¡Viva Mexico!

This seems particularly apropos to write after writing about the teachers' march I saw this afternoon (I wrote this part ages ago and is the only section the internets didn't eat, I'm still bitter). Unlike what many Americans think, the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo) is not the Mexican independence day (it's the memorial of a battle in Puebla in which the Mexicans defeated the French... only to be overcome the next week at the same place). Rather Sept 15/16th is the Independence day (starting at midnight/ 11pm on the 15th) and the entirety of September is "el mes de la patria" (the month of the homeland) during which it seems that almost every building downtown is covered in red, green and white bunting and the Zocalo is lit with red, green and white little lights... and of course, for the first half of the month, mobile venders like the one above were ubiquitous on almost every corner downtown... in a sort of carnivalesque display of nationalism and consumerism. After the 17th a lot of this died down, but the bunting stayed up and the front of the Cathedral now boasts a giant slick countdown clock to 2010, the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence. It’s ironic that we are coming up on the 80th anniversary (depending on how you measure) of the Mexican revolution (in my mind a more interesting and important date for the contemporary State) and little has been made of it except for a 4 day weekend (which I am taking advantage of by heading to the beach).

On the night of the 15th I joined my friends J and M and their assorted 4 children to head down to the Zocalo for the grito, the ceremonial shout that reproduces Hidalgo’s famous “Viva Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe!” that served as the battle cry against Spanish colonialism. The most famous happens in Mexico City where the president ceremonially rings the national palace bells (a sort of Mexican version of Paul Revere’s “the red coats are coming”) and then leads a series of cries “Viva Mexico, Viva Hidalgo, Viva Guadalupe, Viva…..” honoring both revolutionary and contemporary heroes and creating a narrative of struggle for el patria. I think that every town has some version of the grito, led by a legislative or symbolic leader and customized to the struggles and heroes of the local place—linking communities to the Nation while still urging participation in a greater whole. And the grito has been a site in which to demonstrate competing claims to representation, as Obrador has led a competing grito across the zocalo from Calderon since 2006 as has the APPO here in Oaxaca.

As with most things here in Oaxaca, the details of the grito was something that you just sort of had to “know.” As my friends and I asked all the people we could find and were given multiple answers about what was happening and when, we headed down to the zocalo area to see what we could find out and encountered a wall of happenings in the Alameda,

a new altar to the nation for the next days’ ceremonial rising of the flag by the army,

opportunities for the kids to get decked out in their patriotic best (although I’ve never never never seen anyone wearing a sombrero unironically here, they’re all the rage to demonstrate a supposed Mexican authenticity),
and firefighters and various forms of police at the ready.

The Zocalo itself first appeared to be packed with two giant stages set up between the Zocalo and Alameda, with Mexican rockbands performing, although the acoustics were such that I have no idea what they were playing. And so I didn’t feel like I was all that far from home, the Zocalo was set up with a double row of metal police barricades and I saw snipers on nearby roofs (illustrating that the social calm is still fragile especially where the governor’s concerned). Although when I asked nicely, a policewoman let me through a blocked opening, she refused the others but did not protest when we handed the kids across. And once we entered the Zocalo proper, there was plenty of space.


And then there we were somewhat caged in a space where nothing was going on, people were just waiting….. It was all of our first gritos even though M has lived in Oaxaca for 7 years and we saw that people were selling cans of spray foam and kids were already chasing each other with them. So we bought a couple cans for the kids to share, spawning a long foam fight where the kids made up for the lack of local snow… and covered me as well, luckily it quickly brushed off. Meanwhile, people around us gave us the dirtiest looks. M, J and I were definitely confused as to the proper doing of the grito and agreed that it was ironic that this was probably the least fun of any Mexican fiesta we had attended.




Finally, right about when the kids had reached a state of tired crankiness, the governor and assorted local dignitaries (I would assume from their dress and pale skin) ceremonially paraded around the Zocalo within the double barrier, cut off from the crowd in this sort of surreal parade for which people neither booed nor clapped, capped off by Miss Oaxaca and two attendants wearing coordinated red, green and white dresses. Then the Governor, flanked by his family, came out on a balcony of the municipal palace (a place no longer used as the seat of government power, which has been moved to a created ciudad administrativa, outside the city, supposedly to make it harder for people’s claims to be heard) and performed the grito.



And while I could barely (if at all) understand the specific names, I shouted Viva along with the others and was caught up in this collective performance of emotion (I got all nerdy with Durkheim, understanding collective effervesence in a new way)

The governor’s promenade had seemed to unleash a sort of taunt readiness in the crowd that was released with the grito and then unleashed with a giant explosion of sound and foam (we had obviously unintentionally done this too early).

