Flower Girl

I saw her across the Zócalo.

She was strikingly beautiful. She wore a simple flower print dress and a rebozo across her shoulders, like most of the indigenous women do in this part of Oaxaca. She was practically barefoot, wearing only a pair of thin plastic sandals. There was a halting tone to her gait. She walked hesitantly, uncertainly. As she walked by, she asked if I wanted to buy one of the flowers she had on her arm.

You get used to people coming up to sell you things when you spend time in places like Oaxaca City and San Cristóbal de las Casas. It happens so often, you eventually learn to ignore them. If you act too cordial, it gets mistaken for interest and it becomes that much harder to convince the street sellers that you’re not looking to buy anything. So eventually you become adept at doing the casual “hand wave”, brushing them away with such nonchalance that it becomes clear you’re not a potential customer. You become good at ignoring people.

But as soon as I had said “not today” and the flower girl walked away, I turned and looked at her again. Without warning and for no particular reason, I started thinking about her. About her life, her friends, her family.

She didn’t look like she wanted to be here. I mean, who would want to be spending their evening doing this? If there’s anything that will constantly remind her of all the walls and gulfs and gaps that separate HER from THEM, from US, it’s the profession of street seller. The place that is “work” for her is “fun” for them. They are here to relax, to listen to some music, to have dinner and flirt and joke and cut loose. That is because they can afford to do this. She is constantly reminded that she is on the edges of this world of cafes and restaurants and cappuccinos and artisanal beers. She is here to try and glean some of the residual wealth of this world, but everything in the Zócalo reminds her that this is a world that she does not have access to.

Like Abraham said to Lazarus when Lazarus asked for a drop of water, when his mouth was dry and burning, “there is a vast chasm between us that cannot be crossed”.

She is at their mercy. Our mercy.

I thought of something Evelyn said years ago when I was living with her family. Evelyn’s parents let me spend the summer in their home on the outskirts of Ensenada, Baja California. Evelyn was thirteen at the time. Her family is poor. Their house didn’t have running water when I lived there. When you’re poor, you’re very aware of the fact that you are poor. And you think about it a lot. One afternoon, we were hanging around the house when a young woman Evelyn’s age came by selling homemade donuts. We didn’t buy any. As she left, Evelyn commented, “qué pena, tener que andar de casa en casa vendiendo donas.” How embarrassing. To have to walk around all day selling donuts. At least Evelyn wasn’t that poor.

I thought of Evelyn’s comment as I watched the flower girl walk around. Because I knew that the flower girl had friends and neighbors, and some of them were less poor than she was, and didn’t have to walk around trying to sell flowers to rich tourists. And I couldn’t stop thinking about what must be going through her mind as she does this. Is she embarrassed? When she goes home at the end of the day, do people whisper? “There she is, she’s been out on the street trying to sell some of those pathetic flowers today.” And they were pathetic. They weren’t even the nice roses that were grown in a greenhouse. These were mediocre lilies and other nameless flowers.

And it broke my heart. I mean, I realize that I’m down here to support the Fair Trade coops I’m in touch with, and try to expand Fair Trade and promote an alternative kind of economy where we can support each other and all that. So it’s not like the idea of poverty hasn’t been on my mind. But for some reason, this girl stuck out to me. Something I’d been thinking about as an abstract concept for a long time became suddenly, terrifyingly human. The idea of living in the shadow of the people who go to the Zócalo to have a coffee and relax. She walks these streets as an outsider, a stranger, spending her evening in the cold and the rain around people who always have an umbrella and a warm car nearby.

As I waxed philosophical, I looked up and snapped out of my reverie—the Flower Girl was walking my way. She sat down on a curb next to my bench, taking a break from walking around. She set her flowers on the curb and stared off into space. Her face looked uncannily familiar. I realized she looked almost exactly like a Jewish friend of mine in Russia, Vika. Vika comes from a family with money. She takes professional-grade glamour photos of herself and uploads them to Facebook. She puts on Milan’s latest fashions and hangs out with her friends in the hottest clubs in Saint Petersburg and Paris and Tel Aviv, and posts photos of her clubbing adventures online. Vika and the Flower Girl have the same eyes; the same nose. The Flower Girl could just as easily have been born to a rich family in Russia. She could just as easily been born as Vika…but she wasn’t. She had the bad luck to be born on the wrong side of the line, in a poor village in Oaxaca.

