Unfolding Stories

Cabin fever

We have been confined to an area about 15 minutes walk from the house since Friday. Barricades went up all over town early on Friday morning and traffic came to a standstill. Trips were cancelled and the school was shut. The hot weather broke at about 5pm on Friday with torrential rain and wild gusts of wind, just as further violence was breaking out at one of the city centre barricades. Three men were shot dead, including an American journalist from a independent internet organisation. As a result of the rising violence the Mexican president finally decided he had to intervene and sent in riot troops who arrived in the city on Saturday.

They have been clearing the city ever since, the town square is apparently now clear but the protestors, not surprisingly, have moved to other parts of the city including the university campus near to where I live. As a result shops, cafes, cinemas, bars are all shut, public transport is not working and no-one is going far from their doors.On Saturday at least some things were still functioning and after an exciting morning at the local supermarket we managed a short trip to a nearby hotel to use their pool (you buy lunch there in return for a free swim). It turned out to be the only cool, cloudy day I´ve experienced since being here but at least it was a break from the house.Today I have been to the supermarket (twice!), the launderette, and the internet cafe. I am starting to feel like a desperate housewife. Indeed the second trip to the supermarket was to buy the ingredients for palomas, a tequila based drink with grapefruits, lime and ice. Just in case we have to spend yet another long evening at home....Evenings there is nothing much to do except play cards and consume sweet-chili peanuts. At least on Saturday night we managed to go round the block to a neighbor’s house for a game of dominoes - it seems to be a woman’s game here, at least in the home, perhaps the men are off in bars somewhere playing a slightly seedier version.
Sunday was the most tense day and everyone stayed at home - an enforced day with the family. Although my house mother was happy to have everyone at home for Sunday dinner we were all going stir crazy not being able to get out of the house. Helicopters were circling overhead the whole day and there was a constant boom of firecrackers. Every so often someone would say wisely ´that’s a smoke bomb´ but I couldn’t tell any way of differentiating the sounds.
The absence of news was driving me crazy too, I hadn’t realised how much I’d got used to being able to check the news all the time on the radio, TV, internet, broadband never mind papers. There are no Sunday papers here and nothing in the way of news unless you tune into the protestor-run local radio station (I can’t make anything out beyond a lot of shouting). People phone each other throughout the day though and there is a rapid exchange of ´news´ from different parts of the city but it’s impossible to sort out fact from fiction, not to mention the language barrier. There is a rumour of a news programme at the back of 11 so we flick through gruesome Mexican TV and a rerun of Titanic trying to find the news, it finally comes on just before midnight. There are pictures from around the city of the police clearing the streets, but not much in the way of analysis, or any help figuring out what might happen next.
Although most everyone spent the day indoors yesterday the mood seemed to have shifted this morning - I’m not sure that the situation had changed, more that we couldn’t stand another day inside. As we were almost out of bread and purified water this morning I jumped at the chance to walk the 5 minutes to the supermarket and get things for breakfast. It was a beautiful warm sunny morning, people were parading on the walkway just like normal, it looked like they were going to work, or shop, hold each other’s hands, or just enjoy the sun. (Later in the day I wondered how many of us were just walking up and down the pedestrianised walkway to Chedraui - the supermarket - and back, just to get out of the house). It felt so good even after a day cooped up to be in the fresh air, to talk to people, to see what was happening, to shop, to work, to get breakfast. It made me wonder how people cope during a real war, but also how the will to live and enjoy life must get stronger at a time when other liberties are restricted.

Late October 2006

The university of Monte Alban

Monte Alban was a city of some 10,000 people about 300 AD. It was occupied from 500 BC to 500 AD when it collapsed suddenly, no one quite knows why but perhaps because of water shortages. It sits high above today’s city of Oaxaca - at that time Oaxaca was a lake, and they carried water up the mountain to the city (pity the poor folks who had that job). The ruins that we can visit today are the ceremonial part of the city: 20 pyramids, one for each of the gods, a high altar, squares for festivals and dancing, tombs to celebrate the dead, and a ball court (a kind of handball rather than football). The people lived below in stone houses for the richest, mud huts for the middle-classes and bamboo shacks for the poorest. The remains of the housing and much of the ceremonial ruins have not been uncovered yet, and it may be a while before they are. The state has run out of money for archaeology, and meantime a shanty town is growing on the hill leading up to the pyramids - it’s illegal to build there but it wouldn’t be the first law not to be enforced round here.

Monte Alban is normally busy on a Sunday as it’s a free entry day, and you’d expect scores of culture-hungry tourists scouring the remains. The day I visit it is quiet - the current troubles have driven most of the tourists away. It makes the experience more pleasant in some ways, but I feel sad for the tour guides hoping for work (and trying to feed their families) and the melancholy artisans trying to sell their wares.I wasn’t sure whether to take a guide. At first I think it is expensive to pay a guide five pounds for an hour and a half of their time. Well it is compared to other things here, but then I stop and think about how much this man knows, how much he needs the money, and how much I expect to earn in the same amount of time.....It’s not hard to come to the right answer.

