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

First Steps

23 First Steps long before Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres accompanied me to what was for them the mysterious other world of the United States, we had already shared a wealth of experiences, become deeply involved in one another’s lives. When my wife and I took our first steps to Zinacantán forty-five years ago, Romin, and later Antzelmo, served as guides, teachers, collaborators, friends. In those days, anthropology students from dominant societies set out to observe the customs of people who were no longer called “primitive ” but were minorities whose ways of life were enveloped in mystery, creating what we considered exotic behaviors. Some field researchers thought it their job to track down willing “informants” and submit them to batteries of questions. Many anthropologists chose to preserve a hierarchical, superior stance, while others, like myself, committed themselves to adapting as best they could to the native society, which meant learning a language whose very name—Tzotzil Maya—was 24 First Steps unknown to the general public. The strategy I followed was to become, as much as possible, a genuine part of Zinacantec society so as to make an “objective” report of it. My impulses stemmed from childhood. As a boy, I had a map of Indian reservations over my bed. When I was seven, James R. Garfield, son of the president and former secretary of the interior, entrusted to me a beaded belt that he said the Navajos had given him. With the passage of years, I devoted my summers to bird-watching, first at the Smithsonian Institution’s Barro Colorado Center in Panama, then under Alexander Skutch in Costa Rica, and finally at Rancho Grande in Venezuela. But seeing that a career in ornithology would demand the collecting of birds and measuring their feathers, I decided that this was not the life I wanted to live. During a summer with the Friends’ Service,buildingaschoolinalittletowninthestateofPuebla,Ibecame fascinated with the very different way of life of Mexican campesinos. I decided to begin my career as an anthropologist at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City, where I had the great fortune to be a student in the last class of Miguel Covarrubias. But the endless “sympathy strikes” and graying hair of my Marxist classmates convinced me that it would be years before I could attain a degree. I then served briefly as a volunteer for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) among the Mazatec in Oaxaca, who were forced to abandon their homes before they were covered by the waters of the Miguel Aleman Dam. There I witnessed the Mexican government’s 25 First Steps cruelty to the Indians. People were living in rock fields and in towns where it was said that even the fleas had died. Then I returned to my country to enroll in Harvard University. After a year of course work I landed in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, in September 1958, a graduate student in search of a thesis topic in a Tzotzil Maya community. To mark my sympathy for the Indian people, I took my first steps clad not in shiny shoes, but in handmade huaraches. When I arrived in the hamlet of Chilil, my sandals were noted with surprise and commented on approvingly. Nevertheless, the appearance of a stranger was not welcome in this community. A few weeks before, residents had accused their shamans of witchcraft and slain every one. When I asked if someone could provide me with a meal I was told, “We don’t sell tortillas.” Finally, a family agreed to my request, but as I sat in their hut no one would speak to me. Indeed, when a neighbor called to the owner, he shouted back to him at length through the closed door. To this unfriendliness was added days and nights of pouring rain that left the floor of my quarters in the one-room, empty clinic under inches of water. Dispiritedly, I returned to San Cristóbal. There I borrowed a room in the INI, where, in the late afternoons, I was able to chat in Spanish with three men from San Lorenzo Zinacantán who worked as puppeteers . At these gatherings I tried to learn as much as I could of their culture while they assailed me with their questions. “Did you come alone?” “Is your mother alive?” “Is your father alive?” “How many are...