Equivocality

by David Martinez
Winner of the 2006 Writer’s Travel Scholarship

People travel for different reasons. Of course there is always the allure of experiencing new geographies, languages, and spaces. The skies over the Adriatic are very different from the skies over Wyoming.

When we break down traveling into North vs. South, by and large we come up with a different formula. People from the Global South travel to the North for economic reasons: mainly, to make money. Whenever I hear about “Adventure Travel” I feel like laughing. You want adventure travel? Ask an illegal Guatemalan laborer about their trip: walking, hitching, busing and railing it, about 2000 miles, and then once they cross a burning desert that may kill them either by heat or waiting robbers, they still have to contend with vigilante groups and immigration officers waiting to haul them back from whence they came, all of their efforts wasted.

Or like an African working in Western Europe I once talked to: he had smuggled himself inside a shipping container to a port in Italy where he and others had slipped out of the facility in the middle of the night. I think MTV should make an episode of The Great Chase wherein the contestants must travel like illegal aliens for a week.

Now, when people from the North travel to the South, from the “First World” to the “Third World”, they do it for entirely different reasons.

A common theme among first-world travelers (like myself) is the desire to escape, for a moment, the overdevelopment and technology of our respective societies. To walk on roads being passed by horse-drawn carts, and see men fishing with hand-thrown nets from high prowed boats. I’m not sure how much this is the case anymore, but not so very long ago it seemed there was an idea, perhaps unspoken, that when one traveled South, when a traveler left San Francisco, or London, or Chicago for destinations in Malaysia or Brazil that one was, in a sense, traveling to the past.

In any case I remember feeling that way when I took my first long trip away from home, wandering down the Pacific Coast of Mexico to see a solar eclipse, and then turning inland to visit the mountains of southern Oaxaca.

I wound up living in a village volunteering on a health project for several months, and some days it seemed as if I had indeed stepped back in time. The inhabitants were just as likely to seek the advice of a shaman as a doctor, they spoke an indigenous dialect that pre-dated the arrival of Europeans to their soil, and yes, I often walked up dirt roads alongside bright-shirted cowboys guiding horse-drawn carts.

After a couple of months of rising to the crowing of roosters and often drawing water from a well, I began to notice that my ideas of time were not as simple as I had imagined. There was only one partially-functioning telephone in town, but everyone still listened to cassette tapes on stereos and knew who Michael Jackson was. Popular American action movies could be viewed on video-tape in a plywood shack for a few pesos. The people of the village were not living in the past so much as they were in another form of the present. Chalk that up to a lesson learned by a naive young man: Now is now, whether your now is a high-rise or a cornfield.

When the project was finished and winter clouds were rolling in, I said my temporary goodbyes, left the village and went North, out of the mountains and through the plains to visit an old family friend who lived in the smog-choked capital of Mexico City.

There I saw people like the villagers I had been among, but they had moved to the city en masse, they rode cranky mini-buses in lieu of carts, and lived in massive sprawling concrete slums that wrapped around the huge city like dusty tentacles. Visiting those neighborhoods, where most people warned me not to go, one still heard Indian languages amidst graffiti and street gangs, and stolen fax machines could be bought at weekly street-markets.

At my host’s apartment, in a book about the city, I came across a quote by the late Ivan Illich. I hope I remember it more-or-less correctly, as I’ve not been able to find it again:

I live in Mexico City because it is my laboratory. Ten years ago it was declared that it was impossible for more people to move here. There was not enough room, not enough jobs, and most importantly not enough water.And yet they continue to arrive, at the rate of a thousand people a day, and somehow they survive. Human beings are incredibly adaptable, perhaps too much so.

After that stint in D.F., I began to look at cities differently, specifically the massive cities of the Third World like Lagos, Jakarta, and Sao Paolo. I came to believe that these metropoli, with their populations in excess of twenty million souls and their catastrophic urban problems that make the South Bronx look like a quaint suburb, were of course decidedly not a part of the past, but nor were they really the present.

They are the future. They are breakneck experiments in human disaster and improvisation. All of the dire concerns facing the world: not enough water, too many people, little or no social services, out-of-control crime and corruption…if you want to know what our childrens’ and our childrens’ childrens’ world will be like you need look no further than the cinderblock cities of the Global South. Who needs science fiction anymore? Some time spent in Nezahuacoyotl or Chalco is far more immediate and just as informative.

Which brings me to Underwear City. Not as large or populous as the aforementioned megatowns but equally as radical an experiment in high-speed development, it is more commonly known as, Jinjiang, China. This city of almost a million inhabitants has been turned into basically one giant fabric mill, churning out 969 million pairs of underpants a year. The entire region has been transformed into one huge textile factory, thriving off of China’s cheap labor and emergence as a capitalist power. And of course there’s the complete dearth of civil rights or freedom to organize for the millions of Chinese workers that do the labor, which is almost always, unfortunately, very good for business.

Down the highway a thousand miles or so from Jinjiang is Shengzhou, more commonly know as International Necktie City, pumping out 300 million ties annually. Another neighbor is Socks City, or Datang, whose textile mills produce no less than nine billion pairs of socks a year, more than one pair for every person on the planet. There is also Kidswear City and Sweaters City.

Places that were rice farming villages where the locals knit clothes by hand and sold them from baskets along the road as recently as the 1970’s have exploded into cities with populations in the hundreds of thousands and millions, and a new class made up of local factory owners has become enormously wealthy. Rural provinces provide constant streams of people to work at the looms, eager to escape the crushing poverty of their villages and willing to chance it all in the ever-expanding city.

Like the dramatic disparity between wealth and poverty that one sees in Jakarta, Indonesia, where neon-lit skyscrapers lean against clusters of families who live on a single mattress, “Roaring China” is the future writ very, very large.

A country that calls itself communist and yet aggressively competes in the world’s capitalist markets, hammering the economies of the countries around it into dependency and bankrupting factories halfway around the world: is this the face of the powerful nations of the twenty-first century?

And what about the repeated uprisings and protests by the very peasants that this “boom” is supposed to be employing? Barely a month goes by these days without a report of rural unrest, grown much more effective across the massive country via cellular phones and internet organizing. Apparently not everyone is content, and trouble may be afoot in Underwear City as Chinese society catapults through what one might call Extreme 21st Century Industrialization. As a country, it is virtually the “shop-floor” as it were of our whole planet. The lion’s share of everything that is made in the world is made in China.

I have never been to China, much less to Jinjiang or Datang. From reading newspapers and online journals I have pieced together an idea of what it may be like in those cities along the country’s eastern coast that I imagine as being filled with a 24-hour a day non-stop heavy rumbling of fabric plants, dutifully churning out next seasons’ Fall Look In Menswear.

If I have the chance, the next trip I take will be to said region, to learn and to listen, to discover a radical form of Right Now, which is sometimes called The Future. If my past experience is any guide, I know that whatever I find will be completely different that what I expected to, which is absolutely fine with me and is kind of the whole point of traveling anyway.