Why Oaxaca?

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• Published on Tuesday, 06 December 2011 18:49
• By Mary Ellen Sanger

Over the last ten years I have kept close at hand these words from the great Mexican journalist German Dehesa: "Getting to Oaxaca is not a question of trains or planes: it requires an adventurous spirit and open heart... I suspect that Oaxaca’s location is neither geographical nor historical – it is mythical."

Why does Oaxaca inspire even the greats to write prose that extols an almost sublime nature? What attracts so many adventurous spirits and open hearts to Oaxaca?

Of course, it is that long, lush and sensual list of attractions and festivals that appear on some of the most colorful pages of the tourist literature: the dances of the Guelaguetza with their ruffled pinks and oranges, the grinning skulls of Day of the Dead, the whimsical radish worlds that grace the Night of the Radishes, the seven moles with their hundreds of ingredients, the markets heaped with amaranth and grasshoppers, the cobbled streets and colorful doorways, the brass and balloons of the zócalo, the elegant antiquity of the ruins, the rainbow array of handicrafts that are unique to the zone. It is all these things, of course. Oaxaca possesses a heady concentration of colors, flavors, scents and ideas that doesn’t occur anywhere else on the planet. People come to Oaxaca expecting to confront something truly different. And Oaxaca never lets them down. But I suspect that what brings people back time and again to Oaxaca and her environs, and what makes people stay -- is something intangible. Something  mythical.

It’s as if visitors are invited to invent their own creation myths from sunlight and petal-dyed fiber, from black clay and black beans with epazote. There is, perhaps, a quality of light that occurs in Oaxaca, as the sun spills from around afternoon clouds, over the skirts of the mountains that ring the city, and into the narrow streets, that feels elemental, original, novel – the light of the primordial soup. There is a breath to the city, accented by the indigenous, that sings in a new scale to which our ears may be unaccustomed, but we know we like the harmony. So we fill our heads and hearts and hands with all these elements that are Oaxaca – from her stones and her stories to her struggle and her strum – we weave it all together and mold this new world around our old one. It has been done over and over again in Mexico. It is an old story. And we become part of it in Oaxaca. Through the sudden confrontation of the known and the unknown, we create something new. And we come away (if we come away) changed. And if we stay, we experience that change each day. Tomorrow we will try those tiny nisperos in sweet syrup. The woman in the red checkered apron who sells them on the corner of Morelos and Garcia Vigil will have a story to tell. 

"Oaxaca is an anti-depressant that causes addiction". German Dehesa