The Flower Girl and I both watched a little three year old boy running spastically around a light pole while his parents sipped lattes. He eventually loses his balance and falls on his ass, cracking his head on the light pole. We chuckle. “Looks like that kid is all partied out,” I say to her. She looks back at me, slightly startled that I’ve breached the divide between us.

She smiles. “Sí, a veces eso pasa cuando los niños no se cuidan,” she says. Her Spanish is heavily accented and belabored. I ask if she comes from one of the Zapotec-speaking indigenous communities around Oaxaca City. She nods. We chat. I tell her about a book I hope to publish someday, a book of some of the stories and folklore from a Mixtec town north of here. I tell her I hope the book is used by the Mixtec town’s schools as part of its curriculum. “A lot of people around here never learn to read,” she says.

I remember the first time I visited a garbage dump in Tijuana, when I was a high schooler on a church trip to bring donations to the marginal neighborhoods of Tijuana. I met a kid who was a couple years younger than I was at the time. He spent every day sifting through garbage, looking for recyclables. At the time, I had stared at him, and stared at the garbage heaps around me, and stared at the plastic bags flying up into the air as a gust of wind blew through the dump. I had eventually told the kid in my still-amateur Spanish, “You know…it isn’t always going to be like this. Some day, God is going to set things right. In this life, or in the next. You won’t always be living this life.” He had shrugged his shoulders. I had walked back to the air-conditioned van where the other gringo high schoolers were listening to a cassette tape of “Jars of Clay”.

I wanted to tell the Flower Girl the same thing. That I believed that somewhere, somehow, there was a different world where things were set right. That God didn’t want her to be poor, that God was pained to watch her staring at these rich people through a glass ceiling. But I didn’t. “I have to get back to work. Talk to you later,” the Flower Girl said, and shuffled off.

I didn’t catch her name.

Carta a la cooperativa cafetalera Maya Vinic

Les comparto la carta de despedida que dirigí a los miembros de la cooperativa cafetalera con la que estuve trabajando estas semanas pasadas. (No más pa' que vean que también tengo mi lado serio, eh...)

- - - -

A los socios de Maya Vinic, a los miembros de la Mesa Directiva, y a sus familias—

Les redacto la presente carta con el fin de expresarles mi eterna gratitud por todo lo que me brindaron Vds. durante los últimos 15 días.

Realmente es un privilegio poder pisar esta tierra sagrada donde los campesinos indígenas han luchado, a lo largo de varios años, por sus derechos y por su dignidad. Para mí fue un honor poder convivir con gente de tan noble carácter como el que reflejan Vds., fue un placer y un gustazo poder pasar tanto tiempo con los cafetaleros y apicultores que se han empeñado en brindarles un mejor futuro a sus hijos, a sus nietos, a sus comunidades y a su tierra.

Les digo con toda franqueza que en Vds. he visto un grado de sinceridad, hospitalidad, generosidad y nobleza que rara vez se encuentra en este mundo.

De manera especial quisiera agradecerles a Don Fernando y a Don Marcos la hospitalidad que me mostraron al abrirme las puertas de sus hogares. El hecho de que Francisco, a unas escasas 24 horas de haberme conocido, me recibió en su casa, demuestra la generosidad inédita de los pueblos indígenas de la República Mexicana. A Marcos le agradezco la oportunidad de estar en su hogar por 3 días y de conocer a su hermosa familia. Estoy seguro que Dios se lo pagará.

A Don Pablo, gracias por orientarme y regalarme tanto de su valioso tiempo durante estas semanas. A todos los miembros de la Directiva, gracias por permitirme observar sus reuniones y sus talleres “como mosca en la pared”. Y a todas las mujeres y los varones que forman parte de la cooperativa, y a todos los demás que me conocieron, les agradezco su paciencia conmigo y con mis intentos (a menudo fallidos) de hablar la lengua tzotzil.

