Saints and fizzy drinks
One of my favorite places I visited over the last few months was San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, a large state in southern Mexico which borders Guatemala and in fact has many cultural similarities to the western highlands of Guatemala, where I was living: extreme poverty and a history of skewed land distribution policies (although at least in Mexico, even in a poor state like Chiapas, there is still a modicum of infrastructure and public works), mountains and volcanoes, and a thick population of Maya living in highland villages all around San Cristobal, many still dressing and speaking how they did during colonial times.
The hostel where I stayed in San Cristobal was run by two brothers: one who followed me around all weekend attempting to show me his poetry, which was written in a flowery tense I hadn’t learned and took up 20 flourishing pages of his notebook (he graciously offered to sell it to me for 20 pesos) and another who seemed to handle all the business of actually running a hostel in a town capitalizing off the tourism pouring into the region following the Zapatistas’ brief takeover in 1994. This brother recommended that I visit the Museum of Maya Medicine–you’ll have to Google it because they don’t have a website–where for a small fee you can take a stroll through an herb garden, browse the pharmacy’s impressive collection of thousands of herbs, spices, and ingredients involved in traditional healing, learn about the different types of healers and ceremonies, and watch a video about Mayan midwifery (with full frontal nudity! See also: childbirth in a dirt floor hut.). My comrades and I were sold. Somehow we managed to find the place, between the map that didn’t really show the street we needed and a few hollered directions by helpful passersby that seemed to conflict with each other but eventually led us where we needed to go.
As we walked further away from the center of San Cristobal, I started to feel more and more like we were in Guatemala–at least the Guatemala that I had become so familiar with over the previous seven months. The “museum” itself resembled something more befitting of the Guatemalan tourist commission (INGUAT) than I would have expected in a backpacker-drenched Mexican hotspot: no signage, trash, inconspicuous building, people standing around whom you weren’t sure were staff or family members of staff or just people standing there until you tried to go in and were suddenly (politely but firmly) asked for money by a man wearing a too-tight shirt and that always-wet-gelled hair that Central American men have perfected. Unlike many attractions in Guatemala, though, were a few things that stood out to me: signs and posters all over the walls of this dingy little office exhorting visitors to stand up for a number of radical causes, such as: town hall meetings regarding land distribution policies; a large and very informative poster called “The Truth About Coca-Cola” delineating the many ways the Coke company has fucked Mexico and Central America; Latina feminist book clubs; stickers about Monsanto, United Fruit Company, oil, General Motors, the U.S. government’s immigration policies, and warnings about giving your children infant formula subsidized by first world economies trying to profit off weaning Mayan babies off their mother’s milk. All of this stuck out to me because in Guatemala, despite the presence (I think, I hope) of radical leftists intent on dismantling the horrific power structure in their country, radical leftists are thin on the ground–at least, they are not out and proud like Mexican leftists. You do not walk into a tourist attraction in Guatemala, even a tourist attraction catering to the tattooed volunteer traveler crowd, and see signs openly denouncing government policies, the U.S., multinational corporations, or any kind of “let’s gather and talk about this” unless it’s sponsored by a foreign-owned NGO. I won’t speculate here as to why that is, although the images of death squads and the embers of razed highland villages still smoldering from the recent Civil War may be a big part of the seeming disparity.
