In our defense, three conspiratory situations led us, Judas goat-like, to this betrayal without being in full franchise of what we were getting ourselves into.
1) At that time, two of the three of us were severely challenged in the "speaking and/or reading Spanish" department; my uncle's involvement with the activities of our host family meant that he wouldn't necessarily have been paying attention to, oh, the news.
2) CNN.com is pretty much how I get my news, and without access to it, I might as well be residing on some random Pacific atoll for the amount of knowledge I have about goings-on when I am abroad.
3) We were pretty much doing anything that the Mexican host family we were staying with decided would be awesome to do.
The majority of the time we'd spent in country by this point was in Hujuapan de Leon, a largish Oaxacan city nearish to Tlaxcala (in the northern part of the state) and Mexico City. However, one of the brothers of this family secretly lived in Oaxaca City, the Big Mole-Sauced Chicken Thigh herself, and thought that the city's beautiful landscape, baroque architecture and lively culture would be interesting to us. After a few days in Hujuapan - which, I hasten to say, is a lovely place - I fiercely desired to see a more vivid, in-your-face (read: exotic) Mexico; the anthropologist in me clamored for regional costumes and the opportunity to purchase ass-loads of handicrafts, the historian lusted for sight of fifteenth-century architecture and the part of me that remains human lusted after food that wasn't hacked out of or drained from a goat.
We get to Oaxaca in the middle of the night and proceed to pass right the feck out after driving from Huajuapan. And by "driving" I mean "my uncle did all of the driving because a) it was a stick-shift car and b) because it was Mexico." While tooling around the city the next morning (and, as an aside, frightening my relatives with my insensate, rabid lust for ethnographic artifacts), we casually mentioned that we'd not seen anyone in more traditional clothing to our guides. While I certainly wasn't expecting everyone to be girded in hand-woven woolen delights, we had been assured that Oaxaca was a city that prided itself as being a bastion of traditional Mexican lifeways. That, and, uh, we'd been promised that we'd see cool things. One of our guides then disappears and is gone for about thirty minutes; he returns as though he'd not been gone, and our unspoken supposition - that he'd needed to duke - was not challenged.
Later that night, we begin moving toward Oaxaca's zocalo, a word that I have been assured means "stewed chicken neck that one dredges up from the bottom of an otherwise perfectly lovely soup." No, it's the city's biggest plaza or square; Mexico City's zocalo (which I believe is capitalized [pun!] with a "Z") is pretty damn enormous and has the biggest flag I have ever seen in my entire life flying above it. Anyway, at this point we're told that there had been some "problems" in recent months in Oaxaca involving teacher strikes. My uncle indicates at this time that he'd been peripherally aware of this; my cousin and I are like, hmm, yay! Civic unrest! In Latin America! While we are here!
At that moment, an earlier exchange I'd had with a shopkeeper made much more sense.
Me: How much is this weird rug-thing with the creepy birds on it?
Elderly but spry shopkeeper: [fantastically enormous sum of money]
Me: Feck this shet. [leaving]
EBSS: [grabs my shirt and partially kneels] Lemme level with you. I'm hungry. My eight kids and my fifty-nine grandkids are hungry. Nobody comes to this god-forsaken hole anymore now that the teachers have gone and fecked everything to death. Putas! Bad for tourism. Bad for my belly. Hey, make me an offer, man. It's either that or I'll hide in the alley and wait to slit your throat for your debit card. What'll it be?
Me: How's twenty-five bucks sound? Isn't that, like, two billion pesos?
He mumbled throughout the entire transaction, which led me to believe that I'd royally bum-banged him for betraying his desperation. However, seeing many other, similar objects later that week for sale at a quarter of that, I came to the realization that I might as well have greased up, licked my lips and bent over for what I'd paid. (My guides nearly died with shame that a) a Oaxaceno could have done that to a tourist and b) that I was nearly functionally retarded when it came to how much one should pay for things in Mexico).
