A friend who saw the parade into the Oaxaca City zocalo this A.M. said it was similar to all military parades he has seen in the US and elsewhere, and by that standard, quite good. I didn’t go, so have no photos. I did however, watch the fireworks through my open sliding glass living room doors. Noticias will not publish on Thursday because national law “compels” vacation days” for newspapers, so since Noticias came out today it will honor its no-print day tomorrow.
No one shot, wounded or jailed! That makes headlines, although I heard that some APPO people who wanted to protest were knocked around by the police, and so were the photographers taking their pictures.
URO, the Governor, had on hand 1500 cops, some in uniform and some plain clothes. He delivered the Grito dressed in a New York-Miami suit, standing on the balcony of the former government palace now a museum, waving the Mexican flag.
A friend reports that in Zaachila, a nearby pueblo, one of the strongest movement towns, there were two Gritos delivered, one official by the municipal president Noe Perez, and the second alternative-popular. Azael Santiago Chepi, Sec General of Section 22 gave the alternative Grito speech. He is quoted as calling on the people to prepare themselves for the coming revolution “which does not necessarily have to be armed, but is a transformative consciousness raising force of the people to achieve a better level of life in all areas”.
Chepi was backed by the Zaachila Education Front which consists of 19 education institutions in the municipality , which chose girl students to perform the national anthem and one of them shouted the Vivas, which after the historic figures ended ¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva Zaachila! ¡Viva el Frente Educativo Zaachilense!
In his speech Chepi added that people have to prepare themselves for the great revolution awaiting us. “it is the struggle that we teachers have to wage in every community: awaken the consciousness of our students, find solidarity with the parents, contact the true governors of the peoples such as the great grandfathers or councilors of elders, because the movement is in the phase of gathering force…. diversity makes us stronger, ideological concurrence makes us stronger too, to find points of agreement in this battle against the repressive governor; we have to prepare ourselves because more complex situations are approaching where surely we will know how to reply to whatever aggression.”
He commented on the police presence in the Oaxaca capital zocalo which was “to gurad an attempt at a festivity which is not of the Oaxaqueños, but to the contrary, is put in play by all the repressive forces that reside in the state; likewise public plazas in the entire country because of the Mexican government´s fear of social dissent which day by day becomes generalized in the face of evident failure of neoliberal policy.”
“For the past nine months, ever since a certain somebody seized the White House, conservative pundits have dominated the ranks of nonfiction. There have been plenty of golden oldies, such as Bill O’Reilly (“A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity”), Ann Coulter (“Guilty”), Bernard Goldberg (“A Slobbering Love Affair”) and Joe Scarborough (“The Last Best Hope”). But it’s the relative newcomers — Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Dick Morris and Michelle Malkin — who’ve put a stranglehold on the top 10.
It would be easy enough, and rather predictable, to lament this state of affairs and to find in it evidence of an anemic literary culture, a dangerously aggrieved minority, or at the very least the diabolical efficacy of bulk sales.
But such liberal cant totally misses the point. Having spent the past two weeks in what I might call a spiritual communion with these authors, I can assure you that these texts are not the psychotic, fact-challenged rants of the mad, but carefully crafted metafictions in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia.
As such, they fit into a long literary tradition, one that extends from the rhapsodic delusions of “Don Quixote” to the airborne toxic events of Don DeLillo, from the surreal prophecy of Revelations to the post-apocalyptic visions of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Though written in different eras and wildly divergent styles, these works are all about the incursion of sinister forces on an unsuspecting populace.
Which brings us back to Beck and Co. Rather than accepting the standard narrative — that a disillusioned electorate rejected eight years of conservative mismanagement in favor of a pragmatic (and frankly wonky) Democrat with an inspirational pedigree — they have created a vivid “counternarrative” in which the events of November 2008 represent a coup d’état. Actually, Malkin regards the arrangement as an oligarchy, while Levin goes all in with nascent totalitarianism. Either way, you get the point. The point is danger, urgency, what we in the fiction biz call “stakes.'” It goes on.
I might be out in left field (so to speak) but reading this article, I was imagining how similar the paranoia on the far right is to the paranoia on the far left. Hmmm. Newt Gingrich’s goal was to foment the “cultural equivalent of civil war” (as stated by Robert Reich in On Reason.
