Last Friday I went with my neighbor J on an expedition to a small town and village south of here (Oaxaca is at the junction of 3 valleys so it’s always a bit of a challenge to figure out which one is which)…. this is what the southern valley (and the south part of Oaxaca City) looks like from the big hill close to my apt
(L and I went up the butt-kicking ½ mile of steps to the top to watch the evening light after a little afternoon rain… the sun sets behind other mountains).
Now J is a bit of a special character, she’s an American who’s lived in Mexico for many years and she’s very nice to me, she just has her quirks (she's not a very happy person)… and is obsessed with artesania. By tracking down a family whose weaving she had admired in San Miguel de Allende a couple years ago, she started a relationship with them that has grown into something like fictive kin (but with more of a patronage air to it). And she offered to bring me to meet them on her weekly trip out there—one of the granddaughters has two young sons (1 and 2) and was previously the pharmacist when her father was president of the municipio.
And I think that J also wanted to get me out of the city, introduce me to different places (which is very nice, but I had been on the more touristy route on an earlier trip), and have company (she likes being the resident expert). So, she decided that we should leave early-ish and go to Ocotlan (the nearest big town who has its market on Fridays), eat breakfast in the market and then head to Jalieza. We had to walk south through the city to find the bus (which was not in any place I’d ever left from before and involved turning into a specific dirt parking lot). The bus filled up with people going just a short distance out of the city and those bringing things to late to market (including as I saw when we got off the bus, stashing live turkeys and chickens in the luggage space, which were then casually carried under the arm once we disembarked).
This trip very much felt like a hurry up and slow down experience in many ways and J moves so much slower than I am used to or would like… which is good experience for fieldwork timing. She took me to a comedor in the enclosed market where she had a “relationship” with the woman who runs in and we sat and ate breakfast (a little intense for me in the midst of total overstimulation), and I tried not to think too much about whether I should or shouldn’t eat food in the market and what were the protocols for protecting myself and not making myself sick and and and and…. We then had to wait for the owner’s daughter to come with her very cute child (the shape of whose eyes and face suggested to me that she might have Downs) to chat with J and I just such little patience for the chit chat of small talk that is so much of what is around me.
And then we headed into the market, which was filled with stalls selling both local and imported from the states fruits and vegetables (NAFTA at work) of varying quality, odds and ends (one stall just had hardware appliances and I considered buying a wrench to fix my low pressure shower situation), fresh meat (which always makes me a bit nauseous), clothes, etc. Unlike in my local market, people called out for you to try their products and actively solicited our attention. I did buy a gorgeous dark blue/purple and green woven plastic market bag so that I now have something to bring my things home in. As always, it was totally intense sensorally and I felt like a complete amazon amidst the low tarps, people selling sweets from baskets that they carried around, and live animals being taken off by new owners. There is a weird phenomenon in which Americans (or other giant white tourists) in these markets clearly recognize each other and yet avoid the gaze so as to not mar the “authenticity” of the experience (there was a little too much talk about authenticity on this trip). Escaping from the market (made even more intense by this heat that everyone is complaining about), J took me to the church and local art museum in a restored convent (the ubiquitous stops in any rural jaunt).
And then we headed to Jalieza via collectivo (which required finding another slightly obscure dirt parking lot). J and I joined an elderly Zapotec couple in the collectivo and as I got in the back seat with them, once again I was reminded that I am off-sized for this locale. A collectivo is a small (cheap) car that goes from one specific place to another and the driver picks up people along the way until there are 5 passengers (yes, the front seat is often shared between strangers). So I get in and realize that I am half sitting on top of this elderly woman because there is no place to put my knees but sideways (as I am sitting behind the driver)… I had a similar experience on the bus back to Oaxaca when I realized that we were a) sitting on top of the back wheel and b) the seats were reclined in front of us and I found myself essentially kneeling on the floor while seated… fun!
