San Juan de Chamula: the strange Mayan rite of Coca Cola
"I was there, in the year 1971, when the land distribution and subsequent colonization of the jungle was enacted. Then roads were opened with a machete to be able to communicate to the new populations and when the feat was achieved the first truck that entered was the Coca Cola truck that delivered free bottles to all the neighbors who had never seen that drink », Pancho Álvarez explains, Mayan writer and one of the great specialists in this entire cultural universe where magic and dreams mixed with custom.
Just over four decades after the famous soda, that 8 May commemorated his 129 anniversary, has managed to become sacred in a small and humble town in the mountains of Chiapas, San Juan de Chamula. There, Coca Cola is part of their syncretic religious rites, where Christian saints and virgins are venerated under Mayan ceremonies in which even shamanism is practiced within the same church of the population. Coca Cola is part of the offerings. We see people lying on the ground and the sacrifice of a rooster, to which a shaman twists the neck and passes it by the back to a teenager with a frightened gesture. "This is an important ceremony because of the number of candles that are burned. The flames are a barrier of soldiers against evil ”, Pancho explains. It is forbidden, under penalty of arrest even, take photos without the complicated and paid permission of local authorities.
The flames are a barrier of soldiers against evil
The American drink is today of the life of this community. «All religious treatment, civic or commercial, carries the delivery and drink of cocacolates », Pancho tells us. «Here we practically only sell Coca Cola», Manuel confirms, a young man who works in a store that sells drinks near the Church. Each bottle costs eight pesos (0,45 EUR). Then, while we take a posh at the door of the bar, local firewater, a strange parade of traditionally dressed chamulans passes in front of us. They launch rockets and explode firecrackers in their path. Then a completely drunk man appears who approaches us with a knife in his hand but is too drunk to be the threat he does not intend to be.
Pancho then takes us to his compadre Juan Gallo's house, a painter and Tzotzil humanist who lives in the town and who leaves the post of butler that day, religious office, what entails a great party. Gallo is a Chamula humanist whom we finally meet in the great syncretistic ceremony of transfer of powers, where some mariachis sing and, that too universal custom, which dictates that women sit far and in the worst places and men occupy the prominent chairs. "There is a party here almost daily", they tell us. We don't doubt it.
A few years ago he brought a Japanese television to which he explained that where he lived, Coca Cola had become "holy water."
A few years ago, Gallo brought a Japanese television to which he explained that where he lived, Coca Cola had become "holy water.". The BBC has also passed through this town to tell that story in which a soda, the greatest symbol of globalization, is revered by a legendary indomitable tribe and rooted in the past. Ironies of destiny and globalization.
The path of that hegemony was not easy. The Chamulans used other local drinks, like the sweet beer or the chocolate, before it landed on those cliffs and we stopped the trucking fleet of the American multinational. "They say that in another town in the area some women poisoned the bishop when he forbade them to continue with their custom of drinking chocolate at the six o'clock mass with their servants", says the energetic Pancho, to which the stories accumulate, to confirm the roots of those tastes. "Coca Cola erased everything".
There was even an internal war with stone confrontations between the two hegemonic groups that disputed the power of the beyond and the here. "The pepsicolos and the cocacolos clashed and the latter ended up taking control", remember Pancho. There are boxes and bottles of the rival brand in San Juan de Chamula, but they are old or minority.
The pepsicolos and the cocacolos faced each other and the latter ended up taking control
The business grew fast, the distributor settled on the outskirts of nearby San Cristóbal de las Casas and in this impoverished world a new aristocracy was created that were the lords of Coca Cola. "In San Juan de Chamula, the municipal president has been in many cases the president of the distributor or someone close to him", affirm some neighbors who attend with their chamula clothing to the so-called feast of the cross or mother earth. «When the Coca Cola truck arrives and the distributor is awarded, power is granted », Pancho reaffirms.
Next to the party, Mariano, the 31 year old and member of the rock group Wootick, invites us to his small bar and rehearsal room. «I have decided to stop selling Coca Cola in my bar. We do not like it and it is not part of our culture », says. The young Tzotzil rocker, lover of pink floyd and who plays an electric guitar, maintains a complicated protest speech: "We don't like the western system, we want to return to ours. We have our natural medicine and we want to have our schools. Coca Cola is also part of our tradition and it seems that all the people are indebted to them. It has a lot of sugar and causes us diseases that we did not have before », holds. One of the songs from the first album they want to release, for consumption in Chamula, has a theme, Already’ k’ot-Banamil, who talks about that veneration of mother earth and that step back looking forward. All in that complexity of Chamula in which electric guitars claim a return to yesterday.
Electric guitars demand a return to yesterday
The confrontation and desire before such a powerful and tasty rival led to Subcomandante Marcos himself (now renamed Galeano), leader of the revolutionary Zapatista movement in Chiapas, to receive a rebuke from theirs who admonished the Zapatista leaders for appearing in some public image drinking Coca Cola and not local products. "A friend of mine with other people are the ones who brought them the local fruits and asked them if they couldn't drink those things from their land", remember Pancho.
And while, in the town of San Juan de Chamula life is too far away and too complex to even pretend to explain it vaguely without a thousand sheets and a hundred years being necessary. Chamula is really another planet. On the superficial, the people prohibit those who are not Chamula, even to the mestizos, own land there. A way to shield yourself from the rest of the world and that has made your independence legendary, even for the Spanish conquistadors who had a hard time defeating them. «The error was when from the walls they threw takin, which in local language means sun scalp and which for the Spanish had a simpler and more practical translation, oro », the Mayan writer has a certain acidity towards everything related to the Conquest.
The mistake was when takin was thrown at them from the walls, which in local language means sun dung
Then, you re-enter that church of San Juan where the Catholic priest is only allowed to perform baptisms and where the floor is covered with pine leaves and candles that seem to light and burn everything, And the world seems to bend into an impossible total. Along with hundreds of candles with the face of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus Christ, facing the gaze of some saints who for years were punished in black clothes for not preventing the poverty of the city, Mayan rites follow one another. It's hard to believe what you see. There are hundreds more candles burning in rituals that put light in the darkness and in which the gods mix essences, magic and customs.
And in that fantastic world there is doubt as to whether the beginning of all that religious syncretism that narrates the arrival of Our Lady of Dolores of the Lacandones on an impregnable island where they lived and she will be true., blonde and beautiful, conquered Hachakyum, the supreme God of the Mayans, and took him to live in a fortress separated from everything. The story Pancho tells me while we contemplate a Coca Cola bottle buried next to a grave in its original cemetery. We see a family that has probably been there all day eating and chatting, children and adults, next to the tombs of their ancestors.
Behind is the market of the square, full of indigenous people selling fruits, fur, dresses that the more hair they wear are the more sacred. Finally we go and look from the car at a sign on the road that gives all visitors a welcome and a goodbye. The poster says so: «Welcome to San Juan de Chamula. Uncover happiness. Coca Cola".
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