# News From Chiapas



## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

There was an interesting article in the newsletter _The Catholic Sentinel _ for October 16,2013 which I read this morning because I have Googleized daily computerized news reports from Chiapas State along with a number of other areas since we bought a home down there - not because I am a religiously oriented person but because we find the culture of the Chiapas Highlands fascinating in all of the area´s aspects. We have lived down there part of each year since 2006 and continue to learn more every time we go there.

_The Sentinal _reported that, according to the Mexican newspaper _La Jornada_ 63% of the people in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas which covers some 1,500 settlements in the city and surrounding area in the Chiapas Highlands, are indigenous Maya, most speaking the Mayan languages of Tzotzil or Tzeltal which are languages spoken by an estimated 650,000 people in Southern Mexico. The Catholic Church has just decreed that Tzotzil and Tzeltal will now be used for official church ceremonies including prayers for mass, marriages, baptisms, confirmations, ordinations and anointing of the sick.

Now, this is me writing and not _The Sentinel_ and I am simply making observations from my pespective, not expressing an opinion one way or the other. I think the church making those language concessions to local indigenous people in Chiapas was a very good idea on the part of church officials since, generally speaking, the indigenous of Chiapas are quite religious and religion and politices are seriously intertwined down there. Many inroads have been made in indigenous Chiapas communities by evangelical fundamentalist protestant missionaries in recent years and this movement has had both strong religious and political ramifications in indigenous communities where community leaders have long been closely allied with the Catholic Church and its doctrines. Today, many indigenous communities in the Highlands are torn between traditional Catholism and Evangelical Protestantism and this is a serious and, at times, violent battle of poitics and community values which is what I find fascinating as, in a religious sense, I have no "dog in this hunt" and have mixed feelings about each side in this struggle as each faction in the political and social struggle has good and bad points. One thing I do know is that this institutional dichotomy between the Catholic Church and Evangelical Protestant Missionaries who have descended on the region in recent years, promises to be an epic battle that will reshape the indigenous communities of Highland Chiapas in ways yet to be discerned. I´m just enjoying the show and am an observer committed to neither faction.

Anecdotally, let me add that it is my wife, who is also not involved in any religious sense, but has made many indigenous friends in Chiapas, who is our real family contact there, and invited me to accompany her to a wedding ceremony being held by an indigenous family she has befriended in a small, highly religiously divided indigenous community about and hour out of San Cristóbal. Now, as an Alabama boy raised in the Presbyterian Church as practiced in that region which is not bound by fundamentalist doctrine normally speaking (_and where the standard joke was "Where you find four Presbyterians there´s always a fifth." )_, until this occasion, I had never attended a wedding reception where just about every attendee did not get thoroughly soused. Well, there we were at a wedding reception where everyone attending was dead sober and the strongest drink served was Coca Cola (in abundance by the way) and, man, that was the longest, most excrutiatingly boring wedding reception of my life. I thought it would never end. The problem in rural Chiapas is that alcoholism and attendant violence, particularly wife and child beatings and mutual assaults among drunk men often resuting in someone´s death, are serious problems and these protestant missionaries and their local converts strictly forbad the consumption of any alcoholic beverages _ever _among congregants. So this is a religious tenet observed absolutely. Later, when visiting the same family, one family member was going to the nearest grocery store for some, you guessed it; Coca Cola, and they asked me if I would like a beer and, of course, I responded that I would actually like a couple of beers which they readily and cheerfully brought me never expressing any even remote objection to the request. Later, the family matriarch told my wife that they were amazed to see a person raised in the Presbyterian Church ever drinking even one beer or any alcoholic beverage whatsoever. There´s no accounting for taste or religious observance. 

By the way, it is not possible , in my home U.S, state of Alabama, that teetotalling protestant fundamentalists would ever and I mean _ever_, offer a guest any achoholic beverage of any kind in their homes. I remember when I had a cousin get married to a kid from a fundamentalist family of strict non-drinkers in the 1970s and during the wedding reception, my uncle and aunt actually held two separat receptions in their home divided by closed partitions. One side for (us) drinkers and one side for the teetotallars and, believe me, those partitions were not violated by either faction. 

I guess I´ve hit upon one of the things I like about Mexico. Social deference to others whose beliefs differ from your own when they are valued guests in your home as expressed by our hosts that day in the Chiapas Highlands.


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