. The Ladino was very glad. When he heard that we were going to visit him he said, “Let’s go drink some more!” We went out again to drink more liquor. Yes!

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We left him at a cantina. It was already ten o’clock at night when we split up. We were supposed to go with Compadre Lol to hear Mass at the cathedral.

When we arrived at his house, he and my comadre Mimi were in the midst of fixing the bed where the little Niño Jesús would be born. They had waited until the children were asleep. When they woke up the next morning, Compadre Lol would tell the children that Santa Claus brought the Christ Child. He would say that the Baby Jesus fell from the sky. That’s what the children would hear. After they decorated the pine tree for the Christ Child’s birth, they stuck a silver dollar in each stocking. They hid that from the children, too. They stuck candles in with the coins and they hung the stockings on the wall.2 Underneath the pine tree they scattered the shepherds. All their presents were piled there, too. Everybody would give each other presents. We arrived at the cathedral at midnight. The priest celebrates Mass at midnight when the Christ Child is born in the church.

I had bought a tiny tape recorder that afternoon. I was going to record the priest chanting in the cathedral when the Christ Child was born. But the tape recorder didn’t record the least bit. Compadre Lol and I went back the next day to return it because it wasn’t any good. It was simply useless.

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The next morning, Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of December, we went to Compadre Lol’s house. He and his wife gave us a meal. After we had eaten, we opened the presents.

They gave me a strip of red velvet trimming for my ceremonial robe, a ten-dollar check, and a little toy dog for my boy Xun. The little dog was velvety. Compadre Lol’s father-in-law gave each of us a tiny box. The tiny boxes were really beautiful. Yes!

After we received our presents we went to our room to wait for Old Genaro, who was coming to take us to his house for a meal. The Ladino reached the hotel just a minute after our arrival. “Shall we go?” he said. He took us to Pojoaque because that was where he lived. When we arrived at his house, he gave us a drink. “Chase away the hangover!” he told us. After we drank the liquor, he gave us a meal. We ate a lot.

We ate at the table together with the old man and his wife and his sister-in-law. After the meal, Old Genaro gave us both another drink. Then we took a walk about his yard. He was raising rabbits. He had made a pen for them, like one for pigs. He had done a beautiful job of it.

Before we left, the sister-in-law gave each of us a dollar, because she said she was glad that we had come.

•

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The old man took us to see the fiesta at San Ildefonso. The Indians were dancing to music in an open field in the middle of the town. They danced beautifully. They danced to fiddles and guitars. Yes!

There was a young girl dancing in the middle. They had pinned dollar bills on the girl’s dress. Her dress was white, like a bride’s gown. The dress was very beautiful, except it hadn’t a train like a bride’s gown does when Ladinas and Ladinos marry. The other dancers were wearing masks. One wore the skin of a bull pulled over his face. He had horns like bulls always do. A woman was wearing a black mask that looked like the face of a spook. Another was wearing a clown’s face. An old man wore a mask with hair standing on end. He was carrying two five-liter jugs over his shoulders and cracking a whip. A man who was wearing a devil’s face had a lasso tied around his waist. Another group wore beautiful crowns with ribbons. There were eighteen dancers in all.

There were two people who were wearing skirts, but they were men pretending to be women. The man who was pretending to be a bull was goring the two women. There was one who had become an old woman, except she had a huge belly, bulging out. She looked as if she had three babies in her belly. She had a terrible time walking. The others were tormenting the old woman. Sometimes they led her along. Sometimes they pushed her

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down. The old lady would land way off, bottoms up. When the old lady collapsed, the bull lifted her skirt with his horns. The old lady pretended she couldn’t get up. Then the others came over to pull her up. They danced, pulling her along. When she got back on her feet, they pushed her down again. When she was down on the ground, the bull gored her again. Then the bull gored the old man whose hair stood on end. He landed and rolled over and over. He was covered with dust. That devil with the lasso caught the bull and tied the bull to a tree. The girl danced in the midst of them. I thought she was really beautiful.

The dance, they say, represented how the Spaniards arrived long ago. There were two men who wore woven necklaces on their hats. They had dollar bills hanging from their chests. Those men represented the Spaniards. The girl who danced was the Indian. Malintzin was the name of the Spaniard’s mistress. But the Spaniards didn’t hear her name clearly. They called their mistress Malinche. That’s why, ever since, they call the girl who dances in their midst, Malinche. After the dance was over, an old man took us to his house. He invited all the performers to his house. There were lots of fruits and candies on a table. That woman with the black mask was holding a bag. When she entered the house she filled her bag with the fruits and candies. They gave us a glass of soda pop. We ate a candy and a walnut.

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A girl invited us to her house for a meal. The girl was really pretty. But we never went, because Old Genaro didn’t want to go. Instead he took us to his cantina. He gave us more liquor to drink. I don’t know what kinds of liquor we drank. We mixed it with beer. We got drunk. I couldn’t remember returning.

When he brought us back to Santa Fe, he bought us a whiskey at some other hotel. Then we went to Nick’s house for dinner. He gave each of us a cigarette lighter for Christmas. That is their custom. It was past ten o’clock at night when we returned to the hotel. After that I didn’t see anything else. No!

• “You won’t be going home at the end of December. You’ll probably have to stay another couple of days,” Compadre Lol told us. “It’s better if we ask permission, otherwise they’ll impose a fine when you cross over.” So we went to Albuquerque to ask permission to stay two days longer. On our way back to Santa Fe we passed by an Indian town called Santo Domingo. They were in the midst of a fiesta. People were dancing in an open space in front of the church. They formed a circle around each other as they danced to the drums. Everyone danced, men, women, and children. They celebrated wonderfully. Their clothes were decorated beautifully. Some wore necklaces made of dyed

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corn kernels, some were made of animals’ teeth. The most beautiful necklaces were those made of silver and tiny blue stones. We went into the church to worship Our Holy Father, Santo Domingo.3 Our Holy Father was really beautiful. The Christ Child had been born there, too. After we finished worshipping God, we went to see what was for sale in the store. They had everything that the Indians made. There were beautiful rings and belts. They had watch straps. Everything they sold was very fine. The Indians’ work was fine because they made everything of silver. And the pieces with blue stones were even more beautiful.

• When we reached the holy New Year, we bought a bottle of rum and we went to visit Compadre Lol. We drank to renew the holy year. Besides, the period for which we had made the agreement to stay was up. So we went to talk together, of course.4 When we finished our talk, we returned to the hotel. A few minutes after our arrival, Genaro Quintana called us on the phone. “Are you there? How are you?” he said to us. “We’re fine,” we replied. “Well, don’t you want to have a little drink? I’ll measure you as a man. We’ve reached the holy new year,” he said to us. He came to the hotel to pick us up. We went to drink at a bar nearby.

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“Do you want to go with me another time to my house?” he asked us. “Why not?” we replied.

That was when he bought Antzelmo’s guitar. We went to his home for the last time. He gave us a drink. Compadre Antzelmo’s guitar was left behind. Then we went to have another drink at his cantina. Lord, we got drunk. We drank the whole night. All we did was drink liquor. We came back to the hotel around eight o’clock the next morning. As for me, I felt so sleepy I went to bed. As for Romin, he didn’t sleep. He went out for a walk. Then, he says, he met up with another friend.

I met a Ladino by the hotel entrance. The old man worked in the post office. “Would you like to visit my home?” he asked me. “Well, okay, why not?” I said. It didn’t bother me so long as it was nearby. Antzelmo stayed behind at the hotel because he didn’t like going out much, and besides, he just seemed in a bad mood. “Where’s your friend?” asked the old man. “He stayed at the hotel,” I said. “Doesn’t he want to come?” he asked. “Let’s take him along.” I called Antzelmo on the phone. “Do you want to come to my house? says a Ladino who spoke to me on the street. Wait a minute, I’m going to let a friend of mine know that we’re going, I said. Let’s take him along, he told me. Well, do you want to go along with us?”

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“Where does he live?” he asked. “It’s pretty far. I met him on the street. You probably know him. It’s the old man who works in the post office, the old man who is kind of blotchy. If you’re coming he says he’ll pick you up in the car.” “Well, let’s go!” I said.

We picked up Antzelmo at the hotel. When we arrived at the old man’s house we had a drink. When we finished drinking, we ate with the old man and his wife and his children. We ate the same food together. While we were eating, that old man began chatting. “What do you do so that all your teeth are still fine?” he asked. “Mine were like that when I was a boy. All my teeth were really good. I used to be able to eat anything hard, but now I just long to eat hard things.” “But your teeth look fine to me,” I said. “You think these are my teeth?” He took out his dentures. He simply hadn’t a single tooth in his mouth! Notes 1.  Zinacantecs strew pine needles on the church floors and at the foot of crosses before a religious ceremony to provide a sweet scent for the gods. 2.  The “candles” were sugarcanes. 3.  Santo Domingo was the patron saint of Zinacantán into the mid-eighteenth century, when he was replaced by San Lorenzo. Accordingly, he is the second most important saint for Zinacantecs.

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4.  Antzelmo makes no mention of the disagreeable end of New Year’s Eve. It is customary for a Zinacantec, when offered a bottle of liquor, to ask the purpose of the gift. After voicing a number of protests, the donor will divulge what favor he hopes to receive in return. And so, when Antzelmo presented me with a bottle of vodka, I took the customary precaution of inquiring after his motives. He insisted that it was merely to celebrate the New Year and the approaching end of our task. When, however, we had consumed a greater portion of the contents, Antzelmo asked for a retroactive increase in his salary. A shouting match ensued. I berated him heatedly for his deception. Exclaiming that he would walk home to Zinacantán, Antzelmo lurched out into the snow and cold, slamming the door behind him. I knew that his passport was in my possession and I worried over his landing in some unknown jail. Fortunately he appeared the next day, grumpy but resigned to leaving his destiny in my hands for another day or two.

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hen we were about to come home we both longed to have a

few silver dollars. We brought them from the bank in a bag. We took a plane from Albuquerque as far as Ciudad Juárez. Com-

padre Lol put us on the bus there. He came along to help us get across to the other side. Then he went back to Santa Fe. We came back to Mexico City by ourselves. At the bus terminal, they looked at our things to see if we had brought anything back. When we came, they kept lifting up things inside our suitcases. When we left, they just peeked inside. Our things continued on to the baggage room. They weighed each bag.

We left Ciudad Juárez at around five thirty in the afternoon. We traveled all night and all day. But we were scared that our money and our passports would get lost.

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When we got on, it was fine. No trouble. It was on the way that we had some trouble. There were two women sitting in the seats across from us. One of the women was a girl, the other was older.

“It’s good that a woman is going along. She’ll be a help if we ask her whether they’ve stopped to eat or if the driver is just drinking coffee. It’s good if we stick close to her,” we said to ourselves. Antzelmo had stuck his pouch of silver dollars in his pocket. I was on the inside seat, Antzelmo was on the outside, and that woman was across the aisle. As for us, we slept happily because we were traveling together with that woman. How would we know that she would do something bad? When she saw that we had fallen asleep, she slowly stuck her hand into my pants pocket. I had put the silver dollars that Compadre Lol had changed for me in my pocket. They were nearly stolen. Thanks to Our Lord, my soul had not gone completely in my sleep. I felt it right away. I felt her groping about. I opened my eyes right off. When I looked, her hand recoiled. I was wearing two pairs of long pants. I had stuck the silver dollars in the pocket of the inner pants. She probably thought I was just wearing one pair of pants, that’s why she thought she could steal their contents. But she didn’t reach the lower level of pants that I had stuck them in. When I felt her groping about, I immediately woke up Romin. “Wake up! There’s trouble! Don’t sleep much. My money almost disappeared. If it had been on the outside pocket it would have gone!”

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“You swear to God?” “I swear to God, because it nearly went,” I said.

“Where? Did you see who it was?” “I saw a little. It was the old woman. I opened my eyes immediately when I felt her groping about.”

