13 September 2016
News from Oaxaca
News
flash! The Zócalo has been cleared for business!
It’s
September again, and school has started. Mostly. In August the splinter teachers
union, here in the southern states, the Sección 22, doubled down on its
marches, blockades, boycotts, and barrage of graffiti (much of it artistically
sophisticated and intellectually puerile) asking that the government reopen
negotiations with them (here called mesas
de diálogo) and “respond” to their demands. The governments (federal,
state, city) have frequently responded, of course, but they have refused to
abrogate the education reform law in toto. “Respond,” in Sección 22 newspeak, seems
to equate to “capitulate.” The union has been unwilling to discuss individual
sections of the law, and the governments, after several attempts at dialog,
have been unwilling to continue talking as long as the union holds the state’s
economy hostage.
They
governments did, of course, capitulate on a couple of issues. After swearing that
they would fire any teacher who missed three consecutive days without
permission, and would dock the pay for any unexcused absence, they went ahead
and re-instated all the suspended teachers and paid them for the time they were
out protesting. Seems to me to be a time-tested strategy for insuring that
threats not be taken seriously, and for encouraging behaviors that one would
rather discourage. Don’t any of those folks have three-year-old kids?
Curiously, it was the federal
legislature, not the executive, that voted, overwhelming, to create the reform
law, but none of the unions’ ire seems to be focused on the legislative branch,
or what seems like a straightforward democratic path to redress: elect new
legislators sympathetic to your demands who will repeal the law.
Amazing
how the values and procedural traditions of our native cultures shape our views
of other lands’ ways of doing things.
Meanwhile,
three weeks into the normal education cycle, most schools have started. I am
seeing kids in uniforms when I walk in the morning
with Qualba. September 16,
Mexico Independence Day, the anniversary of the famous “Grito de Hidalgo,” is
nearly upon us, and the government(s) have used the calendar to open up public
spaces for proper celebration of the holiday. The hundreds of vendors who had
set up shop in the Zócalo were persuaded to leave, and the recalcitrant few
were moved out at 1:00 AM by a contingent of local police in whose wake came
the municipal sanitation staff and six enormous garbage trucks. They left a few
symbolic awnings in place around the Zócalo’s central kiosk. A nod to “No, we
are not choking off all vestiges of protest.”
Monday
Linda and I had to spend the morning in town for some medical stuff and Linda’s
massage, so we decided to meet for lunch in the Zócalo. I got there first and
sat on the steps on the side of the cathedral to listen to the marimba band
that had set up under the laurel trees. Obviously a planned, not a spontaneous
event, as three rows of folding chairs had been set up for spectators. On the
stone walls that supported the raised planting beds of the Zócalo people sat
eating their lunches and listening to the music. Moms with babies, Indian women
from the villages around Zaachila, their long braids tied with blue ribbons,
their embroidered aprons –an essential part of street wear for the Zapotec
population—catching the light filtering through the plaza’s gigantic laurel
trees. Shoes were being shined, popsicles dispensed. A couple of tourist
families paraded by, their infants on their backs or toddling behind; families
with school-age kids have long since returned to the States or Canada or
France.
[A
curious sidebar: our friend Maryjane Dunn Whitener informs us that marimbas are mostly
manufactured in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, by the DeMorrow company! Go figure.]
Every toe in the Zócalo was tapping to the music! The danzón is back! The danzón,
traditionally early every Wednesday evening, in Oaxaca and dozens of other
cities across Mexico, features a small orchestra playing a variety of dance
rhythms for a couple of hours in a central plaza. In normal times, lots of people
flock to the danzón. Monday a few
people had come to dance to dance to a selection of traditional boleros and Beatles tunes. The dancers
were old folks, mostly, which is our age or older, but with a smattering of
young folks in their fifties, too. Some very, very elegant, as they waltzed or
two-stepped on the flagstones in the dappled light. Some I recognized from the danzón a half year ago, before the
Zócalo was choked with tents and clotheslines and taco stands.
After
our lunch in one of the café’s under the arcades that border two sides of the
Zócalo, as we were heading back to the car, we watched crews of gardeners unload
pots of flowers and shrubs to plant in the raised beds that border the Zócalo’s
paths. It is as if the municipal government, after months of what appeared to
most folks to be an abrogation of any civic responsibility, had decided to
gallop back to normalcy. They have gated Calle Independencia, Oaxaca’s main
drag, and the other streets bordering the Zócalo, and stationed groups of
policemen at each of the gates to keep the occupying forces from returning. It
stands to be seen if they will maintain the guard after Independence Day. If
the Zócalo is still clear a week from today, and the balloon vendors have
returned, we will know they have succeeded.
Until
next time, of course.
Other
news.
Here in Santa Cruz, along with the
usual night noises —barking neighborhood dogs, clucking insomniac chickens, the
late night tuctuc (three-wheeled motor taxi) bringing someone up the hill, and
the odd firework or two— we have notice a rustling, or a scurrying, in the
terrace roofs which, as blog-followers may recall, are constructed over a base of
the local wild cane called carrizo.
Time for the annual fumigation. We contracted with a company on the highway,
they showed up on time (!), Linda cleared out the animals, put away all the
foodstuffs and dishes, they put on their hazmat suits, puffed toxic smoke at
the ceiling, and departed. Eight hours later the house, with all its windows
open, was ready to reoccupy. We were pleased (disappointed?) to note that the
rain of insect corpses was very light indeed.
Of course, nothing perturbs the arrieras, the leaf cutter ants. There are colonies of other ants that don't seem to want to eat everything we've planted. They are content to chomp on us if we walk by their areas blithely unaware of their presence. We wouldn't call them fire ants (like in the tropical areas), but their bite packs a whallop. Linda is sporting several swollen bite areas on her ankles and legs. And there's another kind which seems to opt for the castle-like hole.
It is
the end of the rainy season, and the hills and our gardens are at maximum
green, wrapping the house in a kind of green cloak. The change has brought out
the butterflies, too. The swarms on our lantana flowers and the other blooms in
the fringe of garden beyond our mini-lawn, looks like Grand Central Station at
rush hour. At any given moment, a half dozen species with multiple
representatives of each dart from flower to flower. We don’t have hoodoos, or
fairy chimneys, but in addition to the butterflies we do have ant chimneys that
rise to precarious heights. We don’t have bristly cellphone towers in Santa
Cruz, but we do have bristly caterpillars. In fact, we
have lots of things that we can’t identify in the photos in our nature books or
on the web.
You entomologists out there, can
you help?
David & Linda
