Towns of the Valley of Oaxaca

[bixaorellana]

This will hardly be a complete report, but it's a handy way to kick off covering some of the smaller towns around the capital city. Quite a few places have already been covered, and you can find those reports either by browsing around the Mexico board or by doing a Search. The Oaxaca Valley is roughly in the center of the state of Oaxaca, as shown on the map in the link. The area encompasses a remarkable variety of people, languages, dialects, regional dress, and crafts. Here is a map which shows some of the places already featured on AnyPort (the Etlas, Arrazola, Atzompa, Cuilapam, Zaachila, San Bartolo, Tule, Ocotlán, San Juan Chapultepec, Xoxcotlán, Tlacolula, San Martín Tilcajete) and also shows the three towns I visited this past Sunday. It must be said that Sunday turned out not to be the best day to visit, as most of the inhabitants of the towns seemed to have decamped off to the big weekly market in Tlacolula or into their homes for a quiet day.

Our first stop was San Juan Guelavía, where we were met by the sound of church bells upon exiting our colectivo taxi ~



In common with all the towns we saw that day, this churchyard was extremely large ~



By the time we'd taken a few pictures, Mass was letting out, so we went in to get some pictures ~

[bixaorellana]

Exiting the church ~









I liked this mural we passed on the way to the market ~



This is very much in the "what is wrong with this picture" category. San Juan Guelavía is known for the sturdy, attractive baskets it produces.
So what is being sold in the big area next to the market? It's piles and piles of cheap metal and plastic kitchen items ~



We went inside the market to use the bathroom there. Everything was just peachy!





We didn't get ice cream, but this stand had a particularly enticing selection ~

[bixaorellana]

We had planned to go on to San Marcos Tlapazola from Guelavia, but no one would take us straight there, saying the way was impossible, it was in such bad condition. So we decided to go to Magdalena Teitipac, partly because we could get there & also in the hope of seeing a basket maker along the way. Alas, no baskets, but an amusingly warm greeting to Magdalena Teitipac.

We were deposited on the street in a nearly empty town, but watched with interest as two largish groups of women approached from a couple of blocks away. We were consumed with frustration, as we were dying to take pictures. People in this region hate being photographed. We only got away with it in the last town because we pretended to be interested in the church, market, etc. But here it was mostly the ones that got away -- two kids riding in the back of a fancy pickup who ducked when they spied our cameras, for instance. And all of the traditionally dressed women would whip up of their rebozos to hide their faces.

At any rate, the women, all of them fairly young, advanced towards us and after quick hellos all around, immediately offered us mezcal to drink. They were insistent, but we weren't willing to pour fire water down our throats in the heat and on empty stomachs. The women were quite jocular and soon moved off together. We asked a nearby man what the ladies were celebrating and he said, "Oh, somebody just died."

As you see, it was a handsome church. It was hard to get a decent picture since the church was inside a locked wall. This did not deter Therese ~



These spaces near the church wall's gates were meant for saints ~



When Therese approached the little brick enclosure in order to climb off the wall, the pigeon alarmed her by suddenly fluttering out.
A good person would not have laughed ~



We wandered around a little bit ~



Whatever had gone on at the market was well over with by this time ~



Peering into a homestead ~





Sunday in Magdalena Teitipac ~

[fumobici]

Don't mind me, I'm just drinking this all in. So much amazing.

[kerouac2]

Didn't you use to have a car, Bixa? It must be quite frustrating to have to rely on public and semi-public transporation to get to all of these amazing places.

Maybe it's for the best, though. If you went everywhere interesting, we would be absolutely overwhelmed by all of the reports and fantastic photos.

It's always interesting when there is the challenge of places where people don't want to be photographed.

[bixaorellana]

I await your presence here, Fumobici!

Well, the best-laid plans, etc. We had studied the map, intending to make a loop, eventually winding up on the way back home. But once again we were being told "you can't get there from here" about San Marcos. So off we went to the big hub market town of Tlacolula, to which we'd have to return again to get home. Tlacolula is an infinite photo-op, as you'll see from the first two pictures below. But again we ground our teeth in frustration over photos that were not to be. As we waited for a colectivo taxi to San Marcos we were surrounded by the ladies from there, all decked out in their puffed sleeved blouses and brightly colored satin pleated skirts topped with pinafores and with their braids wound with satin ribbon all caught up atop their heads in their rebozos. They kept their eyes on us, ready to duck and cover at the hint of a camera. It was fun driving with the residents out to their town, and the vistas of corrugated green hills were beautiful.

