CHIAPAS 1994, #1: 'The People by the Highway' poem; review of John Ross' book Rebellion from the Roots; and the "Wish For Peace" song with Alex and Hamid
Three to bring up Mexico and its southernmost State and the spectacular Revolution and Relampago in Chiapas 30 years ago
In December 1994 my visit to Chiapas coincided with Zapatistas’ re-occupation of 58 (that is, most) of the Municipios in Mexico’s southernmost Estado.
I rode many Buses. Many revelations sprang out of circumstances. Snapshots of Natives’ dignity and their “chistes” (jokes) are vivid as if they happened yesterday. It was an uplifting time. The three pieces below—poem, review of John’s book, and song—are published in the 2002 book Flares.
The People by the Highway
The people by the Highway Have nowhere else to turn. Big wheels rolls past them, Wires and the unseen overhead. In their ancient Huipls, Threads of rainbows Like their forests, Babies at their laps and drunks in ditches Also sleeping off History This Christmas day, The people by the highway Look to arms for their trees.
Review of John Ross’ Rebellion from the Roots
Political journalism from Common Courage Press, 1995
Rebellion from the Roots reads like the book that John Ross has lived to write.
By several measures the most vivid account of the Zapatista insurgency that continues to rock Mexico, Ross’ Rebellion ... chiefly chronicles events b
An arresting shock happened to Mexico on New Year's Day of 1994. Masked Indian troops began this year by seizing several towns in Mexico’s southernmost State, Chiapas. Waves of consternation rolled outward from the nation to the world. In one day--the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement began--the illusion that an 'Economic Miracle' would bring 'social peace' to Mexico, a 'vision' touted by both the Mexican and U. S. Governments, was exploded by an uprising of militant indigena.
Who were they? Who were these Mayan guerrilleros?
Who were these intent "little people" behind their pasamontanas? Who was their 'White' or mestizo spokesperson, "Marcos"? What was the EZLN--the Emiliano Zapata Army of National Liberation?
John Ross tells us that Indians’ rebellion comes from a deep place. It comes from the "Mexico Profundo" that anthropologist Guillermo Bonfils has named
Mexico’s native peoples compose 'an unseen and unheard-from nation,' Ross writes, 'buried in remote sierras and deserts or in less distant but equally out-of-sight "lost cities." For them, he writes, 'life is often like a jail--a quarter of the nation's prisoners are indigenas in a country where Indians officially account for a tenth of the population.'
John Ross has lived in Mexico off and on for more than 30 years. Indignant sarcasm is his weapon toward the Mexican elite who profit from poor people’s plight. Spectacles that followed the Zapatistas' 12-day war with the Mexican Army offer abundant grounds for his humor. The fighting for power among higher-ups in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI, the Paldo Colosio, exposed a fine frenzy of long-festering conflicts. John Ross gives these ‘Dinosaurs’ an acerbic back-of-the-hand. 'The competition to fill Colosio's shorts had begun with the death of the candidates' brain,' he writes.
The EZLN in Chiapas is for him an entirely different story. Ross marvels at the National Democratic Convention that Zapatistas managed to pull off in foothills of the Lacandon jungle between August 6th to 9th of 1994, three weeks before Mexico's Presidential Election. Using logs, they built an amphitheater, cookhouses, latrines, and five "inns" or "Hiltons", then hosted 6000 delegates from the multiple factions of Mexico's Left. While the attempt was a self-described 'locura' --craziness--it succeeded. It excited and unite
Delegates’ unifying hope was that demands voiced by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution in 1917--for land, education and equality to campesinos--promises that were grievously broken by subsequent PRI Governments--might be fulfilled.
The PRI won the Election of August 1994, as it's won every Presidential Election since 1928, defeating the PAN on the Right and the PRD on the Left.
Computerization made vote-counting more manipulable, but older kinds of fraud were still obvious. John Ross has fun with some of the more gigantic discrepancies. He writes: 'The anomalies were staggering--at one Nueva Casa Grande, Chihuahua casilla, 400 voters cast ballots, but 1,200 ballots were extracted from the ballot box.'
Rebellion from the Roots lets us understand that Mexico will never return to the inertia that controlled it before the Zapatistas in Chiapas rose up. While a Chase Manhattan Bank memo of January 1995 has called for Mexico’s government to 'eliminate' the rebels, they endure. They remain 10,000 to 15,000 under arms, entrenched in their jungle and loyal to their communities, while Mexico as a whole society founders under debt incurred through the bail-out of U. S. financiers after the Mexican Stock Market collapsed in December 1994. Its PRI President, Ernesto Zedillo, struggles with ruling-class rifts and middle-class losses, as millions more of Mexicans now organize against their recent deprivations.
Ross’ Rebellion ... shows us that the real 'miracle' of our present has nothing to do with 'neo-liberal policy' and Banks' trickery. Instead--
With vigor, humor and moral spirit that recall John Reed's Insurgent Mexico as well as Mark Twain, George Orwell and Agnes Smedley, John Ross brings fresh realities home to us.
“Wish For Peace” with ALEX DE GRASSI and HAMID DRAKE (The GALLOP Trio), starts around 20:15, ends around 24:15.
More of master musicians!
"Wish For Peace"
(San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico, December 1994)
Sunday couples arm-in-arm
Stones are cracked under their shoes
Calle shops not far from farms
Christmas a still, shiny thing
They wish for peace
They wish for peace
Wish that they could grow in peace
Evermore they-ey could go
On TV News sleek faces speak
Denying what has just been shown
From the mountains a wind is heard
No lies can stand against true word
They wish for peace
They wish for peace
Wish that they could grow in peace
Evermore they-ey could go
Clips of guns break the sleep
Thousands millions rise to ring
Sometimes a fight is the only thing
To make hopes lift and sing
They wish for peace
They wish for peace
Wish that they could grow in peace
Evermore they-ey could go.