On Sunday, October 20, 2024 Padre Marcelo Pérez, a beloved priest in Chiapas, was assassinated. Padre Marcelo had just given mass in Barrio Cuxtitali in San Cristóbal de Las Casas when two men on a motorcycle shot him as he was getting into his truck to leave. Padre Marcelo was the first indigenous priest in Chiapas and dedicated his life to the defense of the original peoples of his state and to all people seeking peace with justice. The Catholic Diocese had to move Padre Marcelo from one municipality to another to protect him against frequent death threats from criminal organizations. He stood up against the drug cartels and spoke out alongside his brothers and sisters against the ill-fated rural cities project of the Jaime Sabines government.

Padre Marcelo first arrived in Chenalho’ in 2001 where he became like a brother to the women and their families of three weaving collectives with which I work in Chenalho’.

The internet is full of articles about Padre Marcelo’s assassination. Below are links to organizations that will keep you informed about the courageous efforts of individuals and communities in Chiapas to defend themselves and their territories against increasing threats from criminal organizations:

· the website of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center – https://www.frayba.org.mx
· the website of Schools for Chiapas
https://schoolsforchiapas.org
· the website of Las Abejas https://www.acteal.org
· and the websites of the EZLN https://www.ezln.org.mx
and https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/

Filmmaker, Bill Jungels, conducted an interview with Padre Marcelo about the rural cities project as part of the documentary, “Maya Faces in a Smoking Mirror.” This film is available in its entirety on YouTube and is presented on this website on the “About” page.

Crystal Massey took the photo above of Padre Marcelo at a baptism in Chixiltón, Chenalho’ of the child of two of our friends.

Below is my reflection on last seeing Padre Marcelo on Father’s Day in 2017 in Simojovel where he served before San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

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A couple days ago, I went to see Padre Marcelo, a beloved priest in highland Chiapas. I traveled about 3 1/2 hours through beautiful mountains to reach Simojovel, the parish where he is posted. I first met him in Chenalho’ where he inspired my indigenous friends there by his dedication to their struggle, which is also his, because he is an indigenous man, the first indigenous priest in Chiapas. Padre Marcelo grew up in San Andrés Larrainzar working the land just like my compadres and friends in Chenalho’. A few years ago he had to be reassigned to Simojovel because of threats to his life from his activism in Chenalho’, following the massacre at Acteal and then the fight to keep the government from building a rural city there. Sadly, the threats haven’t ended as he has taken a stand against the drug dealers in Simojovel.

Padre Marcelo and I had a date for breakfast at 11 a.m. My main reason for going to see him was to put in his hands a copy of “Maya Faces in a Smoking Mirror” the film that I’ve been helping Bill Jungles produce. Since arriving in Chiapas I’ve had the privilege of delivering the film to all the participants and most of the time being able to watch it with them and hear their responses. My hopes were that I could do that after breakfast with Padre Marcelo, who speaks eloquently in the film about the harm rural cities have done to the indigenous people of Chiapas.

The feast day of San Antonio was just wrapping up when we arrived and the streets were still festooned with colored flags. I arrived with my friend Petra, who was born there and wanted to see the township again and one of her friends, a retired bilingual teacher from Huistan. We easily found the church in front of the plaza and walked up to doors leading into a large room where Padre Marcelo was standing in a baseball cap and black t-shirt speaking in Tsotsil before a large gathering of mostly indigenous men and a few mestizo men and women, representatives of the town and state government. It soon became clear to us that they were having an important meeting and that it wasn’t ending any time soon. We sat down to learn what was happening and found that this was a meeting about providing water from one or two springs in the mountains to the entire township of about 50 ejidos and barrios. People were thanking Padre Marcelo right and left because he had started the campaign to bring water to everyone in the township. The governor finally came through and the engineers were there to begin their studies of the springs tomorrow. At the meeting representatives of the communities were assembled to talk about how they wanted the process to go. This was another day of seeing in action the liberation theology practice — “see, analyze, and act.”

Petra and her friend soon tired of listening to the talk, although they both speak Tsotsil. They left to walk around town and I stayed to listen. After about an hour and a half Padre Marcelo announced that they would break into groups to analyze what they had heard and decide how to proceed from there. I figured this was my chance to speak to him. He had already asked me to stand up and introduced me as an “hermana” from the US who knew him from Chenalho’ and hadn’t forgotten him. (How could I!) And I had already taken out of my bag the dvd and a gift for him and had come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be talking with him that day, much less watch the dvd with him.