Tlacolula -- part of the big Sunday market ~





San Marcos Tlapazola's beautiful church surrounded by a huge churchyard and a fancy fence ~





Someone loves the sight of those lush hills as much as I, as they're immortalized on the side of this business ~





More art on this long wall: "The fire's spirit is red / like the flames that embrace / the clay to give strength / to each piece"



Note the birds. San Marcos is also known as the place of quail ~

[bixaorellana]

Hi Kerouac. I didn't see your post until after I posted. Yes, I did have a car and did used to go all kinds of places out of the city. The friend who went with me on Sunday is also interested in making the effort for more jaunts out of town. We'll also try to find days when the towns are livelier. I guess this is kind of lame in terms of an exciting travelogue, but I hope I'm imparting some of the pleasure we took in being out in the timeless rural places.

More art celebrating the local pottery and also respect for women ~

Women and men are equally valuable. / Being a man means caring for your daughters and sons. /
Real men don't hit women; they are affectionate, responsible, and care for their families.











This collective has gained a certain amount of fame. It has the only kiln in town. I went into their small showroom and rather blanched at the prices, since I know what the usual rates are on this pottery. I'm embarrassed at my reaction, as even at double or triple what's usually charged for a commensurate piece, the prices definitely would not break the bank.
Also, they did have a few really sleekly elegant pieces. The ladies running the place were super friendly and welcoming, too ~



The kiln was only completed near the end of July of this past year ~



This is a sight we saw all over town -- wood for firing pottery piled high on rooftops.
Pottery is fired here by piling the pieces on a fire on the ground and building another fire on top of the raw pieces ~



This is the interior of the store you can see to the right of Cafe Nidaihñ in the 5th photo in this post. Finally you get to see the baskets of San Juan Guelavía!







~ And that is that! ~

[bjd]

These are great, Bixa. I can understand your desire to visit these places, and take pictures. Too bad it wasn't a bit more lively.

It's interesting to see all these murals and signs about women's basic rights. A shame that it actually has to be expressed, especially in a country where, from your photos, we see that women do so much of the work. Is there some kind of state/political backing for these murals, or are they done by local initiative?

[bixaorellana]

Thanks, Bjd. Yes. my friend & I agreed it would be good to go back & we inquired about market days in the various towns, when they'd be more populated and lively.

I had the same response to the murals you did. I've seen anti domestic violence wall paintings here and there before, but never so much art devoted to the subject in one place. In the last wall painting shown above, you can see a list of sponsors on the right-hand side. The bottom two are from the municipality of Tlacolula, the umbrella municipality to which these towns belong. The third one from the bottom is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Indigenous_Peoples. I have seen that Diversidades symbol before, but don't know what it is. I guess the top one is the artist. I asked someone who did the wall paintings around town and the answer was, "People come and they like to do them."

Many of these communities were fairly isolated for centuries, so have maintained their customs and languages. Indeed, if you visit the market in Tlacolula, you may find yourself talking to a woman whose Spanish is not nearly as good as yours. This may interest you: www.quora.com/What-is-the-uses-and-customs-legal-framework-in-Mexico

[kerouac2]

Feb 18, 2019 18:46:40 GMT bixaorellana said:

if you visit the market in Tlacolula, you may find yourself talking to a woman whose Spanish is not nearly as good as yours

That will always remind me of my visit to Sa Pa in northern Vietnam, where the Vietnamese tourists from Hanoi had to bargain in English with the local population which did not speak Vietnamese.

[bixaorellana]

Feb 18, 2019 20:28:16 GMT kerouac2 said:

That will always remind me of my visit to Sa Pa in northern Vietnam, where the Vietnamese tourists from Hanoi had to bargain in English with the local population which did not speak Vietnamese.

That's interesting, Kerouac. Did the local people speak French, too, or only English as a second language?

Feb 18, 2019 20:38:21 GMT huckle said:

The little or no Spanish situation was felt heavily at the West side of Chicago high school where I taught for many years. The argument: Since many of our Mexican enrollees had little or no Spanish was it worth while to teach them Spanish then English as a second language? Or would it be better to move directly into English? Lots of politics involved here.

