‘WHERE DO YOU CARRY your money?’ asked the small middle-aged man at the back of the rapido bus from Mexicali, on the U.S. frontier, to Mazatlán.
He went on to suggest that I should keep a reasonable float of a few hundred pesos wherever I usually did and put the rest in my sock. His qualifications to advise on such precautionary measures were solidly based, for he was a long-distance bus driver by profession, travelling home as a passenger after a journey up to the border two days before, when his bus had been held up by bandits.
‘But aren’t they going to look in your shoes?’
‘They’re in too much of a hurry,’ the bus driver said, ‘and their nerves are shot to pieces. They grab whatever they can and they get out.’
Like so many law-abiding people dazzled by the charisma of violence, he seemed grateful for the experience and happy to find saving grace in the highwaymen who had carried rocks on to the lonely road and pointed a submachine-gun at his windscreen.
‘They’re not too bad,’ he said. ‘Say buenos dias to them, and they say buenos dias to you.’ One of the passengers had mentioned that he was out of work and they’d given his money back, as well as being politeness itself to the women passengers.
There was always an adventure waiting round the corner on the long-distance buses, the driver said. It was a point of honour to get into a station on time and this sometimes meant pushing the cruising speed up to eighty miles an hour. On the last trip southwards he had hit a cow at full throttle and splashed it all over the bus, which had to be taken out of service and hosed down at the next town. It was a good thing, he said, to sit up at the back as he did, just as it was better when you flew anywhere to get as close as you could to the tail of the plane.
The bus driver was the first Mexican I spoke to on this journey, and like so many of his countrymen in subsequent random encounters, he immediately took charge of my welfare. The bus rampaged on through the long hot day, and then into a haggard nightscape of cactus and flint. The dreaming, hollow-eyed villages came and went, and lean men going home asleep on their horses awoke to kick them into desperate life and charge for the verge at the hideous outcry of our siren. We stopped at dreadful hours at woebegone staging points when passengers got down and staggered away carrying their fatigue like some three-dimensional burden as they went in search of food.
In these hallucinatory moments I foraged under the umbrella of my friend’s protection. The dishes on offer at these places were strongly regional in character: pork cooked in chocolate, or tacos of meat in a maize-pancake sandwich. At one stopping point a man succeeded in selling a number of hydrogen-filled balloons to passengers who were too dazed to realize what they were buying. At another a cartomancer, crying, ‘It isn’t the betrayal so much as the doubt that kills’, promised to tell males of the party whether or not their wives were being unfaithful in their absence. Occasionally there were pleasures on offer, other than the satisfaction of hunger, for those who were prepared to cram them into these few bleak moments in the dead of night. ‘Travellers waited upon with speed and formality’, said a notice displayed in one stark pull-in. But however speedy and formal the young ladies lurking rather hopelessly in the background might have been, the iron schedules of bus travel slammed the door on such adventures. ‘Ten minutes,’ the conductor had warned, ‘and not a second more.’ And in precisely ten minutes we were under way again.
At each major town faces changed as we lost fellow travellers who were by now old friends, and took on a fresh influx of strangers eager for membership of our temporary family. For a while we were on a sort of Canterbury pilgrimage by high-speed bus when eleven fat men from the Middle Ages got in, all of them called Francisco and all of them on their way to a prestigious shrine of the saint by that name. They rolled about the bus fizzing with excitement and forcing bottles of Montezuma beer on the other passengers, and when they settled, like true pilgrims, it was to tell stories endlessly. Their huge posteriors spread over a seat and a half wherever they sat, and a thin doctor, also a Francisco, who was travelling with them and hoped to get them all back alive, said: ‘You may think these men are fat, but actually they’re starving to death. All they ever eat is rice and beans. If you stuck a pin in them, they’d deflate.’ It was twenty miles from the bus stop to the shrine, he said, and the intention was to walk the last seven miles barefoot. ‘It could cut the soles of their feet about a bit,’ the doctor said, ‘but otherwise if they survive could do wonders for their general health.’
We dropped our pilgrims off in a mist-veiled morning full of cactus and circling buzzards a few miles before Tepic, and here we took on a Huichol Indian decked with feathers and beads and carrying a bow and a sheaf of arrows in a dry-cleaner’s plastic cover. Eagles’ pinions sprouted from the rim of his flat straw hat, and his tunic and pantaloons were densely embroidered with deer, pelicans and heraldic cats. He sat in noble isolation from the rest of us, moving only once to fill a paper cup with water from a tap at the back, then having rummaged for a while in his splendidly ornamented satchel, he found an Alka Seltzer, unwrapped it, dropped it into the water, and gulped down the result.
