Beth: Chellis, you have always been out of the mainstream, off the main map so to speak. So what's the difference between the Chellis Glendinning who lives in Chimayo and the one who once lived in San Francisco?
Chellis: I've lived my life documenting and critiquing the dominant society but now, now I really am living off the map. I am not living within the dominant society any more. Now I live in a land-based community that has been isolated until about a generation ago. We didn't even get running water until 1979. The phones came in the '70s. The world I live in now is a completely different world than the one I used to live in. This world is based on completely different assumptions about what life is, what death is, what success is, what kindness is, what right is.
Beth: Can you be a bit more explicit?
Chellis: Let me illustrate with a party I went to a while back. It was given by European Americans, very financially successful Anglos. The culture that defined how people were at that party was so different, so alien, to me, a person from Chimayo, that it took me about an hour being there before I could adjust to it.
Beth: Adjust to what?
Chellis: Let me compare it to an event earlier that week. I went to the local dance hall, where I sat with six people crowded around a little round table that was maybe a foot and a half in diameter. We sat very close, in each other's faces. Every time a new person arrived, they were welcomed and everybody stood up. That's the etiquette here; you shake hands, you always shake hands. Everything is run by an etiquette of respect. And people are genuinely caring and enthusiastic, especially about place. Place identification is enormous. So when the band leader said "Let's hear it from all those people from Chimayo," even though we were all engaged in conversation among ourselves, we heard it at the edge of our consciousness and everyone's fist went up. And you know, we all started cheering. You know, here's the contingent from Chimayo. Yeah!
So, when I went to this Anglo party, the first thing I noticed was that people were sitting in lawn chairs about 12 feet away from each other and nobody was speaking much. There was a stiffness, a defensiveness coming off of their bodies that was so profound and so stark.
And there were other differences. Like the heavy place identification at the dance hall was completely absent at the lawn party. At the lawn party, everyone was saying things to me like, "Are you still in Chimayo?" It was as if they expected me to move on. They were all about to fly to India or to England or to Ecuador. They were all people who moved around, and it seemed to me that their home was just a place where their stuff was. Whereas in the Chimayo world, your home is a place where your ancestors live, where you have responsibilities. You have a responsibility to the river, to the asequias (irrigation ditches), to the monte, the mountain. You have a responsibility for your people. It's a completely different experience of life.
Here, at any given moment, my refrigerator has eggs with the feathers still on them because the eggs came out of the chicken today or yesterday. Or I have apple cider that was made from my friend Snowflake Martinez's grandfather's orchard, chile that Snowflake got from trading but that he peeled and roasted himself, and corn that I grew myself. The water isn't piped in from the mountains 300 miles away or recycled through waste treatment. The water is from the rain, or from the river, or from the well.
Beth: So you have become part of a place-based community? Does that imply more than eating local?
Chellis: Yes, it certainly does. You see the importance of place even in the dance hall. There was a band there from Taos. Some of the band members are volunteer firemen in Chimayo. One of them is the guy who helps me at the xerox place in Espaniola. The band members are part of the community; we can even turn on the radio and hear their music. We have at least three stations that play primarily local music. And when we go to the dance hall, there they are and their music speaks from the land and about love of the land or fighting to protect the land or about revolutionary heroes or the whole corrida tradition. So anyway, this band--it's called Los Amigos Unidos--decided one night to start playing some Tejano music, music from Texas. It's Chicano music, you know; it's not like they decided to play New York rap music. They were going to play Tejano music from their cousins over the border. And people became outraged--"Why don't you play our music? What's wrong with our music? Why do you have to go over the border and play their music?"--They were outraged. It was such an emblem, this little event, such an emblem of being place-based.
Beth: But you aren't "from" this place originally. How did you come to understand this place?
Chellis: There are a million ways that I learn about place every day: the things that people say, the way that people express themselves, the differences that come out in a hundred ways in a hundred conversations every day.
Beth: For example...?
