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THE MAGIC OF THE MIRROR
Photos
by Alex Webb, text by Fabrizio Mejía Madrid. Alex Webb is an American photographer
with the Magnum agency. Fabrizio Mejía Madrid is director of culture at the
municipality of Mexico City. A contributor to the daily La Jornada, he is
the author of three books, including “Small Acts of Civil Disobedience”, published
in Spanish in 1996. |
| The uprising in Chiapas has forced
Mexican society to look at the Indians straight on, perhaps for the first time, and
to start weaving with them a truly common future |
I seemed to notice a movement
from beneath her shawl, a kind of sudden vibration. I looked down at the woman’s
feet and was startled: her calloused heels bore all the dust and dirt of years walking
barefoot. I placed a coin in the woman’s permanently open palm, and ran into the
Museum of Anthropology. I was seven or eight years old. I asked my father about the
woman to whom I had just been told to give some money. “She’s an Indian,” he replied.
“But something was moving inside under her clothes,” I insisted. “It must have been
her child,” my father concluded, and we walked on into the Mayan room of the museum
without saying a word.
The image of that Indian woman in Mexico City has haunted me every year since. It
is not really an image, more like fragments of a body–an outstretched hand, the soles
of her feet, the coppery colour of her arm–and the suggestion of another being moving
beneath her clothes. When you come across them in the cities, you don’t look at them
directly. They, the Indians, lower their eyes as if to acknowledge that the colour
of their skin, their “defective” Spanish and their rural garments have made them
invaders in this land of mestizo nationalism. They have never had looks or expressions.
Nobody can remember their faces.
In contrast, the term “indigenous people” – as opposed to “Indians” – is part and
parcel of Mexican history. Like millions of other Mexican children, I grew up seeing
murals by Diego Rivera, where the Aztecs came to represent symbols and values, but
not people. From as far back as I recall, “indigenous” has meant that under the earth
on which we walk there are vestiges of women and men who erected pyramids to worship
the sun, dreamt about the number zero, sacrificed virgins and predicted eclipses.
But between the “Indian” and the “indigenous” there has never been any connection
beyond the fact that neither had a face.
For centuries the Indians submissively joined the growing mass of invisible spectators
of a distant country, of an ethereal land which changes without the need to involve
those who are watching it. The image of the “Indians” was one of peasants always
waiting for land, justice, education and health. We knew they existed because there
were millions of them, though we stayed deaf to what they were trying to tell us.
Taken into account because of their sheer number, the “Indians” ended up being tackled
as a “problem” in the 1970s: that of migration to the cities. The so-called “Marias”–“Indians”
who asked for charity dressed in highly coloured clothes–were the faithful reflection
of the failure of our shared life and of the only offer that we made to help them
belong to Mexico: stop being Indians.
When on January 1, 1994, the Indians in Chiapas rebelled once more against contempt,
they did so covering the whole face apart from the eyes. They made the country look
at them. They knew that morality started by looking at someone in the eyes. It is
the source of empathy, of identification, a form of magic and a mirror that creates
a third party: neither oneself nor the other, but that which makes us similar, that
in which we both recognize ourselves. This reflection of the other which is also
my own self in another person’s gaze was exactly what was denied to me by the country
to which I belong. For 500 years the Indians were not men and women who had to be
wiped out, but simple non-humans who survived thanks to a national evasion: not looking
at them head-on, in the eyes. Looking in the eyes of the Indians made us capture
in their reflection the very part of ourselves that exists in the other, the foreign
in each and every one of us.
Four years on, the women from an Indian community displaced by a “low-intensity war”
were the architects of another major change. After the massacre of women and children
in Acteal on December 22, 1997, the women of X’oyep decided to rise up against the
army’s presence. Already forced out of their homes, they were not ready to be drawn
into hostilities once again. They pushed the soldiers with their bare hands right
to the village’s boundaries, while one of them carried in her hands X’oyep’s last
hen. Riled by indignation, she defended the bird and together with the other women,
triumphed over a professional army. The moral strength of the Tzeltal Indians of
X’oyep rested in January 1998 on their physical weakness and on their small number,
but also on their opposition to war. They are the poor people who refuse to be helped
by a country which allowed the Acteal massacre to take place. In their resistance
there is a moral stance that connects me to them: neither would I resign myself to
a great “national plan” that I have not chosen. Their actions have made them famous
because they entailed a nationalism without patriots: they did not want any happiness
that would destroy them for their own good. In the hands that pushed out the army,
I saw the “Marias” of my childhood disappearing.
The distance between looking and listening
Although we have become more willing to tolerate difference, we are still no
more ready to listen to and understand the voices of difference. The idea of diversity
in Mexican society brings to mind divided ghettoes where contact between one tradition
and another inevitably weakens one of them. Moving from the ethnic to the ethical
does not mean we should strive to preserve that diversity, but rather absorb what
it is trying to tell us. It is the gap between looking and listening, between accepting
that the Other exists and experiencing its fragility as one’s own, between opening
windows and building bridges. It is this gap that we have to narrow: to go from living
alongside each other to experimenting with living together. I know that with the
X’oyep women we will travel that road.
The image of the “Indians” was one of peasants
always waiting for land, justice, education and health. We knew they existed because
there were millions of them, though we stayed deaf to what they were trying to tell
us. |
| Mexico’s poorest state |
Along with neighbouring
Yucatan and Oaxaca, Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, has the country’s highest
proportion of indigenous people: 42.5 per cent of its three million or so inhabitants
are Mayans. Nationally, there are approximately 10.6 million indigenous people out
of a population of 92 million, 80 per cent of whom are mixed-race.
Mostly rural, Chiapas breaks Mexico’s poverty records. In 1995, it was estimated
that 59 per cent of the population were living on less than the minimum income necessary
for survival (then put at $150 a month). That situation is partly explained by the
fact that Chiapas, so far from Mexico City, is the state where land reform was the
most weakly implemented. When the reform ended in 1992, half the land in Chiapas
was still in the hands of large landowners.
That is the context in which the “Zapatista Army of National Liberation” (EZLN) led
by “sub-commandante” Marcos burst upon the scene on January 1, 1994, a symbolic date
because it marked the entry into force of the NAFTA free-trade agreement with the
United States and Canada. EZLN rebels overran seven Chiapas municipalities, including
the city of San Cristobal de las Casas, demanding “democracy, freedom and justice
for all Mexicans.” A ceasefire was declared after two weeks of fighting with the
army in which, according to official sources, 159 people were killed, though human
rights groups put the death toll at over 400. On February 21, 1994, the EZLN and
Mexico’s federal government began talks for the first time, mediated by the bishop
of San Cristobal, Mgr Samuel Ruiz. Signed on February 16, 1996, the San Andres accords
on the rights of indigenous peoples were rejected by the authorities, on the basis
that national sovereignty had to be protected.
The cost of breaking off the negotiations has been high. For example, 45 alleged
EZLN sympathizers were killed in the village of Acteal on December 22, 1997.
In March 1999, 2.5 million Mexicans took part in a consulation organized by the EZLN
on integrating indigenous law into the Constitution. The strategy of the guerrillas,
whose objective is not to seize power, consists of gathering support from national
and international civil society for a democratisation of Mexican society. |
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