Oaxaca

Tlacalula Again

Posted on by Laughingnomad

When Jennifer got in the car she looked at me and asked if I used to go to the Beanery coffee house in Salem where she worked at one time. Of course I had.

Michael and Jennifer from Portland Oregon visited Oaxaca last week. So at the request of my Canadian friend Charly, who met Michael on a coffee home roast web site, I took them to Huayapam to meet Mica and Bardo. But first we visited the Tlacalula Sunday Market. I’m getting pretty good at this. They bought mucha mescal for gifts and I bought two liters for my mescal barrel.

One afternoon I showed them several of my videos I made of the teacher strike here in Oaxaca…and a couple more of the Day Of The Dead and Charly’s going away party which they seemed to enjoy,

They were only here four days…the last one Michael spent in bed with what we think was altitude sickness…Portland being just a little above sea level and Oaxaca being more than 5000 feet! I took them to the airport Sunday where they were bound for Mexico City and then home. I now have two bottles of real maple syrup, two bottles of especial Oregon Pinot Noir wine and a lot more jazz music for my computer. Thanks Michael and Jennifer!

Sunday I pick up another family (via Charly again) at the airport and take them to Huayapam where they are looking for land to build a house. I think Bardo is getting spoiled with all this Sunday company! And even though I always arrive with an armload of food and mescal, Mica is a saint for doing all the cooking!

Protesting Donald Trump With Poise

Posted on by Laughingnomad

More on the beauty pageant to be staged at Monte Alban:

Auditions to be Held April 18 in New York City Toward a Protest with Poise Aimed at Donald Trump and NBC

By Cha-Cha Connor
Spokesmodel, Popular Assembly of Models for Oaxaca

“In solidarity with the APPO of Oaxaca – Models of the world, unite! Be a part of the most attractive picket protest in history! Join us in New York City on April 18th to audition for the most stylish, the most poised, and the most elegant picket line that Donald Trump and NBC have ever seen.

In May 2007, the Donald Trump Organization and NBC plan to impose the “traditional costume” competition of the world-renowned Miss Universe pageant in the sacred ruins of Monte Albán, Oaxaca. In that same month, local teachers and social movements will be marching in Oaxaca City, as they have each month of May for the past quarter-century, for jobs, dignity, and, for the past year, the fall of the dictator Ulises Ruiz, who now thinks he can use models to justify calling in the police, and brutalizing the teachers in the month of their march.

But we supermodels won’t let it happen. We models aren’t the cheap props of dictators.

For this reason, we have formed the international movement of Supermodels for Oaxaca (APMO, in its Spanish initials). Audition on April 18th to be part of the only social movement that will topple tyranny with beauty and poise – and the only red carpet picket line worth auditioning for.
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Mescal And Lamb With Consumme

Posted on by Laughingnomad

10am Sunday morning, one of the mescal vendors at the Tlacalula Market latched onto Maria and I with a dozen sample cups of mescal..from Mango Crema to the rare Tuvala Agave…after which we made an imperative beeline to the food section. At a long communal table we scarfed barrega (lamb) soup while visiting with a friendly old compesino from the mountains.

We bought a bag of chivo (the prized goat meat BBQ’d in the ground) to take to Mica and Bardo’s in Huayapam…and of course a liter pop bottle full of barrel mescal.

On the way back we stopped in Teotitlan where Maria, overwhelmed by the selection of rugs, ended up not choosing any. We will have to make a return trip while she shops around and thinks on it. Before leaving, The Zapotec Gonzalez family demonstrated their natural dye process and demonstrated the weaving of some very complicated designs.

I took a picture of a forest fire in the distance. The pine forests fall victim to the dry season this time of year. I asked Gerardo, my landlord who happened to be there working on a tourism project, how they fight fires here. “No water,” he said…”just chopping the forest around the fire. We have no helicopters.” “Oh yes,” I said, “you can get helicopters from the Governor!” He didn’t think that was very funny. If you remember there were plenty of helicopters available to tear-gas the people in the Centro a few times.

In Huayapam, Mica fixed us, and Bardo’s sister, Pilar, a delicious chicken in coloradito sauce and rice with clams brought by a friend from the coast. Bardo showed us turtle eggs (illegal) but we reneged. Bardo and Mica had worked all day roasting, sorting and bagging coffee…so noticing their yawns, we exited early. But not before their architect friend, Renaldo, showed up with digital images of a house to be built on land adjacent to Bardo’s new house he is building for himself high on a hill overlooking Huayapam. Before we left, we tried to call friend Gerardo, working in Puerto Escondido now, but as usual no tiempo aero (air time) on his phone.
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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

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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??

Contemplating Going “Home”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I was quickly stopped by a policeman. “Have you been drinking? Have you been smoking pot? Your eyes are all red! Then he made me stand, in high heels, on one foot and count to forty. Then follow his finger moving back and forth with my eyes. Then he let me, shaken, go.

Last time I got off the plane in Portland from almost a year in Asia, I found myself jet-lagged and completely disoriented…driving on the “wrong” side of the road.

Found this blog by a Chinese-American on Bootsnall. He is probably much younger but his experience is none-the-less very similar to mine.

Coming Home: Sharks Also Need Constant Motion
By: Jeffrey Lee

“Coming home meant coming down. It was easier to stay up. I’d return home to piles of bills and an empty refrigerator. Buying groceries, I’d get lost – too many aisles, too many choices; cool mist blowing over fresh fruit; paper or plastic; cash back in return? I’d wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion.

Out at night, weaving through traffic, looking for trouble, I’d lose myself in crowds. Gaggles of girls with fruit-colored drinks talked about face products and film production. I’d see their lips move, look at their snapshot smiles and highlighted hair. I didn’t know what to say.
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