It's been a long time

Today you're looking at the 51st post I've managed to put together on this blog since I started keeping it, which was, by some stroke of synchronicity, almost exactly five years ago.  That's an average of 10 posts a year, not too bad!

When I think back on five years ago, and read what I was writing then, I realize how so much is different and yet how much is still the same.  Back then, I had recently arrived in Oaxaca, Mexico for the 2nd time, and as my writing was a lot more sporadic at the time, I managed to leave out quite a few of the experiences I'd had there.  So today I thought I'd see how good my memory is as I try to piece back together one of the more interesting excursions I took outside of the city.

This particular day involved a trip stopping off at a number of locations, each one offering a vastly different experience.  The first was at a town politically separate from Oaxaca, although with the urban sprawl of recent years you never really leave what feels like a city before you see this:

This tree, the granddaddy of all junipers, belongs to a species known locally as the ahuehuete.  It's enormous.  It's not the tallest tree in the world, nor is it the oldest.  But its amorphous trunk has the biggest circumference of any known living tree.  As far as I know of, anyway.

It, and a younger specimen of rivaling immensity in the near vicinity, are now located within a populated area known as Tule.  But historically this area, like much of Oaxaca, was a swamp, and this particular swamp as it had once occurred would have been the home to countless such wooden giants, a veritable freshwater mangrove forest of gargantuan proportion.  Today the two millenary survivors are fenced off into well-manicured gardens, where local boys will, for a few pesos, point out some animal shapes in the knobby trunks and branches.  To this end they are equipped with handheld mirrors to bounce some sunlight onto the formations in question, like a low-tech laser pointer.

Once you've had your fill of these massive specimens, you can make your way to Mitla:

Like many Mexican towns, this one bears both a Spanish name and an original name from Pre-Columbian times (albeit hispanicized from its former pronunciation of Mictlán).  Today many of them are known colloquially, more often than not, more by their original name than the Spanish one.  Nonetheless, the Spaniards left an indelible mark on the community of San Pablo Villa de Mitla, which was still populated and in use when the Spanish arrived.  Mitla had been a religious center for the local Mixtec and Zapotec people, and recognized as a gateway between the land of the living and the dead.

As such, there had once been an extensive series of temples and other ceremonial buildings in the community, the walls of which were graced with intricate stonework interlaid without the use of mortar.  These designs were intended at least in part to facilitate the transmission of one's spirit into the next world.

Take, for example, the recurring pattern seen in the middle of this photo. Here we can see a visual representation of one aspect of the Mesoamerican cosmovision.  The staircase represents an individual's ascendance from birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. This was followed by the spiraling mystery of existence in the afterlife, only then to be proceeded by another staircase, another life.  Reincarnation!

The Spanish came to such a place and ordered the temples to be dismantled, the stones of which to be incorporated into the church you see above.  Fortunately, not all the temples were needed for that project, and thanks to the lack of mortar, which is more susceptible to erosion, what's left of the temples can still be appreciated today.

After wondering over the silent monuments of (not so) ancient civilizations, you can take a swim in a place known poetically as hierve el agua.  That translates more or less as "The water boils."  I couldn't decide if the water in this shallow pool was really a hot spring, or if the warmth of the water was the product of the perpetually warm Mexican sunshine, and the insulation of the warmed stone beneath it.  Not to mention the further natural heating power of dozens of tourists piling into it every day!

But the real draw of this pool was the incredibly high concentration of mineral content, not the least of which is calcium bicarbonate.  The effect on the bather is the bubbly sensation of soaking in Alka-Seltzer.

You also are afforded, from your perspective in a pool located on the edge of a cliff, a panoramic view of the unspoiled natural landscape all around.  Devoid of any human settlements as far as the eye can see, what you get is a quintessential hot spring experience, as close to nature as a modern human will often find himself.

Before I took a swim myself, I took a quick jog up the hill to see the pools themselves from another vantage.  Here you can see how the cliffside below the pools has accumulated centuries of mineral buildup as water has spilled endlessly over it, like a petrified waterfall.

