Bubba
Mar 26, 2007, 1:10 PM
Post #1 of 5
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My wife and I like this French creperie on San Cristóbal´s prominent commercial street Real de Guadalupe near the main plaza which is filled with all sorts of commercial establishments including many restaurants and tourist oriented businesses. The street is a magnet for tourists including many wide-eyed adolescent backpackers being cool and furtively getting stoned on dope and booze and seeing the world through sophomoric eyes as did Bubba in his salad days. Right in the middle of this commercial, tourist oriented hype is the Tierra Adentro Cultural Center and Cafe at #24 which is a cafe and artisan´s center run (ostensibly) by the Mujeres Por La Dignidad Zapatista Cooperative which, if you cut through the BS means "Strategic Location for Aiding Tourists Wishing to be Relieved of Excess Cash for the Zapatista Cause More or Less".
If you wish to be amused and take the time and trouble to read some of the blogs of the kiddie backpacker Zapatista cult followers relating their adventures in Chiapas from San Cristóbal to Oventik to Palenque, you can see some of this hilarious display of naivete about self-proclaimed leftist causes my father made fun of me for worshipping when I was a kid preaching mankind´s salvation. My leftist causes in the South Alabama of the 1960s and their causes in the Chiapas of today are both worthy of effort but I and they were and are so loudly and condescendingly self-righteous seeing life through the prism of tender youth that, in retrospect we now seem clownish. I´m surprised my ignorant old dad didn´t just shoot me on the spot.
Anyway, about 10:00PM and after dinner, my wife and a friend were exiting the creperie which is right across the street from theTierra Adentro and, as it turns out Subcomandante Marcos AKA Delegado Zero and his entourage were just exiting Tierra Adentro after a Zapatista meeting and what a show it was. Marcos and sycophants in full Zapatista regalia, Marcos´ sweet smelling pipe smoke (his trademark) filling the air as he entered the Real de Guadalupe from the meeting and, after sufficient preening about, he and his associates piling into shiny new white vans with EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) markings prominently displayed on their sides and driving off through Central San Cristóbal with worshipful backpackers and European tourists left swooning in their dust. Not a cop in sight (that was in uniform anyway). Fabulous street theater for the gullible and curious uncommitted onlookers alike.
When all those shiny new vans carrying the repressed leadership of the saviors of the Mayan people were gone in a cloud of dust, the eight year old Mayan urchins selling their chiclets in the plaza and the Mayan village women selling their Zapatista dolls and fabrics were all that was left to remind us that life goes on.
(This post was edited by Bubba on Mar 26, 2007, 2:09 PM)
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