He got off at Tepic, capital of the Wild-Western, gunslinging State of Nayarit, and I did, too, wanting to enquire after my old friend Ramon Medina, shaman of the Huichol people, with whom I had spent some time in the sierra exactly ten years before. The shaman was a unique artist, the originator of those extraordinary pictures in wool now seen in degenerate versions in Mexican folk-art shops throughout the world. He was also Mexico’s foremost bowman and a faith healer of such renown that he had been kept in Zapópan, the Lourdes of Mexico, for a year or two to treat the many sufferers from phobias and psychosomatic disorders attracted to that town. It had now become a matter of personal regret that I had fought shy of accepting his treatment for the affliction of a life-long nervous cough by allowing him to expectorate down my throat. I learned at Tepic, where the shaman’s fame had been great, that he had died some years before, almost certainly murdered by one of the many gunmen that infest the sierra of Nayarit, and prey on the isolated Indian communities that have taken refuge there.
At this point in the journey I backslid. The original intention had been to travel by bus all the way from the U.S. border to the Guatemalan frontier with Mexico at Tapachula, but I had done 1,200 miles from the border and now, with a pair of lightweight trousers half worn through, and the earth shuddering like jelly every time I stepped down from the bus, there were still another 1,200 miles to go. The final straw was a failure to get a seat on three rapidos in succession, and I gave up and took the plane to Mexico City, to spend the night in the vast, unreal peace of the Maria Isabel-Sheraton Hotel. This was the only hotel in the downtown area of this turbulent city where a room was to be found. It is favoured by Americans and I mingled in its marble halls with Elks and Rotarians who had come there for conventions, faced up to its gargantuan meals, and listened to the soft, ubiquitous moan of its airport music.
The Sheraton’s portions of food—this also applied to neighbouring restaurants—were so vast that they could not be contained on ordinary plates, and the pound or more of meat with all its garnishings was spread over an elongated metal dish. The vacuum-religiosity of such places was reflected on a card propped on the table which said, ‘We owe it to “Him”. Let us be big enough and grateful enough to acknowledge this fact today and each following day, and before partaking of this food, let each of us bow his head and give thanks.’ The waiter said that about one third of the food he served was returned to the kitchen to go into the swill.
The hotel presents each guest with the Lloyd’s (monthly) Economic Report, a complacent document which has nothing to offer the visitor but good cheer. A minimum increase in the private sector investment of 235 per cent was projected for the year. For the past year the nation showed a 7 per cent growth in real terms, and among the 152 member states of the United Nations it was in the 10 per cent, having the highest living standards. A deal was afoot with the French to supply three nuclear power stations—and so on. From where one sat in the fairy palace of the Sheraton it was impossible to disbelieve that this was so. On the other hand, Mexico City, said by some to have a population numbering nearly 20 million and therefore to rank as the largest city in the world, is said by others to have the most extensive slums in the western hemisphere, which, when I spent some hours in them, showed little signs of improvement since the days of Dr Oscar Lewis’s famous report. It has been said, too, that most Mexicans earn about £300 a year. Who is one to believe—Lloyd’s, or the sociologists who deny that the vast revenues from oil and steel have any serious effect on the poverty of the man in the street?
Exercise was called for to cope with the digestion of the hotel’s copious and indulgent meal, so I took a walk round the city block on which it is built, where I found seventeen indigent families camping out for the night in the street, these in most cases consisting of mother and two or three small children. They live there, and in the vicinity of the other luxury hotels, scraping a living as best they can, but for the most part dependent upon the charity of passers-by—in the main the travellers from overseas. Hard times are confronted cheerfully. One mother of three said, ‘On the whole I can’t complain. We come to places like this because foreigners are more generous than our own people. My husband is a labourer back in our village but he’s always out of work, and I usually do better than he does. To tell you the truth the children enjoy an outing to the city. It’s a change for them. Anyone can put up with sleeping on a clean pavement, and if it rains we can always go to the arcades. If any of the children come out in sores or pick up a cough you often find that someone who happens to be a doctor will stop and give you something for it, so in this way it’s even better than being at home.’
