Noticias

Hello, all… a brief update and some rambling about things in Mexico, not necessarily in that order. Feel free to skip to the end if you´re short on time.

Friday is my favorite day of the week. It seems to be the favorite day of the week of the internet café guy, too, though he celebrates it, as he celebrates every other day, by sleeping in until 10:30 when the sign on the door clearly says 9:00, so that I can't just conveniently stop by on my way home from work but have to double back later after killing time by drinking too much coffee. But today somehow I was nonplussed by the tardiness of Mexican time, which seem to apply to all establishments except street vendors and beggars, who are at work 24 hours per day.

As I said, Fridays are my favorite day of the week. Once upon a time this might have been because they offered the prospect of two whole days free of work and thinking, the opportunity to escape responsibility and reality for an entire weekend at a stretch, but given that I work seven hours on Saturdays now, I can hardly imagine that that's the case anymore. Rather, I think I enjoy Fridays because I do work in the mornings, from 8 to 9, and then have the rest of the day free to wander around the city and try to get lost. Of course, I have long since stopped being able to be truly lost, especially since I often carry a map with me anyway (damn Clark's geography department!). But I still wander around new streets and loiter in different places, sometimes to the enjoyment and sometimes to the annoyment of the store and restaurant owners in my own fresa (translation: ritzy? snobby? nice?) Colonia Reforma.

Today for entertainment, I spent a whopping $10, walking around the market building near my school and cheering up street vendors by chatting and buying their goods, one item at a time, each thing from a different person. I never get tired of walking through the markets here, seeing the fresh fruit and vegetables stacked one on top of the other in gorgeous rows, red strawberries and green choyotes (no translation- round spiny squash-tasting things?) and yellow platanos (bananas), ripe and plump and vibrant, just waiting to be painted… perhaps someday I will get to this. Somehow it's altogether different from American markets, where everything is sterile and in plastic bags and your groceries are your own private business. Here, grocery shopping is an enterprise, a battle, a ritual. You have to bring your A-game or you go home with something that resembles a chicken chopped up by a seven year old with plastic picnic utensils, or a shriveled cactus that you're not sure how to peel, let alone eat.

So today I began with something familiar: tlayudas (big, flat, round tortillas), a staple which I didn't need but bought nonetheless because they are so delicious. The tlayuda woman was short and dark and hunched and beautiful, her eyes luminous behind her wrinkled skin. She smiled at me when I bought her goods, it being early in the morning yet for so unexpected a sale. I then continued on to copal, a miraculous resin which supposedly keeps away insects when burned and with which I entertain myself at night using the flame from my candles. I then bought a selection of granola, which is absolutely amazing down here and served with yoghurt and honey. I bought quesillo, a Oaxacan cheese which is somewhat similar to Mozzarella cheese but far better, and then, remembering my granola, proceeded to buy yoghurt. I lingered a while over the bread selections, because there are so many vendors selling it and because I didn't actually need any, but eventually settled on some soft round loaves that taste good with quesillo and beans in a kind of Mexican pizza they sometimes serve here. All in all it was fabulous, and I felt like a child at a candy store, as I always do, my eyes wide, shiny round pesos burning a hole in my pocket until I had to spend them to alleviate the burden.

My final purchase was a brave one, something I haven't bought in quite a while: a newspaper. I even chose the liberal rag, Noticias, now operating outside the city because of the current crisis (not sure why, the city is now run by leftists). I have intentionally avoided the news for a while now because it's so damn wrong all the time, but things have been calmer lately, I've been able to sleep at night, and I wanted to get an idea of what is stirring and how the plans for an alternative government are doing, at least according to the socialists.

