Oaxaca — Not Alone
Epistle Six: Epica Pilgrimage to Belem
EPISTLE SIX
OAXACA AGAIN
The market is full. We eat chocolate atole, spun by Doña Lidia’s expert hands, and eggs in salsa, and of course tlayudas with cheese. We are taken from end to end of the city, and the very walls and its history bless us with stories of promise, struggle and work.
Oaxaca, again. We are fed and fed and the tales come down. Norita, an attorney with BARCA, the Bishop Baratolomé Carrasco Human Rights Centre, meets us at the bus terminal. She will host us in the city. In 2006 she was taken off the barricades by La Doctora Escopeta herself, Bertha Muñoz, one of the central leaders of the uprising, La Doctora had noticed — before anyone else but Nora herself — that Norita was pregnant.
The suffering from 2006 is real, a trauma in the hearts of all who love here. There were 20 —30 confirmed deaths in the state smashing of the teachers’ and Indigenous organizations, thousands more imprisoned, people and organizations destroyed or left as shells. La Doctora fled into exile, and died seven years later, some say from grief. 2006 is the reference point for every story. The before, the after. The consequences. The resilience.
Norita takes us to an organic market started by Oaxacan artist and activist, also now deceased, the beloved Francisco Toledo, and we walk by the plaza. Here I embroidered Our Lady of the Barricades for the first time with the teachers. Now it is filled with the most shocking kind of tourism. Sacred, holy, ancient tradition, turned into a vile show.
The calenda, a tradition of Oaxacan Mixtec and Zapotec communities, a rapturous, noisy procession after a wedding, or baptism or any celebration, around the neighbourhood, with giant paper maché figures, and a wonderful oom-pa-pa band, while gifts are thrown into the crowds of bystanders, has been turned into a show, sold to tourists as part of a wedding package. One group after another of white brides and bridesmaids all in matching shiny satin dresses shriek and laugh pushing by us as we walk up to our lunch counter.
LAWYERS
After lunch we get lost in the twisting streets trying to find the office of the Human Rights Platform, a network of 16 organizations. At last, we find them along a road lined with grapefruit trees. Hildelisa and I harvest as many fallen grapefruits as fit in her bag and we make our way into the office, another room filled with posters, papers, piles of the work of the unrelentingly just.
The stories add up: many of these gathered lawyers were children 19 years ago. 2006 has evolved into a myth — of wonder and terror. They know from inside and out the story since. The focus for them all is: how to defend Indigenous communities, and leaders, and their current fight. Water here had been plentiful, at least not semi-arid like the north where we were in Chihuahua and Coahuila. Water here still has life, unlike Santiago-Lerma, the dead river in El Salto outside of Guadalajara in Jalisco. But it is under threat. These things we learn:
—Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Heineken are the three greatest consumers of water in Mexico.
—There are three types of designated water usage: industrial, agricultural, and common human usage. Guess which two always get priority?
—There has been a great sequia, a drought, in the Oaxaca Valley in past five years. But not for the big three.
—Water has been diverted and drained away from rural communities.
—Mexico has great laws, says Isa, a young lawyer. But terrible law enforcement, he adds. CONAGUA, the federal water agency, only serves industry. It is the fox looking after the chickens. Those who have money, manipulate power. Everyone loses. The earth is dying.
—It is illegal for campesinos to dig wells.
The Flor y Canto case was foundational. Flor y Canto Indigenous Rights Centre fought a multi-year battle — and won. They had challenged the Mexican national law granting water concessions only to individuals (and individual entities — like corporations). A critical 2013 ruling went in favour of the Zapotec Indigenous communities’ demands for collective concessions. But as Isa says, the laws are good. But enforcement is another story. The wealthy, the powerful, who shape shift but always stay somehow the same, get what they want, no matter what.