Huckle, I have a friend here who was sent as a neophyte teacher to an isolated village where only one family spoke Spanish. She taught grade school and had to start by teaching her students Spanish, since that was the language of all her teaching materials.
I should have realized that many of the Mexicans who went to Chicago might have come from backgrounds where the main language was an indigenous one. I know that many people from Michoacán and from Oaxaca have settled in Chicago. Both of those states have strong indigenous populations.
The only time I ever ran into any kind of similar situation was in Florida. We crossed Florida in a boat & at one point were in the heavily agricultural area around Lake Okeechobee. At that time (early '90s) there was a good deal of concern that the migrant workers were not always treated well or indeed, that some were in virtual slavery. Apparently many of them were from Guatemala and other parts of Central America. Social workers were sent in -- Spanish speaking social workers, who could not communicate with the indigenous language speaking migrants.
What were the politics involved in resolving the language dilemma?

[kerouac2]

Feb 19, 2019 5:36:48 GMT bixaorellana said:

That's interesting, Kerouac. Did the local people speak French, too, or only English as a second language?

Many spoke French, Chinese, German... Since I was there more than 10 years ago, they probably speak Vietnamese now. Vietnamese tourists were just beginning to visit the remote areas of their country back then, but I'm sure they are swarming everywhere now.

[bixaorellana]

Feb 19, 2019 6:30:13 GMT huckle said:

Politics and power go together and this situation is fed by the big money at stake in any large school system that draws heavily on federal government funds. The situation is no different than it has been for decades.

*sigh* When my son (b.1970) was in primary school, it seems the educational system was littered with new theories and with recent graduates in various disciplines eager to justify their existence. This was the era of "open classrooms", although my son's school was lucky to have some seasoned teachers who just rolled their eyes and taught around the crap. Although it was good that kids were being tested for hearing problems, speech impediments, etc., if often seemed that the new young experts were overly eager to identify problems and thus enroll children into their programs.

Feb 19, 2019 6:30:13 GMT huckle said:

Our Spanish speaking social workers, psychologists, counselors were highly educated Argentines, Chileans, Peruvians and Costa Ricans. As you know, Spanish is really big language with variants country wise and classwise often unintelligible to other Spanish speakers just as I find it impossible to understand many Australians, South Africans and Mississippians among others.

Coincidentally, this morning a friend posted a video on fb wherein residents of Mexico from other Spanish-speaking countries were challenged to give the meaning of certain words. All of the words were fairly common ones which had entered Mexican Spanish via Nahuatl. Several of the participants failed miserably. I was amused, as some of the terms they missed are so standard to me that I don't know the standard Spanish words for them.

Feb 19, 2019 6:33:15 GMT kerouac2 said:

Many spoke French, Chinese, German... Since I was there more than 10 years ago, they probably speak Vietnamese now. Vietnamese tourists were just beginning to visit the remote areas of their country back then, but I'm sure they are swarming everywhere now.

Good point, Kerouac, which probably well describes many parts of the world now.

[Sylvia]

A great way to learn about life in the villages is to go on one of En Via's responsible tourism tours. You get to meet and - with the help of a translator - talk to local women entrepreneurs about their businesses and local life. All proceeds go to their programme of empowering the local women.
For example, En Via works in Guelavía with women who make the traditional baskets and with women from the red pottery collective in San Marcos Tlapazola, as well as in many of the other villages.
More info at www.envia.org.

[bixaorellana]

Hi Sylvia and thank you for spotlighting Fundación En Vía, a very worthy non-profit organization.

[lagatta]

Sadly the misunderstanding about the continuing strength of Indigenous languages may have played the part in the deaths of two Guatemalan children from different Mayan communities at the US border not long ago. And many don't know that Mayan is a language family (like Romance or Germanic) and not a single language.

Nowadays most of the migrant workers here from "down south" come from Central America, no longer from Mexico. Which is good in terms of Mexico as it would testify to a higher standard of living there, but it creates the same problem. Here it would mean learning and understand languages that are far more remote linguistically - There are quite a few trade unionists, health and social services professionals etc who have learnt at least a modicum of Spanish, but learning central American indigenous languages?

I loved this report and hope there will be more (take your time!) www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/22/roma-star-yalitza-aparicio-hometown-mexico-success-story-oscars Yalitza Aparicio in her hometown.
Is Mixtec one of the most-spoken languages in Oaxaca State?

[bixaorellana]

Thanks, LaGatta!

