Rita and I went with anthropologist (now 80 years old) June Nash to Amatenango del Valle, the community where she did her fieldwork and which has long been known for its pottery production.
June hired a driver familiar to her, named Fernando Ortega Guillén. He was very talkative and informative. On the way he pointed out a giant (and I mean giant) military base. He explained that the land had been owned by a Comitan man named Aguilar, but that some Maya from the Ricardo Flores Magón municipio had squatted on an unused portion of his land and demanded rights to farm it. When he saw that he could not win against the Maya, he figured out another way to keep them from using it: he donated the land to the federal government. On this land they built the base, the purpose of which, of course, is to control the Maya population.
This was sad, scary and formidable. But fortunately the journey was softened by the pink blush of peach trees coming into bloom. Fernando continued by pointing out that he is happy about things that increase tourism to San Cristobal, which is good for him and a lot of the local economy. But he noted that things like the low intensity warfare being carried on against the Maya from such bases scares tourists away. The present governor, Juan Sabines, is hoping to further increase San Cristobal’s share of the tourist market by building a new road from San Cristobal to Palenque. Presumably this road would be less curvy and perhaps his idea is to bypass Ocosingo; I don’t know. Fernando also talked about today’s headline, the pension for seniors which he noted would be granted no matter what a person’s income. He was negative about using taxpayer money to further remunerate the wealthy, and also wondered how the pension might get to some of the neediest in the countryside.
Along the way we also passed a growing community of Presbyterians, founded in the 1980s by the “espulsados” of Chamula and other districts. We stopped in Teopisca to look for an acquaintance of June’s, Juan Bautista Gomez, who is involved with Indigenous and particularly bilingual education. We didn’t find him and so moved on to Amatenango del Valle.
Fernando parked in the zocalo, which had been completely torn up as some community renewal project. We stopped in the church, dedicated to St. Francis. I was interested to see stands of incense as well as candles used for devotion, and Rita pointed out offerings of eggs and salt in front of some of the saints’ statues.
June told us lots of interesting things about local beliefs related to the church. She first stopped in front of a statue of Saint Lucy. When June first came to Amatenango in the 1950s, St. Lucy was dressed in traditional European fashion for saints: lots of satin. But when she returned in the 1980s, St. Lucy was dressed in the local style of embroidered huipil. St. Lucy has her eyes on a plate, according to European symbolism, but this is reinterpreted locally. It is said that Lucía offered her eyes to Santo Tomás of Oxchuc, a more important church. According to June, this Sto. Tomás is associated with Quetzalcoatl and with the ability to bring or withhold the rains, and thus has a prominent influence on agriculture. Apparently, Sto. Tomás refused the offering of Sta. Lucía’s eyes.
There is also a statue of St. Peter Martyr with a cleaver in his head, also according to European Christian iconography. The people of Amatenango see this as a particularly powerful image and associate him with an organization of shamans in the area who were an important catalyst in late colonial and early independence resistance movements. Apparently the church accumulated so much dangerous power that it was burned down for safety and rebuilt.
We then went to visit several potters with whom June was familiar. The first was her comadre (god-mother to her child) Carmela Lopez de Leon, age 77. She had to be called from a curing ceremony being held for her 3-year old granddaughter. The child had been to the doctors, who could find nothing wrong. Yet she has had a fever for months and cries all night. They believe she has had a “susto” (fright) which caused her spirit to flee her body, and they were having a ceremony to call back her spirit. June later pointed out that Doña Carmela had learned Spanish from her brother, who was taken as a youth to a residential school. We did not see any pottery at Carmela’s, but the porch was filled with bags of husked elotes.
As we walked along, June mentioned that another time it might be good to take a walk into the hills over town where there is an archaeolological site in which the outline of a ball court is still clearly visible. We then stopped at the house of Juan Bautista Gomez, the teacher, but were told that he was at work.
We stopped in at another workshop. Several women were sitting on the floor of a shed, forming and polishing the large dove effigy pots that many Amatenango women make. One of the ladies (June did not know her name, but she is the wife of Pablo Lopez) offered to let us take her picture. We took a picture of June with her and one of the younger women. We wanted to make clear exactly what they were permitting us to do with the picture, and the point was apparently only that we were expected to make a print and bring it to them.
We next visited Juliana Lopez-Xunton Perez-Jajan. She was kneading the clay at the time we arrived but stopped to show us around and talk for quite a while about her family and local politics. School was cancelled for the day and four grandchildren were hanging around, making noise and generally getting into trouble. Doña Juliana told us that the large bronze monument of an Amatenango potter at the entrance to San Cristobal was taken from a picture of her. Of course, she didn’t receive remuneration and was only told about it by friends when they saw it erected a couple of years after the picture was taken. Juliana said that the statue was first erected in a nice park where it could easily be seen. But she noted that women from Chamula often sat on its legs, doing their embroidery. The present location is just an intersection. It can basically be seen only from passing cars. Of this more later. Doña Juliana offered to let us take a picture. She had been to New York City and had been interviewed on television, so she was quite aware of what we were asking considering the use of the photo. She was happy to have it posted on the blog, which you can see above juxtaposed to the statue of her.
Next stop was an internationally famous male potter, Alberto Gomez Kut-Saben. We couldn’t talk to him as he was involved in a tricky procedure. He makes very large pieces, including huge jaguars that must weigh over 50 kilos. These were being packed for shipping to the US; at least one was destined to be a hotel decoration, possibly in Chicago according to Alberto. The sculpture seems quite fragile (and beautiful) and Alberto and his crew were struggling to get it into a crate. We quietly slipped out so as not to disturb their concentration at the tricky work.
We started walking back to the Zocalo, but up behind us came a woman named Victoria Gomez Perez, holding out small pottery animals she wanted us to buy. June knew her so we went into her house. Rita bought an armadillo about 10cm long. We saw the pieces that go into making the armadillo and that are formed separately, including bodies that look just like eggs before they are attached. We took pictures of Rita with the woman and the Armadillo. Like the earlier potter, her interest was in getting a print, not in having us use it for our own purposes.
Again we headed back towards the Zocalo, and this time we were met on the way by another lady. She is the mother of Juan Bautista Gomez, the teacher, and had heard that we had stopped by his house and invited us to stop for a visit, especially if we might be interested in looking at some textiles the lady had to sell (I didn’t get her name). Rita was interested in the pleated aprons that younger women wear in Amatenango del Valle. She had a nice green one but Rita was looking for red. She also brought out an embroidered huipil that she wanted to sell. It is magnificent. The best work, with huge amounts of embroidery. She asked 800 pesos, which is a steal. It is worth five times that much in my opinion. Rita wanted to think about it (and we weren’t carrying enough money) so we left it for the time being. We will be going back again on a class trip after Easter so Rita can check if it is still there.
While sitting in this lady’s yard, her son came home and we had a conversation with him about bilingual education. He said that in the primary schools with which he works, 25% of the classes are taught bilingually. He is hoping to get bilingual classes in secondary school but there is huge resistance from the teachers, who are educated outside and know only Spanish. June asked if our LASOM group could visit a bilingual class and he said he would ask his supervisor.
After this we headed back. We stopped at the statue of Doña Juliana forming an effigy pot and took a few pictures. We noted that there was no identification of who she was: instead, the statue is used to perpetuate the touristic notion of the anonymous artisan. How sad!.
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