TomG
Apr 21, 2004, 11:50 AM
Post #14 of 31
(1714 views)
Shortcut
|
Re: [Marygwen] Maybe SMA is the place for me after all
|
Can't Post | Private Reply
|
Here's my wish list: incredible architecture (definitely number one); incredible beauty; artsy/off-beat ambience; history; a certain level of sophistication; doesn't have to be super up-market but don't want poverty/squalor; nice weather - probably won't be staying full time but would like pleasant winters - eternal spring is perfect; lots of gringos; tourists (if a place is great, they'll be there).
Heat/humidity would be the biggest negatives and I'm definitely not a beach type.
When I was in SMA, every white woman I saw was alone; it made me feel sad.
Oaxaca, Oaxaca has more colonial era architecture than SMA could hope for, and the decedents of the original Spanish still own the key property I am told by Oaxacan friends. But what do you mean by architecture?...Buildings? Or Walls? Much of what passes for incredible architecture is nothing more than old walls with a door in the wall (and maybe a few barred windows from the days when people could trust their fellow citizens enough to have windows facing the street). Behind those walls may be anything, from architecture to lean-to sheds serving as housing. A good exercise in Mexico is to get up to the roof of a taller building (like 2 stories in Oaxaca) and take a look around. You will get a eyeful. From here you do not see the front wall, but you do see inside the compounds and the other roofs. In Oaxaca many do not waste stucco and paint on anything but the fronts of walls and buildings.
You sound as though lifestyle is a real concern, but money is not. If this is the case Oaxaca might please you. Although the whole city is vastly overpriced in my opinion, within that framework, more expensive areas should allow one to live in a more complete illusion of colorful Mexican culture and manana inhabitants. Oaxaca’s zocalo is dreamier than most. If you picture yourself sitting in a sidewalk restaurant looking at photogenic balloon salesmen and turning away colorful dark-skinned trinket sellers while sipping $2 dollar coffee; this you can do indefinitely in Oaxaca. There is a steady stream of international tourists (especially US, Canadian, English, French and German), many of whom you might find at neighboring tables reading English newspapers. The fourth end of the zocalo is the government building where, except for Christmas high season, Semana Santa season, and the Guelaguetza, you will be disturbed by political reality. These high tourists seasons are not spontaneously respected by la gente comun. The respect comes top-down from the state police, sometimes with Lexan riot shields, who under political guidance, have tourism as the main source of state income in mind. The majority of these protests are made up of rural folks with complaints of political abuse, paramilitary killings, communal land disputes, and natural resources abuse documented on large canvas banners, in photo essays, with caskets and crosses, and blasted from loudspeakers. The best organized of these groups is, without a doubt, the old-fashioned communists. They had posted rotational eating schedules by ethnic areas, which rotated by meal and day. Individual demonstrations can go on into weeks and even months. Thus, as is often the case, the portales of the government building are used as an outdoor kitchen and sleeping area for the protestors. Truthfully speaking, if your Spanish is good, and you are simpatico, you could get a more authentic meal of Oaxaca cuisine with them then you could at the more gentile sidewalk cafes. But then again, if one ate with them it could be interpreted as a political statement and leave one subject to immediate deportation. Owning property could be a drag under these circumstances.
One colorful detail of the rural communists group is that they were still flying large banners of Marx, Engels, Lenin and (who in the world could possibly guess this one?) Josef Stalin. Whom their political officer was I do not know, but he would certainly make a great coffee conversation partner. My guess is that he comes from the ranks of the Mexican intelligencia who received university scholarships from the old Soviet Union and studied in Moscow. The United States has only informally offered scholarships to Mexicans in the way of lax enforcement against illegal fruit picking, service economy, and factory jobs. This makes US illegal, self-earned, scholarships from the “School of Hard Knocks”, the second largest form of national income for the whole Mexican national economy – second only to their large petroleum exports. While the Soviet Union has collapsed, these Mexican Soviet scholarship recipients are stilled employed in higher education. I just met one of them a few weeks ago. He is about early 40’s, speaks Spanish and Russian, only a few words of English, is a professor, writes for a newspaper, is very smart and perceptive, and is the best cultural critic I have met in Mexico. He often came back to this theme – he and the others in the room were university prepared intellectuals who only earn $5,000 to $6,000 US dollars in equivalent exchange from their work, while their equals in the USA earned $35,000 US dollars. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him his USA figures for public university professorships were outdated.)
