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THE FABRIC OF LIFE The inevitable tide of progress creeps into remote Mayan villages in Mexico's Yucatan |
THE FABRIC OF LIFE
The fabric of life is changing here. When I first arrived, and for many, many years previous, everything centered around the family and the
milpa, the small farming plots each family has. Very early every morning, the men and boys of the family left for the milpa. There are no
horses here, so the main mode of transportation was bicycles and walking, rifle slung over your shoulder. One might get lucky and shoot
some game that day; a Chachalaka, a wild pig, maybe even a deer if your land was far enough out in the hills, “en el monte”. There were
only a couple of field areas that had a communal well that the government had dug, where water could be drawn out to irrigate the crops.
Here you had a turn, a day, so many hours a week, of water usage. The irrigation channels were hard packed dirt furrows between the
crops, those being primarily corn, various beans, and peanuts. At times watermelon and tomatoes would be grown also. A great deal of
this was just for home consumption and little was left over to sell. Many farmers supplemented their income by beekeeping. This region
produces several kinds of honey, and much of it is exported, if of high enough quality. My favorite is from the flower of the plant they call
“Ts’iits’ilche”, the honey of which is light in color and has a delicate, slightly orange flavor. Every year someone brings me a liter Coke
bottle of it, which I treasure. The tahonal flower and the jabin tree are also important sources of honey for this region.
The village has a couple of tractors for tilling, preparing the land, after the last years crop residual has been burned. The ash is a source
of nutrients for the future crops, and burning rids the fields of bugs and insects. The farming areas are widely spread out in the valleys
between the hills, and not visible from the highway around our village. They are anywhere from 2 to 6 or 7 kilometers from the town, quite
a hike in this climate. Each area is composed of the group of men who have their plots of land in that area. Each is a small society of men,
and can be quite powerful within the village political structure. Women do not have fields in this area, but they are the ones, with their
younger sons, whose job it is to go into the hills and cut “leña”, the cooking fire wood from dead trees. You will see them in the late afternoon,
returning with tump lines around their heads, shouldering large bundles of cut sticks for their cooking fires. They appear out of the scrub
jungle from invisible trails, like apparitions, stepping suddenly out onto the road. This job also falls to the elderly men, and it continually
amazes me how strong they all are, to support such bundles, walking long distances back to the town in this heat.
Planting is done in the age old way. Poking a sharpened stick into the ground and dropping in a seed, tamping the dirt over with your foot,
and continuing. Machines don’t sow seed or weed, water, or harvest here. People do. When a big crop is ready, everybody in the family
will go out to help. There is laughter and joking and the soft lifting Maya language floats and soars in the air. The Maya language is lovely
to listen to. It always reminds me of music, music with an African flare to it almost, and a wonderful cadence. I have been surrounded by it
for the last 14 years, as it is the language of the interior of the peninsula, not Spanish, and yet I have learned little more than words and
phrases. It is not an easy language to learn.
Where the men rule in the fields, the women rule in the cooking palapas. Cooking is still done with cooking fires, three rocks with a metal
grill placed on top of them, commonly the top of an oil barrel. Meat is broiled on skewers of green wood, off to the side. The grill is to cook
the tortillas, made from fresh ground corn, after the meal is cooked. The meal most times is cooked in metal pots, hung from chains and
hooks from the roof poles, or placed directly on the rocks over the fire. The pots are charred black on the outside, but scrubbed clean
inside after the food is finished each day, and hung upside down on the kitchen pole structure, away from rodents and animals, until
needed again. Beans are reheated in the late afternoon to keep them from souring, to be eaten again the next day. With other foods,
only what can be eaten that day will be cooked, or whatever food is available. Meals can be quite meagre if a family is very poor, but there
will always be tortillas and chillies. There is one main meal a day, eaten around 1 to 2 PM. In the later afternoon, it is bath time for everyone.
The cooking palapa is the heart of the family, at least until after the meal. Here the women and girls spend most of their hours preparing
and cooking the meal, gossiping and discussing the village events, or “desgranando” the corn ears, removing the dried corn kernels from
the husks by rubbing them together, a job not as easy as it looks, and which can take hours. These kernels are then boiled in a powdered
lime and water mixture to soften them and remove the coarse outer shell before grinding the next day. While one girl hand washes the
family clothes in the “batella” and hangs them to dry, another will be sent to the “molino” to get the corn ground, and yet another “to buy”
whatever is needed for the meal that the family might not have. Pigs, chickens, and turkeys are the Mayas saving account. They can
always be sold, or eaten, if all else fails, so everyone has them. In our village, everyone has their own chickens to slaughter, but most will
buy the pork they need daily from whomever has slaughtered a pig in the wee hours of the morning. Your own pigs and turkeys are saved
for special occasions, or raised to sell for other things that are needed. Only a few people raise cattle, and only one is slaughtered per
week, so beef is only available on Saturday in the early morning.
