I Felt Like a Gringo
by ST Brophy

Preface: A few years ago, while working as an underpaid, unappreciated office boy for a pseudo-hippie adventure travel company, I was rewarded with the only perk or benefit my decidedly cheapskate overlords were wont to offer, and begrudgingly at that. A bus trip originating in Merida, in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, and wending its way Pacificward and eventually home to San Francisco, was going out less than 1/4 full, and if we so desired, my roommate/office manager, Brenda, and myself could weasel our way aboard without dropping dime one (including, ultimately, the nominal food fund to which we were expected to contribute). Some of the most memorable and exciting moments of the trip occurred during the nearly five journeying days it took to reach the bus and join the tour in Merida, including a memorable-if medicated--44 hours on the segunda close train from Mexicali to Guadalajara. But this story isn't about that.

Flashforward a week and then some into our below-the-border sojourn, through the Yucatan, away from the Caribbean, beyond the exhumed remains of Uxmal and Chichen Itza, and deep into the old-growth rain forests of exotic, mysterious Chiapas (and how's that for some low-rent, bottom-feeding, pulp-n-gristle travel writing; did I get enough turgid adjectives and magazine-ad drama in there for ya? No? Well, then, read on).

The majestic ruins of Palenque rise from the midst of the Chiapan jungle in Mexico's southern most state, a recovered jewel in the crown of the once great Mayan civilization. The great city endured for a number of centuries (and unfortunately, my fact checkers haven't been able to tell me just what that number is), and was at its height of prosperity and power during the reign of Lord Pacal, whose impressive subterranean tomb is one of the highlights of any visit. With Brenda as my guide, I learned a great deal about the Mayan people and their way of life (most of which I've since forgotten, but, hey, a lot's happened since then, y'know?). Suffice to say, they were an extraordinarily sophisticated people, with a complex social system, elaborate rituals, and one of the earliest, most accurate calendars known to history. Evidence even exists to suggest that the Mayans at Palenque and other sites performed successful brain surgery, and the recipients of this pre-modern medical attention lived many presumably fruitful decades consequential to the procedure. Only arrogance and era-centric thinking could relegate these incredibly advanced peoples to the primitive category to which certain schools of historic thought have attempted to consign them.


st in chiapas art by luis garcia

I staggered through Palenque in awe, trying to will myself back in time, trying to imagine what it must have been like before ... well, before us. The hordes, the busloads, the wan and the weak-kneed. With the probable exception of the mostly pasty-fleshed suburban-bred blinder-clad world-travelers that daily wander its mazelike paths and meandering trails and climb the ziggurat steps of its pyramidal structures, it looks, I imagine, much as it did when the earliest turistas came tramping through to trash the place. A little less overgrown maybe. The first known generation of white-trash-with-an-attitude to encounter these crumbling edifi were those bastard Spaniards. And even if they hadn't left copious records and an impressive swath of near-genocide in their wake, we'd have ample proof that they'd been there. The Conquistadores, in their hubris, tagged the inner walls of the ancient city, her temples and palaces, scrawling their name, rank, and date of visitation, mostly around the late eighteenth century. I say they scrawled, but actually, this Age of Reason graffiti was rendered in flowing cursive, one careful handwriting sample barely distinguishable from the one above or below, like maybe only one guy in the whole unit knew how to write, and all his compadres paid him to ink them into indelible history. And history it is. History layered upon history, For some reason, while I found myself greatly perturbed and disgusted by any example, carved or markered, of such vandalism obviously added within my own century, I was far less bothered by the Spanish signatures; though no less a violation in their own day, these were now part of my history. Another layer, as, I'm sure, the more recent tags, the Janie Was Here's and the Jim Loves Belinda's and the This Place Sucks, will be to some future generation (however few they might be) and no less telling in regards to our cultural moment.

Profound as my experiences at Palenque may (or may not) have been, I don't think I truly appreciated its impact upon my consciousness until a week or so later, when I had the dream ... the Dream ... far more vivid than the churn and thrum of my real-life hangover-opaque memories of those scant few hours spent amidst its splendor, wretched refuse of an all-night Hornitos round-the-bender with some fellow travelers on the bus. The Dream, which told the true story of my experience in that very old place, the oldest piece of conquered sod these feet have yet to trod...

I am walking along the northern side of the zocalo, or agora, or whatever the Mayans called it, late afternoon, past siesta time, and the bustling marketplace teems with local merchants hawking their trinkets and wares to tourists from every comer of this massive bastard planet. The time-worn facades of the centuries-old buildings are appropriately painted in faded, peeling red, as archaeologists speculate they were in the city's hey-day, around 650 AD or thereabouts (this information passed on to me by my roommate and travelling companion, something of an amateur authority on ancient civilizations). Wooden awnings have been erected alongside the buildings here, creating a shaded kind of sidewalk effect as I pass under, sucking on a Negra Modelo. Soot-encrusted Fanta signs and yellowed Lucky Strike posters are affixed to the ruins here and there, not inconspicuous yet neither entirely incongruous. I am in Palenque, and the Mayans never left.

These are not the gypsy peddlers who show up everyday at the excavated attraction to hustle a few pesetas and slink back into the jungle. These people live here, don't ask me how, it's a dream, I just know this, the direct descendants of Pacal and his followers, coexisting in twisted symbiosis with the late twentieth century world, their way of life compromised, not exactly thriving, but very much alive. The commercial trappings of a modern civilized society fit this place like a Mr. Bubble t-shirt and a Nike gimme cap on a defrosted Cro-Magnon. But at least we haven't completely destroyed them, in the genocidal sense. Not here. Not in the Dream...