The trip came to its conclusion with one more stop, this time at a mezcal distillery.

One of the things I suspected through some prior samplings but never knew for sure until I spent some time in Mexico is that I love mezcal.  When it is made well, it has for me a flavor which rivals the complexity of the finest whiskey from either side of the Atlantic, and at a fraction of the price.  It took me awhile to find some mezcal that genuinely belonged to this rarified category, but by my reckoning, Mezcal El Mitleño's top shelf offering, at about $50 a liter, is a fantastic imbibe.  On the other hand, there's a lot of mezcal out there that ought to be reserved for cleaning the floor, so watch out!

Here, we were offered a tour that explained the process of making mezcal.  The first steps are illustrated above.  You cut the leaves respectfully from the agave plant until you are left with a pineapple-shaped core.  This you slice from the earth and cart off to the distillery.

The next thing you're going to want to do is take those big agave hearts, pile them into a big hole on the ground, and smoke them good.   The heat converts the natural starches of the agave into deliciously caramelized sugars available for fermentation, and the technique also imparts onto the final product that magically smoky overtone I've never gotten from any other beverage.

The next step is to grind up the smoked agave into a pulp ready for fermentation, and later, distillation.  Then it's into a barrel with it for at least a year before it's good enough to drink.

At the end of the tour, we got to try the mezcal, and my heart was won by their highest-end bottle, still a steal at the price I mentioned above.  In fact, I bought enough of it to travel with, and I drink it sparingly enough to still have a few ounces left for sharing on a special occasion.

Once armed with a bottle of high-proof drink, and once back in the city of Oaxaca, I was now equipped to embark on one of my other favorite activities in Mexico: street food!  This stand was serving up empanadas de amarillo, which quickly became my preferred main course of any Mexican street food adventure.  It is basically a corn tortilla with chicken and a fantastic sauce of yellow color, hence the name of the dish.

But what really kept me coming back for more of the Mexican food on the street and in the markets was the endless variety available to try, from the well-known tacos, tamales y tortas to some of the lesser-known and exotic preparations: chapulines, huitlacoche, tlayudas, molotes, chochoyones, atoles, pulques, to name a few with no explanation whatsoever.

If you're worried about the safety or cleanliness of what you just ate, don't.  That's what the mezcal is for.  I can tell you after weeks of frequenting countless markets and food stands on the streets of Oaxaca, and always going to a cantina or back home for a shot or two of mezcal afterwards that no harm will come to you if you follow that formula.  And in the process you will have tasted what Mexican food really is, and due to the naturally gregarious Mexican spirit, you will have met plenty of people happy to talk and listen for as long as the meal lasts.

How I learned Spanish

Back when I was living in Santa Fe, I discovered Allá, a bookstore downtown that specializes in rare books from Latin America.  I would have probably never wandered into its hidden upstairs location if I hadn't first become fascinated by a book in Spanish that I was determined to find.

I first heard of the book during my first trip to Mexico, where I had been on an immersion Spanish course during the summer.  Little did I know before leaving that my trip to Mexico would occur during the infamous teacher strike of 2006.  News traveled slowly enough about this strike that tourists were still obstinately crawling through the historic center of Oaxaca, attempting to go about their regular tourist business while ducking under the tarps and canopies of the teachers' makeshift campgrounds that lined virtually every downtown street.

The institute where I was studying was just a few blocks from the focal point of the teachers' demonstrations, and one day after our morning classes were over, this sight greeted us just outside the walls of our quiet language school.

The protest was truly impressive, with people marching in a line as far as the eye could see in both directions, and featuring hundreds of signs and dozens of paper mache symbols of what the teachers were rising up against.  For someone like me, experiencing Latin America for the first time, I found the energy and the sheer number of people involved to be at once exciting and frightening.  One thought resonated with everyone in the small group of foreigners I happened to be standing amongst: this protest isn't going to just fade away.  Either they're going to get what they want, or they're going to be forcibly silenced.