Yes, Mixteco is one of the major languages in this state, although there is more than one version of it due to history & geography: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixtec_language

Thanks for the article. I think you'll enjoy this one, too: www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-yalitza-aparicio-roma-oscars-20190128-story.html

[cheerypeabrain]

Ooh those cooking pots are amazing....drooling over the colours in this thread dear Bixa 😁

[bixaorellana]

Thank you, dear Cheery!

I carried four of those heavy pots back on the bus -- the crowded bus where I had to stand part of the time. It was worth it! Then, less than a week later, a neighbor had a yard sale less than a block from my house. She had brand new San Marcos pots, so I would up getting another one, plus a saucer thing to use as a lid. *happy!*

[kerouac2]

Are you cooking for the local militia?

[bixaorellana]

Hee hee.

You jest, but there are certain foods that require long slow cooking. If those foods also lend themselves to being frozen, I'm all for making them in quantity.

All of the pots I got that day weren't huge, although I did get one that can handle a kilo of dried beans. Does the food taste better cooked in an unglazed clay pot? I cooked a kilo of garbanzos seasoned only with salt & bay leaf. Let me tell you that they were absolutely the best garbanzos I ever ate, delicious even without further enhancements.

I also made a test batch of plain steamed basmati in one of the smaller pots and it was divine.

Anyway, I just like cookware.

[bixaorellana]

Lucky me to have landlords who are also my friends. Their daughter is a talented violinist and, as a graduating music student, took part in this year's Oaxaca Strings International Music Festival. Her parents kindly invited me to accompany them out of town for the final concert, that of the masters.

This event was held in the main church of the rug weaving village of Teotitlán del Valle.
We arrived in the mellow light of late afternoon with enough time to take a little look around before the concert.

The first stop was the community center. We only peeked into the store part, but this is a large architectural marvel that merits a return visit.

Before entering I had to wait for these two Beauty Queens and their entourage to exit.
There was much picture-taking, so I took one too, but then had to fend off eager offers to have my picture taken with them ~







For those of you not already familiar with the rugs of Teotitlán, please see the first section in the second link in Reply #21 ~



Many of the rugs from this village that are for sale in the city are the traditional designs or some tried & true variations.
That is why I was so struck by the crisp modernity of this small rug, but also by its excellent workmanship.
It was created by Soledad Hernández ~

[lugg]

Looking forward to it Bixa

[bixaorellana]

Thanks, Lugg! Finally managed to host the pictures by using the poky old uploader on Flickr.

Next to the community center is a row of open-front spaces which revolve through different weavers ~





There is a flight of stone stairs leading up to the church, but we took the long, less steep way around ~



The church yard is vast & affords great views of the town and surrounding area ~





The views were lost on this class of children, who were fighting the setting sun in their eyes ~

[kerouac2]

Ah, that looks like the vacation that so many of us are not taking.

[bixaorellana]

Evening is falling & the time for the concert is approaching, but there is still time for a few more pictures ~



The church has an extensive inner courtyard system, in part of which the musicians are gathered ~





Let's go inside ~



There is a great deal of colonial era ornamentation ~









No idea what those panels on the pulpit are supposed to be. The suspended Holy Ghost is a nice touch, though ~

[bixaorellana]

First some transporting music, then time for intermission. I wander back outside ~





The Spaniards built the church atop a Zapotec temple they destroyed, re-using some of its stones.
We inspected the ones on the front and others in the courtyard & decided the renovation work exposing
the Zapotec work was less than successful from an aesthetic angle ~







Back inside for the last half of this lovely concert. The lighting and where I was seated meant no good pictures ~

The concert itself was exquisite -- really outstanding. If you have access to facebook, the entire concert is here: www.facebook.com/sa.oaxacafestivalinternacionaldecuerdas, in two parts. If and when it gets posted on youtube, I will replace the facebook link.

[mich64]

Wonderful Bixa, how lovely that your neighbours invited you to come along. A very interesting thread, I went back to the beginning.

[lugg]

Just wonderful Bixa ; what a treat . Just a quick reply before I come back to look at the detail. I think the thing that strikes me the most is how much I have missed seeing the "colour" and vibrancy of Mexico during these last months of Covid times .

[bixaorellana]

Thanks so much, Mich! Really, I've only touched on the towns in this thread, many of which are worth full threads of their own.

Very kind, Lugg -- thank you! It's funny you say that about the missing color. Ordinarily, this would be time of winding up the Guelaguetza. Yesterday, as I walked down the street with my dogs, it struck me how all of that color and excitement is missing.