Extreme poverty, as I have always observed in Mexico, is in no way inconsistent with happiness.
There was a choice of routes from Mexico City to the deep south, and someone recommended an east-coast approach through the swamps and the oilfields of the State of Tobasco, so I flew to Villahermosa and there hired a self-drive car, so as to be able to reach areas not served by the buses. In this simple operation an unexpected complication arose. Villahermosa, an oil-rich city, glutted with cars, and on the edge of an area currently producing the staggering total of 2 million barrels of oil a day, was a place where it was as hard to buy petrol as it is to find freshly caught fish in an English seaside town. The manager of the car-hire firm presided over a row of shining new Mexican-made Volkswagen Beetles, but all of them had empty tanks, and a pint of petrol had to be syphoned with enormous difficulty from his own car to get me to the one filling station, where by luck and by favour I managed to fill her up at 30p per gallon.
Villahermosa draws a few tourists by reason of being within easy reach of the Mayan pyramids of Palenque. It offers striking contrasts. The sudden raucous prosperity engendered by oil is grafted on a rootstock of impassive Mexican calm. One sees a heron prospecting an abandoned tanker for edible ticks in the belief that it has come upon some gigantic new species of zebu cattle, while a bird of the same order occasionally mucks in with the guests in the swimming pool of the local hotel. This establishment has both character and charm. Beautiful Mayan waitresses serve the mettlesome plat du jour—which may be tripe cooked in chilies—with the dignity of priestesses officiating at a religious ceremony. Frogs like miniature race horses gallop up and down the air-conditioned passages, and in the evening guests are entertained with ‘Rose Marie’ and ‘Pale Hands I Loved’ on the Yamaha organ.
The audience, largely Japanese on package-deal tours, are mystified by the music but eager to show appreciation, and clap whenever they can. In the morning they are up betimes, cameras loaded and the wide-brimmed Mexican sombreros imported nowadays from Korea strapped to their luggage, ready for the jungle-smothered ruins. The hallmark of an advanced society is obsession with plumbing, so the Japanese lady in control of the group presents herself at the reception, bowing and smiling, to make a routine complaint about nonfunctioning flushes, after which the party is on its way.
Sixty per cent of the State of Tobasco, of which Villahermosa is the capital, is swampland. It rains here softly and remorselessly for ten months on end, and as it rains the waters rise gently and spread their lily-decked margins over more and more of the landscape. When the sun finally shines it is on a scene that is deceptively meek. Aquatic plants, many of them sporting magnificent blooms, quilt the spread water to suggest a fictitious solidity, but only Indians can live here, and about 60,000 of them actually do.
The thing to see near Villahermosa is the invention born of desperation and ingenuity by which the survivors of the redoubtable Chontal race, chased into the marsh by their Spanish conquerors, managed to stay alive. Using their bare hands they scooped slime from the bottom of the swamp and piled it up to form mounds and ridges above the water level, and on these they planted their beans and their squash.
A few years ago government agriculturists appeared to have noticed what was going on—and had been for centuries—and decided that all that was required was the application of scientific farming methods to develop the camellón system, as it is called, into an important new source of food.
Teams of experts arrived with the fertilizers, the insecticides, the new types of seeds and plants, and, above all, the giant dredgers borrowed from PEMEX, the state oil concern, with which the great swamp was to be dominated and encouraged to produce the new vegetable abundance. The dredger would build the camellones at a hundred times the speed of men working without tools, and the hollows left where the mud had been gouged from the swamp’s bed would be stocked with suitable fish. A trial batch of 600 approved families were to be presented with this living space created from virtually nothing and, working under scientific supervision, were to produce the new wealth. Exactly three years had passed since the beginnings of this hopeful experiment when I drove out to visit Nacajuca, headquarters of the project, a few miles down the road from Villahermosa, to see how things had gone.
The rain, having fallen for some forty weeks on end, had stopped only a few days before, and the tropical sun had begun the slow process of sucking away the water. Most of the Chontals were out of sight, busy as usual with survival, but a few privileged ones who had managed to establish a foothold by the side of the raised metalled road carried on their normal occupations, knee-deep in water, mending and making things, cooking, washing the clothes and child-minding with an indifference that suggested they had forgotten the flood’s existence. A man busied himself with wire to mark out the boundaries of a garden two feet under water. A funeral party, all its members properly drunk, staggered and splashed towards a hillock where the coffin they carried would be temporarily interred to await reburial in the cemetery when it dried out. The most extraordinary vision was that of cattle swimming to feed on floating beds of water-hyacinths, only heads and shoulders showing above the water, the lavender blossom trailing from their lips.
