colonialism

Some memories of less violent times (and a women’s space) in Chiapas

It’s sad for me to hear about the violence that has overcome Chiapas. Already back in 2018, the last time I was there, my friend Pilar told me grisly stories about what women there – women that she personally knows – had experienced and witnessed. Now there are increasingly more articles about the cartel violence that has made its way to the land of the Zapatistas. I found this one informative. I have been thinking about this because of a recent article about the assassination, in San Cristobal, of a priest who was an advocate for indigenous rights.

I started this blog at the beginning of a 6-week stay in San Cristobal in 2016*, but that was not my first time there. I spent about 3 months in Chiapas in the early 2000s and also went back for a few days in 2018 for the first women’s encounter convened by Zapatista women.

The first time around I spent about a month in a small Zapatista community – it was so different from what I saw in 2018! We had no electricity or running water. I would cook beans after making a fire with leña. I would use the onion and garlic we had brought from San Cristobal, but I would feel a pang of guilt when I’d share my beans with the villagers (all hermanos and hermanas) who always stopped by our place, as they would say things like “muy sabrosa su comida”… because they didn’t have much access to onions, garlic or anything else. I’d also use chili peppers but learned to tone it down as the people in that community did not eat spicy food and I didn’t want my beans to be too spicy to share.

On the subject of leña, my friend Patrick and I would always admire the muscular arms of the hermanas, because every day they chopped leña. Their arms were like tree trunks. I had met Patrick back in Switzerland during our preparatory workshops to go to Chiapas as human rights observers, and we ended up getting sent to this particular village together. Patrick’s Spanish was better than mine at the time, and he was much better read on Zapatismo and everything else, so he would spend a lot of time talking with people, including one of the two pairs of unmarried sisters of the village. He got some indication that marriage was of interest to one of them and he would muse about staying in Mexico and growing a little milpa. As a Swiss, he was seen as less macho and potentially a better husband than the local men. Those two sisters were feminists and unmarried, but Patrick was maybe the kind of man with whom marriage could be possible.

Indeed, the Zapatistas might have embraced feminism but that doesn’t mean that attitudes completely changed overnight. I was also the object of some interest: some of the young men asked Patrick if I was a virgin, presumably to see if I was marriage material. Patrick told them that he didn’t know and they should ask me directly. They never did, thankfully!

There was another pair of older unmarried sisters who grew tobacco and rolled puros. They’d come give us a taste, “like any good dealer” as Patrick would joke, and we spent a lot of our time sitting around and smoking those homegrown puros. I might still have some in my old boxes. We also rolled our own but mine were pretty bad and I kept having to relight them, so I was happy to purchase theirs. My theory was these two were also shamans or some sort of healers, but I would not have been privy to that. I do know however that shamanism was part of the local social fabric. One of the women who led the workshops we attended before going to Chiapas was an anthropologist by training, and she initially went to Mexico in that capacity. She shared how her sister had suffered severe, debilitating depression and had been cured of it by a shaman in Chiapas. She warned us however against prying.

For bathing, we had to walk a ways to get to the river. There was a different spot for men and women, and self-conscious as I am, I just had to deal with it and take my shirt off in front of the other women. One time an hermana pinched my boob and said “que hueros tus chichis!” Getting to and from the bathing spot always made me anxious because there were cows grazing and they were very aggressive, they would sometimes run after you and stare you down. The villagers would say to be careful of the vaca loca. I would skirt around the field as much as I could, and luckily, nothing ever happened (aside from being scared out of my mind). To this day I am still afraid when I pass cows and especially bulls while hiking.

The annoyances are fond memories now, because I am glad I got to know a little bit of that world. Like the last night I spent in our shack, lying there worried that scorpions would fall on me. Our walls were just wooden planks with gaps between them. There was a strong storm so the wind was blowing inside, and we had given up on trying to light candles. Scorpions and tarantulas were common in that area, and I had seen a couple scorpions that evening on our walls or ceiling. I lay there worried that as the whole structure shook, any scorpions that might be above me would be shaken loose. Thank the Goddess, that was not so, and the next day we made our way back to San Cristobal unscathed, wading through deep mud.

