Journal

Trip to Oaxaca – June 2003

Thursday, June 26

Following a safe landing in Oaxaca, a taxi deposited me at Casa Conzatti, a pleasant small hotel facing the city’s several parks where, as is traditional here, all the tree trunks are painted white for the first four feet from the ground, which is, I surmise, an act of pest control. My other traveling companions, who are friends from Austin – Jill and Jack Nokes – and their friend Lynn Storm had already arrived and checked into the hotel. Jill, who is an authority on the native plants of Texas, had organized the trip and invited Lynn and me to join her since we both share her interest, if not her considerable amount of authoritative knowledge regarding botanical discoveries. Jack is a culturally interested traveler, happy to join the adventure with three plant-focused women in this exceptionally diverse and ecologically, as well as archaeologically, rich part of the world. Now, with xeroxed pages of guidebooks and scholarly tomes spread before us on a hotel bed, we are ready to begin learning about the Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations and the indigenous people that are their more-or-less Hispanicized descendants today. Because of her own expertise regarding rare plants, Jill has arranged for us to meet with Alexandro de Avila, an ethnological botanist whose life work is the cultural interpretation of Oaxaca’s native plants and their display in the new botanical garden that has been taking shape since 1998 within the walled compound of the Convent of Santo Domingo a short walk from our hotel.

We were thus soon moving though the wet streets, hand-paved with a handsome native stone of a pale grey-green and soft pinkish hue, to the plaza where the recently restored façade of the large colonial baroque, ornately-decorated church of the Convent of Santo Domingo, is splendidly illuminated.

At the nearby Casa de la Abuela we have our first meal of Oaxaca’s justly-famed cuisine, which consists of a sampling of regional specialties: Plantains with a dense savory sauce; dark creamy beans topped with crumbs from a slab of a local white cheese that had been lightly grilled, exquisite chile relleno with a smooth chipotle flavor, and strips of flank steak. . . . . Back in our room at the Casa Conzatti, I leave the French door open to the little outside garden, and, lulled by the falling rain, I fall peacefully asleep.

Friday, June 27

Today we are joined by Pedro Torres Hernandez, the man we have engaged as our tour guide to various locations in the three valleys that form the regional landscape around the city. Trained as a doctor, Pedro can achieve a better income by using his considerable knowledge of local archaeology, history, art history, and linguistics – intellectual feats that have equipped him to organize tours for discriminating tourists like us. After an hour of pouring over maps he has brought, gauging what can be accomplished in a day in various directions, we have a provisional itinerary and agree to meet tomorrow at 9:00 AM. For the rest of today we simply walking around the historic center of the city, first visiting Santo Domingo where there is a fine museum containing many Zapotec and Mixtec artifacts found in Monte Alban, Mitla, and other pre-Spanish Conquest sites where there are excavated tombs. The church itself is the third one dating from 1572 that the Dominican friars built in the Oaxaca area. Their first church, named for San Pablo (Saint Paul), was destroyed in an earthquake, and the second, the convent of San Santiago in Cuillapan de Guerro, which was under construction between 1555 and 1572, was left unfinished because of hostility between the Dominican order and the Cortex family. The 1572 church we see today has been carefully restored, and its interior a richly gilded and bearing an elaborately ornamented polychrome narrative of Dominican glory. The church’s impressive size and capable is a testament to the triumph of colonial Catholicism and the skill of the native workforce.

We do not linger long in the resplendent basilica because we want to concentrate today on the pre-Conquest archaeological artifacts that this part of Meso-America has yielded to archaeologists.

Jack passes around the rented audio-guide, and Jill capably translates the informative wall texts as we stare, fascinated, at the burial urns and other grave goods that have been unearthed from a few of the thousands of sites that have been excavated by archaeologists.