In Jalieza again J had a set notion about how we should come into this space (which was nice in the sense of thinking about how to enter communities, but oh so slow and tedious, and seemed to have more to do with her own conceptions of who she wanted to be in this community), and she took me to the cooperative women’s artesian market first. I realized that I had been brought to this town briefly on one of my very first weeks in Oaxaca to see the cotton weaving (mostly backstrap) and what had been so interesting about this town was that it was basically all run by women—the men having immigrated to parts around California—and that this market was one economic strategy by and for women. I was really struck by the greater range of products hanging in the market this trip and impressed with the way that weavers were incorporating more contemporary shapes and color combinations into their work—the first of many disagreements J and I had about “authentic style.”
Which, together with the self-presentations of many of the younger women (who hung out sharing an ipod equivalent in their downtime), illustrates how small rural villages are imbricating themselves within these transnational or global patterns, and makes me really wonder how these younger women (and men, which I’ll get to) are crafting semi-cosmopolitan lives within spaces that make their livelihood on selling a sort of “traditional authenticity”… and where they are living in villages with only a couple paved roads and sharing their household compounds with a couple oxen etc. I can’t begin to come up with any conclusions, but as (what may or may not be unrelated to my project) I find these little pieces of seemingly incongruity I’m trying to be attuned to issues around aspirations and life projects—especially in with these sort of “transborder elements” (where the issue might be the states and immigration, but might also have to do with the relationship between urban and rural communities in the Oaxacan metropol (and these valley communities can definitely be considered as such). As an example, J took me to another household of weavers who use big pedal looms and make bedspreads and tablecloths (and this is a type of weaving that men do).
As we made our way through the dusty streets (trying to avoid the direct sun), I glanced into the gate portals of different households because I find the insides fascinating (and I’m slightly obsessed with livestock at the moment) and in one, in the paved entry part before the dirt courtyard there are two full-sized electronic arcade games! So I’m not sure where the money comes from, but remittances are a good bet, but it raises questions for me about what it means to grow up in these tiny villages (we’re talking maybe 750 people) in the midst of these larger material flows. Or one of the men who worked the looms, who was fully tatted out with ear plugs (and not the kind that deaden sound) and dressed in a way that I could fully see him hanging out in LA—I didn’t get a chance to ask him if he had spent time there. So also (and this isn’t my project, but others, I want to ask L what she’s finding about this), what does it mean to come back and create a future?
It was really nice to spend time with J’s family in Jalieza. They seem to have a slightly outsider position within the community, J explained that they are some kind of non-Catholic religious which means that they don’t dance or drink and also means that they have taken themselves out of the cargo system. But they also were doing weaving that was much finer than what I saw in the local market… doing a lot of really interesting weaving using sewing threads and using a slightly altered backstrap loom.
They were, as every family I’ve met, incredibly hospitable and welcomed us into their compound, stopping work to sit with us and bringing tamarind water etc. I explained my project to one of the older women and she thought it sounded really interesting and asked good questions so yay! And I was of course invited to go back… need to get over feeling shy. The babies were huge (the two year old was at least 3 feet tall) and shy, they have these really neat cribs set up in which a reed platform is suspended from the ceiling about a foot off the ground and then lined with blankets and small toys.
So I said that I’m slightly obsessed with livestock, it’s because it still is so visually disjunctive to me to be tooling down the road in a rickety bus (which themselves are awesome playing loud music, having their name or a religious expression painted across the windshield and a little altar set up in the front) and have a two-wheeled cart pulled by two oxen and full of hay, firewood, or alfalfa cross in front of us. Or enter someone’s home past burros (sometimes ridden and always making the coolest noises), turkeys, sheep (that look like some cross between a goat and sheep) etc. As we came back to Oaxaca there was a horse tied up alongside the road fitting out in full racing attire (hood and saddle with colors) in the middle of nowhere special. The nice thing about being here is that so much of what I see raises questions, the not so nice thing is that when I get back from trips like this and get incredibly sick, it them makes me cranky about leaving certain 1st world conveniences behind.
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