It Rained in San Cristobal

I walked past the native craft sellers huddled under the arcade on the town square and I walked up and down the slippery sidewalks. In front of one shop, a group of little ones, their hands bursting with braided wrist ties, their little arms holding bundles of toy llamas, crowded around a television set, their brown faces turned blue in the TV light.  My jeans were wet from sloshing in and out of puddles and when I got to the restaurant, party of 12, 8pm, my people were nowhere to be seen.

I drank a beer and scooped at a mountain of guacamole and listened to a shaggy haired boy sing his heart out while he played the guitar. He had black eyes and black hair and dark, dark rings under his eyes, and I was the only one who applauded between songs. He looked so tired. I wanted to buy him coffee and maybe a sandwich. When he pitched me his show for the following night, I apologized for my bad Spanish and told him I was leaving for the airport in the morning. He shifted to English, almost seamlessly. I bought his CD, five dollars, and hoped he’d spend it on coffee and maybe a sandwich. The restaurant needed the big table, and the waiters apologized, like it was their fault I was alone.  They wouldn’t let me pay for my food, only for my beer, and I plunged back into the rain.

In the morning, on the shuttle to the airport, I found out that everyone had gone to the official party, that’s why I was alone. I didn’t get the message. Thing is, I wasn’t sorry. I felt bad that I hadn’t felt worse. I liked watching it rain, I liked how indulgent the restaurant staff was with me, and I liked watching the local families come in to eat dinner. I liked the walk back to my hotel and how the wet pavement reflected light back at the colonial architecture. I’d had a lot of time with other people, and it was okay by me to eat dinner alone and walk the wet streets. It was a good way to say goodbye.

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Four days in town, three out in the jungle. That was my schedule. I was a guest of ATMEX, an adventure travel conference. They’d flown me down and covered (almost) all my expenses for the week. My only obligation was to give a talk on “Selling with Stories.” Given that the first slide in my deck slashed out “Selling with stories” and replaced it with “Telling stories,”  well, you can come to your own conclusions about how I tackled the subject.

The deck is here. The first half is my my co-presenter, Juno Kim, and you’ll see a decided shift in tone in the middle where I start. Storytelling is all the rage with marketers these days, as though they’ve all of a sudden figured out that you get someone’s attention by telling them a great story, as though telling a story is not one of the most human of all pursuits… a-hem.

I digress.  I was there to give a talk about story and how to tell good ones, and in exchange, I got to spend a week in Chiapas where I was enchanted by everything. I hiked and ate tamales and drank tequila with coffee and made some new friends that I genuinely miss now that I’m home.

Before I headed south, lots of people asked me if it wasn’t dangerous to go to Chiapas. It didn’t even occur to me to worry about my safety until they asked.  Given that my plans did not include buying drugs, running immigrants over borders, dealing arms, or starting a revolutionary movement, no, I didn’t think it dangerous. I wandered around the city of San Cristobal at night, alone, repeatedly, and even during my 5 am misadventure at the bus station, I didn’t feel unsafe.

“North Americans think Mexicans are going to treat us as badly as we treat them in our home country,” said one of the fine people I met on my travels. “That’s why we’re afraid.” I though this very insightful, and terribly wrong headed, and oh, if we could be as kind to our visitors as the people I met in Chiapas were with me.

After hearing that, I doubled my efforts to be kind with the locals, who returned the favor. The girl in the market at the churro stand wouldn’t let me take her picture, but she let me stand behind her cart and pretend I ran the churro stand. The other girl, the one selling the embroidered shirts, she didn’t mind the camera and she offered fair prices. The waiters at breakfast in the hotel helped me order in Spanish and taught me a few new words, which I’ve already forgotten, but they smiled and were kind. And the girl in the dark bus station at 5 am said, “Do you speak English?” when I tried to find out if I was in the right place. I was not.

And yes, yes, it’s a messy place, deeply flawed. There are weird checkpoints all over the roads where you have to stop while a boy who seems too young to carry a gun looks into your vehicle. And there’s garbage all over the damn place and skinny stray dogs and kids who really should be in school and mysterious public works projects taking place using dated equipment. Of course, there are all of those things.  While I was in the church on the market plaza, I watch a shaman do some kind of ceremony in front of an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and I thought about colonialism and missionaries and how the native people always get the short end of that stick, and how here in San Cristobal, you could see that right in front of you.

But I was still teary with regret when my departing flight pulled away from the gate. I wanted to stay longer, recover my dusty Spanish, go back to that tiny cafe with the loft where the painfully hip local kids were hanging out. I wanted to find the big chain supermarket on the main avenue outside the twee little inner city and spend much too long in the snack aisle trying to figure out what things are. I wanted to eat in all the places that made tamales, first, and then, all the places that served pozole, and then, I wanted to find out that I was missing out on something regional, and then, eat at all the places that made that, next. I wanted to be in the bus station at 5 am because it was the right place, not because I’d ended up there by mistake.

I have been to Mexico three times. Once, over 20 years ago, to a tiny beach town in Baja where there was little more than two or three small hotels and some fish BBQ joints. Once, maybe five years ago, to Cancun. I stayed on the strip and while I had a nice enough time, I thought, “Yeah, I don’t need to do that again.”

And this time, to Chiapas and San Cristobal de las Casas where, as I walked back to my hotel in the rain, I thought, “Oh, I’m just getting started here.”