Photo: Anna Vogt
Miriam Harder is the regional coordinator of MCC Latin America’s work in conservation agriculture and is seconded to Otros Mundos, a local organization in Chiapas. She lives three hours from Mexico’s southern border in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. This was originally published on her personal blog, Meandering through the milpa.
Whenever I am outside of Canada I contemplate what it means to be a visitor, but especially so in the last six months. Almost two years ago I wrote a post on the concept of “Home”. The beauty of living life is that life continues to unfold and teach you new truths and ways to interpret the world around you (in another six months, my thoughts on this topic will likely have changed…).
Six months ago I’d contemplated writing this blog under the title of “How to be a good visitor”. In my experience, people try very hard to be good hosts, but I am convinced that we have the responsibility to work at being good visitors as well. At the end of June, after a month spent in rural communities in Nicaragua, the people I was working with made the following comments about my stay: “You eat everything on your plate.” “You drink our water.” “You can sleep on the floor.” “We feel comfortable with you in our homes.” And then proceeded to give examples of visits of foreigners that had not gone so well.
After almost 3 ½ years in Mesoamerica, I have figured out logisitically how to live here and the questions to ask when I don’t know how to do something. But is that enough to make me feel at home? To be at home here? Do I actually have the right to name any place I feel comfortable in “home”? I am in an incredibly privileged position to have been able to travel to and live in places other than where I grew up. But why am I here? Who invited me to or consented to me living in Chiapas?
These days I feel my foreignness/outsiderness/visitor status strongly. I am not from here. I will always be seen as a foreigner on the streets regardless of how well I learn to make tortillas, speak tsotsil or the depth of relationships/community I develop.
Human migration, human movement from one place to another, has been part of being human since human existence, for a diversity of reasons including economic push and pull factors, conflict, etc. But the forces of globalization continue to shrink the size of the world and travel time required to get from one place to another resulting in an ever increasing amount of human movement.
While I am not from Spain, nor do my ancestors originate from there, I represent current colonizing, oppressive forces. I have incredible privilege here, even though I didn’t chose it and often try to diminish and deny it. I can take time to immerse myself, learn, dialogue, but I am not from here.
But then again, where am I from? Where is home? If living in Chiapas has taught me anything, it is that the same dynamics are alive and thriving in Canada. Only one of my parents was born on Canadian soil (I myself was born an ocean away). But home is not Germany or the Netherlands either. How many centuries ago did my ancestors leave for Russia? What is my responsibility for the place I was born into and the actions/lives of the ancestors I follow?
Sure, I have Canadian citizenship and can come and go as I please with my Canadian passport and live without ever considering my precarious presence there. But I feel like that would miss the whole point of what I have learned and experienced in Chiapas. Perhaps it is easier to engage with the systemic injustices and racism present in marginalized and indigenous communities in Mexico because it doesn’t seem as personal. But as soon as I return to Canada it becomes intensely personal. After learning about and walking alongside indigenous struggle at a very close proximity in Chiapas, how do I live in Canada? How do I live in Saskatchewan?
I don’t know. I don’t have the answers figured out for these questions. But I don’t want to live as if the same systemic injustice doesn’t exist and it will probably require a similar process as what it has been here in Chiapas, to humbly listen with an open heart for a long time.