The air was filled with raining sprays and more clued-in people pulled out their umbrellas to huddle in the midst of it all. At the bandstand there was an clearly patterned (and anticipated) warzone in which people on the bandstand showered those below them, which was rather ineffectually returned in kind.



And then in the midst of this aural and visual chaos (to me in some ways recreating the sensual overload of the too recent conflict) explosions started on both ends of the Zocalo, a wooden castillo of fireworks on the side in front of the municipal palace


and high-flying fireworks in front of the cathedral,


. In the mist, and midst, of this J and I struggled out of the crowd with Ky between us, trying to remain untrampled by the flow of the crowd. I had the (in my mind) brilliant) idea to cut through the inside corridor of the Zocalo between the café’s and their outside tables, but soon learned that they claim these arcaded spaces as private, rather than public spaces, blocading them off to create expensive “front row for the grito” boxes. It was more than a little terrifying as I ended up with Ky, hunching my body over his (he of course refused at that moment to be carried) and luckily still standing heads over the majority of the crowd. I looked behind me to see what was being pushed into my back and saw that the woman behind me was both clutching her baby and using its body mass to urge me forward.

We spilled out onto the neighboring streets where the all-night party was just starting. People had told me earlier that the grito starts (continues) what they called the night of tolerance, in which many of the rigid social strictures (like drinking in the street) could be flaunted openly.

J and I had made plans to go to the parade the next morning (knowing nothing, in my case, about what that entailed) and I supposed that it would be similar to all other parades I’ve seen, big monos de la calenda, brass bands, indigenously dressed dancers, and probably a mobile shrine to Guadalupe. So, it was a shock to see line after line of state police troops in full battle gear when we arrived at the Alameda—too reminiscent of all the footage I saw during the conflict.



It took me too long to realize that they were not there to contain the parade crowd, rather, they were the parade! I understand now that independence parades are demonstrations of military prowess, and it makes sense, it was just too awkward of a tableau given that the last time that this number of military troops were such assembled was to fire upon crowds of its citizens. It was very weird and I found myself taking side-long glances at them and speculating as to whether their weapons were loaded and whether the APPO crowds would be out, and what would be the visual if not actual confrontation… plus I just learned the national anthem in which Mexicans are urged to rise-up fighting should a foreigner put a foot on her land (I joke, I find it ironic though given the recent expropriations by foreign corporations).
We found a spot on a side street as the surrounding area was literally filled with all branches of the military and waited and waited and waited. I of course was staring fascinated at the Marines (?) in front of me, wondering when and where they had been most recently deployed and the weirdness of seeing them (literally and symbolically in one sense) occupy the city center as the army (as in the US) is forbidden from deploying within the country. And while yes, context is everything, I couldn’t/ can’t look at these pictures without the referent of these exact same images illustrating the State’s power over its citizens all too recently. I wasn’t in the place to do interviews to satisfy my curiousity, but I wonder if the relative paucity of applause reflected the thin crowd’s similar ambivalence.

It was also interesting that while Mexico’s armed forced are gender integrated, those units are marked separately,

we saw the women’s military nurses and then the men, etc.As they paraded in front of us in strict formations, there were demonstrations that to me seemed sometimes farcical, like the emergency response team riding in an open truck with their lifejackets on,
the forest firefighters with their shovels, or my favorite, the transito cops with their flat bedded tow truck (I didn’t get a picture).
As soon as we could we headed out to avoid the now filled with military units Zocalo, unwilling on my part to see the governor address them, and returned to the rest of the city where independence day was an opportunity to spend time nursing hangovers, with family, and indulging in the visual trappings of independence day as a nostalgic anti-colonial celebration rather than one unambivalently celebrating the current State status quo.

I’m wondering if my characterization of the party as the “least fun” I’ve gone to yet in Mexico stems from the fact that this is also the first public, national celebration (I’m not sure if the Guelagetza fits this criteria), rather than a local town or specific church celebration. So, rather than a parade of/for a specific community involving giant dolls and bands, this was a nationally ritualized affair with the state army band performing the soundtrack…. But I’m also not sure that’s a useful distinction.

For those who don’t follow Mexican news obsessively, my somewhat complicated feelings about being in the midst of a collective expression of emotion that was also heavily militarily managed were evermore heightened when I read that in Morelia (the capital city of Michoacan) two grenades were thrown into the crowd right after the grito and about 10 people were killed. Crowds are always tricky and potentially dangerous, and I think that given the slightly unstable nature of contemporary Mexico, I’m going to avoid any large official gatherings from now on. The ongoing fights and relationships between the police and narcos is fascinating on some levels (in the sense that you can also see people getting to a place of ya basta in which interesting possibilities for change are opened up) and on others purely terrifying.

