Mexico
Chiapas
New Year's Eve 2015 • Pushed all the way to San Cristobal de las Casas (near Guatemala) and expected to get some sort of primer on the Zapatista movement, but mostly got a master class in all-night partying and the durability of the hippie trail. A side trip to the Mayan ruins at Palenque also played with expectations. Met Nadia during a day-long downpour that made it hard to take photos or even stay upright on wet stone. She's a migrant-rights activist whose CV includes stints at big NGOs and the Mexican parliament, so her reasons for being in Chiapas were neither tourist nor Zapatista. We met up later at the bus station, where she intervened with police who were trying to detain a couple of young men. I thought maybe they'd been caught shoplifting, but Nadia said their only crime was "looking Guatemalan." She used a point-and-shoot camera to document the Migra and make sure the men weren't loaded into the van waiting outside. The irony of this going down in Palenque—aimed at descendants of the people who actually built this lucrative Mayan theme park—was fuel for a long conversation over dinner (and fire twirling) at the hippie jungle enclave in Panchan.
