Three cultures combine to entertain one in Oaxaca in Mexico’s southeast: the lively present, the colonial past, and Indian antiquity. I arrived at a particularly animated moment just before the New Year and in time for the Saturday market with its extraordinary display of green glaze and black pottery. Vendors were offering pots and dishes of all sizes and shapes ornamented with flower, bird, and fish designs; black pottery mermaids perched on their tails; angles masquerading as candlesticks; and my favorite, a whole orchestra in green glaze—deer, donkey, goat, pig, dog, all playing a very strange assortment of instruments such as violin, cello tuba, cymbals maracas, drum. The potter who made the lot had a rare musical imagination. Along with the pottery were colorful handwoven rebozos, serapes, and blanket-rugs, some gaudy with all the colors of the rainbow and other beautifully subdued designs of doves in beige and white with tiny accents of red and black.
Both the plazas—the city boasts two, side by side—were jammed with people, many in local costumes, which no other state of Mexico can rival, and the scene reverberated with music. There were visitors from the world over, some of them as colorfully, if not as elegantly, dressed as those in native costume. In addition to music the air was filled with a medley of Indian languages (still very much spoken in Oaxaca), Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian—all creating a background for the inevitable, sometimes desperate, honking horns of automobiles whose drivers were ill-advised enough to attempt to traverse the plaza.
It was late afternoon, but the sun was still brilliant in a deep-blue sky and the trees were green and lovely. In the soft warm air, tempered by five thousand feet of altitude, it hardly seemed possible that it was winter. I had a tequila cocktail beneath the arches of the Hotel Margués Del Valle as I wasn’t yet ready to deal with tequila’s fiercer cousin mescal, the Oaxacan specialty. I was a little bemused by the gaiety around me and also by the fact that some people like me seemed to be having a predinner drink while others were finishing a late lunch, and still others, to judge by their choice of food, were having breakfast. It was the true atmosphere of fiesta. We were staying were staying at the Misión de los Angeles (formely the Oaxaca Courts), described as a motel, which I suppose it is technically, though the term hardly does justice to the attractive whitewashed bungalows with their beamed ceilings, polished brick floors, and colonial furnishings. There are not a great many units, and the spacious garden insulates one from whatever fiesta is taking place; the noise is mainly in the center of town, only minutes away by car but a long way by ear. There is a swimming pool in the garden and a colonial-style resataurant with red-tile floor and red-brick ceiling, a décor that I never tire of. The windows, barred in a decorative patter of wrought iron, are the celosia, or jalousie, type used by parents to keep daughters safely indoors and their lovers outside. They also work admirably in this sweet climate, letting air in and keeping burglars out. In the restaurant one is waited on by charming young women wearing the costumes of the region.
The Zapotec, an ancient people, were the first Oaxacans, and their name for the city was Huaxyacac, which time and the Spaniards changed for Oaxaca, They were descended from the Olmec, a people about whose origin very little is known and who left the great mysterious stone heads in the jungles of Veracruz and Tabasco. Later arrivals, probably from Teotihuacán near Mexico City, again about whom very little is known, were the Mixtec. Today their descendants are two of the fifteen or so major tribes in the region, each of which has special costumes. There are the full, embroidered skirts and the embroidered blouses of the Valle women; the short, white, embroidered huipils (tunics) over full skirts, worn with rebozos, of the Mixtec; and the full white skirts topped with sashed and colored tops and white rebozos o the Sierra. The Yalalog dress in heavy white cotton huipils with tasseled embroidery down front and back over a long skirt and braid their hair into elaborate headdresses with skeins of black wool. The Tehauna from the Isthmus wear heavily embroidered huipils over long, finely pleated, lace-trimmed white skirts with lots of necklaces—gold where possible—and a unique headdress, a sixteenth-century Spanish baby’s baptismal dress, the pleated skirt falling to the shoulders and the lace-trimmed sleeves hanging decoratively at each side. Men wear white cotton trousers tied at the ankles and white cotton shirts, extremely effective in contrast to the colored ribbons, embroidery, and necklaces of the women. Not all the costumes appear at one time in the hotel’s restaurant, of course, so I never quite caught up with the full range. I did go, however, to the Regional Museum, where I counted twenty-eight different costumes before I gave up and decided that numbers are not what matters. The outfits are colorful and pretty, and I am glad they have not disappeared.