“Lord, and we thought it would be good to join her!” The old woman didn’t make a sound. She was just bowed over. She pretended she was fast asleep. It was almost midnight. That’s why we had felt so sleepy. But our sleep was scared off. We never fell asleep that night. And we never slept during the day. We didn’t sleep until we arrived in Mexico City. We arrived at the hotel at eleven o’clock at night. “Well, come on in!” the hotel man told us. He took us to a bedroom that was empty. “Can you sleep all alone by yourselves or shall we send for a couple of girls to join you?” he asked us.

“No, thanks,” I said. “Don’t you like women?” he said. “We like them, but we are tired now and we feel very sleepy,” I said. “They probably aren’t men, then. They’re just women! he probably thought,” we said to ourselves. After the hotel man left, we were a bit scared. “If he sends them, as he said, all our little coins will surely stay behind here!”

We were afraid that the woman from the bus had followed us. “What if she comes now? What if we have fallen asleep? All our

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money will disappear, of course!” we said to ourselves. We simply didn’t sleep again until dawn came. The next day we took a walk around. There was a construction job. We went to see how they were working. They were digging holes, burying pipes. Then we went to see what was for sale in the stores. That’s how we distracted ourselves. In the afternoon we went to the terminal for buses that go to San Cristóbal. We arrived at the office pretty early, because we wanted to come back when it was still light. The trouble was, there weren’t any empty seats on the bus that was leaving in a few minutes. “Not until the next one, if there are free seats later on, otherwise not until tomorrow,” the person who sold the bus tickets told us. We were terribly scared again. What if we didn’t get the bus back? That’s what we were afraid of. There was a Ladino standing there. “How far are you going?” he asked us. “We’re going to San Cristóbal, but we couldn’t get the bus that is leaving now,” we said. “Well, but you’ll get the one that’s leaving in a little while,” he said. “I don’t know. The ticket seller already told us that it wouldn’t be until tomorrow.” “No, go ask for your tickets. Of course they have to give them to you!” he told us.

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We went to the counter to ask again. But the ticket seller said, “There aren’t any more tickets. Not until tomorrow.” “Lord, but what can we do?” we said to ourselves. Another person came along. “Where are you going?” he asked us. “We’re going to San Cristóbal,” we said. “But not yet. Perhaps you’ll do us the favor.” He went to buy our tickets. We were terribly relieved now. “You have a half an hour until it leaves,” he told us. We waited a little while. We got inside the bus. We had a hard time getting the tickets, we did! They said some people had come earlier in the day, some had come the day before, but those people stayed behind. We went on first. Thanks to Our Lord we got tickets. Otherwise we would have had to spend another night. It was already dark when we left Mexico City. We traveled by bus the whole night and all the next day. We were a little scared, too. What if there were robbers? No, we didn’t get bothered any more. Thanks to Our Lord we arrived safely in San Cristóbal the next night. Nothing else happened to us on the way. The only thing that seemed a bit bad to us was the difficulty with our meals. The bus stopped every few minutes but it never stopped for long. We kept eating in a rush. We didn’t have time to fill up well before the bus was ready to leave. Sometimes we took our food with us, folded in a tortilla. We were starving when we arrived in San Cristóbal.

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We went to a barber because our hair was so long. We were hungry but there wasn’t any place open where food was sold. We took a taxi to Zinacantán Center. We arrived home late at night. That’s the way my trip ended. That’s all the talk I have about when I went far away long ago. That’s the way Antzelmo Péres’s talk ends.

The next day I left my house early. I came out to hear Mass because it was Epiphany. Friends kept coming up, one after another. Old Maryan Sarate had a cantina then in the late Puli Krus’s house. “I’m here, Father Maryan,” I said. “Could it be you, Romin?” he said. “It’s me, sir,” I said. “Lord, are you still alive? People say you died there, that you’d never come back.” “God, that’s not so, Father Maryan. Our Lord didn’t do that,” I said. “Lord, drink a little! Where in the world did you go?” he said. “Ah, pretty far away,” I said. Then I drank with the old guy. That’s what the whole trip was like.

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Journey to the American East • • •

Journey to the American East

c

ompadre Lol sent me a request in the year 1967 that he wanted

me and Antzelmo to come to his country. The government did us a favor here; they issued our documents for us. When they were ready, my compadre Lol came all the way to Zinacantán to pick us up. But the trouble was that he came just before my fifth child was born. The day he arrived, the twenty-sixth of August, my wife, Matal, went out to gather firewood with my children and my next-door neigh-

bor. I stayed home to work on a translation from Tzotzil into Spanish. It was raining. When my wife came home, she was soaking wet. I made a good fire for her and my children to warm themselves by. It was around five-thirty when her stomach started hurting. “Hurry up and bring the lady while it’s still light,” she said. “Wait a minute, I still have to finish this page,” I said. I filled the page. Then I poured some kerosene into my lantern. I took a pint of cane liquor and went to bring the midwife, Mother Petu’.1

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When Compadre Lol arrived at my house, I had just come back with the midwife. It was already dark and I was standing at the gate with my lantern. We went into the house quickly, because it was raining hard. Mother Petu’ sat down and my wife fixed a meal for her and Compadre Lol. My wife was enduring the pain in her stomach. “Eat!” she said. “Soon I won’t be able to feed you.” But she hardly sat down at all. Standing there she did what had to be done. She prepared her children’s meal. When her pain kept coming, she knelt and leaned on a chair. The midwife kneaded her back but the midwife wasn’t strong enough. So I myself kneaded her back and in a minute or two the baby came. We could hear its voice beneath my wife’s skirt. Mother Petu’ had me knot the baby’s umbilical cord so that cold wouldn’t pass into the baby’s stomach. I cut the umbilical cord with a razor blade. I put my old machete into the fire and burned the cord with it. The midwife bathed the baby in a big gourd. She bathed it in laurel water. While it was being bathed, I offered three rounds of cane liquor in a large shot glass.2 When Mother Petu’ finished bathing the baby, she wrapped the umbilicus in cotton. Then my wife spoke. “Is it a boy or girl?” The midwife dressed him in its little clothes. She wrapped him carefully in blankets. I gave the baby three chilis to hold so that he would receive their soul, so that he would know to buy chili when he grew up. Then I gave him a billhook, a digging stick, and an axe, so

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that he would know how to plant, and I gave him a strip of palm so that he would learn to weave palm hats. Mother Petu’ put a bit of pine in his hand, so he would light the way home for his father when he got drunk. The midwife censed the baby. She prayed to the ancestral gods so they would gather up his little soul at the meeting place at Calvary.3 Then she gave him to his mother to cuddle. At dawn we buried the afterbirth far from the house, to lengthen the time before the birth of the next baby. The hole in which it was buried was more than three hand spans deep. I offered a round of cane liquor in a small shot glass. When we came back to the house, Antzelmo was there. We offered a liter of cane liquor in appreciation for Compadre Lol coming to visit us. Then we went to San Cristóbal to get everything that I needed to entertain the midwife. I bought four kilos of meat, two pesos of shrimp for my wife to eat, one kilo of rice, and three liters of cane liquor. I invited Old Professor John and his wife to join us. When the meal was ready, we lined up at the table. First we washed our hands and rinsed our mouths. Salt and a bottle of cane liquor were placed at the head of the table. I offered a round of liquor to ask the midwife the favor of letting us gather at the meal. My stepmother had killed and cooked a hen for the midwife’s breakfast. The patient can’t eat fresh meat because the meat has blood and that would upset the patient’s stomach.

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We finished eating. The liquor on the table was finished. We washed our hands. We rinsed our mouths. Then I offered the midwife her pay. I gave her ten pesos, because that’s the way it is when the baby is a boy. A girl is five pesos. It was already late at night. Compadre Lol, Antzelmo, and I walked the midwife home. I carried a small basket with her presents. In it were forty tortillas, one kilo of meat, one liter of cane liquor, and one liter for the road. She drank a little on the way. At the door of her house, I knelt down and set before her the basket of presents. See here, Mother Petu’, Grant a little pardon, Grant a bit of pardon. Thank you. May God repay you. You endured your humble suffering, You bore your lowly hardship, You watched over my spouse, My companion. My mother, My sainted lady, Grant a little pardon.

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She accepted her gifts. She prayed to all the gods. We finished drinking the liter in equal parts. The midwife and her children would eat the meat and the tortillas afterwards. Antzelmo collapsed on her floor, because he had been drinking a little before. Compadre Lol and I returned to my house with my basket and my bottle. Compadre Lol waited for three days after my child’s birth because I cared for my patient for three days. They say that the grave yawns open for the mother for three days after the birth. When the three days of care were up, we got ready. We drank a bottle of Bonampak rum with the mayor. It was during the magistracy of Chep Xantis. After I saw that my son had been born, we left.

• Well, now, Antzelmo Péres will chat with you about when we went to the United States another time. We went right off to Tuxtla in a taxi. We went to the airport, because this time we were going by plane, indeed! We got inside the plane. There was a belt so we wouldn’t fall if the plane tipped. And there was a container for our vomit if we were sick to our stomachs. The plane landed for a short while at Minatitlán. There was a terrible amount of smoke in the sky. “What could they be making here?” we asked.

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“They make oil,” Compadre Lol told us.4 “Oh, that’s why there’s so much smoke, then!” we said. We got back in the plane. We flew above the ocean, because Minatitlán is on the coast. The ocean is very wide. I saw a ship far below us in the ocean. When we arrived at the airport in Mexico City, we met a student who was trying to get a ticket home. So we stayed a little while to help him. After the student had gotten his ticket, we went by taxi to the hotel.

The next morning we went to the American Embassy. We showed them our documents, which were issued in Tuxtla. We left our signatures on the papers that gave us permission to cross the border. Then we took a quick walk around the new anthropology museum.5 There was a waterfall at the entrance. The water fell from high up on the roof. Inside there were models of a Zinacantec bride and groom, but the woman had no shawl. She didn’t look like a bride. Her legs were horribly skinny. They had made models of the thatch houses in Zinacantán Center. They didn’t look right, either. But the models of the salt sellers looked exactly like Old Markux Promax and Old Xun K’obyox sawing their blocks of salt. Everything that belonged to the ancestors was in the new museum. There were teponaxtles [slit drums] made of stone. The snakes were made of stone and the turtles, too. Everything long ago was made of stone. Only the altars were made of clay.

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Next we went to see if sandals were for sale in the market. But we just went in vain. There weren’t any well-made sandals. The things were all fastened on the side with wire. I thought they looked terrible. Then we went to the cathedral to worship Our Lord and the saints. It was just after the main altar had burned. It had caught on fire from the electricity. The altar turned terribly black. But all the saints’ images were there, lined up in the windows. They had done a beautiful representation of Our Holy Father, San Lorenzo, and Our Holy Father, Santo Domingo.

We took a bus back to the hotel. We watched television for a while to see what they had pictures of. Little by little the day passed. Then we went to the airport. Two Ladinos asked if we had our documents. “We do!” we said. “Hand them over, then!” they told us. We gave them our papers. They signed them and stamped them. After they looked at our documents, they asked for our military cards. They stuck a slip of paper in the military card. We continued on. Then we met two women. They asked for our papers and our military cards, too. They signed them, too, and they put in another slip of paper. Then we came to two more soldiers. They asked for our military cards. They changed the slip of paper that had been stuck in the middle. They signed and stamped the other paper.

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“Okay, go on! Don’t lose this paper here, you will turn it in when you come back!” they told us. We got in the plane for the United States.

We left Mexíco City around four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun set on the way. It was eight o’clock at night when we arrived at the airport in Washington. It grows dark there two hours earlier than in Zinacantán.6 When we arrived at the airport I had thought we would reach the ground. But no, we were inside a bus. We went by bus to the terminal. First, they looked at our documents. After they looked at our documents, they asked for our military cards. After they looked at the military cards, they looked at our things. They groped through everything. “Okay, go on, then!” they said.

Compadre Lol’s wife came to meet us in the car. We almost got lost on the way. We took the wrong road. Compadre Lol had forgotten a bit, but soon he found the right road. We arrived at Compadre Lol’s house late at night. They gave us a room for as long as we were there. On the morning of the next day we couldn’t tell where we were. We didn’t know which direction our home was. The sun was already high when we woke up. You couldn’t tell where the sun had risen. You couldn’t tell at all.

