On the Road in 1980, Part 5

The communal courtyard of Posada del Abuelito in San Cristóbal de las Casas. I spent some time at that table, eating my home-cooked meals and writing.

Miércoles / 12 marzo.[1] I arrived that night in Ciudad de Oaxaca, joining forces with Charley, a freckled-faced Canadian kid I met on the bus, to find a cheap hotel. Walking around the mercado near the bus station, we met some French travelers who took us to their place, the Hotel Pasaje, well-kept and low-budget, populated by lots of young gringos. After Charley and I booked a room to share, we went off with nos amis français to meet up with their friends at another hotel and get high.

The next morning, I awoke to the calls of the hotel’s songbirds, proceeded to the bustling Mercado Benito Juarez, and sat down on a bench to enjoy the hubbub while drinking a big bowl of sweet brown café con leche into which I dunked my pan dulce. All the competing aromas of the panaderías and carnicerías, the freshly ground café and cacao, the ripening plátanos, naranjas, and piñas.[2] A man sat down next to me, a pajarero[3] with a stack of cages displaying a kaleidoscope of native songbirds – doves, parrots, toucans, buntings, finches.

Note: this letter was forwarded to Oaxaca from the Mexico City lista de correos. It contains a conceptual drawing of an airplane by Sierra, who had just turned three.

On Friday I collected two letters from the lista de correos, one from Pat and one from Theresa, lifelines thrown from worlds I’d left behind. Pat’s letter made me both happy about where she was at and wishing I were there:

I’ve missed you a lot. Sometimes I get lonely, wanting someone to hold me without having to ask them to. But I also feel a growing strength inside, a connection with myself…. It’s like I forgot how to depend on me when you were here.

I also got a letter from Michael Cummings, with whom I was co-editing a literary magazine in Iowa City. I’d promised to read and appraise the submissions during my travels. His letter explained that the package of submissions wasn’t ready to send yet, but would be by the end of the month, so I instructed the Oaxaca post office to forward my mail to the lista de correos in Guatemala City, where I felt confident I’d be in two weeks or so.

The bolsa de hombro (shoulder bag) I bought in Ciudad de Oaxaca.

I spread around some of my pesos at the Mercado de Artesanías, just a block from the hotel: a handwoven cotton hamaca, lightweight and brightly colored; a dark blue guayabera shirt (as most of my shirts had become threadbare); and a woolen bolsa de hombro. Charley had moved on, as had our French friends, but my closest friend, Rico, a chill and clearheaded dude from New York, was still around. The hotel continued to host a revolving cast of vagabonds, including a number of excellent musicians. Taking advantage of a spell of sunny weather, we’d gather on the hotel’s roof terrace. Someone would produce their stash of embroidery thread, and we’d get high, tie five long threads to our big toes, and then weave colorful friendship bracelets while digging the impromptu jams.

By Monday, though, grown weary of the constant partying at the hotel, I continued my journey. After recovering the 1,000 pesos I had loaned to a mellow (and trustworthy) Danish couple who’d been ripped off, I set out for parts east. I’d heard talk of a good campground by a river and waterfall south of the Maya ruins at Palenque, but resisting the idea of landing at another place crowded with young gringos, I headed instead for San Cristóbal de las Casas and then Guatemala. 

At the end of that day, I was 200 kilometers down the road, camping on a hilltop, basking nude in the warm dry mountain air, drinking up the last hour of sunlight, and regretting the loss of my pocket copy of Psalms and New Testament, which Charley had walked off with. I’d gotten a good ride from a semi driver going to Salina Cruz, but as we drove across the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre del Sur, he pulled out a bottle of mezcal and proceeded to get stinking borracho, pressuring me to join him in his boracchi-tude. With a couple of hours of sun left, I discreetly hopped out when he stopped to build up the air pressure in his brakes. It felt good to be camping in solitude under a full canopy of stars.

