This morning Rita and I took a combi out to Chamula, as planned. The main town of Chamula appears very prosperous, apparently because public funds are not getting out to the hamlets that compose most of the community’s population. The main square in the two was a marketplace, with lots of fresh foods as well as souvenirs. We walked around that some and then headed for the church.
Upon entering the church, we were both struck by the atmosphere. In part, it seems to be set up for tourists. There were literally thousands of the kinds of candles that come in what look like drinking glasses. They were all arranged neatly along the sides and back of the church and looked as if they had all been lit at the same time. We also noted the baptismal font, painted in bright colours to emphasize the carved plant deisgns.
But there is also plenty to the church that is not designed to look pretty for tourists, but to Maya taste. The floor was covered with long pine needles, and the walls hung with both green and dried plants. Large cloth banners also were fastened between the ridge of the ceiling and the side walls, with hanging arrangements of ribbons at the top where they join. Of course there were also bouquets of flowers all along the sides and back, where the saints images are kept behind glass. Neither Rita nor I knew why the saint statues have mirrors hung around their necks.
There were groups of Maya people praying. Each group had cleared the pine needles from a space on the floor and set up small, thin candles in neat rows, organized by colour. They had offerings of eggs (food) and drink for those supernaturals to which they preyed. The usual drink was posh (cane liquor) of course, but we did see an exception. We watched one woman set up her candles. She was a young woman with her face disfigured by a large tumor. Before she and her companion lit the 80-or-so candles she had brought, she laid out her offerings of eggs and canned soft drinks. I suspect that this is partly the result of the women’s movement in Maya communities, over the last decade or so, rejecting men’s control and posh-lubricated violence. I saw the soft drinks as an example of women’s resistance and women’s influence over dramatic changes in their communities.
Rita and I then decided to visit the old, ruined church at the cemetery near the entrance to town. Walking along we came to an “ethnographic museum” which we investigated for a few minutes, then continued down a road lined with tourist stalls, arriving a few minutes later a more isolated stall where two women sat weaving brocade designs, while an older woman suggested we buy something, and a young girl rocked a babe in a wooden crate that served beautifully as a cradle. In a couple of minutes, we were at the old church. A horse tethered there seemed to badly want attention but we didn’t feel it was appropriate.
We had hoped to get a combi from Chamula to Zinacantan but it turns out to be more complicated than that. One has to walk out to the highway (which we did), get a combi that goes toward San Cristobal, but get off at a crossroads and get another combi to Zinacantan. We decided that there wasn’t time today if we were going to do other errands, and that we would try for Zinacantan on Friday.
On the way back we had a newer combi, muy de lujo, and next to me sat a Chamula lady with a pre-schooler, a toddler, and a baby she was nursing. The combi returned us to the main market in San Cristobal so we walked through it buying vegetables and beans to make a soup for supper.
On the way home, we ran into Peggy, freshly returned from Playa del Carmen, and visited her while Rivkah entered with her friend, having just come from Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. Later Paulina came in with her father: they had just driven in from Oaxaca. The ranks are filling up.
