Musings on Black nomadism (pt 1)

delicately moving the roots

I write a lot about Black sojourners now that I am accustomed to a suitcase-sized life. My career as a travel writer began by writing for and about the Black experience and the parts of the world where we tread joyfully. What Black Women Friendships Taught Me About Nomadic Life or Where Black Travellers Find Safe, Welcoming Community in The Diaspora, etc. I would write these things to affirm or offer an alternative lifestyle in case any of us needed it.

My own entry into nomadism was a little unexpected even if inevitable. It was an accident that led me to reevaluate the safety and necessity of a singular home space. I was travelling, starting in Mexico, and feeling out the rhythms and energies, seeing if I could be in flow with it all, transfer my living to that place (because why not? I was young, in my twenties with no kids, and working remotely). I grew to love the prospect of living nowhere and everywhere and always having somewhere (new, old, unexpected) to slip into and slowly learn.

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San Cristóbal de las Casas was the first place I began to meaningfully lay temporary roots. It was where I stayed long enough to witness how other Black travellers were living a life of their choosing. I saw how they were happier in the simplicity of travelling only with what they could carry, how their hometowns could be seen and heard in a walk or a laugh, how they were not all hippie or were varying degrees of it, not all women, not all child-less, not all from the States (though several were proudly of, though always leaving, the D.C. area). It was the first place I learnt, leaving on a 4 am shuttle out of the mountain town, that goodbyes are layered, sequel-length things and never finished.  

In San Cris, I discovered, month at a time, a community of nomads and long-term travellers who saw beauty in the quest of locating home multiple times in one lifetime. We offered eye contact in case no one had looked at us with kindness that day, nodded and crossed roads, and made ourselves late for the sake of an introduction. These are friendships that start from the principle that you have ended up somewhere your family is not. We drank horchata, fried plantain, celebrated Christmas the night before with our Mexican friends, we were first and third-gen to somewhere, we were artists and writers, former rat racers and performers, we met at El Paliacate, we rapped on stages about Africa, everyone sang with us, we made homes and bought things and gave them away when we left. We wrote about it, how this small town in Mexico began as respite and became more like home than anywhere else so far. 

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Let me tell you about San Cristóbal de las Casas. It begins where the forest is and unfolds into a cobbled stone town that mimics this unkept energy in feeling. Elevated 2,200 meters above sea level, where the air is noticeably fresher and the heat of the sun nearer, it is one of the most visited cultural hubs of the country. It feels like a quiet sanctuary if you go out early enough, like the air after heavy rainfall, like a full moon, always, on most nights. It smells like the end of the year: pine trees and hot corn, roasted and seasoned.

Some evenings rivalled autumnal English crispness, and so it is rare to visit and not need to buy more clothes. Throughout the year you’ll always have your choice of scarves laid out in their numbers and sweaters with thick pointed hoods made or sold locally in San Cris. It’s true, it is ‘un pueblo mágico’, an unmistakable magic town. 

It takes so much physical effort to arrive (the nearest airport is reachable only by a long drive through the foresty, narrow, and sinuous roads about 1 and a half hours away in Tuxtla), that those who arrive, stay and savour the absence of sky-high buildings and the promise of tradition, always, everywhere. This is a town that has escaped over-commercialization even if becoming one of the most international small backpacker towns for miles in the process. Every street with its own family-owned comedor with hand-made table runners told us so. The vibe is honour: to elders, to culture, to Chiapas, and the history the land has seen.

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We were all passing through at first, of course. Most came for the quiet, the unstable internet connection as an excuse, the morning mountain hikes, our soon-to-be jewellery-making artist friends convincing us to stay, as did the small town community love which kept them (us, me) coming back. For a while, San Cris nurtured our belonging and let us see how roots do move too.

Some of us visit for two weeks and stay for 6 months. Some of us cannot bear the descent, back down to the world where you walk too fast, ignore dining strangers without saying ‘provecho’, where artisans are not revered as the very fabric of a place. If we feel permitted, if we are aware of what we can do, give, leave while we are here, we stay.

It is so hard to ‘go home’ after living in a place like San Cris, where the nervous system has become so new, so unused to survival mode and so welcoming of gentleness. Black travellers in San Cris and my further trips (in Central America) sensed it too. Even with the obvious colourism, classism, and the decentering of indigenous voices and livelihoods that happens in the world, Mexico and San Cris included, it does not hurt the same way it does immediately as we land in our birth countries and immigration wants to know where we are from, scowls when we say ‘here’. I am thankful to have the choice of movement, but I’ll never be able to overlook the compromises that this part of the world asks me to make.