I have to say, the paper made me laugh. I sat at my kitchen table at home, listening to mariachi music along with the guy doing construction in our complex, reading Noticias and drinking tea, and the sheer ridiculousness of the situation finally dawned on me. Never mind I walk to work past both APPO stakeouts and uniformed military with assault rifles and a scary-looking green jeep. Reading the newspaper, it all seemed to make sense. A march beginning in Etla yesterday walked the first 25 kilometers of the five hundred and something it takes to walk to Mexico City, protesters yelling, "This march is going to arrive in DF (Mexico City)!" According to my calculations, it will take the better part of a month for this to happen, while the rest of the country waits, bored, picking their noses and walking to work over rubble. On the same page, glaring out is a picture of lame duck Vicente Fox and president-elect Filipe Calderón standing too far apart, Calderon seeming rotund and almost obscenely short in comparison to Fox's lanky figure, his round glasses making him look more like an elderly gentleman at a wine tasting than the future president of Mexico. Next, a picture of "the APPO" and "the magisterio" parading around in matador costumes in a political cartoon that I clearly didn't get. An article on potholes. Elaborately overstated opinions in the Editorial section. Calls for peace. Calls to arms. Apparently the phrase for bloodbath in Spanish is " baño de sangre," which to me means bloody bathroom. But why not? This is Mexico, and no one's really sure who the President is anyways, let alone our state Governor. There's no police and no government in the city and we don't really care because the APPO takes care of it. Either that or we complain a lot about it just for fun. Just ask the periodistas: they make up news as it comes into their heads, just like the protesters do on the stolen radio stations. Soap boxes everywhere.

So that's the news: there is no news. No one knows what's going on. Just listen, and if you do it long enough, you'll hear what you want. Everything's going on. Nothing's going on. It's all happening at once. Ulyses is about to regain power. Ulyses is about to be assassinated. We're still deciding on how we want to end this one, but we're taking our sweet time doing it. This isn't the US, there are no deadlines. The internet cafes don't even open until noon if the owner went out for mezcal the night before. Just try organizing a revolution. We're just waiting. But I've got my tlayudas and my copal, so I'm good to go in the meantime.

Vasconcelos/Periferico blockade

In recent weeks, I have spent much time looking long and hard down “Calz. E Vasconcelos”-- the northern half of the Periferico loop-- with curiosity, wondering what lie beyond the bus blockades to the South. I had walked the street perhaps once before, trying to get my bearings long before I actually lived in Colonia Reforma to the north of the city. Somehow, however, the blockades looked menacing, and I did my best to put off the compulsion to walk down the street. No, Anna. Dangerous.

Today, as luck would have it, I stumbled upon this very street, except from the southern end. Buses circumnavigate the entire area every time they drive from my neighborhood downtown, and to be honest, until today I wasn’t even sure where the long line of blockades ended. I myself always walk in another direction, through a pleasant cobblestone neighbhorhood which is always open and feels safe. But today after work I needed to pick up some groceries, and in my wanderings I came upon the southern end of what I could only assume to be the blockade. I should say, by the way, that this "street" is not really any such thing; rather, it is a four lane highway, one of the largest in the city, two lanes on each side with a median in between. For perhaps six blocks running north-south in a three-block-wide swath of the city, it is closed off to vehicles by city buses, which are parked at every intersection across each of the two lanes on either side of the median.

Laden with my one overloaded grocery bag and my leather satchel full of teaching materials, I decided today to investigate the mystery further: it was, after all, the easiest route home. Tentatively, I started walking towards it. To my surprise, no one halted me, and I could in fact see one or two normal people walking towards me from the other side of the first line of buses. In fact, there seemed to be no one about at all who looked interested in asking me what on earth I was doing there. I continued, and my heartbeat quickened to the beat of the punk rock music blaring from the CD store open on one side of the street. At least some stores are open, I thought. That's a good sign.

Taking a breath, I crossed the first blockade. And on the other side of the buses, I entered a foreign world. Here, a four-lane highway had been converted into a city park. Women sat picnicking in a thicker section of a median, and genuine, relaxed laughter drifted lazily my way from men sitting across the street from me. Several people riding bikes took advantage of the fact that there were no cars, and as I passed blockade after blockade, I realized that this is the tranquillest part of the city that I have thus far found. I could not hear a single car, even in the distance, just the soft sound of people living, their voices travelling lazily across the warm air. I almost felt cheated for having thought it a dangerous zone for so long.

Walking down the streets, I saw that this area was covered with graffiti, but that it was far more philosophic in nature than the common vandalism I usually see on my way to work: one phrase which particularly struck me read, Mejor morir de pie porque no se puede de rodillos. Esperanza es la ultima morir (Better to die standing, because one cannot die on one's knees. Hope is the last thing to die).