Some spectacular finds have gone to the National Museum in Mexico City, which constitutes in my opinion the world’s greatest primer in Pre-Columbian art history. Unfortunately, INAH, the governmental organization that oversees the protection of Mexico’s cultural patrimony, now encourages the curatorial work and exhibits in regional museums as a matter of local cultural pride, economic tourism, and, it is to be hoped, as a means of stemming the disappearance of many fine anthropological objects into the international art market.

The beautiful craftsmanship of the gold and silver Mixtec jewelry and the strange iconography of the ferocious Zapotec pantheon holds us fascinated until two PM when we decide that is time to return to the hotel for lunch and a nap.

Refreshed, we head back to the convent at 4:00 o’clock when we are scheduled for an appointment with Alejandro de Avila, the visionary, who, along with Francisco Taleverro and some other Oaxacan artists, prevailed in their struggle to prevent the government from turning the grounds of the convent, which had been transferred from military use in 1993, into a luxury hotel for tourists, complete with a parking lot. The alternative plan – to create a cultural institute and an ethnobotanical garden within the walled compound where the military had a shooting range and other activities that had abused the grounds and compacted the soil, leaving a complete for Alejandro and his artist collaborators once the military paraphernalia was removed.

To prepare the site it was first necessary to loosen and amend the soil with both animal and green manure (fast-growing plants that get turned under to add nitrogen to the soil.

Saturday, June 28

Pedro, our excellent tour guide, is in our hotel lobby at 9:00 AM, and Jill and Jack arrive by 9:30, ready for the excursion we have planned into the valley that runs to the northeast, and we climb into the small van with Pedro and our driver Pasqual. On the outskirts of town, we pause briefly to observe the site of an old quarry called Ixotel, meaning the place of holes. The area is now a public park, and, looking out the car window, I am reminded of the Parc Buttes-Chaumont in Paris where Baron Haussmann converted another abandoned quarry into a public amenity of great charm.

At Cuilapan, before we visit the massive ruins of the Dominican monastery, we stop and look at a piece of the old wall. The church, which looms before us a few feet further down the road, has the grandeur of great abandoned architectural objects, and I am reminded of the temple at Segesta in Sicily and the temples at Paestum where all the forces of a peaceful and beautiful ancient agricultural landscape are gathered into a human artifact of immense dignity that in turns broadcasts power, authority, intuition, and meaning into the humble world of villages and fields.

This is the second convent built by the Dominicans in this area. The first, which was dedicated to San Pablo in 1531, was destroyed in an earthquake. This one, built in honor of San Santiago, was in construction between 1555 and 1572 when, because of a dispute between the Dominicans and the Cortez family (the Oaxacan land had been granted to a Cortez conquistador as a reward from the crown), it was abandoned and work begun on the convent of San Domingo in Oaxaca City where the botanical garden is now taking shape. The doorway to the wonderful nave bears the escutcheon of the Dominicans, which is flanked by bas-reliefs of their emblematic black -and-white “dogs of God.” Elsewhere, scallop shells symbolize Saint James (San Santiago), the patron saint of the Cuilapan convent. Pedro points out the syncretic nature of religion as the friars induced the native inhabitants to convert of Catholicism by accepting certain symbolical structures inherent in native religion without enforcing the practices they found idolatrous, including the abhorrent one of human sacrifice, Thus, they could foster acceptance of Christian dogma, allowing it to be fused with native spirituality. According to Pedro, the thirteen arches separating the nave from the side aisles of what was once a large outdoor chapel the unfinished nave is symbolic of the thirteen levels of heaven in Zapotec and Mixtec theology, while the nine door opening along the lateral sides of the building stand for the nine levels of the Underworld, a Dantean concept pre-dated by Meso-American belief system.

There are only faint traces in a few places of the frescoes that once covered wall surfaces, and Pedro makes the interesting point that glyph writing being already a familiar form of architectural narrative, along with didactic frescoes, which the friars found an easily acceptable medium of instruction. Our tour of the corridor and various courtyards of the convent gave us an opportunity to see, as we did yesterday at Santo Domingo, the soft sheen of the plaster in which successive layers of the museum-like picture of the nopal cactus had been added.

