A Twelfth Night Tale: A Walk in Oaxaca

We were there for Christmas with friends and a winter holiday. Flying from the Ann Arbor 'peace movement' with its silent [sic] vigils and its Zionist virus we were aching for a change of scene, weather, and political outlook. There were three of us, and we were bearing gifts: Michaela, my partner, carrying medicines, Riley, a sophomore in high school, our daughter, bringing an abundance of expectancy, and me, historian, bringing a copy of my study of the commons and Magna Carta. We wanted somehow to step into another possible world, healthy, hopeful, and chartered.

Our bags were misplaced or lost in Texas. Befriending a Mexican American similarly bereft in the Mexico City airport when he learned where we were going he praised the food of Oaxaca immediately. And so it was: hot chocolate, mole, corn bread, tomales, tlayudas. Got to remember this. Nothing'll get you to Right here! Now! quicker than the taste buds. Vanilla and chocolate are Oaxaca's gifts to the planet's aromatic olfactory system. (Only the chapulins, or fried grasshopper did we save for another time.)

The Christmas crèches were all over, in the cathedral, in the cafeteria, in the store window, in an upstairs lobby of the hotel. All over town the manger was bare: ain't no room at the hotel. Not until Christmas Eve did they put the baby Jesus in. The three wise men from the east, including Balthazar, the African king, were often prominent. Birth was certainly the theme, especially after visiting Frida Kahlo's museum in Coyoacán. She was looking for a miracle too, but didn't find it in the medicine offered by the Henry Ford hospital up in Detroit, which her paintings depict as a series of ghastly machines. How beautiful is her museum, how intimate the spaces, and what a great cup of coffee served in the café! By contrast Trotsky's house around the corner was all books, dark, serious, and nothing to drink. It spoke of exile and death of course. Yet he too was engaged in a labor of birth, to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old!

The Aztecs danced at dusk in the huge zócalo, or square, of Mexico City, to the four directions. The skyline was ominous with Church and State, for it was filled on one side with the National Palace and on the adjacent side with the immense and brooding façade of the baroque cathedral. We went to the Templo Mayor, excavated in 1978, buried almost directly underneath the cathedral, one pile of rocks on top of another, to learn that it was "the center of the universe. In the museum we saw statuettes from long ago supposed to play a role in fecundity and the underworld. Those fighting for a new birth of social life fled Oaxaca or were driven into hiding or prison after 'the night of hyenas,' 25 November 2006, when the helicopters, plain clothes police, and death squads ran rampant.

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