•

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We used to go to work in Washington by car. But the trouble was we went slowly, because there were so many cars traveling. Compadre Lol lived in a place called Virginia, so it was pretty far away. Compadre Lol had a little boat. His house was on an arm of the ocean. The river passed by Washington. We could go to Washington faster by boat. He would tie up his little boat at the riverside and we would just walk to the office. The first time I got in the boat I was scared. It didn’t feel very good when we passed big boats on the way, because they threw off a lot of water. But Compadre Lol bought us little orange jackets. We put them around our necks and we tied the straps around our chests. Afterwards I felt better. On our way to work we would pass by the cemetery. The grave of the late President Kennedy could be seen easily. A flame was burning on top of his grave, by day and by night. His grave was guarded by soldiers. The other dead people’s graves didn’t have soldiers or flames.

• The office where we worked was on the third floor. 7  There were steps to each of the floors. We were pulled up, because the steps ran by means of a motor or electricity or something. We were pulled up. And we came down just the same way. We came straight down, standing up. At the office we corrected the words. They had a secretary, a black woman, who took the letters.

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At noon we bought our meals. We didn’t go to Compadre Lol’s house for lunch because it was far away. We only ate there in the morning and the evening. At noon we usually went to eat where the old workers ate. Not just any old people could go in to eat there, just the ones who worked in the offices. When we went to the cafeteria, the food was lined up in front of us. We lined up with our trays. We would select whatever we wanted, meat, chicken, pie. We could just heap it up on our trays.8 When we would go to a restaurant we wouldn’t tell them with our mouths what kind of food we wanted. The waitress would bring a piece of paper. All kinds of food that we might want were written on the paper, even coffee and milk and soft drinks. We could choose from the paper. Then we would tell the waitress with our mouths if we had been able to decide on something. One time we ate what they call “pizza.” It looked like a spread-out tortilla, but it was made of wheat. Mushrooms were put on top. They were fried together with it. We could call it a substitute for tortillas, because there weren’t any real tortillas. They simply don’t eat corn. But there are always lots of mushrooms, even in wintertime. They raise mushrooms. Even if they break them off, the stem sprouts. That’s why the mushrooms don’t disappear. When we ate at a restaurant, Compadre Lol left some money as a present for the person who brought the food to the table. If the food cost more, then they left a little more money. If it cost just a little, then

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they left a little. It was a present. The money for the meal went on a little plate. The person who served the meal made out a check on a slip of paper saying how much the meal cost. It came on a little saucer, and there was what looked like a little towel spread out on it. The money for the meal went on top of the towel. But the money that was a present was just left stacked on the table. It went into the waitress’s own pocket. She might get a dollar fifty or two dollars or so, according to how the person who ate felt.

• The museum where we worked had rocks of gold, rocks of silver. There were green rocks, yellow rocks, black rocks, blue rocks, red rocks. They looked as if they were painted.

We saw flying insects and swimming insects. We saw twig-carrying insects. We spent a long time looking at bugs, because there were so many kinds. There were cockroaches and spiders, wasps, yellow jackets, all the bugs with stingers. All the bumblebees were there, big bumblebees and little ones. All the tarantula killers were there. Every kind of bug with a stinger was there. But all the bugs were dead. We saw the skeleton of an animal. The animal skeleton was huge. It had a terribly long neck and a terribly long tail. And it was fantastically high.9

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There were human corpses, too, but who knows where they had dug them up, probably wherever they had found them discarded. They simply got terribly thin. They just hardened with their clothes. They had half a face and half a hand, cut off. They were probably found somewhere by the people of long ago when they were waging war. There was another museum nearby.10 We saw silver pits, old copper pits. There was a whole mine there. There was some really beautiful old-fashioned money. Some were all of silver. And some were all of gold. They gleamed wonderfully.

The tools of the people of long ago were there, their motors, their clocks. The old-fashioned watches were fixed there. We saw old-fashioned typewriters. We saw old-fashioned cars. Their wheels were made of metal. We saw old-fashioned trains. They weren’t like the trains used today. The old-fashioned trains looked as if they had horns. They had sharp corners on each side. They were really strange. We saw an electric plant. They used to be built entirely of wood. We saw an old-fashioned mill. It was made of wood, too. It ran on water when it was working. Its wheel revolved and it was huge.

There were models of Japanese carpenters and how they worked. They were really ugly. Their horrible hair stuck straight up. It looked like they never cut their hair properly. In another room they had old-fashioned weapons for waging war. There were guns and pistols and cannons. The old-fashioned rifles were flintlocks. Their barrels were long and thick and the inside was

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very wide. The pistols had long barrels, too, not at all like the pistols used today. They had a place for the percussion caps, which were stuck in there just like for a flintlock rifle. As for the flintlock rifles, the gunpowder was put in first, then the wad, then the bullet, then another wad to stopper the bullet. The pistols were just the same. We saw a little cannon that had hooks for shoulder straps. They say the soldiers slung it over their shoulders when they went to war long ago. On the first floor of the museum there was what looked like a rock swinging back and forth.11 It was very round. There was a circular sign made on the ground. We asked Compadre Lol what it was for. “That shows how the world and the sun revolve,” he said. We watched to see how it revolved, but we simply couldn’t see it turning. It swung very, very slowly. It looked as if it just reached the same place.

• We went to visit the statue of a former president of long ago. His name was Lincoln. He was sitting on a chair. His statue was huge. There were letters written on the wall that told how he had served as president and if his laws were good or bad. The letters told it. The words were written in Spanish in a pamphlet, that’s why I understood a little of what the writing on the wall said.

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Another time we went to see the current president’s house. But when we arrived at the door, soldiers were stopping people and looking at their permits. First they made a phone call to see if there was still room to go in to see the house, because the police kept track of how many people could get in. That’s why our names had to be given one day in advance. But the soldiers who were standing at the door chose which people could go in. First the people with influential jobs went in, afterwards the people who were just left over went in. They call the building the White House. In one room of his house there were loads of chairs for when he was paid visits by presidents from other countries. That’s where they talked together, they drank together. There was a table in the middle of the floor. His flags were standing there, too. Each flag had a picture of an eagle on it. The portraits of the former presidents were hanging on the wall. I saw the money of the former presidents, the kind they used, the kind of money they handled. There was a seal in the middle of the money.

The house had an observation tower, but it was simply closed up all the way to the top where his windows were. We never climbed up it. The observation tower was small, because all the buildings in Washington were low. The observation tower, they said, was in memory of Lincoln, the president of long ago.12

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One time we went to see the house of the former president of long ago, George Washington.13 His house wasn’t in a town. He just lived alone with his soldiers. He lived overlooking the river. In order to go in we had to pay. They asked for the money at the door. Once they had taken the money we walked around happily. There was grass—tiny green plants—all around the house, and there were loads of flowers. His house was really beautiful. His house had room after room. Inside the house there were pictures of the late George Washington. His beds were there, his pistols, his guns that he fought with long ago, his watches, his wife’s rings. Everything was there. As for me, I bought a book of pictures of Old George as he was long ago. Where the man ate, where his meals were cooked, what his fire was like and his weapons: they were all in the book. His plates had beautiful designs, and his cups were beautiful, too. The handles of his knives and pistols were all of gold.14 All his books were there, the laws of the former president.

The room where he used to sleep was on the second floor. The people simply crowded about, looking. His bed was wonderful. It had an arch over the entrance where he got in when he went to bed. He had beautiful cupboards for his things. He had a large clock sitting on the table. It was entirely of gold. The clock was beautiful and very shiny. It seemed as if you would long to own it. It didn’t have real numbers; they were what are called “roman”

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numerals. There was another clock hanging above the head of his bed. It was all gold, and the cord was gold, too. One of his pistols was lying by his bedstead. The pistol was entirely of gold. We passed by to look at the president’s carriages. He had three carriages, two carriages of wood and one carriage of metal. They never had cars long ago. They just used to travel by carriage. That’s why the president had his own carriages. There was a model of his horse and his saddle. His saddle was marvelous; its trappings were all of gold and silver. His horse looked wonderful, too.

The tethering posts for his horses and his soldier’s horses of long ago were there. Everything could be seen. After we looked at the horse and the saddle, the carriages and so on, we went on to another building. More of his papers were there. His rings were there. His rings were marvelous. His rings were all of gold. And the money they used long ago, during his presidency, was there.

His graveyard was there, too, but it was locked up carefully. There were two flags standing by his grave, one at each side of the entrance. He was buried next to his house. He was first buried in another grave. But they dug up his bones and buried his bones in the place where they are now. The grave where his bones are lying now was fixed up. A very fine building was constructed for them. An eagle was carved on top of his grave. The eagle was really beautiful. After we looked at his grave we walked down to the riverside. A house was standing by the river. The people who came to see the president’s house got off the boat there. We went to see what was inside

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the building, but there wasn’t anything inside. It was just a place for people to disembark.

On the other side of the river, across from George Washington’s house, there was the old fort where the soldiers of long ago waged war.15

• Compadre Lol’s house was on the same arm of the ocean. Every day we saw the boat make trip after trip to George Washington’s house. The boat was really huge. The boat was three stories high. But it never went any further down the river. It just kept carrying people back and forth to George Washington’s house. On the river, too, there was another big boat. That boat was very long. And it had shovels. It dredged up sand from the bottom of the river. There were loads of little boats taking trips on the river. Some were playing and some were fishing. Some boats just traveled on the wind. They traveled very slowly. The airfield is at the edge of the river, too. So many planes fly over. They simply never stop. One just waits for the other to leave, then it comes right behind. If one plane sees that it can’t land yet, it circles around in the sky waiting for another to leave. Then it lands. They just make room for each other to land. They never stop at all. They thin out at eleven o’clock at night, and there aren’t any at midnight or one o’clock. Then at two o’clock in the morning they begin again. And they keep going through the whole day and on through the night.

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• One time we got on a ferry boat. We went to see a fiesta at a tiny town at the edge of the river.16 It was a wonderful fiesta. There were little trains that ran around in circles. There were what looked like little cars. Their road went up and down steeply and the cars went really fast. At the place where the fiesta was held, there were all black people. That’s all there were, black men and women in crowds. When we arrived, people stared at us, since they had never seen us before. “Where could they be from, looking like that?” they probably said to themselves. They wanted to chat, but what could we do? We didn’t understand their language. They just laughed. I didn’t know if they were laughing at us or if they were just laughing. They were celebrating a wonderful fiesta.

• We took a trip to the great ocean. It seemed to be very far away. We left early in the morning and the sun set on the way. First we followed a road that went up along the edge of the river.1 7 But the road just disappeared at the river’s edge. Compadre Lol asked where the road went. “It goes down there,” said the people. So we went down along the edge of the river and then we found the way. We crossed over the river, but the bridge was terribly high. There was a bridge on a

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lower level, too, but the higher bridge was wider. We crossed the river. We came to land again. We saw nothing but corn fields extending on and on, on either side of the road. The holy corn fields were really beautiful.

The corn kernels were planted in straight lines in the furrows. One kernel was put down at a time, not in clumps the way corn fields are planted here. The ears of corn were really thick. Corn like that doesn’t grow here in Mexico. The ears were huge. They had planted beans, too. The beans were very tall and they had lots of pods. You could see that the beans inside were big. The tomatoes they had planted looked wonderful, too. There was rice, there was wheat. They grew everything.

There were pumpkins piled along the roadside. They wash them, then cut out eyes and mouths. They do everything to them, because there are so many pumpkins. The pumpkins were orange, and they were all huge and round. It was well after sunset when we arrived at the seashore. We didn’t have time to have much fun there. We just took a quick trip to see it. We came back to a town called Chincoteague. We spent the night at a house near the beach. The next day we went to the ocean. At first the ocean seemed beautiful. We walked right to the very edge of the water. Then Compadre Lol told us, “Don’t go too far or it will pull you in.” Lord, we got scared. We simply stayed on the sand.

