Chiapas Journal by Peter Cunningham Wednesday April 18, 2001 - Airport resaurant, no sleep, plane full of sneezers, three hour layover, no place to lie down, but, but, I am eating guacamole in Mexico City! Bernie Glassman (Zen teacher and apprentice clown), Eve Marko (Bernie's wife and writer) fly down from LA, we are staying here for a day with the Sufi community before heading further South. diner with Amina and her Sufi cohorts; she is a compadre from our travels to Jerusalem and to Auschwitz and she is the head Sheik of the Sufi Order in Mexico City. Thursday - Bernie, Eve, and I tour Mexico City by Metro. I've never been Mexico and I'm very surprised at how little english is spoken - the metro is physically like Paris' but the riders seem to be mostly lower class and the closing car doors are unforgiving. We ascend at a random station in the middle of town to find a vibrant stew of music and munching; no corporations in this quarter, just the people of Mexico. The food looks fantastic, but we've been warned not to buy food from street vendors. Wandering, suddenly there are more store windows with fashions to sell, so many mannequins, many nude or with a thousand versions of the wedding dress. Eve wants us to find the "Zocalo"; we enter a huge public square with government buildings on all sides and the biggest flag I've ever seen flying on what must be a hundred foot flagpole; it's larger than the flag used car dealers fly in Jersey. Sirens. A crowd rushes across the other side of the square, a man breaks free, 20 soldiers/police run after, half of them break away, the other ten catch the guy and swing their clubs over his body many many times; they are enthusiastic about their work. A swarm of photographers and camera crews run to catch up with the action, they miss the beating but record the bleeding Zapatista protester. I hold back from razing my camera for the beating, I'm new here and don't know the rules; I promised Lisa I would come home safely. A hundred people gather around the bleeding body, an ambulance takes it's time but finally carries him off in a stretcher. The solders return to their busses showing each other how they swung their clubs. The Zapatistas of Chiapas, revolutionaries without a lot of guns but with a very good pr operation, marched hundreds of miles to the capital this month to demand that the Mexican Congress honor agreements they signed four years ago; an encampment and daily demonstrations remain. We asked about the beating over the next few days, but apparently it wasn't considered newsworthy enough to make the papers either in Mexico City or in Chiapas. Severe beatings must be a routine ritual. The afternoon is too long a story for this journal, but suffice it to say we attended an interfaith conference organized at an institute run by our host Sheik Amina; There are religious representatives from all the faiths of Mexico City; my best conversation was with a TIbetan Monk who came here to teach meditation and raise money for the monks back in Asia, but who has recently realized that there is great need right here in Mexico and is trying to figure out how to help. In the evening Bernie and I attend Sufi Zikker. About 40 dervishes gather at the Mosque; bernie gives a talk, Zen and Sufism have a lot in common. The Zikker is ecstatic singing and dancing, individuals becoming one. I am honored to be given a Sufi name by Sheik Amina, my name is "Abdul Basir": Servant of the One Who Sees (or just, The One Who Sees). Friday - Fly to Chiapas, two hours into San Christobal de la Casis, meet Moshe Cohen (aka Mr.Yoowho) who has flown in from San Francisco, Moshe is a master clown and Bernie's clown teacher. Moshe is the head of Clowns without Borders-USA and has been coming here to Chiapas for 15 years. He takes us to the hills above town where we will be staying with Alejandra Alvarez who works with the Sava Foundation supporting community development among indigenous people in Chiapas. We meet two other Payassos (clowns), Rudy and Brian (Smedly-O), theyÕve been here a week and have incredible stories to tell, Brian will be staying on and performing with us. Exhaustion for both Bernie and me after a long day of flying, walking, and dancing. We crave rest. Saturday Breakfast in town, they serve hot peppers with eggs, my kind of place. The market. Watch Rudy and Brian perform behind the cathedral, they are great and the kids are in heaven, I now understand why this work is important. Wander. The color, a complete a feast of visual harmony for the eyes that flows right to the heart.