Oaxaca is not only the land of innumerable costumes; it is also the land of the seven moles, dishes whose sauces are made with chili peppers and various other seasonings. The most famous is mole negro oaxaqueño, which, like the well-known mole poblana, has bitter chocolate in the sauce. The Oaxacan version is darker in color, slightly hotter, and not as sweet as the Puebla one. It is a festive dish and was the highlight of our dinner one night, made with hen turkey and served with the usual accompaniments of rice, beans, guacamole, and tortillas. It was so good that it sent me to market later on looking for chilhuacle, the chili pepper that gives the dish its special flavor. In the meantime I was able to impose on friends and do some work in their kitchen, and I found a substitute for chilhaucle, which is very hard to locate outside Oaxaca, even in Mexico. Guajillo, a long, smooth dried red chili pepper, which is available, gives much the same flavor, though it lacks the dark color. While I was about it, I investigated the six other moles and discovered that of them it was possible to make Amarillo (yellow), verde (green), and coloradito (red). Oaxacans love color so much they even use it as a theme for favorite dishes.
After dinner we returned to the plaza, which, was all color, strings of lights, and trees hung with tinsel and Christmas ornaments. The noise level had risen from its earlier pitch, augmented by small brass bands, singers with guitars, and, of course, firecrackers. Outside the cathedral there were stalls where one could buy the traditional New Year buñuelos, large, flat, crisp golden fritters to be eaten with syrup from plates, which are then broken. Oaxaca is an area renowned for its pottery, and the plates are, I am reliably informed, factory rejects. A lot of plate-breaking is supposed to go on during the Christmas season, but I never saw any smashed crockery lying around in the morning. Either there is great activity with brooms or plate-breaking is a tradition more honored in the breach. Holiday celebrations in Oaxaca begin on December twelfth with the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, proceed to the December eighteenth feast of the Virgin of Solitude, patron saint of the city, and go on to the Día de los Reyes (Epiphany) on January sixith. The festivities include not only Christmas and New Year’s but also, on December twenty-third, La Noche de los Rábanos (the Night of the Radishes), when giant radishes are carved into fantastic shapes of animals and people and displayed in the plaza. This night is also supposed to be a plate-breaking occasion.
Although it is the capital of the state of Oaxaca, the city of Oaxaca is not large (150,000 inhabitants) and has remained provincial. It is Possible to do a good deal of sightseeing on foot; and just as well, because parking on the narrow streets is a problem. The next day we left our car to wander through the plazas, much quieter and relatively uncrowded in the morning hours. We admired the carved green stone façade of the Cathedral and the costumed girls sitting under the trees weaving sashes and other pieces on small looms, weaving that reminded me very much of Guatemalan work, which is Mayan-inspired. Shoeshine boys were busy with their neat little portable stands, shining the shoes of customers who were sitting and chatting on benches. There were glass-encased stalls featuring fresh fruits and other selling vividly colored soft drinks. Straw-hatted men in white trousers and shirts were hawking serapes, using themselves as their own display counters. I watched one man with a basket of pale-green palm leaves shred the leaves with agile fingers and weave them into birds, usually doves, grasshoppers, and all sorts of things. He had merry face, and it was a joy to watch the pleasure he derived from delighting passing tourists with his art.
Though the sun was brilliant, the air was cool and fresh, and we could have sat for hours in the plaza doing nothing but watching other people walk by, listening to the birdsong, and observing the play of sun and shadow as the light winds ruffled the trees. However, we wanted to get to the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Mexican Art—to give it its full title—before lunch. It was only blocks away, and we walked there resisting curios of all kinds, except for a yellow shopping basked made of istle (maguey fiber), which I brought in case my resolve were to weaken later.