Si en algún momento de mi estancia he ofendido a alguien sin querer, le pido disculpas. A todos, a cada uno de Vds., les digo de todo corazón—y me tendrán que perdonar la grosería—les tengo un chingo de respeto. Espero que nunca pierdan su valor, su solidaridad mutua, su orgullo y su nobleza. Recuerden que la unión hace la fuerza, y que no se les olvide nunca:

"Moj k’an tonkaxan…" (chiste local en lengua tzotzil)

Con fraternidad y solidaridad,


David Schmidt

A Good Old Country Shit

I’m gonna be honest with you, folks. I’m a fellow who knows how to have a good old-fashioned country shit.

And I’m not squeamish about where I do it. Hell, I’ve been to country towns in the Sierra Madre where there wasn’t even so much as an outhouse to speak of. Where I had to find a cozy, secluded place on the hillside and wipe my ass with rocks. And hope that I was the first person to choose those particular rocks.

But this really takes the cake. Today was the first time I’ve had to face off with venomous animals during my country shit.

All told, the bathroom itself was pretty nice. It was a part of an actual cinder block building, not an outhouse, and even had a light bulb to illuminate it. This is pretty luxurious, considering it was out in the small mountain village of Xoyep, Chiapas, a good 30 minute walk from the nearest road.

But there are a couple interesting things about this particular bathroom. One is that it has a large tank of water adjacent to it, collected from rain runoff, that is halfway outdoors and halfway indoors. This is the water you dip the bucket into to pour into the toilet and flush it. Fairly common in a lot of places. But this particular water tank has hundreds of little tadpoles swimming in it. I guess some momma frog thought it would be a good environment for her kids to grow up in, and laid all her eggs into the tank. So every time you dip your bucket in, you have to be careful not to catch a bunch of tadpoles along with the flushing water. (At least I tried to spare the little guys from being poured into a pile of my shit. This was partly out of compassion, and partly because I was sort of afraid some of them might survive the septic tank and become enormous mutant frogs hell-bent on revenge.)

So today I sit down for my good old country shit, greet the tadpoles in the tank next to me…and next thing I know, I see something move out of the corner of my eye. I turn, and there is The Momma, clinging to the wall next to me, come to check on her babies. This wouldn’t be so bad, except I remembered the family I’m staying with told me that a lot of the species of frogs out here are poisonous. If you frighten them or piss them off, they shoot poison urine out their butts, or something of that nature, and it can blind you if it hits your eyes.

So now I’m trying to hurry up and finish my good old country shit, and thinking the whole time about how not to piss off this momma “hem hem” (the name for frogs in the Tzotzil language, an onomatopoeia derived from the noise they make). And she’s in a protective mood, being around her little baby hem hem’s, so I know I have to move carefully when I dip my bucket in to collect my flushing water.

I’m afraid the story just sort of peters off here in anti-climactic fashion. The momma frog hopped away and I flushed my shit in peace. Still, I’ll bet it’s more exciting than any of the dumps YOU’VE taken this week.

The Terror that came to my Town (another Chiapas story)

I am a two year old Mayan girl in Chiapas.

I spend my days running around our mountain town, chasing my mother’s chickens, drinking atole, listening to grandpa’s stories, eating and sleeping whenever I please.

I haven’t a care in the world.

And then, today, it happened. I was walking around the yard in front of my parents’ house, and decided to wander over to the next door neighbors’. They have a little store in the front room of their house, and sometimes they give me candy. I walked past the banana tree in front of my house, toddled between a crowd of chickens and their baby chicks, and rounded the corner…and there it was.

The creature from my worst nightmares.

It looked vaguely humanoid. A head, two legs, two arms, a torso. But something wasn’t right. This was like a cruel parody of the human form. To begin with, it was almost twice as large as a normal adult human, making it about ten times my size. It sat on one of the plastic chairs that my neighbors keep in front of their store, the chair’s legs nearly buckling beneath the beast’s weight. It leaned back lackadaisically, one monstrous leg crossed over the other.

