By Leila It's a party with too much food, an endless beer supply and a whole cast of music snobs (myself included.) In short, a Friday night filled with all of the standard tropes of our extravagant merry-making. As the evening warbles past midnight and the conversation starts repeating, I slip away from the garden barbeque. At some point the beer has gotten warm and the decadence of the food left abandoned on the table has become upsetting to me. Troubled, I retreat to the house and lay down on the couch to sort through my cluttered thoughts. The flat, green lawn shimmers in the moonlight and the white walls and ribbed, bare wood rafters of the quaint house remind me of a ski lodge. In the garden, fresh spring flowers blossom in perfect order around the fence and gate, which is black, tall and resolutely locked. Outside, around the grill, the sound of confused but exuberant chatter and trendy Ipod music drifts back to me. It's not until the next morning that my discomfort crystallizes into clarity. As I'm being driven back into San Cristobal in the backseat of a car with power-locks, automatic windows, and a deluxe CD player, I watch the life of the colonia I've spent the night in glide past me. An indigenous woman at a roadside stand leans through the open window of her plywood and nails hut to hand a bag of peanuts to a small boy. Another woman with long braids, wrapped in the traditional wool skirt and the vibrant shirt of the local indigenous population, arranges mangos on the shelf at her own roadside stand. The world inside and outside of the tall black gates is sharply disparate. Here in the colonias of San Cristobal we're settlers in someone else's home. Our houses, luxurious in their own right and disturbingly more so in contrast to the surroundings, are fortresses of wealth and occupiers of land. The land is not, by cultural heritage, ours and our wealth is nothing but a cruel trick of history. Are we settlers in someone else's home not only in the colonias, but everywhere in San Cristobal? Do there have to be plywood shacks and indigenous families living across the street to acknowledge the extremity of economic privilege? And of economic marginalization? What does our affluence mean and what are its consequences? What are the ramifications of these side by side worlds? *** San Cristobal is a town of shocking contrasts that leaves me feeling absent, pensive and troubled. In Café Revolutión, a favourite with the international crowd and urban Mexicans alike, groups get rowdy over 25 peso beers while listening to reggae music. On the walls pictures of the icons and heroes of the dispossessed are twisted into novelty items for the diversion of the affluent. Marcos' face hangs over the revelry; Che's. At Café Revolución you can order a coca-cola, the drink responsible for water deprivation throughout Chiapas. Outside the doors, 8 year-old children sell ceramic "animalitos" and woven bracelets, beg pesos, while indigenous women sell underpriced artisanry until late into the night. For the 25 pesos that bought a beer 3 kilos of tortilla could have been purchased. That's enough tortillas to feed a family. Evidence of these deep inequalities is everywhere.

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