In my not so raving reviews of a certain foreigner scene I encountered in Chiapas, Mexico, I think it’s important to note that before I set foot in the state, I was already wary about some of the travelers and expats I might encounter there.
The first tip off came on my very first visit to Mexico City in June of 2010. I was sitting at a hostel computer chatting with a fellow hosteler from Switzerland. He was dressed in a manner that would lead people to believe that he figured himself to be a hippie.
That night, I was preparing to leave for Cuba in the wee hours of the following morning. I knew I’d be disconnected in Cuba, so I was making sleeping arrangements for when I returned to Mexico and went straight down to Oaxaca.
The guy from Switzerland kept looking over my shoulder at my computer. “Why are you going to Oaxaca?” he quizzed me.
“Well, I heard Oaxaca is a beautiful city,” I replied, thinking that was a reasonable enough response.
But it didn’t appease him. “Don’t go to Oaxaca! Oaxaca is ugly. Go to Chiapas!”
WTF?
He was unique and extreme in his pushiness, but I wondered what his projected persona combined with his love for Chiapas might say about the scene there.
When I made it to the wonderful and complete opposite of ugly state of Oaxaca, I linked up with an extraordinary writer who was based in Oaxaca city at the time. We met up several times and had great conversations about Oaxaca state and beyond. After I returned from a visit to Mazunte, a beach town on the Oaxaca coast, we found that we had similar views about the hippie expats there in that we were both perplexed by their arrogance. She had recently visited San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas and said that she’d found a similar scene there. I was equally repelled and curious about seeing it for myself.
Flash forward a year. There had been a lot of space between the formation of the previous year’s prejudgements and my actual arrival Chiapas. And then I encountered the El Panchan scene and it all came rushing back. I’d just had a sleepless night in a jungle in Southern Mexico thanks to 12 hours of techno music. I might as well have slept next to a warehouse rave in any concrete jungle in the world.
But despite a severe lack of sleep, I’d had an amazing day of sights — Palenque, Misol-Ha, and Agua Azul. At the end of the day, I was sitting in a restaurant with open walls at Agua Azul to escape the rain and take in the beauty of the stormy day.
I’d finished my torta and moved on to reading a book when a trio of hippie garb-clad 20-something guys from Europe occupied a table between me and a Mexican family. They immediately took out an iPod, hooked it up to some mini loudspeakers and began to play techno music as loud as the volume would go.
I didn’t understand this. Why would you override the soccer game the family who ran the restaurant was watching, the conversations, the peace, the thunder and rain and thundering waterfalls with your techno music? I knew that they sure as hell wouldn’t have the audacity to do that a restaurant or cafe in New York, Paris, San Francisco, Berlin — even the most casual one. Why was it okay to do that there? Because we’re in Chiapas? I asked them to turn it off.
The following day I moved onto San Cristobal de las Casas. I could immediately see why people compared it to Oaxaca. They’re both cities surrounded by mountains with lots of rows of short and colorful colonial buildings. The indigenous populations have a large impact on both cities. Both are associated with popular uprisings.
But the atmosphere in each city is very different. While Oaxaca has its touristy restaurants and shops, the city’s focus seems to lie in promoting all things Oaxaca. In San Cristobal there are certainly aspects of Mayan culture present, but it felt like the bulk of the shops and restaurants were more focused on appealing to “hippie” tourists.
I know some people want that kind of familiarity when they go abroad, but for me, travel is largely about the opposite, especially in a place that has such a strong culture. There are places in the world that naturally have that bohemian feel, but in San Cristobal, it lacked genuineness. It felt put on by monetary desires — a “this what people who come here want, so this is what we’re going to give them” mentality. Although it is dressed up differently, the ideas behind the tourist set up of San Cristobal are not all that different from the ones that create coastal resorts, places the hippie tourists in San Cristobal would likely sneer at.
On my last day in San Cristobal, I stopped by a craft market to buy some Chiapaneco gifts and souvenirs that I wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere in Mexico. This market was full of Mayan women and a few men selling lovely woven handicrafts, amber jewelry, and more. But interspersed were a few non-local hippies, some of them selling trinkets decorated with images of marijuana leaves.
And can you guess who had more customers than almost every other stall at the market? Tourists in their flowy skirts and gauzy shirts and contrived pale dreadlocks flocked to these vendors.
Technically, these salespeople had as much of a right to be there as the indigenous women. They probably went through the same process and payment to set up a stand in the market. But to me, it’s disrespectful, arrogant, and straight up thievery to take away customers from the indigenous women at the market with crocheted weed paraphernalia.
I hope you don’t think I am a hippie hater. I do live in San Francisco after all, a city that played a key role in creating the genre as we know it today. There are people I know here who I respect immensely and if I had to label them, I’d call them hippies. They are people who not only believe bettering the world, but have committed both their work and personal lives to doing so, despite the difficulties and effort it requires.
A key difference between them and the so-called hippies I encountered in San Cristobal is action. Where the hippiedom I respect continues on with a to-do list left over from the 60s and adjusts to the problems and needs of modern times, hippiedom in Chiapas is often just about the look. It’s arrogant and standoffish towards fellow foreigners whose style doesn’t fit in. It romanticizes about the hedonistic aspects of the 1960s counterculture but offers none of the sacrifice that went with those times. It feels entitled to El Panchan and San Cristobal.
Perhaps a key difference in the way Oaxaca and San Cristobal have evolved is that Oaxaca has a mestizo population with weight in the city whereas San Cristobal is largely indigenous and white. A large poor indigenous community that keeps to itself makes San Cristobal ripe for takeover by even those with the best of intentions.
I understand why people love Chiapas. It’s a fascinating part of the country and it’s not a Mexico that you expect. In my life, I’ve been blessed with abundant opportunities to view beautiful scenery, and I would say that Chiapas holds some of the greatest. The perseverance of the Mayans in Chiapas is enticing and inspiring. I would go back to Chiapas and I’d highly recommend it to others.
So go on and explore Chiapas. Claim your love for it. Just don’t claim it.
{ 10 comments }