Still, the city seems to exist in a kind of nethertime, shimmering strata of mineralized history, time dug up and turned like earth, mixed and sifted, the layers all shaken together ... Conquistadores in their dandy pantaloons and armored garb rove the streets like rogue cops on the beat ... Japanese tourists experience their visit through the remove of a camcorder lens, obsessively recording every detail, however fantastic or banal, for later perusal ... Americans and Europeans of every flagstripe shoulder their way through the milling crowd with the arrogance of ownership that can only come from conquest ... some kind of manifest consumer destiny ... yes, we have tainted and polluted this, but here it is, and here they are, the Mayans, in their beautiful city, a testament to indomitable history, a mystery subsumed and transformed in order to render it palatable, familiar. Lived in, in the way that we understand living...



The village of Chamula is an idyllic slice of indigene life located in the hills outside of San Cristobal de Las Casas, which is either the capital or the most populous city, or both, in the state of Chiapas (again, my fact checkers have exemplified their tragic shortcomings in regards to this crucial data, and I've got a deadline). At least according to the guidebooks, and they are correct in regards to its location, if little else. San Cristobal, for those who don't know, was the seat of resistance during the Zapatista uprising for self-determination in 1993, and during my visit, their presence was still heavily felt, and I must admit it was infinitely more comforting than the various military types encountered in other times and places throughout the trip (like the members of the Mexican navy who beset Stuart, the most fishbelly white member of our entire entourage, at the place we called Toxic Beach, because they suspected him of smuggling Guatemalans into the country, near as poor Stu could figure, but that's another story, and not really mine to tell. Sorry.). In the near mystical bliss and white heat shimmer of San Cristobal, I celebrated my 29th birthday, serenaded with a tenuous, if heartfelt, rendition of "Happy Birthday" by a local bar band who spoke no English except for what few Pink Floyd lyrics they had managed to phonetically deduce from many listenings. I tell you this only to establish the sense of culture clash I was experiencing before I stumbled dumbly upon the wonders of Chamula. As Minuteman D. Boon once sang, "Yeah, I felt like a gringo..."

Our visit to the region happened to coincide with a sacred Mayan festival ritualized in three or so days of religious ceremony and all-hours alcohol-induced carousing. And of course, what ancient, tribal, mystic festivity would be complete without hundreds of tourists being shuttled endlessly into its midst. Gringo-Saxons arriving by bus, taxi, and of course, the familiar and more traditional horseback. As I and my travelling companion made our anthropological pilgrimage to this wonderful little preserve of native culture and history, I eyed the ghetto of tarpaper, cardboard, and tin through which we passed, poverty of which I had not seen the like since ... well, Mexico City. I thought it was bad, my middle-class whiteboy heart went out, to them all. But I hadn't seen nothin' yet. Even before our shuttle stopped to unload us, I saw the signs, red and white and looming, bright and brand new. The ubiquitous logo, with its most recent slogan, less a promise than a threat, rendered in the national tongue: Siempre Coca Cola Siempre. A1ways. On every third building, wherever there wasn't a political logo from the PRI or PRD or whoever held the reins the day we were in town. An entire village apparently wholly subsidized, if not outright owned and operated, by the sugar-spittle soft drink that made the American Dental Association the industry it is today. Sure, the village was cleaner than most in the surrounding region, with fresh coats of white paint to help the bright crimson logos stand out more vividly, and the villagers themselves were perhaps enjoying some slight improvement in their economic quality of life under these corporate auspices. But for how long, and at what cost? You know the Cokeheads must have some say in local government. Already, I was feeling vaguely ill-at-ease, out-of-sorts, just about ready to flee. But no, I had to see this through...

A handful of pesos insure a guided tour of the town church, the ostensible center of this quasi-religious street fair. If I felt like an interloper in the village square, I am a full-on intruder here, stomping on the ritualized mishmash of their Mayo-Catholic ceremonies, which incorporate Coke, Sprite and Fanta bottles alongside the candles and incense and straw. And as we wander through like velvet-rope gawkers on a White House tour, the women kneel and chant and pray and sob and prostate themselves before God or whatever, and the men on their three-day drunks sleep it off underneath the altars to various mannequin saints, and the children approach us with the gleeful greed of retail sales clerks or free-market parking lot capitalists at a Phish concert, doing what they can to separate us from our devalued currency. And who can blame them? What's a few pesos to assuage my late-generation Caucasian guilt? Just give me a little billboard space in your backyard, kid, and we can have what you might call a "mutually beneficial relationship." Right? A little economic condescension to the "little brown ones" (George Bush's words, remember, referring to his Latino grandbabies) makes everything all right ... Right?

Staggering back into the sunlight, flipping down my clip-on shades to further polarize my worldview, I have a minor revelation, a mini-epiphany, right there in the market square ... this is my dream ... here are the Mayans, still living, filling the zocalo, peddling their Zapatista dolls, their batik fabrics, their amber jewelry, their dresses and handbags and belts and hats...here we are, the flagrant turistas, with our cameras and our sunburns and our bottled water... the Mexican soldiers and police, the current generation of the Conquistador lineage... here is the Coke and the Fanta and the Marlboro and the Bud Light ... Here is my dream made real and I am sick with it ... or maybe it's just last night's tequila...



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