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Second Border Crossing PEDRO SEARCHING FOR PARADISE ON EARTH I met Pedro for the first time one morning as I was bathing with several refugee women friends in the river near Las Ceibas. I had begun to be less embarrassed by participating in the collective bath, but because of my urban modesty, I had not yet been able to take off my shorts and T-shirt, which made the daily ritual very uncomfortable. K’anjobal refugee women usually bathed in an underskirt with the upper part of the body naked. Men passing by did not seem to pay much attention to the young and old breasts so freely exposed. Pedro arrived on his honey-colored horse, one of the few horses in the ejido, and calmly proceeded to bathe it with soap scarcely a few feet away from us. Recent rains had already made the water rather muddy, and by washing his horse so close to us, our daily bath, though refreshing, left us that much dirtier. Some women got out of the water, while the bolder ones confronted Pedro and asked him to move downriver, where, by tacit agreement, animals were to be bathed. Mumbling between his teeth, Pedro grabbed his horse’s reins and left, turning around to watch us and stopping for a while near the river. After this unpleasant company had left, some elder women approached and asked me to wear something else while bathing, because an unmarried woman should not show her legs in such a fashion. I, who modestly had covered my breasts, turned out to be the impertinent one of the group, a bad example for other unmarried girls. This first memory of Pedro, as an arrogant adolescent who had shown little respect for the rules of the ejido Tseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103 6289 Hernandez / HISTORIES AND STORIES FROM CHIAPAS / sheet 98 of 317 Searching for Paradise on Earth 77 and who was responsible for my being publicly reprimanded by K’anjobal elder women, made me keep away from him during my first stay in Las Ceibas. Years later I returned to the ejido and saw that Pedro still had his adolescent looks. He was now almost twenty-two and worked as a publisher1 for the local Jehovah’s Witnesses. He had remained single, which was uncommon for men of his age. Like most young men of the ejido, he had no land of his own and worked on the coffee plantation and the family milpa until three o’clock in the afternoon, at which time he devoted himself to the activities of the religious group. When he learned of my return to the ejido, Pedro looked for me and proposed a book exchange. He would lend me Watchtower and Awake! magazines, published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, if I would help him obtain a good English-Spanish dictionary. For the last two years, Pedro had been studying English by mail. Every two months he walked three or four hours through the forest to reach the unpaved road where he would catch a bus that would take him to the municipal capital of La Trinitaria. There he had a post office box that linked him to the ‘‘outside world.’’ The first time I heard Pedro speak English I could not believe my ears, for his pronunciation was better than mine, and he used ‘‘shall’’ for the future , instead of ‘‘will’’ as is commonly done in American English. I thought that through the Jehovah’s Witnesses he had managed to travel to the United States, but I was wrong. Pedro did not even know the state capital , and his only contact with English speakers had taken place two years before, when some tourists had passed through the ejido on their way to the Miramar lagoon. This was the beginning of a long friendship. For several years, Pedro’s letters arrived in my mailbox at Stanford University; and in one of them he told me he was learning classical Greek so that he could read the ‘‘original’’ version of the Bible. Pedro’s interest in languages had led him to approach some elders and ask them to teach him Mam, and his desire to know what was beyond the rain forest led him to spend hours with the eldest men of the ejido in order to speak about the times of finca work. He longed to go back to the Sierra, whence his parents had come, to know the Soconusco...

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