I passed block after block of languid protesters and their families reclining in the streets, finally walking by a baseball game in progress. Relaxed, and totally unafraid, I watched the men play, and realized that in all my wandering I had not been harassed once, nor had I been called güera, the obnoxious word for "pretty white lady" or something of the sort. These people, it seemed, had something more interesting to worry about than me, even if I obviously didn’t belong here. As I walked down the street I even went so far as to wonder whether the people in this neighbourhood didn’t prefer things the way they were for all the tranquillity and calm.

And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. I walked through the last blockade right onto Highway 190, the six lane divided highway I have to cross one way or another to get to and from work every day (it’s divided in strange ways so there are as many as four and as few as two lanes to cross at a time, with frequent confusing lights that have quashed any potential desire of mine to ever drive in the city). And suddenly, the world was full of noise again. I was confused and disoriented, and my turnoff to go up my street came sooner than I expected. As I continued to walk home, somewhat stunned, the strains of a saxophone reached my ears, accompanied by a slow, mournful drumbeat, a plaintive song like the one in the movie Glory which always used to make me cry. And I wasn’t sure, for a moment, why I wasn’t crying, because I half wanted to, but the tears wouldn’t come.

Teotitlan del Valle

I went yesterday to Teotitlan del Valle, which I had visited before with Tim, Laura, and Anna Barto to buy rugs and check out the old church. This time, however, I had somewhat more of a mission in mind beyond simply wandering and exploring. One of the three brothers whom I collectively refer to as "my landlord" (Enrique this time), who is also the coordinator of the Spanish school partnered with the English one that I teach at, had invited me and my roommates to participate in a traditional parade. My two English-speaking roommates immediately declined. "We have to teach," they begged off quickly. I had to teach, too, but when you are being invited to not only watch but participate in a traditional parade in a Zapotec community, you simply do not decline. So, rushing my lesson plans for subs, I accepted his invitation at the eleventh hour, as had my Japanese roommate Yoko who, incidentally, is amazing to practice Spanish with because she doesn't speak a word of English nor I a word of Japanese so there is no cheating when we try to communicate.

When we arrived in our collectivo taxis, I could immediately tell that we were in for something special: we veered away from the tourist trap downtown and began climbing the hills to residences higher up from the central marketplace. Teotitlan is in the same valley as the larger (?) Tlacolula, and as with many of the pueblos surrounding Oaxaca, the main marketplace is the only area really accessible to outsiders. Outside of the central shopping area, in the residential zones, there are perhaps a few good places to eat, but no stores, and therefore no real reason or excuse to go exploring. In fact, most artisans from the normal neighborhoods sell their goods to bigger, wealthier families in the more central areas and those families sell to tourists in a perfectly sculpted hierarchy of power and money.

At the home we visited, we were immediately welcomed, shown the family's looms, and invited to sit in a back room facing the family altar, where we crunched on giant rounds of communion wafer, which are, as it turns out, made only from flour, egg, and sugar. My heathen tongue had never actually tasted communion wafer before, my experiences in Church being limited to Easter and perhaps Christmas masses, but I equate the taste to fortune cookies. Simple ingredients but not a simple process unless you have been taught to make them by an expert, was what I could gather from the explanations. This served with agua de jamaica (a brewed mixture made from the leaves of the hibiscus plant, I believe, which I have made myself but never quite tastes the same) made the perfect afternoon snack, as our curiosity and anticipation were allowed to get the better of us while we waited, eager to know what on earth we were actually going to do.

And then the dresses came. Rather, they were red blankets, wool or something else thick and heavy and warm. An old woman, the doña of the house, looked appraisingly at all the girls in the room. I, of course, had been the first to step forward to volunteer to "participate", whatever that meant, and she looked at me with smiling eyes. She was, as it were, over a foot shorter than me, perhaps as tall as my shoulders, her wrinkled skin beautiful and chocolatey brown and creased with wisdom. She spoke to her son, about my age, in Zapotec. I was enchanted. For one, m y American ears were not attuned to words spoken that softly, the practically inaudible lullaby of a Zapotec language I could only even imagine being able to understand. And unlike the city folk I have heard speak Zapotec, she was the real thing, speaking, from what I could gather, only limited Spanish, as simply and sparsely as possible. Her son translated to Spanish, and I, prideful at being the most adept at both Spanish and English, translated to English for the French Canadians (who spoke English moderately well but French amongst themselves) as appropriate. It was a strange, confusing mix of Japanese, Zapotec, English, Spanish, and French; a truly multicultural experience.

