Town-Gown Relations July 14, 2021
My neighbor Jodi has lived in San Cristóbal for more than 3 years and hopes never to leave. She is retired and living on a tight budget, and the cost of living here beats the United States by a lot. Medicines are cheap, food is cheap, transportation and other living expenses are cheap, certainly compared to her previous life on Vashon Island, near Seattle. And, like the Pacific Northwest, the climate suits her—“Not too cold, not too hot,” she says, giggling like a Goldilocks who has found her perfect porridge.
Since this latest rain squall arrived, meanwhile, I can only think of Mark Twain’s remark that the coldest winter he ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco.
San Cristobal attracts people from all over, and temperate climate is only one of the draws. It is a bit too chilly to support the large Yanqui retirement communities one finds in San Miguel Allende, Baja, and the Riviera Maya, and its remoteness tends to appeal to a more adventurous type of traveler. The mix of indigenous spiritualism, natural beauty, and radical chic politics makes the place a particular magnet for leftists, spirit seekers, gypsies and hippies, and this suits my bohemian neighbor Jodi just fine, although she does find the expat community rather “crazy.” One friend of hers, 60-something and made up like a Woodstock princess, recently jumped out of a moving taxi because she suspected the driver was a human trafficker trying to abduct her, adding her to the invisible list of 60-something-year-old sex slaves gone missing. Yes, “crazy” is one word for it.
The craziness is not limited to the retirees. At La Iglesia del Carmen, an old man with a cigarette dangling from his lips ignites 6-inch bottle rockets, one after another for minutes on end, like a hardened guerrilla shelling a military garrison, without emotion, just some beleaguered sense of duty. The target is merely the pleasant midmorning sky. Boom boom boom. He has God’s attention. The guardians at La Iglesia de San Francisco across the street must be seething with envy.
Along Real de Guadalupe, the principal walkway heading east from the Zocaló, amid the eateries and chocolate shops and tattoo parlors, clusters of native women in black furry skirts huddle with their wares and sternly discuss the state of things. Beside them is the other tribe on this Camino—the barefoot and hairy white couples, wreaking of patchouli, seeking enlightenment, hugging, kissing, playing musical instruments, peddling jewelry and colored crystals. These two groups—the mangy young spirit travelers and the Maya who are not going anywhere—are incomprehensible to each other. Worse, the hippies are cutting into the Chiapanecas’ jewelry sales.
Someone is perhaps looking out for these ladies’ business interests, because those carefree outsiders have been under assault in recent weeks. Robbed at gunpoint, beaten and stabbed, there have been four incidents reported and one death, an Italian yoga teacher apparently celebrating his country’s victory over the English soccer team. The perpetrators are identified as alienated Tzotzil teenagers, and they ride past the bars and night markets in the late hours, on black and red motorcycles, looking for stoned peaceniks to beat up and run over. The expat community mobilized a candlelight vigil on the Zocaló last night, with the aim of showing solidarity and raising awareness. “Enough is Enough,” they chant, but given the rising death toll among the Tzotzil to the north, punctuated by another barrage of airborne explosions, “Enough” seems far away.