In the end, it was the latter that brought the ongoing protests to an end.  The first of the government's military responses occurred just a week after this picture was taken when thousands of police entered Oaxaca's downtown area.  With the use of helicopters, tear gas, rubber bullets and flame throwers, the protesters were systematically driven out and their lean-to dwellings on the streets were destroyed, effectively wiping out the infrastructure of their live-in demonstration against the state government.

That particular day we still had classes, and within the walls of the institute life felt just about normal, with tea and biscuits next to our notebooks as we commenced our lesson for the day.  Our professor Luis relentlessly steered our conversation back to literature throughout our barrage of endless questions about what was going on outside.  Despite my own deep curiosity about the teachers and police, a moment came when my interest was definitively captured by our day's reading, and it was at that moment that my fascination with Latin American literature was born.

We were reading about one of the first encounters between the Spaniards and the people of the mainland American continent.  11 ships are burning and they burn too the rebel soldiers that are hanging on the captain's ship.  While the jaws of the sea open devouring the flames, Hernan Cortes, on foot upon the sand, grips the pommel of his sword... 700 men in Mexico, towards the mountains, the volcanoes and the mystery of Moctezuma.  So went this bold tactical move by one of history's most notorious conquistadores according to the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.  As I wrapped my mind around the words of this unfamiliar language, I witnessed fleetingly the unfolding of 500 years of history between the moment we were reading and the moment of the battle outside.  I decided then that I wanted to read more from this book we were sampling, and that I wanted to know as much as I could about the long history of the Americas, all the Americas, especially Mexico and the many countries of Central and South America.

With that intention I stepped into Allá bookstore for the first time, and bought Los nacimientos, volume 1 of the series Memoria del fuego.  From that day on I didn't leave home without that little yellow book and my fat Spanish-English dictionary.  Knowing already that I had another trip to Mexico and a subsequent one to Ecuador ahead of me, I set about studying that book, reading passages over and over until I could understand them in Spanish without thinking about the corresponding words in English.

As it turned out, I don't think I could have picked a better piece of literature for my purpose of studying both Latin American history and the Spanish language at once.  Galeano's three volume set begins with dozens of pre-Colombian creation stories which culminate with the founding of the mighty Aztec kingdom and the many prophecies of the coming Spanish Conquest.  It then shifts to documented moments in history, beginning with Columbus' 1st voyage and continuing throughout history until the final decades of the 20th century in volume 3.  Each moment is a story that stands alone as well as it fits in with the sweeping chronology of the discovery, conquest and colonization of these continents by the European nations, and the subsequent revolutions and development of the distinct countries which color modern maps of the Western hemisphere.

Each story is told as if it were happening in the present, each moment is taken from real history, and none of the stories exceed 3 pages in length.  A perfect way to take a basic understanding of Spanish vocabulary and verb tenses and shape it story-by-story into a broad perspective on Spanish language, history and literature.  The series has its critics, especially from professional historians who scoff at its brief accounts and lack of detailed footnoting.  But Galeano has crafted a work that lies somewhere between non-fiction and literature, and also provides one or two primary sources for each of his hundreds of historical cuentos.  For someone like me, a novice when it comes to Latin American history, I've found countless reference points from his stories which I can further explore when I choose to.  More often than not, I let these moments in history sift through my mind and am content with the fact that when I need to know more about them I can pull these books from the shelf and reacquaint myself with the story.  Then I can investigate further, either using the references Galeano provides or by simply punching some key words into a wikipedia search.

Hats off to Eduardo Galeano.  As I often find from truly good literature, a good story hooks me from the first line.  I've also thought that life is too short for too much fiction and daydreaming.  In a series that contains hundreds of stories drawn from the real history of the world, I get hooked by these first lines over and over again.  To leave you today, I give you my pale translation of the first lines from Volume 1, a veritable Genesis story in what could be considered a kind of Bible of American history and prehistory:

The woman and the man dreamt that God was dreaming of them.  God dreamt of them while singing and shaking his maracas, enveloped in tobacco smoke... and together they will live and they will die.  But they will be born again.  They will be born and they will die and again they will be born.  And they will never stop being born, because death is a lie.