So: teacher strikes. Widespread unease. A highly weakened tourism base, through which one out of three Oaxacenos earns a living. Well isn't THIS effin' fancy, I thought, but kept my white, round-eye trap shut as we moved toward the zocalo.
As we move toward the city center, I begin to wonder why we'd be doing so. Heaps of things laying the middle of roadways reminded me a little too much of the barricades in Les Misrables; a confirmation that this is what they actually were didn't necessarily reassure me. Let's keep going, our guides insisted, and because Conspiratory Situation Number Three was still in effect, we just went with it.
At this precise astral moment, 1691 miles away, Keith logs in to CNN.com to see that there has been some "violent" unrest in Oaxaca, Mexico that week. He proceeds to lay a golden egg in his boxer-briefs.
In another part of the forest, we begin move through the zocalo, which had been cordoned off by protesters and was covered in graffiti, posters, and wet garbage. My uncle, who'd been to Oaxaca's city center before it looked like that, sighed at the passage of a beautiful thing
and then began to take pictures.
It was only after the second flash that I realized what he was doing, and lawd, did I become sore afraid. "Pray, dear uncle, what are ye doing?", I squeaked, trying to look as grave and somber as the unwashed folks who were cooking things in holes in the pavement. "Perhaps these fine AND CERTAINLY JUSTIFIED folks would like to not have this bit of hell immortalized in thy camera."
I don't think he heard me, or else politely ignored my entreaty; the unwashed folks who were cooking things in holes in the pavement went back to moistly reeking and cooking, and my uncle got quite a few great pictures of the zocalo. I can say they are great now because a) I'm about 2,000 miles away and b) I didn't get murdered.
The crudely-drawn hand with the middle finger is pretty saucy, no? I have to admit, though: I couldn't draw a better hand myself, so more power to the proletariat.
At the center of the zocalo, they'd covered over what I've been assured was a lovely fountain with anti-Ulises (the then-governor of the province) smear.
On the surface of this note: we're sorry things look like shet but we're making history.
Subtext: Go home, white round-eyes, and leave us the feck alone.
The tarp-city.
Finally, my cousin got up the chutzpah to ask the all-important "WTF are we doing here?" question of our guests, and we were led quietly to a building just on the edge of the zocalo and guided inside.
Ah. A Mexican folk-dancing troupe. Our whining about not seeing "traditional" Mexican things meant that our hosts had secured us five seats at a performance of Oaxaca's very own Grupo Folklorico Teotzapotlan, which held court on what would ordinarily have been a rather beautiful hotel's dance floor. However, as the front entrance of this establishment was, oh, directly off of the city's ruined zocalo, things had...well...gone south a bit. There was still pride and charm, but let's just say that big metal bars do not a decoration style make.
The leader of this group was a woman who apparently calls herself "La Gordita", which, yes, means "The Little Fatty." In Mexico, like many other much cooler places in the world, being plump is pretty fly. She whistled through her teeth a lot to signal dance maneuver changes.
Ladies dancing. OK, motherhumpers: there are only seven of them, as opposed to the requisite nine. But two of the gentlemen DID have a rather feminine energy...
Also: I don't know why there are pineapples on their shoulders, so don't ask.
And the "Gaily-Painted Gourd Calabash Held Aloft While I Have a Lacy Headdress-Thing On Dance", which was my favorite of all.
We left the folk dance feeling better that we'd seen some local color and that we'd (through our hosts) been able to pump a little money into the city's dying perishing tourist infrastructure. The fact that we'd crossed over a de facto picket line to do so, though, meant that I felt as though the acts canceled themselves out in terms of karmic retribution.
Later that week, though, as electrolytes were ejected from my body at speeds generally regarded when speaking of horseracing, I became aware of the ghastly, altogether stark truth.
And so, on this "ninth day of Christmas", I am reminded of a crossed picket line, a dancestravaganza, and, as high retribution for this from an as-of-yet undetermined spiritual force, losing twelve pounds of water weight in a foreign country.
I remain, as ever,
Domonic (maybeitwasthatchickenneck) Potorti
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