A Nice Reality Check

This afternoon my neighbor J's mother who's visiting from Canada (and having some really hard culture-shock issues being in Mexico, and poor Mexico, for the first time) asked me to help them get out a bind. They were supposed to head to the coast this afternoon, but a large march prevented J from being able to drive her car the last couple blocks to our house to put it in the garage and could I do it. I stifled my immediate "sure, no prob" with the reality check that it's been over 10 years since I last drove stick, I was never really good at it, and driving an unfamiliar car down a hill and into a narrow garage by myself was probably not a good re-introduction. So instead, C and I went to see if we could gauge how much longer the march would block traffic.

I had been dimly following the latest political manifestation by the teachers union, which I think involves a struggle over the state representatives between the larger, more established, and more radical section 22 and the government supported upstart section 59 which was started post 2006 conflict, but other than making mental notes to avoid the Zocalo planton, hadn't thought much about it. I think it's a reflection on my feeling a little mentally/ emotionally overwhelmed by local, state and national politics both here in Mexico and in the States. But there C and I were standing on the corner 2 blocks down from my house watching a sea of people as far as I could see in either direction.

And while I might have turned away to report back to J that she shouldn't plan on moving her car anytime soon, C was fascinated and asked me all these questions about who people were, what they were doing, and why-- because it was a really plain march (or at least the main part we saw) which ordinary people walking together down the street without many banners or chants. And I tried to explain the context (involving both the internal state struggles for legitimacy and voice between sections 22 and 59 and a lot of anger within the Oaxacan union activists toward the national leader of the union, who everyone agrees is corrupt and too closely aligned with the Calderon government) and translated for her the few sheet banners that we saw.

C was completely in awe at the size of the manifestation and was so struck by the size of delegations from around the state-- telling me about her various family members who are teachers and why this kind of activism is so important to her. And for me it was a really good reality check of how important and impressive these political actions (that I have largely taken for granted and unfortunately usually view in terms of my personal inconveniences) are and how powerful the sight of sheer masses of people together in the street can be.... I'm still cynical about their relative political efficacy, but that's for other reasons.

When I first came to Oaxaca three years ago and was lonely and very inwardly direction (hmmm, seems like a bit of a pattern), I kept a journal for longer than I ever have and I revisited on a recent trip an observation that Mexicans seem to have such a different relationship to political action and that socialism is not the same taboo word as it is often in the US (this does not hold for the conservative powers that be, nor to large extents the rural communities I spend most of my time in whose political preferences are often directly tied to the benefits-- like bags of cement-- a given party offers). I keep trying to maintain a sense of historical perspective which remembers that the Mexican revolution was not that long ago in generational terms (1911) and the political ideals that animated Zapata and led to the amazingly rights guarantees inshrined in the Mexican Constitution (the ability to enact them is another story and tangled in neoliberal structural adjustments, and centralized corruption and and and) are not that far from peoples' personal experiences. This is by no means to say that Mexico is really this radical utopian beneath the enormous wealth inequities, racial stratification, and narco-violence, but I think that the taken-for-granted analyses of peoples' lives are strongly influenced by these radical ideologies. I mean people are shocked when I ask them what they think of the differences between health care in the US and Mexico and I tell them that everyone does not have health insurance or access to healthcare and that people go bankrupt to pay for their medical care and I was blown away when a commercial tour guide at the Canyon of Sumidero casually talked about the injustice of Chiapas producing the majority of electricity for the nation and having the largest percentage of people without access to it.

So I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but C's unadulturated wonder at the march this afternoon was a nice reminder to me not to be complacent at what has become my normal landscape. It was also heartening that a woman whose trip has been largely characterized by fear for her daughter and grandson (Oaxaca just seems very very different and scary in ways that I anticipate my beloved grandmother would also experience it) saw this political action as the most awe-inspiring thing she has seen thus far (and this is not to overly valorize this march, which was small in Oaxacan terms and tame, but more to remind myself that all social activists in Oaxaca have been largely framed as radical destroyers of the local economy in the Mexican press for the last three years).


Oh, and as a non-sequitur, here's a picture of me with the (as of the last time I saw her) unnamed baby girl whose development I have been following for the last couple months, she's about a month old in these pics.