I am wondering if what we have in Obama is another Czar Nicholas II…(who introduced the original glastnost and freed the serfs and we know what happened to both Nicholas and President Lincoln.)
In those days in Russia gradual reform was seen by the revolutionaries on the left as leaving people satisfied with the status quo…wanting society to coil like an overtightened spring so that when it popped, it would break. The Bolsheviks got what they wished for after they assassinated Nicholas II and the rest is history.
In the 1960’s, 100 years after Nicholas II, the revolutionaries in the U.S. thought they had their chance but failed. Now we have revolution coming from the right that is spawning violence that makes the the radical leftist Weathermen look like babes. I am reminded what the Russian anarchist Bakunin said about revolutionary change…that revolutionary change must not come from authoritarian methods but libertarian ones.
It feels like now in the U.S. the liberals are caught in no man’s land and change is being co-opted by the far right, most often by voice and pen but increasingly by violence precipitated by a feeling of cultural displacement by a liberal black president and could result in a disastrous 2012 election. Alaska has had a separatist movement going for years which Palin and her husband has been implicated in supporting. Palin anyone?
But don’t make the mistake of thinking this is something only recent. It has been fomenting since the Continental Congress and the Civil War which we are essentially still fighting. Rep Joe Wilson from South Carolina who called Obama a liar (he was wrong) during his speech to Congress is a secessionist and one of only seven Republicans to go against their own party and vote to keep the Dixie Rebel flag flying over the South Carolina capitol. So much for reconstruction.
A farmer, my own father who I loved dearly, used to read really scary far right wing literature to the eternal embarrassment of my mother who wouldn’t let him read the stuff in the house so he had to sit outside. As a small girl I would ride with him in his pick-up truck as he made the rounds…whispering in low tones with his farmer friends who were all members of a national far right-wing farmer group that I can’t remember the name of. I used to hear him say that if the “govment” ever came to his house he would shoot the hell out of them. And then I worked for state government for 10 years.
No one talks about the Ku Klux Klan anymore, but their off-shoots like the White Aryan supremacist survivalists and their militias have been digging shelters and stockpiling arms for years. Kirk Lyons attended Pete Peters’ 1992 gathering at Estes Park, Colorado that is widely credited with giving birth to the militia movement. At the session, he led discussions on how to establish common-law courts throughout the country.
Rep Joe Wilson is director of a North Carolina legal organization called the CAUSE Foundation, (whose initials ostensibly stand for Canada, Australia, United States and Europe — everywhere that white people are established) describes itself as a defender of unpopular causes and the powerless: “I will always support the rights of radicals,’’ Lyons has said. “The more radical they are, the more they need to be supported for their rights. If you take away their rights, we’re all losers.’’ So then we have a yokel who shows up at a Health Reform town hall presided over by Obama with a side-arm in full view strapped to his leg. And the gun lobby buying off the Congress left and right. Who the hell needs an MK47 to hunt?
Actually, Lyons himself is a white separatist who sneers at the current American system. “Democracy in America is a farce and a failure, ’’he once wrote.” It has led us to the brink of a police state.’’ Words that could easily have come from the radical left.
One of these, Tom Metzger, precipitated a hate crime in 1988 when a 28 year old Ethiopian student and father, Mulugheta Serew, who went to the US to attend college, was killed with a baseball bat in Portland, Oregon by three racist skinheads who were members of a group known as East Side White Pride and White Aryan Resistance (WAR). Seraw’s father and son, represented at no cost by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, successfully filed a civil lawsuit against the killers and Tom Metzger, head of WAR, and his son John, holding them liable for the murder for a total of $12.5 million. Meanwhile Metzger said the skinheads did a “civic duty” by killing Seraw. More in “In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest” Then we have the bombing in Oklahoma, murder of abortion doctors, the stand-off by the Freemen in Montana etc.etc.
On the other hand, Glenn Greenwald,, in Salon.com on the same day as the NY Times booklist article was written, maintains that trying to destroy the presidency of the opposite party is not unprecedented.
