Jeanne Simonelli, Erin McCulley, and Rachel SimonelliDressed in layers and sweaters and raingear, we march into Nahá,
another line of visitors on the ecotourism trail. Before coming, Kate
asked Victor to set up a service project that the group could do while
in Nahá. We had collected money for supplies and explored the mean-
ings of community and service in our pre-departure study. Victor met
with the Nahá elders: old Antonio, inheritor of Chan K’in’s cosmic
legacy; and K’ayum Ma’ax, worldly, traveled, holder of a different
type of knowledge. They’d decided we should help with the school—
a clean-up project, and provide whatever assistance we could for two
other women named Koh—the last remaining widows of Chan K’in
Viejo.
The students grumbled a little as we squished into the village. Nahá
is growing and shrinking at the same time. The road from Ocosingo,
the good road, is too good, and is both a catheter and a garbage truck.
Nahá is the dump, absorbing all the paraphernalia we anthros want
to “protect” the people from, with our well-intentioned information.
We walk past the skeletal shape of an unfinished two-story dwelling,
slide in the pudding soil to the door of Chan K’in’s house. Flashes to
Trudi’s photos again, Discovery Channel videos, Chan K’in’s enigmatic
and glowing face, bent shape, smiling up at the towering Trudi. They
called Trudi the queen of the jungle, celebrating her devoted, pater-
nalistic relationship with the Lacandón and their selva.
The house is large, simple, dirt-floored, but with none of the smoky,
cramped poverty of the banished Chan K’in Quinto’s. Here, at dif-
ferent times, Chan K’in lived with four wives and thirty-five children,
some dead, some moved to their own houses, some gone to sit on
stones selling bows and arrows to the tourists in Palenque. A young,
pale-skinned, red-haired boy comes in; smiles shyly. Still another son
of Chan K’in; he is one of the Lacandón albinos, an anthropological
lesson in endogamous marriage and genetics. Is this a de-colorized
version of indigenous culture, a snapshot of the great white hope of
total assimilation?
The widows are poor, thin, tiny. Left without the labor of their hus-
band, they have taken over the milpa. Koh-the-elder makes ceramic
animal and god pots for sale to the tourists. Koh-the-younger bore
the last children of Chan K’in Viejo: a boy, preteen (do the arithmetic