My trip in 2018 was shorter but powerful. Zapatista women convened a women’s encounter – for “mujeres que luchan” – and while they expected about 1500 women, about 6000 showed up. We absolutely made do. We had enough food, the bathrooms weren’t great but we survived, we made connections and we got to be in a wonderful male-free environment for several days, with Zapatista women patrolling with their uniforms and weapons to make sure there were no men (they are soldiers after all). There were talks, activities and art and photography exhibitions (many of which would have been deemed “white feminism” by wokesters in the US). I attended a talk that featured a recorded message to our gathering from a Kurdish fighter in Rojava, during which she stressed that women’s oppression is the first colonization. A good message, and one that American wokesters would again dismiss as white feminism if they heard it from a “white” woman.**

The ignorance and mind-addling ID politics of Americans are what they are–at least some American women got to hear these ideas and experience this sort of space in a way that they could actually hear and experience them (if not entirely accept them). It didn’t escape me that this was just a few years after Mitchfest shut down. As someone both of American and Iranian origin, I can say in no uncertain terms that just as whitewashing is a thing, brownwashing is also a thing. But again, it is what it is. While some will have the need to see this space as something that only indigenous women have ever built, it does not take away from the fact that the space and experience were truly very special.

The last night we got treated to a party and a show, with theater (one skit on the harms of prostitution coming to indigenous communities) and music (ski-masked Zapatista women with electric guitars felt like a world away from my little Tojolabal village of yore, where to have a party meant that we danced some sort of awkward two-step to a rythmless marimba). At the end of the program, everything went completely dark. We stood there waiting. Then, hundreds of candles were lit, held by the Zapatista women who were standing around us. They gave a powerful and moving speech that stayed with me for days.

Well, I don’t know exactly what it is that stayed with me; it could have been the words that were spoken, it could have been the impressive spectacle effect, maybe some sort of ritual power had been raised, or maybe it was the whole experience of my days spent there… I don’t know. What I can say is that for days afterwards, I felt an opening in my chest, unlike anything I had experienced before or since. I believe something happened to my heart chakra, an opening, a healing, something. While I don’t know exactly what I was feeling and what caused it, I believe that healing and accessing other experiences can happen when women take time to be away from men.

Holding their candles, the Zapatista women asked that as we go back into the world, we always carry the light that they were giving us, that we remember that we are not alone but in sisterhood, that we continue our lucha.

I have been wondering whether I should restart Seed the Commons, and how best to go about it. I think that the decolonial perspective that Chema and I brought to the table can still be useful. I’ve been a bit taken aback recently by the lack of sensitivity (and integrity) around racism, sexism and colonization from the white Canadians I’ve come in contact with. (I apologize for being so specific, but this is the truth.) It think it is showing me possible directions for future projects. I will see.

I still carry the lucecita you gave me, hermanas.

* So many belated thanks to Pilar for helping me access indigenous communities for my research and for taking me on hiking outings! You helped make my trip a success.

** I use quotes sometimes when using these words not to imply criticism but to indicate that I am referring to the way Americans use these words, which might not be my own default way of using them or the default way of other people. The way Americans use terms like white, brown, black, POC… tends to be US-centric (and tautological), which is fine, but not universal (this is not evident for Americans as US-centrism leads them to take as given that their language, premises and ways of categorizing the world are universal).

White People in the Caribbean?

When I moved to the US, I was surprised by the common representations of Latinos held by Americans. Latinos are often thought of as racially homogenous and Latino is likened to a racial category. Like the United States, Latin America is racially diverse, so this is as ridiculous as thinking that the citizens of the US are racially homogenous.

In Latin America, like in the United States, Indigenous lands and peoples were colonized by Europeans. Like in the United States, Africans were brought as slaves to many regions. Like in the United States, Latin America continued to attract immigrants from different parts of the world after the end of the colonial era. Consequently, there are people who are of Indigenous, Black and European descent, with various combinations of the above depending on the specific history of their region and family. There are also people of Middle Eastern, Asian and other origins. So yes, there are white Latinos. There are even Asian Latinos.

In Mexico, the majority of the population is Mestizo, which refers to someone who is a mix of European and Indigenous. Since many of the Latinos in California are Mexican or Central American, they often are the face of “Latino”, to the extent that white and Black Latinos are sometimes not recognized as such. But even in Mexico, there are white and Afro-Mexican populations.

This conflation of ethnic and national categories with a racial one largely stems, in my opinion, from US-centrism. Part of this is the sense that diversity is the purview of the US and that all people south of the border are the same. US-centrism also shapes how the categories of “white” and “people of color” are conceptualized and delineated. I plan to devote a post to discussing the US-centrism of American racial categories and when and how it leads to confusion, but in the meantime, I want to leave y’all with this great commentary:

Persian Vegan Food

I didn’t intend to do food posts but I do wish that the search terms “Persian/Iranian + vegan” would bring up more results, so here it is.

A vegan Iranian friend invited me to celebrate Norooz at her house this year and this is the vegan dinner with which we celebrated new beginnings and the new year.