The museum is a gem, the collection of famed Mexican painter Tamayo, a native of Oaxaca. Art and artifacts have been brought together in a fine eighteenth-century house that has flower-filled courtyard with a splashing fountain surrounded by four smiling stone lions. Surely the most beautiful small collection in Mexico, it is an intensely personal assemblage of pottery, stone, and jade figures and artifacts dating from 1260 B.C. to A.D. 950. There is a Nyarit house from the late preclassic period that shows daily life and a ceramic scene of a ball game, both of which made the people of the ancient cultures more real to me. The exhibits are beautifully mounted and arranged in imaginatively lighted cases. I was pleased to see Chicomecoatl, the Toltec goddess of food, carrying ears of corn and was amused by a ceramic figure of a very lively laughing dog from Colima and a parrot that looked as if it were about to speak. There was a cheerful lady from Monte Albán, a corn goddess, appropriately decorated with ears of corn, when I later visited the ruins of Monte Albán the memory of her helped bring them to life.
We went to lunch at the Marqués de Valle, where one can site outside under the arches and observe the life of the plaza or inside, where it is quieter. I had tequila along with sangrita, a drink made with tomatoes, oranges, lemons, or limes, onion, and hot chili peppers. Sangrita is traditionally Mexican, not a regional specialty, and, though one is supposed to drink alternating sips of it and tequila, I confess to having a dreadful habit that shocks purists. I pour both into a stemmed wineglass and add two ice cubes. Mescal, the regional drink much like tequila, is generally served in tiny black pottery shot glasses with salt and lime slices on the side. In this case, I usually squeeze the lime into the glass and forget about the salt. It is a fiery drink, stronger in flavor than tequila.
I was eager to try Oaxacan specialties, but apart from the famous mole negro I found that I ended up with a potpourri of Mexican food from all over the Republic. There was, however, something Oaxacan in every dish because the local chili peppers have flavor all their own. I enjoyed the hearty soups and the luncheon platters featuring good steaks with beans, guacamole, and tortillas in one form or other. I very much liked the Oaxacan enfrijoladas, in which tortillas are dipped in a fairly thick black bean purée, sprinkled with fresh cheese, folded in flour, and topped, if desired, with thinly sliced onion and more crumbled fresh cheese; and entomatadas, in which tortillas are dipped in a tomato and chili-pepper sauce, folded in four, and topped with sliced onion and crumbed fresh cheese. With these specialties I drank beer, always a good choice in any part of Mexico.
We decided to see more of the past and drove out of town to the ruins of Mitla, calling in on the village of Santa María del Tule on the way to visit what may be the oldest tree in Mexico. It is a giant ahuehuete, a Mexican cypress, which is reputedly over two thousand years old, 40 meters high, and 42 meters round, and 549,020 kilos in weight. How anyone managed to weigh it I don’t know, but the information is on a plaque, and I am not a doubter. A magnificent tree, green and flourishing despite its great age, it is the home of innumerable singing birds. After walking round it, one stands there thinking philosophical thoughts about the transitoriness of man. A market was in progress on the church grounds, and despite firm resolve I bought some green glaze casseroles and was glad I had my yellow istle bag. Both church and grounds were decorated with balloons, flowers, and streamers. The small stone structure is charming, highly decorated inside, and has an interesting painted façade. It is well worth stopping for. We drove on to the town of Mitla, where there was also a market, which seemed to me to have everything from clothing to live piglets—and even a desperate character. A small boy was asking each passerby in a hopeful treble: “¿Quiera cosas de contrabando?” (Do you want any smuggled goods?) I wonder what they were. I forgot to ask. For a market-fancier Oaxaca is a perfect base; markets are held on Sundays, Wednesday, Thursdays, and Fridays in various small towns near the capital.
Milta, on top of a small hill, seemed to be asleep in the sun, its great courtyards now open to the sky where once they were roofed with wood and thatch. There is a very impressive hall of untopped columns and massive stone walls carved in the Greek key design. Mitla was built by the Zapotec perhaps as far back as 300 B.C. It reminds one how very urban ancient Mexico was. In face, over a hundred city sites have been found by archaeologists in Mexico and Central America. Even then farmers brought their produce to market from the countryside and townspeople sold their manufactured goods—pottery, weaving, jewelry, and so on. That tradition is still strong, as I realized when we left Mitla and stopped at the weekly market in Tlacolula, a rather dusty little town.