It was about midday when we reached the spot where they were building up new camellones. The dredger plunged its huge claw into the swamp, scooping up a ton of marsh at a time to drop it on the half-completed bank. A lorry dumped a load of cocoa bean husks on the mud and rotting vegetation as a small army of Chontals moving like sleep-walkers arrived with their mattocks to nudge the husks into the unsatisfactory soil.
The Chontals inherit elaborate social graces from noble forebears, and they are saturated with the sly, defensive humour of the underdog. When I asked the man in charge of this party what the goings-on on his Tarzan T-shirt were all about, he displayed the ruin of his teeth in a stealthy grin and said, ‘These are the legends of a primitive people.’ I understood that I was included in this category. When these men sat down to their midday meal it was clear that they were eating the same old vitamin-deficient maize cakes and beans that the Indian Institute had described in its book on the project as not only inadequate for the needs of the body but detrimental to the mental faculties.
Later, the director of the project spoke of his experiences with good-humoured resignation. He had learned a lot from the men he had set out to teach, he said. Probably as much as they had learned from him. Some of their attitudes had shocked and surprised him a little at first. He had run up against the hard fact that they had no sense of money or trade and this being so the marketable surpluses the Institute had hoped for with which they might have bought such consumer goods as transistor radios, or even Japanese mopeds, were out. ‘I accept now,’ he said, ‘that the Chontal wants to work with his family, produce just enough to live on and consume all he produces.’
He had been stunned by such things as their tolerance in the matter of the irresponsible idleness of certain of their fellow workers. The idea was that ten men should form their own little co-operative nucleus to farm a camellón efficiently, but it didn’t work out that way. ‘You find two or three don’t want to work at all. They just sit round all day and talk about their dreams, and the others don’t mind in the slightest. You and I would resent a situation like that, but they don’t. They never criticize each other and you’ll never believe how conservative they are. We introduced new vegetables, but most of them were attacked by plant diseases, and when we got them to use sprays they poisoned the fish. We found out that the cocoa bean husks they’ve always used seem to be the only fertilizer that works on that soil.
‘Their diet’s terribly short of protein, so we persuaded them to raise pigs, but when the time came they wouldn’t kill them. “Christ,” they say, “I can’t kill that animal. I love him like my brother. Kill him after I’ve been giving him a wash and brush-up, and food out of my own mouth every day for the last six months? Excuse me, your honour, but what do you take me for—a cannibal?”’
Scarlet dragonflies flew in through the office window, and the director cuffed them away, and laughed. ‘After all, what are we after? Our hope and intention was to fill their stomachs, because everything depends on that. Do you know what we’ve discovered in the end? We’ve learned that the traditional agriculture of these people’s ancestors fills their stomachs faster than we can. So technicians are out. Insecticides are out. Diversification is out. We sow by the moon and the rain, and we sow maize, beans, squash, yuccas and plantains. We’ve gone right back to the Mayan solution of the pre-conquest. All they needed was a little land to be able to take off. At least we’ve given them that.’
The only road due south from Villahermosa crosses the high sierra, and no driver should take it on in a car which cannot be repaired by the blacksmith-electrician team likely to be found in any of the small towns passed in a day’s driving. There are terrific gradients, and many bends, some spread with the mud of recent landslides. The forest that climbs through up to the cool, thin air displays tropical embellishments: parrots surfacing suddenly like a shoal of glittering fish from the quilted foliage, an occasional toucan, a scrambling, raccoon-like animal in the road. A café has been built at the highest point, with wolves’ and bears’ skins tacked to its walls, where the boss entertains the occasional customer after serving the food with the extraordinary knack he has developed of catching the flies that have settled on his plate—eight to ten in a single swipe of the paw.
It was shortly after enjoying this experience that I stopped for two Americans stranded by trouble with the automatic transmission in their opulent new car. There were thirty miles of wary driving round the edge of a number of precipices between them and the last town they had passed, and I had to break the news to them that the situation that faced them was roughly the same. I offered them a lift, but they wanted to stay with the car, so, promising to try to arrange a rescue, I drove on.