Sunday First trip to the countryside - with 3 people from the Zapatistas informational service - half hour on paved roads and then an hour and a half on a tough dirt road - such innocence in the children, Moshe says there's nothing like it around the world, that this is a rare place and it won't be like this forever. Bernie does his first Clowns without Borders performance, has a cigar knocked out of his mouth by a juggling pin and sits in a chair that breaks. We are offered supper after - walk to the top of the hill where an old woman is hand making corn tortillas over an open flame - we eat outside with the chickens and dogs and children - beans and avocados and an unknown vegetable that is supposed to cure diabetes. The afternoon is Monday- wake, step out to find 3 horses grazing at the doorstep. Packing for a 3 day trip into the deep countryside, don't really know what to expect. In town I buy a rainbow-colored basketball; basketball is the sport of choice in the indigenous communities, perhaps it is too mountainous for soccer fields. Another long drive, but more paved road to a Zapatista community- I pull out the rainbow basketball and my making lookaway passes to the children quickly turns into me being the monster they are attacking - I challenge and they turn and run away, they challenge and I cower in fear and run away only to rise up in my full mightiness yet again and send the kids scattering - this become a chase all around the large bb court; when I'm exhausted I fall to the ground and they stand over me, about 20 of them, and I rise up again - the whole village watches the spectacle - Bernie suggests I pied piper them into a sitting place for the show to begin, which I do but when I sit they gather and stare - I have to do something, so I do a series of sounds - ahhh, eeee, iiii, ooo, uuuu.... faces, .....I sing row row row your boat - such a rare problem, an audience that just won't go away! We are called away for an important meeting. I am the last to enter a small hut, dark but for the light coming through the open door and the cracks in the walls, benches on all 4 sides, all filled with very serious looking men and us. We have been summoned to explain to the community council why we came here and they will decide if we are to do it. It's all very serious and it's out of the question to make a photograph, but Moshe finally breaks the ice by making a cigarette disappear up his nose and then sneezing it out into his hands and the council decides by concensus that the show will go on. The payassos perform, I expose film. It is dark when we finish we finish with the juggling of fire. We are shown our sleeping quarters in a bunk-bed dorm with 40 children. Our "contadora" friend Ivan from Catalonia (these idealistic workers remind me of the Spanish Civil War) reads to the children to sleep in their indigenous (Mayan) tongue. The afternoon is Tuesday- at 4:30 2 workers dress and leave, I follow hoping to find my nose which I lent yesterday in the truck- lie awake until 6:30 when the kids start to awake still wearing yesterdayÕs cloths with no concept that others are sleeping - I get up with the light, kids gather around me when they notice I am making notes, I ask them to each write their names in my notebook, they are all very catholic names - the kids wash their faces and feet at a faucet plugged into a large cement cube container that holds the community water supply which has been funneled through the gutters of the aluminum roof of our dormitory building. The tank is covered on two sides by a bright red and white "Vivala Coke". The afternoon is Eve is up now and the children swarm around her feeling the bumps on her head, comparing their warm brown hands to her winter white forearms, and placing their fingernails side by side with hers. The same thing happened to me later, I was surrounded by 20 kids, mostly just prepubescent girls probably 2-4 years away from motherhood. They did all the comparisons and pulled at my arm hair and reached up under my arms, and pulled at my chest hair - they were fascinated and excited and then they pulled me away from the community center off about a hundred yards into a prepared but unplanted garden. They pulled me down to my knees and they then picked green weed leaves which they sowed into my hair. It was a strange feeling; under different circumstances their curiosity about my exotic body might have know no limits, I thought of the first white sailors to land in Tahiti...but, but I led them back on a merry jaunt to the community square and on the way we danced around a group of older women who were crowded around a spout washing radishes. I made photographs, they gave me 5 radishes. Radishes make perfect substitute clown noses. All this before breakfast. Two women have been tending a fire in a small cooking hut since before dawn. Breakfast is these tortillas with black beans and hot green peppers. They serve hot 'coffee' that we think is actually burt corn. There is never