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...