It was the understated envy that caught my attention. Where had I heard that before?.... Well just about everywhere. Small poor farmers, indigenous peoples, pueblo residents, lower middle class city dwellers; they all had mentioned envy as a local social problem. “Here (insert the name of your rancho, pueblo, barrio, or city) the people are very calm and pacified; but over there (insert the name of the next rancho, pueblo, barrio, or city) it is dangerous: you can get robbed, assaulted, killed, you can’t walk alone at night, and the women are not safe. The only problem here (insert the name of the your rancho, pueblo, barrio, or city) is that the people have a lot of envy. Inequalities between social equals are accelerating rapidly with the remissions from workers in the USA that weekly arrive in nearly every Mexican community. Property values double and triple, construction labor and skills get bought up while their prices rise, the uneducated darker-skinned poor send money back to a family that begins to own more and live better than the doctor and teacher. Incentives get reversed. Why work at all when a family member on the other side can earn more in an hour than you can in a day? With the added free time, one will need a pickup truck to drive to store to buy stuff you would have made before. I was just recently a guest in a Mixe village in the sierra where Spanish is a second language; spoken to outsiders, most frequently by the young. Only three years ago, there were about three vehicles in the whole pueblo; now it is a full-time traffic jam on a mountainside. Nevertheless, you still have to walk part of the final distance up to a sacred mountaintop with a witchdoctor to make your pre-Hispanic sacrifices. Wouldn’t you know it?....We had to pass a couple of large encampment of state police, and the central subject: a roadblock heavily manned by men of one village who were only allowing passage to folks who could prove they were going to anyplace other than the competing village with whom they have an old communal land dispute.
Old photos of the ‘30’s and 40’s show that Oaxaca was a place of considerable architectural and natural beauty. That beauty has been steadily assaulted by the same problems that have plagued most of Mexico. To see Oaxaca de Juarez as beautiful now takes thick rose lens glasses. Although if you restrict your movements to a few blocks of tourist-ready el Centro, eat in a handful of fancy restaurants, and like your beggars to be good accordion players, Oaxaca could be perceived as remarkably beautiful. It is actually pretty difficult for the third world to stay beautiful in modern times in either their man-made or natural environments. Reducing the scale of one’s expectations on beautiful will produce results. Settle for a few square feet of beauty and you will find it easier to be pleased. Fixating on beauty, you mind will continually be thinking about what once was and what could be if.
artsy/off-beat ambience; history……Here you hit the jackpot. Oaxaca has a history of producing artists of considerable stature, as strange places often do. This is not really a complimentary thing. In an article about the effectiveness of the National Endowment for the Arts written in the 1980’s the writer said that the Soviet Union produced better writers in the Gulag Archipelago than the National Endowment did with their Artist’s Grants Programs. Whatever the social fertilizer they use it tends to grow major trained artists with a social conscience. One of Toledo’s Institutos is a very serious free non-lending art library with a large book collection in many languages (these types of books are most often not translated out of the original languages) that is sufficient to fuel a graduate Art History program in a state university in the USA. On a different scale, in the realm of folk art and crafts poverty and stubbornness are the main engines of cultural tradition. This is the best light that you can put on this stubbornness; socially it translates into collective passive aggression. In terms of “a certain level of sophistication”; you should get a portion of the sophistication that you pay for. I would not expect to walk into sophistication, but you may be able to buy your way into a bit of the appearances of it. On the other hand, you could just fall into it if you are the right kind of person and interest the right kind of people (I wouldn’t count on this unless you are creative, intellectual, and speak Spanish). There are visual artists and musicians worth knowing there. Lila Downs though not entirely an Oaxaca product, makes music at a high level of achievement. More locally, I made the acquaintance of “El Muerto”, a very accomplished guitarist with a love of jazz, folk, R&B, and classical. His arrangement of “Summertime” was the best I ever heard. He used to play with Lilia Down’s in her early days. If you ever make contact with him, take him a few CD’s of Willie Nelson and Hank Williams. In my last conversation with him at he club he asked about grass roots music in the USA. In terms of theatre, I saw only two local productions. One was very good and featured Ophelia Medina as a guest performer coming as a personal favor to Francisco Toledo. The other was a cartoonishly heavy-handed all female production of political skits which drew considerable approval from the locals. Locals high and low are accustom to finding external scapegoats for their problems, and they do so in most simplistic terms. They don’t do this with problems of trashing, municipal water, and garbage collection – and I assume it is due to a lack of ability to make more imaginative connections. Here is a case where rote learning methods fail them.