Children are not really pushed to stay in school, especially the girls, as they are needed to help out in the family. Many of the girls are not
allowed to go further than 6th grade, as soon after, they will be of marriageable age. When a girl marries, she goes to the new husband’s
family, and becomes part of the fabric of this family. And of course, when a son marries, that family inherits a new daughter. It is very rare
that the new couple would move out of, or away from, the village. This extended family means that there is never a shortage of help and
comfort, someone to care for the children and the old or infirm, people to share the burdens of work, and it has worked very well. It is a
very secure feeling.
And now it is being threatened. Before, we had several men who worked construction on highways or buildings, in Merida or around
Cancun. They would return every two weeks, or once a month, for a day, perhaps two, and go back on the bus to work. If the need
arose, another brother, cousin, or uncle was always around to help the family women. Cutting down a tree, rebuilding the rock property
walls called albarradas, fixing the one light in the sleeping palapa. Some family member was there, available to help.
A few years ago, the migration to the north began, men going over the border, seeking work. Most often this was, and is, in California,
with each village getting established in a certain area, slowly building their own community within a community. Speaking their own
language, preparing their own food dishes inasmuch as possible, leaving behind wives and mothers, sisters and aunts, and children.
So the women were left alone, and children began to grow up with no fathers, no uncles, and no older brothers. Women moved back
to their mothers house to share responsibilities and chores and child care, to not be alone. The men sent back money, a great deal
in comparison to what they had before, and new businesses arose because of it. Construction material places boomed, as everyone
started building a new concrete block house. Avon products became a big seller, as women now had money to buy “frivolities”. Clothing
styles changed and the traditional white embroidered dress called a huipil was replaced by modern dresses and jeans and tee shirts for
the young. Modest plastic sandals gave way to high platform shoes. Nail polish became the rage along with permanent hair waves and
hair coloring. Everyone had to have a washing machine now, even if it could only wash one pair of jeans at a time, a refrigerator (with
nothing but Coke inside, usually to sell), and maybe even a stove, the oven being a good place to store your new dishes. Furniture could
be bought “on time”, in payments, as well as pots and pans, and salesmen appeared as if by magic. Never mind what the people needed,
or could use, or were ready for, these items were bought. Huge stereo/radio sets and TV’s were the first major purchases on the list.
Where to put them in the palapa sleeping hut did not matter. Space would be found. The altar/saints table had to do double duty, and did.
And no one wanted to work in the milpa anymore. It was much easier and more profitable to go over the border and wash dishes. The
times they were a’changing.
Those who came back with money, opened new clothes stores and construction supply stores to meet the demand. Stores expanded
their wares, and people began selling chickens because it was easier to buy one plucked and ready, than to chase, kill, and pluck your
own for the noon meal. Bands of young boys out on the prowl began to form, all growing up with no father’s discipline, and delinquency
reared its' ugly head. But not for long. Calls went out, and when fathers or older brothers came home, the troublemakers were on the
next trip north to earn money. And so crime sort of passed us by.
Whereas this flow to the north killed any inspiration for the boys to stay in school, why dilly dally away preparing for jobs that would only
pay 50 to 80 to maybe 100 pesos per day, when you could be washing dishes in San Francisco tomorrow, earning more in one hour than
in a whole day here! For some of the girls, it has provided an unforeseen opportunity, the chance to continue your education. If there
are no boys to marry, and fewer family babies to care for, then you might as well stay in school. So our girls have been given a chance
too. Several have now completed preparatory school and gone on to a tech college, or to computer schools, teaching schools, or nursing.
But we also lose them this way, as this takes them out of the village, most never to return permanently.
After 5 years of a steady northern flow, the fabric of the village has changed. The U.S. dollar now speaks loudly, but still doesn’t shriek.
Kids have brand new bicycles and clothes, unheard of before, and the division is growing between the haves and have-nots, those with U.S.
money, and those without. Many small children have never seen their fathers, and know only a voice over the telephone, or a face on a
video tape. Women are reforming and arranging their own lives, as their men stay longer, and are not always happy to be back under the
thumb when the husband does return. So far, the pattern has been that the men stay no longer than 4 to 6 months in the village, after
returning, run out of money, and head north again. Few have yet to come back and stay.
There is a tiny farming community way back in the PUUC hills about an hour from here, that we found on a Sunday drive. What was startling
was that almost every thatch palapa house had a new, large, elaborate concrete house being built right beside it. And everyone has the
most amazing, huge, carved, double black wood entry doors! Truly elegant, almost all the same design, in a village that time almost forgot.
Except for the U.S. dollars rolling in, enabling these people to buy these outstanding wooden doors for their new houses. What will happen
to this village in the future? Who will continue to tend the fields?