When I reached Padre Marcelo he gave me a big hug, graciously accepted the dvd and my thanks for all he is doing for his people, and then said the words that prompted me to write this reflection. He held my hands and asked almost tenderly, “Have you eaten?” I was moved by his words because they were not what you would expect to hear from a priest, but instead from a mother or someone who cares about you. And indeed, that is what Padre Marcelo does, he cares about and for thousands of people. That means he cares that they have their most basic needs met – potable water and food to eat. He knows what it is to be hungry and go without water. He knows the value of corn and caring for mother earth so she can continue to produce food for her children.

Padre Marcelo asked a young man to take me to the kitchen. When I got there I realized that the cook would have to prepare a special breakfast for me, that, combined with the irony of having to eat alone when that is so strange here, I declined the offer and went to join my friends in the plaza where they were eating chalupas.

I only had one minute with Padre Marcelo, but his words moved me deeply and made me think about all the different kinds of fathers there are who sacrifice for their children and their communities.

I recently read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson in my book club. My friends and I found so much in the book to talk about and after reading it felt compelled to write a letter to the editor of our local newspaper, the Las Cruces Sun News, urging everyone to read it. We talked about other ways to share the book and came up with the idea of putting copies of the paperback (when it comes out) into “little libraries” around our town.

Based on being the only anthropologist in the club, I’d like to add that until reading this book I didn’t know that for eight years in the 1930s a team composed of two couples – one black and one white – collaborated on a study of racism in rural Mississippi using caste as a central organizing principle. The trail-blazing work of Allison and Elizabeth Davis, the black couple, and Burleigh and Mary Gardner, the white couple, was side-lined by the work of Hortense Powdermaker and John Dollard who spent only months researching the topic, but published their work before the Davises and Gardners were able to publish theirs.

Below is our brief editorial, which the newspaper titled “Looking for a worthwhile book?”

We are five white friends in a book club. We have stood up against racism throughout our lives. But until reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, we didn’t fully grasp how the polarization in our nation between whites and non-whites — laid down in laws and social conventions in the 1600s — reverberates today in our current struggle with racism and social inequality.

Isabel Wilkerson shows through meticulous research, historical events, and personal anecdotes how the singular quality of a person’s skin color became the sole marker of their place in American society. No matter how wealthy a Black person might become, their class privilege couldn’t protect them from being a victim of humiliations based on the color of their skin. And no matter how poor a white person might be, at least they could cling to the knowledge that they were not Black.

Before reading Caste we already knew about the horrible anguish of Black parents unable to prevent slave owners from tearing their families apart and brutalizing even their littliest children. But after reading Caste, we were haunted by the evidence that still today Black mothers and fathers are powerless to protect their children from harm, for just being Black.

As Wilkerson writes, “None of us chose the circumstances of our birth. We had nothing to do with having been born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God-given talents and how we treat others in our species from this day forward.”

We encourage all Americans to read this ground-breaking book.

Janet Darrow
Christine Eber
Elaine Hampton
Aurelia Holliman
Kim Sorensen

In the days following the murder of George Floyd, my friends and I on the Steering Committee of Weaving for Justice joined organizations throughout the world to express our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. On June 3rd we posted the following words on the Weaving for Justice Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/p/CA-l5NwAuU1/)  We continue to post inspirational quotes from individuals standing up for justice in the U.S. and Chiapas, Mexico on Instagram.

Weaving for Justice stands in Solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and with all people protesting the brutal legacy of racism in the United States.
Black lives have always mattered, as Abiodun Oyewole, founder of the Last Poets reminds us.
So have the lives of the Maya weavers of Chiapas.
The liberation of the Maya people of Chiapas is bound with that of the Black people of our nation. It is bound with the non-Maya and non-Black members of our organization.
None of us is free until we are all free.

Books as Bridges

by Christine Eber, October 2, 2019 
This essay was originally published by Powells.com and appeared in October 2019 on https://www.powells.com/blog

“Books don’t matter to us. What matters is that our children don’t get enough to eat and get sick and die.”

I don’t remember exactly when Flor de Margarita Pérez Pérez said this to me, but I remember how it made me feel: that, as an anthropologist and writer, I had little to offer her and her community.

I arrived at Margarita’s house in Chenalho’, Chiapas, Mexico, in February 1987. Though I love to read, I had only brought a few books with me. While studying Tsotsil, my host family’s language, I would look up from my dictionary to the corn crib in the room and compare it to my bookshelf at home. Like my books, corn cobs were neatly stacked in rows from floor to ceiling. They had been harvested by Antonio, Margarita’s husband. They were the fruit of his labor in the corn and bean fields. Margarita’s job was to take the dried ears of corn and transform them into tortillas, corn gruel, and, for special occasions, tamales.

Corn cobs also embodied a form of ancestral knowledge about how to plant, care for, and harvest corn, knowledge Antonio had learned from his father. In that way they were like my bookshelf, a source of wisdom handed down from previous generations.