The chapel of the convent is still in use for religious services and is also the place where Donaji, the decapitated Zapotec princess, is buried, a reminder that the convent stands in the intermediary zone between the former Mixtec and Zapotec settlements and that although the Mixtecs were successfully assimilating the Zapotecs through conquest and intermarriage, hostility was still active at the time of the Conquest. I am reminded of the account of Cortes’s conquest in which it is clear that the conquistadores could not have attained victory in spite of their superior technology without enlisting the support of the enemies of Montezuma.

It is after noon when we leave the convent and head for the village of Zaachila where there is a small archaeological site with two excavated tombs in which museum-quality treasures were found, including an exquisite polychrome bowl with a turquoise-colored hummingbird perched on the rim in the Anthropologia. Pedro shows us a photograph of this and other objects of consummate craftsmanship taken from the tombs as we have our picnic lunch, after which we climb up the hill to sit on some benches set within the knobbly landscape of excavated ruins in what was, in fact, the last remaining Zapotec capital before the Conquest. Monte Alban having dwindled in importance, we stop and buy cold sodas and soon find ourselves inhaling the sweet pungent aroma and enjoying our lunch in what is called a Molina, after the curved stone grinder for turning grain into molé. These are brought in by people who assemble the ingredients – raisins, chocolate, sesame seeds, cloves, chives, chilies, and other spices, herbs, and dried produce according to one’s personal taste and family recipe. They are all ground to make the dense, sticky paste that, in several flavors and colors, is the basis for various Oaxacan dishes.

Pedro is our picnic-ground professor, explaining many things that demonstrate the continuity between past and present. Molé, for instance, was a Zapotec food, and many of the flavors that constitute Oaxacan dishes. After lunch, we purchase tickets and descent into one of the tombs, a three-chamber affair with stone carvings in the style of Mitla around the entrance to one of the burial rooms.

Back in Pedro’s van, we are ready to head back to Oaxaca and our last stop of the day: the big market where every Saturday people come from the city and its surrounding villages to buy and sell an incredible array of produce, meat, craft wares and industrial products. Here we say goodbye to Pedro and the driver, for no one needs instruction, only sensory receptivity and a degree of sales resistance to experience the earthy splendor of a Mexican Indian Market to feel its immemorial connection to the land and a traditional way of life that was once connected to all people, whereas now this way of life strikes the casual outsider as exotic, foreign, remote, and “colorful.”

We plunge into the warm odorous mass of little stalls, long tables, and women sitting on the ground beside pyramids of heaped fruits, great bundles of basil and other herbs and large bunches of flowers. A foreigner would say that everyone is wearing a costume, but, of course, the traditional dress for married women of a head-tied rebozo (an oversize scarf) and skirts of vivid colors along with embroidered aprons register as costumes for tourists in the sense of their being the dress of the indigenous people surrounding them. Many of these items are for sale together with cheap shoes, plastic toys, transistor radios, washing machines, CDs, a vast cornucopia of agricultural products, craft wares, and industrial goods.

We return to the ethnobotanical garden at 4:00, where we join Jodie Nandall, the director of education, for her tour, which for us provides an excellent two-and-a-half hour reprise of what we have learned from Alejandro the day before. As result of our appreciation, she accepts my invitation join us afterwards for dinner, and we soon find ourselves sitting in one of Oaxaca’s best restaurants. Drinking margueritas and mescal, which I find fiery although it is touted by Jodie to be a particularly excellent one. Of both botanical and economic interest is the fact that this liquor, made from the agave plant, is one of Oaxaca’s major industries, and there are many “moonshine” versions from local stills that are to be avoided.

We order the soup with wild mushrooms, fresh greens, and an especially savory Sopa Azteca, which we happily enjoy while Jodie’s story. A New York City native, she was a labor organizer in the 1960s and went to Vermont with her husband to live on a farm. Her interest in agriculture dates from girlhood when she enrolled in the children’s program at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. After becoming divorced from her husband she came to Mexico to learn Spanish because of her sympathy with some of the people she worked for in the labor movement, and after her three-month crash-course decided to settle in Oaxaca, where she felt she had found her true spiritual home.