I wanted to investigate the local varieties of chili peppers and hoped I would find people willing to help. Indeed I did. Number of ladies sitting in front of piles of dried of fresh peppers of all kinds, who spoke Zapotec to each other and Spanish to me, explained names and uses and flavors with great goodwill. The large covered market was very comprehensive. There were silk and wool rebozos in every color; rugs; tablecloths, some striped pink and green and purple and other striped orange and green and purple; dresses and huipils; and handkerchiefs, scarves, ribbons, laces, jewelry, combs, needles, pins, and thread. There were live turkeys tethered by the leg, meats of all kinds, strings of chorizo sausages, brilliantly orange cecina (meat spiced with ground guajillo chili pepper), a Oaxacan favorite, and herbs and spices scenting the air. One whole section was filled with fruits and vegetables and another, with pottery. I saw green glaze casseroles as big as a baby’s bath and was told they were for make mole negro oaxaqueño. The size of them made me understand old recipes that have puzzled me by the sheer volume of sauce that goes with so little bird. It is the sauce that everyone likes best, mopped up with tortillas.
Still in pursuit of the past we set off early the next morning—after a breakfast of café con leche and pan dulce, the sweet bread that Mexico excels in baking—for the ruins of Monte Albán. This other pre-Columbian Zapotec city of the region was begun about the same time as Mitla. It was built on a group of hills and is really vast. Only one part has been fully explored, and we drove up a steep hill to reach it. The great plaza lies six thousand feet above sea level and stretches more than nine hundred by six hundred feet, though numbers cannot justly convey its expanse. The remains of buildings line each side, some, like others, like the tombs, are painted with murals. The great pyramid is tremendously impressive, and I was glad we had seen Mitla, so much smaller, first. It would have been anticlimactic to do it the other way around. A lot of work has been going on at Monte Albán, and some sense of what a great city it was has emerged. The views over the valley are magnificent, and after spending an hour or so walking from stone building to stone building I found I wanted very much to visit the Regional Museum in Oaxaca, with its fabled collection of jewelry and artifacts from this site, so that I could people Monte Albán in my imagination.
On the way back we made a brief detour to the ruins of the early colonial monastery of Cuilapan; so much of it is in such fine shape that “unoccupied” seems a better term than ruins, it is build of the green stone of Oaxaca, which has a very subtle color. The church itself is open to the sky, with only one row of the columns of the name standing. Though the church is only a shell, the monastery is in very good order, roofed and with flower-filled cloisters, spacious cells, and marvelous views of the mountain-ringed valley. One can still see the old kitchen and it chimney. It makes a fascinating contrast to the pre-Columbian ruins.
Back in Oaxaca, we went to the Dominican Church of Santo Domingo, surely one of the most splendid in the hemisphere. Only in Brazil have I seen churches that compare. It was begun in 1575 and finished a century later. Both the church and the adjacent convent had a rather checkered history during the Reform of the mid-nineteenth century, which separated church and state; at one point the convent was turned into a barracks and the church, into army stables. The imposing façade has twin Baroque towers of pink and green Oaxaca stone, and the church is set back in a wide plaza. But it is the interior that is the astonishment. All the walls and ceilings are covered with gilded stucco reliefs, sculptures, and frescoes. My neck became stiff from gazing at the ceiling and trying to look at the gold altar at the same time. The Rosary Chapel is magnificent, all the gold and richly decorated with figures of saints. Another delight is the genealogical tree of Don Félix de Guzmán, who was the father of Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. On part of the ceiling the family figures are in relief on branches of a leafy tree, and the whole is richly colored. I don’t think there is an inch of the church that isn’t visually exciting.
