"When arriving at La Garrucha, the Zapatista Caracol that has jurisdiction over the rebel territories near Ocosingo, Chiapas, it hit me. Actually, two things hit me. The realization that I was standing in a Zapatista Caracol at the entrance to the Selva Lancandona, the very birthplace of the Zapatista movement, came first. The second thing that occurred to me was that I was in a normal indigenous village complete with a church and small stores just outside selling Coca-Cola and Doritos. At the time, these two images contrasted in a way that I found very hard to swallow. There is this view that some privileged United Statsian activists are burdened with. The idea that when we get to Mexico or Guatemala or Nicaragua, all of the indigenous and campesinos are going to have turned their backs on globalism and all its trappings. I loved that view, but here it was crumbling yet again, in the cradle of zapatismo. And then I waited. The familiar pace of life that I had become accustomed to in Guatemala reasserted its reign, and I waited.

The meeting with the Junta itself was an awe-inspiring experience, again. While sitting there in front of the three men and one woman (which is required at La Garrucha) there was already the thoughts of how great it would be to tell all my friends back home how it had felt sitting in front of a Junta de Buen Gobierno. It was an awkward meeting in the end and hard to read, but its obvious now that I had not yet opened my eyes at that point. The Junta wasn’t clad in balaclavas, there weren’t old model rifles slung across every back, there was bureaucracy. I was still (and still am to a large degree) the foreigner or gringa with foreign ideals and foreign expectations. When I did finally get on my way to my destination, Nuevo Rosario, the change started to come over me. Maybe it was the switch from the ‘Hora de Fox’ to the ‘Hora de Dios’ but it was indeed a different world than the one expected from those of us born on ‘El Otro Lado.’

As you crest the hill on the path to Nuevo Rosario, you are struck by the picturesque tranquility. It is pleasing. A small valley nestled in among majestic mountains. You can see tiny horses with tiny riders below you and miniature pale pink and blue and yellow houses with vibrant laundry strung between them blowing in the wind while the verdant maize stalks stand solemnly as a thread of aquamarine babbles along the edge of the village. Our house for the next two weeks was modest, but comfortable and best of all it had amazing views of the village below and the mountains rising just behind. The people were kind but quiet and there was a slight sense of ennui mixed with faint curiosity. We were obviously not the first gringos here and most likely not the last. I was ok with this, I had been in this situation before. It’s humbling, but comforting too. You blend in, but you’ll never fit in. I knew that I was there to do was human right observation, that’s why they asked me to come. It was not an invitation to become a part of their community.

There was a fiesta the day after we arrived to commemorate the founding of the community three years ago, when the land was recuperated in 2004. That is when the conflict began. A nearby village, Nuevo Jerusalen, claims that about three quarters of the land recouped in 2004, actually belongs to them. In retaliation, they have aligned themselves with OPDDIC and have even set fires to milpas and walked across the Nuevo Rosario football pitch brandishing their rifles in a show of force. In late February of 2007, the first of the human rights observers arrived, and there have been no incidences since. This meant that my job was less a reporting situation and more that of a continuous buffer for the community. In the end the fiesta was a rather docile affair, though from a far you would not be able to tell, given the bumping music and rather regular discharge of fireworks, also known as mortars. I stayed for a couple of hours and then made my way home to the strains of keyboard norteños.

My stay was short and consisted of a lot of free time. The days were hot and the nights bitingly cold. I met most of the compañeros from the village. What I learned from them was significant. Many of them don’t live in Nuevo Rosario full time. In fact some live far enough away that they have to take a collective to get back home. Again, this isn’t true for all of the families. Some of the larger families with many children live on their small plots year round, full time, it’s all they have. One day while fetching water in the village, Rosaura, the woman houses the spigot told me she was going to Campet (the nearest thing to a town in the vicinity) to wait for her husband’s return the next day. Now, Rosaura is one of the compañeros who has two homes, one in Nuevo Roasario and one in Campet. So, when she told me she was awaiting her husband’s return from the oil fields in Vera Cruz, it hit me. Zapatismo is a means to a better life and it does not necessarily infer an ideological movement. While many people in the village did not know what the ‘Otra Campaña’ is, they didn’t need to. They do what they need to survive and if that means taking on an extra milpa or leaving their wives for extended periods of time to work in the oil fields for the ‘mal gobierno,’ then that’s what they do. They are Zapatismo, not adherents to some international ideology.

When I left Nuevo Rosario, I was still wrestling with all of this. I left early in the morning, before the sun had risen, and made my way back up that hill. It took me weeks to sort it all out in my head, and to be honest, I’m still not completely certain how I feel. The trip from Zapatista territory to Ocosingo in the back of a truck was one of reflection. As I watched the fields and forests laid out all around me in pastoral beauty, I came to realize that not only had I experienced a complete ideological shift, but I had experienced that shift after barely getting to know one community out of a multitude of Zapatista communities. How was I to know anything based on that?"