“doesn't have to be super up-market but don't want poverty/squalor”: Poverty is what Oaxaca is all about. It built Oaxaca and sustains it. Scarce undrinkable water is directed to el Centro to support tourism, insuring regular showers; while some distances outward less fortunate people carry water in buckets for their home use. Oaxaca tourism is build around three seasons: Christmas, Semana Santa (Easter), and the Guelaguetza festival in July. In between many just sit and wait in empty shops for next flock of chickens to pluck. Oaxacan tourism is built on poverty, which is sold as “custumbres”: the poor indigenous are encouraged to maintain their customs to provide the free entertainment, while the rich collect $200 hotel fees. Peddlers scratch out an existence selling crafts stuff they buy from less fortunate producers and from Chinese importers.
“nice weather”: Contrary to what has been said here about weather Oaxacan weather is desirable. If your picture of heaven is a climate where your ambience is meaningless because you never think of it, then you need to look at annual weather charts for relatively flat patterns month to month, with an appreciable drop in temperature from day to night for comfortable sleeping (a somewhat dry tropical climate with elevation). This kind of a climate does not build character, but it is very easy to live in. If those are your standards, Oaxaca has a climate that make SMA, Chapala, and other tooted highland places seem downright miserable. I just recently had this conversation with two women in the Semana Santa carnival-style market in Llano Park. One stall keeper was from Oaxaca and the other from SMA; when we described the climate of Oaxaca to the SMA woman, she went on to say how ratty the climate is in SMA, what with the extremes of hot and cold. I have not been to Cuenavaca, but its chart pattern looks pretty good. When you get to this point, you are really beginning to split hairs. A friend use to say, “If coffee grows, you want to be there.” = tropical highlands. Coffee does not grow in the actual Valley of Oaxaca, it does grow in the state.
“lots of gringos; tourists (if a place is great, they'll be there)”. ….????? Well… There are enough gringos and tourists in Oaxaca to spark the imaginations of all the populace. Each one is an outsider, a chicken to be plucked. For lack of world experience, many of the people of Oaxaca through the social ranks think that just one gringo well plucked might render enough to supply a lifetimes dream. Many are so dumb they don’t even know a coyote: that makes you their only hope for a good living without working. Many city dwellers of Oaxaca couldn’t cut the mustard as illegals; pueblo people do cut the mustard. Some indigenous pueblo people consider the city dwellers to be “dirty and lazy ones.”
“In the US, I like New Orleans the best but have decided against it because of crime, poor economy:” New Orleans and Oaxaca have a lot in common: festival loving people, rigid social stratification, music, success at selling their native home-cooking as cuisine, and banana republic politics. Laughably, you can buy scrambled eggs in Oaxaca as native gastronomy. Grandma’s pollo estufado was first class, but 5 months of unsuccessfully trying to get her, her daughters, or daughters-in-law to write down the recipe may have been due to none being much able to write; and being too embarrassed to ask the doctor do it. New Orleans may be the best preparation that an American can have for Oaxaca. Crayfish <> grasshoppers.
|
Forums Index
Search Posts
Who's Online
Log In or Sign Up
My wife and I went over and over this. What could the difference be between our immigrant friends up north and our neighbors in the barrio in Oaxaca? We settled on natural self-selection as a part of the answer. Other factors we felt were different regions (in truth you might as well be in a different country in some states), the influence of an organized environment (they admire it), higher pay, and the feeling of a more fair game (Can you believe that! Even the immigrant game here is perceived as more fair than life back home.). We think that different regions of Mexico play a big part. We watched a couple of big dual axle trucks pull up before daybreak on the Gulf Coast a few weeks ago. 20 to 30 people of all ages and both sexes quickly showed up with buckets and day food; and began to climb aboard. Spirits were high. This is where your fruits and vegetables come from in Mexico. The pay would have been typically between 45 and 50 pesos a day for this kind of farm labor – long day, hard work. If Roy and Ed & Fran are reading, they know these kinds of people. We know people from that area both down there and up north. As a Central Mexican friend says of the other workers at the stone quarry where he works in the USA, “The Veracruzanos are very hard workers.” Stone quarry work isn’t for wimps. I venture to say if the big truck had pulled up before daybreak in Oaxaca de Jaurez (City) they would not have found anybody stirring. If they waited until 9:30 AM they could have encountered unemployed city people and began haggling over how much they were paying, and just exactly how much work they expected to have done. Assuming anyone would have agreed to work, and if they had just said “picking fruit”, they would have gotten picked fruit, not loaded, along with the pay demands. More likely about 11 AM, having been told where to get off, they would have thrown up there hands and left empty handed. 
1
2
View All