When I saw massive Ku’kulkan slithering down the mighty Mayan steps of Monte Alban I knew it was time to answer the call of the road. His ferocity stood in stark contrast to my bookishness and snapped the cord that had been tying me down to Merida. Tendrils of history pulled me towards the dense Lacandon Jungle, towards ancient ruins in seas of green. I had to see what I had been studying for so long. Besides, the wet season was over. It was now or another year. I packed up my backpacking gear and set off on the 13 hour bus ride to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
It was March 21st, 1995. The vernal equinox.
6 hours into the drive, my body was thankful for the Mexican government. For the past few decades the government had been working non-stop on huge infrastructure projects, so the roads were smooth even as they wound their way through the drastic peaks of the Veracruz heights. Around every bend I found massive patches of teal agave clinging for dear life on the steep mountainsides — unlikely sources of prosperity. I, too, felt out of place, uncertain, transient. Mexico City folk hardly even visited cities in Chiapas. What was I doing venturing into the Chiapian jungle? Why could I not ignore these ancient forces pulling me into the deep unknown?
I knew I was close when my window framed the high walls and glittering water of Cañón del Sumidero. Yet, just as the canyon passed behind, a new sight emerged. Harsh concrete, gauche blue: a brand new Walmart. I pulled out my journal.
Unsettling —
From where did it come?
Capitalism strikes
Wandering through San Cristobal, I felt as though I was in another country, the cityscape being drastically different. In other Mexican cities, the magnificent churches were testaments to power, Christian rule, Spanish conquerors. Here, the churches were modest but colorful unions of faith and history; bright orange and blue monuments to the community that supported them. Citizens walked by in azure blues, delicate pinks, lush greens. The constant presence of the military was nowhere to be seen. Still though, as more tourists poured into the city, so too came the Oxxos and the clubs.
I met Iktan in my hostel. He was from Chiapas and would serve as my guide. I got into contact with him through a colleague of mine who studied in San Cristobal. Seeing him for the first time, it was clear he was Maya. I cringed at my focus on his ancestry, and I knew that where I felt wonder, those back home in Mexico City would feel distaste. It should not be this way. We left the hostel and he showed me around the city.
The next day we traveled to the home of a curadora in the hills above the city. When we arrived she was building a large fire in front of a mud hut large enough for five to ten people to sit in. A temazcal. We greeted the curadora with customary respect. She sat us down and pulled out a picture engraved on a stone and began speaking in Tzotzil while pointing to parts of the picture. Iktan translated: “The panther represents the past. It prowls behind you. You must keep walking, or it will pounce. Do not look back. The rabbit represents the future. It is fast and will always escape you. Do not chase. The tree is the present. It has roots that sink deep into the history of the mud and branches that stretch far into the hope of the sky, but it is steady in its place. Be present. In the temazcal and in life you will be challenged by the panther and the rabbit. Be the tree.”
And with that we went into the temazcal. I wrote of the experience in my journal:
I am nothing
Only mud and leaves
And I am filled with the world
Two days later, on the 25th, we set out in Iktan’s car, a dilapidated Toyota. We drove west, straight into Lacandon. In the speeding car, the jungle was a never ending blur of lavish greens. After a few hours we reached a small town. “Villa las Rosas,” Iktan said. It was too quiet. It seemed abandoned. “It’s the government’s land now,” Iktan told me. “Because it is a good place to grow coffee.” His eyes were dark. He parked the car in front of a small house, and we set off into the jungle.
Two hours later, I was sucking in air with wild, heaving gasps. My heart thundered in my ears. I could see nothing but the path at my feet and Iktan in front of me, who seemed perfectly unbothered by the constant uphill slope, given the cigarette he was puffing. Suddenly the first man made thing in miles came into my tunnel vision and I was shocked out of my exhausted stupor. It was a sign, black ink on a plank of wood:
ESTA USTED EN TERRITORIO ZAPATISTA EN REBELDIA. AQUI MANDA EL PUEBLO Y EL GOBIERNO OBEDECE.