Its hair—if it can properly be called “hair”—was overgrown, tangled and straw-colored, pulled together behind its oddly-shaped head. Unlike the humans I have seen, this creature seemed to have hair growing all over its body, and far too much of it. Its lanky, simian arms were covered with thin, yellow hairs; its face was thick with dark fur. As far as I could tell, its skin was a pasty, pale color at least three shades lighter than a person’s skin. Like the skin of the dead. And where its nose should have been, it had an enormous projectile erupting from its face.

And the eyes—unlike a normal person’s eyes, this creature had a bright blue ring around its pupils. As soon as I rounded the corner, the creature stared at me through those terrible, terrible eyes. And I screamed. I screamed and ran, unconscious of where my legs carried me. I ran and screamed until I felt the warm embrace of my older brother. He held me tight, but it offered me no consolation. I continued to scream, and although I no longer scream, my fear has not subsided.

I lie here tonight in bed between my mother and father, surrounded by the familiar smells of the wood fire from the kitchen, the fresh rain outside, and the wood panels of our house. But it will never be the same. Up until today, I thought that the fearsome world of my nightmares was kept safely at bay by the cold, harsh borders of reality.

But today, I have seen that the monsters of the dream realm are able to cross that boundary and erupt into the dimension of my waking hours.

I have seen one of these creatures, and I know that it is real.


(…at least that’s what I imagine the poor girl would have written if she had the ability. I spent the night at a family’s house in a remote mountain town, and apparently surprised their neighbor’s daughter this morning. I’m guessing she’s never seen an outsider before.)

A Chiapas Story-part 3

The DVD kept playing. The semi-tropical rainstorm kept pounding on the tin roof. Kids in traditional woven indigenous clothing kept popping into the store, soaked to the bone from walking across town for a can of preserved jalapeños.

We all sat around the table on wooden chairs, staring at the television set. We were on our third DVD by now, this one the same as the first two: Evangelical Christian women from Mayan indigenous parts of Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, singing cheesy praise songs. All Mayan Evangelical music videos, all the time.

The singer in this DVD had a deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face as she sang about God’s love. A sort of “oh, shit, am I really doing this” look in her eyes.

Much of the text was misspelled in the videos. The end credits invited other Evangelical musicians to come by the studio and record “gragaciones en estudio” (translation: “in-studio regordings”).

The DVD was titled “La Invasión de Dios”. The special features included an evangelistic campaign with a famous Guatemalan pastor.

I’ve heard that some communities in the Mayan highlands have gone to war with each other over the arrival of these new religions. A couple times in the past, people got chopped up with machetes for trying to start a new church. As I watched this video, I was starting to understand why.

The next song on the DVD was “El Tren del Evangelio” (The Gospel Train). Every three seconds, a computerized train sound effect would play, drowning out the singer and making it impossible to hear the lyrics. None of these singers sang in a Mayan language, even though most of their target audience didn’t speak Spanish as a first language.

I started to watch the expressions of my companions to see what their take on this whole evangelistic DVD thing was. They didn’t seem to be Evangelicals themselves; several of them wore Catholic crucifixes, scapulars and Virgin of Guadalupe medallions. Not even the shop owner seemed to be Evangelical. He had an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus up in the corner of his store (this is what Evangelicals call “Satanic idolatry”.) As far as I could tell, nobody was into the whole praise music-thing. It seems that this store owner had just acquired a handful of these worship DVD’s and figured watching them was better than staring at the wall.

Every cut-away to a new scene in the music video was performed in the cheesiest of fashions. The screen would turn into a butterfly and flap its wings and fly away, or it would turn into an inner tube and float off into the distance.

But none of the men seemed to be making derisive comments either. They joked in a subdued, good-natured manner. And I thought, maybe these guys don’t care about how cheesy these types of church-people videos are. Maybe they actually were listening to the message of grace and forgiveness, and were able to totally look past the gaping holes in production value. Maybe this obsession with “production value” (a concept that is extremely relative) is foreign to a lot of these country folk.

The music video ended with a shot of the singer randomly staring at a rock in a field. She didn’t appear to realize she was being filmed.

