Rachel and Eric on sat 6 sep 97
Here, in retrospect, and in the form of high prose, I send Chapter One of
these Mexican tales. An introduction.
OAXACA
Far in the south of Mexico where Middle America begins to crumple and twist
into the long land bridge that ties it with South America, rising from the
Pacific where the Southern Sierra Madre mixes with the clouds, where the
centuries have seen empires rise and fall, where the corn has not ceased to
grow in untold thousands of years, lies the state called Oaxaca. It is a
place absent of subtlety, a land where no one piece of ground resembles
another. Quiet coastal beaches disappear into hot thorny lowland scrub which
is lost in pungent foothill jungles that cool into mountain cloud forests.
The hard edged mountains tumble into canyons that spread beyond to a broken
arid interior cut by jumbled mountain ranges and broad valleys of cactus,
zapote, stone and dusty arroyos. The land burns under a persistent sun until
the sudden roar of summer rains turns all a wet, brilliant green and set the
arroyos thundering with torrents of red, earth drenched water.
It is in this disparate land, beside the rivers and tempered arroyos,
grouped in dusky forests and among the ever present cactus, dotted in the
sharp mountains and filling the valleys, where the abundances of nature or
accidents of history have placed them, that the people of Oaxaca live. For
well over ten thousand years the people, like the cactus, stones and clay,
have survived in this wild land.
Five hundred years ago the Spanish conquest turned the nations of Middle
America upside down and placed them on the path of forming modern day
Mexico. The old leaders have been replaced by new ones. The ancient gods
have been renamed. Wires and asphalt have spread across the hills. But
quietly living on to the cadence of the summer rains and the harvest of the
corn, shaded by the cactus in the vastness of a turbulent land are the same
people that have awaited the summer rains for hundreds of generations. These
are the people who are the heart and pulse of Oaxaca.
The Oaxacans today are an immense mosaic of peoples, ancient tribes,
nations and races: the Zapotecs and Mixtecs, direct descendants of two of
Meso Americas greatest civilizations, the Ayu'uk, immigrated from Peru six
hundred years ago on a quest to find a holy mountain, the Chontales and
Triques, the Huaves, Chinantecos, Amuzgos, Zoques, Cuicatecos, Tacuates,
Chatinos. . .They, more than the arroyos and forests, the nopal and acacia,
give Oaxaca its mystique. It is a primordial presence, the sense that the
most basic and fundamentally human energy is close to the surface, that man
and the nature that bore him still live together in the same house.
These are the people who are the potters of Oaxaca.
saludos Eric
Eric Mindling & Rachel Werling
Manos de Oaxaca
Apartado Postal 1452
Oaxaca, Oaxaca
CP 68000
Mexico
tel/fax (951) 3-6776
email: rayeric@antequera.com
| |
|
