San Cristobal de las Casas was founded in the 1520s and was the center from which much of the rest of Chiapas (then in Guatemala) was conquered. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, as the other conquistadors, was granted land, but in his case not in San Cristobal, although he usually visited in the winter/spring dry season and stayed at the house of another conquistador on the zocalo where he met with his old buddies from the conquest and gathered information for his book. It was also from here that he set out to conquer San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan. The house still exists. Not much changed in San Cristobal for the next 400 years when European explorers from Harvard, the Carnegy institution, etc. began coming to investigate the ruins and Maya cultures. Around the turn of the 20th century Guatemala ceded Chiapas to Mexico, and in the early 1920s Franz Blom, a Dane who had studied anthropology in the US, visited, and ended up devoting the rest of is life to the anthropology and archaeology of Chiapas. He met his wife, a Swiss Jew who had had run ins with the Nazis, while they were both exploring the Lacandon jungle on separate teams. She lived until the 1990s and became famous for her environmental work. Franz discovered the Lacandon Indians in the 20s or 30s, and he and his wife started a research institute in San Cristobal that incorporated ideas they learned from the Lacandon on sustainable agriculture. The institution provides research facilities for investigators, but which sadly the lessons the Bloms learned have not been used by many others in the area. It was people like Franz and Gertrude Blom and other investigators who introduced San Cristobal to the modern world. Until the 1940s it took two days by foot to reach San Cristobal from Tuxtla Gutierrez. In 1947 a paved road was build that cut the time to 8 hours by car. It was on this road (now the Panamerican Highway) that my grandparents must have travelled to get to Comitan where the road stopped and they took a small plane to get to Yucatan in 1950 or 1951. Now the trip to San Cristobal takes about 45 minutes. Makes me appreciate what my grandparents accomplished when they were in their 50s. The new road was finished in the 1970s-80s, and nearly all of the environmental destruction dates to after that time. I remember reading about the destruction of the jungle when we lived here in the 70s, and the new road has greatly accelerated it. It takes 200 years to regenerate jungle to what it was originally like (originally in the sense of the 50s-60s) and 500 years to regenerate the highland pine forests. We will not see it restored in our lifetimes. The Lacandon jungle is now greatly reduced in size compared to what the Bloms knew. Hillsides are burned off by ejidarios, and for a couple of years produce corn which wears out the soil. The milpas are then abandoned and with no ground cover, the soil is washed away. The Usumacinta River which my grandparents knew now runs brown along with lots of plastic bottles and trash, even though it is 100-150 meters across. They and the Bloms would not recognize it. Our driver said that when the new road to Palenque opened in 1980 it was like a long dark tunnel through the jungle. Today it is pasture and heavily disturbed hillsides and precious little shade. They no longer even call it the Lacandon jungle along most of the highways length. If you want to see what it was like for most of its history, you better get here in the next decade. Even though there is a lot of water, waterfalls, lakes, rivers, and second growth vegetation, etc. It felt as though I was in a science fiction novel set in the future where I was visiting the last remaining remnants of a natural environment that you had to wait years to actually get permission to see because it was so precious and vulnerable. Even though everything I was seeing was unlike anything my grandparents knew, it was still the last remaining territory that had any resemblance to what used to be. Very sad really. And it has all happened so fast with seemingly very little intervention by the government to protect it. All of our guides made a point of letting us know how much pressure the environment is under and how important it is to protect it, but without the government actually enforcing the environmental laws very little will actually change I am afraid. I will post some pix to go with this.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:45:47 +0000
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