In the Americas with David Yetman

The Mexican state of Chiapas is strongly Indian and traditional.

It's geologically complex and home to a staggering array of plants and animals.

But, it's the people who make it different, breathtakingly so.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

The State of Chiapas has a variety of cultures natural historical places, fauna, flora, geology unmatched anywhere else in the world.

It's a place of unequaled diversity.

Chiapas is the southernmost state in Mexico - it abuts Guatemala.

More than half the state is in rugged mountains with profound canyons.

The most famous is Sumidero Canyon.

The gateway to this deep chasm is the ancient city of Chiapa de Corzo.

It's a half hour drive through the clouds to the overlook of the canyon.

Sumidero Canyon is a national park in Mexico.

It has a supreme advantage of being able to view the canyon from the top, look down 3,000 feet and from the bottom, which you can get to by water.

We have the advantage of having a native archeologist show us what she has discovered.

You can know the river at its bank, but when you go to the top of the canyon, you see the magnitude, the importance and strength that this river has.

The first complete successful exploration of the canyon was was done by the group known as Pauelo Rojo, or red bandana.

Before them, there were many explorers who unfortunately failed to conquer the canyon The Pauelo Rojo group was dedicated to explore all around the top of the canyon before thy descended to the Chicoasn Dam.

Once completed, they submitted their reports about how dangerous the circumnavigation was.

This happened in 1960.

If you have heard of Chiapa de Corzo, you know that Corzo is great.

It has the big river next to it and it is the entrance to Sumidero Canyon from the river.

The Canyon is a great representive icon for the municipality and the state.

From a social perspective, the canyon, is one of the most important natural preserves and producers of oxygen.

It has a lot of trees and wildlife.

It is located on an important trade route and a communication path historically and continuing to this day.

I grew up on the banks of the river, and in my childhood, I learned to float there.I learned to breathe,to manage the water resource as it provides us food,fish.

We learn to live in concert with the river.

We have to be friends with the river.

Now it is dangerous because there are dangerous places, such as the eddies, that you have to know about.

We must first respect it, care for it, so that it can also be a friend of ours.

Fortunately, in 1980, Sumidero Canyon was declared a national park and that has helped in the conservation of this place and our city.

it was much greater in the past, but we still have time to save it for future generations.

A few thousand feet below, Chiapa de Corzo sits on the banks of the great Rio Grijalva.

The city is home to a very old culture and its fiesta is unlike any other.

So, here's the traditional drink of Chiapa de Corzo.

It is called pozol and I have to choose whether I want the dark with cocoa in it or the white.

Salud!

Tha'ts good.

That's good, it tastes, It's very much like a rich cocoa with cornmeal in it.

So she's drunk this ever since she was a little kid.

I's a traditional thing to drink it in the morning with everything they serve it with food.

So, it has to be served in what they call the jcara, this old this old gourd, otherwise it's not really legitimate pozol.

It kind of fills you up in a very solid way.

This is nutritious pozol.

So, that combination of fruits is very elaborate as a neighborhood adornment that they take to various churches They beforehand figure out who's going to do where so they don't conflict with each other.

But, there's gobs of these happening throughout the fiesta and they are elaborately strung withlimes, pineapples, bananas, coconuts.

And each neighborhood is sort of in competition for the church So, this is kind of a welcome to the saint who's the patron saint of the fiesta and its been a year since he's been welcomed.

So they take them up to the church up here and that's just one of the opening salvos of the fiesta of Saint Sebastian in Chiapo de Corzo.

Those big figures that are kind of grotesque like clowns,their job is to lighten things up for everybody, to make the atmosphere happy.

We take a break from the fiesta to ride into the canyon in a bo It gives a view of the wild canyon walls and rock art and variety of flora and fauna.

I'm glad we're in the boat.

Noemi says she was born right there so she lived all her life along the edge of the river here The river originates in Guatemala,it's a long way away, it's 730 kilometers long before it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico So, we can see the old original remnants of the old bridge here, the old rusty orange remnants.

So this was built in 1950, the new bridge.

Here we see cormorants, ducks.

They generally have a grey color and we see over there a flock of black vultures.

These are fundamental for the conservation of Sumidero Canyon.

There're important relationships between animals and plants here.

If an animal dies or something, the vultures consume the rotten meat to absorb it back into the ecosystem.

In this part of the canyon, the river is alive with crocodiles and on the sides of the banks you'll see many many iguanas and a variety of birds.

