With Young Men of Highland Chiapas: a view from the place of immigration origin
To tag along to their game at a basketball tournament in another nearby Maya
town I have to pay the taxi fare. Edgar drives it. He’s one of the super-abundance
of low paid taxi drivers in the town near his parents’ milpa. There on any noon
two rows of taxis line the entire town square and nobody wants to go to San
Cristobal. As we drive I ask them about heading for El Norte.
Edgar: I cleaned office buildings in D.F. [Mexico City]. Hard work, all night, and
you can’t save any money. Sure, I’d like to go to the US. But my parents say it’s
bad there.
Cristóbal: Some come back and buy a car to drive as a taxi or they build a cement
house, but some come back dead or we never hear from them again.
A year later I return to Chiapas and find that Edgar has gone. But 10 days and
still no word from him. His mother cries as she tells me. Towards the middle of
my six weeks stay Cristobal too has gone, but has returned, caught by the Migra
in Arizona. He talks of the phantasmagoric experience of walking the night desert:
“This guy is suddenly walking alongside…asks me where I’m going. The coyote
yells “Everyone run!” Lights go on and we are surrounded by Migra. But”, he
assures me, “I didn’t cry” Which tells me that he probably did, as he does now.
Meanwhile Edgar calls home. He’s with his uncle in Vermont harvesting potatoes.
Six months later I’m back again. I look for Cristobal, but only his young wife,
Guadalupe, and their child are at the house on his parents’ land. She has a
bruised cheek and she says he’s left to work in Cancun as a bricklayers assistant
to pay off his debt to the coyote. Others tell me he has been drinking a lot and
coming home angry and hitting her. If she hears him come yelling she runs with
the child up above to the house of her mother-in-law and father-In-law.
Another eight months. It’s the end of January and cold at night in the Highlands.
There’s no heat in the posada in the Cabecera (the small town which is the civil
and religious center of the of the municipio or township where I stay.) My
friends spread out in the countryside have their cooking fires in the separate kitchen
and a blanket in bed at night in the unheated, dirt floor, one room house where
they sleep. The wood slats that had to be nailed up uncured have dried and left half-inch cracks in between some of the wall boards.
Cristóbal is still in Cancun. Guadalupe is living at her parents home an hour
away over mostly mud ruts. Edgar’s wife, alone, is in their cabin near his parents house.
She seems kind of distracted and detached and the dirt floor is littered with the kids' mess, but I've rented a car for the day to take photos and she is eager to help me. She rides with me and we stop along the way to take photos of newer hoses financed by remittances of those who have gone north. at one point I document where the road is washed out and we have to go around it. We wind up at Polhó the Zapatista autonomous town.
Word from Edgar is that he now works as a busboy at a Chinese restaurant in
Atlanta. He left Vermont after he heard that immigration arrested a man from
Chiapas who was a leader trying to organize the migrant work force. They immediately
shipped him off to a detention center in New York, far from those who
would try to get him legal help.
As I prepare to leave I see Cristobal briefly, back from Cancun. He speaks resentfully about his suffering and seems hostile to me. Because of my unearned privileges, I imagine.
Guadalupe keeps in the background, says nothing to inflame him. She is pregnant.
Back in the US I learn that Edgar has moved to work at another Chinese restaurant
in a city only an 8 Hour drive from me. I decide to go interview him, and
I call him and arrange it. I meet him outside where he lives with some other
restaurant workers. He doesn’t want me to come in. We drive to my motel and
I set up the video to interview him under another name, but he doesn’t want
to be shown. I arrange him in a back turned silhouette and we begin, but he
doesn’t really want to talk about his experience working in the US and the kind
of treatment he has received. I continue through some empty talk, knowing my
none of this will be useful for my documentary on immigration. Maybe I wouldn't want to reveal much in his situation.
We get take out food and he cons me into taking him to Walmart to buy him
some weights he wants to build up his body. He plans to go home soon and to
find a wife. He knows he doesn’t look like the guys that come back buff after
doing heavy farm work or construction.
There’s more, of course, to their stories, but this is enough to show you their
experience with El Norte. These are young men have no place to go. A kind
of lost generation, unskilled and more attracted to the glamorous lifestyles on
telenovela’s than the hard life of the subsistence milpa or Zapatista autonomy and cooperatives. They are landless. The population of young men and woman is growing and no land is available. Mexican has withdrawn support for the small farmers, anxious to comply with the "Washington Consensus" and complete the NAFTA agreement with the U.S.A. and Canada. The seasonal jobs they once took to support their families by wage work at large fincas in the low lands are gone too as subsidized U.S. farm exports enter with no tariffs. Many young men feel disrespected and resentful. In this they are like the some of the jobless in the countrysides of the U.S., brothers if they only understood this.
Back in Chiapas I get to know Armando, who has gone in a different direction. I
missed him on my earliest trips because he was in one of the tourist resorts, working
as a bricklayer’s assistant. Even those without English language skills can work
in some to the spin-off jobs created by tourism. During that time he admits he drank
a lot and didn’t send money to support his wife and two children. Now he is trying
to make it up to them, living a close to traditional life, raising enough corn on his parents' land to last the year, if it is a good year. “My uncle, a catechist, told me that I needed to change, and I have tried. Now they have made me a catechist to work with the children. But
I realize I can’t teach them unless I change myself. You can’t teach the Word of God
unless you live it.”
A catechist is a lay assistant in the Catholic Church. The Church here has been profoundly
modified by the former Archbishop Samuel Ruiz, whose autobiography is
the wonderfully entitled “How the Indians Converted Me.” He encouraged the social
gospel and the preferential treatment of the poor that came out of the Medellin bishop’s
conference in 1968. When he made his rounds of the communities he stayed in
the dirt floor houses of the people rather than in the rectories of the parishes.
My own children have felt the effects of a time when greed and exploitation are celebrated.
In this context, what can be done to limit the damage that a savage economic
system is inflicting on these much poorer young men? Hopefully they can unite and
become stronger. Here at least they have a community with which they still share some values and vision. Some, like the women, have found ways to make things with their hands to sell. And hopefully the cooperative autonomy nurtured by the Zapatista
movement will spread. A few find educational mentors and are able to get aid and complete prep school or even college and find jobs, but away from their culture. And some use their education to help preserve the positive values they find in their Maya community.
The story of the young Maya women is different but equally hard. Some of it is revealed
in Maya Faces in a Smoking Mirror, a documentary produced by myself
and the anthropologist Christine Eber. This film explores the stories of a number of
young Maya women and men responding to their Maya identity in different ways.
Christine’s novel, When a Woman Rises, masterfully explores in depth the women’s
stories in a near past context.
Everything related in this narrative happened to someone I know from the Highlands of Chiapas. I have melded together stories from several persons to construct“typical” stories and to protect identities.