9/19/21

I woke up around noon and headed out to explore the city. Yesterday I was told that San Cristobal was a city with lots of hippy tourists, and this was definitely the case. It is city where Deepak Chopra and Charles Bukowski inhabit every bookstand and a dreadlocked drummer sits on every street. The influence of the indigenous Chiapan population is also remains present, albeit commodified by trinket-vendors and park-performers. San Cristobal came to global prominence with the Zapatista Uprising of 1994 and the anti-globalization movements of the later 90’s, but ironically this demand for autonomy seems to have shifted them to a more central, albeit counter-cultural, node in the global economy. In resisting the centralized power of the Mexican state, will the international tourism market become San Cristobal’s new master? All of this is not to say I have a negative experience. Quite the opposite; I had a great time and intend to return soon. San Cristobal is a fantastic city to be a tourist in. It seems to be a hub for all manner of interesting travelers, in much the same way I imagine Tangier in the 50’s. But I have to wonder if this was what people wanted when they took up arms in 1994. The girl I spoke with last night grew up in Tulum, a coastal city on the other side of the Yucatan where rich people go to do drugs and party naked on the beach. The picture she painted of her hometown was interesting and often comical, but I have to imagine that being a local in such a place would be an alienating experience, and it seems San Cristobal may be slowly headed down a similar path.

The bus ride home was beautiful. San Cristobal sits in the mountains, where hills rise in every direction and disappear into the fog of the cloud forest before you can see the peaks.

In the evening, upon return, I called up my friend who studied stats and we took a look at the media mention data I had collected. Preliminary results say population is a better indicator of media mentions than GDP, but this is possibly because GDP distribution is more exponential than linear and the program I’m using can only check linear regression. I’m going to keep playing around with the data sets, but at this point it seems unlikely that any publishable research will follow. Regression analysis is “more of an art than I science”, I was told, and I remain a novice in the field.