There’s a definite chill in the air up here in the highlands of Chiapas, the most southerly state in Mexico. The locals are dressed for winter and when evening falls we’re happy to layer up too, especially under the cloudy skies of our first evening’s wander.
The city of San Cristóbal de las Casas was founded by the Conquistador Diego de Mazareigos in 1528 at the third attempt, after the Spaniards had been twice foiled by the fierce local tribes. But it was Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican bishop and one of the first defenders of universal human rights, after whom the city was named twenty years later, and who succeeded in securing the city for the Dominicans over their rivals the Franciscans. Both orders had rushed to the area to evangelise the indigenous peoples, but Bartolomé’s respect for the native Americans meant he was successful in winning their trust.
We’re seeing the Dominican church he established in the north of the city tomorrow so instead head south from our hotel to check out the Iglesia de San Francisco and the next door Mercado de Dulces y Artesanías. The church is plainer than its predecessors in Oaxaca and Puebla, and its floors and ceilings are made of wood rather than stone, due to the fact that San Cristóbal is surrounded by forests. However there’s nothing plain about the market as it’s piled high with souvenir stalls and sweet shops.
Coman chooses a pastry with a thick custard filling but we both find the pastry tastes strange, almost cheesy, and can’t quite put our finger on why. It’s definitely quite unpleasant though. Leaving the Mercado we pass the Church of Santa Lucía and then walk back through the Zocalo to Andador de Guadalupe, the main pedestrianised street full of shops, restaurants, bars and tourists near our hotel.
One of the bars is a tapas place called El Vino de Bacco, offering a glass of wine for less than £1, with a free tapas dish to accompany it. The tables out front are packed but there’s a couple of stools free, so we sit down for a moment, and immediately get talking to the two girls next to us.
Helena and Carys are sisters from London who are backpacking through Mexico for five weeks, taking the opposite route to us by starting in the Yucatán peninsula and finishing in Mexico City. We swap tips and stories, in the fashion of travellers, and notice that they have not eaten the tapas dishes they’ve been served with their wine. Helena says it’s because they’ve been warned that food poisoning is very common amongst tourists in Chiapas, and San Cristóbal in particular, and it can really wipe people out for a week or more.
Apparently half the travellers in the hostel they recently stayed in were suffering really badly, so they’re taking no chances. I’m already starting to feel a little queasy from the custard pastry so we put down the tapas we’ve been served and just concentrate on the wine. The afternoon flows into the evening and after much convivial chat and an exchange of numbers we say goodbye to them both and go in search of somewhere a little safer to eat.
Further up, on Real de Guadalupe, we go for a straightforward veggie burger (no lettuce!) and pizza at Pachamama, whilst enduring some dreadful reggae busking from a dreadlocked dropout who obviously arrived in San Cristóbal a few months ago, discovered some extremely strong weed and never left. He plays electric guitar and scat sings nonsense like “Scooby Dooby Doo, Reggae reggae reggae, Ganja ganja ganja” while his stoned mate parps away tunelessly on a melódica.
It’s so bad it’s hilarious but we feel a little guilty at our sniggering when he comes over and starts chatting to us, and bless him, he’s a sweet, young Canadian student who’s been travelling for a year but has to return home next month so is trying to fund his final few weeks away.
The next morning, Aymeric, a Belgian ex-pat and sometime radio presenter, meets us at the hotel to take us on a tour of the city and a couple of neighbouring villages. We start at Mercado Jose Castillo Tillemans, which is just over the hill from the colonial district, but a world away from the bars and cafés that the tourists frequent. It was set up for the indigenous inhabitants of the area in the 1970s by the then mayor of San Cristóbal of the same name.
For centuries the city had been the preserve of Spaniards and mestizos (Mexicans of European / mixed heritage), but the mayor knew he had to make provision for the local peoples too and created this district. Aymeric advises us however that it’s now pretty much been abandoned by the authorities and is fairly lawless, so we should be very careful about taking photos as it can sometimes provoke trouble, and if someone takes a dislike to us, we’re pretty much on our own.
It’s full of stalls selling knock-off versions of designer clothes, plus fruit and vegetables piled high and a very vibrant and pungent meat market, with every element of pig, chicken, cow and seafood being hung, drawn and quartered as we pass. We’re definitely ‘extranjeros’ in this area and the people are far more akin to their Guatemalan relatives just a short distance away than the rest of the Mexicans we’ve met. However the women at the little food shacks all wave their menus in our direction and shout at us in competition for our custom.
Aymeric confirms what Helena and Carys told us yesterday that Montezuma’s revenge amongst travellers is indeed very common in the area, mainly because there’s specific bacteria in the water here that causes severe gastric problems, so advises us to only eat at very reputable places and above all, to avoid salad. He also tells us that pastry here is made with pork fat, which explains why we found the custard tart so weird and unpleasant yesterday.
The market stalls continue from the Mercado all along the streets to surround the grand Iglesia de Santo Domingo, with its decorative facade, and the plainer Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Caridad, a church provided for the indigenous peoples which celebrates mass in the local Tzotzil language once a week. The divisions between the Dominicans and the Franciscans are displayed to full effect on the front of the main cathedral in the Zocalo, diplomatically and neutrally dedicated to St Christopher, the city’s patron saint, and the protector of travellers.
On one side of the facade is a statue of St Dominic, denoting the north side of the city as Dominican territory and on the other side is St Francis, announcing the south as their territory. It’s like gang warfare in cassocks. Thank God (literally) the Jesuits never gained a foothold here. There’d have been public burnings on every corner.
The ideological struggles in San Cristóbal continue to the present day. In 1994 the Zapatista guerrilla movement took hold, trying to advance the aims of Emiliano Zapata who had been instrumental in the Mexican revolution in the early years of the 20th century, forcing the redistribution of wealth from European landowners to local people.
