The Brooklyn Rail

For Grace

“Bolom Chon”; it’s a song played in total devotion to a jaguar, the Bolom, that comes to visit the Chamulans, Mayans from the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, with their lives of goat-herding and back-strap looms, their traditional skirts that tell to which social class one belongs, their cement architecture, cowboy hats, and world renowned Carnaval.

The Bolom also visits the Zinacantáns—Mayans from Highland Chiapas, whose wealth from the flower trade can be seen on their garments and their high-back sandals—in the “Bolom Chon,” in which indigenous versions of sixteenth century Spanish harps, guitars, the native rattle (sot), and violins accompany Tzotzil language. One sways to its poetic, raunchy, lyrics in Zinacantán and in Chamula.

“Chon” can mean different things; sky, snake, a diminutive often attributed to Mayan kings, or the essence of an animal that lives in a parallel society.

For thousands of years, at traditional festivities in the highlands of Chiapas, the Bolom—its suit made from the dye of an alder tree—has danced either on top of a tree or a rock, reenacting the destruction of jaguars (except for two) to make way for human life in Mayan creation stories. These festivities are Christianized versions of traditional festivities that match the classic Mayan calendar.

To be allowed to play the “Bolom Chon” at a traditional festivity, you must have a specific dream at a young age. You must communicate this dream to a shaman who validates the dream. It is the dream that instructs you on how to properly play the “Bolom Chon.“

I first heard it in the archives of Na Bolom, an anthropology museum, hotel, tree nursery, restaurant, and cultural center, in San Cristóbal de las Casas Mexico. I was stunned to hear the song as an old 1960s ethnographic recording, having never heard music so close to poetry. It had an immense elegance, a monument of refined form. It arrived at a height that took over one’s senses, which it maintained, magnificently; one-two three, one-two three, like short, full, waves. Like a waltz, the song’s lyrics as a lineation of sensual praise, each line ever more so devoted than the previous.

For some, a jaguar in a parallel universe can only be a fantasy. Fantasies guide our desires, and that is the beauty of songs. They become our truths, drives that lead us. As a jaguar, or as a fantasy of high sensuality, the song is profoundly human, conveying a deep desire to make sense of this world, and to make profound use of one’s presence in this world.

San Cristóbal de las Casas, in Chiapas, was once a city in which indigenous folks could not walk on sidewalks, and had to leave by 6 p.m. Now, in the near future, it will be an indigenous city. It was the market town where highlands Mayans would bring the fruit of their labor. The coletos, meaning “pony-tailed,” ran an apartheid system in this underdeveloped mountain city. But with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas came the future, and came this new rock, “Bolom Chon.” It is “bats’i rock,” a genre that came about after the Zapatistas.

What the “Bolom Chon” is in the highlands of Chiapas is rooted in traditional belief in an entity with strength and ferocity, a lord of the underworld, one who especially appears in dreams and structured festivities. The Bolom is a living tradition that extends beyond Chiapas into new songs and albums.

Aesthetically, as a mix of new age instrumentals and the traditional song, it is an expression of a deep-seated desire that resists both modernism and reactionary traditionalism. Sak Tzevul’s “BolomcHon Reloaded,” from their album XCH’ULEL BALAMIL, is a collage of contemporary and traditional instrumentation with traditional lyrics. And the “Bolom Chon” is all over the internet. With smartphones, folks record festivities on their own, and the Mayan communities now produce their own records. The Bolom being sung to is the stuff of dreams, of life in a community, of shaman’s dreams, structured into traditional festivities that regenerate a cosmos—including the “Bolom Chon,” and a community’s will to live in a splendid world.