Revisiting the ruins

Ai and I also went to both Mitla and Mt. Alban (both places I've taken the last two visitors to, and where I've vowed not to accompany more this visit), which gave me an opportunity to try to look at the places from a different angle so as not to be bored and anti-social. I am always so struck by the scale and history of these sites (as I joking comment made "while my people were living in mud huts and destroying the intellectual work of the pagan past"). I've also been reading an interesting non-fiction book about the Americas pre-Columbus that does some good meta-analyses of the process of writing histories of the Americas and have been mulling on the indelible traces of such findings that pre-Columbus/pre-pre-contact infectious decimation the Americas were the most densely populated areas on the earth of the time.

When Ai and I headed out to Mitla our blue skies turned grey and we arrived in the midst of a raging thunder storm (La and Ai definitely brought us East Coast rainy weather on top of the existing rainy season.... or it was the diluted impact of the devasting hurricanes). After imitating the kids on their way home from school and standing under overhanging eaves for a bit waiting futilely for a passing mototaxi, we rolled up our pant legs (literally and metaphorically) and headed up the hill to the ruins site. Luckily one passed by before we had progressed too far (me with an umbrella and she with a more shelthering raincoat), as we noticed making our way up that the road and sidewalk were under about 6 inches of moving water in many places (Mexico's drainage system has consistently under-impressed me... though so has New York's in comparable rainstorms) and the mototaxi driver had to both cautiously ford the new rivers but also navigate the topes (speed bumps) in their midst. Luckily the small engine held. It was clearing up as we reached the site and we had the place virtually to ourselves.



It's really interesting to me the ongoing work that these sites require. They are alive sites in their own ways.
At the church built on/ next to the ruins site (short of Cholula in Puebla, Mitla is one of the largest stark reminders of the Spaniard's practices of spiritual conquest by building their churches on indigenous religious sites/ using their very stones to construct new religious spaces), there are tons of veladoras stacked up next to an outside shrine-- I'm not sure if they reuse them or simply keep them as memorials of devote offerings. I also haven't heard of people using Mitla (or Mt. Alban) as spiritual spaces apart from their Catholic syncretic practices (although Mitla is home to a ton of American evangelicals who use it as a base for church planting throughout the mountains).


Due to other scheduling issues we were only able to go to Mt. Alban on Sunday, the day it's free for all Mexican nationals... oy! We took the one bus that goes up and I think the route has changed since I last took it as we powered through the top of San Martin along a twisty road the width of a single lane (although not used as such). It was a mad house at the top, although really nice to see ways in which it could become a space of normalcy which you could incorporate into a an easy family excursion. Unfortunately it was a heavy travel weekend as well for independence day so there was a heavy proportion of tourists as well. However the space is also big enough that in the central plaza you did not have the sensation of overcrowding.... and I've never seen it so green! To see it with probably a thousand people and to have it still not feel full really brings the scale of the site in its hay day into perspective (I seem to be currently obsessed with geographical demography at the moment).

making me want to start a food blog

I'm coming off a long visit with college friends (La and Ai) that took me to new states and up and down mountains with tons of pictures and stories to process.

One of the things that Ai and I did was take a cooking class (at the same school, Casa de los Sabores, that my friend S and I did in July when she visited) where we learned to make black mole (the "king" of moles), squash blossom quesadillas with homemade tortillas, rice, and mango sorbet. This time I not only took copious notes to replicate recipes, but I also photographed the stages.... and our market trip.

We met up mid-morning and Pilar took us (Ai and I, a Texan threesome, an Aussie woman, and a young German couple) through the menu and shopping list and we set off for the market. It's always weird since so much of that stage is part of my weekly routine, to step back and see it as a cultural adventure takes me back a sec.


Squash blossom flowers (they taste like zucchini).

Basil, camomile and other herbs used for limpias (ritual cleansings) rather than cooking, people are actually really surprised and want to know more when I buy basil for eating.

The pale green are chayote (a bland squash like thing).

Dried maguey worms on thread.
We came back to the cooking school and Pilar arranged all the ingredients in baskets, one for each dish before walking us through the preparation stages.

Everything needed to make black mole (the color comes from the toasted-- and burnt-- seeds and nuts).

Comal roasting tomatoes to make a red salsa.
Pan fried plantains in lard (a crucial part of this dish) used as both elements of the mole and garnish.
The masa (ground corn and water) is ready and Pilar demonstrates how to form tortillas.


All the elements for the quesadillas, tortillas on the comal, squash flowers sauteed with onions, and quesadillas on the same comal.



Ai demonstrates tortilla making, flat, not too thin so it tears and then carefully placed on the comal.



The finished product of chicken in black mole!



It's definitely something I think I can make at some (with a lot of time to spend) and the complexity of the flavors really can't be replicated with the jarred masa. Tortillas I don't feel the need to make from scratch, although they are amazing right off the comal.