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There were lots of seashells on the beach. The shells were heaped up like stones. We picked up a lot of conches. Some still had their animals, since the ocean just spills them out when it comes rushing in. Lots of dead fish were tossed up on the sand. There were a few tiny boats in the ocean, but they looked as if they were about to turn over when the force of the waves came flooding in. Then we were looking at things that weren’t on the beach. At that moment the ocean came in forcefully. “Look at the size of the wave that’s coming in!” Compadre Lol said. We looked. It was coming from far off. We saw that it was coming closer and closer. When it reached the shore it came sweeping forward. It nearly reached where we were standing. The wave was the size of a small mountain!

We couldn’t hear ourselves talk. The ocean was simply roaring and roaring. The ocean brought its strength from far off, and when it came, it came in big waves and with wind. It seemed as if its wind would send us flying. It seemed as if we’d die of the cold.

Wherever there was water in the woods or in the open, wherever the ocean covered the land, wherever there was mud and grass, there were horses. “Where does the owner of the horses live?” we asked Compadre Lol. “They don’t have any owner. They just run loose like that,” he told us. “Wild horses, then!” we said. “Yes, wild horses all right. They really don’t belong to anyone!” he said.

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“Lord, if only our home was nearby we’d take back one apiece!” we said. We thought the horses were really beautiful. They were pinto horses, and they were all tiny and very fat.

Who knows where they were raised long ago. They were simply wild animals now. We wanted to catch them. But there was nothing we could do, because the wild horses were so far away. We traveled along the beach in the car, to pick up shells. But on the way back the car got stuck. The tires just sunk in the sand. We were a little scared because when the ocean came in strongly, the water reached the tires. Besides, there weren’t any trees nearby or even rocks. But the car came out at last. We were overjoyed when it came out. On the way back to Washington we crossed three arms of the ocean. Once we crossed over a bridge. Twice we went underneath the water.18

One highway passed over the ocean, but three times we reached the ocean floor. That’s where the highway went, along the firmness of the earth on the ocean floor. When the road went up on top of the ocean again, the ships went under it. When the road went down to the floor of the ocean, lights were shining at the bottom of the water. Traffic cops were standing at the bottom of the ocean. The road was wide enough for two cars to pass each other, just like the highways here. But in order to go on that road you had to pay road rent. Each car cost two dollars.

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We arrived at a town at the edge of the ocean.19 Now it was called Virginia. Big ships were lined up at the edge of the ocean. All the ships carried cannons. “Look at that ship over there!” said Compadre Lol. We looked at it. The ship looked huge in the distance. You couldn’t see what its flag was like, but as for the ship itself, you could see that its color was black. “That’s a warship,” he told us. All the ships were for war. Who knows how many hundreds of ships there were. We passed a town that was holding a big fiesta. There was a merrygo-round and a Ferris wheel spinning. But we didn’t stop to see the fiesta, we simply came straight along. We arrived late at night at Compadre Lol’s home on the water. Notes 1.  “Mother” is a term of respect for a woman older than oneself. 2.  Cane liquor, a distilled sugarcane drink produced primarily by Chamulan bootleggers in their secret stills, closely resembles vodka in taste and potency. It is considered a necessary lubricant for matters of consequence involving communication between men, and between men and gods. 3.  The ancestral gods watch over the town and its inhabitants. Calvary is the principal shrine overlooking Zinacantán Center. 4.  There are large oil refineries in Minatitlán. 5.  The National Museum of Anthropology.

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6.  With Daylight Savings Time in effect in the United States and not in Mexico. 7.  In the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 8.  The Internal Revenue Service cafeteria. Romin and Antzelmo were totally oblivious of the strange impression they made standing, in their native costumes, in the midst of a long line of gray, faceless clerks. They were also unaware of how much longer the line grew behind them as they tried with undisguised anxiety to identify the odd varieties of meat dishes on display. In the end they were apt to settle on at least two main courses; their trays piled high with supplementary choices. 9.  The dinosaur Diplodocus longus. 10.  The National Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution. 11.  The Foucault pendulum in the National Museum of American History. 12.  The Washington Monument. I had told Romin and Antzelmo that buildings in Washington could not be built taller than the Washington Monument. Romin got mixed up on the presidents! 13.  Mount Vernon. 14.  Here, as elsewhere, Antzelmo believes that brass is gold. Not until after I had read this account did I realize that my companions had assumed that our doorknobs, andirons, fire tongs, and shovels were of solid gold! 15.  Fort Washington. 16.  Marshall Hall Amusement Park. 17.  By “river” (“nab”) Romin means a wide expanse of water, whether it is a large river, a bay, a lake, or an ocean. In this case it was Chesapeake Bay. 18.  Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. 19.  Norfolk, Virginia.

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e took a trip to Boston. We went to visit Old Professor John

where he worked, at Harvard University. We went by plane. The plane traveled for an hour. As soon as we arrived at Old John’s office, we went with him to

see a movie. The movie was all about Zinacantán.1 Old Chep Nuj appeared with his wife and his sons and his daughters. His daughters were grinding corn and patting tortillas. Old Chep Nuj and his sons were in the midst of making gunpowder for his older brother. It was when Old Yermo Nuj and Old Markux Okotz were serving as ensignbearers. They appeared in the procession at the end of the Fiesta of San Lorenzo.

In the evening we went to Old John’s house. It was a little twostoried house at the edge of the forest. Some of Old John’s students arrived. We celebrated a small fiesta. After we finished supper, the drinking of liquor began. The night

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passed with chatting, chatting and drinking. One of Old John’s sons, little Charlie, began to play the guitar. The three of us played music. We drank more liquor. The students stayed until very late. It was past midnight when they split up. We kept drinking. We felt pretty tight when the affair was over.

The next day we went back to Old John’s office. There was one kind of work after another. We worked on maps of Zinacantán and Chamula. After we had worked a little while, we went to visit Victoria Bricker in her office. “Do you want to go see what’s in the museum?  2 My husband works there,” Victoria told us. “Okay, let’s go!” we said. We saw lots of dead animals and dead people. Some of the animals looked as if they were still alive. There were snakes. There were animals like horses, animals like dogs. Some were skeletons, but their bones weren’t just scattered. Their entire skeletons were there. The dead people were just the same. The whole body was lying there. They looked as if they had just died. When you looked at them it seemed as if they hadn’t been buried yet, but they had died long ago. They died in an epidemic. They were never properly buried. People just stuck the corpses in one big grave. The grave was discovered much later. The corpses were stacked in the grave. They took them out and put them in the museum. The corpses were rolled up in old straw mats. They didn’t rot. Their entire bodies just dried out in the grave. The only thing missing

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was their eyeballs. They were ruined. They had no eyeballs any more. That’s why the corpses looked like rolls of clay.

We went back to Old John’s office. After we had a good time there, we passed by the hospital, to talk to Johnny Musician.3 He was stuck in the hospital, because he had just been operated on. He showed us where he was cut. The poor guy was lying in the hospital.

His bed went up and down by itself. If he wanted to sit up, he fixed his bed that way. If he wanted to sleep stretched out, he would straighten his bed by himself. His wife gave me a ring which they were presenting to Old Petul Buro’s daughter, because she was about to be married. So they asked me to do the favor of taking the ring to her. The ring was of gold. It took three trains to get to downtown Boston. We missed our plane. Compadre Lol went to talk to the airline company. He asked them if they would exchange the tickets. “No, wait a little while, another one is leaving,” they said. We waited a while. The next plane was full. We were left behind a second time. Compade Lol went to ask the company again. “No, don’t worry, another one is coming in a little while. Wait!” they told him. We waited again. There were no empty seats on the next plane. We came back in the third plane. It was already dark when we arrived in Alexandria.

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Notes 1.  Shunka’s Story, a documentary filmed by Stephanie Krebs. 2.  Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 3. John Haviland, a fellow anthropologist, was nicknamed Xun Jvabajom, “Johnny Musician,” in Zinacantán because of his fiddling talents.

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a

nother time we went to a town called Ithaca. We went to

visit Old Frank Cancian, who worked as a professor there. We got on a plane in Washington. We landed at an airport called Kennedy that was outside New York. While we were waiting for another plane to leave, we walked around the airport. I bought some little dolls, which I was going to bring home to my children. With two planes we reached Ithaca. Old Frank came to meet us at the airport. We went to see a ball game. The ball field was surrounded by a fence. There were seats on either side. The seats were in tiers. There were two groups of players, one group from Ithaca, the other from Princeton. Each group had a band. The music resounded as they played. The musicians of each group had seats on their respective sides. The two groups, Princeton and Cornell, hit each other. Cornell had a king. Princeton had a tiger. The king strolled about, watching

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to see who was winning. The tiger was walking around and around in circles. Sometimes he danced to the band. They had small cannons that they fired when either side caught the ball [made a touchdown]. The players fell in a heap on the ground. “Could they be dead?” I said to myself. The game ended. Cornell’s king, won. Princeton’s tiger lost.

Frank showed us his university. The offices looked like buildings of long ago. We went up to the third floor where he worked. All the offices were empty since nobody was working on Saturday. So, happily, we walked about. In Frank’s office I saw a picture of a former magistrate of Zinacantán and a man who was giving money to the magistrate. Frank asked us to tell him the last names of all the people in Zinacantán Center. We did, of course.1

Below the offices were little cliffs, a little woods, and a steep drop. We walked around there until it grew dark. We took a walk around the town, but it didn’t seem very big. Then we went to Frank’s house. We ate there before going to bed. We drank a little before going to bed, too. Frank had brought his maid from San Cristóbal. She was a fairly old woman. Her sons were going to school in Mexico City. She hadn’t the money for it, so she took a job far away. When dawn came, Frank took us for a trip to the cliffs nearby.2   We went down into the ravines. The cliffs were very steep going down.

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There was just a narrow trail cleared along the cliff. Only one person could pass. The cliffs were very tall. They were probably a hundred and forty meters high. We saw a high waterfall. The water fell probably eighty meters.

The pools of water were really beautiful. They looked like little bowls. They looked like baptismal fonts. We didn’t go to the end of the path. We just walked down about three hundred meters. On the way back we passed an old-fashioned wheat mill. It was made of wood. It ran on water. But it was terribly long ago when it was used. That mill was working in 1847. They said they abandoned the mill in 1920.

• Frank left us at the bus station in Ithaca. We passed through a town called Binghamton. We bought some sandwiches to eat. We changed buses there, because the first bus broke down. We continued on in that bus as far as New York. We got in a train there. We went underground. Then we took another bus.

We went as far as the house of one of Compadre Lol’s older brothers. He lived in a place called Newark. His brother was a priest. He prayed over our meal. But the priest wasn’t a Catholic. He had a wife and children.3

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The next day we went to New York by car. We crossed over the ocean, because New York is on the seacoast. The city is surrounded by water. The roads in New York were very different. A railway ran underground. The road for the buses was higher up, but not completely above ground. On the very top, facing the sun, as we say, was where the cars and the trucks traveled. As for us, we went on up to the highest one, the one facing the sun. We went to look at the stars.4 They were shown as in a movie.

There was a building that had a model of the sky and the stars. It was at noon that we went to see the model of the sky. We went by train. But the train didn’t run on the earth’s surface, it only ran underground. The train ran beneath the buildings. The train ran on electricity. And they were lit with electricity underground. The sun never got in. The people went underground to work. They just saw by electric lights. Lord, but the trains were unbelievably horrible. There was smoke in the whole train. It looked as if we were sitting on top of a fire. When we got off the train we climbed out of the underground. There were steps that went up to the earth’s surface. We climbed up to the earth’s surface on foot. We arrived at a gray building. It was there that they showed pictures of the stars.

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They turned the lights out. The sky was deep blue, just the way it is. It looked like nighttime when they turned the lights out. We saw Scorpio, the Hyades, and Venus. All the saints in heaven appeared, as we say. We even saw Our Holy Mother, the moon. We were looking for Orion’s Belt and the Three Marys. We couldn’t find them. No! Who knows why Orion’s Belt and the Three Marys weren’t there. But all the other stars were there. I saw the scorpion, the spider, birds, the angels, shoes.5

Afterwards we were going to go to a soda fountain or a restaurant or something. We went on the underground train. But the trouble was we got lost on the way. We didn’t know where the restaurant was. We simply got off that train. We simply went to look for a restaurant in the daylight. After we ate we went up to the top of an observation tower.6 The observation tower was very tall. We went up a hundred and two floors.