For Norooz, it is traditional to eat fish with herbed rice. We stuck to tradition – somewhat. Tradition is not an excuse for cruelty, so we upheld both tradition and compassion and enjoyed some mock fish. We also had ash reshteh, mast khiar, stuffed eggplant that’s not pictured, torshi, olives and other sides, salad and baklava for dessert. Let me say again for the search engines that this was an entirely vegan Persian dinner.

The main chef was my friend’s 73-year old vegan Persian mother, a woman who loves animals and has participated in several protests with Direct Action Everywhere. Protest is not only for the young, and veganism is not only for the West. There is a notion that elderly people, working-class people, non-Westerners, and people of color are stuck in their ways. They can’t understand animal liberation and they won’t give up their favorite dishes. It’s not true though, people from all demographics are choosing plant-based diets, for health, spirituality, sustainability, and for compassion.

A few years ago, I exchanged a few pleasantries with some students at work. One of them asked me where my name was from. I said Iran and without missing a beat, he asked if Iranian food had a lot of meat. It seemed like such a random question: he didn’t know that I was vegan and we were not in a place with food or any reference to food. He might have been speaking of food with his friends but from my vantage point his question came out of nowhere. Then again, not entirely out of nowhere.

At the time, San Francisco was experiencing the full force of the foodie obsession with meat done right and with the appreciation of tradition and culture as cardinal virtues come mealtime. I was working at a yoga studio that sold copies of the book Nourishing Traditions, which positioned Tradition with a capital T against the unbalanced and déraciné take on food of the modern West. It relied on a few meat-heavy traditions to convey a generic and universalist idea of Tradition and forgotten wisdom, and its populistic tone was effective in delegitimizing vegetarianism in the minds of many readers.

The man who asked about Iran was from Argentina, which is one of the few countries that rivals the US with its obsession with meat. This could explain his enthusiasm for meat and perhaps his implicit adoption of the notion that of course, all traditions are meat based. In the case of Iran, this isn’t true. While most Iranian dishes contain some meat or dairy, I contend that Iranian cuisine is one of the most easily veganizable. It does not seem to have been developed with meat as the central feature. If you take a steak dinner and remove the steak, you’re left with some potatoes and a sprig of parsley. On the other hand, if you take adas polo or ghormeh sabzi and omit the meat, you’re left with complex flavors and satisfying dishes in their own right.

Amongst the Diaspora and in Iran, meat is now consumed often and in relatively large quantities but this is a recent development, as in most of the Global South. The chunks of meat in khoreshs have gotten bigger and more numerous, kebab has become more than an occasional treat. I once asked my dad how often he ate meat as a child and he answered with the impatient tone reserved for stupid questions, “people didn’t have money in those days!” By the standards of a third-world country in the 1950s, my dad wasn’t poor. He had shoes and my grandfather had a decent white-collar job, but meat was not eaten daily. I might as well have asked if everyone had a car.

Remove meat and dairy from Persian food and you still have one of the most sophisticated and flavorful cuisines in the world. But perhaps you have money for meat and you want that umami richness – I get it. It’s a great opportunity to play with new ingredients. Make kookoo with chickpea flour and black salt, learn to make your own nut-based feta and seitan, and divert that meat budget to wonderful plant-based alternatives.

I am not a stickler for authenticity. We’ve seamlessly incorporated tomatoes (“foreign berries”) from Mexico and potatoes from Peru into our khoreshs – why not also adopt the delicious mock meats that our East Asian neighbors have developed for centuries? This Norooz, my friend’s mom tasted mock fish for the first time and said “Why would anybody kill a poor fish when they can eat this delicious food instead?” Why indeed.

It’s often thought that non-Westerners can’t and won’t change their ways, but perhaps more questionable is the idea that they shouldn’t. Westerners have profited off the destruction of cultures and economies around the world and now want to be the guardians of authenticity and maintaining others’ traditions. For the benefit of whom? Somehow it’s always imperative to “experience culture” when it comes to tasting grilled llama or roasted pig but there’s less enthusiasm about partaking in the authentic experience of eating beans three times a day. The westernization of diets also doesn’t seem to concern many when it takes the form of skyrocketing milk and meat consumption, which is the problem that most people are actually experiencing. So what is this trend really about?

The former colonialists want to display their now-enlightened relationship to non-Western peoples by the gratuitous consumption of their folklore. Meanwhile, peoples’ food systems, livelihoods and lifestyles are still being eroded because imperialism has simply taken new forms. If you want to resist this, there are better ways to do it than fashioning yourself into an Anthony Bourdain and shaming people away from animal liberation.

Let’s not selectively uphold traditions – or our idea of them – to resist social change. The beautiful culinary traditions of the world can and should still be appreciated as we build a world where animals are friends, not food. As all living traditions, cuisines continually evolve, and what better reason to do so than compassion?