Unleash shock waves of college kids on spring break, for a start ... for each squad of these to distract authority, there will sneak through the lines a stout girl in glasses, and sensible shoes
'indigenous socialism' - yes this is fair to say, to a point ... in Chiapas, attitude toward land tenure is most noticeable, also there is a strong ethic of sharing, it is not cool to feast while your neighbour starves, no matter that his own actions resulted in his starving .... if you land naked and hungry in the poorest of indian groups, you will be clothed and fed, protected from authority as well [this will be assumed as helpful, all the kids told to keep quiet on your presence]
There is that, sure, but there's a lot of natural Adam Smith capitalism at the same time ... people trade things quite actively, each campesino farms his 'own' land to which he has certain rights of use and disposal, he specialises to some degree, or will have better/worse luck with a certain crop in a given year .... there is barter, but more buying and selling, a very few pesos will fly back and forth between people with an amazing velocity, it would look impressive if you added it all up as 'income', but of course no one does ... prices can be quite subjective, a bag of beans could go for five pesos, or two, or one, depends on supply and demand, meaning in this case what coin the kid sent for the beans is holding in his hand .... a mother who sends too small a coin too many times will need a good reason [like poverty caused by catastrophe], or she will find the bag of beans getting very small .... or, a kid sent her way with one peso for an half-kilo of pork, or whatever she has .... it all gets squared up, people who take advantage suffer consequences, so that's capitalist, meantime the kids will get fed wherever they say they're hungry, so that's socialism i guess .... these terms come from industrialised societies though [and even here they're not black and white boxes - Is a law against insider trading 'socialist', or is it an improvement to capitalism?]
The zapatista rhetoric was a reaction to robbery, not to some abstract concept .... like many reactions, it went overboard [and was expressed in terms of outsiders - spanish is a foreign language still to many maya], but just look at the other side of the polarisation, the 'Paz y Justicia' faction .... all the ancient tensions came to a peak again when several things coincided, the erupcion of Chichonal volcano which caused displacement that had wide ripple effect, then pressure from the south as indigenous fled from the terrorism of the eighties, also in the petroleum boom many young mexicanos made money, wanted land, and the government sold them somebody else's land ..... NAFTA/TLC, along with talk of major highways splitting indigenous zones, were seen as attempt to wipe out the culture, rip off its resources ... looking at history here, you can see how people can get that impression, especially considering that people living in an isolated valley are as ignorant of outsiders as outsiders are of them .... anyway it wasn't about ideology, it was tangible stuff
Babalú - i don't know much about this, but tend to think the curses on whites would be only part of the past, i think the god has been sort of converted to San Lázaro, patron saint of lepers, with a generally positive message ... the catholic church tolerates a lot of incorporation of local deities, for instance in Chiapas at San Juan Chamula where there is a cult with a friendly civilised look to it [provided that you observe local prohibitions], but really wild belief structure and background ... theologies, ideologies - it's so hard to tell the difference |