Chellis: I don't know if this is the best example but I remember when I first arrived, I went to the dump, an important place here, and I introduced myself to the hefe, the chief of the trash. The next time I went to see him with some garbage, he says to me, "What, you're not working today? Why?" And I said, " Well, you know, I'm a writer and I just finished a book and so I'm taking a little time off. " And he said, "Well, I wrote a book once." And I said, "Really, tell me about it." And he said, "Well, this woman, she came to the dump and she said to me, 'Benito, you're not doing anything. Why don't you write a book?' And so I took a paper and a pencil and I wrote for two days. I wrote two pages and then I didn't have any more ideas." And then he added, "And then the piñon season came and I was on my hands and knees, picking the piñon nuts off the ground and I got a lot of piñon nuts and I put them in these plastic bags and I set up a card table and I put the bags on it and with all the people coming to the dump, I sold all the bags and I made a lot of money. And then I went back and I looked at my two pages and I said, 'To hell with it.'"
And that's the story, the difference. Do you want to write a book that people in other places are going to read or do you want to take advantage of the piñon nuts right here?
Beth: So there's a time dimension to this culture?
Chellis: Yes, time and place. Because the piñon nuts, man, they don't come every year, you know.
Beth: So, you are part of this community now?
Chellis: I think in time that I become a more profoundly accepted part of the community... Let me go back to the lawn party again; people there would ask me what it was like to live here, as if I were alien, an expatriate. As if I really truly identified with them, as if I were just making a little foray into a strange and alien land and I would come back soon. That's not how it is. I live in this culture and my politics are the politics of this place. I stand, first and foremost, with the people here. It's not like I am coming in, like I did years ago, when I worked with native peoples on uranium mining issues. I came in and I left and they were like an adjunct to my life. Now I am inside the culture and everything else is an adjunct to my life.
Beth: So you're within the map of this community?
Chellis: I think that over time I have become familiar in the village, a terrain on the map. I've proven myself to be a good vescina, a good neighbor, and I have participated in the collective activity of the community. You can find me hanging out at the store, walking the badlands, or riding horses in the monte.
Beth: Were you always inside the culture, from the time you arrived?
Chellis: Very early on, I understood that the politics of this place are the politics of sovereignty: the politics of preserving culture, the politics of land and sustainability.
Every day we face a struggle against imperialism, domination, racism, and dysfunctional relations--whatever you want to call the bulldozer that is just mowing over land-based communities that still exist, mowing them over in the interests of a single, monocultural, monoeconomic, corporate technological system.
From inside this land-based world, I see the beauty of it, the preciousness of it, the importance for humanity and for life on earth. That's why I feel so passionately about it, why I feel the need to stand up for it. Do you want me to get specific?
Beth: Please.
Chellis: Well, of course we're fighting corporations. We fought off one that wanted to do copper mining here. By the way, the fight was won by Indian people coming to the public hearing and telling them that if you put your copper mine in our traditional lands, where our potters get their clay, we're going to war with you.
Now that's my kind of politics because it's bare bones, just totally stripped down. It's about imperialism versus sustainability.
We also beat off a lumber company, a multinational from England that was clearcutting the forest.
Beth: But you do have a WalMart.
Chellis: Yes, we have WalMart now.
Beth: Do you think your community will survive? Or will they be absorbed into someone else's universe, someone else's map?
Chellis: What's happening is that the Map has arrived and it's called Highway 285. I don't know who they think is coming here but they are building this incredible highway. The scale of it is like you find in Los Angeles. There you are in the desert where, just about three weeks ago, was this little road and, about a half a generation ago, was just a dirt road. And now, there's this huge highway. And it's coming here. It came right into Espaniola and became the main drag of Espaniola and then they put in the WalMart. So, it's coming. You can see it coming up the road. You can see the new cell phone tower in the village. Who do they think is going to be talking on those cell phones? We don't need those things with the way of life we have here but it's coming.
Beth: Do people feel invaded?
Chellis: Yes, very much so but it is happening so quickly. Decades ago, the elders said that they didn't want the big chain stores because they would do something bad to the culture. But now, there's a fascination with it, particularly among the young people who like Nike shoes and New York rap music... The audio section, the CD and tape section, of WalMart doesn't have local music in it... I wonder if Merlin's, the little local discotheca and tape store, is going to survive or not.