any silverware. Four women in red and white traditional clothing stand behind a counter serving the food, when I bus my empty plate and use half my entire Spanish vocabulary (mucho gracious). Among themselves they speak their indigenous language. They giggle and blush; the older women and mother tend to stay very far in the background even during our performances and are rarely seen in the company of their men. During breakfast (which Moshe doesn't eat, his stomach is queazy) the head of the community council asks if we would repeat our show for the kids who didn't see it the night before - Moshe insists on inventing a variation of the previous show which he does with Brian and Bernie in 30 minutes. The children are singing in class as we prepare - the teacher must have instructed them in clapping because it's apparently not part of this culture and this is the only performance where the audience responded with unison applause, pleasing the North American performers. The afternoon is Moshe is not feeling well. We go. Town,tires, batteries, Moshe dyspeptic, pickup and drop off people everywhere, the back of our pickup is a clichˇ of all movies and books about traveling in a pickup in Mexico. This is a down and dirty Mexican town, way off the gringo path . To a house on the outskirts of town, a half mile past the paved road where we are to have lunch and they are to have a meeting about alcoholism. More tortillas hot off the open fire to soak up our beans served with a precious egg. Social pressure to clean our plates. Moshe, Bernie, and Eve meet in a shadey grove behind the houses to discuss their new book project about Clowning and Zen. Four boys play in the field with a slingshot. We arrive at our 4:00 show at a school at the end of a dirt roadwith lots of dogs on the outtskirts of town. The teachers are practicing Mexican folk dance on the baskeball court for the talent show tomorrow night; nobody has assembled for our spectacluar. Moshe is irritated that nothing is organized and that there is another school right up the road that hasn't been invited. Apparently they are of a different political party, but Moshe sees the work of Clowns without Borders as being about bring disparate groups together in laughter as well as leaving "no child without a smile". Moshe is pissed and feeling sick but does a great show which ends in a downpour; when the rain ends Moshe pukes his guts out behind a classroom. Brian (Smedley-O) opened this show by approaching the videographer (me) with his portable loudspeaker as if in a battle of power between sound and light; I realize quickly that it is my role to lose this battle and pass power to the payasso while ridiculing the photographer who they still actively suspect might be stealing souls, so I take a fall, this time off an 18 inch ledge onto the dirt gravel below. I make a quick falling plan which protects my camera and take the dive. I'm told it caused quite a laugh, but the funny part for me was that I found the shooting angle from the dirt to be an improvement over what I had before I fell. We decide to head home to San Christobol rather than be sick in outhouses - Bernie and I bundle up prepared for cold and rain, but we had a lovely ride back in the dark in the back of the pickup - talked the whole way about the "meme" of money, and the "meme" of the one body, and about where human evolution is going. Wednesday: Lots of sickness, we cancel our show, I feel fine. I spend the day in town wandering and photographing, my idea of a good time. Thursday: After breakfast in town, our little group of 5 takes of for the 2 hour drive with three different diseases among us; I have a wicked sore throat, Moshe is still queazy from his stomach flu/food poisoning of yesterday and both Bernie and Brian have had diarrhea all night, plus, it's raining. But the heavy rain holds off and our health holds on as we head high up into the mountains and valleys of Zapatista country where roving paramilitary units have recently been active. They are apparently agents of the big landlords here in a Mexican state where 20 families own 80% of the land. We ride in our open pickup truck through layers of clouds and islands of sunlight, up into mountain villages where the only advertising to be seen are the ubiquitous Coke and Pepsi signs; they provide color, but not the only color; the women are almost all dressed in their traditional indigenous clothing, each ethnic group having their own patterns, the colors they choose to wear are SO beautiful and the cloths are so clean though the women are simply herding sheep or carrying young children in bags thrown over their shoulders. Many times see see young girls, also dressed in traditional attire carrying their younger siblings. The men and boys were occasionally dressed traditionally, but more often were in cowboy hats and jeans. A Roman toga or two were spotted, I didn't know the Romans had made it into Mexico. We were greeted in Acteal by a sour man who pulled