Or the other adjustment which is to become smaller but then, safer. No cell in my body believes that life is black and white, but the paths seemed to be ‘small and safe’ or ‘free and unknown’. The narrative is mine to choose.

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I think about the mass leaving of artists and writers like James Baldwin and Langston Hughes who took to Paris for a kind of escape from the racist reality of the States. It must’ve been so similar, the feeling of exodus in the form of a one-way ticket, just to regulate the nervous system. My literary role model, Maya Angelou, knew this too; she left for Europe while touring with Porgy & Bess for a time but mostly lived the nomadic path in Egypt and Ghana, in search of community and kinship. I also recall that Audre Lorde lived in Mexico for a time and later swapped New York for ‘The Berlin Years’.

I see a pattern, we all must, of Black people whose work depends on imagination and voice, opting out of their birth country. This is particularly more urgent when we name the birth country as a colonial power, whose greed led to nations and wearied lands that we must make homes in. Black nomadism has a lot to do with choosing, for the first time in generations, where you want to be. 

Many of us who found our way to San Cris, found our way to a life of our choosing or were at the genesis of it. Disconnected from the city life that distracts from what was not originally, indigenously ours, we questioned what type of life we could pass on to children, to our curious friends, to our families who made decisions out of survival mode but could opt out with us, today or tomorrow if they desired.

It wasn’t even that we envisioned San Cris as the place to uproot and replant our lives necessarily. That would be to ignore the struggles of the land that already exist. We like the freedom and movement but we get it, we can’t all leave. There is great beauty in staying where planted. I think of Black British culture, how the culinary, educational, literary (more, so much more) worlds of the UK wouldn’t be the same without the Caribbean migrants, or how the Windrush generation risked their lives to make safer spaces for their families and later generations to feel entitled to the land. I’m learning not to leave any of that behind; there’s no point uprooting entirely from the work and fruit of an already flourishing garden. It’s now my garden, it belongs to me too. When intentional, both of these choices - to maintain or uproot- are important to celebrate.

Baldwin wrote about his travels in Paris, how the romance of the city was not intended for him, rather, how he “had not been to Paris, but simply away from America.” The romance is not traveling, it is leaving, being free enough to do so. Knowing that you’re deserving of that immediately, even if only with $40 in hand as was the case with Baldwin’s departure.

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For many of us being raised in Black households across the diaspora, there is a sense of safety in being quiet. Being too open or trusting has a heavy impact on your freedom (the semblance of it) and the ability to get by unharmed. I noticed this sense of laying low, holding your tongue, minding your business, sticking it out as a plea to not jeopardise the experience of being here, alive and well, as a Black person. I understand. But I want to healthily take up my space without sacrificing anything that made me feel alive, i.e. seeing the world and living in alignment with my own values, not the ones that would keep me safe in one definition of the word.

Many of my Black nomadic friends had confronted this feeling too; they had seen the sacrifices that brought their bloodline this far and still, chose not to hold too tightly to past decisions, moved the roots elsewhere. We spent nights talking about the guilt of leaving, the hope that many will see how necessary it is to leave where you’ve always been, where you weren’t always home.

Another conversation that came up was the sense that we were privileged, yes, but also from underserved communities. The privilege was a double-edged sword. We were travelling on passports considered ‘powerful’ but only because of violence inflicted on our previous generations. It was not a true privilege then. Regardless, it’s not an option to let tourism and expathood guide the way we travel; oppression is oppression and I recognise the responsibility that I have as a nomad wielding any form of privilege. One of my biggest goals is to live in my power with the least amount of harm. This is true to myself (in San Cris I began learning from ancient practices how to care for myself) and to the places that I occupy. I know there is more to learn, and I hope to arrive there with an open heart. For now, I’m listening to what those local to the land have to say about the harm my presence may/will invite (examples for Hawai’i here and Mexico City here) and I’m seeking out ways to buy/support/rent from those from the country I’m in over corporations and foreigners. It takes conscious work, listening, giving, time, and respect for the community to not worsen the facts of travel as someone with a Western passport.

I thank San Cristobal de las Casas, deeply. In this town, I became a nomad by being invited inside a Mexican home more times than I had an English one. Or by going on to visit a place because someone, a stranger, a now friend I am aligned with in my heart but always in a clashing timezone to, personally recommended it. To learn from other Black nomads who will also always remember this place. This taught me everything about navigating travel from this town onwards. I travel to be. I travel to listen, to examine myself, and be examined without fear. The journey so far has been challenging, thoroughly joyful and mine, which is all I could ask for.