You'll see cormorants, various herons, you'll see even a couple of ibises.

What is amazing is that they survive still with the pollution that the river experiences.

And the crocodiles seem to be quite fat.

Well, they live on fish and there are fewer fish, far fewer fish than there used to be.

But still, it's a pretty exciting place to see wildlife.

It's a protected area.

You can't hike in here, you can't get out of the boat.

So it's about as pristine as you're going to find anywhere in the country.

It's been here for a long time, this is old limestone over 100 million years old but the canyon itself is only about 15 million years old.

So as this limestone is uplifted the river very slowly cut through it and pretty soon we have this incision here, this great chasm.

And you can see the layers of the limestone.

This limestone here was once at the bottom of the ocean.

This is actually rainforest.

How do we know?

Because there are monkeys in here.

The humidity increases, the amount of rain over 80 inches per year, it's an astonishingly wet place with a variety of trees.

A mixture of cultures exists here.

There is a mixture of cultures between Meccas among Chiapanecas among Zoques among Mayas.

This was a watercourse of a cultural exchange of commodities and knowledge.

Although there are traces of occupational evidence from the Olmeca state, such as rough tuxtla figures.

The strongest evidence found here are from the Chiapaneca culture.

When the Spanish began their wars of conquest here in 1521, 1527, the Chiapanecas decided to flee along the river before being conquered by the Spaniards.

These people, the Chiapanecas, about who noemi is speaking of and is studying, nobody knows exactly who they were.

But they were clearly here at the time of conquest, they were different from the Olmecs, they were different from the Mayas, they were perhaps people who came from Nicaragua.

But it's really intriguing the studies that Noemi is doing to know that the Chiapanecas were here and maybe they, made the paintings that she is studying, the rock art.

So, some of the paintings that she is studying are above, way above the current water line because the river used to get higher than it does now.

Those are now protected because the water is so low that graffiti artists can't get at them.

The lower ones have been defaced but the ones that are really high you can study at least from a distance.

So, this formation is called the Christmas Tree and with very good reason.

And Noemi explains that during the wet season, we're in January which is the dry season, there's a lot of water that comes out there and has created these sort of cave formations.

From Chiapa de Corzo, we follow an old highway route into the highlands where indigenous cultures dominate the countryside.

In the late 1990s, these highlands were the setting for a powerful Indian rebellion whose leaders referred to themselves as Zapatistas.

The uprising, armed and well planned, shook the roots of Mexican society and continues to do so.

We are fortunate to visit one of the most Indian towns in the state.

This is the town of Tenejapa in the state of Chiapas, Mexico.

it's a mountain town like many thousands of other mountain towns in Mexico surrounded by pine trees and oak trees.

But this town is very very different.

It is an Indian town, one of the most Indian towns in all the country and it has a fiesta that is unlike any I have ever seen and my guess is any other that you have ever seen.

Guiding us into this complex world is anthropologist Gillian Newell.

She knows her way around the town and the people trust her.

Tenejapa maintains the essence of the tradition of the Maya culture left to us by our parents and grandparents.

The Mayordomo, or the community stewards, continue to remain strong in the task of each of the cultural activities during the ceremonial festivities.

Right now we're having the opening presentation at this house and they're welcoming.

Sitting next to me is the administrator of the culture, a very important position in this town, it's a town of about 3,000 people and he has the very difficult position of watching over all of the, what they call the Mayordomos, the men in charge of the fiestas to make sure everything works right.

There are ten different fiestas in the town each year.

It is during the ceremony that posh is consumed.

We drink a little and then store it in our flasks so that we can finish the ceremony.

I've been able to sample the posh at their insistence and found that it is highly acceptable though it is only about ten o'clock in the morning.

The Mayordomos, or stewards, are responsible mostly for safekeeping.

For example, protecting the clothing articles and necklaces of the saints.

They need to decorate on the altar and shelter more than anything else the dress, the necklaces of the saints, and also arrange what is holy within the church.

On the very day of the festival, they parade the saints around the main street of the town.

There are nine groups of Mayordomos, or stewards.

Each group arranges and prepares their virgin and their saint to parade around the town.

Inside they have both wild and domesticated fruit as a backdrop for the adoring of Joseph and Mary, the two saints we see.

So these are the vestments that the women are carrying for all of the saints that they use in the church.