“To see that, just look at what that movement’s leading figures said and did during the Clinton years. In 1994, Jesse Helms, then-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that “just about every military man” believes Clinton is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief and then warned/threatened him not to venture onto military bases in the South: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard.” The Wall St. Journal called for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the possible “murder” of Vince Foster. Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker. Tens of millions of dollars and barrels of media ink were expended investigating “Whitewater,” a “scandal” which, to this day, virtually nobody can even define. When Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden, they accused him of “wagging the dog” — trying to distract the country from the truly important matters at hand (his sex scandal). And, of course, the GOP ultimately impeached him over that sex scandal — in the process issuing a lengthy legal brief with footnotes detailing his sex acts (cigars and sex talk), publicly speculating about (and demanding examinations of) the unique “distinguishing” spots on his penis, and using leading right-wing organs to disseminate innuendo that he had an abandoned, out-of-wedlock child. More intense and constant attacks on a President’s “legitimacy” are difficult to imagine.
This is why I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly “hijacked” by extremists and crazies. On the one hand, this is true. But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn’t just magically appear in the last twelve months. He — along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms — have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr’s sex report, “Angry White Male” militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster’s murder, Clinton’s Mena drug runway, Monica’s semen-stained dress, Hillary’s lesbianism, “wag the dog” theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks. And the crazed conspiracy-mongers in that movement became even more prominent during the Bush years. Frum himself — now parading around as the Serious Adult conservative — wrote, along with uber-extremist Richard Perle, one of the most deranged and reality-detached books of the last two decades, and before that, celebrated George W. Bush, his former boss, as “The Right Man.'”
But those folks (with the exception of Pat Robertson (who I believe got the ball rolling with the populist Christian fundamentalist sector) were inside-the-beltway hacks. How many people read their books? I argue now that the difference is that the radio and TV pundits are reaching far more people (Rush with 7 million listeners) who are personally affected by the economic downturn, are and have been feeling culturally displaced and have a real stake in the outcome of a threatening Black presidency. (Who really cared about Clinton’s sperm on that blue dress.) We really should be ignoring them which I think is the point Greenwald is trying to make. But I blame the mainstream media for hopping on the ratings train and giving air time and even more influence to these people who are essentially media personalities on an ego and money trip.
What upsets me, is that these far right “pundits” are using hate speech that, wittingly or unwittingly, foments hatred and violence. No different than yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. They should be held responsible for the violence that I believe they have precipitated already. Some have salient ideas that without the inflammatory name-calling (Obama is a Hitler and a communist) could result in rational discourse. But we have radio and TV ratings to tend to. We have to entertain and cater to a basically uninformed and civically illiterate populace.
So the revolutionaries and anarchists don’t have to do anything but sit back and watch society coil like an overtightened spring so that when it pops, it will break.
Heaven forbid we should have a cool rational wonky president trying to reform a system with his hands tied behind his back by lobbyists, corporations and financial institutions with their billions. And to make it worse the Supreme Court is about to rule that a corporation is an individual. They are about to grant corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to attack political candidates right up until an election, which would destroy the very fabric of our voting structure…such as it is.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Obama expected this kind of opposition. We are a very resilient society and ultimately I have to trust that we will find our way through this.
But Obama is becoming Blacker by the day. I just hope he makes it to the end of his term. The alternative gives me shivers.
I am thankful that some of us, in a cynical time, can still be touched enough to shed tears for, not only a man, but for an entire very human family, and what it stood for. Years after the death of John and Bobby, I could not find a Black or Hispanic professional or political office anywhere that did not have pictures of them displayed prominently…embodying hope…and reminding us of what we were all working for.
For me this is a season of hope — new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few — new hope.And this is the cause of my life — new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old — will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.
After the death of John, when I was a little older and more politically aware, I, however, thinking we had a second chance, was personally most shattered and disappointed by the assassination of Bobby of whom Teddy said at his eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York:
“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it,” Mr. Kennedy said, his voice faltering. “Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.
”Teddy, perhaps, although not as mythically loved, was foreshadowing his own legacy.
My husband wrote me and our three sons an email the other day telling us what he wants done with his body if something happens to him in Thailand…where he lives…where he has regular bouts of road rage…while driving…or dodging threatening cars while on his motorbike. I have to admit, drivers are worse in Thailand than they are in Mexico and that is saying something!
My husband:
I just stumbled onto a site re USA embassy procedure for a death of a US citizen in Thailand. The embassy makes an effort to notify the next of kin, coordinates wishes re transfer of the remains, organizes and disperses the personal property and forwards all the official necessary documents.
