Sunday, April 13, 2008
Report from San Cristóbal de las Casas
(An Internet album of photos I took of San Cristóbal is at album.) Here I am in Chiapas for the first time in eight years, on my way to Guatemala, having flown on April 7 from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutiérrez and shared a taxi the rest of the way. Like Guanajuato, San Cristóbal is a tourism-oriented colonial city, but it has a totally different feel. On the one hand, it's larger (population about 250,000, as opposed to 150,000) and brisker (everyone seems to be in a rush), built on a grid with traffic lights (which are unheard of in Guanajuato, where the streets wind and rarely intersect). On the other hand, there's a marked indígena presence, with the various groups from the surrounding villages (speaking various languages other than Spanish) coming to town to sell their artesanía to the tourists, in the churchyard of the Iglesia Santo Domingo and in the zócalo, and selling to and buying from each other in the large, busy market.
San Cristóbal is centered on a square, well-landscaped plaza with a Victorian-looking kiosk in the center, well populated with muchachos selling newspapers and shining shoes. On the north side is the Cathedral, painted mustard color with red borders and white flowers, facing to the west a large open space punctuated by a large cross. The first street to the west has for several blocks been made into a pedestrian corridor since my last visit, tourist-oriented restaurants and shops alternating with everyday stores. Several blocks to the north, the Iglesia Santo Domingo is a major presence with its spacious churchyard thickly populated with indígenas selling artesanía, the municipal market a little further north and east.
Santo Domingo Church deserves its own paragraph, looming above a steep stairway with its superbaroque facade, inside the walls of both sides of the center nave and the chapel to the right one baroque gold altarpiece after another without interruption. The main altar, in austere neoclassical style, looks oddly out of place. There is an enormous space around Santo Domingo and between it and the smaller Church of La Caridad further south, where indígenas have sold artesanía as long as I've traveled here but whose density has now reached saturation. The ex-convent attached to Santo Domingo is the site of Sna Jolobil, a weavers' cooperative founded by an American anthropologist who wanted to encourage native weavers to revive their traditional patterns and dyes, where the weavings are breathtakingly exquisite and the prices are breathtakingly high.
I divide my time between museums, buying provisions (I eat two meals a day in my room, buy fruit at the market and fabulous cinnamon buns and empanadas of curried veggies at a gringo-oriented bakery), looking at artesanía, and wandering around taking (over 200) pictures, with occasional stops for a lemonade or hot chocolate. I do two day trips to indígena villages.
Chiapas being one of those places where amber is found, I go to the Amber Museum and marvel at the delicate sculptures carved out of (not large) chunks of amber--people and animals, even a marimba. (At the church to which the museum is attached, in a former convent, by a side altar with an enormous quantity of artificial flowers there is a large bowl of water on a stand, and a number of indígenas who were kneeling on the floor in front of the altar rub the water on all exposed parts of their bodies and their children's bodies.) The private Museum of Regional Dress Sergio Castro, which requires an appointment, is a good orientation to the variations (for everyday, for fiestas, for weddings) of traje típico of the various indígena groups throughout the state. More along those lines is the Museum of Popular Cultures.
Thursday being market day in Tenejapa, 30 kilometers away, I want to go there, and the morning after my arrival I inquire of the guide rounding up tourists by the Cathedral to go to Chamula if he'll be going to Tenejapa on Thursday. As usual, it depends on a few other people being interested, which as it happens on Thursday, there aren't, besides which, when I learn that the tour would cost 220 pesos (my transportation cost 40) my interest declines, so I set off to find the colectivo that goes to Tenejapa. (A colectivo is simply a taxi that fills up with passengers.) Tenejapa's plaza is crowded with people, and as I wander around I start to see here and there men who must be members of the cofradía, wearing their traje of red-and-white hand-woven wool shorts under a black wool tunic, with an ordinary long-sleeved shirt. Some have long necklaces with what look like large coins but are really religious medals. So I scurry around chasing them, taking a lot of pictures from the back, noticing on the way that most of the women have forsaken their gorgeous red-and-white huipil, woven on the backstrap loom, and are wearing turtlenecks instead, which is logical in that they would be both cheaper and warmer in the chill of the highlands. From the plaza after a while I walk down to the market, simply a long street lined with improvised puestos, and try shooting pictures in a confined space with people constantly moving. After an hour or so, having checked out the church, I take a colectivo back to San Cristóbal.