The other buildings were very tall, but they were left far below. There were planes called helicopters. They landed on the tops of the buildings. But you couldn’t see all of New York, because it was so big. Besides, there was so much smoke, because there were so many factories there. The town looked awful. It was simply covered with smoke. Just smoke could be seen over the whole town. The smoke looked like fog. It was awful. It blocked our view. You couldn’t see if there were good

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things or bad things there. It looked as if it was just bad because of all the factories.

When we came down, we rushed to the bus terminal. But on the way we met an actor who said his name was Cantinflas.7 “Are you from Mexico?” he asked. “We are!” we said. “I’m a Mexican, too,” he said. “When are you going back?” “We are going today, but we are stopping in Washington,” we said. “Where are you going?” Compadre Lol asked him. “As for me, I’ve come to leave a film here at a movie house. They asked me for it. That’s why I’ve come to leave it,” he said. He wanted to chat longer, but the trouble was our bus was about to leave. We went on the run to the bus terminal. We stopped a minute to look at some old Mexican pesos that were for sale. They could be seen in the window, but we never asked about them because we were running to the bus station. We got on the bus just as it was leaving. We crossed over loads of bridges. The bridges were very long and terribly high. There was nothing but factories along the highway. The smoke that came out was too much! The smoke stank horribly. It would make you sick to your stomach. You wouldn’t want to live there. We arrived at the town where Compadre Lol’s eldest brother lived. The place is called Princeton. We spent the night there. They gave us a meal, too. But his eldest brother isn’t a priest. He just has a job of some kind. His eldest brother’s house had many rooms, but his house

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hadn’t many floors. He had a car, of course. We took a short trip in it the next day.8 Both his older brothers were very good-hearted. We amused ourselves while we were waiting for Compadre Lol’s father and mother to arrive. We went to see what was for sale in the stores. We took a walk. We went in a church to cross ourselves. But there weren’t any saints standing there at all. There were just pictures of them. There was only a Cristo in front of the altar. There was a figure of Our Holy Father, San Pablo, behind the church door. When we came out of that church we went into the students’ church. It was just the same. There weren’t any saints standing there either. There were just pictures of them. We met Compadre Lol’s father and mother next to the park. They took us to a restaurant. They bought meals for us. After we ate, we took a trip in Compadre Lol’s parents’ car. We passed a wide field. Only old men were playing ball there. Compadre Lol’s father played for a while, too. We watched them playing golf. The ball was really beautiful. It was small and hard and white. We went on to a town called Trenton. We caught a train there. We returned to Washington. We went in a little cab and a bus and a little cab again to Compadre Lol’s house. Notes 1.  Afterwards, Frank took us to a bar on the campus, thick with smoke and so dark you could barely see the people at the next table. Romin and Antzelmo asked

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me, “Why do you gringos always drink in the dark?” 2.  Robert H. Treman State Park, known colloquially as “Upper Enfield.” 3.  My brother is Episcopalian. 4.  Hayden Planetarium. 5.  We went to the Hayden Planetarium in order to identify Zinacantec constellations. The Three Marys are O, 1, and d of our constellation Orion. The “shoes” are the Hyades and the Pleiades. The rest allude to other signs of the Maya zodiac. 6.  As we stood on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, we were greeted by a tourist from Tuxtla Gutiérrez. 7. Mario Moreno “Cantinflas,” the renowned Mexican comedian. When I finally screwed up my courage to ask the gentleman if he could be Cantinflas, with a deadpan expression he replied, “No, señor, soy Cantinflitas.” I was still uncertain, for his face had not a single wrinkle and perhaps, I thought, he bore his nickname in recognition of his striking likeness to the movie star. I learned later that Cantinflas had just a short time before undergone a face-lift. He asked my companions how many of them had come and seemed disappointed when they assured him that they had come alone. I imagined him envisioning a scene before the movie cameras. 8.  In 2006 my nephew, Christopher, remembers as a boy, watching my companions looking at his father’s small lawn and asking, “Why don’t you plant corn there?”

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e took a trip to the school where Compadre Lol’s little chil-

dren study. The school was at the edge of the forest. There we caught two small turtles. They looked really cute. I was going to take them back home, but the trouble was, we didn’t know what to give them to eat. I had them shut up for maybe two or three days, but after that I simply let them go, because they were dying of starvation. It was better that they be freed. They know themselves what to get to eat.

• One evening a man and his wife came to visit at Compadre Lol’s house. After he and Compadre Lol finished chatting, the man started to play his fiddle. His wife played a long flute. The flute was made of wood and it had a great many openings. Her flute was really beautiful. The man’s fiddle was beautiful, too. They played a pretty long time, and their

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songs sounded beautiful. They played songs to their heart’s content until it was late at night.

• In the museum where we worked I saw an old-fashioned harp from Chamula.1 The harps of long ago used to be much larger. Rather than having holes made in the belly, like today’s harps, there was just one hole in the side. The harp didn’t have a single string. Who knows where they had put the strings. Or could it be that they had taken it without any strings?

The harp strings were placed differently. And besides, it faced differently. It looked as if the old-fashioned harp had to be played lefthanded. There were four holes cut in the body, but the body was just perforated on the left-hand side. There were drums that had come from Chiapas long ago. But our countrymen of long ago had different drums. There was an old-fashioned marimba, too. It was a Guatemalan marimba. The old-fashioned marimba was made differently. The gourds underneath were real gourds. The part that was played was the same, except that the keys were flatter. The marimba was smaller, too. The marimbas of long ago were more beautiful.

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In the office was lying a picture of my late compadre Maryan K’obyox. You could see him peering out the jail door. He was probably photographed when he had been put in jail. He had already died long before his picture could be seen. But he looked as if he had never died.

• My leg got sick, but I didn’t know what to treat it with. I got some broken glass. I let my own blood, but it didn’t do any good. The blood didn’t come out. It was probably because my foot was scared, because I let the blood myself. Compadre Lol took me to be treated by a doctor.2 But the doctor didn’t give me anything except some pills. When the doctor was looking at my leg, they brought out a baby, covered with plastic. It had just been born. The baby was given to somebody else. Its mother probably stayed behind in the hospital. Then a Ladino man arrived. His body was terribly cut up and one of his legs was broken. They said he was a war officer, the kind that travels on big ships. The admiral presented himself at the hospital to be treated. After the doctor had given me the capsules, we went to work. I didn’t walk about much. Little by little my foot calmed down.

•

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We went to the stores in downtown Washington to ask about kerosene lamps. We weren’t going to buy them right away, we just wanted to learn the cost. If we learned where they were cheap, we would go there to buy them. We went to one store. We saw many lamps there. We went in to ask. They were too expensive. Besides, the lamps were strange. They were chubby. There was one kind that was better looking, but it wasn’t for kerosene, it was for gas. “But these aren’t any good at all. Let’s forget it. Let it be. We’ll see if there are any better ones somewhere else,” we said. Then we saw a beautiful tape recorder. “Shall we buy one? Let’s ask what the price is!” we said. Compadre Lol asked how much it was. “I think it’s a lot,” he told us. Then I saw a record player. It played records and it was a radio. It ran on batteries and by electricity. It played all three kinds of records. “That’s neat, then. I’ll buy one of those. Ask them how much it costs,” I told Compadre Lol. “They say it’s thirty-five,” he said. “Would they sell it for thirty if I had the money?” I asked. “If they would give it for thirty, I’d take it right away.” “They say they won’t sell it for that,” he told me. “Okay, now we know. There isn’t the money for it anyway,” I said. “Never mind. There are probably cheaper ones someplace else.” The record player stayed there.

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We saw lots of clocks in another store. Some were really beautiful. Each one had a price tag tied to it that said how much the clock cost. But we thought they were too expensive. We just passed by to look. We didn’t buy any.

Then we went to buy a watch in the blacks’ section, because they might be cheaper there. Besides, we each wanted to buy a kerosene lamp and a small lantern. We were looking for them when we were just getting ready to come home. On the way we passed by a store where we bought a record player. But the record player was no good; its radio antenna was broken. We showed it to the storekeeper. “We’ll see if he exchanges it,” we said. “Go get it fixed at a radio repair shop!” the person who sold it to us said. We went to a repair shop and Compadre Lol told him the antenna was broken. “Ah, but that can’t be fixed right away. It’s better if you have the shopkeeper exchange it,” the radio repairman said. He spoke to the shopkeeper on the telephone. “He says he’ll exchange it. Go back to the store!” We went on to the blacks’ section.3 “Up to here there are just gringos’ houses. On the other side there are blacks’ houses,” Compadre Lol told us. “The blacks certainly keep separate. I thought they were mixed together,” we said.

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“No, they are divided apart. This is the boundary line,” Compadre Lol said. “Won’t they eat us there?” we asked. “They probably don’t eat people,” he said. You see, they aren’t real demons. It’s just that their skin is black.

But we heard that the black women now get married to the gringos. The gringo women are just the same. Black men marry them, too. They say that their children are mixed, but only after there have been many already. The first ones come out white, they say. Not until the sixth or the seventh, do little blacks appear.4 The blacks’ houses went on and on. They sold good things in their stores, but the things weren’t made by them. Everything they sold was retail. We passed through Chinatown. We saw their writing on a wall, but we didn’t recognize their writing at all. It just looked like crosses.

We found the little lanterns next to the museum where we worked. I, myself, bought a half-size light and a quarter-size light. They were both red. After we bought the lanterns, we bought something to drink for our last talk. The time was up for the number of days that we had said we would stay. So we were going to talk together with the drink, of course. After we bought that liquor we went to exchange the record player.

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Then we searched for the kerosene lamps. We went to one store. We didn’t find any. We went to another store. We found them there. We bought one apiece.

Antzelmo and I each bought a red kerosene lamp. I bought a watch there, too. They say that the building where we bought the lamps was set afire by the blacks. And they set fire to the building where I bought my watch, too.5

•

In Washington machines do everything. It’s with machines that they scoop up the garbage and the leaves that have dropped off the trees. The machines gather the leaves by blowing them with air. The leaves aren’t gathered by hand. As for the buildings, the people don’t work much with their hands. They work with machines. When they tear down old buildings, they just knock them down with machines. There is a machine that tosses down a great pear-shaped metal ball. The ball knocks down the walls. The walls just come thudding down. But it doesn’t look like work at all. When they build houses, that’s done by hand a bit. But it’s blacks who mostly do that work. The gringos work more in offices, because they say that blacks don’t get office work very often. The blacks are their laborers. They build buildings, they build bridges, they build everything. That’s their work, because they don’t let them study much the

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way they themselves do. That’s why the blacks have never risen very much. They just get to be schoolteachers, they get roadwork and other low jobs. That’s the only kind of job they get.

• One evening we went with Compadre Lol to visit a neighbor of his. The neighbors had asked Compadre Lol to do the favor of looking after their house, because the house was to be locked up. The owners were anxious about it and that’s why they were going to entrust it to our compadre. When we went to visit, it was growing dark. The husband had already left and the wife was alone. She was going to leave the next day to meet her husband. The man used to fly airplanes. He carried soldiers who were going to the war in Vietnam. The trouble was, the minute the plane landed, the soldiers were riddled with bullets. The pilot could see the corpses piled up. He could see the large puddles of blood. As soon as the soldiers stepped on the ground they were dead. It was a very frightening thing. He just saw corpses every day. And when he went to sleep every night, he was just screaming, because he saw the corpses. He simply couldn’t go to sleep. That’s why he went to get a job far away. He didn’t want to see the corpses.