Not always a palatable subject but I do have some preferences: -no need to transfer any remains — arrange for a cremation in Thailand, ashes left under a tree anywhere. And prefer no memorial service. – I have little personal property of any value in Thailand (beatup pickup, obsolete computers, generic TV, poorly functional gold clubs and misc shorts, T-shirts and sandals). I will arrange for local dispersal.
I am registered with the embassy and receive their periodic updates, warnings etc. It is a worthwhile feature. Statistically, most likely, I will be around for a while. But an accident –esp with my motorbike riding is always a possibility so when I saw what the embassy does I just wanted to express common sense wishes.
Also in Thailand the medical profession goes to inappropriate heroic measures to prolong life. Shutting off a ventilator is apparently not an option so step in if I am incapacitated and veging inappropriately…
Not anticipating checking out anytime soon but just wanted to simplify any decision making……..
A friend recommended Effexor for road rage but received no comment…:))
Son number 1 who lives in Las Vegas:
Ok.
As long as we’re on the topic.
My preferences.
I want to be buried in the middle pasture at Black Butte Ranch. I’ve often thought about this. It’s the happiest and most serene and most beautiful place I can ever remember.
I dont care if it’s my whole body, but I think the BB folks would NOT be cool with something like this (full burial in public w/o permission with guests passing by with frowning faces) so it will probably have to be clandestine. So that means cremation and then plunk me under a cow pie somewhere while no one else is aware of whats going on.
Im serious. I dont want a headstone. I dont want to be in some no name cemetery.
As far as my belongings, I dont care about any of it. Disperse it, share it, trash it. It wont matter to me. My estate attorney, he’ll help with all that.
Ok. Got it? Black Butte Ranch. Cremated. Buried in the pasture, maybe a couple meters off the bike path that cuts across it. NO sign or maker. I just want to be where I can see the sisters, Mt Washington and Jeff.
K?
Got it?
Good. Im not kidding.
Afterward, hike up Black Butte, stand at the top breath the clean eastern oregon air and think, “it’s good to be alive and not under a cow pie!”
You dont all have to be there, but at least got to be one of you otherwise it wont happen.
(My day is coming, just like everyone else’s)
Then son number 2 who is married to a Thai wife and lives in Thailand:
creamate me, add the ashes to soil, grow a pot plant and my friends can smoke me.
Not a peep from son number 3 who lives in Hong Kong…yet…:))
I told my husband that in Mexico, where I am, any unclaimed bodies are cremated…no charge! :)) Of course all this is predicated on at least one of us being around to honor various wishes.:))
But all is duly noted..and recorded here…:)) Mainly so as to not drive future genealogists crazy who would uselessly be looking for headstones.
After living here and watching events unfold since 2006, this is one (not small but easy) thing that would not only protect the life of one unjustly incarcerated man, but the human rights of thousands of others in Mexico.
The case of JUAN MANUEL MARTINEZ MORENO, incarcerated for the murder of Indymedia journalist Brad Will in Oaxaca October 2006, is being railroaded by the Mexican government in Oaxaca.
Moreno’s next court hearing to have the case dismissed for lack of credible evidence will be held in Federal court in Oaxaca IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS.
Significantly, case of Brad Will’s murder was singled out by the U.S. Congress when they passed the 1.4 billion funding bill for the Merida Initiative in July 2008 (popularly called Plan Mexico to help Mexico fight the “drug war,”) calling in that bill for “progress in conducting a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation to identify the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice” as a condition for 15% of the funds. Read More
My thoughts after nearly 40 years of thinking about this subject and watching this 21 minute speech by Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, who challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if “we don’t always get what we want,” as the Stones sing. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned, Gilbert says. Watch the film first, when you have time, before reading my rambling or it won’t make as much sense… my rambling I mean. He talks fast so it took a second watching for me to “get” it all.
Suddenly, I am realizing what the answer is to the fact that so many people I have seen all over the world, in deepest poverty, in wretched conditions, no choices, no expectations, with or without a faith in a religion, generally seem so happy and joyful.