Then there is the mine. San José gold and silver mine. Canadian. Fortuna Silver. Based in Vancouver on Melville Street. Sold just this year to a Peruvian company. History of community strife. Two mine opponents murdered. Tailings spills. Poisoned rivers. Divided and devastated communities.
Around the table every person shares a story of loss, threats, broken relationships, forests and springs destroyed, mangroves taken down for tourist infrastructure on the coast, forced displacements. Then the twisted mangle of organized violence, the state, army, police, drug cartels. All of it circling around land and water defenders, who for centuries have cared for these things.
What to do?
We travel from there into the late afternoon, sun setting over a centuries-old church. Padre Uvi serves here. Another veteran of the 2006 war. He remembers me. I guess I stood out. We embrace, and he disappears inside to take care of a family celebrating a young woman’s 15 years.
We go to a side room and meet Licenciado Maurilio Santiago Reyes, an internationally recognized expert on Indigenous rights. He is Mixtec. He has defended many indigenous-rights cases and has been shot at and severely persecuted himself. This is a man who will move nowhere he doesn’t want to; he knows the difference between blessings and curses and will not budge from his fight for justice.
He describes an award his group has created: the on-the-ground defenders award. The first recipient: Doña Josefa Sánchez. She is 85 years old, and a grand protector of women’s right to be free from violence. She is also a defender of the forest.
Maurilio eats, drinks, and breathes this stuff. He is an expert in moving between two worlds and calling bullshit and theft when he sees it. He sees it a lot. Laws that turn victims into criminals. He makes sure they aren’t helpless.
He says, “The state is no longer functional. We are reconstructing the social networks.”
His wife, Cindi, is a Mixtec-Zapotec teacher. She says, “We are engaging with education campaigns, teaching people to fall in love again with the world around us. We are creating a new commandment: we are a part of the earth. We have to protect it, before all else. We have recovered our consciences. We know what to do: look after the seeds. Stand with the communities.”
We stand outside the church and talk after we wrap up the sharing. The full moon rises over the ancient house of worship filling the world with a ghostly blue light. It is so beautiful that we stand there for a while and just notice it.
POPULAR EDUCATORS
The next day Hildelisa and I eat grapefruits, and then we are off to EDUCA, an alternative education centre. They started 30 years ago as a church youth group with Bishop Bartolomé and just kept going. They had to slip undercover in 2006 but popped up again. A great group comes to meet us, and they are fresh and full of fire, and not boring at all. Not in the slightest.
Workshops on everything. Woman-led, queer-positive, Indigenous-centered, collaborative, questioning, curious and fun. Wow. This is how communities grow. I want to stay here. I want to learn here. I want to take all their books home.
After another lunch in a Toledo-formed market we head over to Ideas Comunitarias, much smaller than Educa, and focused in a distinct way. Like a giant co-operative of ideas, gifts, products. How might we live and exchange with one another. Saul was quiet, thoughtful, and interested.
“I’m not out there to resolve things,” he says. “We are all subjects, with pain, suffering, needs. I can’t save anyone. But I can be in constant self-examination, and I can engage in self care. We can care, deeply, for one another. Become vulnerable. The Fast Life is going nowhere.”
The axelotl on his t-shirt shimmers. “Oaxaca has something special,” he says. “Communality. There is a special relationship here. When you become a godparent to someone, you become part of their family. Well, we can become godparents to our foodstuffs too. And to rivers — imagine a river was your godson!” I remember Tititi and his poisoned river. The grief he carries is the loss of a precious loved one.
Saul looks at me directly and says, “You, pilgrim, are not walking alone. You have come here. We have shared things. We are now part of one another. You will stay here with me; I will go along with you. Your feet aren’t yours alone.” He points to my soiled black runners and then smiles and his eyes light up the room.
Indeed. There is no such thing as the individual. The goal in life is not success. Either we walk together or we sink. Oaxaca, beautiful, cherished, remembered, loved. My time here was brief, in 2006 and even more so now, but I carry you in me. I love you
.