The following day I go to Na Bolom, a more-or-less obligatory stop for visitors to San Cristóbal, though I must confess that my interest in the inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle is minimal, I guess because their traje típico is so austere. Na Bolom was the name given to their huge house in a former seminary by the late Frans Blom, an archeologist, and Trudy, his photographer wife. For some reason the lacandones became their special interest and special project, so the museum--where I arrived for a tour, but since I was the only person interested, the tour wasn't--is replete with photos and artifacts of the lacandones, of whom Sergio Castro of the private museum has told me there are only 200 left, with a major problem of inbreeding.
I am here until Monday the 14th, really a day longer than I need, because my itinerary is based on market days, and Sunday is market day in San Juan Chamula, an indígena village only 10 kilometers away--and the source of large numbers of indígenas living in shantytowns around San Cristóbal who have been expelled from Chamula for converting to protestantism. I take a tour that goes to Chamula and the nearby village of Zinacantán. In Chamula the main attraction is the church, in which a syncretic version of Catholicism is practiced and the only sacrament a priest is permitted to perform is baptism, which happens once a month. The church has no pews, there are pine needles on the floor and groups of people placing candles of different sizes and colors on the floor, with chickens, eggs, and soda bottles in evidence, all used for healing purposes. Glass cases with figures of saints line the walls. The market area is to one side of the large central plaza, and on another side are cement benches where the mayordomos are in evidence, with their black wool tunics over white pants and shirt, hats with multicolored ribbons cascading from the center of the top. Picture-taking is strictly prohibited of these officials and of anything inside the church. The normal traje for Chamula is blue blouses and black wool skirts for the women, white or black wool tunics over Western clothes for the men. (Our guide's take on the question of the expulsion of Protestants is that it is the fault of the Morman and Jehovah's Witness missionaries who are intruding on the native culture.)
Chamula is an agricultural village; Zinacantán, where we go next, produces flowers for export and is more prosperous. The curious thing about its traje típico is that when I was here eight years ago it was bright pink, but it has undergone a transformation and is now blue and purple, the women wearing a long skirt and triangular poncho and the men wearing a similar poncho. Here the church has the usual pews and the usual service. Here we are permitted to visit a family, the hope being that we will buy some of the weavings they have produced, for which purpose we are allowed to take pictures of a young woman weaving. Personally, I prefer Guatemalan weaving, so I put off my purchases for later in my trip.
Tommorrow morning I get on a tour agency's van and cross the border to Guatemala, getting off in Panajachel on Lake Atitlán. I have five destinations in Guatemala, with stays ranging from a day to a week, then spend four nights in Mexico City.
San Cristóbal is centered on a square, well-landscaped plaza with a Victorian-looking kiosk in the center, well populated with muchachos selling newspapers and shining shoes. On the north side is the Cathedral, painted mustard color with red borders and white flowers, facing to the west a large open space punctuated by a large cross. The first street to the west has for several blocks been made into a pedestrian corridor since my last visit, tourist-oriented restaurants and shops alternating with everyday stores. Several blocks to the north, the Iglesia Santo Domingo is a major presence with its spacious churchyard thickly populated with indígenas selling artesanía, the municipal market a little further north and east.
Santo Domingo Church deserves its own paragraph, looming above a steep stairway with its superbaroque facade, inside the walls of both sides of the center nave and the chapel to the right one baroque gold altarpiece after another without interruption. The main altar, in austere neoclassical style, looks oddly out of place. There is an enormous space around Santo Domingo and between it and the smaller Church of La Caridad further south, where indígenas have sold artesanía as long as I've traveled here but whose density has now reached saturation. The ex-convent attached to Santo Domingo is the site of Sna Jolobil, a weavers' cooperative founded by an American anthropologist who wanted to encourage native weavers to revive their traditional patterns and dyes, where the weavings are breathtakingly exquisite and the prices are breathtakingly high.
I divide my time between museums, buying provisions (I eat two meals a day in my room, buy fruit at the market and fabulous cinnamon buns and empanadas of curried veggies at a gringo-oriented bakery), looking at artesanía, and wandering around taking (over 200) pictures, with occasional stops for a lemonade or hot chocolate. I do two day trips to indígena villages.