I’ve always thought that disappointed expectations (which is really the desire to control our lives) is what makes us unhappy. Buddhism, as my friend Jiraporn says, says just accept…in fact all religions preach surrender. Maybe it doesn’t matter what makes you surrender, or what you surrender to…God or the 12 steps, or the gods, or nature or the laws of the universe. Maybe there is an inherent wisdom deep in all societies that we need to surrender to be happy and the concept of God is a “synthetic” construct to encourage this…or demand it as the case may be.
Have always felt, on an intellectual level, that the whole concept of a God seemed artificial…not in the same sense as Marx thought…but in the sense that we know we need to surrender in the face of mystery, to the need to understand. It may be that faith in God is just as artificial as a chemical that allows us to transcend an ordinary state of consciousness. I think that maybe this creates the bliss we feel when we do it…the bliss during a born again experience is the same bliss we feel during meditation. For me anyway. I know. But whatever, opening the “doors of perception” and letting go at times seems to be a universal need.
At the same time, it doesn’t mean that we surrender to abusing spouses, corrupt governments or poverty. It doesn’t mean that we surrender to ignorance. We still will explore the universe and the laws of nature and man itself. It is just the basic attitude in the meantime while we ponder the choices we do have to improve and move life forward. The trick is to realize what improvement means and what moves us forward and what doesn’t…politically or personally. And the ability to feel happy in the meantime. Our Declaration of Independence guaranteed our freedom to pursue happiness. It just didn’t tell us how. Maybe they were wise.
We practice surrender when we meditate and then it becomes a habit. Just sitting down and letting go of the stimulants of the outside world helps us to practice surrender…maybe doesn’t matter what technique we use…a mantra, a prayer…our breath. Maybe we use faith.
Letting go of the expectation that a certain outcome will make us happy (more money, a perfect spouse) makes us feel invulnerable on the inside to life’s whims. Then “bad” outcomes can not touch our interior…our ability to feel happy and secure. Fear of a bad outcome makes us feel more pain than the outcome itself.
When we were counseling foreign exchange students and host families when you were in high school we told them not to judge an experience as bad or good. It is just an experience that we learn from. We don’t allow it to knock us off our feet. Of course that is easy to say when we are not in the middle of an event. But things always work out, I always say, not just the way we expect.
Couple more things to leave you with:
“When do you know your God is man-made?
When he hates the same people you do.”
The Two Wolves
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a
battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son,
The battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow,
regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment
inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.
“The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope,
serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence,
empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute
and then asked his grandfather,
“Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
These are just my thoughts. You get to choose.
Update: You might like to check out the comments to this post.
Ernesto Reyes Martinez, an editor for Noticias Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca and radio correspondent for the program Hoy por Hoy” on radio XEW, was grabbed by members of the 9th Infantry Battalion, subjected to violent handling and held for an hour and a half. This occurred at 9:30 AM on Monday July 20. Reyes was not involved in any criminal act. He was riding in his car with his wife, trying to take photos with his cell phone of men of the State Investigative Agency (AIE). The newspaper Noticias says he was taking photos of “an unusual event” when he was stopped. The unusual event seems to have been an extortion attempt (police do this to get bribe money) operating on the highway. The first press release (July 21) indicated that extortion was involved; the second article, put out by the National Commission for Human Rights and the National Center for Social Communication, (CENCO in its Spanish initials) focused only on Reyes.
I am assuming that since Reyes is affiliated with Noticias, the account they printed is his.
Combining accounts, Reyes observed five individuals chasing a man on a bicycle. The chase vehicles made the bicyclist stop. Reyes got out of his car and took photos with his cell phone camera. His car was thirty meters from a military post, a check-point on highway 190 which inspects vehicles for drugs and guns. However, at that moment the barrier was not operating because the soldiers were inside eating breakfast.
After he was stopped, 14-18 armed soldiers appeared and arrested the police participants in the chase. Reyes and Reyes’ wife were as also detained. Everyone was held in the military encampment, where Reyes’ cell phone was confiscated. Reyes identified himself and told the military he is a reporter. In addition to his personal cell phone they also took his work phone which belongs to Noticias. The illegal detention lasted an hour and a half while he remained incommunicado, although his wife was released after half an hour without her cell phone. According to the first report, Reyes’ personal identification was also retained.
Weapons of the AIE police were also confiscated. The police were released, along with another presumed accomplice in extortion who had been taken earlier, after the State Attorney General’s office came to get them.