To go to the Regional Museum, housed in the exceptionally beautiful convent beside the church, is to be thrust from on epoch to another, from colonial past to antiquity. There is a fascinating collection of old religious masks, now usually worn only on feast days when there are dances in front of the church, and regional costumes, still in use today. There is also a collection of ceramics and handicrafts of all kinds and gold, jade, and other jewelry from Monte Albán, as well as obsidian and rock crystal pieces and pearls. The Mixtec were great goldworkers. They learned their techniques from the Chibcha of Colombia, who were famed for their jewelry and ornaments and whose work was bought by both Incas and Maya. The jewelry is well displayed, and I found that it gave added meaning to my visit to Monte Albán.
To round things out we went off to visit the house where President Bentio Juárez, architect of the Reform, lived from 1818 to 1828. It is small and attractive, with beamed ceilings, whitewashed walls, tiled floors, and colonial furnishings. It as an interesting kitchen in which there is a tiled charcoal-burning stove.
I especially wanted to see the virgin of Solitude, so we made our way to the Church of La Soledad, which has a very fine carved façade in addition to the famous statue. The Virgin, in a richly embroidered, jewel-encrusted gown and gold crown, is worth the visit, but after Santo Domingo I could not really appreciate the church. I was Still dazzled by the earlier explosion of gold.
We particularly enjoyed lunching under the arches of the plaza. There the offerings included international fare such as steaks, Mexican food in general, and Oaxan dishes. On one occasion we shared tamal oaxaqueño, a banana or plantain leaf spread with the usual tamal corn dough, stuffed with mole negro, folded up, and steamed. This has always been a favorite of mine, but what I was really interested in was the cecina enchilada de Oaxaca, which I had seen in the market. This spiced pork was served with mashed black beans, triangles of crisp fried tortilla, lettuce and tomato, and an interesting guacamole, the avocado simply mashed with finely chopped coriander, fresh hot green peppers, and salt. It was a bit picante but very good. The pork was well flavored and unusual. We drank a Mexican red wine, Los Reyes, and found it pleasant as Mexican wines often are, but not really more than a vin ordinaire.
I was intrigued by the Hotel Victoria on a hillside, with its dramatic view of the valley, and we went there for a night. The hotel is very attractive and the grounds are well aid out with a large swimming pool set among trees, shrubs, and flowers. As night falls the terrace is a lovely place to sit and enjoy the sweeping vistas. It is also worth getting up early when the valley is filled with mist to watch the changing color of the mountains as the sun gains strength and dissipates the mist.
No state of in Mexico celebrates fiestas better than Oaxaca, and I remember with pleasure the guelaguetza I attended one July on an earlier visit. It is called Lunes del Cerro (Monday of the Hill), and its origin is very old. People from the various regions bring gifts of flowers, fruits, produce of all kinds weaving, pottery, whatever is their specialty, for the governor or visiting dignitary. In the colonial period the honored person was the viceroy or similar figure, and in antiquity, the Zapotecan king. There are regional dances, the most splendid of which are those performed by dancer with feathered headdresses. Guelaguetza means offering or gift in Zapotecan, and the fiesta does not have to take place only on the customary Monday of the Hill. Even during the Christmas-New Year period when one fiesta tumbles over the heels of another once can see the dances put on by the Instituto Cultural Folklórico de Oaxaca, and great fun they are.
Oaxaca also has the advantage of being on the way to other places, giving one every excuse for visiting it. There are airline connections with Acapulco, Villahermosa (the proper stopping point to reach the ruins of the Mayan city of Palenque), and Mérida in Yucatán. For drivers, there is a highway over the mountains to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and on the Chiapas and Guatemala. We had not planned to go on; it was just that the road lured us with scenery that changed from lush beauty to dramatic harshness, then to cultivated valleys with villages nestling beside rivers, to hillsides of maguey plants, and to other hillsides that looked quite untenanted, as if man had yet to discover them.
We reached the Isthmus, hot after the gentle climate of the mountains and visited the market in the town of Tehuantepec. We bought hammocks, handmade and brilliantly colored, from the Tehuana, the stately, elaborately dressed women of this more or less matriarchal region, and I both admired and was amused by the flair with which they were those Spanish baby dresses on their heads.