Bubba
Apr 2, 2007, 1:35 PM
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It was Palm Sunday and my wife´s Tzotzil teacher in San Cristóbal offered to take her and several others, young students and associates, to the place in the mountains where he was born and raised and, of course, transportation was a Volkswagen Beetle with five people stuffed inside negotiating twisting mountain roads through Zapatista country but, what the hell, you only pass this way once and it was Palm Sunday - a festive time -so there was no way she was going to miss that.
Ybeljój is not really a pueblo but a place along the way on the road between Chenalhó and Pantelhó Municipalities about (I´m guessing here) 60 kilometers from San Cristóbal and the reader will not find it unless taken there by someone knowledgable about the area. It probably would not be a place to go on one´s own anyway as the welcome mat would be tentative at best if one were not accompanied by a local. Ybeljój is reached not by road but by ascending an unmarked primitive path straight up a mountainside after first traversing a gravel road. This is not an easy climb and is difficult enough during the (more or less) dry season but, with much agonizing effort, the visitors made it to the teacher´s family home somewhat embarrassed by the ease with which locals were negotiating the climb.
The home could best be described as a rustic cabin set off by itself on a path which continued on to a village farther up the mountain. There was no electricity and water was supplied by a communal pipe which seemed to come from the area of the unseen mountain village. Furnishings were minimal and, as is the custom in those parts, beds are wooden planks on the floor while food is stored on wall hooks. The family cabin is located at about 1,300 meters in an area of thick and beautiful hardwood forest under much of the canopy of which is grown coffee. The cabin is constructed of planks that have spaces between them for ventilation and cooking is done inside over an open fire in the center of the one room home with the smoke escaping through the sides of the house as there is no opčning in the roof. In the area around the house, the family grows shade coffee, corn, bananas, citrus fruits, nisperos (loquats), lemon grass, epazote, mint and other herbs, fruits and vegetables for their normal everyday use. They also raise chickens and pigs and make their own clothes. The key to day-to-day survival in this remote, roadless area is to provide for oneself as trips to the market, especially during the heavy rainy season, are a major undertaking.
My wife´s teacher´s mother prepared thick tortillas from yellow corn meal harvested from their fields and, after eating primarily the bland tortillas prepared commercially in town, my wife reports that these tortillas, which were served simply with ground red pepper and hard boiled eggs, were delicious and a reminder of how good a tortilla can be when prepared properly from scratch. The tortillas were served with café de olla made with coffee grown on the property, roasted and boiled with a small amount of pilloncillo and she reports that the coffee was exceptionally aromatic and flavorful. They enjoyed these treats while sitting outside the cabin enjoying the spectacular mountain view as intermittent rain squalls and fog passed in succession alternating with bright sunshine. All in all, a magnificent experience according to my wife. One, unfortunately, I would have missed even had I been in San Cristóbal since there was no way I would have fit in the Volkswagen much less made it up that mountain path with my pathological fear of heights.
Later, she tells me, they drove into Pantelhó which is known for its excellent organically grown shade coffee and organic honey. Most of these products are grown there for export but she was able to score a liter of the honey, some green coffee beans and some boiled peanuts for her husband to be enjoyed upon his return from Ajijic. The coffee and honey are produced and sold by the Junax Contantic Coffee Company in Pantelhó which is a joint effort of the Tzotzil and Tzeltal people. The coffee is mainly exported to Europe but some is sold locally.
The group had lunch of chicken leg mole in Pantelhó served by a surly indigenous waitress who, when one Mexican member of the group, a kaxlan* from Veracruz, demanded white meat instead of a drumstick and non-contaminated ice for his lukewarm Coke, offered him a neck and one (probably contaminated) ice cube for his trouble. Local humor.
Lunch was followed with drinks of posh (distilled sugar cane spirits) offered communally by locals outside the Pantelhó church where they were celebrating Palm Sunday by getting looped. My kind of religion.
It´s interesting that we are always reading of the large number of indigenous people who live in Chiapas with no road access or infrastructural improvements of any kind provided locally by the state or federal government and Ybeljój is certainly one of those places. For better or worse, people simply take care of themselves and it is clearly a hard life but admirably self-sufficient.
Reminds me of that old Hank Williams, Jr. song, A Country Boy Can Survive:
I can plow a field all day long,
I can catch catfish from dusk ´till dawn,
We can make our own whiskey and our own smoke too, Ain´t many things we can´t do,
We can skin a buck and run a crop line,
Country folks can survive.
You tell ém Hank.
*"Kaxlan" (kashlan) is Tzotzil for any non-indigenous "outsider", Mexican or otherwise, or their version of "gringo". Indigenous people from elsewhere in Mexico or Guatemala are not considered to be among the "kaxlan". The word is not necessarily pejorative in nature but I certainly wouldn´t think of it as complimentary.
(This post was edited by Bubba on Apr 2, 2007, 2:20 PM)
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