After Reyes and his wife were released, the reporter lodged a formal complaint with CENCO, which responds to aggression against reporters.
In 2009, up until June 30, the 147 acts of aggression against free communication registered with CENCO (i.e., national numbers) included five murders, six demands to stop (reporting or broadcasting), 32 intimidations and threats, 10 attempts to harm, 46 physical assaults, and 14 kidnappings. These figures indicate a rise in crimes against the news media and reporters.
In 2008, 223 cases of obstruction of speech and communication occurred through direct and indirect aggressions. Thirty-six radio stations were smashed. 85.1% of the attacks were against journalists; 14.7% were against media. The states which had the highest incidence of crimes against reporters and news media were the Federal District (Mexico DF) with 15.3% , followed by Oaxaca with 11.7% (this data is from Informe Buendia 2008). In third place was Veracruz with 9.9%, then Chiapas with 7.2%, then Tamaulipas and Hidalgo with 4% each. The northern states’ media also get threatened not only by government agents but also by narcotraffickers.
In addition to Ernesto Reyes, Manuel León López of the News Agency “Reflexión Informativa Oaxaca” was recently attacked, on April 2, 2009. In fine rhetoric, state director of the Convergencia political party, Mario Arturo Mendoza Flores, demanded an immediate halt to actions “orchestrated by the government of Ulises Ruiz against reporters dedicated to freedom of expression and against the media they represent.” Taking advantage of an opportunity to attack the rival political party of the PRI, Mendoza Flores said , “This constitutes a clear demonstration that the only form of governing that Ruiz Ortiz has left to him is the billy-club and deployment of many police wherever he is or will pass; therefore the ordinary Oaxaqueño who has a tranquil conscience endures fear and difficulty in moving about.… If recognized journalists suffer this type of aggression, you can imagine what happens to ordinary citizens.”
Some military personnel may not know how to read (or understand the significance of) Reyes’ identification; soldiers are often recruited from the very lowest level of national education, and they are not well trained either as soldiers or as readers. Possibly the military didn’t distinguish Reyes from any other person. They beat up on everyone; that’s normal.
Back from a cool refreshing weekend in the mountains!
Tlaxiaco (IPA: /tla.’xia.ko/) is a Nahuatl name containing the elements tlachtli (ball game), quiahuitl (rain), and -co (place marker). It thus approximates to “Place where it rains on the ball court”. Its name in the Mixtec language is Ndijiinu, which means “good view.” Population about 20,000. 600 taxis…most of them illegal.
The city is formally known as Heroica Ciudad de Tlaxiaco (“heroic city”) in honour of a battle waged there during the 1862–67 French invasion.
Three and half hours in a comfortable van into the Mixteca Alta northeast of Oaxaca City with my friend Paula who has been here this past year teaching English to second graders in a private school. We met friends Max, Sandy and Budd there who came up the next day. Stayed in a beautiful recently remodeled hotel across from the plaza with a huge German clock installed in 1947…one of several in the Mixtec area…and it was working and on time!
Saturday was the weekly rotating market day so the plaza was full of vendors selling just about everything possible that began setting up 4-5am…including outside my hotel window I might add. Side streets full of women vendors selling huge pots of posole, chicken soup, big fat tamales, memelas, atole, cafe de olla (sweet coffee made in a pot…we called it sheep camp coffee when I was growing up). I bought a big pottery casserole with lid for 30 pesos…about $2.50 and a smaller one with lid for 20 pesos.
Toward evening we took a taxi ride up a hill so we could look out over the valley…stopping for blanco mescal for Max (ugh) before heading back to the hotel and something to eat.
Sunday, after a buffet of chilaquilles, beef burria, scrambled eggs and ham etc etc…and some of the best Mexican hot chocolate we’ve ever had, (the coffee tasted like dishwater as my mother used to say) Paula and I walked up to the house where Lila Downs, the famous Oaxacan singer, grew up…Paula knowing them because she had spent several weeks in the village during college.
Paula had wanted to see an old friend who owned a tienda…but about 20 days before we got there he had been drinking and fell and hit his head and died…a sad disappointment. But we had several nice conversations with other locals some of whom had worked in the states before and wanted to practice their English.
Then we took another taxi ride through the valley before scrambling on the van back to Oaxaca City…Sandy and Budd having gone on before us.
Laughingnomad 