Apparently I was wearing the right shirt: by chance, I had worn a puffy white shirt I bought in a market during Guelaguetza with hand embroidered red flowers across the chest. Taking my shoes off, I stepped onto the rug indicated, and stood obediently while the old woman expertly wrapped a red cloth around my waist, folding it like a fan evenly and smoothly at either side of the waist so that it creased just right at the bottom in a sort of pleat. After this came a small white rope, which she securely fastened around my midsection at the top of the red cloth to the fan-folds in place. And then, with superhuman Zapotec strength, she tied the string pretty much as tight as it would go, sucking the red cloth, the bottom of my shirt, and any miscellaneous parts of my torso which might have had the idea of being unruly or moving around all into one tight loop. It felt stiff. Lastly came the pink sash, again tied ritualistically, and which covered the plainness of the rope. When she was finished, she stood back and looked appreciatively at her work. I stood upright, feeling tall mostly because I couldn’t bend over very well but also because of the pride I felt at being the first to be dressed. Then with slow labouring patience she dressed the other two girls, my roommate Yoko and the French Canadian who I had just met and whose name I can’t remember. Her granddaughter, perhaps 15, already dressed and ready to go, looked on from the doorway.

I should interrupt myself here for just a moment to explain the meaning of this whole desfile (parade) thing. In a nutshell, it is a tradition in this village to have the virgin women of the area march around in a large, 2km (about 1.2 mi) with canastas on their heads as penance. Whoa, whoa, whoa, you say… was part of the entrance interview a gynocological exam? And why are the virgins of the village the ones paying penance, while the rest get to sit back and watch? And what on earth is a canasta? Well, in modern times, virginhood is no longer a requirement for participation, though it is generally young women ages 15 to 25 or 30 who participate. They are often but not always unmarried. And in fact, it is a status symbol to have people from outside of town as members of your particular legion because it shows that you have both resources and connections in the outside world. Translation: blond hair and blue eyes are bragging rights. As to the irony of having the purest women in the town paying penance for sins they probably have not committed, I have no explanation. All told I still don’t know what this particular pueblo’s virgin saint is. But seeing your girlfriend or sister march in the parade is, as it has always been, a source of immense pride. As for the canastas, and what they are, and how I chose mine, we will come to that later.

When at last we were ready to go, we marched out of the house and down towards the main church. It had rained for perhaps 20 minutes in the earlier afternoon, and water ran freely over the cobblestones, making the steep descent slippery. And very tenderly, as we walked down the hill, the old woman reached out and held my hand. Maybe it was because she didn’t want me to fall in the mud, but maybe, just maybe, I think it was because she was proud to have me there. All in all it was more like holding the hand of a child than that of a woman, because really she was only holding on to two or three of my fingers, and I her whole hand, and at the same time I had to drop one shoulder awkwardly in order for my arm to reach down to where her hand was. But there we were, marching codo a codo (more or less, “side by side”) to the church, and I the tallest, blondest girl in the parade.

We took a pitstop at another house to sit, drink some more agua (flavoured water, as opposed to agua purificada, or plain water), and wait for further directions. Several women with children came and went, inspecting us, murmuring quiet whispers in Zapotec, and for the most part nodding their approval. And here we were introduced to our first canasta. About five feet high, it was essentially a giant printed picture of Jesus on a crucifix, mounted onto a basket and held erect with bamboo poles. Glitter, many different kinds of paint, and plastic flowers framed the picture beautifully. Not something you would find in a Catholic church at home, but it fit in perfectly with my image of typical Mexican shrines and altarpieces. It was, nonetheless, vaguely frightening, particularly given the idea that we were each going to be wearing one on our head for a two kilometre hike in skirt-blankets. Giggling nervously, we took turns picking it up and precariously balancing it on our heads. This must be a big one, right? Certainly, this awkward, teetering thing cannot be expected to rest on our heads as we march around in circles, right?

