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The
Occasional
March 29, 2002
Oaxaca
Oaxaca is situated in a beautiful broad valley
surrounded by mountains which are covered in pine trees. Much of
the modern city itself is nondescript, but the old Spanish colonial
part of town is absolutely beautiful and feels like a world of fiction.
The Sokolo, the town square is as vibrant as any public place I’ve
ever seen. In the evenings it’s jammed with people walking
under the enormous trees. Music is everywhere; organized concerts,
wandering Mariachi bands and the occasional saxophone playing “My
Way.” Little kids are playing with balloons and teenagers are
escaping the censorship of their homes and kissing. The various
local Indian tribes (there were 53 dialects spoken in Oaxaca until
very recently) are selling wares ranging from woodcarving to weaving
to pottery. As with almost everywhere I’ve traveled in Mexico,
the people are kind. Except for the red haired hostess at El Asador
Vasco whose voice would be rejected as harsh by a flock of crows,
everyone is kind. I gather she’s somewhat famous in town. A
taxi driver named Mario knew instantly who I was talking about.
He took exception with my description of her voice, insisting that
a strangling Chihuahua was more like it.
Teotitlan del Valle
Whole towns outside of Oaxaca are dedicated
to a single craft. This town does woodcarving, this town pottery
and this town weaving. Demetrio Bautista Lazo weaves rugs in Teotitlan
del Valle. There is a photo of him at age seven sitting at his own
loom. There would be other photos of his father and his grandfather
and his great grandfather back to 1735 in the same pose if they’d
had cameras. His work is exquisite, a subtle departure from the
purely traditional. Men and women, eighty people in the family,
all work in weaving. Everyone’s rugs are on display in a building
which features a fabulous family-run restaurant and the only flush
toilet for miles.
Demetrio is unhappy because a rug he’s put seven or eight months
into was recently stolen. The piece was of a painting by Diego Rivera.
On the other hand, he’s happy because Jimmy Carter just bought
two pieces. He shows me a photo taken of him and his father and
his brother standing at the end of a rug the size of a tennis court
which was recently sent to Los Angeles by DHL. These sales are keeping
a craft alive which all but vanished in the mid-20th century, a
craft which is based upon natural dyes and community.
His son Victor has a black scorpion on a short leash (the black
ones only hurt like hell, it’s the yellow ones that will kill
you). His daughter Jessica poses for a photo on one of her grandfather’s
rugs which I buy. The red of the inner field is made from the most
unlikely source, an insect called Cochineal. The Cochineal obscures
itself in a white cotteny nest and feeds off of the prickly pear
cactus. Someone in the 18th century bumped up against one of these
cactuses and after the hail of profanity and removal of cactus spines
from their flesh was complete must have noticed that their clothing
had been dyed a bright red. By adding lime juice the red turns magically
to orange before your eyes. The blue of the rug is indigo. A tree;
trunk, branches, bark, leaves and roots is reduced to pulp, turned
into a sludge with water and poured into large drying trays and
finally broken into clumps like natural blue charcoal. One of the
trees is growing in the courtyard of the restaurant. The yellow
is derived from a parasitic plant which I’ve seen in the deserts
outside of Death Valley which looks like a profusion of yellow angel
hair pasta so dense it obscures the host. In a nearby town it covers
a Bougainvillea tree across from the 14th century church. The town
gardener knows not to burn the stuff, but calls Demetrio. Demetro
can be reached by calling 52 951 524 4090 or emailing demetrio_b@hotmail.com
(I was stunned too, frankly) Please tell them Will sent you.
Demetrio
Jessica
Santa Maria El Tule
On the way to Teotitlan del Valle, in Santa
Maria El Tule, you can see the world’s largest tree. Not the
tallest (I think that’s the Sequoia in California), but the
biggest in circumference. I’d seen pictures of this massive
cedar, but there is nothing that can prepare you for it. At 2000
years of age, it’s not young by any means, but there are trees
nearly twice that age. The Bristle Cone pines in the White Mountains
between California and Nevada are 3800 years old, but tiny, stunted
little things. This tree is not stunted. In Santa Maria they sell
a postcard of a little girl in a light blue dress standing at the
base of the tree. The photograph is horizontal. The girl is so small
her smile is barely visible and yet the photo still does not capture
the edge of the tree’s trunk on either side. Go to a football
field and start uncoiling rope at the goal line and go out past
midfield until you reach the far 40 yard line. Make a rough circle
of that rope. That’s the base of the tree. Or go out into a
parking lot and drop a book on the pavement to mark a starting place.
Now take sixty giant steps (you almost have to run to make them
large enough) and describe a circle. You’ve just run around
the tree. My hope is that enough people will be encouraged to try
the latter experiment so that others observing them from high rises
will think they’ve witnessed the onset of a new neurological
disorder.
Santa
Maria El Tule is an isolated little town today, but was infinitely
more so until very recently. The town’s people knew the tree
was big, of course, but had no real appreciation for how unique
it was. Eight years ago it had lost all but a few of it’s leaves
and had turned decidedly brown from years of neglect and lack of
water. Then some professor arrived from Mexico City and started
yelling at them to wake up and smell the roses. Not only was this
the largest tree in the world, but it was potentially the biggest
source of income the town had ever known in it’s entire history.
The tree began receiving a lot of attention and 5000 liters of water
a day and made a dramatic recovery. The tree was also threatened
by another scourge in the person of a furniture manufacturer from
Oregon. This visionary saw only board feet of lumber and offered
to buy the tree. There must be a special hell for these people.
Thankfully the town eventually rejected his offer after a period
of all-too-serious consideration.
This is one of the few places in Mexico where the face of Christ
has not been seen, but lots of other images emerge from the twists
and turns and burls of the tree. A local boy will take you on a
tour of the tree for 5 pesos. He carries a small mirror to reflect
light onto the part of the tree he wishes to highlight. Here is
the face of The Lion, here The Elephant (actually one of the most
obvious outlines). You proceed through The Dolphin, The Bull and
The Three Wise Men before coming to what the kid obviously regards
as the high point of the tour. He crouches on his haunches, getting
low to the subject, holding out his mirror between the iron fence
and proudly points to what is, at least to him and the other boys
so employed, “Monica Lewinski’s Butts.” I suggest
Jennifer Lopez’s Butts to be more contemporary (not to mention
far more aesthetic), but he insists not.
The
Big Tree
San Martin
I am not psychic. There are mysteries in this
lifetime, thank God, but I am a skeptic and do not pretend to have
any particular abilities beyond being able to play a decent melody,
drive a car without slamming into trees habitually and slug 16 penny
nails into softwood pretty well after some warm-up. But this really
happened. Mario took me to the village of San Martin to the home
of an artist, Jacobo Angeles, who had passed away and whose home
is now a school where promising young painters in Mexico are encouraged
to dream. The courtyard of this home is a magical garden; three
story Bougainvillea, royal palms and flowering vines. As we left
and closed the heavy iron gates behind us, I turned and looked to
a staircase of stone and terra cotta. My eyes didn’t see anything
but a staircase. But somewhere in my imagination I saw the fan of
a peacock as it climbed the stairs, turned on the landing and disappeared.
The gate closed, Mario and I walked toward the outdoor market and
I said, “Mario, I just dreamed a peacock.” Mario stopped
dead in his tracks and said, “ When Jacobo was alive, peacocks
lived in the Hacienda. They have not been there since he died.”
Will
(I
recommend reading Katanchel next)
Photos
by Will Ackerman
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