The next town was a mile or two off the main road and, stopping at a cantina to enquire the way, I found myself talking to the local chief of police, who had just arrested two youths for making an affray and had paused for a beer before taking his prisoners back. I told him about the stranded car, and he offered to help me find a mechanic. He led the way down to the town, and courteously invited me into the jail where the two prisoners were put in one of a row of cage-like cells of the type shown in Western movies, where they continued their arguments and threats. We then set off in the almost hopeless search for someone with an experience of automatic transmissions.
This town was a museum-piece of the traditional Mexican scene: a square with a seething market, a general store stacked with cartridges, nails and tattered stockfish, a pub called ‘I’ll be here when you get back’, a main street with trenches hacked out of its surface to slow down the traffic and a great number of people going nowhere in particular, including a man with a pig on a lead, and another carrying a canary in a cage. For all the world it was a multi-coloured Mexican version of a Lowry. Inevitably fireworks lit surreptitiously popped here and there, hissing thirty feet into the air to explode with a blue cauliflower of smoke. The mechanic’s wife, when in the end we tracked him down, said that he was asleep, but the chief of police would have none of this and led the way through the house into a backyard where we found him soldering together a toy spacecraft that had to be ready for some child’s saint’s day. In the end he agreed to go up the road and see what could be done. Had he any experience of automatic transmissions? the police chief asked. No, the man told him, but he had his intuitions. ‘Tell them to flog the thing and try a Volkswagen next time they come to this country,’ the chief of police said.
San Cristobal de las Casas is the last town of stature of the Deep South before reaching the Guatemalan frontier. It is built in the high mountains, an enclave of the colonial past, its walls pitted with the cannonballs of forgotten revolutions, and its streets full of sharp, Alpine colour under a sweetly discordant muddle of old bells. The misfortune of San Cristobal is that the Pan-American Highway runs through its outskirts, and down it has come the advance guard of the invasion of our times, including 2,000 American hippies who have settled in the town and attempted, with signal lack of success, to copy the appearance and life-style of the Indians who form the great majority of the surrounding population.
The presence of these expatriates has stimulated a never deeply buried anti-American feeling—based supposedly in the memory of ancient oppressions and interventions—and insulting graffiti are frequently scrawled on the walls of the houses in which they lodge. Although many young Americans have tried to transform themselves into Indians, so far only one Indian is known to have returned the compliment by becoming a pseudo-hippy, having abandoned the industrious, hyperactive life of his people to spend much of his time in one of the cafés, imitating a hippy imitating an Indian.
The State of Chiapas, of which San Cristobal was the old capital, is on the last frontier of tourism in Mexico; a frontier now widely breached, and in course of demolition. Mayan tribes who survived the holocaust of the Spanish conquest, and contrived to keep a nucleus of the old civilization intact, find themselves faced by a more ruthless destroyer of their culture as the tourists pour in.
In the past half-century, the anti-clericalism of Mexican revolutionary governments, plus in this case geographical isolation, has favoured the re-emergence of the Indian personality, and even in the end the unconcealed practice of the ancestral religion. In some churches the Catholic priest has been replaced by the Indian shaman. This return to the ancestral customs and beliefs has sometimes gone along with a rejection of valuable and positive aspects of the dominant civilization. Peasants have preferred to bundle all their goods on their backs to bring them to market rather than use a wheeled vehicle, and in Amatenango, a village devoted to the making of pottery near San Cristobal, a well-meaning attempt by an American woman to convert the villagers to the use of the potter’s wheel led to her murder.
The violence of our times has spread in all directions down the Mexican roads. San Cristobal has been transformed in a single decade from a town of extraordinary tranquillity into one in which it is no longer safe to walk in the streets after dark. Both Indians and whites have been frequently attacked and occasionally murdered, and women of both races have been raped. The tribal elders watch what seems to them the decay of the Western world and struggle to prevent the spread of its contagion into the Indian areas.
Indians feel themselves more threatened by metaphysical than physical violence. In the recent past they have been largely left to live their lives in peace in their own way, but the mountain villages are now under assault by groups of tourists who offend by their permissiveness, often behaving insultingly—sometimes, as the Indians see it, in a sacrilegious manner, when they force their way into their shrines and sacred places. These invasions provoke violent reactions. Tourists have been frequently attacked in villages such as Chamula, which attracts great crowds of foreigners on feast days and is now patrolled by cudgel-armed vigilantes determined to keep the invaders in their place.
