It’s Friday afternoon in Oaxaca, and thunder has just driven me inside from our patio. We’ve had a lot of rainy days and few sunny ones. Last weekend brought an unexpected adventure: During breakfast Sunday morning, the crown on Steve’s front tooth came loose. Luckily, we were able to arrange an emergency appointment with a very kind, very capable dentist. One of the first things he did, however, without any warning, was yank the dead tooth out of Steve’s mouth. It didn’t cause him any pain, but it made me pretty woozy. I was really trying hard not to pass out as I translated the dentist’s explanation of Steve’s X-ray, but before long, I was dizzy, ashen, and having trouble feeling my fingers. The dentist helped me into his chair to recover, and Steve smiled down at me, gap-toothed, urging me to “jutht relakth”. It’s one of those images that immediately inscribed itself into my lasting memories of our relationship.
This weekend finds me a little homesick (for family and friends but also for the liberty to make myself a bowl of cereal at midnight or to sink into my own squishy couch) but also swimming in thought about all the new experiences that this place and my program have provided. I’m chipping away at an understanding of the culture here - both prehispanic culture and contemporary culture. I’m learning that “culture” – as a word, an idea, a lived reality - is even more elusive and complex than I thought, but I’m also slowly piecing together a new understanding – of people here and of my own cultural identity.
I am wondering about the two indigenous boys (brothers from the countryside who speak Chontal as their native language) who are living in our guest house and who Magdalena, our hostess, introduced as “new members of the family.” She is kind to them, but they do the work of servants – sweeping, washing dishes, cleaning out the birdcages, mopping the floors. In exchange, they will be able to go to school, an opportunity they probably wouldn’t have in the villages where their families live. The arrangement – which I really know very little about – makes me a little uncomfortable. Is it okay to exchange child labor for educational opportunity? Do cultural factors (for example, large, inclusive families in which all members – young and old – work to support the family business) make this arrangement more tenable than it might seem to me? How do these young men perceive their situation?
Being here has also helped me notice some things about my own culture. After visiting archeological sites, puzzling over codices, reading, and talking with various professors, I’ve learned a little bit about the ways that Zapotec and Mixtec people saw the world before the Spanish arrived. The main thing that strikes me is that they didn’t seem to compartmentalize the world as much as my culture has taught me to. For example, the sacred and the secular were far less distinct. Praying was not a personal, spiritual pursuit but a practice essential to keeping the world going. Priests and leaders were experts in making clouds rise out of mountains and rain fall onto fields. I see “religion” as something that can be chosen or not chosen (not unlike a product) and “god” as a separate entity from myself and the world, someone that occasionally floats into my consciousness. I don’t think the words “religion” or “god” would have made much sense to a person living in the Zapotec empire. The powerful forces of the world pervaded their lives and their surroundings more deeply than those words suggest.
Here, in modern Oaxaca, I see other places where my categories don’t seem to fit. The boundary between indoor space and outdoor space is much less defined than I’m accustomed to. It’s easy to see through, hear through, and smell through walls or doors, and most homes are designed to allow for fluid passage between rooms and courtyards, inside and outside. “Art” is another category that doesn’t seem to fit the way I’m used to. Art is not a special realm where a special breed of people (artists) reign and where the rest of us sometimes visit on weekends. In so many of the communities I’ve visited, people do art because it’s part of life. Women make comales or pots from clay so they can use them to cook tortillas and beans or so they exchange them at the market for other things they need. People learn to carve and paint wood and teach their children and neighbors to carve and paint wood so that they can distinguish their community as a tourist attraction and earn money to build schools. People pave roads with stones, cover floors in tile, paint homes, make clothes; all of these are both necessary activities and acts of art. I feel lucky to be in a place where art is everywhere – the Virgen de Guadalupe painted in the knot of a tree, red poster art clinging to blue stucco walls, vessels made of clay or stone or gourds on the table, flowers and crosses arranged in stone in the road under my feet – and I hope I can bring some of this back with me. I hope that I can learn to see my world as less divided, that I will see fewer products (religion, art, space) and more opportunities to create something.