a Zapatista mask over his face and by a statue erected by the Swiss memorializing the massacre of 45 people by the paramilitaries a few years ago. The people killed were pacifist indigenous people and the army barracks were close by when it happened. This has become a place of pilgrimage on the anniversary for thousands of indigenous and their sympathizers from Mexico City and beyond. We are sick and tired, but we are told by a friendly organizer (not everything in this part of the world is organized and very little runs on a schedule) that we are to do a show in a small displaced persons camp about 15 minutes away and then come back up here for an afternoon show. We take on 5 teenage boys in the back of the truck and head down to Vibelho. In the back of the truck I take on the role of of public payasso (clown) donning my pink rubber nose and wildly waving at all the children (and adults and road workers and shepherds and dogs) that we pass by. Almost without exception a smile comes to their faces, everybody seems to know about the idea of "payassos" and the red nose is a symbol they seem to equate with lightness and laughter. 30 minutes later the dirt road become impassible and we disembark for the final walk down to the village, the children carry our bags and we descend through coffee bushes under which roosters are regularly having their way wit h willing chickens. If National Geographic set up a theme park in partnership with DIsney, it would look just like this town, right down to the presence of the International Red Cross. These, apparently, are people who have been forced to leave their land under threat from the paramilitaries (land on which they may have been squatters, nothing is simple), wooden shacks, children and animals pissing freely and mud, mud, mud. Nobody has been told we are coming, but an announcement goes out over the loudspeaker - apparently the only form of mass communication - and people continually arrive throughout the show. Moshe ("Mr.Yoowho"), Brian ("Smedley-O"), and Bernie ("The Boobysatva") make the children laugh, but Moshe theorizes the that biggest beneficiary of this work are the care taking adults and village leaders; they lead a very difficult life with little hope for the future and for them to be given a moment in which they can laugh and see their children laugh must be energizing for the rough road ahead. No applause. It is not the custom here, but it sometimes throws off Brian's rhythm; he is accustomed to finishing a spectacular juggle or ball spinning routine with a flourish a bow and culturally conditioned applause. But they laugh and that is what Moshe lives for. Moshe is a master-payaso, he has the ability to perform and listen at the same time; he is very sensitive to what brings out the laughter in a particular audience and he is able to vary or extend what he is doing to respond in real time to the laughter. And each community or town is different. The Red Cross medic gives us a powdered herb from his hand to cure stomach problems, it's aromatic but it starts Moshe's stomach rumbling again and he has two episodes in the "latrine" before and right after the next and final show in Acteal. He is what they call, "a trooper". For the show in Acteal we climb down from the road about a hundred yards into what passes for a town square, one building and some benches under a tarp. As the Payassos prepare and the loudspeaker announces our arrival I play with about 20 kids who gather around attracted by my exuberant gait and my red nose. They get over their shyness quickly (this community is often visited by outsiders) and they are soon touching my nose and then trying it on - I have come to a policy of never putting it back on my own nose once it has been filled with the snot of 10 indigenous children. After the show Moshe goes from group to group singing with his ukulele, "love is a rose but you better not pick it only grows when it is on the vine hands full of thorns and you know you've missed it lose your love when you say the word mine..." The long drive home to San Christobal is stunning in the fading misty light. Dinner at the Cafe Theatro is the best we've had, the beer slides down gently. Friday. Pack up and head out. Moshe advises us to have a lie ready for the internal immigration officials at the airport (we are tourists visiting the pyramids); it seems he and Rudy were interrogated heavily on a previous visit and he doesn't want them to know that we've been touring Zapatista villages, clown or no. There is no problem, everyone is friendly, the war here is in suspension, the army is being partially withdrawn from Chiapas, the National Congress is debating an indigenous peoples bill of rights and everyone here is holding their breath. I, however, find it an ominous sign that Jesse Helmes visited Mexico City last week and had what was described as a "very friendly meeting" with the Mexican government. Peter Cunningham

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