Today is not the day after. Doña Juanita grinds the corn that will later become a new tortilla on the table where, after the exercise, the promoters will eat. Doña Juanita confesses to me that, when it comes to distributing the food, she serves the health promoters the most. Because they are healers, she says, and they need more strength for their heads to learn and teach.
We talk. Rather, she talks and I listen. She says of a distant land that is just over there, on the other side of the mountain range that extends its slopes on our soil; our land that before belonged to the strangers, those from outside, those of money and death; soil that became free because of our struggle.
Doña Juanita is happy about the struggle. Telling stories of the past, when the landowner and the government ruled, she encourages her granddaughters, exhorts them, warns them: “Never give up the struggle, look for your place and fight to defend it. If you lose it, our dead died for nothing and they will come to yank your collar. And I’m going to kick the daylights out of you. Even if I’m dead, I’ll come at night.”
“The system only taught us how to die badly,” she says as she stokes the campfire. “And the struggle taught us how to live. It’s hard to follow the path of death, and harder to walk the path of life. But the struggle is more joyful, because it makes you look further. For example, in health. Before disease only ended with death, and our medicine only delayed our departure by a little bit. Now there are many forms of health. Starting from the bottom, just as you build up a champa. Well, that’s what I think. That’s what my head says. That is why it is good for young women to learn about health. Because that road is long and it is a road of life. But not only about medicinal plants, because even I know about that. It is about new things, about laboratories and those strange devices that listen to what your belly says. It’s about opening a brother’s belly, taking out the evil and mending it like you mend an undergarment. I think the landowner wanted us sick so that we would die quickly and not be a pain in the ass. Anyway, the boss brings people from elsewhere to serve him. The struggle is good because it’s not only about killing or dying, it’s about living. I would like to see that they put a knife in a Christian, but a good knife because it does not kill, it heals. It is very different, the issue of health. I think that’s why you don’t mention it when you get sick. It’s not because you’re brave and don’t want to make a fuss. It is because you are afraid of the knife that heals. Imagine that you see with your eye how the machete reaches your belly. Oh my God!”, says Doña Juanita while she repeatedly makes the sign of the cross.
Doña Juanita checks the beans. She tells me that, in that other land, nearby -although far away-, live kindred peoples who call those soils “Palestine.” She says that destruction and death are still sown there, although now another war in another geography is the news that hides its news. Doña Juanita does not cry when she speaks of “Palestine.” Her eyes shine, yes, but there is no pity. There is rage, courage, shame.
“I don’t know, but I imagine that everyone wants to tell those people what to do. That is how it was with our communities, who came to order us what we should think, dress, eat, pray, they even want to tell us how to talk. The boss does not always arrive with the face of a landowner. Sometimes he comes with the face of a good person, who comes to help you, who gives you alms, who strokes you. But what he wants is to command. If we did not struggle, today we would be the same, living a life that is not ours.
We would have no consciousness of our own and we would be what the vision of others wants us to be. It doesn’t work that way, because they only leave you with death. Your life is the life they say and not yours. The struggle is good because it does not command, but obeys.”
Doña Juanita sighs. She piles up the tortillas and memories, and tells me a story her grandmother told her 30, 50, 100, a thousand years ago. Doña Juanita is old now, but she is a child again when she repeats the story her grandmother carried with her from the ones who came before:
“After the beginning the beings who began to speak, and thus to walk, fought a lot. They wanted to have. Whoever had a little, wanted a lot. Whoever had nothing, wanted to have, even a little. Whoever had a lot, wanted to have everything. It was not really their way. That way was brought by the one who is the color of money, the one with fierce eyes and hands of death, the Dzul. The ones who came before suffered a lot. And they fought a lot among themselves. And with the fights, diseases for all: for the young, for the mothers, for the fathers, for the fields, for the animals. The plants also became sick and the waters and the skies became sick. Before money, there was health and the disease of wanting to have more did not exist. There was the common.
The Dzules, the foreigners, the outsiders, taught our people that, to dominate a people, it was necessary to dominate the women. And if they didn’t let them, they had to kill them. Because by killing women, the Dzules said, they killed future rebellions.
But the women had a wiser one, older in age and rank. Ixchel is her name and her job is the health of everything. By day she hides, but at night she stands guard to see if everything is in order. She is the moon, Ixchel.
To the women in struggle, Ixchel gave them the inner strength of heart and body. She made her heart big so that the seed of life could fit in it. That is why the oppressor’s wars seek to harm the women who fight. From the time they are small they are attacked. Because life goes in them, tomorrow goes in them. She made them rebels. Nonconformists. She made them wise. They are farsighted. They see life beyond where others only see death. And when the Ixchel is embraced, then yes, forget that they are very macho and bossy. That is why our work as women is resistance and rebellion. Because this is the only way to heal a land sullied by bombs, industries and machines. This is the only way to heal death. Fighting, that is.”
-*-
Now I realize that Doña Juanita, when she says “Palestine”, she is saying “girl, woman, old woman”. And that is why Doña Juanita, who was and is a girl, woman and old woman, when she says “Palestine” she says “rage,” yes, but she also says “tomorrow.”
And that is what we Zapatista communities say when we say “Palestine”.
Okay. To your health, and that’s just it: health.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast, almost on the corner of the Middle East.
The Captain
November of 2024.