My guide is a local man who has been working on the site for 30 years. He knows everything there is to know about it and is a wonderful teacher (he speaks English too). He takes a mirror out of his wallet and uses the light of the sun to create a pointer to the detail of the stones. He picks flowers, herbs, resin from the trees and tells me to smell, taste the plants that were used from as early as 500 years before Christ. Resin for the incense. Plants that lower your cholesterol. Another that is an aid for indigestion. He takes a stick and sketches the different building periods for me in the dust. And I think, it’s not the resources you have that make you a good teacher, it’s how resourceful you are in teaching what you know. And I think: I will remember what this man teaches me.
The first people at Monte Alban were the Olmecs. They had large, flat noses, big lips, and a strong body. Look at me, he says, I am an Olmec. And I look, and so he is. History seems to shrink in time. The main people that inhabited Monte Alban were the Zapotecs, and they are the most significant group of indigenous people in Oaxaca today. They had more slanted eyes and thin, regal noses. From the pictures and statues you would think they were Indian or Chinese princes, or gods. Later in the week out working in a Zapotec community I see the same faces in the children of the school.
The ruins are everything you would expect and more: an amazing site, flat topped pyramids, carvings, sculptures, ritual, custom, culture, history. You can walk round as a tourist, archaeologist, historian, anthropologist, or on a Sunday, just as a local having a picnic. There is so much to learn from the place. The Zapotecs were great astronomers, even though they did not have instruments. Their knowledge was based on detailed observation of the sun, stars and the moon. They were also doctors, and the site includes an old-style medical school, with carvings showing medical problems (like a woman twisted in pain in childbirth, and dying) and solutions (a caesarian).
When they uncovered the tombs of the dead the people were not lying straight out as we are buried today, but curled up foetus style, head first, ready to be reborn. The Zapotec people recognised the cycles of life, of drought and rain, of darkness and light, of life and death, and that the cycle continues once we are gone. The celebration of death allowed them a more intense enjoyment of life.
I tell my guide that I love this place. He takes my arm, looks into my eyes and says he is so glad that I love this place. That this is a place you can come any time to meditate, and reflect. That Monte Alban is a university, where you can come and learn, and each time you come, you see and learn just a little bit more. And I think that he is right, that this is a place to come and learn, and think, and remember what we have forgotten, and what we used to know.

Guide, teacher, professor

Sounds of the street

You have to pay attention to the sounds of the street in Oaxaca. In the house there’s always a push-cart or van going past selling its wares. They announce their presence with songs, honks, whistles, and shouts.  When the bin men come round they let you know they’re in the neighbourhood by beating on a triangle (bizarre I know), you have to run out with your rubbish or they’ll whizz past. A moo-like honk for the gas man. Beep-beep-beep for ice cream. Doh-reh-me-fah-so for the knife sharpener.  The shout of AAA-gua is often heard in the street - drinkable water is sold door to door in huge containers, the water in the taps is unusable even for brushing your teeth. As my ear tunes into the language I can recognise other things too - naranjas! naranjas! (oranges), and tamales! tamales! - a local delicacy, a mixture of maize, mole, tomatoes, onions cooked in plantain leaves. Platanos (banana kind of plantain fried and served in hot milk - pretty disgusting I’m afraid) arrives with a whistle that sets all the dogs in the neighbourhood barking.Traveling requires you to be alert too. When the buses go past a guy hangs out of the door and shouts the names of the destinations - if you’re quick enough and can work out what he’s saying you need to jump on. Waiting for a ´colectivo´ (cheap form of taxi with fixed route, and shared with other passengers) last week near the main market was a cacophony of sounds - buses with the shouts from their guides, cars, taxis and colectivos hooting and shouting, market vendors selling their wares and wandering through the traffic, one solitary (and completely ineffective) traffic policemen blowing his whistle just to add to the noise.

Then there’s the music. Salsa music spilling out of the cafe bar near my school, dancers cooling off in the street before heading back for another hour of dancing. Soulful but somehow upbeat Mexican music in every taxi and colectivo you ever drive in. And the strangest music of all, a car driving past our school with its sound system blaring out the protest ‘hymn’ of the APPO, it was like tuning into the sounds of the Russian revolution.

In the pueblos the sounds are so much softer. Almost no traffic apart from the occasional truck and umpteen three wheeled moto-taxis that carry old women, babies, chickens and market produce around the town. There are the sounds of the animals - donkeys, of course, roosters, and turkeys (called guajolotes in Mexico, which is pretty much like the noise they make). Church bells, and dogs barking (always, everywhere). And as a visitor you will hear ´buenas dias´ from every person who passes - and the older people will stop and take your hand.

