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Field of Dreams; Fields of Reality
“Still no one helps us. Perhaps that albino over there will help us.
Perhaps he’ll come back with an airplane and take us off this rock.”
Thepox man makes another pass.
“I already had three.”
“You must have four.”
This time I shake my head, hoping the students will do the same.
You can drink pox or you can refuse it, as long as you don’t throw
it away.
The fire smolders, and the play continues. In the end, the world is
saved in a flawless game of catch, where stuffed squirrels are juggled
back and forth between the jaguar twins and the rest of creation. The
squirrel piece is incomprehensible to me, an observer, just as the got-
it-right-in-seven-days creation by a perfect Christian God might not
make sense to a Maya.
The performance, the celebration, the story is fantastic. It’s good
street theater, a set of beliefs that is dynamic, elastic, inclusive, chang-
ing. Perhaps this is what’s wrong with the contemporary Catholic
Church outside of Chiapas. No flexibility, a problem inherent in writ-
ten history and social-scientific research. Blame it on scripture, blame
it on the pope; but maybe there’s a chance for change. The pope’s pre-
occupied, dancing through tv commercials prior to a Mexican tour,
waving, making speeches, and in Chiapas, Mary might have been an
apostle.
The month is almost over, our line-listed itinerary has come to life.
In between the lines are stories mounded on stories, lives mounded
on lives. Chiapas has taught us her own tale. Our students are a lit-
tle disappointed that we haven’t really seen the Revolution. They’ve
been dreaming of Subcommandante Marcos, maybe doing a cook-
ing show, live, at the Zapatista kiosk close to the Zocalo. Still wear-
ing his ski mask, with Julia Child apron, they see him extolling the
virtue of chicken cutlets for the revolutionary on the run. “Fry ’em
up; wrap ’em up, in-between meals or as a main dish—pollo in the
pocket when there’s just no time to cook.” They wish they’d met the
revolution face to face.
We want to point out the places they’ve just been, people they have
heard, soldiers they’ve been searched by, but we don’t fault them. In
