Oaxaca

Graffiti At IAGO Library

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Internationally renowned painter, Francisco Toledo, has approved the use of his IAGO art library and the Alvarez Bravo museum for many things-from conferences on the current situation-to the future of Oaxaca. The latest daring move is the recreation on the inside walls of the library of some of the anti-government graffiti that appeared on the city’s outer walls during the seven-month teacher strike. A visitor log contains many anonymous supporting messages from visitors critical of the Governor. However I doubt that many of his supporters will view the installation.
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Arrest Of NYU Professor

Posted on by Laughingnomad

He was picked up outside the “Curtaduria,” a space for arts and performance in the next-door barrio of Jalatlaco.

Last week, a professor of German citizenship from New York University was arrested, photographed, finger-printed and interrogated by elements of the State Judicial Police.

It is unclear whether the professor was harassed because he was in town to participate in an international forum on democracy and press freedom in Oaxaca (and Mexico), or as part of an ongoing series of harassments aimed at the Curtaduria itself, where painter Francisco Toledo has sponsored a show considered to be very anti-Ulises Ruiz (the unloved governor of the state). What is clear is that the administration of governor Ruiz is still doing its best –not very successfully – to stop independent observers and media from telling the truth about what is going on here.

Monte Alban & The Miss Universe Contest

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I had worked with my friend Maria, psychologist & nurse practitioner, for some ten years in Oregon. On Saturday February 24 she arrived for a ten day visit with me. I have been leading her all over Oaxaca ever since…beginning with Monte Alban, the Zapotec ruins high on a hill overlooking the city.

Around 500 BC ancestors of Oaxaca’s present day Zapotecs founded what many experts believe to be the Americas’ earliest metropolis. Today the ruins of platforms, pyramids, palaces and ceremonial ball courts still remain…much of it decorated with inscriptions in a language yet to be deciphered, recording the exploits of their god-kings. Monte Alban flourished as a city for a millenium with as many as 40,000 people at it’s height. The city was repeatedly reconstructed over the centuries, like a peeling onion, first by the Olmecs, two periods of Zapotecs and finally succumbing to the Mixtecs by A.D. 1000 who used it mainly as a burial ground.

So it is with anguish that Oaxacans are anticipating the besmirching of this ancient site. Mexico’s national tourist bureau has decided to hold the “costume competition” phase of the annual Miss Universe contest at the Zapotec shrine of Monte Alban in May.
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Protestor In The Zocalo Fountain

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Last Friday Ana and Steve saw a man take off his clothes down to his shorts and climb into one of the fountains in the Zocalo. I got a call from Ana: “Eunice get down here with your camera!”

it didn’t take very long before two municipal police told him to get out. He carried a sign that said, “señor gobernador, necesitamos agua.” He was from Santa Ana-one of the many communities and colonias here that have no supply of water at this time of year. When the drought kicks in people have water trucked in to fill cisterns…just as we do in the Centro.

Unfortunately, just as I arrived, a group of 5 officers talked the man out of the fountain, watched as he got himself dressed again, and then calmly escorted him away in their truck. So no photos. He probably will be beaten.

Why is it that we can have fountains running, but people don’t have water for washing??

Following Trouble?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Good grief! Either I am following trouble around the world or trouble is following me! First a violent demonstration on a university campus in Istanbul…then the tsunami in Thailand…then the coup in Thailand…then the subway strike in New York City…then the teacher strike in Oaxaca and now this just as I am planning on returning this fall. Or maybe it’s just that there is always trouble all over the world!

Security in Bangkok To Be Tightened
Bangkok Post 2007-02-21
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Solitude In The Sierra Norte

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In search of a little alone time yesterday, I drove 40 miles (but two hours) north of Oaxaca City up into lush, pine-clad crests descending deep into river canyons to the Sierra Juarez, the birth-land of Benito Juarez, Oaxaca’s beloved favorite son.

Born in 1806 in the municipio of San Pablo Guelatao in the village of Santo Tomas Ixtlan, his parents died tragically when Benito was three. His uncle took him in and his childhood was spent mostly herding his uncle’s flocks in the surrounding hills. But Benito left for Oaxaca city in 1818 to live with his sister in the genteel, well-to-do Maza family where his sister worked as a cook. He gained exposure to music, books, politics and people that was not possible for a poor boy in the country. He ended up studying law and eventually entered politics…rising from state to federal legislator, then Supreme Court judge, and finally was unanimously elected governor by Oaxaca’s legislature in 1849. He was elected Mexico’s president for three terms…interrupted first by civil war and then by the French Intervention. He toiled day and night to realize his dreams for Mexico but died “from exhaustion” in 1872.

I stopped in nearby Ixtlan de Juarez, quickly perused the small rotating Monday market but skipped the huge baroque church built with fortunes made with slave labor growing cochineal (used to make the magnificent red dye) where I would have seen this:
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Wedding In Teotitlan del Camino

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My friend Bardo is from Teotitlan del Camino near the Puebla border and his parents, three brothers and a sister still live there. Bardo’s father, Don Bardo, a furniture maker, and Dona Mari raised six children in their big open-air three story house in this town of 6000 so there was plenty of room for all of us who made the four-hour trip: me, Ana and Oscar from next door, Bardo’s wife Mica and her two children, Pavel and Angelita and Bardo’s sister Pilar. At the last minute Bardo didn’t go and missed the trip entirely.

