Post by Jorge Gaupp
This travel diary is organized in two parts, of which the first one is now published. Both the journey and the publication are part of the action-research we are developing in the European project ReDes_Ling, Resisting Linguistic Inequality (Staff Exchanges ref. 1011131469). In this research we study linguistic inequality and seek to reverse it. We highlight various forms of inequality, based on certain premises:
– The asymmetrical relationship between linguistic groups translates into social differences, economic disadvantages, unequal access to rights, lack of material and emotional well-being, or inability to develop one’s own potential (Bonnin 2013).
– Linguistic discrimination is as pervasive as other forms of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sexuality or gender (Baugh 2003; Lippi-Green 1997; Urciuoli 1996).
To reverse the role of languages in these inequalities, we need to bridge the gap between academic research and society’s perception of language, with exchanges between interdisciplinary teams of academics and organizations.
—
After the excellent welcome by Professor Maria Luisa de la Garza of CESMECA, the next thing that greeted me when I arrived to San Cristobal de las Casas was extractivism, in its material aspect. It turns out that almost everyone who resides for any length of time in San Cristobal, especially in certain seasons, picks up some kind of pathogen from the water, as it is heavily contaminated. I was no exception. This is especially so since the Coca-Cola factory was established, which took the best water. Water is now sold in jugs on the street: that’s the first thing I heard in the morning when I woke up: the house-to-house salesman selling bottled water.
During the first few weeks I was able to visit the Intercultural University of Chiapas (UNICH), which seeks to respect and welcome the indigenous peoples, who make up about 34% of the population of San Cristobal and 26% of the population of Chiapas. Incidentally, the Mexican government defines the indigenous population by “speaking at least one indigenous language”, so sociolinguistics is already at the center beforehand in this context. In the talk I went to see at UNICH, I was struck by the moment when the speaker, a Chilean academic, made a call for participation shortly after she began to speak, producing many more interventions from the audience than she expected.
Image 1. Speaker with portrait of Zapata. UNICH, San Cristóbal de las Casas.
Later, listening to several academics about their research projects at CESMECA, this culture of participation and de-hierarchization between the figure of the researcher and his/her interlocutors resonated with me, since most of the research projects, in different disciplines, were carried out with the full participation of the researched communities in the final result. They followed, precisely, methodologies that UNICH had also exposed and defended. My feeling is that the Spanish university still maintains a great separation and hierarchy between research subject and object, compared to what I saw in Chiapas. The possibility of access, even slight, by the native peoples of the area to higher education, together with the visibility they have fought for and achieved (especially since the 1996 National Indigenous Congress) probably had a lot to do with it.
Image 2. Delmy Cruz, speaker at CESMECA, San Cris.
Festivities of the Guadalupe neighborhood were also taking place, so from the house you could not only hear the water vendor, but also the processions coming from other towns on foot, in trucks, on motorcycles…. The religiosity here is great, but at the same time it is very syncretic, incorporating indigenous traditions (such as the pilgrimage itself to a place that was already sacred to them before) or the music inside the church, where there is, by the way, a black Christ (also in Spain there are figures of black virgins, in that case it is presumed that they come from previous cults to Isis).
Image 3. Temple of Our Lady of Guadalupe, San Cris.
In the stands of the fair, you can see booths in which the target shooting does not give dolls, but the possibility of listening to the music and the lights of the gear that brings the wall. Weapons are also more impressive than in Spain.
Image 4. Shooting stand at the Guadalupe fair, San Cris.
Memory practices
But returning to religiosity, I was also able to attend several commemorations of indigenous victims murdered in the area by paramilitaries in collusion with the government. The most important one is the Acteal massacre of 1997, in which 45 Tsotsil indigenous people, including children and pregnant women, were murdered inside a church. It is important to point out that the murdered people were members of “Las Abejas”, a Christian pro-human rights group, opposed to any kind of violence and therefore formally separated from the EZLN, which had risen up a few years before. However, while clearly maintaining the non-violent approach, the two commemorative events I was able to attend emphasized many times similar approaches to those of the EZLN regarding who are the oppressed, the oppressors, the causes and the consequences… in fact, in one of the masses recorded at one of the documentaries, the priest ended with “God bless you and hasta la victoria“.
Image 5. Screening during the presentation of the book El camino de la no-violencia. Jtatik Samuel Museum, San Cris.
One of the events (the presentation of the book El camino de la no-violencia (2024), written collectively by the organization Las Abejas about this Acteal massacre) was in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the Jtatik Samuel Museum, a space dedicated to Samuel Ruiz, the bishop whom the indigenous people affectionately decided to call Jtatik (father in Tsotsil) and who they hold in high esteem (he is not the only one, homage was also paid to Father Marcelo Pérez Pérez, parish priest of the diocese of San Cristobal, an important mediator and great defender of human rights, so uncomfortable for some local powers that he was assassinated just a month before my arrival). Later, in the house where I lived, one of my companions, a man in his 70s who had been a foreman and friend of the finqueros (the landowners), told me that he was the figure they hated the most, because of how he defended the indigenous people who recovered their lands in the EZLN uprising of 1994. He spoke from the racist perspective of the landowners, for whom no indigenous person can be trusted, they only look out for their own interests and commit barbarities. As an example, he mentioned the demand of money from cars on the highways.