At Margarita’s, I became accustomed to eating mostly corn, beans, squash, and an occasional piece of fruit. Well before the end of the year, what little corn remained was riddled with bugs. The bananas the couple grew went to market, as did most of the eggs their hens produced, to earn the cash to buy corn and beans. I heard stories of different kinds of hunger. Margarita told me that Black Hunger was the worst — when the corn crop failed and people had to grind up the roots of plants to make tortillas and fill them with greens, the food of animals, not of humans.

After 13 months in Chiapas, I returned to the U.S. to write my dissertation. Before my departure, an anthropologist friend, Graciela Freyermuth Enciso, cautioned me: “You better not be like those American anthropologists who come to Mexico and do their investigations and then go back home and never return their writing to us in Spanish.”

Graciela’s words stayed with me and encouraged me to make my academic work available in Spanish. Although I gave these books to my compadres, I had finally accepted that writing about their lives was not a way they saw me helping them and their community in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Then, in 1994, the Zapatista uprising occurred and things changed on many fronts. When representatives of the movement came to their community, Antonio and Margarita recognized the struggle as their own. After decades of protests and demonstrations, it was finally time to stand up to the Mexican government and hold it accountable for its centuries of neglect of the original peoples of Mexico. For example, at the time of the uprising, 55% of the nation’s hydroelectric power came from Chiapas, while only one-third of homes in Chiapas had electricity.

I began to write from my compadres’ and their friends’ perspectives about the dramatic changes that joining the Zapatista movement entailed. I brought my writings back to them and explained that with these I was telling people in my country and elsewhere about what they were trying to accomplish. They seemed to understand that this writing was helpful.

But all along they gave me much more than I gave them. They taught me how to live and work in a collective way. In their community each person depended upon others in profound ways. Reciprocity and borrowing formed the basis of social life. Houses went up with kinsfolk and neighbors helping each other. After the Zapatista uprising, cooperatives became an important way to construct an alternative to the government’s top-down economic development policies.

Before coming to highland Chiapas, I had only read about cargos, services that people take on for their community, usually for life and often without remuneration. Healers, midwives, and leaders of prayers in sacred places took on such cargos for life. More recently, representatives in artisan cooperatives and in the Zapatista movement assume them for shorter periods.

It became clear to me that writing was my cargo, my service to this community. Eventually, I received another cargo from Margarita in which I could help her people more concretely — assisting weavers in her community to sell their work through fair trade in the U.S. Over the years that work extended to working with two other artisan cooperatives in highland Chiapas and using my writing to educate people about the significance of their textile traditions.

I hadn’t been to visit my compadres for two years when I arrived in Chiapas in August 2019. On the first day of my visit, we got our book business out of the way: I paid Margarita for two years of royalties she had earned on the sales of her life story, about $133. Not much in the U.S., but quite a bit to her. In 2001, I had convinced Margarita to embark on a 10-year journey with me to tell her story. That book has three versions: an English one, a Spanish one, and one just for her family with the real names of everyone and their photos. When we prepared the public versions, we decided not to use her real name or photos of her or her family for fear of reprisals from her involvement in the Zapatista movement. After receiving copies of her personal book to give to her children, Margarita said that she is glad she told her life story so that her children can understand what her life has meant.

I also had news for Margarita about another book: my first novel. That book owed a lot to the work we did together on her life story. The abundance of material we generated didn’t all make it into her book. I sat on that material for several years until I realized that I could use some of it as a springboard to tell a story about a friendship between two Tsotsil women from Chenalho’. And so When a Woman Rises came into being.

Before I went to Chiapas, I hatched a wild plan to raise money to give away 2,000 copies of When a Woman Rises in Spanish to pueblos originarios (original peoples, what Mayas and other “indigenous” people prefer to be called) in Chiapas. I didn’t want to wait for a Mexican publisher to buy the translation rights to my book some day in the distant future, plus I knew that few pueblos originarios would have the money to buy the book if it were available in Spanish. Although some of them have read my other books in Spanish, when my novel came out I realized that I had finally written something that the people who made the book happen could enjoy reading, and in doing so be reminded of the creative spark they carry within themselves.

When I was in Chiapas, I talked about my idea to make free copies of my novel in Spanish available with about a dozen organizations. A few are run by pueblos originarios who have been writing poems, stories, and novels in Spanish and in Mayan languages and could have resented me for seeking support for my writing instead of theirs. But instead, I received their gratitude and encouragement. One told me they plan to use multiple copies of my novel in reading circles. Another suggested that literate women and men can read the book out loud to their parents and grandparents who don’t read.

Books still do not matter to Margarita as much as the struggle to sustain her family and community. But I think she sees the bridge that books can build between her people and the world. I hope that my novel will inspire pueblos originarios to write their own novels and be a mirror reflecting their valuable collective knowledge and practices.