More about my Mexico trip

Cuernavaca, August 2006

Allie's and my first destination in Mexico, after a couple of days in Mexico City, was Cuernavaca, where we spent a little time with her boyfriend's family. Before our arrival, his mom had worried about what to feed us. "Do I give them hamburgers? Hot dogs?" She needn't have worried. We learned how to make sopes, and I politely ate everything from pozole to pigs feet. (You're right, that was no effort to be polite ...I just like to eat.)

We had intended to travel overnight from Cuernavaca to Oaxaca City, but the roads to the state capital were closed the night of our departure. Events in Oaxaca that week had been tumultuous, as paramilitaries had attacked a radio/TV station taken over by the movement. The housewives who had taken the station, previously used for pro-government addresses, had renamed it "La Caserola" in honor of the pots they had banged in their march to occupy it. The paramilitaries had destroyed the transmittor and thus taken the station off the air. Police had also shot a demonstrator in one of the huge marches through the city. In response, sympathizers of the movement blocked city streets at night with barricades, intending to prevent the passage of paramilitaries and keep movement leaders safe.

Unable to get to Oaxaca, Allie and I detoured to the coast, enjoying a spontaneous day and a half of beach vacation in Puerto Escondido before taking another overnight bus through the mountains to Oaxaca.



When we reached Oaxaca at last, we found the city filled with teachers, who for the past three months had been camped out in the city. By this point they had grown tired, bored, and worried, but they continued to sit each day, embroidering, reading the newspaper, and waiting and hoping for a resolution to the impasse between the government and the movement.



Daytime was peaceful in the city, with most stores and even the cafes around the zocalao open. Few tourists wandered the graffiti-painted streets of the city center, although a few stopped to read signs describing the movement.



The banners and tables in the zocalao gave the city an almost festive feel. After dark, however, things grew quiet. People headed home before the 500 barricades were set up in the streets, limiting vehicular passage until morning. One night we headed home in a friend's car from a dance performance after 11PM and spent an hour driving the wrong way down one-way streets and allies, stopped every few blocks by burning tires, before finally arriving close enough to walk to our friends' house.



to be continued...

My new band name

I am taking an Old Time ensemble class at the Old Town School of Folk Music. During the class we break into different bands and work on pieces; the culmination is to be a performance (which I know you won't want to miss) at a local bar in a couple of months.

My band (consisting of two banjos, two fiddles, and an autoharp) needs a name...any suggestions?

For my next birthday...

Mexico City, August 2006

Mexicans really really like cake, and apparently they like really really big cakes. This particular store had some amazing displays of icing, including a cake bigger than Allie!

The "permanent encampment"

The Zocalao in Mexico City, August 2006

Supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have vowed to remain in the tents, which occupy the Zocalao and numerous blocks of the surrounding streets, until AMLO is declared President. That seems unlikely to happen, given that the electoral tribunal is poised to declare Felipe Calderon the offical victor. Liberals in Mexico declare with conviction, however, that AMLO was the true winner, citing evidence of fraud. The nine per cent of ballot boxes that were recounted did show evidence of discrepencies, but the election tribunal refused to order a general recount. Since most casillas are unlikely to be re-opened, the scope of the potential fraud will probably never be known. Calderon's corporate supporters did bombard the electorate in the weeks before the election with negative ads portraying AMLO as another Hugo Chavez, in flagrant violation of strict laws banning this kind of private funding for electoral campaigns.

The newspaper La Jornada notes the irony of the United States' calls to Mexicans to "respect the institutions of democracy", given that American political institutions were themselves unable to determine an undisputed victor in our last two Presidential elections.

How much it costs to nearly kill me

I just talked to the demolition company that nearly decapitated me with a falling piece of building material (see below). I think $6200 sounds pretty good.

Letter from Oaxaca

I've spent the past two weeks in Mexico. This is the first time I've had more than a couple of minutes on the computer, so I thought I should post a note to the long-neglected blog.

It's been, shall we say, an interesting trip. My roommate Allie and I bought our tickets a month or two ago with a couple of goals. We wanted to visit her boyfriend's family in Cuernavaca, and we wanted to bring new radio equipment to the radio station of the teachers' union of Oaxaca, Radio Planton. On June 14, the state police of Oaxaca had violently attempted to disrupt a then-month-long teachers' strike, arresting demonstrators who would be held and tortured, bombing teachers and their children with mustard gas, and entering the radio station and destroying the equipment.

Allie and I wanted to do something in response, particularly because she had spent time working with teachers in Oaxaca, so we (with lots of help from a few others) organized an event in Pilsen and raised $1400 for new equipment for the station. The station is an important source of information for the teachers and others. Unfortunately events in Oaxaca over the summer made it seem unwise to bring the equipment at the time of our departure--we didn't want to see it destroyed again--so we had to leave for Mexico empty-handed with plans to send what seemed most useful later.

We spent the first weekend in Mexico City, during which we got to visit the huge encampment of protestors calling for a recount of the Presidential election. Then we were off to Cuernavaca. It was a little odd to spend a couple of days with Allie's boyfriend's family--without him. We learned to make tortillas and his mom was very excited when our tortillas puffed up with air on the comal because apparently that means we're going to get married soon. hmmm.

Then we headed back to Mexico City to take the overnight bus to Oaxaca. We got to the bus terminal about 11PM and found out that--oops--all the busses were cancelled. That's what happens when you're trying to visit a strike, I guess. What to do? We stood there looking at the board trying to decide where to go. There was a bus leaving for Aculpulco, so we hopped on that. We arrived in Aculpulco at 5AM and walked to a different bus station, where we learned that there was a bus leaving for the Oaxacan coast in 15 minutes, but from yet a different station. So into a taxi and onto another bus with minutes to spare. Seven hours later we were in Puerto Escondido, where we decided to spend the night before trying to get to Oaxaca. Thus we had an accidental and brief but well-deserved beach holiday!

We finally got to Oaxaca a few days later than expected after spending a good 20 hours on busses. As to what we found...well, that will have to wait for another post!

For now, suffice to say that I am staying out of trouble and experiencing only minimal gastrointestinal discomfort.