The Weaving Village

Teotitlan de Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico

Slow processionary brass music accompanies the gentle march from the church to the graveyard. In front are the musicians - old men in cowboy hats and collared shirts. In back are the tiny withered old women wrapped in colorful shawls and carryng lillies. The silver-lined coffin is bore in the middle by the able-bodied who seem to be fulfilling their role of carrying the remains of the village forward from an ancient time of mountain community to a modern one of designer shirts, hair gel, and souvenir shops.

Luis was the drummer, an old man with sparkly eyes who greeted us with fist pounds. Whenever we asked him a question, he would look down, deep in thought, then lean extremely close, look mischieviously to the left and to the right, then answer with a conspiratory grin and a wink.

Horatio was the tuba player. He was heavily built and stood on a strong, tranquil foundation. He told us he wanted to go to the USA because there was a special kind of tuba he could get there.

The village is closed down out of respect for the deceased. No food stands are open, everyone is at the church to say goodbye.  It makes me think of my own funeral and who I hope will be there. The answer is simple: the community, bringing whatever they have to bring, closing down communal life for the day, coming together as a community to mourn and celebrate a life. That´s the meaning of togetherness, the virtue of village life. Yet it's all too clear who was here today: the aging, the fadng away, the carriers of a different and disappearing way of living: one marked by its simple togetherness, focus on the home, respect.

After the procession has passed, a short man in his thirties walks through the courtyard greeting all with a self-assured manner, yet he responds to my buenas tardes in a way that's barely polite. Kids ride bikes through the courtyard, laughing, oblivious to the ritual that has just passed.

Now we're here alone in the empty town in the desert at the base of the mountains, hungry, wondering what comes after the death of a village, what village can we build and be a part of so that our deaths will feel meaningful when the time comes to die?


PART II - LEARNING TO WEAVE

Teotitlan de Valle is an ancient Zapotec village whose central church is built on the ruins of a pre-Hispanic temple. The village is famous for the rugs they weave. We were hesitant to visit because my previous visit warned me that these days the village seems to exist solely to offer demonstrations of weaving (in English) and to sell finished rugs (most of which follow the same design) to tourists.

We came anyway because Nick met an old woman in the market of Oaxaca City who claimed she made blankets and spun her own wool. Nick wanted to learn how to weave his own blankets, belts, backpack straps...we wanted to learn how to weave.

We made it to town right after sunset and ate the most delicious burras at a place called Samburguesas. Then we looked for the old woman. She wasn't home so we sat on the concrete ruins of someone's roof and watched the stars. When she got home, she immediately started trying to sells us rugs, which seemed very expensive. It felt like she had no recollection of what Nick had said he was interested in, or else maybe her Spanish (which was, after all, her second language) wasn't so strong. When Nick finally made himself understood that he wanted lessons in weaving, not to buy rugs (it turned out, she didn't actually have any blankets anyway), she said her son could help us out. He would be there in the morning. In the meantime, she showed us to our room.

Her son, Luis, was not only a great weaver, but he turned out to be even more of a geek about the subtle chemistry of natural dyed than even Nick. They talked for hours about recipes and the differences in color you get by using the same ingredients in different kinds of pots. All morning we set up the loom to make 2 belts and 2 backpack straps when finally Nick's real desire emerged: to learn the Pre-Hispanic technique of weaving on a backstrap loom, and acquiring one small enough to fit in his little canvas backpack. Luis understood Nick's project and started making phone calls, speaking Zapotec into his state of the art cellphone.

We stayed in Teotitlan for 2 nights and by the time we left, we had learned how to weave as they did before the Spanish intriduced the giant pedal looms used by everyone these days. We walked away with far too much wool from Oaxaca sheep, hand spun, and home-dyed in classic cochineal, black and indigo. We're going to spend spring equinox  in the Mixe regin of the Sierra Norte making our belts on Nick's new loom, which weighs about as much as a couple bamboo twigs.

I read my piece posted above about the funeral to Nick and he disagreed about my sense of the village dying. Where I saw a beautiful old tradition reduced to mass production and catering to tourists, he saw a vibrant village that survived (like everyone else) in whatever way it could. He was optimistic that it still had young people like Luis who was a perfectionist about the chemistry of his people's tradition of dyeing. So much of this trip for us is about finding people who still live outside the incredible sway of the modern market economy, and seeing what we can learn from them. Teotitlan is a perfect example of a place in which the modern tourist market has redefined the entire economy of the town - the kids spent hours at night at an Internet cafe, paying to browse Facebook, the old lady (Luis' mother) had a huge Ford  Explorer in her courtyard with California plates registered in 2013, almost all of Luis' clothes had some sort of American symbol or name printed on them.

We understand that people do what they need to do to get by, and that more people welcome and prefer modern conveniences and innovations much more than modern cynics would have you believe. Still, in Nick's words, we're looking for somewhere that doesn't feel like the USA in a different language (even Zapotec). So now we're in Mitla, at the base of the Sierra Norte, preparing to go to villages that are hard to get to and almost never see foreigners.  This is one of the places that the Spanish never really penetrated and is part of the reason Oaxaca state is so famous for ethnic and linguistic diversity (though if you stayed in the city you would never know it). It's also part of the reason Oaxaca is technically the poorest state in all of Mexico per capita. We'll be out of contact a few days while we cross the mountains and then we're headed to Chetumal and then down into Central America.

NEXT POST: The Mixe, Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, and Nick's shoes, which he made out of leather strips and airplane tires.