And maybe, I thought, maybe a blanket condemnation of cheesy Christian music videos is just as Manichean and judgmental and over-simplistic as the Holy Rollers’ unquestioning acceptance of them.

Still, whatever their opinion of the “God’s Invasion of Guatemala” series was, the men were definitely not giving their full attention to this DVD crusade. And when the shopkeeper’s teenage son came in from the rain with a SmartPhone and started playing a California porno he had downloaded, all the men crowded around immediately.

This was definitely more interesting.

A Chiapas Story-part 2

I thought I’d test the waters on the Zapatista front. This was, after all, the heart of the guerrilla uprising. Who knows, maybe I could convince the shopkeeper into launching into a political rant of some sort.

We were discussing greetings, comparing the relative benefits of the English language “jelou” and the various Mayan greetings (which I have yet to figure out—it seems like every damn person says something different when they greet someone, and I have yet to nail down a simple all-purpose “hola”).

I casually mentioned in passing, “Is it true that some folks in this area greet each other with their left hand instead of the right?” Of course, this was a reference to something I had read about; this was a politically-charged habit of Marcos and some of the other guerrilla commanders.

“I don’t know about that,” the store owner said. He stared at the dirt floor. The Guatemalan singer continued to croon in the background on the TV set, accompanied by an electronic synthesizer. Every song had at least one moment of blatantly incorrect notes hit by the piano player. “Stuck pigs,” as they call them in show business.

“The only time I’ve seen someone greet with their right hand,” he continued, “is if they’re mad at their neighbor for some reason. It’s like a way of making it obvious that I’m not happy with you, by giving you the wrong hand when I greet you on the road.”

That’s all the left-handed shake was for this guy. Not a clever way for a revolutionary to show his preference for the Left wing of the political spectrum.

Just a big Mayan middle finger.

A Chiapas Story

After clearing the plot of land with our machetes, we stopped into the general store for a refresco. We made it inside just as the mountain rainstorm hit.

It was a small wooden shack, a corrugated tin roof that made the pounding rain resound with a fierce echo. A scattering of products lined the walls—Coca Cola, Arco Iris snack cakes, canned chiles, plastic bags of laundry detergent. A television set had been set up on a simple wooden stand next to the crude table where we sat drinking our Cokes. On the TV, a DVD played of a woman from Guatemala singing Evangelical praise songs.

We sat around chatting with the owner. The rain was in full force, rattling on the tin roof. The men leaned on their machetes and sipped from the glass Coke bottles, some of them wearing the boots, jeans, checkered shirts and cowboy hats typical of Mexico’s country towns, others in traditional native one-piece garments. The rain made it difficult for me to make out the conversation in Tzotzil—the Mayan language spoken in this part of the Chiapas highlands. Spanish is definitely a foreign language out here.

Every now and then, a young boy or girl would run in holding a piece of plastic tarp over their head, sent down the road by his or her parents to buy one of the five grocery items available in this store. Invariable, the kid would poke their head in the door, stare at me in disbelief, then look around at the other men incredulously. The expression on the kid’s face seemed to say, “Are you guys SEEING this shit over here? What’s the deal with the white guy, man?”

I was able to follow the conversation enough to figure out that the men were talking about the rain coming down: “vo” in Tzotzil. I decided I’d capitalize on the occasion to try out my Tzotzil and make an ass of myself in the process. After the shopkeeper handed me my Coca Cola, I told him, “Koalabal, vinic” (“thank you, sir”) holding up the bottle. I decided to flex the word “koalabal” some more.

“Thank you all, gentlemen.”

“Thank you, general store.”

“Thank you, chair.”

Then came the real kicker. I leaned towards the open wooden door, looking up at the dark rain clouds above. “Koalabal, Chac”. This was pure gold—the men cracked up laughing at the cultural reference I had just dropped. I had showcased my knowledge of Mayan history by thanking the ancient pre-Hispanic rain god Chac for the downpour.

Success!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my adventures, it’s that there is no better way to bond with other men and overcome cultural differences than doing manual labor together and dropping a well-placed cultural reference.

Also, being willing to make a complete ass of yourself.