Chiapas being one of those places where amber is found, I go to the Amber Museum and marvel at the delicate sculptures carved out of (not large) chunks of amber--people and animals, even a marimba. (At the church to which the museum is attached, in a former convent, by a side altar with an enormous quantity of artificial flowers there is a large bowl of water on a stand, and a number of indígenas who were kneeling on the floor in front of the altar rub the water on all exposed parts of their bodies and their children's bodies.) The private Museum of Regional Dress Sergio Castro, which requires an appointment, is a good orientation to the variations (for everyday, for fiestas, for weddings) of traje típico of the various indígena groups throughout the state. More along those lines is the Museum of Popular Cultures.
Thursday being market day in Tenejapa, 30 kilometers away, I want to go there, and the morning after my arrival I inquire of the guide rounding up tourists by the Cathedral to go to Chamula if he'll be going to Tenejapa on Thursday. As usual, it depends on a few other people being interested, which as it happens on Thursday, there aren't, besides which, when I learn that the tour would cost 220 pesos (my transportation cost 40) my interest declines, so I set off to find the colectivo that goes to Tenejapa. (A colectivo is simply a taxi that fills up with passengers.) Tenejapa's plaza is crowded with people, and as I wander around I start to see here and there men who must be members of the cofradía, wearing their traje of red-and-white hand-woven wool shorts under a black wool tunic, with an ordinary long-sleeved shirt. Some have long necklaces with what look like large coins but are really religious medals. So I scurry around chasing them, taking a lot of pictures from the back, noticing on the way that most of the women have forsaken their gorgeous red-and-white huipil, woven on the backstrap loom, and are wearing turtlenecks instead, which is logical in that they would be both cheaper and warmer in the chill of the highlands. From the plaza after a while I walk down to the market, simply a long street lined with improvised puestos, and try shooting pictures in a confined space with people constantly moving. After an hour or so, having checked out the church, I take a colectivo back to San Cristóbal.
The following day I go to Na Bolom, a more-or-less obligatory stop for visitors to San Cristóbal, though I must confess that my interest in the inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle is minimal, I guess because their traje típico is so austere. Na Bolom was the name given to their huge house in a former seminary by the late Frans Blom, an archeologist, and Trudy, his photographer wife. For some reason the lacandones became their special interest and special project, so the museum--where I arrived for a tour, but since I was the only person interested, the tour wasn't--is replete with photos and artifacts of the lacandones, of whom Sergio Castro of the private museum has told me there are only 200 left, with a major problem of inbreeding.
I am here until Monday the 14th, really a day longer than I need, because my itinerary is based on market days, and Sunday is market day in San Juan Chamula, an indígena village only 10 kilometers away--and the source of large numbers of indígenas living in shantytowns around San Cristóbal who have been expelled from Chamula for converting to protestantism. I take a tour that goes to Chamula and the nearby village of Zinacantán. In Chamula the main attraction is the church, in which a syncretic version of Catholicism is practiced and the only sacrament a priest is permitted to perform is baptism, which happens once a month. The church has no pews, there are pine needles on the floor and groups of people placing candles of different sizes and colors on the floor, with chickens, eggs, and soda bottles in evidence, all used for healing purposes. Glass cases with figures of saints line the walls. The market area is to one side of the large central plaza, and on another side are cement benches where the mayordomos are in evidence, with their black wool tunics over white pants and shirt, hats with multicolored ribbons cascading from the center of the top. Picture-taking is strictly prohibited of these officials and of anything inside the church. The normal traje for Chamula is blue blouses and black wool skirts for the women, white or black wool tunics over Western clothes for the men. (Our guide's take on the question of the expulsion of Protestants is that it is the fault of the Morman and Jehovah's Witness missionaries who are intruding on the native culture.)
Chamula is an agricultural village; Zinacantán, where we go next, produces flowers for export and is more prosperous. The curious thing about its traje típico is that when I was here eight years ago it was bright pink, but it has undergone a transformation and is now blue and purple, the women wearing a long skirt and triangular poncho and the men wearing a similar poncho. Here the church has the usual pews and the usual service. Here we are permitted to visit a family, the hope being that we will buy some of the weavings they have produced, for which purpose we are allowed to take pictures of a young woman weaving. Personally, I prefer Guatemalan weaving, so I put off my purchases for later in my trip.
Tommorrow morning I get on a tour agency's van and cross the border to Guatemala, getting off in Panajachel on Lake Atitlán. I have five destinations in Guatemala, with stays ranging from a day to a week, then spend four nights in Mexico City.
# posted by Louise Lander @ 11:11 AM 