I was not horribly attached to the corrupt Mexican government (even considering their nice roads), but I had never heard of the Zapatista rebels. A cold panic touched my heart. “Iktan?” I asked. He kept trudging on, but responded without looking back: “If you want to experience the Maya you must experience the Zapatista.” I remained standing still. He turned around. “Don’t worry, they’re friends. They are Maya. You came for the Maya, did you not?” And he continued. A few seconds passed and then I followed. I felt as though I was stepping off a cliff. Perhaps that was the way it had to be. But now, on edge, I walked with awareness, my vision capturing everything around me, and I realized what I had been missing. The dense jungle was so much more than a blur of green. Intricately intertwining vines created tapestries of life, bright red and orange flowers sprouted from low hanging branches. Alien looking insects prowled under massive leaves. A squawking parrot would occasionally flit by overhead.
We reached a village as dusk settled. Iktan greeted a wizened old woman with a tight embrace as a cluster of kids ran over with excitement. They all spoke in Tzotzil and smiled at me warmly. They wore white with embroidered splashes of color. We sat around a fire and ate a meal of bean tamales and drank thick, goopy cacao. Iktan told me it was supposed to open my heart. It was hard to feel open: my body and soul were tired, and the cloud of mosquitoes hovering over my pink skin was thick. I sat directly in the smoke to escape them. Iktan left the fire early, and as I was making my way to my tent I saw him around a different fire with three other men — two distinctly indigenous and one mestizo. They looked serious, talking in quiet Tzotzil and gesturing wildly. I wrote in my journal before I slipped off to sleep.
Spring breeze brings
Refreshment on a moist
Mayan night
The next day I embarrassed myself by trying to offer money to Iktan’s friends for their hospitality. They laughed at my gesture, they had no use for money. Iktan said his goodbyes and we headed to Kʼop Ton, the place of reflecting stones. It was a long hike through the jungle and I was itching to lay my eyes on the ancient sight the whole way there. Finally, we reached a clearing, and in the middle I beheld the boulder, split perfectly in two. Each side was smooth as a mirror. Iktan asked if I wanted to hear the mythology. I knew it from my studies but wanted to hear from him. He began: “According to the Story of the Words, the first gods in one of their games found two stones that had been dragged around the world so much that they had become smooth like mirrors. They placed the stones opposite each other and started throwing words into one, which bounced back into the other, and every time the amount of words doubled. The first three words, the ones that gave birth to all the other words, were democracy, freedom, and justice.” The last part was new to me. I had known of course, this is where language began, but I did not know that those three were the first. “It is known by us,” said Iktan in response to my questioning, “and it is what we fight for.”
Iktan gave me a poem that day. It reads:
Did you listen?
It is the sound of your world crumbling.
It is the sound of our world resurging.
The day that was day, was night.
And night shall be the day that will be day.
Democracy!
Freedom!
Justice!
We stayed that night in the clearing, eating tortillas we brought from the village. The next day we hiked deeper into the jungle and a few hours went by before we came across another village. This one was larger and again Iktan was greeted warmly, but this time there were other Spanish speakers, the only people not wearing pure white. It was delightful to chat with them. They spoke artistic Spanish. A Spanish full of images and feelings. I felt I was communicating through poetry. “The wind welcomes you,” they told me. “The mountains watch over you,” they said. Some had grown up in the village, left to the city, and had come back. Others grew up in more populated parts of Chiapas. They were there because they were needed, they said. They were meeting deep in the jungle, where their spirits were born. “Meeting for what?” I asked them. They told me they were meeting about how to take back what was theirs, and refused to elaborate.
We had a feast for dinner and the mosquitos seemed less interested in me. By the light of the fire I wrote a small entry.
