Come to Chiapas

An open letter to Senator John Kerry and Teresa Heinz

by Al Giordano

JULY 26, 1997: from somewhere in the mountains of southeast Mexico

Dear John and Teresa,

Picture this. I am kneeling upon volcanic rocks, alongside a turquoise mountain stream. The breeze keeps the flies and bees away, softens the red blows of the pounding Mayan sun on my skin. A spotted lizard scampers by my guide, Francisco, age 10, a child -- get this -- with an attention span. Your so-called First World of television and computer games, the world of money-media-Sony-Disney-Microsoft, hasn't yet colonized his mind and spirit in the nefarious ways it has manufactured half-persons out of his counterparts in the North. He watches patiently, curiously, as this 37-year-old gringo tries to wash clothes in the river -- occasionally cracking a quiet smile at my obvious difficulty with the task.

This is the first time in four days that I've been able to bathe or do laundry. The civil comandantes of this village, responding to nearby Mexican army troop maneuvers and responsible for my safety, had asked that I not venture beyond the village into the jungle, and I've obeyed. But I have dreamed of this river, of the idea of a bath or shower, for 100 hours now, ever since the morning I cleaned the latrines. My pants -- the other of my two pairs -- have been caked in mud and feces ever since.

Even the vulture circling above me seems to laugh at my situation, riding the wind on seven feet of wingspan. Cleaning the latrines wasn't so hard: digging holes in the earth through root and rock, setting fire to the used toilet paper, burying excrement in the ashes and covering it all with dirt. It was the sacrifice of my pants to the task that proved more distracting, the odor that remained within the stains of brown on white. But at last, now, a few hundred scrapes of fabric on stone later, they are almost clean again. Francisco approves. Hey, I'm getting the hang of it.

Is this paradise beneath these steep green cliffs and vines? At very least there lies here the promise, the potential, of Eden rediscovered. I think I'm figuring out a new set of strategies to clear away all the shit that stains our lives. But such utopian grandiosity is fleeting, temporary, at best appearing in glimpses. I've just made my first rookie mistake in the river "laundromat." I washed every pair of socks I have. And now there are storm clouds gathering in the Southeast. The vulture flies away. The rain will fall. The temperature -- 80 degrees -- will drop into the 40s. And tonight I'll be without dry socks. Nature is a forceful teacher, eh?

I'm startled as two Indian men, kerchiefs obscuring their faces, appear through the brush. They are friends, not predators. They want to know if I heard a gunshot. "No," I reply, "Nothing. Is it necessary for me to return to the camp?" They sign for me to continue what I'm doing, then, watchful and vigilant, they venture further into the jungle.

In this highlands village, there are 70 indigenous families, 200 children, a small group of young people from Mexico City, two Argentineans, and me. Hello! John and Teresa, it's me. Remember?

I'll spare you the entire story, in all its self-indulgence, of why I have abandoned the world that you live in for an older one here. I'll save that for a second communiqué -- to my friends in the creative community: the artists, musicians, performers, writers, poets, conversationalists, and other weirdoes with whom I congregate. It has been my good fortune to know some of the most talented people on earth. But they -- and I -- have failed to live up to our potential. We have spent our days and years struggling merely to survive in the world of careers, identities, images, and egos. We have allowed our most creative selves to deform, to devolve around machines and systems of media and commerce, while those forces accomplished a kind of coup du monde over everything that used to be real life. I will spare you the full airing and disclosure of my sense of alienation, of disillusion, of despair and depression imposed by forces out of the control of every individual -- suicidal ideations brought on by the mundane demands of economy, self-destructions without purpose or reason.

My decision, more than a year ago, to refuse all forms of imposed mediation and alienating labor, indeed, granted me the finest, the freest, year of my life. But economy's boot pressed upon my neck, and after two months of homelessness last spring, I decided: if I must live like a refugee, I'm going to make it count for something. I have come to Chiapas to die, or to be reborn. There can be, for me, no more compromise.

In the overmediated jungle that is our electronic world, this "open letter" is a kind of ambush. I apologize, in advance, for the public form of this "come to Chiapas" invitation. John, as you know, an open letter can add gravity to an urgent request. You've penned some good ones yourself.

Plus, I wish to address all my friends -- professional or actual -- from whose radar screens I disappeared without notice in late June. Apologies all around. I needed stealth to reach my destination beyond the customs agents, the searches at the hands of the police and army, the Mexican government's penchant, of late, for deporting foreigners, especially journalists whom it suspects of collaborating with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation -- the EZLN. But now I am here. I am safe; I am healthy, fitter and more focused than ever, and it is time to decloak.

On to part 2

Al Giordano, former political reporter for the Boston Phoenix, is author of The Medium Is the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media (1997, an Immedia Project pamphlet).