By Jane Bauer

“The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people.”
― Henry George, Progress and Poverty

Learning about history in school was like hearing about people you would never meet. For me, there was an abyss between the Then and the Now.

Even when we were studying WWII in grade six it felt so distant – something that belonged in a museum exhibition with a sign warning you not to touch it. Of course we need only look at the morning news to see that human atrocities are never ending. Our species is insatiable for more, insatiable for claiming ownership and dominion over… well anything that crosses it’s path. World leaders behave like squabbling five year olds, each pulling the arm of a doll while screaming ‘mine’. There is a crassness to needing so much.

From the moment I moved to Mexico I felt the way the past covered the now like a gauze, time here is not linear but layered. Although the Mexican Revolution occurred over a hundred years ago, life here will constantly remind you what it accomplished. This month our writers explore Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican icon and hero of the revolution.

Revolution is word that conjures up violence and conflict and yet the Mexican Revolution aimed for more equanimity, more humanity and dignity for living off the land. It questioned ‘what is ownership?’ and challenged the class system that gave, and continues to give, one group power over another. I would even go so far as to say that it hinted at the dissolution of the ego. If our egos are intertwined with what we have, then releasing this idea of dominion and ownership is letting go a little bit of what most of us have been taught defines us.

These questions and reverence for the land continue today, not throughout all of Mexico, but in some places. Places like the communal land village where I live. Where there is a feeling of contentment that I hope rubs off on me.

If you are in Mexico enjoy Día de la Revolución celebrations on November 20th. There will be a parade in almost every town and city with children dressed up as revolutionaries, a testament to the way history is now.

See you soon,

Jane

P.S. Aim for a plastic-free vacation and travel with your own refillable water bottle.