2003-11-19 - 12:24 p.m.
I am in a strange place. It reminds me of birthday cake, flat, party-colored, and covered in swirls and curlicues. In a vacuum, it might be just another pretty little colonial city. But it is not in a vacuum. It is the mountains, in jungle. It's in Chiapas.
You know Chiapas? The Zapatistas sound familiar? There was a war here. It just ended a little over a year ago. There were massacres. People were dissappeared. Thousands of indigenous people have been displaced, lost their farm land, lost their homes. They live in scrabbled-together communities on the outskirts of the bigger cities with few services and little hope.
But San Cristobal de las Casas, this birthday cake of a city, is bustling and mostly oblivious. Swarming with tourists. Big white people like me (German, French, Swiss, a few Americans) drifting like clouds amid tiny brown folk.
Right now the only evidence of this turmoil here are the hundreds of women, little boys, and tiny, tiny girls who come in to town to eek out a living, with loads of hand made belts and bracelets in their arms. They don't sell. They insist: 'Buy it. Buy it. Buy it.'
I said 'No' to one girl at least twenty times until she got this bright idea: 'Yes!' I had to laugh. But it didn't work.
And then there are the Zapatista dolls. Little masked guerillas with rifles in their hands. Some are on little stuffed horse's backs and others are dangling from key chains.
'Buy one. Buy one. 10 pesos. Buy one. For you, five pesos.'