The eagle
Witnesses from above —
Yet the jungle calls
I slept well, feeling more comfortable with the thundering sound of the jungle at night; the squawking of the birds and croaking of the toads fell into the darkness. In the morning I was ready to head to Palenque. After hours of hiking, the first glimpse of stone rising above the trees sent chills down my spine. I picked up my pace. Iktan chuckled. When we emerged from the jungle I stopped dead in my tracks. The air was sucked out of my lungs. My head buzzed. Stretching out before me were huge structures ranging from 10 to 30 meters tall. They were covered with brush but clearly man-made, and the lay out of the city was obvious. It was the most unlikely sight in the world. A civilization hidden deep in the jungle. As I wandered through the ancient city I felt as though I was peering through layers of time. I could see the ball games being played in the stone ballcourt, the high priest making a bloody sacrifice at the temple base, the market open for trade from all over the Yucatan peninsula. This ruin was a memorial to a thousand years. A testament to the ancient power of the Maya. The proof of the greatness that had been here before the Spaniards arrived. Before my people arrived. And suddenly I was horribly aware of where I stood in the flow of time. I expressed my feelings to Iktan, and he responded: “Time is the rainy seasons, the slow passing of the constellations and the agricultural breath of the mountains, the valleys and the rainforests. We feel the rhythm of the land; the pulse of the land beats in their pulse; and from this we know that time says something to us. Our struggle has no time, neither a beginning nor an end, and we can continue for another 500 years.”
We walked through the quiet ruin, inspecting engravings and marveling at the ancient construction. Eventually we came across the massive spiral of a snail engraved on the sacrificial platform at the top of the Temple of the Sun. I had read about this. The snail represents the call for an assembly, the sounding of the conch shell. And then something hit me. I realized I had been seeing snail imagery throughout my journey. Iktan’s community seemed to have it engraved on everything. I asked him if it was related to the call for assembly. “Yes,” he responded. “And light and dark. Death and rebirth.” He gestured outwards, across the whole of Palenque. “What is in ruins will be reborn. The dark will become light.” I looked out at the majesty of the ancient city, solitary in a sea of green, and I thought perhaps he was right. My journal from that day reads:
The snail creeps slowly
With a hard shell
of a thousand years
Our next destination was Calakmul. One of the most powerful cities in the history of Maya, known for dominating much of the Yucatan and present-day Guatemala through trade and warfare. It was in a much deeper part of the Lacandon jungle. Getting there involved a week of travel, and felt like a never ending chain of river boats, bumpy rides in the back of pickup trucks, and miles and miles of trudging along muddy paths. The day before we would have reached Calakmul, I fell sick and had to be rehabilitated in another indigenous village. Iktan didn’t know the residents, but they took us in regardless. The hospitality of the villagers took me aback. I wondered how a tribe of indigenous folk with little access to the modern world had developed such a care for outsiders. I examined their character and saw nothing but generosity, a respect for the unity of the human spirit.
A few days of cacao and cornmeal got me back on my feet and finally one morning, the 7th of April, I was feeling ready to head out. We were served a delicacy of mushroom soup as we left. And then I dissolved into nature and four hours later we reached the Calakmul ruins and I was 50 meters in the sky and deep green stretched towards every corner of the horizon. It was a deep and passionate beauty, a joyous beauty, beauty that gripped my soul. It clashed potently with the knowledge of where I was standing. I was at the top of the mightiest temple, the place of sacrifice, where innocents were offered to the gods. And a place where war was called for, where the flames of violence were sparked. My head was swirling.
“Do you see it?” Iktan asked. I said I didn’t know. He looked me in the eyes and said: “Looking out at the jungle we speak with our dead so that they will reveal to us in their word the path down which our veiled faces should turn. In the voice of the earth our pain speaks and our history speaks. ‘For everyone, everything,’ say our dead. ‘Until it is so, there will be nothing for us.’ The cycle of death and rebirth continues and our spirit lives on. We are one, you see?” I felt the swelling of the earth. The eons beneath my feet. The road that had brought me here. I said: “I see.”
