Travelers to the Other World: A Maya View of North America

Afterword

225 Afterword thirty years later, in the 1990s, Zinacantec travelers had become quite sophisticated; aware of social, economic, and political problems at home and across the border to the north. Rather than acting as objective anthropologists, they now have embraced advocacy anthropology, working to understand and aid those who share their problems. In 1982 I helped Antzelmo and Romin’s son, Xun, to form a TzotzilTzeltal writers’ cooperative, Sna Jtz’ibajom, The House of the Writer. In 1989 we created Teatro Lo’il Maxil, Monkey Business Theatre, which was directed for ten years by Ralph Lee of New York. We created twelve plays collaboratively, half of them reviving myths and half dealing with social, economic, and political problems confronting the Mayas of Chiapas. Last year Sna received from President Fox the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes; Artes y Tradiciones Populares. This is the nation’s highest award for Indian cultural achievement. 226 Afterword Our multicultural outreach is impressive. In 1999, on our third trip to the United States, we acted in the Indian Summer Festival in Milwaukee and for the Oneida Nation at St. Norbert’s College. On Labor Day in Milwaukee we rode on a flatbed truck, protesting the North American Free Trade Alliance, which had meant the loss of eighty thousand jobs in the city. In Cleveland we acted in an inner-city African American school, an Italian/Polish blue-collar family school, and at the Laurel School for girls in Shaker Heights, from where they sent us the children’s drawings of the performance. At the Duval School in Lake Worth, the actors, with their animal masks, cavorted among elementary school students, finally asking them if they wanted to wear the masks. Every hand shot up. In one school, 700! As they departed single file, the white and black students joined the Latinos in shaking the actors’ hands, saying, ‘¡Adios amigo!’ while many stopped to touch with one finger a toad mask. Though one teacher reportedly complained that the actors were just stirring up trouble, looking for help for the rebels, others wrote to say it had been a “social catharsis” for the black kids to see “people of color” acting with pride and assurance. Reviewing their role, the actors concluded, “We entertain. There is always a bit of joking, but it’s the truth. We see great hardship. It isn’t just entertainment.” 227 Afterword In 1994 Allan Burns arranged with the Guadalupe Social Services and with Lucas Benítez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers a trip to Immokalee in the Everglades, where five thousand Mayan and Haitian tomato, chili pepper, and orange pickers worked. They commented that our theater would be an effective way of dealing with social problems among the field hands. “What would you do?” they asked. “We would improvise.” That meant nothing to them, so the actors stood up and enacted the return of a Mayan immigrant “who had not been careful,” and who, after fruitless visits to a shaman and a doctor, finally died, not of SIDA (AIDS), but of cidra—cider! Immokalee was a town of fifteen thousand in the nonpicking season that grew to forty-five thousand when the pickers poured in. Here follows the group’s adventures there, largely in their own words. As it was March, we were met with cries of “Here are the Zapatistas!” In fact, one of our group was stopped and questioned by an immigration official. We were put up for the night in the ramshackle trailers where the pickers were housed. Conversing there and the next day we learned a bit of the local Spanish vocabulary, “el agua del dich,” the ditch water the workers were told they could drink! We added “El Pelón,” “Baldy,” the nickname for one of the notorious foremen. Then there was “la troca,” the truck, “el dompeador,” the man who dumped the tomatoes in the truck, “día y daime,” day and dime, a unique system of economic exploitation. As dark fell, 300 Indians formed a semicircle [to watch From All for All]. I asked if any were from Chiapas and ten hands went up. Watching 228 Afterword in rapt attention, quite predictably they laughed uproariously as the campesino couple stretched out under their blanket. They cheered when the campesina upbraided the men with, “¿No son hombres?” Next we improvised a play later entitled El largo camino a $5.25 (The Long...