Blog #8: Other People, Better at Weaving

Other People, Better at Weaving

(something I will remember from this trip, and hopefully use again …a fitting concluding blog)
I live at the north end of Macedonia Alcala (the perfect vantage point from which to conquer the world). I have lived there through the period between Christmas and Dia de los Reyes Magos (25-12-x to 6-1-x). Each morning, I go out at 07:00 to get some orange juice and give my parents their daily report viapay-phone, doing my best to convince them that Oaxaca is not under constant air-raids; the sirens, loud words, and racing trucks they are hearing through the phone are just propane-delivery trucks (the none-too-subtle dominance of the state petroleum company, Pemex founded by president Cardenaz, as told in the “20th century Mexico” article, where he reverses generations of growing US financial hegemony, actively built during the Profiriato, and rebelled against during the Mexican Revolution – related in “The Emerald City” and “The Oxford History of Mexico – Mexican Revolution” respectively). I come back to the house for breakfast at 08:00. I go out again for Spanish classes at 09:00. I come back for lunch at 15:00, and then go out again, before coming back for bed. Consequently, I pass through the Artisan-Market on Alcala about 6 times a day. My usual quick, eye-contact avoiding march, honed by a life in a hurry, and perfected against beggars in India and Tibet who consider begging to be a contact-sport, is thwarted by the human traffic in proximity to tables of merchandise one would not want to see bumped into. And, after going to Teotitlán, and seeing how they are made, I do have a modicum of appreciation for the rugs half the vendors here sell. Things here are worth a look – which is often returned with a kind smile. When one, at a laborious rate, passes through a market 6 times a day, it is not long before walking as if one were in a hurry (even if one sometimes really is), becomes unreasonably rude. 

After gaining much experience that exhaustion is the road to succumbing to microbes in foreign lands, I retired from New Year´s Eve celebrations at the possibly-ridiculous time of 22:00. In a negative-hurry, I stopped to talk to one of the carpet-vendors in the Artisan-Market: Veronica, a sweet girl who always waves hello. Used to avoiding eye-contact in crowded urban settings, and having had much practice body-checking away from the pockets that have stuff in them, beggars who lack a concept of personal-space, I was quite surprised when Angela Mendoza (Veronica’s mother, with whom she sells carpets) gave me a big hug in greeting – and then Veronica did too! It is going to take me a while to get used to people here in Latin America doing that. Of course, some people embrace in greeting in North-America too – but, in my experience, those people are categorically old, strange relatives who smell like death and cigarettes. It is always a surprise when someone who doesn’t fit that stereotype gives a hug in greeting.

Considering that the people at the market are nice, ignoring them is no longer a viable option – they have become neighbors, rather than annoying human advertisements. I end up speaking more Spanish at the market than at Bacari. They suffer my butchering of Spanish kindly, “Hey, many of us know Spanish as a second language too (our first being Zapotec). We feel your pain about conjugating verbs.” It turns out almost everyone in the market is from Teotitlán; during the period between Christmas and Dia de Los Reyes, they travel to Oaxaca to sell the carpets they weave and the impressive metal earrings they forge, during most of the year. Many of the carpets have been made by the very person they are being sold by. Even considering the near-impossibility of trying asking someone to accept a lower price for a product they personally spent weeks making, I found that the prices of the rugs sold here are uniformly lower than the prices asked at Teotitlán, after the tour. Apparently, the price-increase one can command by awing people with a grand presentation on the construction of the rugs, is far greater than the additional costs incurred by transporting the rugs - even compounded with the greater quantity of money in Oaxaca City, relative to Teotitlán. …Or, these rugs are made in a more-expedient, less-traditional/durable manner, as Miguel suggested. However, as far as I can tell, that is not the case. Geronimo had a poster of photos of him and his family making rugs; Veronica's brother, just after New Years, wrote an impressive treatise on the process for making rugs, including the carding and spinning steps, and a lengthy section on dying – herbs used, and the different colors obtainable from each, depending on what other herbs or minerals the initial dye is treated with. It felt like I was reading an alchemy lab-manual in Spanish. It was similar to the presentation received at the Teotitlán tour, except a bit more exhaustive (and exhausting to struggle through reading).

After having talked to a person for a long time about her work, taking up time in which she could have, at least in theory, been making other sales, it would have been quite disappointing if I were to not buy something. Consequently, I now have a superfluity of wool products. Among them, is a 50cm x 50cm carpet made by my friend, Veronica. It took her a week to make. She asked 250-pesos for it. What a gift! Feeling a little horrible about paying a friend, who needs the money more than I do, $40 for a week of labor, I refused to accept change for the 500-peso note I gave her. In response, her mom insisted on giving me a purse for free – What nice people.

