Oaxaca

An Old Friend Visits

Posted on by Laughingnomad

My friend Barbara and I hitch-hiked Europe the summer of 1965. Then I didn’t see her for thirty years. Then I found her on google about ten years ago…living 30 minutes from my house in Oregon. She has been here four days.

Today she, Mica, the kids and I drove to the Tlacalula market to pick up some hippy headbands for Charly to sell in Canada. Barbara had her first chivo (goat) barbecoa con consumme which she loved. The goat is cooked underground under hot rocks overnight.

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Walked by the colorful indigenous vendors from all over the mountains who come down on sundays for the market, bought some more alebrijes, surveyed the live pavo (turkeys) lying on the ground with feet tied together and picked up some fruit and flores (flowers.) It was hot so we dragged ourselves back to the car early in the afternoon to take off for Huayapam where we ate again…delicious caldo de res, (beef bone soup) that Bardo had waiting for us. A man that Bardo sells coffee to was there…owns a coffee finca (farm) in Pluma Hildalgo, south of here. Pluma Hildalgo is considered the primo coffee of Mexico. Bardo’s nephew was there too…from Teotitlan del Camino. Then a mescal vendor from Miahuatlan came by with plastic barrels of pechuga (chicken breast) mescal. We bought five liters to fill Bardo’s mescal barrel.
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Abastos Market

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Yesterday Sharon and I went shopping for furniture for her new digs when we came across this tired fruit vendor who had probably been up before sun-up. Sharon is moving from a third-floor bird’s-nest apartment to a ground-floor house in the centro..for less money.

URO Visits The Zocalo

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Last tuesday the teachers kicked off their usual June strike with a march to the Zocalo. It was pretty low key with teachers entering in small groups and with a few speeches and songs in the kiosk. APPO showed up about noon and promised they would be boycotting the government-sponsored Gueleguetza again this year…but that there would be a “Popular” Gueleguetza sponsored by the people as there was last year.

As I was about to leave the zocalo tuesday the governor showed up. The guy on the right is URO…guy on the left is the mayor of Oaxaca City. Didn’t notice the time but it was about dusk. Even though the zoc was pretty well thinned out he paraded more than once around the zocalo followed by video cameras and security… kissing babies, shaking hands and talking with a few people who came up to him. Interestingly, he never went near the west side. The place was crawling with security. Then for about 20 minutes or so he casually sat with the mayor and 3-4 others and had something to drink at a sidewalk table in front of one of the cafes (the one in front of the sushi restaurant) on the east side. Then he left with cameras in tow.

Pissing on his territory I guess.

“Oaxacans Like To Work Bent Over”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

This is the title of a paper issued this month by Seth Holmes with an M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco, and a Ph.D. in cultural and medical anthropology from UCSF and U.C. Berkeley. His paper, “‘Oaxacans Like to Work Bent Over’: The Naturalization of Social Suffering Among Berry Farm Workers,” captures the grinding details of what it takes to get strawberries out of the fields in Washington State, and in the equally challenging task of figuring out what it all means — and what to do about it.

Find this paper on Salon.com. In the posted review of the paper you will find a link to a PDF file that can be downloaded with Acrobat Reader.

Holmes says: “I began my fieldwork in a one-room shack in a migrant camp on the largest farm in the valley, the Tanaka Farm, during the summer and fall of 2003. I spent my days alternately picking berries with the rest of the adults from the camp, interviewing other farm employees and area residents, and observing interactions at the local migrant clinic.

In order to understand the transnational experience of migrant labor, I migrated for the next year with Triqui indigenous people from the Mexican state of Oaxaca whom I had come to know on the farm. I spent the winter living with nineteen of them in a three-bedroom slum apartment, pruning vineyards, and observing health professionals in the Central Valley of California. During the spring, I lived in the mountains of Oaxaca with the family of one of the men I knew from the Tanaka Farm, planting and harvesting corn and beans, observing the government health center, and interviewing family members of migrant workers back in the U.S.

Later, I accompanied a group of young Triqui men through the night as they hiked through the desert into Arizona and were caught by the Border Patrol. I then migrated north again from California, through Oregon where we picked up false social security cards, and once again to the farm in Washington State in the summer of 2004. Since then, I have returned to visit my Triqui companions in Washington, California, and Oaxaca on several shorter trips.”

Many of the conditions he describes on this Washington farm have been outlawed in Oregon by an omnibus bill I helped introduce, as a lobbyist, to the legislature in the 1990’s. This bill was pulled together by a coalition of farmers and farm labor advocates and one dedicated legislator who actually composed the bill that was passed unanimously that session . I have a sneaking suspicion that he is letting the Tanaka Farms off lightly unless this farmer is unusual. Farmers are usually loath to allow outsiders onto their farms…one of the issues addressed in the omnibus bill. He somehow gained their trust. Very tricky.