•

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We went to see a movie. There were just robbers in the movie. But the two robbers were very clever. They had learned how to break into houses to get food to eat. Even though the owner was there, if there was anything to eat, they ate it. The first robber was strolling across a field. He came to a house. He knocked on the door. The door was opened. He went in. The poor woman was in the midst of fixing her meal. The man supposedly needed something. The woman was distracted. When the woman went into another room to get it, the robber went to the kitchen and took away all the cooked food. When the woman came back to her kitchen, the robber was no longer there. Then she saw that her food was gone. “But where did he go?” she said. She tried to look for him. Where would she find him? The robber had already gone. The robber went on. There were some woods nearby. He went there to eat. When he was eating, a boy came along. “What did you get for yourself?” they asked each other. “Me, I got a meal. Let’s eat,” said the first robber. “As for you, what did you get?” he asked the boy. “Me, I got some money,” said the second robber. They divided up the money. Then they went to another house. The man raised a lot of pigs. He had saved up a lot of money. The robbers knocked on the door. They had already planned carefully what they were going to do. The door

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was opened. They went in. They spoke to the poor old man. “Sell me one of your pigs,” they told him. “Okay, I will. Pick out which one you want,” said the old man. One robber went to look at the pigs. The other climbed in the window. He picked up a small chest full of money and a pistol. The other robber was looking at the pigs. He made a deal. “I want that one. Catch it for me!” said the robber. “Okay,” said the old pig owner. He caught his pig. “Here it is,” he said. “Don’t you have a rope for me to tie it up with, even if I have to buy it?” said the robber. “Okay, hold on to it. I’ll just go and get the rope.” When the old man went to get the rope, the robber quickly tied the pig’s jaws. He stuck it in a sack, put the sack over his shoulder, and went over the top of the adobe wall. When the old man came back, the pig buyer was already gone. “But where did he go?” said the old man. He tried to look for him. Where would he find him? He had already left with his pig. The old man looked at his pigs. Not all his pigs were there. “He’s a robber, then!” said the old man. He hurried to his house. He went to look for his pistol. Then he saw that his pistol was gone. His money was gone. The poor old man just cried. As for the young robber, he was sitting happily in a field. He opened the chest. There was loads of money. He wrapped the money in an old

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rag. He tied it around his waist. He went on. He carried the chest with him. He met a man on the way. “Won’t you buy a chest?” he asked the person. The man looked at it. The box was really beautiful. “How much will you sell it for?” the robber was asked. “I’ll give it to you for twenty,” said the robber. “Ah, that’s too high. If you’ll sell it for five, I’ll take it,” said the person who was going to buy the chest. “Okay, take it! That’ll help me buy my tortillas,” said the robber. His chest was bought. Now it looked as if he hadn’t ever stolen anything. He went to wait for the other robber. The one who had stolen the pig went on. He went to sell the pig. “Won’t you buy a pig?” he asked the pig buyer. “How much will you sell it for?” he was asked. “I’ll give it to you for a hundred,” said the robber. “Ah, I won’t pay that much. That’s too high!” said the pig buyer. “How much do you want to pay, then?” asked the robber. “If you give it for eighty, I’ll take it,” said the pig buyer. “No, I’ll lower it five for you. That’s all,” said the robber. “Okay, stick it in the pen, then,” said the pig buyer. After he had stuck his pig in the pen, the pig buyer went into his house to get the pay for it. The robber entered his house. He went to see where the pig buyer hid his money. He kept his money box on top of a table. A pistol was lying on another table. When the pig buyer

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was looking at his money, the robber quickly stuck the pistol inside his shirt. When he was handed his money, the robber went on. He met his friend where they had agreed to meet. “Well, what did you get? Me, I only got a pig, but I’ve gone and sold it for ninety-five,” said the robber who stole the pig. “Ah, fine. Me, I got some money,” said the other. “Did you get much?” he was asked. “I don’t know. I think it was a lot. It felt very heavy.” They looked at it. You could see there was loads of money. There were bills of fifty, a hundred, a thousand. “Well, let’s divide up all the paper money. We’ll bury the little stuff,” they said. They split up the money. Each one received a great deal. Who knows how many thousands each one received. “I got a pistol,” one of the robbers said. “I got a pistol, too. It will help us defend ourselves if we run into any murderers,” said the other. “Let’s go buy some bullets for them, then!” they said to each other. They went to buy the bullets. After they had bought their bullets, they decided to go to a clothing store. They pretended they were buying clothes. They asked if they had the kind of clothes they wanted. “We do!” said the salesman. “We’ll see what they’re like, then,” they told the salesman. He brought out lots of clothes. One of them found a really good suit. “How much does this cost?” the salesman was asked.

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“I don’t know. I’ll go and ask the boss,” said the salesman. When the salesman left for a minute, one of the robbers left with all the clothes. The other stood there waiting to be told how much the suit cost. When the salesman returned, the other robber was gone. “That’s too expensive. I don’t have much money,” said the robber. He left the store. He went to meet his friend. At the place where they met, the robbers changed their clothes. They put on new clothes. They tossed away their old clothes. They got dressed up. They went off to have a good time. Little by little it became known that they were quite some robbers! They were happy. They didn’t know that they would be caught. The next time they looked around, soldiers were standing there. “Let’s go!” they were told. Both of them were captured. “Okay, let’s go! But take your hands off us. We’ll go by ourselves. We haven’t killed anyone,” they said. The soldiers freed them. They walked on for a while. “What’s our crime, that you are forcing us to go with you?” the robbers said. Suddenly they stopped. They beat up the soldiers. They took their pistols away from them. They killed them. They killed the soldiers with their own pistols. They fled into the heavy growth along the river, the cliffs, the gullies. The soldiers went to search for them. A lot of soldiers. They were holding their guns, because they were going to kill the robbers for good when they saw them. There was a cliff that you could see looked very

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tall. The soldiers lined up on the top of the cliff. The robbers saw that the guns to shoot them were being held ready. First, the robbers killed four of the soldiers on the cliff top. The soldiers just landed in the ravine. Then those robbers were killed, too. The business of the robbers ended there.6

• A lot of people assembled in Washington.7 They came to confront the war leaders at their building, because they said that the president of the United States sent too many boys off to war. When the boys went to what was supposed to be military training, the generals sent them straight to the war in Vietnam. They said that there was a question whether they would come back or die there, but it made no difference. Some came back, but with one leg or one arm or one eye. Some would come back, of course, but what use was it if they didn’t have arms and legs? All the people were angry that so many men were killed in the war. A great many were gathered next to the statue of former president Lincoln. Most of them were boys who had reached eighteen years of age, because they were the ones who would be sent to war. They certainly didn’t like that. They went to tell the generals that they didn’t like the constant wars. They wanted the war to be given up, and they thought the generals should stop it.

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Thousands of people assembled. Men and women, young and old, gathered together. Even priests came, because they wanted to make the president stop causing so much trouble, because so many people from their country were being lost. They said that a president like that was no good, because he was just using up all the money on constant wars. From whatever state the people came, they had banners so we could see where they were from. Some had brought banners with pictures of a baby carried by his mother. They said that was a picture of the president, because the president was still a baby. He didn’t know right from wrong yet, he did anything he pleased, because he was still a baby, he still sucked his thumb. When they were gathered by the statue of Lincoln, people shouted over a loudspeaker. They told about the president’s way of thinking, that he had no reason in his head. Some people who knew Spanish spoke to us. They asked us where we were from and what we had come to do. I said I had just come for fun. “Well, do you know how many people have gathered here?” one of the Ladinos asked me. “There are probably eighty thousand in all. There could be more. I’ll see when they line up later on,” he told me. Then people started hitting one another. They ripped each other’s clothes. And they were constantly taking pictures. It was too much! When the time came, they lined up. We lined up, too. They all had banners. I was given a banner, too. The Ladino came to tell me how many were gathered in all. “There are two hundred thousand people!”

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“Ah, good!” I said as we were walking along.

When the sun was dipping down, the people crowded together and went to confront the war leader at his fort. We passed over a big bridge because the fort was on the other side of the river. All the people held hands so they wouldn’t get lost, because there were so many people. After we had gotten halfway across the bridge, two helicopters flew over. Both of them were circling overhead. They were taking pictures of all the people. That’s what those two helicopters were doing. People reached the fort after three rest periods. They stopped for a rest each time someone shouted for a rest over the loudspeakers. We were held up on the way by loads of soldiers. Six thousand soldiers were guarding the general. They were watching to see that nothing happened to him, that people didn’t go in and pull the general out of his house. The doors of the general’s house were surrounded by a pen made of rocks or cement or something. The boys were determined to go in.

The soldiers had made a corral. They had lashed a fence together out of boards. But the protestors broke the fence down. The girls didn’t pay any attention to the fence, they had to break it down. They cut the lashings, they pushed against the soldiers who were trying to stop them. But the soldiers had something on the side of their rifle barrels. They fired them at the women and the girls. The thing that they fired was tear gas, to burn us. Some of the people got burned.

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But others went in very, very close. Some reached the gates to the fort. They were shoving now at the gates. They were shouting through tiny loudspeakers that were slung over their shoulders. Some scrambled up the wall. It was probably five meters high. I don’t know how they climbed up. When I looked, they were already inside, by the door itself.

Some had brought ropes with them. They climbed the wall surrounding the fort and tossed the ropes down to pull up the others, so that many could get in. When they tossed the ropes down, they just pulled the girls up. The girls were going up with their asses sticking out. They didn’t care at all if they died, just so long as they could grab onto the rope and go up over the wall. Soldiers were circling around on the roof of the fort. They were keeping an eye out to see if the people were doing anything more. The soldiers were occupied removing those who had scrambled up. When the doorway was free, the people shoved their way in. The soldiers came to block them off, but many got in. The soldiers couldn’t get them out. As for me, I was going in. I don’t know what those soldiers were attacking people with. It was terribly acrid. We would choke from it if we breathed it. I got scared. I went to find my compadres where I had left them standing in the crowd. Then we abandoned it.8

Some people seemed to be suffering a lot. Others wanted to sleep, because they stayed very late at the fort. Some slept at the door of the

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fort. Some were still walking around there at dawn, they say. They didn’t know where to sleep because they had come from so far away. Everybody carried little suitcases, no matter where they came from. We met up with a woman who said she was from England and she didn’t know where to spend the night, because she didn’t know anybody in Washington. She spoke to Compadre Lol. The poor thing stuck right to us and she came to spend the night at Compadre Lol’s house. The poor woman was happy. The next day she probably went home. There was one group that came from California. They had come on foot, they had come on the run, carrying torches as they came. They said they had traveled a month, running constantly. But they probably just took turns. Some probably rested, traveling by car, while the first group was running. They probably alternated like that until they arrived in Washington. But when they came right into town, they all ran. All of them were carrying their torches aloft. That’s the way the meeting ended.

• The next day we got our things ready to go home.

The seven weeks were up. The words were almost finished for the dictionary. We prepared the maps of Zinacantán Center. We finished giving names to the hamlets and names to all the springs. Compadre Lol’s wife took us to the airport. We passed a town called Baltimore. That’s where the gringo priest lives, they say, the one

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who used to come to Zinacantán Center, who used to stick close to the elders and eat his meals with them. But we didn’t go into the town. We arrived at the airport. We got the checks for our bags and handed them over. A machine carried the baggage from the airlines office to the plane. They stuck the bags in the bottom of the plane because you can’t take your suitcases where you sit. The plane took a turn by way of Texas. It stopped there for a pretty long time. The next plane went as far as Mexico City. There the soldiers looked in all our bags. Compadre Lol got a cab. We went to a hotel. We spent the night there. The next day Compadre Lol went to leave some of the maps to be fixed, because he said the first maps weren’t clear. He left them to be made over again so they would show up better. Then we took a trip on foot. We still went shopping. Watches cost less in Mexico City. They looked really beautiful. They were luminous. There were ones for seventy, for eighty, for a hundred pesos. The prices were very low, but who knows if they were any good. I bought two dozen cups which would be needed for my religious office as Steward of the Sagrado Sacramento. Little by little I was collecting my things. We went to change our money at a bank. We passed by a record store. I bought one big record and one little record.