We took the four lane Mexico City toll highway NE to Tehuacan and then through Puebla back down into Oaxaca again to Teotitlan del Camino (or de Flores Magon) and Pilar drove ahead with Pavel so that we could follow – which did us no good as I drove faster than she did. When it was time to leave the carretera Mica directed us to Miahuatlan instead of the road to Teotitlan so we ended up detouring slowly on pot-holed dirt roads through a couple tiny scenic villages…San Sebastian and Coxcatlan, the birthplace of corn…which was fine with me.
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CoCo’s Cantina

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The last time Max partook of his Brandy Presses at Cocos, a working man’s bar with classic swinging louvered half-doors near his apartment, he met with an altercation with a burly self-professed “communist” Mexican who insisted on appropriating Max’s drink. Max is a gringo…spread the wealth…I guess was this guy’s thinking. But Max, who subsists on a small social security check, was not to be outdone. It ended up with Delia, the bartender, who is incidently quite a lovely woman, walking Max home…cane and all. Embarrassed, Max had not been back for several weeks. So one night this week Steven from next door and I met Max at CoCo’s to help out with his reentry. Max is a great storyteller and the evening was enjoyed by all…if it just wasn’t for the music they apparently assumed would be our preference. We laughed when the minute the bill was settled up they switched to Mexican rancheros. We will have to let them know next time that we really didn’t come to Mexico to listen to old sappy American soft rock especially when we can revel to the happy sounds of drunken Mexican sing-alongs…and that high-pitched “campesino yodel” as I call it. Am going to have to find out what the Mexicans call it…certainly not a “yodel.”

Yesterday I watched “Babel” on my computer…borders and boundaries…subjects I could certainly relate to. Now I’m getting history in the HBO series…”Rome.”

This morning Bardo, Mica, Pavel and Angelita and Steven, Ana and little Oscar and I are driving to Teotitlan del Camino, a small village up by the Puebla border, for a “la boda”…a Mexican blow-out wedding celebration over the weekend. We are taking a hundred dollars worth of Tequila. If I stop blogging someone send out the Green Angels.

What Now For Oaxaca?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Local analysts argue about whether the causes of the popular social movement here in Oaxaca are utter corruption and the history of political bossism by the PRI party, the effects of transnational/neoliberal policies created by NAFTA, the lack of economic development by federal and state authorities…or just plain infighting between any and all political and social groups.

In Oaxaca State, the main employer has been the government.

Outside of Oaxaca City the lost jobs are mainly in agriculture and that results in a huge migration to the US and Canada. The Isthmus is in an uproar over the wind farms. They were “rented” by intermediaries who gave the local owners next to nothing (100 pesos annually per hectare) and then turned around and rented the land to the transnationals at hefty prices. They are making grand profits while the local people are left behind.

This last weekend the APPO met, while other APPO activists are in Mexico City or the USA or Europe or somewhere, trying to get support. The biggest decision now has to do with how to approach the elections.
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A Typical Sunday in Oaxaca

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Made another trip to the Tlacalula Sunday Market last week with my next door neighbors Ana, Steve and little Oscar. Bought some carved coconut shell halves made for drinking our wonderful Mexican chocolate and then in my impending senility just walked off and left them on the table…not the first time this has happened. But with my new telescopic lens I did get some nice long shots of some of the colorful women vendors that come down out of the Sierra mountains to sell their turkeys, baskets, vegetable produce etc. They don’t like their pictures taken…not respectful. And they often feel that to have their picture taken means that their spirit is stolen…so have to be surreptitious.

Then we tried to find the little town of San Marcos high on a hill west of Tlacalula. After wending back and forth through Maguay, vegetable fields and pastures on dirt paths (could hardly call them roads) and with a little direction from a shy old campesino in a checkered shirt and white straw hot and with a wooden stick in his hand for herding a few cattle, we finally see before us a large green sign: “Servicios de Salud de Oaxaca. San Marcos Tlapazola, Tlacolula.”

As we slowly enter the tiny town we see an older guy sitting on the steps of a tienda…seemingly asleep with his head draped down his chest…but we think it was the tranquilizing effects of his afternoon mescal. Winding our way up a hill above the town for a few great pictures we come across a group of giggling women and girls standing in their Sunday best in front of a covered plaza. “Get their picture,” I urge Ana but when she pulls out the camera they all run back through the gates laughing…ignoring the exhortations of a group of men and boys on the roof above. Shyly peeking around the corner they tell Ana there is a wedding that day. On the way back through the town we see another plaza full of people. I stop to look. Two cute young girls walk up to the car and ask our names and where we are from. They were also celebrating the wedding…their primo (cousin). A couple of men drinking mescal next to them joined in on the conversation…in English. It is not uncommon to find old men speaking the English they learned during their norteno migrations. The young ones are all up north…the small villages nearly empty. It was a Sunday and all the vendors were in Tlacalula so we will have to return one week-day to buy some unglazed pottery that the women are famous for in this town of San Marcos.

On our way back to Oaxaca City we stopped by Mica and Bardo’s in Huayapam armed with beer and the makings for white russians. Mica cooked up a great cena and I gave her a cd I burned of an Italian singer that is popular in Brazil…Ornella Vanoni. I had used one of her songs, “L’Appuntamento” (also made popular in the US by the soundtrack of Oceans 11) in a video I made of our trip to Hierve el Agua and Mica had asked for more of her music. Later four men friends from Puerto Escondido stopped by…a typical Sunday at Mica and Bardo’s.