From Chiapas with Love

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Recommended: identify the importance of anthropology

From Chiapas with Love

One of the first mistakes I made in coming to IU was thinking that simply by studying I could understand the lives of people. I thought that if I learned enough- read enough books, talked to enough professors, attended enough forums, and developed my ability to artfully use jargon, I'd be powerful and wise before I knew it.

The next mistake I made was to decide to study the Zapatistas. As I was soon to discover, the movement which has grown up around the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico is not something that can be studied, used, and forgotten. It is something that eats its way into you until you can't extricate yourself from it without seriously damaging who you are.

These two bumbles led me, in my third year of university studies, to ask the IU Honors College for money to go to Chiapas to live in an autonomous community. I planned to study the people-their society, their culture, and their situation in the world. I thought it would be a nice way to top off my degree in Anthropology-an honors thesis, and something that could definitely be called an "international experience".

Getting to Mexico was an international experience all in itself. I spent three days traveling through a foreign country before I reached the Mexican border. The country in which I was born seemed, in the full flower of September 11th hysteria, far more foreign than anything I could imagine down in the depths of the jungles of Southeast Mexico. After five days on buses of all shapes, sizes, and smells, I arrived in Chiapas, the Southeastern-most State in the Republic of Mexico. What I found there has left me, I think, a little outside the bounds of "appropriate distance" i...

... middle of paper ...

...discomfort. I'm supposed to be a better person, and more adult.

I can't say that. I'm ill-at-ease, pensive, and constantly seeing the faces of the people I know there in my dreams; hearing their voices telling their stories through my throat. I'm deeply uncomfortable in the world I live in, and I think about our future, the world's future, every day. I cry at night out of helplessness. I can tell you, my reader, that I learned from my time in Chiapas. I learned the most important lesson of my "university experience" there, from people who didn't understand what graduate school was. So here it is. After all, that's what the university is about, right? Sharing knowledge.

Education provides the tools. It can never provide the quest. People tell their own stories best, and dignity is what you have left when everything else has been taken from you.

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