Der Spiegel
Long a bastion of Catholicism, southern Mexico is quickly turning into a battleground for soul-savers. Islam, too, is gaining a foothold and the indigenous Mayans are converting by the hundreds. “In Islam, race plays no role,” Anastasio Gomez, a Tzotzil Mayan from Mexico, says joyously. His enthusiasm is understandable. After all, in his home state of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest, the indigenous people are viewed as second class humans, and whites and Mestizos treat the Indian majority as if they weren’t there.
“They see themselves as restorers of Islam,” says the anthropologist Gaspar Morquecho, author of a study of the Muslims of Chiapas. “Their defiance of capitalism is similar in many respects to the critique of globalization espoused by many left-wingers.”
“In Islam, the Indians rediscover their original values,” claims Esteban Lopez, the Spanish secretary general of the Muslim community. “The Christians destroyed their culture.” >> continue
SEE ALSO:
Red Alert: Zapatistas – War in Chiapas likely to resume (Indymedia San Francisco Bay Area) / see also comment by Subcomandante Marcos on ZMag and Blogosphere Reacts to Zapatista Communique on Global Voices Online
An anthropologist inside a Community in Resistance in Chiapas (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Book review: Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (American Ethnologist)
Subcommander Marcos: Chiapas – The Southeast in Two Winds A Storm and a Prophecy (Latinamerikagruppene i Norge / Latin American Groups in Norway)
Der Spiegel
Long a bastion of Catholicism, southern Mexico is quickly turning into a battleground for soul-savers. Islam, too, is gaining a foothold and the indigenous Mayans are converting by the hundreds. "In Islam, race plays no role," Anastasio Gomez, a…