Her story involves a return to the United States, re-marriage to her former husband, another separation (she says they are still close friends) and then her taking up residency in Oaxaca where she now owns her own home and, after enlisting at the new ethnobotanical garden as a volunteer, she was asked to take on her current paid position as education director. With her salt-and-pepper long single braid, large glasses, animated eyes, intelligent face, and slender body, she has taken life on its, and her, own terms.

After red snapper and sea bass delicately prepared, we are too full for dessert, and saying goodbye to our new friend, we stroll back to the hotel on Calle Alacala on the beautiful stone-laid street that has now been closed off to traffic.

Sunday, June 29

Because of family responsibilities Pedro cannot join us today, but we have been assured that his capable friend Leonardo Herrero-moto can give us reliable information and answers to our questions that will take us beyond what we can glean from our ample supply of xeroxed guidebook and scholarly monograph pages. By nine-thirty we are ready to set forth in Pedro’s van for our trip into the valley that runs to the east of the city. It is a beautiful sunny day, and the fields and hills, refreshed by the rain, are green at this time of year.

Our first stop is the Dominican Church of San Geronimo de Cacochahuaya. Instead of the spacious open-air chapel at Cuilapan, which was used as a place where the friars assembled the “Indians” for instruction in the Christian faith, here there is an ample courtyard and atrium plaza, with domed structures at the corners, which, according to Leonardo, are intended to protect the holy statues of the church before they are paraded on feast days. This courtyard is agreeably shaded by a huge tree, and instead of moving into the baroque dimness of the Church, we linger beneath it as Leonardo tries to describe the character of the feast days and the syncretic nature of religion in Mexico that persists unto this day. The deeply communal character of native religion and its connection to the earth, with blood sacrifice, prayer, propitiation, and attention to the symbolic signs emanating from a dualistic spiritual world that governs the affairs of man and nature in a violent land is a system of belief that had to be absorbed and colors Hispanic Catholicism to this day. This perhaps explains the fervent piety that is so common here and makes the magic realism of some contemporary writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marques seem entirely natural.

Somehow religion, not secular science is what is trusted most in a broad cultural sense, although the inexorable demands of globalization and economic betterment have set Mexico’s course, like that of the rest of the world, on the latter track. These thoughts run through my mind as I listen to Leonardo, who is proudly a Mixtec, discuss the great festival of the Day of the Dead, a feast day more important to him than Christmas. “It is about reuniting with family, those who are alive and those who have passed on,” he explains.

Inside the church we inhale the odor of sanctity – the lingering smell of candle wax and incense in our nostrils, looking at the frescoed walls and rich gilded carving. As in every church we visit here in Mexico, alter flowers are anything but modest arrangements. Always there are banks of gladioli and great bouquets that are brought as offerings to the Redeemer, Our Lady, and the helpful saints, and this vegetal bounty combines with the rich décor, which, even if not of the highest artistic merit, is one of great splendor.

The building and decoration of these impressive Hispanic churches are evidence of the artistic and artisan capital upon which the baroque church designers drew. The syncretic aspect of Mexican culture is symbolized in the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose iconic portrait one sees everywhere, including here in the Church on la Cochahuaya. Jill explains her importance. The story is familiar. Juan Diego, a poor peasant, in the seventeenth century when Spain was implanting its yoke on Mexico, received the apparition of the dark-skinned Madonna in a field. Her miraculous appearance as the Virgin Mary and her gentle words – “Don’t you know that I am your mother?” somehow made reverence of the Christian Madonna syncretic with worship of the corn goddess with her sun-and-moon symbols and radiant cloak of gold and blue. This fusion of belief systems worshiping the Earth Mother of old makes Mexican Catholicism something quite different from Spanish Catholicism. The Conquest is, of course, the great cataclysm dividing Mexican history into two dramatically opposed epochs that somehow had to be reconciled. But Mexican history was violent and bloody before the arrival of the Spaniards, and the extent to which human sacrifice was practiced made the suffering a sacrifice of Christ on the Cross easily understandable: His death as a means of redemption rather than the sacrifice of life to ensure life – fertility of crops, animals, and humans – is however different. That skeletal images of Death, which sometimes bear an almost comic aspect, makes us uneasy.