The museum guide kindly offered us a brochure written in Spanish and poorly translated English, but it didn’t really matter as most of the signage on the wall was in Latin (scientific names of plant and herb species) and we were clueless anyway. The museum itself was small: three or four rooms with disturbing life-size statues of Mayans in replications of a highland church, healer’s garden, and house interior. In fact, walking into the first room, which is set up like the inside of a church complete with iconography and three kneeling parishioners, I was startled and began apologizing to the people whose ceremony I thought I’d disturbed. (This caused the museum guide even greater amusement than my accent and clothes had.) In this room, spooky not only because of the models in traditional black-hair-sheep skirts and piercing eyes but soundtrack full of chanting layered over howling wind, we learned that any healer worth his or her salt rarely leaves home without the four essentials in tow: candles, a cross, an icon of Saint Jude, and some kind of carbonated drink (Coke or Pepsi are the beverages of choice). The brochure explained that gas from the carbonation in soda is seen as helpful for distracting or awing pernicious evil/meddlesome spirits into submission, so many times a liter of Coke will be poured out or left on an altar to consecrate the ground at which a ceremony is taking place. Very strong liquor like aguardiente or whiskey is sometimes used to placate the victim during healing, especially if their ordeal is particularly painful (childbirth, excessive bleeding, etc.); however, as the brochure again explained to us, the waves of evangelicalism sweeping Central America have also reached into the Chiapas highlands, and while they haven’t managed to stamp out Mayan Catholicism/mysticism entirely, some converted Maya now disapprove of imbibing the fire water on religious grounds. Apparently goat sacrifice is still okay with the Pentecostals.
It’s amazing to see how resourceful people are in the face of hunger, poverty, and total isolation from the world around them (even from villages just over the next mountain range). Yet it’s incredibly disturbing to see how much knowledge has been stolen, patented by Monsanto and other giant corporations, and then sold back to us in the form of a wonder pesticide. Knowledge of which herbs kill, which heal, what to use during childbirth, what to take for depression and insomnia, what to help your corn grow, what to use to resist harmful bacteria–this is all the cumulative work of many centuries of discovery and oral history which has been handed down and perfected among the indigenous Maya, and which has now been co-opted by the so-called 1st world, all for the thrill of meeting that bottom line. Many of these corporations are now patenting whole species of plants in order to corner the market on every last goddamn blade of grass on this earth. It’s terrifying, but mostly, when you see the poverty and dispossession and disenfranchisement writ large across whole swathes of southern Mexico and Central America, it’s heartbreaking.
Our tour of the museum concluded with a 12-minute video on Mayan midwifery, which consisted of a handheld camera trained on a Chamulan woman plying her trade in a candlelit dirt-floor hut. Everyone was speaking in a Mayan language (Chamulan, I guess?) and the video was subtitled in Spanish, but Mayans apparently speak even faster than Mexicans do, so I was hard-pressed to follow what the woman was explaining about each herb she was smearing on herself, the mother’s stomach, and the new infant. At some point the baby is born (from a mother who didn’t look older than 14, to a father who looked about 35), as the woman kneels in front of her husband and pushes the baby out while the midwife catches it from beneath her skirt. The placenta was buried in a corner of the hut–maybe for protection?–although I think some of it may also have been ingested by the parents. Bottles of Coke to keep away troublesome spirits and shit-tons of candles were strategically placed all around the hut. A special herbal poultice was rubbed all over the mother’s breasts to help her milk come down, and then she and the tightly wrapped baby were put to bed. The husband and the midwife drank aguardiente and prayed in gratitude of a safe delivery and for continued protection from evil spirits for the first inauspicious weeks of the baby’s life. It was fascinating, and called to mind the documentary The Business of Being Born, in which the oftentimes cruel farce of hospital labor is exposed for the profit-driven sham that it is: what we know about women’s reproductive health in the 1st world is so limited and heavily influenced by tampon manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. I’ll take the Mayan midwife, please. (Although I think I’d like a shower afterward. And some aguardiente.)
Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photographs of the museum or its surroundings, for the very reason that the community is concerned (and rightly so) about people selling photos of heretofore undiscovered herbs to Monsanto or someplace and then having willowbark slapped with a fucking patent. (It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because a week later my camera was stolen.) The photo above is of one of the most famous of the many famous cathedrals in San Cristobal and doesn’t do it justice; the town continually took my breath away. Just walking around is like a feast for your eyes, where you aren’t sure which is more beautiful or colorful: the churches, the buildings, the people, the clothes, the volcano-rimmed skyline. When I left, I put San Cristobal on a mental list of Places I Could Live, sheephair skirts and all.
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