Chiapas had been the only state to resist the revolution and the hacienda owners had kept their grip over society, maintaining the exploitation of indigenous workers. Almost eighty years later, the indigenous people rose up as the Zapatistas to fight in San Cristóbal taking back their lands. But while the movement achieved many of its aims, the effects are still felt in the area with anarchic tendencies everywhere.
The most relevant for us is that the descendants of renegade Zapatistas still hideout in the nearby jungle and, as armed bandits, have been known to hold up and attack travellers on the road between San Cristóbal de las Casas and Palenque. This means our journey there in two days time can’t go by the most direct route, but has to make a massive detour through safer territory, almost doubling the length of the journey.
The anarchic spirit is not just confined to political rebels though as we discover on our visit to the neighbouring Tzotzil village of Chamula, which has one of the most weirdly unsettling atmospheres we’ve ever experienced. Aymeric has arranged for a driver, Carlos, to drive us into the mountains surrounding the city, past vast pine forests that thrive in this altitude, being 2500 metres above sea level, and we can instantly sense we’re entering a very different kind of place.
We park the car and walk to the main square, aware that eyes are upon us, and once again Aymeric warns us to be very discreet about taking photos, and says it is expressly forbidden to take any picture at all inside the church at the far end of the plaza. Like the market earlier, this is a place where authorities are not welcome and it operates by its own laws, with its own politics, and the square has various stalls selling food, with the inhabitants all bearing a marked racial similarity to each other, quite distinct to the other locals we have seen.
In fact we learn that on the very spot we’re standing just a few years ago, the locals shot their own mayor, known as the major-domo and responsible for providing the ritual fiestas for the the population, as they disagreed with some of his policies, such as trying to expand education for women and children. None of them have ever been charged for his murder.
As we walk to the church the bells start to chime midday, rung by three men standing on the roof above the church. The local people believe in the spiritual energy of time and place and worship the moment the sun is at its highest. There are also green crosses in various parts of the town, denoting different energy zones. The green cross is a sincretic mix of the Mayan tree of life and the Christian crucifix but inside the church this strange joining of beliefs is a scene unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Only the fee we’ve paid to enter allows us to safely witness what goes on inside.
While externally the building is a Catholic Church, Chamula violently broke with the establishment in the 1860s and returned to its Mayan beliefs by sacrificing a boy in the church. The font at the entrance is decorated with Mayan symbols and, as the church was once dedicated to St John the Baptist, the only time a priest is allowed in is to baptise a child. The locals have retained baptism as their sole link with Christianity, along with glass boxes housing multiple statues of saints, now worshipped as gods, and often berated if they do not answer prayers as requested. Pretty much all other religious iconography has been removed, and on the ceiling above the altar are representations of sacred snakes, jaguars and more, relating to pre-Hispanic beliefs, although paintings of Jesus and Mary have remained.
Huge drapes sweep down from the rafters creating a tented feel and it’s dark, smoky and oppressive. The floor is covered in pine needles amongst which groups of women and children sit chanting and lighting hundreds of candles, invoking rituals for healing, and drinking alcohol to purify themselves. Some women have live chickens strapped to their backs which will be sacrificed, and shamans often perform ceremonies within the building. Decaying flowers are everywhere and the weird and otherworldly sense of trespassing in an area where our presence is tolerated but not welcomed is overwhelming.
Photos taken from Google ImagesIn fact the whole town of Chamula feels very much like it could turn upon us at any moment. Aymeric says that today it is quite calm, and while I can very much sense a strange and dark energy directed at us as intruders, we are not directly threatened. However the sound of explosions behind us as we walk back to the car chimes with what Aymeric has said about demonstrations erupting at any moment with firecrackers being set off both in celebration, and often in anger.
Thankfully the next village of Zinacantan, just ten minutes away on the other side of the mountain, has a completely different feel, populated by a separate ethnic group, with a shared language. Instead of being a disturbing annoyance, we are welcomed into the house of a very friendly group of women who are weavers.
Maria shows us their altar, featuring the Virgin Mary clad in a robe that looks like bat wings (Zinacantan means bat in the local language) which is permanently lit in case their village’s major-domo visits. Her colleague demonstrates their technique of belt-weaving where instead of a loom all the threads are attached to the weaver’s belt, and Coman is encouraged to try on a multicoloured poncho.
We can’t actually purchase any of their goods as we have no room in our luggage, so happily just give them a donation for their time, at which point various home-brewed alcohol is produced for us to try and we are taken into a back room kitchen where an a third woman is making black tortillas over a smoky fire and we are given ones direct from the hot pan specially filled with beans and cheese.
Our final stop of the tour is the church of Zinacantan, which like its counterpart in Chamula, is sometime used for pre-Hispanic rituals but remains a consecrated Catholic church and is much brighter and lighter. Nevertheless, photos are still banned so we find a few on Google Images.
While we are looking around a family come into the back of the church and all kneel in the middle of the floor, starting to chant and pray in their own private ritual. We discreetly exit and pop into the smaller chapel next door dedicated to El Señor de Esquipulas, a saint from Guatemala. His statue used to reside in the main church but one day the villagers found it unexpectedly in the square outside so decided it was a miracle and he wanted his own chapel, which they built next door.
Apparently the chapel is used far more frequently for indigenous rituals than the main church and often the local major-domos gather together there for their own services, which involve eating feasts, getting drunk on local moonshine and passing out. There are even ashtrays on the shrines and weird, unsettling music playing by the altar.
The thought of food reminds us that it’s lunchtime and so Aymeric and Carlos drive us back to San Cristóbal in search of more vegan food and to collect our laundry. It will be a delight to have some clean clothes again!