Meantime, back in the city, firecrackers go off day and night. It takes a local to tell you if it’s a fiesta, a saint’s day or part of the protest in the zocalo - and to reassure you it´s not gunshots, which is what most of us think when we arrive. In San Dionisio - the little village where I was working this week - they set off two huge firecrackers at 1pm each day. I jump out of my skin - but feel right at home.

Guajalote

Food supplies

One of the most important things to work out on arrival is where to get food, when it comes and what it’s like. There are two main meals a day, a pretty hearty breakfast and then a big meal about 3pm. The tradition is for all the family members to go home then and eat, partly as it’s the hottest point of the day and you can siesta afterwards. There isn’t really an evening meal as such, just a snack of bread or fruit or some of the remainders of the earlier meals. Breakfast at home has been papaya plus home made pancakes one day, or tortilla with eggs, cheese and onions, or tortilla with cheese, refried beans, and hot salsa. It’s pretty good eating a ´real´ meal (including chilies...) for breakfast and it sets you up for the long spell through to lunch. The first day I was here I had a great breakfast at a local market, there are stalls everywhere offering a variety of tortillas, beans, cheese, eggs, salsa and you perch down on small stool and eat it as neatly as you can in your hands (most of the food is designed to be eaten without plates or knives and forks). The other part of this amazing first breakfast was a fresh fruit juice drink of strawberries, bananas, pineapples, papayas and orange juice served in a plastic bag tied in a knot plus a straw to drink it with: not pretty, but completely delicious.

It turns out my house mother is a great cook and she is providing all sorts of vegetarian delicacies for me, all based on a variety of beans, pasta, salsa, chilies, eggs, cheese, tortillas, herbs, peppers.......all local products of course. What doesn’t get eaten one meal turns into supper or breakfast or next day’s lunch so nothing is wasted...and there’s always something around to eat. The beans are a good example, they sit in a pot for days and days and as they get heated and reheated they turn into a paste which you can then spread on tortillas. Today we had an amazing dish based on potato peelings cooked with onions, herbs and chilies. It sounds horrible but was actually really nice, and you ate it stuffed into a bit of bread, taco style. It was a good example of how nothing is wasted, and every effort is made to make use of the most nutritious parts of the fruit and vegetables. Oaxaca (and Mexico generally) is blessed with a good climate and therefore an amazing array of fruit and vegetables, this keeps the people relatively well fed and healthy despite the shortage of money.

Juice Bar in Oaxaca

Visual impact

The main topic of conversation in Oaxaca is "the situation". We are five months into "the situation" when I arrive. It started with a teacher’s strike back in May – in itself not that unusual (there has been a strike in Oaxaca each year for the last 26 years). But this year the strike has turned into an occupation of the town centre by the striking teachers and associated groups from across the state of Oaxaca. As well as the demands for the teachers the main demand, unifying all the groups, is for the local governor ‘Ulises’ to resign. They took over the town centre in the summer and have been there ever since - and the police are not allowed anywhere near the place.

The consequences for Oaxaca are far reaching. The most visible signs are that there are barricades on the streets around the town square, a few burnt out buses (part of the barricades) and graffiti absolutely everywhere - demanding the departure of Ulises plus a variety of other messages from support for indigenous rights to general anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation slogans. It is hard to describe the overall impact - visual and psychological - of the graffiti. It has completely taken over the public space.

Oaxaca is a town with little in the way of industry and it depends almost entirely on tourism for money - tourists from other parts of Mexico and the US. The tourists have now almost deserted the city - although it is still very safe (for visitors) the mixture of the news and the eyesores of graffiti and barricades have driven them away.  And so other things start to change, businesses are closing, cafes shut early, people are losing their jobs, they have no other source of income and many people are talking about needing to leave the city to find work elsewhere.

´The situation´ assails your senses. You see the graffiti everywhere, the lovely old colonial streets with warm colours, yellow, reds, oranges, defaced. You have to step carefully along the streets in the town centre because the street corners have been dug up to create piles of (very large) stones to use for barricades (or maybe missiles). You have to look both ways for traffic along the one-way streets - cars are likely to adapt routes if a normal thoroughfare is blockaded. Firecrackers go off during the night - in a way that is reminiscent of a medieval siege the protestors communicate with each other about the movement of police, army or other enemies with firecrackers and church bells. There is a surprising absence of sirens.

And the human, social and economic consequences are all pervasive. My language school is going to have to close in the mornings because there are hardly any visitors and not enough students to justify the classes.  One of my teachers is talking about leaving Oaxaca because her husband has lost his job. My house mother is very sad because she hasn’t been able to go to the town square for months - and this is where people here go for music, coffee, chat, talking, dancing. Her son phones late at night to say he can’t come home because he has got stuck behind a barricade and will need to stay with a friend. The local community neighbourhoods have established a vigilante system due to the absence of police in Oaxaca. At the beginning there was an increase in petty crime so now they are policing the streets themselves. There is an advert in the nearby supermarket saying ‘vigilantes wanted - apply to the community association’. It seems both surreal and normal here.

October 18 2006

Political graffiti