After we walked around, we picked up the maps. Then we went to get our airplane tickets. At the place where the tickets were issued there were scales to see how much we weighed. After we were weighed, three

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girls came in to weigh each other. The first girl weighed almost sixty kilos. The second girl weighed fifty kilos. The third one weighed only thirty kilos. She was very embarrassed because they were the same age. They were just teenagers, but that poor girl was pretty skinny. Early the next morning we went to the airport. We took the plane as far as Tuxtla. A meal was served on the plane, because that’s what all the planes that travel far are like. They serve you a meal when they realize that they have reached half way. They just keep track of where the half-way point would be. They look at the clock. Then the women, the cooks, serve the meal on the plane. The back of the seat in front of where you sit can be opened up and used as your table. We arrived in Tuxtla. There we took a taxi to the plaza. Then we took another taxi from there to San Cristóbal. We reached Zinacantán Center in one day. We arrived just before Todos Santos.9 That’s how we went far away the second time. Thanks to Our Lord, we came back safely. Nothing happened to us. No! Those are the things that I saw. I don’t know if it’s right now or not. We’ll have to be satisfied with a word or two. Notes 1.  This harp from the neighboring community of Chamula was donated to the Smithsonian Institution by the State of Chiapas in 1885. 2.  At the emergency room of the Georgetown University Hospital. 3.  Pennsylvania Avenue around 10th Street.

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4. Although physical anthropology was never my forte, I don’t believe I explained the genetic results of intermarriage in this way! 5.  As Romin reports, the area around 14th Street in downtown Washington was devastated by fire during the Martin Luther King Jr. riots. 6.  Unfortunately I did not see this Spanish film and cannot identify it, but the plot is extraordinarily like scenes from the picaresque tales about Pedro de Ordemales that are well known in Zinacantán (Laughlin and Karasik 1996: 238–241). 7.  The March on the Pentagon, 21 October 1967. 8.  As we approached the Pentagon, marshals with bullhorns warned everyone that they should keep their distance from the building as it was defended by soldiers with tear gas canisters. Unless we wished to suffer the consequences of violent civil disobedience we were to remain where we were. It was with more than a little concern that I saw Antzelmo disappear into the flying column of demonstrators who had decided to storm the gates. 9.  All Soul’s Day, when families gather in the cemetery to give offerings of flowers and food at the graves of loved ones. It was extremely important that Romin and Antzelmo be able to return by that date.

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t

hirty years later, in the 1990s, Zinacantec travelers had

become quite sophisticated; aware of social, economic, and political problems at home and across the border to the north. Rather than acting as objective anthropologists, they now have embraced advocacy anthropology, working to understand and aid those who share their problems. In 1982 I helped Antzelmo and Romin’s son, Xun, to form a TzotzilTzeltal writers’ cooperative, Sna Jtz’ibajom, The House of the Writer. In 1989 we created Teatro Lo’il Maxil, Monkey Business Theatre, which was directed for ten years by Ralph Lee of New York. We created twelve plays collaboratively, half of them reviving myths and half dealing with social, economic, and political problems confronting the Mayas of Chiapas. Last year Sna received from President Fox the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes; Artes y Tradiciones Populares. This is the nation’s highest award for Indian cultural achievement.

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Our multicultural outreach is impressive. In 1999, on our third trip to the United States, we acted in the Indian Summer Festival in Milwaukee and for the Oneida Nation at St. Norbert’s College. On Labor Day in Milwaukee we rode on a flatbed truck, protesting the North American Free Trade Alliance, which had meant the loss of eighty thousand jobs in the city. In Cleveland we acted in an inner-city African American school, an Italian/Polish blue-collar family school, and at the Laurel School for girls in Shaker Heights, from where they sent us the children’s drawings of the performance. At the Duval School in Lake Worth, the actors, with their animal masks, cavorted among elementary school students, finally asking them if they wanted to wear the masks. Every hand shot up. In one school, 700! As they departed single file, the white and black students joined the Latinos in shaking the actors’ hands, saying, ‘¡Adios amigo!’ while many stopped to touch with one finger a toad mask. Though one teacher reportedly complained that the actors were just stirring up trouble, looking for help for the rebels, others wrote to say it had been a “social catharsis” for the black kids to see “people of color” acting with pride and assurance. Reviewing their role, the actors concluded, “We entertain. There is always a bit of joking, but it’s the truth. We see great hardship. It isn’t just entertainment.”

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In 1994 Allan Burns arranged with the Guadalupe Social Services and with Lucas Benítez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers a trip to Immokalee in the Everglades, where five thousand Mayan and Haitian tomato, chili pepper, and orange pickers worked. They commented that our theater would be an effective way of dealing with social problems among the field hands. “What would you do?” they asked. “We would improvise.” That meant nothing to them, so the actors stood up and enacted the return of a Mayan immigrant “who had not been careful,” and who, after fruitless visits to a shaman and a doctor, finally died, not of SIDA (AIDS), but of cidra—cider! Immokalee was a town of fifteen thousand in the nonpicking season that grew to forty-five thousand when the pickers poured in. Here follows the group’s adventures there, largely in their own words. As it was March, we were met with cries of “Here are the Zapatistas!” In fact, one of our group was stopped and questioned by an immigration official. We were put up for the night in the ramshackle trailers where the pickers were housed. Conversing there and the next day we learned a bit of the local Spanish vocabulary, “el agua del dich,” the ditch water the workers were told they could drink! We added “El Pelón,” “Baldy,” the nickname for one of the notorious foremen. Then there was “la troca,” the truck, “el dompeador,” the man who dumped the tomatoes in the truck, “día y daime,” day and dime, a unique system of economic exploitation. As dark fell, 300 Indians formed a semicircle [to watch From All for All]. I asked if any were from Chiapas and ten hands went up. Watching

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in rapt attention, quite predictably they laughed uproariously as the campesino couple stretched out under their blanket. They cheered when the campesina upbraided the men with, “¿No son hombres?” Next we improvised a play later entitled El largo camino a $5.25 (The Long Road to $5.25). In our play, using the vocabulary we had learned, we showed the hard lives of the pickers, the many abuses they endured, ending with the creation of the Coalition. Exclaimed one member of the Coalition, “In just two days these, Zapatistas (as they were called) learned all about us!” Afterward a Chamulan addressed us in Tzotzil: “That’s the way it is in my country.” He thanked us, wished us “strong hearts,” and exclaimed, “Don’t let this be the last time you come. God willing we will see each other again!” Other immigrants there asked, “Is it true what you were showing or did you just think it up in your heads? Years and years pass and the government does not attend to our demands. This is not the same as the newspaper, which does not speak clearly! We must see about this because there are many people working here illegally. We must do the same thing. We are going to know what our rights are, too.” The immigrants said they wanted to “prepare themselves in the same way, to do the same thing so that their problems would be seen, would be recognized.” In the words of the Haitian social worker, “It was a magical night.” In January 1997, the coalition and Florida Legal Services invited us, with Ralph, to dream up a new play that would build on our previous

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improvisation. Ralph molded a wonderful, enormous red tomato head for Don Tomate y sus coyotes (Mr. Tomato and His Smugglers). This we performed near the coalition headquarters. Our visit made the front page of the Naples News, January 23, 1997, with the headline “Mexican Troupe Dramatizes Farm Workers’ Plight.” The coalition was anxious for us to return in March to give a workshop to teach the pickers to create their own theatre, to make masks, and to act. We went to a retreat to work with the pickers, but it was very frustrating as so often they were unable to attend our sessions. Finally, we incorporated several pickers in our cast. We held a dress rehearsal where Lucas Benítez, president of the coalition, stood on the stage and spouted long speeches about the injustices. We told Lucas he must act, not just talk, and waited worriedly for the evening’s performance. But he filled his role with amazingly quiet dexterity at La Belle and Immokalee. The coalition had a flatbed truck to serve as a stage for Don Tomate; we spent some hours trying to figure out how we could present the play on such a narrow platform and how to arrange the lighting, which we finally secured with the headlights of a car. This was for our second performance when a big crowd gathered on the dirt. Part way through the play, a bottle sailed over the heads of the audience and struck one of our actors, but we persisted. Then, rain came down in sheets. The only place we could continue was in the cramped office of the coalition, which immediately was chock-full. With their bodies crammed

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together under the roof overhang and their noses pressed against the wet window panes, others watched us perform. Again we made the front page of the Naples News, March 24, 1997, with “Act 1 for New Farm Worker Theater Troupe in Immokalee, The New Group Hopes to Share Problems and Find Solutions Through Artistic Expression.” According to Lucas, Our relationship with Sna Jtz’ibajom was instrumental in organizing our community of farm workers here in Immokalee, because their plays helped us to see our reality. They gave us the chance to examine the lives we are living and in that way seek solutions to our problems. Their theatre is a theatre of analysis and a major part of our program of popular education, which is designed to create in our members what we call Conscience + Compromise = Change, a change from the grassroots up. While it was not possible for the coalition to form their own theatre, our presentation inspired the first hunger strike in the United States, which, with Jimmy Carter’s intervention, achieved their salary hike to $5.25 an hour. For their demonstrations they hired Ralph to craft a number of masks and they made their own, too, that have paraded in the streets in support of their Taco Bell Boycott. Lucas and his coalition have won many prizes, including the Robert Kennedy

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Prize for their endeavors that resulted in the discovery of slavery and the jailing of the Chicano slavers. Sna returned to Chiapas the next year to create Trabajadores en el otro mundo (Workers in the Other World). The visits to Immokalee had a strong impact on our actors. They became anthropologists, even recording in memory the voices of the undocumented workers. Tziak told me, “We go, not to teach, but to learn.” In our online exhibit, Unmasking the Maya: The Story of Sna Jtz’ibajom, they report on their experience and give their analysis of what they saw and heard. Xun, son of my compadre Romin, speaks: Parts of Mexico have industry, technology, and other signs of progress, but Chiapas remains a poor agricultural state, the poorest in the country, and one of the poorest regions in the world. People are destitute. There are few opportunities for finding work and, since the North American Free Trade Agreement, our native corn is being displaced by hybrid corn imported from the United States. Industrial corn is only good for feeding pigs. It has no soul, like our corn that was a gift from the gods. Their corn is cheaper, and now we can’t count on a local market where we can sell our harvest. Because of this, many of our countrymen have to emigrate to the U.S. in search

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of jobs. They think that migrant work will be better than starving or suffering under the military oppression that has followed the Zapatista Rebellion. As soon as we arrived in Immokalee, the workers surrounded us, and we asked them about the problems facing them. Many were poor Mayas who either had no work or were paid starvation wages in their own countries. They told us of their suffering, which was almost as bad as the abuses they have experienced here. One member of our group was caught and interrogated: “Where are you from and what are you doing here?” But since he had the proper papers, nothing bad happened. The directors of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers went to talk to the migra and freed him, and later the story appeared in the local newspaper. In Immokalee they live in trailers. Each trailer has a kitchenette, a bathroom, and three or four small rooms. Three or four people live in one room. Each one pays $500 a month for a little place to sleep. Those with the good fortune to reach Immokalee have no guarantee of work. Every morning at 6 a.m. thousands line up in the town plaza to wait for the trucks that will carry them to the fields. When the trucks are filled, many men are left by the side of the road. Some get work only two or three days a week.