The next morning: after a couple of short rides and a few kilometers of hiking, a ride to Jalapa de Marquez, midday in the tropical lowland savanna of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Then, a young, zealous Toronto couple on their way to Nicaragua stopped their VW van to give me a 400-kilometer ride to San Cristóbal. Their destination was an orphanage in Managua, where they’d be supporting the efforts of the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front.[4] We stopped for lunch and then drove on into the state of Chiapas, spent the night in the busy city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, where we had dinner, shared a hotel room, and then ate breakfast the next morning before continuing on to San Cristóbal, all paid for by the government of Canada, muchas gracias!

The last fifty kilometers climbing into the pine-oak forests of the Central Highlands of Chiapas were breath-taking. We passed many Maya villages, the women wearing long black wraparound skirts and beautifully embroidered white huipiles.[5] Some women sat on the porches of their homes, handweaving with their backstrap looms. San Cristóbal de las Casas is a mid-sized Spanish colonial city tucked away in a valley 2,200 meters above sea level and surrounded by mountains. Its popularity among travelers stems from the fact that the city and the surrounding mountain communities are inhabited predominantly by indigenous Tzeltal and Tzotzil people.

When my Toronto friends dropped me off, I ran into some compañeros from the Mexico City hostel, a German guy and his Italian girlfriend. We compared notes from the road. Then I met a beautiful Veracruzana, the epitome of that region’s striking blend of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous features. She was staying at the place recommended to me in Oaxaca, and kindly accompanied me there. The Posada del Abuelito was a charming, low-key hostel, offering a cozy courtyard, cooking privileges, and a bed for 40 pesos a night (less than $2 US). This would be a good staging area for my passage from México to Guatemala.

That first night there, I ran into Alain and Christine – French voyageurs I knew from Oaxaca – and we eventually wound up in their hotel room. In a darkness lit by a single candle, Alain rolled a huge spliff, and we got crazy high, me barely clinging to the caboose of their conversation en français. After that evening, I lay low and went domestic, buying lots of fresh food to make breakfasts and dinners, laundering everything in my backpack, talking with other travelers passing on their way to or from Guatemala.

On Friday, I crammed into a bus for a dusty, thirty-kilometer, two-hour ride to Tenejapa, situated among steep mountain cliffs northeast of San Cristóbal. The entirety of the Tzeltal community was out in force for the fiesta of El Señor de Desagravio.[6] I wandered around and visited the church, but then, exhausted by the trip, I began hiking back to town with Michelle, a Québécoise friend. A pickup soon stopped to give us a lift, offering a much less obstructed view of the terrain than the bus ride had. On Saturday I caught a transporte returning from the mercado to the Tzotzil community of San Juan Chamula, a short ten-kilometer ride in the back of the truck among beautiful smiling Maya faces. The women wore lots of blue – blue rebozos and blue huipiles with almost no embroidery. The Tzeltal women of Tenejapa, in contrast, wore white huipiles richly decorated with red embroidery. 

In my journal I attempted a sketch of the tall crosses found at street corners and on the plaza of San Juan Chamula: green with a white design of stylized corn plants and flowers symbolizing the four directions. The churches in those two villages lacked pews or chairs. The dirt floors were covered with pine boughs and needles. The people lit candles placed on the ground, burning copal incense and leaving offerings of eggs and bottles of Coca-Cola. The many statues, wearing mirrors around their necks, some fusion of Catholic saints and Mayan gods, reflected their syncretism of customs and beliefs.

I was ready for Guatemala, the next stage of this journey. Although I know my experiences in no way compare to theirs, as I reflect on that 3,000-kilometer journey from the Arizona frontera to the Guatemala frontera, I can’t help but think about the grueling exodus now being made by so many desperate immigrants from Central and South America.

Footnotes:

[1] Wednesday, 12 March.

[2] Bakeries and butcher shops; bananas, oranges, and pineapples.

[3] A traditional occupation dating from pre-Hispanic times, usually involving a family who shares the work of capturing, acclimating, maintaining, and selling the wild birds.

[4] The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional had cobbled together a revolutionary government after ousting the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship the previous year.

[5] Short, blouse-like tunics.

[6] Our Lord of Relief or Vindication.