Hola Folks!
Perhaps you are thinking, “Oh, that boy has been gone so long, and no word from him yet, save a scribbled postcard”. To this delay, I can readily point at two culprits thus clearing my name and upholding my untarnished reputation as an industrious and responsible young man whose ever foremost concern is keeping his elders informed of his whereabouts, activities, and state of being, both mental and physical. The factors impeding my grace are these:
A. The much famed Mexican postal service. They are known for their extreme disorganization and high illiteracy rate among sorters. And the Oaxaca puebla postal transport has been suffering an alfalfa shortage, thus increasing resistance to service by the burros. Also it is a documented fact that the consumption of certain types of chili peppers will drive people to extreme laziness. Postal service workers are know to consume these with extreme gusto.
B. It has become very apparent to me that while eating beans and rice in a market food stall, I unwittingly consumed what I thought to be your average salsa, but much to my surprise, it contained a none to docile dose of the above mentioned peppers. Subsequently I, beyond all efforts to the contrary, have been driven to long lazy afternoons swaying in a hammock under the shady mango tree or sitting in the Zocalo on a bench, little more able than to read and watch the senoritas go by. And desire though I might I could not muster the needed motivation to work up a letter. I would struggle, but tire myself even at the thought of removing the pen cap. And so with a big sigh I’d slump down into the bench again and maybe chit-chat with the postal worker falling asleep beside me.
Of course, I ate no more such salsa and the old active self is returning, with occasional relapses. And now I’ve started a letter, and in a selfish attempt to protect dear ‘ol lethargic me I have plummeted to feeding on the most evil and vile devices of exploiting demeaning stereotypes of the Mexican way, thus giving yet more creed to my northern counterpart’s already twisted view of the people among the cactus.
There is perhaps no redemption for such a crime, as a plead of guilty is nothing once the deed is done. But what am I if not an American, ever ready to gain at another’s loss!
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Life here for me is so full and often exhausting. It is a very physical existence, with lots of bicycling and walking. Mentally, while most of my conversations do not reach great intellectual heights they revolve around new territory for me. The value of a bull, the coming of the rain, black bean plague, the amount of work to gather wood for the kiln, the neighbors bad character, the flavor of tortillas, going wet back to the U.S., and so on and on. They have a very direct style – some conversations are repeated daily with different folks – “where are you from?” The U.S. I say, California (who the hell knows where Nevada is). California to most Mexicans is L.A. “Is there work up there”. “How can I get up there?”
These conversations get old, irritating, but the irritation is always outweighed by the absurdly overwhelming hospitality of the people. They never hesitate to buy you lunch or a soda or open their house to you. There is an incredible warmth among the people that I have never seen in the U.S.
And yet while I’m seeing all this and soaking it in, I am also able to stop idealizing Mexico and especially Mexican village life. In their beauty there is also the negative. Villages are perhaps like big families held too close. They are full of strife, envy and gossip. Most talk about other villages is negative and cutting. These are very closed worlds. Male- female relations are generally abusive, though I never witness it but I learn on the side. They are also extremely clear, black and white, and traditional.
Women make all the food, serve the men, clear the table, wash the dishes, clothes, raise and bear the children (lots). Men work the land and many drink a lot. Yet abusive, macho and drunkard, most of these men seem to have a good and simple heart. Many seem almost an extension of the soil they plant.
My work and pleasure often find me in remote villages and If I didn’t know better I’d think these places were only populated by women. But the truth is that during the day (this time of year anyway, which is plow and sow time) all the men are in the countryside working except the very old, young, or injured. Also many are working in the U.S. I’m absolutely amazed at how many men I’ve met that have gone to the U.S. to work. In the villages I’d say about 80 percent of those I’ve met. In the cities it is much less. There is a gap between the city and village, very different worlds and attitudes prevail. Mine is the luxury of playing in both.
Life down here has me existing in many realms. To go from the city to 500 years back into the countryside, to a hushed warm village and spend the day among women kneeled on the floor grinding corn (nixtamal) for tortillas, and rhyming back and forth to each other in Zapoteca or Mixteca or Mixe, to smell the hot corn and pig shit and ripe alfalfa and taste the clean wind. Then to return to Oaxaca in the afternoon with all its groaning buses and church bells, music from doorways and the blur of hurried people. This is an amazing and always abrupt transition to make. It really opens an awareness of the worlds we walk in and how varied they can be. Most of us never get out of our city or village, and our mind space, and so operate believing that’s all there is, not understanding the immense variety of options that exist and also gladly free of the knowledge of our own constraints.