All too soon, the market-period ended, with the advent of Dia de Los Reyes. As I walked back to my house, from Café Cuiles, and said hello to everyone at the market, Veronica and her mother asked if, in an hour, I could help them load up their store into the back of their pickup truck. Veronica may be built like a beautiful weight-lifter full of kind-hearted laughter, but lifting heavy boxes into a pickup truck doesn’t sound like it would be the easiest chore for sub-5-ft people. And they are kind friends, so of course I would help. As 22:00 rolled around, the market became a flurry of packing and deconstruction. Amidst that, I got some interesting looks, as a gringo tourist dressed, in Miguel´s words, “not only ready to go out, but ready to go to war,” wheeled a heavily-laden crate-dolly through the remnants of the market, doing unpaid heavy-lifting for Mexicans. I can now put on my résumé that I have been a migrant laborer.

Actually, I gained a bit of an appreciation for the difficulties Mexican laborers in the US face. I found it very easy to appear dumb as dirt, due to the fact that I did not easily have a prehensile command of the lingua franca. I can pensively construct an idea in Spanish, I can speak Spanish, I can understand Spanish, and I can lift sacks of rugs, but I cannot do any two of those things at the same time. Luckily, there weren’t too many sacks, so deriving the most logical way to load them into the small bed of their compact truck was not too difficult; I was able to arrive at the proper way by means of my own intellect. But for a task any more complicated than loading 5 bags and a folding table into the bed of a truck, the extra effort required to do problem-solving communication in Spanish would have made me look mentally impaired, or at least quite drunk – I can’t do Spanish and lift at the same time. I now have a better appreciation for how my contractor neighbors often get irritated with their Latino migrant workers: If I, working for them, was as bad at communicating as I was here, my neighbors would be quite irate with my slovenliness. Luckily, my Zapotec friends were already well aware how horrible my Spanish was, and they made sure to not give me any tasks that would require me to attempt verbal communication. But had I been given tasks where not every detail was blatantly obvious and derivable by the most dim-witted of individuals, it would not have taken me long to run into serious mistakes. Successfully building a house, or doing any form of complex work, while surmounting a language barrier, is no small feat. Not looking abjectly stupid while struggling to complete the task, is a herculean undertaking. The migrant laborers merit the benefit of the doubt when they look dumb or lazy; functioning in a new language can necessitate dropping all other tasks.

The sunburnt gringo dressed for a war, and walking like he is in a race, must not difficult to pick out of a crowd here in Oaxaca. The next day, some lady (from Teotitlán, as it would turn out), chooses me to ask for help lifting a huge carpet into her pick-up truck. I guess I’m now the official hired laborer of Alcala, master of putting bulky objects into the back of Ford Rangers. They Zapotecs are appreciative though, so it´s all good.

But aside from a poignant tryst with apparent-stupidity, and gaining renown as a volunteer truck-loader, I have gained a friend in Teotitlán to keep in touch with, and therefore a reason to see Teotitlán again. Maybe I´ll even be able to sell Zapotec rugs in the US, where the market is not nearly as saturated as Oaxaca’s, and people are willing to pay a lot more than $40 for a week of labor. The Zapotec weavers seem like good people to do business with: we share a common method of exchanging business-cards: digging out a pencil and a scrap of paper from our pockets, and racing to scribble phone numbers, writing on the flattest cobblestone we can find – much less cumbersome than the coastal East-Asian protocols. 

Not-so-far-east in Asia, between Tibet, Burma, and Thailand (Yunnan province of China), I have been to a few towns that have similar traditional weaving practices to the Zapotecs. The looms are similar, except in Yunnan, the weft is tied to a torpedo-shaped piece of wood, which is slid quickly across the warp. Weaving this way is a lot faster than the Zapotec really-by-hand method, but one is limited to horizontal designs; the Yunnanese make some impressive one-dimensional plaid. Really, that is the most-deflating way to describe it; the artisanal work in some towns in Yunnan is the equal of Oaxaca, in my opinion (ergo, buenísimo), including everything from proper ricotta cheesecake to faithful replicas of shearling flight jackets left over from the Burmese theatre of WWII. Maybe one day, I´ll bring Veronica to China to teach the Dai and Naxi ethnicities how to weave 2-dimensional designs. It would be a meeting of weavers from opposite sides of the world, however, there would be remarkable similarities. Speaking in a brutally-broad sense, the weaving in the Yunnan mountains (towns in valleys of the Himalayan foothills – imagine an Oaxaca with much more rain), is not all that different from Zapotec weaving. Ignoring precipitation rates, the geography is not too dissimilar either. And aside from some of the Khampas being about a foot taller than the Zapotecs, those TibetoBurman people and these Native Americans look very similar – a Bering Straight migration recent in memory. And in China, Veronica will finally see people who drive more aggressively than the Mexicans.

Here in the Western hemisphere, this opening of Mexico provides an alternative to the rigors of getting my girlfriend, Wanlin, into the US. She would like Teotitlán a lot. Vastly tired of her current city of 8,000,000, she would appreciate Teotitlán very much. Veronica merits thanks from both of us, for opening to us a bucolic village in the Western Hemisphere – something quite rare in North-America, and an idyllic toehold in a Western country less immigration-isolationist than the US (and warmer than Vancouver).

-Justin-