Oaxaca Trip Report Part I

Barry and me in front of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca

A scene from the etnobotanico de Oaxaca

Old Oaxaca viewed from the hill.
Oaxaca side street

Here I am at the market.


Here’s my long awaited Oaxaca report. I had wanted to make installments while there, but had difficulties in getting my pictures to upload.

A Bit of Background
The state of Oaxaca is located at the southern Pacific bulge of Mexico. It is made up in large part by mountains, the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca on the east and the Sierra Madre de Sur on the west. A coastal plain meets the Pacific Ocean. Despite its southern latitude, Oaxaca’s elevation and sea breezes creates a moderate climate with seasonal summer rains and dry winters with plenty of sunshine. This, we enjoyed immensely during our stay.

Oaxaca City, the state’s capitol, and its surroundings, is where we spent our time. Oaxaca, with pre-Columbian indigenous traditions, was laid out in 1529 by Spanish conquistadors and thus is filled handsome Spanish Colonial architecture. The old city is compact and very walkable.

Here are the highlights of our days which I think appeal to the textile enthusiast:
Visit the markets: Mercado Juarez and the Mercado San Juan de Dios. Here you’ll find everything from live turkeys, to samples of mescal, to sellers of embroideries, handwoven blouses and skirts, as well as rugs big and small.

We also visited the Mercado de Artesanias, the handcraft market, but were disappointed. Other craft shops to visit are Mujeres Artesania de las Regiones de Oaxaca at 204 Cinco de Mayo which is a government supported facility where women from across the region sell their wares. My favorite shop was La Mano Magico at Alcala 203. The shop offers high quality crafts and next door in the courtyard you can watch a weaver and see some beautiful rugs.

Once you start walking around this beautiful city, you’ll see textiles everywhere. There’s an outside market not far from the cathedral Santa Domingo where you’ll find crafters selling textiles. Another shop, on a side street next to the Santa Domingo, at Allende #113, is Etnico Textiles, a tiny but jam-packed shop. I loved the well-made pillows and bags made from traditional fabrics. Another shop I loved was the austere and beautiful Tienda Q at M. Bravo 109. On display were high-quality contemporary textiles and crafts.

It is not uncommon to see street sellers with rugs or shawls along popular pedestrian routes, and if you happen to stop for a cup of coffee at one of the pleasant restaurants under the portico in front of the zocolo (central plaza), you’ll have sellers visit you right at your table.

Stroll from the zocolo up the pedestrian street , Andador Macedonio Alcala to the Centro Cultural de Santo Domingo which is comprised of the Iglesia y Ex-Convento de Santo Domingo and the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca. Outside, a must see is the Oaxaca botanical gardens, the Etnobotanico de Oaxaca (check the times for their English tours).

Another must-see stop is the newly opened (April 2008) Museo Textil de Oaxaca at Miguel Hdalgo #917. We enjoyed the exhibit Animated Wefts, a Textile Zoo, featuring textiles from around the world.

Good Eats:
Restaurant los Pacos (love the mole), at Abasolo 121
Café La Olla, Reforma 402, delicious Mexican nuevo cuisine (if there’s such a thing). You can eat the salad here.
Casa Oaxaca, at Garcia Vigil 407. A great splurge restaurant with superb service and delicious food.
Mercado 20 de Noviembre, two blocks south of the zocolo’s southwest corner. A culinary must for the adventurous eater (I won’t reveal more—you just have the experience this!)

We stayed at the pleasant Hotel Casa Vertiz (Reforma 404), just behind Santa Domingo.

Twenty Thousand Years Ago

Here in Oaxaca I’ve been reading Women’s Work , by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. In it she talks about the evidence that suggests that women first started weaving some 20,000 years ago during the upper palaeolithic age in the Dordogne river valley in France. The author notes that until the industrial revolution changed the task of cloth making, we no longer engage in the day-to-day activity of making textiles.
That is, unless you’re in the Oaxaca valley were whole families, no, entire villages, are involved in the making cloth. This, I learned on a recent visit to Santa Ana de Valle where I visited a weaver and dyer, a reed and heddle maker, a carpenter crafting looms, and a family cultivating the cochineal bug used to make a beautiful red dye.
I don’t know how these crafters and growers view their lives, but I felt a sense of connectedness to textile makers and traditions that emerged some 20,000 years ago when humankind began to create fabric from fiber.
In the Oaxaca valley, the tradition of creating cloth by hand lives on in the lives of the people who make them and indeed the textiles themselves.

Trip to Oaxaca:bamboo fence

Leaving the familiar for the unfamiliar has a way of heightening your senses and allowing you to see things in new ways. That’s one of the wonderful things about travels, especially if they take you far away from the every day.
Yesterday I arrived with my husband Barry and friends to the hills of Oaxaca, and today we oriented ourselves to our little village. We lunched outside beside a pond where the air was perfect and the Modelo beer refreshing, and on the walk back home bought some very good mescal from the back of a pick-up truck. We spied the internet café where I’ll make this post and watched a man unload firewood from his burro just outside our gate. We reflected on the contrast of the high tec just steps away from life lived seemingly unchanged for centuries.
Along the dusty narrow streets lined on either side with high adobe walls and fences, many woven bamboo ones like this one made practical use of local materials.