After eighth grade, I thought I was through with nuns forever, but one can never tell where the ways of life will lead and so on our recent trip to Mexico, Adrienne and I put ourselves voluntarily (albeit apprehensively) into the care of the Benedictine Sisters of Guadalupe. These women – short, brown and radiating more warmth than the Mexican sun – were our guides and teachers on our tour of real Mexico.

For ten days they brought in economists, political scientists and eyewitnesses to tell of such horrors as the Guatemalan holocaust of the 1980s. Other days, they escorted us into the colonias – poor neighborhoods – to meet struggling workers and teachers educating the children of the indigenous. One thing the trip was emphatically not was a sightseeing tour through Mexican slums, designed to evoke gringo pity over “the poor Mexicans who have so little.”

The sisters do not seek to make the poor rich. Mexico possesses the widest gulf between poor and rich of any nation in the Americas; it is abundantly clear how profoundly riches corrupt. Rather, what spoke eloquently was the dignity of the Mexican working class and how that dignity deserves to be answered with justice in the form of decent food, water, education, employment and housing.

Justice is the least evident virtue in Mexico today. Ten crushing years after NAFTA went into effect, the poor have been reduced to misery, the never-large middle class is evaporating and the elite are more corrupted by riches than ever. Hope survives. Sister Fabiola, a 68-year-old Benedictine spoke of growing awareness of the need for real democracy among Mexico’s educated class. She stopped and looked around, then wagged her index finger and whispered, “Zapata vive!”

Emiliano Zapata the revolutionary championed the poor and the fought for the redistribution of wealth. He was assassinated in 1919, but his ideas survive and his name has been adopted by the indigenous rebels of Chiapas.

Zapata lives vibrantly in Mexico’s hospitality. “Hospitality” in the U.S. is a frivolous word, appropriated by chain motels. The Mexican version of hospitality is a larger, more radical concept, closer to the Biblical ideal practiced by Abraham or the Good Samaritan. This hospitality has two parts.

The first part involves meeting people and accepting them without judgment, which for me is as easy as crawling on broken glass. Although we Americans were well-intentioned, we committed an almost-nonstop series of culturally arrogant blunders. Our Mexican hosts neither reproved nor condemned, they just moved along to the next point.

The second part of hospitality has to do with sharing. In the U.S. we buy everything we need, then we buy everything we want, then we buy some things we don’t need and don’t want and if there’s money left over, we give some away and call it sharing. Not so in Mexico. The working people there share not their excess, but their necessities. On a routine basis, they share with their neighbors the money they need to pay next month’s bills, the food they need to eat next week.

One reason for this is that poverty forces sharing on them. Good fortune, when it smiles at all, is so meager and short-lived that it makes sense to include those around you, because very soon you will need your neighbors to share their good fortune with you. Americans, on the other hand, pay the price of social isolation for our middle-class security.

I can’t help thinking there is a directly proportional relationship between our financial and spiritual sharing. Writing a 50-dollar check to the United Way carries no more spiritual import than paying the electric bill. Giving away half of one’s family Christmas dinner draws our neighbors close, close enough for them to see our need and we theirs.

As Americans, we’re indoctrinated to see poverty and need as a judgment and moral failing, whereas the Mexican people showed us need is the opportunity to show courage, take action and create community.

Merry Christmas, or as Sister Fabiola says, “Zapata vive!”

© Mark Floegel, 2004