Image 6. Book signing by the authors of The Way of Nonviolence. Jtatik Samuel Museum, San Cris.
But the greatest barbarities I heard had been committed routinely by the foremen and farmers until the seizure of the land, for the indigenous people were considered less than human, and it was because of brutal punishments and humiliations that they began to escape from the farms and organize through (first) FLN and (later) EZLN, together with mestizo revolutionaries from other parts of Mexico. In fact, as I was able to verify by visiting several prisoners at the local jail, the police’s practice of imprisoning any number of indigenous people in order to be able to tell their superiors that they solved the case, usual in many indigenous areas, has not yet ended. In other words, members of indigenous peoples (remember: those whose first language is not Spanish) are still being treated by certain authorities as if they had no rights at all.
Image 7. Poster in the municipality of Acteal.
On the other hand, the ceremony in the town of Acteal, just as open to the public as the one at the Jtatik Samuel Museum but larger, was purely religious and included representatives of various indigenous communities, choirs and music bands, and stunning crosses, one for each person assassinated in the massacre, with their name and the age at which they died. These crosses, which made the presence of the dead in the environment inescapable (again the syncretism), were not so impressive for a little girl, daughter of one of the authors of the book El camino de la no-violencia, who walked over them calmly without anyone being in a hurry to push her away, in what seemed a metaphor of life making its way over death and the dead, but also somehow through them.
Image 8. Commemorative act of the Acteal massacre. Municipality of Acteal.
Las Abejas is not, however, the only organization dedicated to memory. I was also able to visit the headquarters of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (known as “el Frayba”), which combines the work of memory and archiving with documentation, denunciation and protection against the repressive actions that continue to occur. One of the strengths of the indigenous movements in Chiapas has been the international impact of what has happened and is happening there, both at the institutional and activist and cultural levels. In this sense, Frayba and other organizations recruit, for example, young people from other countries for international presence and documentation in places of repression, a presence of “white bodies” that often helps to inhibit the actions that the army, paramilitaries or organized crime want to carry out in the shadows.
Image 9. Engraving on the door of the Junax residence, created for volunteers working in human rights tasks in the area. San Cris.
Christmas Eve at CIDECI
On December 24 I had the privilege of being invited to spend the day at CIDECI-UniTierra with its students, all indigenous. CIDECI (I should perhaps write SIDESI, because that is how it is spoken), is the Centro de Innovación e Investigación de Desarrollo Educativo y Capacitación e Integración social, a beautiful vocational school with great facilities, located in a popular neighborhood of San Cristobal. It is made by and for the Zapatistas, and follows a pedagogy inspired by Ivan Illich, where the motivation is found in learning and ‘learning to do’ in order to be able to perform in a job, rather than the focusing on grades or a title proper to schooling education/mentality.
Image 10. Some buildings of CIDECI, San Cris.
The event began with a classic Catholic ceremony in Spanish (“castilla” as they say there) by a teacher without priest’s attire, a candlelight procession to the dining room, and a collective meal. Afterwards we danced cumbia in the assembly hall, where I appreciated some gender roles that reminded me a lot of those in the disco in my home town when I was a teenager: women dancing from very early on, and men who shyly encouraged to dance with them later on. Of course, here everything without a drop of alcohol. Apparently, the main pressure to prohibit alcohol in Zapatista territories came from women: because of gender violence and because of the waste of income that a drunken man could mean for the family.
It may come as a surprise that a Zapatista community performs classical Christian rituals, but it is not unreasonable to argue that the indigenism of this area has known how to use religion to its advantage, protected by the well-known flexibility of Catholicism throughout history. Many times, to end up dominating, as we never tire of repeating from the European perspective, without knowing so well the opposite history. As one of the comandantas would say a few days later: “The Europeans talk about the Conquest, but they did not conquer us because we are still here”.
Image 11. Poster at CIDECI, San Cris.
REFERENCES
Baschet, Jérôme. Adiós al capitalismo: Autonomía, sociedad del buen vivir y multiplicidad de mundos. NED, 2015.
Enlace Zapatista. https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/
Galeano, Subcomandante Insurgente. Habrá una vez. Sin pie de imprenta y sin fecha.
Graeber, David y Wengrow, David. El amanecer de todo: una nueva historia de la humanidad. Ariel, 2022.
Marcos, Subcomandante Insurgente. Relatos del Viejo Antonio. Virus, 2004.
Olivera Bustamante, Mercedes. Lecciones a las feministas de las mujeres zapatistas. Cooperativa Editorial Retos, 2023.
Scott, James C. El arte de no ser gobernados: una historia anarquista de las tierras altas del sudeste asiático. Katakrak, Traficantes de sueños, 2024.
–. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1985.
Vázquez, Guadalupe; Hernández, Mariana; Jiménez José Alfredo y Gómez, Juan. El camino de la no Violencia. Ed. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 2024.
Wójtowicz-Wcisło, Marta. “El derecho al aborto electivo en Chiapas, México”. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revista Europa de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, no. 110 (julio-diciembre 2020), pp. 39-58.