And what will happen to ours…
Kristine,
Flycatcher Inn, Santa Elena,
15 minutes southeast of Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico
The fabric of life is changing here. When I first arrived, and for many, many years previous, everything centered around the family and the
milpa, the small farming plots each family has. Very early every morning, the men and boys of the family left for the milpa. There are no
horses here, so the main mode of transportation was bicycles and walking, rifle slung over your shoulder. One might get lucky and shoot
some game that day; a Chachalaka, a wild pig, maybe even a deer if your land was far enough out in the hills, “en el monte”. There were
only a couple of field areas that had a communal well that the government had dug, where water could be drawn out to irrigate the crops.
Here you had a turn, a day, so many hours a week, of water usage. The irrigation channels were hard packed dirt furrows between the
crops, those being primarily corn, various beans, and peanuts. At times watermelon and tomatoes would be grown also. A great deal of
this was just for home consumption and little was left over to sell. Many farmers supplemented their income by beekeeping. This region
produces several kinds of honey, and much of it is exported, if of high enough quality. My favorite is from the flower of the plant they call
“Ts’iits’ilche”, the honey of which is light in color and has a delicate, slightly orange flavor. Every year someone brings me a liter Coke
bottle of it, which I treasure. The tahonal flower and the jabin tree are also important sources of honey for this region.
The village has a couple of tractors for tilling, preparing the land, after the last years crop residual has been burned. The ash is a source
of nutrients for the future crops, and burning rids the fields of bugs and insects. The farming areas are widely spread out in the valleys
between the hills, and not visible from the highway around our village. They are anywhere from 2 to 6 or 7 kilometers from the town, quite
a hike in this climate. Each area is composed of the group of men who have their plots of land in that area. Each is a small society of men,
and can be quite powerful within the village political structure. Women do not have fields in this area, but they are the ones, with their
younger sons, whose job it is to go into the hills and cut “leña”, the cooking fire wood from dead trees. You will see them in the late afternoon,
returning with tump lines around their heads, shouldering large bundles of cut sticks for their cooking fires. They appear out of the scrub
jungle from invisible trails, like apparitions, stepping suddenly out onto the road. This job also falls to the elderly men, and it continually
amazes me how strong they all are, to support such bundles, walking long distances back to the town in this heat.
Planting is done in the age old way. Poking a sharpened stick into the ground and dropping in a seed, tamping the dirt over with your foot,
and continuing. Machines don’t sow seed or weed, water, or harvest here. People do. When a big crop is ready, everybody in the family
will go out to help. There is laughter and joking and the soft lifting Maya language floats and soars in the air. The Maya language is lovely
to listen to. It always reminds me of music, music with an African flare to it almost, and a wonderful cadence. I have been surrounded by it
for the last 14 years, as it is the language of the interior of the peninsula, not Spanish, and yet I have learned little more than words and
phrases. It is not an easy language to learn.
Where the men rule in the fields, the women rule in the cooking palapas. Cooking is still done with cooking fires, three rocks with a metal
grill placed on top of them, commonly the top of an oil barrel. Meat is broiled on skewers of green wood, off to the side. The grill is to cook
the tortillas, made from fresh ground corn, after the meal is cooked. The meal most times is cooked in metal pots, hung from chains and
hooks from the roof poles, or placed directly on the rocks over the fire. The pots are charred black on the outside, but scrubbed clean
inside after the food is finished each day, and hung upside down on the kitchen pole structure, away from rodents and animals, until
needed again. Beans are reheated in the late afternoon to keep them from souring, to be eaten again the next day. With other foods,
only what can be eaten that day will be cooked, or whatever food is available. Meals can be quite meagre if a family is very poor, but there
will always be tortillas and chillies. There is one main meal a day, eaten around 1 to 2 PM. In the later afternoon, it is bath time for everyone.
The cooking palapa is the heart of the family, at least until after the meal. Here the women and girls spend most of their hours preparing
and cooking the meal, gossiping and discussing the village events, or “desgranando” the corn ears, removing the dried corn kernels from
the husks by rubbing them together, a job not as easy as it looks, and which can take hours. These kernels are then boiled in a powdered
lime and water mixture to soften them and remove the coarse outer shell before grinding the next day. While one girl hand washes the
family clothes in the “batella” and hangs them to dry, another will be sent to the “molino” to get the corn ground, and yet another “to buy”
whatever is needed for the meal that the family might not have. Pigs, chickens, and turkeys are the Mayas saving account. They can
always be sold, or eaten, if all else fails, so everyone has them. In our village, everyone has their own chickens to slaughter, but most will
buy the pork they need daily from whomever has slaughtered a pig in the wee hours of the morning. Your own pigs and turkeys are saved
for special occasions, or raised to sell for other things that are needed. Only a few people raise cattle, and only one is slaughtered per
week, so beef is only available on Saturday in the early morning.