Writing From The Ground

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New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof (incidentally from my home state of Oregon) has written an excellent review of William T. Vollman’s book entitled “Poor People” that reflects a deep understanding of the issues underlying poverty.

From my 30 years of work with impoverished people in the US and from six years of travel in impoverished countries, what Kristof says rings true for me.

Vollman interviewed poor people in several countries and asked them questions like “do you consider yourself poor?” Or “why are poor people poor?” Or “are men and women equally poor?” Or “why are you poor?” Or “why are some people rich and some poor?”

Kristof considered Vollman’s book a kind of “tour guide of the slums.” The answers were not very illuminating without some larger context…just as I pointed out in my last blog entry on getting information and making connections between the pieces.

Referring to just one issue, health care, Kristof says that before seeing the effects of the hurricane on New Orleans, he “had thought that the obstacle for poor people—and the reason they die as a result of deficient health care —was that they couldn’t afford it. But that’s only one factor.

What we’ve seen over and over is that even if there is a free clinic, the poor family may depend on a single mother who doesn’t have a car or driver’s license and so can’t get there. Or she can’t afford the gas. Or her car doesn’t have insurance. Or she doesn’t understand how serious the symptoms are. Or she is working at a low-level job where she can’t just ask for time off to take a child to the clinic. Or she doesn’t speak English. Or she’s illegal and is worried that INS agents may look at the clinic’s records. Or she’s got three other small children and can’t leave two at home while she takes her sick child on a series of bus rides to the clinic. Or…the possibilities are endless. The point is that making medical care accessible to the poor requires much more than making it free.”

Economic-development experts promise that with the correct mix of promarket policies, poor countries will eventually prosper. But policy may not be the only problem. Geography may be a problem. Tropical, landlocked nations may never enjoy access to the markets and new technologies they need to flourish in the global economy. In Oaxaca, only government workers (who usually live in Oaxaca City) get free health care. For the poorest of the poor there are no accessible clinics at all without a 7 hour bus ride out of the mountains…even if they had the money. As a result the infant death rate in Oaxaca is twice what it is in Mexico City.

Comics…A New Way Of Thinking?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Have been thinking that I need a new way of thinking. Like comics. Not Donald Duck or the Road Runner although those have their virtues. In Salon.com I came across an interview of Alan Moore, who the author, Scott Thrill, thinks reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our (whose?) day.

Some thoughts of his: “Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette…I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries..We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.”

He goes on: “Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature…If you can find a new synthesis…you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves…”

Hmmm. This need to make sense of our world…to find meaning…I think, is part of what is giving rise to the popularity of radical religious fundamentalism in the world today. Simple. Just pick up the Bible or the Koran. The “connections” are all there…or at least the ones some of us are looking for. Or we could read the comics. Or…

But this all assumes we have the the money and the “luxury” of taking time out from putting food on the table. In other words, how do we access relevent information and when do we think about it? And what if we don’t have the language and education to understand the terms. And what if you are a Trique, or Mixtec indigenous living in the mountains of Oaxaca and all you know is that your land is being taken away?

Worker’s Day May 1

Posted on by Laughingnomad

International Workers Day is traditionally a big holiday in Mexico with workers getting the day off to celebrate. Oaxaca had a huge march…thousand walking to and out of the Zocalo. The APPO contingent showed up about noon…a few speeches and songs…not a lot of interest. But observers say things are heating up.

But you know those nice pretty newly painted walls that the Governor paid for? They are now all full of graffiti again. The APPO spokesperson said the APPO has been instructed to only spray paint government buildings. The APPO apparently is assuming that many marchers are government-paid infiltrators when they graffiti private homes.

So the APPO has asked the masked young people (encapuchados) to unmask assuming that those masked would then be identified as provocateurs or government-paid infiltrators. Seems silly to me.

Today there is supposed to be highway blockades and strikes. I will definitely not be taking my car out today.

Wages

Posted on by Laughingnomad

May Day is coming up. An op-ed piece was printed in the Oaxaca Noticias daily newspaper criticizing the employment practices of WalMart and VIPS.

I and many expats here usually tip 20% to help make up for their small salaries and for all the people who don’t tip at all. I talked with a woman expat from Europe who has lived here 30 years and now makes sausage and baked goods to sell. She was trained as a nurse. The working conditions are terrible she said….nurses are expected to contribute out of their salaries to the electricity and janitorial services of the hospital…among other expenses.

In the year that I have been in my apartment I have found out that Adelina, who works for the landlord 12 hours a day (cleaning, cooking) and is supposed to clean all our apartments once a month (free cleaning the landlord said when I moved in) and does all the washing by hand, gets about $7.00 a day. (However, instead of buying a washing machine for her, the landlord has bought a gas lawn mower so he can mow the postage stamp lawn in the courtyard.) Adelina lives in a rusty tin-hut at the end of an ally on the other side of the Periferico…no water…no cooking facilities…just a room barely big enough for a double bed for her and her daughter. She walks to work and back home at 9 at night in the dark…about 2 miles.

