Oaxaca

On Wednesday the 25th of October we caught the 9:35 a.m. Continental Express flight to Houston. It was an uneventful flight on an Embraer EJR-145 jet. These are small commuter jets, made in Brazil. There is a narrow aisle, and each row has one seat on the left side and two on the right. There is only one flight attendant. The overhead bins are only on one side, and so small that there is not room for normal maximum-size carry-on luggage. Before the flight, the woman who had earlier checked us in went through the lounge, putting blue gate-check tags on the larger carry-ons—they would have to be left at the plane door and picked up on the way into the Houston terminal.

There doesn’t appear to be any interesting place to eat at the Houston airport, so we ended up having an early dinner at Fuddrucker’s.

We saw a beautiful sunset on the plane (another EJR-145) going from Houston to Oaxaca, but otherwise another uneventful flight. Getting into the city was another question. We loaded onto a combi minivan-taxi with seven other people and headed off. It seemed strange that the driver, instead of taking the main highway to town, followed twisty back roads. It turned out that the recent heavy rains had wiped out a bridge.

We were in four groups. First to get off were two Mexican women, who were going to catch a bus for a five-hour ride to their village in the mountains, where, presumably, everyone’s first language was not Spanish but Mixtec.

Next were two young women from the rear seats, who got out at the central square, the Zocolo. They had spent the trip into town speaking to each other in some Scandinavian language. Occasionally I heard a word I recognized: Washington, Jefferson, Baltimore, Georgetown, Chiapas, fliegen (to fly), Mexico City.

Third were an older Mexican man, a younger American in a suit, who spoke little or no Spanish, and an American guy (not in a suit), who spoke very good Spanish. The two Americans, at least, were lawyers of some sort. They got off at the Holiday Inn Express.

Finally, we arrived at our B&B, not far from Santo Domingo church. It is very nice, though our room is kind of small. We were going to take our showers and go to bed, but the water was out. The next morning, the owner apologized, saying that this hadn’t happened for a long time. The city water hadn’t been working for five days, but they had five water tanks (tinacas) on the roof. Suddenly, these had stopped working. Sometime early in the morning they got the water back going, but they still had to bring in a plumber, who arrived at the same time (around 9:30) that I got back from leaving Mary Joy at the bus for her trip into the countryside. (I wouldn’t let him follow me into the house, since he didn’t have a key. He tried to explain that he didn’t have a key and was there for work, but gave up and just rang the doorbell. He looked more like a college kid, with a backpack, than a plumber.)

Oaxaca is a beautiful colonial city. In the eighteenth century it got rich on the cochineal trade. Cochineal is a brilliant red dye, made from a certain sort of insect that is found on prickly-pear cacti, collected and ground up. Much of the money ended up being spent on buildings, especially churches.

We spent a long weekend in Oaxaca in October, 2002. We visited the spectacular Zapotec ruins at Monte Alban and had a driver take us to the outlying villages, each of which is known for a particular craft. We ended up with a few small rugs, some black pottery and an alebrije, a fantastically painted little wooden monster. We also saw the restored baroque organ at San Jeronimo Church in Tlacochahuaya—something that we’ll get much better acquainted with on this trip. One result of the cochineal boom was that even small village churches ended up with beautiful one-manual, no-pedal organs. They have fallen into disuse and decay, but now there is a foundation that is restoring them and working to train young Mexican organists to play them.