Children are not really pushed to stay in school, especially the girls, as they are needed to help out in the family. Many of the girls are not
allowed to go further than 6th grade, as soon after, they will be of marriageable age. When a girl marries, she goes to the new husband’s
family, and becomes part of the fabric of this family. And of course, when a son marries, that family inherits a new daughter. It is very rare
that the new couple would move out of, or away from, the village. This extended family means that there is never a shortage of help and
comfort, someone to care for the children and the old or infirm, people to share the burdens of work, and it has worked very well. It is a
very secure feeling.
And now it is being threatened. Before, we had several men who worked construction on highways or buildings, in Merida or around
Cancun. They would return every two weeks, or once a month, for a day, perhaps two, and go back on the bus to work. If the need
arose, another brother, cousin, or uncle was always around to help the family women. Cutting down a tree, rebuilding the rock property
walls called albarradas, fixing the one light in the sleeping palapa. Some family member was there, available to help.
A few years ago, the migration to the north began, men going over the border, seeking work. Most often this was, and is, in California,
with each village getting established in a certain area, slowly building their own community within a community. Speaking their own
language, preparing their own food dishes inasmuch as possible, leaving behind wives and mothers, sisters and aunts, and children.
So the women were left alone, and children began to grow up with no fathers, no uncles, and no older brothers. Women moved back
to their mothers house to share responsibilities and chores and child care, to not be alone. The men sent back money, a great deal
in comparison to what they had before, and new businesses arose because of it. Construction material places boomed, as everyone
started building a new concrete block house. Avon products became a big seller, as women now had money to buy “frivolities”. Clothing
styles changed and the traditional white embroidered dress called a huipil was replaced by modern dresses and jeans and tee shirts for
the young. Modest plastic sandals gave way to high platform shoes. Nail polish became the rage along with permanent hair waves and
hair coloring. Everyone had to have a washing machine now, even if it could only wash one pair of jeans at a time, a refrigerator (with
nothing but Coke inside, usually to sell), and maybe even a stove, the oven being a good place to store your new dishes. Furniture could
be bought “on time”, in payments, as well as pots and pans, and salesmen appeared as if by magic. Never mind what the people needed,
or could use, or were ready for, these items were bought. Huge stereo/radio sets and TV’s were the first major purchases on the list.
Where to put them in the palapa sleeping hut did not matter. Space would be found. The altar/saints table had to do double duty, and did.
And no one wanted to work in the milpa anymore. It was much easier and more profitable to go over the border and wash dishes. The
times they were a’changing.
Those who came back with money, opened new clothes stores and construction supply stores to meet the demand. Stores expanded
their wares, and people began selling chickens because it was easier to buy one plucked and ready, than to chase, kill, and pluck your
own for the noon meal. Bands of young boys out on the prowl began to form, all growing up with no father’s discipline, and delinquency
reared its' ugly head. But not for long. Calls went out, and when fathers or older brothers came home, the troublemakers were on the
next trip north to earn money. And so crime sort of passed us by.
Whereas this flow to the north killed any inspiration for the boys to stay in school, why dilly dally away preparing for jobs that would only
pay 50 to 80 to maybe 100 pesos per day, when you could be washing dishes in San Francisco tomorrow, earning more in one hour than
in a whole day here! For some of the girls, it has provided an unforeseen opportunity, the chance to continue your education. If there
are no boys to marry, and fewer family babies to care for, then you might as well stay in school. So our girls have been given a chance
too. Several have now completed preparatory school and gone on to a tech college, or to computer schools, teaching schools, or nursing.
But we also lose them this way, as this takes them out of the village, most never to return permanently.
After 5 years of a steady northern flow, the fabric of the village has changed. The U.S. dollar now speaks loudly, but still doesn’t shriek.
Kids have brand new bicycles and clothes, unheard of before, and the division is growing between the haves and have-nots, those with U.S.
money, and those without. Many small children have never seen their fathers, and know only a voice over the telephone, or a face on a
video tape. Women are reforming and arranging their own lives, as their men stay longer, and are not always happy to be back under the
thumb when the husband does return. So far, the pattern has been that the men stay no longer than 4 to 6 months in the village, after
returning, run out of money, and head north again. Few have yet to come back and stay.
There is a tiny farming community way back in the PUUC hills about an hour from here, that we found on a Sunday drive. What was startling
was that almost every thatch palapa house had a new, large, elaborate concrete house being built right beside it. And everyone has the
most amazing, huge, carved, double black wood entry doors! Truly elegant, almost all the same design, in a village that time almost forgot.
Except for the U.S. dollars rolling in, enabling these people to buy these outstanding wooden doors for their new houses. What will happen
to this village in the future? Who will continue to tend the fields?
And what will happen to ours…
Kristine,
Flycatcher Inn, Santa Elena,
15 minutes southeast of Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico
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