In college, I spent a lot of time in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. It was indigenous Mexico, as captured in Frank Cancian's 1974 book Another place; photographs of a Maya community.
My Spanish was a halting classroom idiom learned from Iberian teachers. Although I had dutifully digested the required bibliography and could discuss it (in English) in scholarly circles, I was an outsider in a market center for the marginalized. There, itinerant farmers from outlying villages brought crops and handicrafts to sell in order to take industrialized goods back home.
In those days, prices were rarely fixed and shoppers bargained for the best rates. There were three tiers of prices. The lowest were for the local people. Tourists paid a higher price. But it was the Maya people – who had the least – who paid the most.
When they passed the rest of us in the street, they were expected to step into the gutter and leave the sidewalks to people with lighter complexions. They did.
Barefoot women carried babies tied to their chests in rebozos while tumplines around their foreheads helped distribute the weight of firewood on their backs. The men fared only slightly better. They usually wore huaraches to navigate the frosty roads, and a few had burros to carry their loads. But men and women alike relied on brute strength. They routinely walked miles with heavy burdens. Prejudice was a further encumbrance. Perhaps a greater one.While anthropologists from all over the world were drawn to San Cristobal for its indigenous population, these people were the most despised. Cancian tells how a generation before his fieldwork, Indians were jailed for being in town after dark.
It was monstrous! It was unfair! Burning with feminist sensitivity, I wanted to make amends. To raise their consciousness. To lead the way for justice.
Of course, I could not.
Our circle of influence is limited.
Photos copyright Frank Cancian, Another Place, Photographs of a Maya Community, Scrimshaw Press: 1974. Click on pics for large view.