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Some save a lot of money. Even though they only work three days a week, they can live and send money home to their families. Those who have been here a few years can buy a small used car. Those who don’t know how to save their money spend it on beer. They go to the cantinas, to night spots where there are prostitutes, of which there are many in this small town. They spend all the money they’ve earned. The ranchers own the beer stores, grocery stores, and clothing stores. The stores sell used clothes that are infested with fleas. The contractors are all Chicanos who know how to speak English. They are the ones who deal with the ranch owners. The workers have no idea who the owner is. The workers are badly treated by the contractors. The contractors are vicious. They only paid the workers $4.00 an hour. Our play would reinforce their demand for a raise in pay, from $4.00 to $5.25 an hour, the basic minimum wage. That was the idea and that is what happened. The workers told us that after one day of not working, the ranch owners lost thousands of dollars. The following day, the contractors offered $5.25 an hour. We changed the title of the play to $5.25. The plays were a kind of catharsis. The migrants said they wanted to prepare themselves in the same way, to do the same thing, so that their problems would be seen, would be recognized. We returned the following year, and again in 1998, to

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give classes in body movement, voice projection, improvisation, playwriting, and theatre production. An undocumented worker speaks: We suffer a lot to get here, because we came as wetbacks. We have to cross deserts, hide in sewer drains, because if the immigration officers see us, they send us back where we came from. They look for us on horseback, on motorcycles, with airplanes, with dogs. When a plane passes over, we cut down a tree and hide under it or we use the tree as an umbrella. Kristobal: After we presented De Todos para Todos [From All for All], the audience asked us why the Zapatistas took up arms. “Because there is so much corruption, and that’s no lie,” we told them. The EZLN represents the best values and the hope for justice with dignity for native people, not only in Chiapas but in all of Mexico. They have no other way to be heard with respect than to follow the armed path. Rosenta: On their days off they can’t leave to go into town, like in our country, because if they go out, the migras, or immigration officers, grab them. They have to go out secretly, because the

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migras will see they’re illegal. The immigration officers know immediately because the illegal guys can’t speak English. Undocumented worker: When we go to cut tomatoes, they give us each a bucket. For every bucket they give us a chip. If the bucket’s not full, they scold us, they hit us, and won’t give us the chip. They treat us like dogs. When we go to work, they growl at us if we don’t work fast enough. When we’re thirsty, they say, “Drink the water from the ditch!” Then they kick us. Maryan: Our hope is that the seed we planted there will grow. That the group and its art will reproduce and be robust. Tziak: When we mounted De Todos para Todos [From All for All] in 1994, we dedicated it to the memory of our countrymen who fell in ancient and recent wars in Chiapas, struggling against the same social, economic, political, and cultural conditions that we have endured for over 508 years. The play reflects our beliefs and convictions about the causes of the Zapatista movement, which surprised the entire world with its armed uprising.

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They learn to be invisible, but many return in a coffin. Others lose their lives without anyone knowing their names or who they are. The coyotes, or smugglers, entice men and women to cross into the United States on the pretext that a more beautiful life exists in this country and they can earn a lot of money. They say that the gringos wipe their behinds with dollar bills. They say that all you have to do is enter the bathrooms, take the bills from the wastebaskets, wash them off, and you can return with a pile of green dollars. After they cross the border they endure mistreatment by the bosses, bad pay, sickness, sleeping with cockroaches and rats. Many sleep in the streets because they can’t afford to rent a room for $100 a week. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers adopted the slogan, “From the People, for the People.” They teach the undocumented workers about their human rights. We lived with them and slept in their trailers. Only in this way could we understand their story. We thought we were on the coffee plantations in Chiapas, but much worse. “March in the streets to attract the public!” the members of the Coalition told us. It was a great surprise for people to see Indians from Tenejapa, Chamula, and Zinacantán marching

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in their native costumes through the streets. The onlookers shouted, “¡Viva los zapatistas!” At our second meeting a man appeared who had been beaten. His shirt was covered with blood. He had asked for a drink of water and they beat him savagely. Then they told him to drink the water from the ditch, which was contaminated with pesticides used to fumigate tomatoes. We went to the authorities, along with reporters from the local newspaper and television channel. They presented the bloody shirt as evidence of maltreatment by the bosses. But the result was negative. As undocumented workers, they have no right to ask for justice. We presented De Todos para Todos in the patio of a church where many people gathered. Some of the ranchers came to watch. They said that the play was about zapatismo. They turned around, put on their dark glasses, and told the workers to appear for work at 4 a.m. the next morning. Because of the impact caused by our play, the workers were changed in attitude, and this bothered the bosses. “Let’s capture the Zapatistas before they cause more problems and the workers rebel against us!” they said. Immediately the workers ran to advise us, and we left at 2:00 in the morning so they wouldn’t grab us and throw us as food to the crocodiles, which are abundant in the lakes and swamps of Florida.

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For my part, it was an historical experience but a drastic one, to know that places exist in the world where there is still racism, intolerance, and no recognition of human rights. The rich only think of money and not of the well-being of humanity. For many a life with justice and dignity is still a utopia. Turning from the actors’ assessment of the world to the world’s judgment of them, it is instructive to note the newspaper headlines in Mexico and the United States. Again and again the actors are championed as presenting their “ethnicity in action” by reinforcing their tradition, expressing their literary and dramatic creativity, offering their history and their understanding of the world and their problems, protesting their marginalization, finding solutions, and sharing all the above with fellow and other Indians as well as with foreigners. As has been pointed out, these actors, like the Zapatistas, are demanding that they be treated as subjects and not objects.

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Literature Cited Cushing, Frank Hamilton 1896 Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths. Bureau of American Ethnology Thirteenth Annual Report, 1891–1892, pp. 321–447. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Danien, Elin C. 2005 Maya Folktales from the Alta Verapaz. Philadelpia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Laughlin, Robert M. 1963 “Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on Zinacantan Courtship and Marriage.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University. 1977 “Of Cabbages and Kings: Tales from Zinacantán,” Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 23. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

239

Literature Cited

Laughlin, Robert M., and Carol Karasik 1996 Mayan Tales from Zinacantán: Dreams and Stories from the People of the Bat. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Past, Ámbar, with Xun Okotz and Xpetra Ernándes 2005 Incantations by Mayan Women. Chiapas, Mexico: Taller Leñateros.

Related Literature Alvarez Q., Francisco, Robert M. Laughlin, and Diego Méndez Guzmán 1998 “A Traveler to the Other World: In Memory of Anselmo Pérez,” Cultural Survival Quarterly (Spring). Breedlove, Dennis E., and Robert M. Laughlin 2000 The Flowering of Man: A Tzotzil Botany of Zinacantán. Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Bricker, Victoria Reifler 1973 Ritual Humor in Highland Chiapas. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Cancian, Frank 1965 Economics and Prestige in a Maya Community: The Religious Cargo System in Zinacantán. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

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Literature Cited

1972 Change and Uncertainty in a Peasant Economy: The Maya Corn Farmers of Zinacantán. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 1973 Another Place: Photographs of a Maya Community. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press. 1992 The Decline of Community in Zinacantán: Economy, Public Life, and Social Stratification. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Colby, B. N. 1966 Ethnic Relations in the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press. Collier, Jane Fishburne 1974 Law and Social Change in Zinacantán. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Haviland, John B. 1977 Gossip, Reputation and Knowledge in Zinacantan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laughlin, Robert M. 1975 The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

241

Literature Cited

Stevenson, Matilda 1904 The Zuni Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies. Bureau of American Ethnology Twenty-third Annual Report, 1901–1902. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Vogt, Evon Z. 1969 Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1976 Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. 1994 Fieldwork among the Maya. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Wilson, Edmund 1965 “The Zuni Shalako Ceremony.” In William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, editors, Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, pp. 171–180. New York: Harper and Row. Wright, Barton 1985 Kachinas of the Zuni. Flagstaff: Northland Press.

242

1) Robert Laughlin, Liana Laughlin, Miriam Laughlin, Romin Teratol, Na Bolom, San Cristóbal de las Casas, 1960. Dorothee S. Wolfe.

243

2) Lol Bik’it Nab attending the Fiesta of San Lorenzo in Zinacantán, 1977. John Swope.

244

3) Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1963. Helga Gilbert.

245

4) Antzelmo and Romin flanked by B. N. Colby (left) and Robert Laughlin, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1963. Lore Colby.

246

5) Antzelmo and Romin on the beach at Chincoteague, Virginia, 1967. Robert Laughlin.

6) Romin, Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico, 1961. Frank Cancian.

247

7) Romin, Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico, 1971. Frank Cancian.

248

8) Antzelmo decanting cane liquor, Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico, 1977. John Swope.

249

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book

9) Matachina Dance, “La Broncada,” San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, December 25, 1954. John L. Champe. (Courtesy Museum of New Mexico, negative number #49349)

250

10) Zuni Girls at the river, Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, 1903. Edward S. Curtis. (Courtesy Museum of New Mexico, negative number # 76957)

251

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book

11) Shalako, “The Courier of the Gods,” Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico. Duane Dishta.

252

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book

12) Koyemshi, “Mudhead,” and Shulawitsi, “Little Fire God,” Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico. Painting by Duane Dishta.

253

13) Antzelmo, 1994. San Jtz’ibajom.

14) Juan Benito de la Torre. San Cristóbal de las Casas, 1998, Sna Jtz’ibajom.

254

15) Don Tomate, 1994. Robert M. Laughlin.

255

A n t h rop o l o g y / L at i n Am e r i c a

Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, now deceased,

“ Robert Laughlin is a distinguished anthropologist who, among other things, is the author of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, a project

Project, one of the best known long-term field research

that he accurately describes as “the most comprehensive dictionary of a native

projects in anthropology. Robert M. Laughlin is curator

language in the New World” and which took him fourteen years to complete.

emeritus of Mesoamerican Ethnology of the National

Tzotzil is the language of the Zinacantec Maya and, in 1963, in connection

Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

with his dictionary research, Laughlin decided to invite two of his Zinacantec

Carol Karasik is a poet, writer, and editor who has

collaborators, Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, to accompany him to the

worked on books and films in the fields of anthropology,

United States—a place no Zinacantec had ever been.

art, ecology, and educational philosophy. She lives in Chiapas, Mexico.

“This was the equivalent of asking two of his non-Maya colleagues to travel with him to the moon. . . .   Laughlin flipped the conventions and made Teratol and Péres the observers and himself the informant.”—Foreword, “Visits to the Underworld,” Peter Canby “This book is filled with the varieties of human experience and expression as they are seen, heard, and felt by two innocents abroad, the first Mayas to describe the United States, Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres. Impelled by the wicked desire to change masks with my companions, so that I would become the superior native and they the unwitting and incredulous ethnologists, I invited Romin and Antzelmo to describe ‘gringoland.’ They show us another world, so familiar to us, so strange to them, where their fears were allayed by their spirit of high adventure and exploration, by their ready appreciation of the sometimes ridiculous, sometimes beautiful sights that awaited them. Of course it was they who had the last laugh as they placed in my hands a Mayan mirror, in which is revealed the curious,

Antzelmo and Romin flanked by B. N. Colby (left) and Robert Laughlin, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1963.

scary, and bizarre behavior of their host and his countrymen.”—Robert Laughlin, Travelers to the Other World

Lore Colby.

Tra velers  to the Other World

were important participants in the Harvard Chiapas

Teratol and Péres

Tra velers  to the Other World A M aya Vie w o f  No r th Am e r ic a

Jacket photo by Helga Gilbert

unmpress.com

Jacket design by Deborah Flynn Post

800–249–7737

other cultures, has long been a tradition in the English-speaking world. This book turns the

tradition on its head and records what is surely the first Maya literary exploration of the United States. The authors were Tzotzil-speaking Zinacantec Maya who accompanied Robert Laughlin, the compiler of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, on two trips to the United States. These were action-packed journeys. On the initial voyage, in 1963, they were in the United States for the assassination of President Kennedy. “The murderer had never met the President. He never had spoken a single word to him. He didn’t even know him!” one of the Zinacantecos reports. They also met Margaret Mead at an American Anthropological Association meeting and flew on their first plane, which they referred to as a “buzzard machine.” They also visited the Navajo and Zuni reservations. On the second trip, in 1967, they stormed the Pentagon with a protest march and met the Mexican actor Cantinflas, who had just had a facelift, in New York City. It took Laughlin several years to persuade his

Romin Teratol and

companions to write about their travels. Laughlin notes

Antzelmo Péres

to Zinacantán, “If I tell people what I saw, nobody

that Romin Teratol confided to him before returning will believe me.” Published here with Laughlin’s more

isbn 978-0-8263-4888-3

University of New Mexico Press

T

 r avel writing, the literary exploration of

academic account of his introduction to life among the

™xHSKIMGy348 83zv*:+:!:+:!

Zinacantec Maya, these remarkable travelogues shed light on both Maya and American societies. Translator and Coordinator, Robert M. Laughlin

Editor, Carol Karasik