I must make an observation on the comment about the blur of hurried people in Oaxaca. This is a relative condition as seen coming from a village. I am scarce able to walk slowly enough in a village where a 20-yard walk from Isabela’s house to her aunts may take five minutes. There is never a hurry out there, and perhaps to make their town larger, they walk slower. But perhaps they just don’t know a hurried walk, for what is there to hurry. It is seeing this that I really have to laugh at the myth of progress and better living. These people have not one modern convenience except electricity which solely lights the house, radio, and TV. (A far to common feature) and they do work hard grinding corn or making tortillas, pots, etc. Yet their day is always taken at a slow pace – relaxed with time to chat and gossip and visit, and of actual work they do not put in 40 hours a week. And so for a family with a decent piece of land to plant, good rains for the seed, and a good level of pottery sales, life is a good one with food always on the table. To suggest however, that there is not hunger or suffering in villages would be a foolish lie. And I couldn’t see myself living such a life style because I would be ruined by the monotony. Yet there is much to learn from such a place, and learn I will.
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Of course there are many things to be related. Stories of coastal trips, the dark, warm ocean whispering in the heavy fall of the afternoon rain with us in the thick of it riding to shore the waves that come in like rolling emerald velvet. And the tropical storm that turned all to white froth and fury with the wind and tide carrying palapas and beach together into the deep blue. There are tales of going on beyond Tamazulapan in the white van to the other side of the mountains, to the slopes that take the heavy breath of the gulf, and there tumbling into the high cloud forest where not a soul is to be found and everything everywhere is soft and green and misty, all riddled through with cold, clear and swift creeks and falls.
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Our journey to San Marcos takes us a step back in time. This is a very traditional Zapotec village where the fields are tilled with oxen and the corn for tortillas is ground daily on stone metates. From the making of the day’s pile of tortillas over the fire at day-break, followed by a few hours turning clay into pots, to the mid-day meal preparation and trip to the fields to deliver hot bowls of mole and tamales to husbands and sons, and the late afternoon spent gathering firewood or visiting neighbors, the rhythms of a potters day have changed little in 500 years…except for one detail.
Mid-afternoon, from 3 o’clock to 5 o’clock, the soap operas are on the tube, and the clay, the tortillas, and firewood can all wait just a bit.
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Manos de Oaxaca … Oaxacan hands … the hands of the potter, carver, and weaver. In Mexico, “Manos” is also short for hermanos – brothers and sisters.
Our warehouse and wholesale catalog are full of beautiful pottery, a rich gift to our times born of thousands of years of practice. But the reason Manos de Oaxaca exists isn’t for the pots, but rather the people who create those pots. The knowledge and life ways in the pottery villages have existed as such for thousands of years, a type of sustainability rare in the human world. As the industrial world moves into Oaxaca with its plastic buckets and aluminum pans, the pottery is disappearing. Through our sales we hope to lend a hand to the culture of pottery by giving the potters the opportunity to continue with their ancient trade.
Let us hear from you…
If you find these pages of interest let us know. You can e-mail Manos de Oaxaca directly by clicking on the link below, but we are not always at home in the adobe. Due to long, rutted dirt roads, unpredictable deluges, the potter’s pace (preindustrial, no time clocks, lots of chit-chat with the neighbors), the harvest season (when all would-be potters pluck and shuck corn for a month), the fiestas in the Sierra, etc., it takes some doing to assemble a decent sized stack of pots, and we are frequently on the road. For a quicker response, try webmeister Papa. He put this site together, and is almost always hulking over his computer.
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Far in the south of Mexico where Middle America begins to crumple and twist into the long land bridge that ties it with South America, rising from the Pacific where the Southern Sierra Madre mixes with the clouds, where the centuries have seen empires rise and fall, where the corn has not ceased to grow in untold thousands of years, lies the state called Oaxaca. It is a place absent of subtlety, a land where no one piece of ground resembles another. Quiet coastal beaches disappear into hot thorny lowland scrub which is lost in pungent foothill jungles that cool into mountain cloud forests. The hard edged mountains tumble into canyons that spread beyond to a broken arid interior cut by jumbled mountain ranges and broad valleys of cactus, zapote, stone and dusty arroyos. The land burns under a persistent sun until the sudden roar of summer rains turns all a wet, brilliant green and sets the arroyos thundering with torrents of red, earth drenched water.
i.jpg (3984 bytes)t is in this disparate land, beside the rivers and tempered 
arroyos, grouped in dusky forests and among the ever present cactus, dotted in the sharp mountains and filling the valleys, where the abundances of nature or accidents of history have placed them, that the people of Oaxaca live. For well over ten thousand years the people, like the cactus, stones and clay, have survived in this wild land. woman1bw.JPG (41029 bytes)
f.jpg (5805 bytes)ive hundred years ago the Spanish conquest turned the nations of Middle America upside down and placed them on the path of forming modern day Mexico. The old leaders have been replaced by new ones. The ancient gods have been renamed. Wires and asphalt have spread across the hills. But quietly living on to the cadence of the summer rains and the harvest of the corn, shaded by the cactus in the vastness of a turbulent land are the same people that have awaited the summer rains for hundreds of generations. These are the people who are the heart and pulse of Oaxaca.
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The first crystalline glaze appeared in Chinese porcelain during the late Ming Dynasty. It is called Fat-shan Chun after the locality in which it was produced. Inhibition of crystal formation in the reduction atmosphere found in fuel-burning kilns may account for the disappearance of crystals for two centuries. Read More…
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