The space was a small classroom, all the chairs to one side of the room, which we had to organize so that we could hear the "refugees" as they talked to us. We had crossed a school yard with a few small trees. It was foggy and cold, but children played soccer in front of the school, where a cheerful Catholic sister greeted us. She was too young to command the formal treatment of usted from one of my companions. She spoke Tzotzil to the people who stood respectfully behind her. Before we went in for our conversations, Sister Celia said that she had been in Chiapas for nine years. The language had been so difficult to learn! She recalled crying every night for a long time. "And then," she said, "all of a sudden, it was my language. I still don't know how it happened."

It was the Tzotzil language that surrounded us in the classroom: rich in sibilants and accented word endings, full of `l's and long `e's, a liquid language to match the streams of the high sierra that is the home of the Tzotziles. A language that survived the subjugation of both the colony and the republic. A language used to carry deep pain. This time, as before, we would hear from a man first. We were mostly a diverse Angloamerican group of 21 that also included one German, one Chinese from Hong Kong, and one uprooted Mexican from Pennsylvania, me. The man, Saúl, "took up the word," as the ancient Spanish expression goes and is solemnly used by the indigenous people of Chiapas. He recalled the story of his flight from the village of Los Chorros in Chenalhó, back in September. He was a member of Las Abejas, The Bees, a Catholic peaceful organization, the same that was repressed in Acteal. He spoke about money extorsion on the part of his enemies, armed supporters of the PRI, indigenous like himself, interested in the profits of a gravel pit whose ownership is in question. He spoke in short Spanish sentences, giving me an opportunity to translate into English. Articulate and clear, he was but one of many examples of the new man the rebellion has made visible to the world.

Only the previous Saturday, Saúl had gone back to the town to bring out other people. Eva, the woman sitting to my left, was one of them. She spoke next, in Tzotzil; Saúl translated into Spanish, which they call Castilla, like all Mayans in the state; and I translated into English. Not for a moment did Eva doubt the power of her words, in spite of the tenuous lines of delivery through two more channels. She kept her eyes on the audience as if someone from NBC had come to train her as an improbable anchorwoman. She was small and barefooted, and her feet were caked with mud. She looked old, but she spoke of her young children and her elderly father, whom they had to carry out of the village under cover of dark. She was probably no older than forty. Saúl and others had taken several dozen people out that night, risking everyone's life. Now they feared for the future. Their corn was stolen, their homes ransacked, the coffee they planted would be harvested by someone else. In the camp they were cold, really cold, and hungry, subject to a spare diet of corn, beans and rice brought in by the diocese, but lacking in vegetables, fruits and meat. Eva said she felt ridiculous in the clothes she had been given: she missed her own huipil, made by her hands in the tradition of centuries, with the only threads that have held her people together and her culture alive. She said the children were sick.

Eva wept loudly, but did not stop speaking. Holding the edge of her shawl to her mouth, she had trouble pausing for translation, her words bursting forth toward her audience. I held her hand as I translated, sensing the flow of her words through me, happy to be her tongue. After the conference, members of our group embraced her with wordless expressions of sorrow. We kept asking ourselves: how can we tell others what we have seen. How can we convey the depth of suffering that the government policy is bringing to the state, or the sweeping changes that are coming to Chiapas, and from Chiapas to the rest of Mexico...

It was the second of January, but the year felt spent, the future opaque. Yet the bishop Don Samuel, called Tatic, or dear father by the Tzeltales of San Cristóbal, had said that a great hope is rising out of Chiapas. He had said that only two days before, in the Cathedral. And Margarito Ruiz, a former congressman, had told our group that change is coming as surely as dawn, and that it is only a matter of how much longer these conditions will prevail, and how many more people will be killed.

Aurora Camacho de Schmidt
January 16, 1997