A few years ago a Facebook friend who turned out to not be very friendly made some comments on some photos of me playing the flute in some indigenous community in Chiapas. She said that I played classical music that those people probably could not understand. I told her I played the music that I personally like, beautiful and contemplative melodies that I find very spiritual and that can be played on a solo instrument. I told her it was not like I was playing Schoenberg or Stockhausen or some abstract music in which you need some modern (perhaps warped) sense of aesthetics to appreciate. I often got into friendly debates with my musician friends who were into more modern currents of music. I would ask why even a mind uneducated in music can find a melody of Bach or Mozart very beautiful but who would have a melody of Stockhausen repeating itself in one´s mind? You would have to be either insane or very abstracted from natural aesthetics and caught up in abstract, 20th century concepts of art to find some kind of beauty in that music. That is an extreme example, of course. Yet many people who are educated and from the “first world” cannot follow a much more approachable work of Beethoven or Mozart without getting bored or sleepy.

When I first arrived to Jaltenango I used to go and meditate and play flute by the river in the afternoons. I had many friendly interactions while doing so. Children and adults would come up and say hello and say they liked the music and wanted to see my flute. Once there was a man who would bring me mangoes from his ranch near the river when he heard me playing by the river. He had several varieties of mangoes that he would bring me and I would return to share them with my friends. We became friends with a few conversations. One day he asked more about my past and so I also asked him where he was from. I knew that most of the people in this region came from indigenous communities in Chiapas after the government started some land distribution programs in the 1950s. Most people had lost their indigenous roots, spoke only Spanish, and had entered into mainstream, marginalized Mexican culture. I guessed from his age that he did not grow up in Jaltenango.

What he told me was unforgettable. He was from an indigenous community of Chiapas. At 13 years of age his family sold him to a rancher where he was abused and overworked. He remained a slave until he was 16, considered independent and old enough to be set free. He said he worked hard and was able to buy a piece of land and start a life. He had passed through alchoholism and seemed to have an existential insight of how his past traumas drove him toward alcoholism. A few years before this I heard an account that helped me begin to understand the existential situation of so many indigenous people. I was at the CIDECII, an indigenous cooperative university in San Cristobal. A Zapatista leader was speaking about this subject of modern slavery, of how families were so poor that they sold their children to ranchers. I gathered she had passed through such a situation. She seemed to be a very wise, strong and admirable maternal figure that many people trusted. She said that being mistreated, physically, and/or sexually abused was so common with indigenous children who were sold into slavery. It was so common that it has become a core issue in the collective story of modern indigenous people.

After hearing his story I put myself in his place and could easily imagine how easy it would be to get lost in some addiction as a way to cope with such overwhelming traumas. Recalling it is personally a great trauma but also a great joy. It makes me feel miserable about the human condition but also gives one hope that all things may be healed. What would I be like if I had passed through such traumas: a street fighter, a schizophrenic, heroin junkie or just an alcoholic? It was inconceivable. What was even more inconceivable is how warm and loving this man was despite his past difficulties. I have found this paradox in so many of my indigenous friends and have admired their strong hearts.