Travels with my Family by Marie-Louise Gay, David Homel Page A

terraces below.
    Suddenly, my brother shouted, “Look, down there!”
    On the terrace just beneath us, where the banana trees grew, people were lying on the ground, face down, with their ponchos over their heads. They really didn’t want their souls stolen, not one little bit.
    â€œDid you take a picture?” my mother asked.
    â€œNo,” my father said. “I didn’t have time to.”
    â€œWe’re leaving. Now.”
    We all got into the car. But when we tried to drive away, the car wouldn’t move.
    â€œSomething’s wrong,” my father said, worried.
    â€œMaybe the Tzotzil people cast a magic spell on us,” my brother suggested.
    â€œI think I know what it is.”
    I squeezed out of the back seat. You can’t be any fatter than a string of spaghetti to get in and out of a two-door rented car.
    Then I went around to the front of the car and kicked the two big stones away from the tires. My mother started laughing as I got back inside. So did my brother. My father concentrated on his driving.
    As we drove past the first terrace, I saw that all the people had gotten up again, and were working in their fields. That was a close call!
    At the bottom of the valley was a crossroads. One of the directions led to Chenaló. But it didn’t look as though we were going to get there. Big rocks were blocking the road, and on those rocks were men wearing scarves over their faces. When we got closer, I could see that they weren’t much older than I was. And they all had guns.

    â€œChenaló?” my father asked.
    â€œ
Ustedes no pasan
,” they said. “Not for you.”
    â€œWhy not?
Por qué?
”
    They stared at us. I guess
Why?
was not a question they were used to answering. They pointed in the other direction.
    â€œChamula,” they said.
    â€œWere they soldiers?” my little brother asked as my father turned the car around. “They didn’t have uniforms.”
    â€œI don’t think so,” my mother told him. “I think they were ordinary people, trying to get their land back.”
    â€œBack from who?” my brother asked.
    â€œThe people who work on the land don’t own it. And they don’t always get a fair price for what they grow, like those bananas you saw. In a lot of villages, they don’t even have schools or clean water. I think the guys blocking the road are trying to change that.”
    My brother was quiet for a minute or two. And let me tell you, that doesn’t happen very often.
    And that was how we ended up visiting San Juan Chamula, another town that’s famous for being a place where you can’t take pictures. There were signs in several languages, warning people to keep their cameras in their pockets.
    There did not seem to be very much to see in Chamula. We went into the church to look at the paintings. It was very dark inside, but when my eyes got used to the darkness, I could see that this church was different from other churches we had visited. Very different. First of all, the benches had been taken out, and the floor was covered with fir-tree branches. The statues of the saints, that usually sit on pedestals, were standing right on the floor, along with the paintings that are usually on the walls.
    People were praying to the saints so hard they didn’t even notice us. They had burning candles stuck in Coke bottles in front of the statues, next to squares of chocolate and little piles of chili peppers. It wasn’t like any church I’d ever seen.
    We didn’t spend more than a minute in there. It felt as though we had wandered into someone else’s house, where we didn’t belong.
    â€œDid those guys who were blocking the road change around the church, too?” my brother wondered.
    â€œMaybe,” my mother said. “It looks like the Indian people are taking back the church and using it in their own way, just the way they want