It's coming so fast, this global economy. I mean, this horrendous cell phone tower just arrived. It was such a demonstration of the lack of democracy of technology. Who asked the village, who said, "Would you like one and where would you like us to put it?" It just came one day. It was just there with a big, eight-foot cyclone fence around it so no one can do like they did back in the old days.
Beth: The old days?
Chellis: Like when the first ATM machine came in, the vatos, the guys from the village, just shot it up with rifles. And the bank got the picture and said effectively, "Whoops, we didn't realize that this village was off the map. We thought this was America already." And they left and they never brought the ATM machine back... But now, this stuff is happening so quickly and there seems to be a lack of resistance. I find myself wondering what happened to the machismo, what happened to that automatic distrust of anything that comes in from the outside, that automatic distrust of technological things.
Beth: But you drive a car. That's technological. I remember your saying it was a dream come true.
Chellis: Oh, you mean my Honda!
Beth: Tell me about it.
Chellis: It's a '77 Civic. It took me about two seconds to want to buy it. It was in mint condition. It only had 60,000 miles on it. It was truly worthy of being painted in the lowrider tradition. Chimayo is the center of lowriders and the center of lowrider painting. In fact there is a legend that people from Chimayo went to Los Angeles years ago and there they invented the lowrider.
Beth: And what is a lowrider?
Chellis: It's an old car, usually an old American car that has been lowered so that the body is almost scraping on the earth. One of the qualities of a lowrider is not just that it's low but that an artist has painted the car and perhaps painted a mural on it. The most popular figure for murals is Nuestro Señora de Guadalupe. Religious scenes are very big. Elvis is also popular. So are flames comes off of the front wheels. Lowrider painting is really superb and everything is done by hand.
So anyway, it was my dream always to have a beautifully painted car and so I took my Honda to Lolo Medina, one of the best lowrider painters in Chimayo. And I asked him to paint Subcommandante Marcos on the hood of my car. Lolo is the guy who's famous for the twelve-stations-of-the-cross Lincoln Continental and he also did the Elvis car.
It took Lolo six months to prepare himself to paint my car. Then he did it in airbrush in two days. So now, my beautiful yellow car has this magnificent portrait of Subcommandante Marcos with bandeleros over his chest. He's got green eyes and he has his mask on and a greenish yellow halo around him. And the montes of Chiapas are in the background.
Beth: I'm lost. Why does Chellis Glendinning have Subcommandante Marcos on her car?
Chellis: The answer brings us back to a point I made earlier. Subcommandante Marcos, the spokesperson for the Zapatistas, is a figure that stands for the struggle between the larger forces of imperialism--the expanding technological society, greed, ruining the Earth and ruining communities for profit, the whole system--and land-based communities that have ancestral ties to the land, that know how to live sustainably on the land, and that have the spirituality and connectedness and sanity. Subcommandante Marcos has become emblematic of that struggle, that struggle that I have the honor to be part of here in Chimayo.
Beth: Yours is a struggle against ruining the earth for greed. And yet, people who challenge the tenets of land-based cultures, environmentalists who object to cutting trees or hunting whales or elk, would also be against ruining the earth for greed. So what's the difference; how do you understand the difference?
Chellis: I come from the environmental movement and I understand the perspective of putting forth policies that would create wilderness parks where people basically can't go unless they're just hiking through or taking photographs, where there's no use of the land. The holders of this perspective have witnessed the lungs and the nervous system and the blood flow of the earth being impaired and destroyed everywhere. And in response, they have offered the idea of saving a certain percentage of the land from technological society, saving it not only for its own sake but also for the sake of humanity. There is no doubt but that theirs is an interesting politic. And an important politic. However, the struggle of land-based people to survive in a sustainable way outside of the dominant system is an equally important struggle. And I think that both struggles are essentially about the survival of life on earth. Further, I think that a conversation needs to take place to find a way to sustain both land-based cultures and wild places. That is a conversation that will require respect on all sides.
Beth: So we're still talking about maps. Such a conversation would require speakers who could approach each other's places with humility, with the understanding that they are carrying different maps and that there is no master map.
Chellis: Yes, you've got it. Bingo!... As we sometimes say in the valley, Bingo! (laughs)
Beth Burrows is director of the Edmonds Institute, a small public interest group concerned with environment and technology.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual