Living With Zapatistas
There is Zapata, staring fiercely with his long curling whiskers, wide sombrero, trademark red-and-yellow neckerchief, blue tuxedo and draped gun-belts. Then Marcos, peering seriously through his black balaclava, pipe hanging but mouth hidden, round military cap on his head, and sporting the adopted neckerchief. And Che, as ever, silhouetted against a red background marking his idealised past, staring intensely into the future that he never really lived to see.
The majority of the villagers were under thirty years old, though some had elderly relatives living nearby. Most families had at least four children with more on the way.
The mothers kept the house and kitchen and did the washing in the river, whilst their daughters looked after the babies. Work began at five in the morning, with the grinding of maize to make tortillas, and cooking black beans on the wood stove--there being no electricity.
The men would normally work the fields, also from five in the morning, or go to markets to sell livestock or arable products. But because it was the dry season during my stay, they had little to do. In the night though, areas of woodland--already the least fertile in Chiapas - were burned to make space for the next crops, sparking luminous ridges across a black horizon.
Most families had a fruit tree or two, typically of mangos, bananas, plantains or lemons; and also some chickens or pigs. Each owned a horse, which was used to get from town to town - there being no road from the village.
The men and boys washed these handsome horses, with themselves, in the refreshingly icy river, occasionally joined by their hairy grunting pigs. The dizzy chickens never bothered with personal hygiene, spending their days blindly buck-bucking around, followed by troops of tall chirping chicks. As for the mangy, flea-ridden dogs, when not sneaking pitifully about with their tails between their old-man’s legs searching for grub, they were randomly kicked, pelted and whacked by the young lads.