We soon found out, of course, that this canasta was standard make and model. Descending even further from the hill to the church, we separated from the men and were shepherded into a back patio behind the church where rows and rows of canastas were lined up royally, waiting for floods and floods of young women to come, who then selected them happily like passive dates being taken to a fiesta. Crucifixes, the standard image on most of the pictures, have always made me feel vaguely uncomfortable and guilty (perhaps that is the point), so I picked instead a softer, less austere picture of Him, clad in blue robes and wearing a smile, rays of light emanating downward from his open palm. “Jesus, confio en ti (Jesus, I trust in thee),” it said at the bottom. “Okay Jesus,” I muttered to myself, feeling rather silly, “I will trust in thee as long as you don’t fall off the top of my head and expose me for the American I am for at least half an hour.”

We then followed our fifteen year old guide, who seemed to be the closest we were going to come to a guide outside, where we were to line up in two tangled rows. She disappeared and reappeared in and out of a sea of red dresses with pink sashes, plaited black hair, and sparkling canastas. I began at this point to feel somewhat like a Girl Scout before a parade, all lined up in legions and utterly anonymous. Then I realized that of course I was the tallest one in the parade by about a foot (these are Zapotec women, you see, not of Spanish descent for the most part, and therefore rather short), blond hair falling in a tangle over my white shoulders, and that there was no way I was ever going to look anonymous in this crowd.


And then, with the loud bangs of fireworks that I could not look up to see because I was too busy balancing a basket with a large picture of Jesus on the top of my head, the parade began. At the front were a band and some other men in costumes, there to entertain and play music for our march around the pueblo, which helped us keep pace. These were the only males in the parade except for one or two fathers walking alongside their very small daughters, whose mini canastas decorated with flowery crowns spent some of their time on the girls´ heads and some in the arms of their fathers. I was continually tripping over the feet of the girl in front of me, stepping in puddles of mud, and trying to crane my head around to see what was going on behind me without disrupting the positioning of my canasta and causing the others in line behind me, including Yoko, to all topple over as well.

The parade march itself was short. We marched more or less in a square, five blocks, left, six blocks, zigzag left right, left, five blocks, left, six blocks, or something of the sort. But at some stretches it felt like an eternity. Little by little the awkward posters became heavier and our arms grew leaden, fixed as they were in an upright position, elbows bent, to keep the baskets from falling off. As we turned the last corner and finally saw the church, I realized how tired I was, and how hungry, in spite of my reassurances to Enrique, who walked alongside snapping pictures, that I was neither. We left girls and came back women, panting and sweaty and massaging our sore arms and heads, trying to realign the tangled mats of hair at the tops of our heads from the baskets sliding and rubbing in all kinds of directions. We laughed breathlessly, setting our canastas down and departing in our troupes without paying further heed to them, our abandoned fiesta dates.

After all was said and done, we women sat down to a grand dinner, tlayudas with chicken and an Amarillo sauce, just right after the long walk. I laughed at the sight of big 2-liter bottles of Sprite, Fanta, and apple and grape soda. Congratulations, corporate America, you have made it quite far. The dueña of the house served us, the guests of honor, for once more important than she as head of household was herself, and at the end pridefully asked me whether I liked the food she had served me. I responded honestly that I did, looking happily across the table to my Mexican, Japanese, and Canadian amigas, who began to wrap up their leftovers in tlayudas to take home, maybe for breakfast tomorrow. As we walked out the door to the house where the men were waiting, I ate the perfect apple, which had been offered me for dessert, for once not worrying about the fact that it wasn’t peeled. It was late, far later than we thought, and the sky was dark. We marched contentedly down the long hill towards the center of the town and the church, having experienced far more than any tourist at first glimpse of Teotitlan. And thus the night ended: slowly, on the steps of the church´s courtyard, where I quietly sat next to a smiling Enrique as we waited for a taxi to take us home. The air was cold and the night was lit by an almost full moon, and someone’s tiny puppy came and curled up on my lap, snuggling its nose under my elbow for warmth.