I drove up to Chamula with an Indian friend without whose help it would have been impossible to break out of the quarantine imposed upon visitors from the outside world. It was a Sunday morning, and the wooden shacks round the fine colonial church—now taken over for the performance of Indian ceremonies—were afloat in a freezing mist. A coachload of tourists from a local agency had already arrived, and they were fiddling uneasily with their cameras which could only be used surreptitiously, and with some risk to themselves under the mistrustful eyes of the Indians with their staves. In the last week a stern notice had been put up, and an English translation supplied:
ALL VISITORS. IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO TAKE ANY PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS MUNICIPIO AND OF THESE FESTIVITIES CARNIVAL SO THAT OUR CUSTOMS AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS WILL BE RESPECTED.
SINCERELY
NOTE. INFRINGEMENT WILL BE SEVERELY PUNISHED.
The Chamulas set out to show that they meant what they said. A set-pattern exchange of compliments and courtesies had to be gone through with half a dozen dignitaries of varying ranks, and bitter coffee drunk with the Alcalde, dressed like a minor Spanish nobleman of the sixteenth century, before we could be given the freedom of the village!
Even then two mayores carrying cudgels slung like rifles from their shoulders were assigned to keep an eye on us. Their first act was to conduct us to the lock-up where two prisoners were held under austere conditions, to make it clear what happened in Chamula to people who broke the rules. We were told that these two men were being held, until they showed sincere repentance, ‘for failing to comply with their civic duties’. The climate of the mountain villages is authoritarian, with a reverence for hard work, and tasks for all, men, women and children alike, are allotted according to age, sex, and ability. Idleness is more than frowned upon.
The visit to the church that followed was the most remarkable experience, in its way, of the whole Mexican journey. Many tourists had had their cameras smashed trying to photograph these scenes where Indians worshipped in the old style, crouched on the bare pavement among the twinkle of innumerable candles and the red and white blossoms spread to represent the souls of the living and the dead, the theatrical presence of the shamans escorted by their guitarists, the incantations, the frenzy of possession and the ritual drunkenness. Two rows of Christian saints, twenty or more of them, carved larger than life, blood-striped and formidable in their anguish and wrath, looked down on this scene. Hanging from their necks were the original mirrors given by the Conquistadors to the tribal ancestors in exchange for their gold, and they seemed to be held here like captives or hostages in this wholly non-Christian scene. Realizing that the memory could not cope with the bizarre richness of the surroundings, I took out a notebook, but one of our guardians, ever watchful, signed to me to put it away. Even note-taking was prohibited in this Mayan holy of holies.
Indians have been attracted to settle in the Chamula region for two reasons, the first a spiritual, and the second a highly practical one. A few miles away, behind Tzinakantán, rises up the highest peak in the State of Chiapas, and this is regarded as a rich repository of animal souls, the Naguals, with which the Mayas of this area link their own. Anthropologists are in dispute about the precise nature of this empathy, or soul-making, and my Chamula friend was bewildered at what he saw as the imaginative poverty of Western intellectuals who were unable to grasp the basic simplicities of Indian metaphysical thought. He explained that most of his people, although not all, developed a mystic affinity with one or several animals of the ‘noble’ kind, for example, the jaguar and the deer, and that the human benefited from the instincts and the sensitivities of the animal, although since his well-being ran a parallel course with that of his Nagual, he was bound to suffer from its death.
The village of Tzinakantán being in such close proximity to the magic mountain, it followed that this was the best possible place for an Indian to spend all the time in he could. When we drove over from Chamula we found about a thousand of them, dressed in all their finery, clustered on the terraces in its centre to discuss their problems, or getting drunk in the well-conducted, ritual fashion that fosters visions and dreams. The practical attraction of the region lies in deposits of fine clay used in the making of pottery. A number of villages have exploited this since the remotest times, and in pre-Hispanic days their production was exported to all parts of the Mayan empire. Most celebrated of the potters’ villages is Amatenango, where the potter’s wheel was once rejected in so emphatic a fashion.
Amatenango’s tragedy is also the vicinity of the Pan-American Highway, passing within half a mile of the low hill on which it is built. The life of this village as described by a traveller in the 1950s followed archaic ceremonial patterns, most of which have been brusquely swept away. It was the habit—still observed in other less accessible villages—for the male head of the household to rise in the small hours to perform the principal act of creation, that of lighting the fire, after which the family gathered for a three-hour exchange of ideas and discussion of moral problems before the day’s work began. Thereafter the men occupied themselves with such manual tasks as digging and preparing the clay, while creative activity passed into the hands of the women, who fashioned the pots, shaping them with their hands, smoothing surfaces with the instruments employed by their ancestors for at least 1,000 years, and painting them with traditional abstract designs. At this point the men would be called in to make fire again, and the pots would be baked—as now—in bonfires of brushwood lit in the village streets.
Every stage in the pot’s preparation required its small ceremonial act, its mumbled invocation, or its libation, and when finished it was regarded with pride, and with respect for the impulse of creation translated to the clay. A potter would be happy, as she might in the case of the surplus puppy, to find it a good home. The medieval craftsman’s desire to impose his personality upon his production survived, as it still does in the remoter textile village of Bochil, where an order for a large number of the exquisite embroidered blouses which are its speciality was recently turned down because the buyer insisted on absolute uniformity, whereas by tradition no two garments could ever be exactly the same.
Amatenango was the last of the villages we visited, and it was immediately clear that something was wrong. It is a picturesque place with well-made wooden huts screened by high cane fences. The women’s blouses, brilliantly embroidered in reds and yellows in imitation of tropical birds, remain as yet unchanged—although they are certain to go—and the spectacle of these magnificent creatures at work firing their pots in the street bonfires is irresistible to the camera of any tourist. The village has indeed been featured in the promotional literature of several tour operators, bringing in the main visitors from Japan and from France. At the moment of our arrival a Club Mediterranée group was just about to leave and was being besieged by a horde of the only ill-mannered Indian children I have ever encountered, selling ugly pottery toys, demanding to be photographed for payment, and when refused shouting insults in broken French.
My Chamula friend led the way to the house of a potter he knew, where the feeling of disharmony became stronger. There were no words in the Tzotzil language spoken in the villages for the processes of trade, for stock, profits, discounts, competition, turnover, etc., so the villagers who find themselves drawn into commerce are obliged to turn to Spanish, and these people were speaking Spanish most of the time.
The complex protocol of village life had been largely abolished. On the occasion of this visit we should have been courteously seated, but thereafter kept waiting in near silence outside the house while the Lares and the Penates of the home accustomed themselves to our presence before being invited to enter. But what was the point of such a procedure when almost daily groups of excited tourists would arrive to stand and stare, to point their cameras, and even to push their way into the houses without further ceremony?
People had too much time on their hands, too, and almost certainly too much money. Men were mooching about the streets, hands in pockets, dazed with their indigestible leisure. There was a village shop with canned beer on sale, and where the rude little girls, whose mothers could now afford to dress them in drab factory-made dresses, bought ice-cream with the money extorted from tourists.
The woman of the house explained that it used to take her family four days of common endeavour to make a pot of the largest size, for which she was paid about £3, but that by arrangement with the couriers who brought the parties of tourists she now charged the equivalent of £2 to allow herself to be photographed making a pot. The suspicion grew that the pots were no longer made for sale. It was a suspicion strengthened by the plastic buckets stocked by the village store and a depressing feature of local markets.
What the village still makes and sells is pottery toys, although these are no longer of the artistic calibre of those once made here and offered in fairs all over South Mexico. In the old days they were models of jungle animals, of alligators, armadillos, anteaters and the great cats, and the Indians’ insight, their special comprehension of the animal world, had enabled them, sometimes in the very grotesqueness of these objects, to capture something of the quintessential quality of their living models.
These works of art have now vanished, and are to be found only in collections or museums. The new kind of buyers brought here in the air-conditioned coaches remained unimpressed by Indian art, although they were on the lookout for colourful souvenirs of their travels. The weavers of Bochil refused to admit Donald Duck into their traditional designs, but the potters of Amatenango surrendered. One of the tourist couriers gave them a sample of the cuddlesome toy he believed no tourist could resist, and he was right—Amatenango now turns out large numbers of Disney-style pottery kangaroos, and, sad to say, so far has taste been corrupted that Indians even buy these for their own children.
Now is the time to see South Mexico. Nothing can dim the glory of the great pre-Hispanic ruins and the great colonial towns, but outside that, in ten years it will be all Amatenango.
1980