The landlord owns several business/office spaces in my block and another apartment house on another street…at least that I know of. They are well to do by anybody’s standards. Ana, who is bilingual, found out from her regular vendor at the market that our landlord, whose son has a chilli stall and lives downstairs, is very powerful in the market. The way our landlords have made their money, the vendor says, is by lending money to the sellers in the market at 25% interest…which may be their only option…I have no way of knowing.

For my part I have told sweet cheery Adelina she doesn’t have to clean my apartment. Before she returned home to Canada, Ana, who lived next door, used to give Adelina $20 a month for a tip for apartment cleaning. When I leave I will give Adelina money for her services (answering the gate and providing security) during the year so she can send her 5 year old daughter to school next year.

Foreigners, at least those not living on the local economy, get charged more for everything, which would be ok, except that it drives up the cost of living for the locals. It’s not that I want do-good credit for this…it’s to warn other travelers what to expect who come here to live short-term. I am retired and fortunately don’t have to live on the local economy. I have no idea what it is like for foreigners who live and work here.

This Side Of The Border Problem

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Oaxaca is Mexico’s second poorest state with many mountain villages nearly empty of working age men. But over half of the poco English speaking men I have talked to have said they learned the language by working on the East Coast…sweeping a parking lot, waiting tables, dish washing, working on dairy farms in NY state. Many others refer to back-breaking work picking strawberries in California and Oregon….or better…construction in Las Vegas. A woman working as a janitor at the Toyota outlet here said her husband has been in the states for four years. “Oh, where,” I asked. She didn’t know.

My friend Mica had an aunt in Huayapam, Juvita, who sold her successful Tejate business in the market here and unbenownst to her husband, Pedro, paid huge money to an inept “coyote” to take her and two daughters across the border illegally. She died in the Arizona desert. Her daughters survived and are still in the US, leaving her husband here alone. Pedro’s sister, Carmen, is married to a man who hasn’t been back from the US for several years, leaving her here with her 4 year old daughter, Paula.

For 8 years, I mentored a teenage girl from a family of 10 from the Mixtec, in the northwestern Oaxaca mountains that have been playing both sides of the border for years…some of the children legal and some not. The parents have to return every year to work the communal land.

Many are trying to get legal status for work in the US. One young waiter in the Zocalo left his wife and two children in Los Angeles to come home to a small village in Oaxaca to file immigration papers. He is living with his parents and travels by bus one hour twice a day from Tlacalula to Oaxaca City to wait tables at a restaurant in the Zocalo…sending his wages home to his non-working wife. He has been told by immigration all he can do is wait. He has been waiting for one year.

A long-time American born friend from Oregon came to Queretaro with her new Mexican-National husband who is an auto mechanic to file papers for him. They tried once unsuccessfully. Now, in order to be with him, she is stuck in Mexico…trying again. He had been in the US for ten years, living frugally, sending every extra penny home (with Mexico ripping off up to 20% money sent home charges) to support an ill mother with the extra ($40,000) going into “savings” here. Big mistake. As often happens the two brothers entrusted with the money now say there “is no money.”

An AP article of April 27, 2007 illustrates part of the problem that leaves Mexican migrants in a catch-22:

Farm labor shortage may leave crops to rot in field
Tighter border, better paying jobs keep workers away

Black In Mexico

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Until 1650 there were more African slaves in Mexico than anywhere else in the Americas. Until 1810 there were more Africans living in Mexico than Spaniards. (From Bobby Vaughn’s dissertation “Race and Nation: A Study of Blackness in Mexico” ref Wikipedia) This was due to the fact that early on Spanish women were not sailing to Mexico and the Spanish population was slower to grow.

Spanish Mexico’s history is of slavery is overshadowed by the vast numbers of Africans sold as laborers in the Caribbean, the United States and Brazil. Although Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico is envisioned as a black state due to the legacy of slaves coming into it’s ports, few people, including most Mexicans, realize that a much larger black Mexican population lives along Mexico’s “Costa Chica” (west coast) which runs just east of Acapulco in Guerrero state down to Huatulco in the state of Oaxaca. Some call themselves Afro-Meztizo (meztizo being the term for the mix of indigenous and Spanish blood) and although they are Mexican, they are beginning to celebrate their black heritage through artistic and cultural activities.

This explains why, when I arrived in Oaxaca in June of 2006, I noticed, in just not a few people, what appeared to be African traits in skin tone and hair texture. In fact, while riding the bus one day during the teacher strike, I also noticed banners hung on the fence surrounding the University calling for more attention to Mexico’s black brothers and sisters.