Native Latin Americans, however, not only proclaimed their victories with skull racks of their enemies; they also buried their dead beneath the floors of their homes and thus lived in an intimate relationship to their ancestors. Death therefore is not, as it is for most Westerners today, something to be ignored and kept invisible, even largely ignored.

I have never yet witnessed a Hispanic Day of the Dead celebration, but I can see that for Leonardo it is a sweet and loving holiday, an affirmation of community past and present. “You see,” he says, “We are not exactly Catholic; the Day of the Dead is about making connections.”

Following this lesson on diverse ways of mourning, we climb up to the choir loft of the old church where there is a mid-eighteenth-century organ with a big hand-operated bellows beside it. I take notice of the fact that it is delicately painted in the same style as the frescoes that cover the walls of the Church. I find out that both the frescoes and the organ have been recently restored, and its stops are marked with a flourishing hand and have a small lever on the side labeled “Pajaritos” to furnish, I suppose, a birdlike trill.

After examining this marvelous instrument while respecting the “Non tocar” (Do-not-touch) sign on the top of the keyboard, we descend from the choir loft and continue our journey to Tiacolula where we are soon plunged into the heady experience of the Sunday market in an outdoors arcade. I purchase a carved gourd that has been cut to form a shallow bowl and a special bottle for holding fluids such as mescal (juice distilled from the sap of an agave plant, which is used to make a variety of alcoholic drinks). Both are ornamented with hand-carvings of animal and floral motifs and cost twenty pesos each.

Making our way through the market, we find our way through an intricate network of stands amid the greatest profusion of sights and smells imaginable. This market packs an even greater sensory wallop than the Saturday market in Oaxaca, and that one surely dazed my senses. The sights of Mexico are already in Technicolor, but an Indian market is like a great work of folk art in Technicolor-to-the-power-of-ten. We roam , amazed for an hour, among the sights that we see, such as live chickens that are golden-hued because they have been raised on a diet of marigold flowers, great cylindrical mounds of several varieties of green and red dried peppers in many sizes and flavors; dried corn and chalky white limestone to add to the soaking water in order to make the hard husks separate from the corn kernels that will be placed in metates in order to be pounded into piles of granulated grain for the making of masa (the dough used to create tortillas and tamales).

What else can we find by strolling around? There are hammocks with embroidered aprons, woodworking craftsmen’s furniture, fine ceramic wares. Olfactory, audible, and visual senses alert, we smell savory odors and hear appealing invitation to eat the cooked food that we pass, but we are careful tourists and therefore repair to the plaza in front of the church to eat the picnic lunch that Angelica at our hotel had packed for us before we left this morning. When we were finished, we took one more tour around the maze-like market, this time passing tables with heaped fresh-from-the-oven breads, sacks of dried grasshoppers, candies made of nopales, (edible pads of the fleshy nopal cactus used as a staple in Mexican cuisine), washing machines, plastic satchels, shoes, rebozos (beautiful hand-made shawls).

Finally, we pull ourselves away from this intensity of shopping experience and head back to Oaxaca. By seven o’clock, I am rested, showered, and ready to greet my daughter Lisa whom I invited to join me on this trip. Lynn keeps me company while I wait in the courtyard of the hotel for her arrival before eight o’clock. We are all weary and overstimulated by the day to venture out into the Oaxaca evening, and therefore we have a simple hotel meal while Lisa, a great traveler on her own, gets caught up on our adventures and plans for the days ahead.

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