So these big bags, then, are full of the clothing, the vestments, that they use for the saints and for adorning the sacred objects.

So, San Ildefonso is the patron saint of this town.

The person who carries the cross has a very special status.

He is the first assistant to the festival.

So in this town, the Mayordomos, sort of the local chieftains who are in charge of a saint, and the town has various saints.

Each Mayordomo is in charge of one of those saints.

One of the things they do that is very important is three times a year, they wash, they launder the clothing of the saints and they take it to a special place.

The musicians start every ceremony and without the musicians starting it, you cant really have the ceremony.

The bromeliads that you can see from time to time, the gentleman next to me is actually one of the Mayordomos.

They view with great reverence its wild,its sturdy,it doesnt wilt, and its a red color.

Flowers this size are not real common so they have to spend a lot of time picking them.

If someone was carrying one of those, you can bet that is an important person and only the men get to do it.

Well, we're seeing a community ritual where different parts come together.

On the one hand, you have the community with nature, you have the community with the saints, have the community really with life and everything life presents.

So right now we're being given Coca Cola which to many people will seem jarring, right?

But it's to lift the spirits, right?

We just had an event where we were inside, you had the music, you had the dancing which is very rhythmic.

And it's rhythmic in the sense that it sort of captures the heart.

The posh It is a drink that is really for the spirit.

When we got to the town, the minister of culture who graciously allowed us to come in here, led us through a street and then through the narrowest of alleys.

So is it select people who come here?

Who comes to this?

Well, you go into a different dimension almost.

You are leaving the public life, you are leaving your public self and you go to your inner spirit really.

So, going through the alley symbolizes that, you know?

The vientre to the womb.

Where we all started, we all started in the same way.

So the ritual represents that.

At some point the women said to me, You need to be here.

And I left the role of being the teacher of the Unicach and the people who were accompanying you, to being the woman.

So, the ritual celebrates that.

It celebrates life,it celebrates the life force.

Separation is really clear.

Women are on the left, men are are on the right.

It goes to sort of the organization of life.

The fact that the women have included me means a lot, it means an entry.

Really, if you are a woman, it means you have children, it means you've been married.

The women eat after the men which in oriental terms means you k now we see it as discrimination.

the way the world is, right?

g So, the people said hello to us and then we had to say hello to everybody.

They pulse you, you know?

They measure your strength, they measure how much you are able of being, of doing, of talking.

Its connection to the earth, its connection to the continuation of life.

Each family is associated with a water hole, with a place of living, with a lineage, and with a force of nature, right?

Which connects to a bigger clan system which then connect to a patron saint of that clan system, of that way of life.

One god, the air, the sun, all those elements play their own role so every different family has their role in the community.

They're together,but each person has their own individual role.

So, I pointed out that my hat, they said it's because it's American, and I said, Well, it really isn't, it's made in Australia, and I pointed out where it says on the hatband Made in Australia.

And he pulled his off and pointed to an imaginary hatband and said, Made in Tenejapa.

Now, they're studying us as much as we're studying them.

Right, exactly.

Absolutely, absolutely.

It's a curiosity of who we are.

It's warm, it's heavy.

I think at night it would be very nice, but in full sun, um, I feel like I'm being led to a sacrificial altar.

There is a hierarchy, a first and second Mayordomo, that must be present for the ceremony Musicians play an important role women, the wives of the Mayordomos.

the ceremony, prayer, this must be performed by the main character.

And they need to decorate every altar with the canchi it is this wild fruit.

And the cupal then, the cupal is a very important food as an offering to a saint.

Which, in this case, it is Saint Alonzo.

I have been studying archeology for four years and archeology practically goes beyond that which we are witnessing now.

It is much older and one must take into account the creation of our civilization.

And we are Mayas Tztetal, always starting in what many researchers call preclassic time And what we're actually seeing here is the result of the development of our culture through time.

And really, the Maya culture is here, we witness it every day in each ceremony, in each ritual and each Mayordomo will continue to practice all that.

It's a continuation that has been going on for 2,000 years.

We are practically a product of that world - of what is called the Pre-Hispanic Maya.

In the state of Chiapas, the lowlands are dominated primarily by Mestizos.

In the highlands, they are dominated primarily by Originarios, as the Indians call themselves It's there that the ancient traditions prevail as do the conflicts between the Indians and the government.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center to order call 1-800-937-8632 Please mention the episode number and program title Please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or at intheamericas.org