Year of Decision 1712 January 14, 2022
Sporadic road closures persist along the routes north to Palenque. Several commercial tour buses traveling back to San Cristobal were stopped over night, leaving passengers stranded, with frantic appeals to civil authority and diplomatic consulates. The latest information is that these buses were freed this morning through negotiation with tour bus companies. Civil authority was notably absent throughout the standoff.
This is but the latest incident seemingly centered around the township of Oxchuc, where nativist gangs have been halting traffic, extracting illegal tolls, threatening tourists, and even committing violence. The two hippies beat up last week at one roadblock turned out to be German rainbow-gatherers, perhaps feeling invigorated from a month of jungle peace and enlightenment, but they turned indignant when faced with a masked man’s demand for cash, and all harmony vanished forthwith.
German diplomats have reportedly been informed of the skirmish, as if Germany could somehow do something about it. This is Chiapas. Even Mexico cannot seem to do anything about it. The question of who exactly is in charge continues to be a pressing one. The military is reluctant to act, as it has a troubled reputation for violent interventions in the region, and it has the added complication of not being the only army in Chiapas. As for the EZLN, Zapatista presence is always disguised and purposely murky—suspicious armed men in black masks tend to look alike.
It is a pronounced truism that the civil discord in Chiapas has deep and ancient roots. Ardent supporters of the Zapatista cause readily trace the source to Columbus, Cortez, and the Catholic Church—500 years of grievances, the displacement of one world order with another, etc. In Chiapas, there is one particular year that recurs whenever discussions turn to the events of 1994, and subsequently. That year of decision in Chiapas was 1712, a hundred years before Independence, during the early construction of San Cristobal, and the Maya of the hill country near Oxchuc are evidently still mad about it.
As the local story is told, a little peasant girl claimed to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Whether etched on a scarred tree or branded on a toasted tortilla, I cannot say in what form the Mother of Jesus decided to visit northern Chiapas. However, the miraculous sighting attracted believers and other curious people. The shrine that was erected in the small settlement of Cancuc was promptly condemned by Catholic priests and dismantled, which only caused the small shrine to grow into a cultish holy ground, worth defending even by Catholic standards.
The revolt that ensued managed to unite a wide range of disparate Maya populations, who were otherwise separated by language and culture and nurtured prejudice. The Tzotzil is the largest indigenous community in San Cristobal, but only marginally represented in the north; still, they joined with the dominant Tzeltal and Ch’ol in resisting the arrogant colonialists. According to the little girl, Mother Mary advised the faithful to drive the Spaniards all the way back to the sea.
Invoking the Catholic rapture was an apt trigger for what came to be called the Tzeltal (or Tzendal) Rebellion. Since at least the 1690’s, native blood was boiling over an increasing class divide, pitting the poor masses and midlevel elite against a ruling class, which was newly charged to collect taxes for the Catholics in San Cristobal, in order to construct their beautiful Ciudad Real. While the Church of Guadelupe was being immaculately conceived on an Eastside hill, the Mujer Real was telling a little girl in Cancuc to attack her priests.
The Rebellion of 1712 was ultimately crushed over the next year, thanks to the intervention of armed forces from Guatemala and Campeche. The purge that followed this Maya heresy was deadly. Indeed, this period, which included pandemics, famine, and slavery, saw the Maya population of Chiapas drop precipitously to its lowest levels on record. Numbering only in the thousands, their fight was for existence.
Cambridge anthropologist Robert Wasserstrom argues that the customs and traditions practiced by these varied Maya groups came into being only after the conquest. The longstanding practice of Catholic missionaries was to parse ethnicities, based mostly on language acquisition, which perpetuated stratification while preventing kindred groups from finding common ground. The customs established thus came to be the means by which the rural poor were divided and exploited, then and as now. As Wasserstrom explains, way back in 1980:
“Natives have accepted more or less passively a culture which was designed for them by Spanish missionaries and administrators, a culture which emphasized ethnic differences at the expense of class solidarity. In contrast to these ideas, contemporary events provide us with many indications that such people did not simply resign themselves to the fate which colonial authorities elected for them. Of primary importance, native uprisings and rebellions, messianic movements and religious heresies occurred in Latin America with astounding frequency throughout the centuries which preceded Independence.”
We shall see if this nuanced historical context of the situation in Oxchuc will be favorably received by the German consulars, but I would not hold my breath. A couple of beaten-up rainbow-gatherers might not gather much sympathy. On the other hand, a few detained tour buses coming from the ruins of Palenque—the Disney-like spectacle of southern Mexico, soon destined to be the last stop on AMLO’s futuristic Tren Maya—might just draw the kind of attention never imagined in 1712, or even 1994.
And, yes, this all happened 310 years ago, just as it happens today in Oxchuc, or yesterday in San Juan Chamula, or tomorrow in Quien Sabe. The injustice has lasted a half-millennium, and Chiapanecos are still counting. Counting and waiting restively.