Travels in Oaxaca, 1912
Oaxaca has 40,000 inhabitants, which is to say that it is as large as the old Massachusetts town of Salem. It is older by a hundred and forty years—older than…
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Oaxaca” from A Mexican Journey by Emil Blichfeldt, 1912
Still back over your course as far as Santa Lucrecia, then north, that is parallel to the coast, which is to say west, two hundred miles to Cordova, and again you touch the route that you might have taken at once from Vera Cruz to Mexico City. But still you are not ready to follow it. You are bound for the city of Oaxaca, the capital of the state m which you have been for several days, and then to Mitla, the place of ruins. At one time you were within seventy-five miles if you could have struck across country; but the trail would have led through formidable mountains, where the Indians are of uncertain temper toward strangers, and you could have saved nothing in time, nor in money after guide and mules were paid for.
So you make this circuit of more than four hundred miles over three railroads, through two states besides the one that you have left and into which you will return.
A night in Tehuacan, whose bottled water has made you familiar with the name in advance, will give you a taste of perfect climate and a view of Mexicans at a health resort. The hotel has decorations that would cost more in New York than the whole establishment is worth. You walk out into the country about sundown and see women washing clothes but find no evidence that their own, or they themselves, were ever washed.
The swift streams rush along with water enough to cleanse a multitude, through the clean, hard banks that they have lined with their calcium deposit; but people and houses look as if the water had brought none of its ministries to them. Is this merely one of the unaccountable variations of custom, or partly explained by the disheartening amount of dust that flies about, so that cleanness would be but a momentary state at best? I remember speculating about this at El Riego, a mile or so out; I remember as I returned seeing two soldiers, one reading to the other, under a palmetto tree; I remember the mountains at sunset; and I remember the heavy, fragrant white flower that dropped on the pavement under my window at night with a sound like that of a banana peel. So much I remember of Tehuacan.
It has been the scene of many battles, from when the Mixtec and Zapotec Indians made stand after stand against Cortez, the future Marquis of Oaxaca, to the times of Hidalgo, Juarez, and their successors. Such opposition did the Spaniards encounter here on their first visit that they withdrew till a year later, in 1522, when Montezuma had fallen and his capital, Tenochtitlan, was in their hands. Then they subdued the place by the aid of great numbers of native allies.
The inhabitants of the region were largely an agricultural people, though the city itself had grown important because of the presence of gold in rich deposits. It was on account of the gold that Cortez chose this as the seat of his domain and had himself created Marquis of Oaxaca by the Spanish crown. As for the gold, the conquistadores were not wholly disappointed, though their dreams were beyond realization. As to the people, while the city has always remained a stronghold of Romanism and often of political reaction, it has also been a center of political agitation whenever any new impulse was astir anywhere in the country. Even to-day there are Indians coming in to sell their wares at the Oaxaca market who have never acknowledged the authority of a foreign ruler.
The cochineal industry originated here and spread hence to Central America, then to the Canary Islands and elsewhere. The Indians of Oaxaca had used the brilliant and permanent scarlet dye to color their sarapes, probably for centuries, without discovering that they were indebted to a minute insect which feeds on certain species of cactus. They thought that they were baking or boiling a natural product of the plant itself. However, they were perfectly familiar with its, virtues, as they were with those of many of the native dye woods. Here are still to be bought the best Indian blankets in the republic, of either wool or cotton, dyed with vegetable colors, though one needs to guard against aniline and other delusions. The Oaxaca market, be it here said, is as characteristic as any in Mexico; and as becomes the market in one of the best Roman Catholic towns of a Spanish country, it is at its liveliest on Sunday.
Oaxaca nestles, as do many cities of the Mexican plateau, among mountains that give a noble frame and background to every picture. There is no vista without a church dome; and churches and houses alike have an appearance not only of age but of permanence that is satisfying. The houses are all made of the heaviest construction to survive earthquakes. I saw one of adobe that has been standing since 1660. Solidity is the keynote, in aqueducts, houses, churches, everywhere.
The ancient-looking ox carts with their ponderous wooden wheels, and the rough cobbled pavements over which they move so lazily all express it. The native men and women are types of it. One has difficulty to conceive that anything at Oaxaca ever changed. The climate never does—it is almost perfectly equable, and thoroughly delightful.
There is an amazingly rich old church, Santo Domingo, once larger with its accessory buildings than St. Peter's at Rome, where young Porfirio Diaz dangled down upon a rope to the window of his former teacher's prison cell—one of many exploits in the career of this daring and resourceful man. He, like Juarez, was a native of the city.
As striking as any architectural feature are the massive and extensive portales, which face the Zocalo and, with the cathedral, give satisfying dignity to it. They harbor, within doors and without, the busiest mercantile activities of the city, and make part of a picture which could not seem much more remote than it does from any twentieth-century part of the world. Having left my hat in one of the shops to be cleaned after a dusty ride, I ventured bareheaded among the vendors, public letter-writers, idlers, and passers-by, in search of a boot-black. When I found him, his first impudent, astonishing words were: "Where's your hat. Mister? You'd better look out or they'll arrest you and send you into the army." I told him they'd have to send me into the American army, and asked where he had learned my language so well. It developed that he had beaten his way to New York a year or two before and had spent several months there in the "shine" business. He was about fifteen years old.
The cathedral stands where the Zocalo and the Alameda, both rectangles, touch at a corner, so that it has beautifully shaded park both in front and on one side and is itself the central figure of the whole scheme. It has at least one delightful aspect, that of the facade from the plaza opposite. Particularly in the evening, this view is one of melting loveliness. The soft creamy or greenish hues of a native stone, the somewhat decayed surfaces, the angles softened by wear, are all more beautiful than they can have been when the builders left them, though the front must always have been one of singular beauty. Within are two or three noted paintings by native artists; but often I have not found Mexican churches favorable places for looking at pictures, and
this cathedral with its warm tones and gentle outlines is a sweeter picture than any that it houses.
On one of the high, surrounding hills, what appear from the hotel windows to be several
natural mounds are in fact part of the ruins of Monte Alban, to be reached by three hours' horseback ride and worthy of a visit by any one of antiquarian interests. They may be older than the ruins of Yucatan and are certainly much older than those of Mitla, which nearly every visitor to the region sees. They are also more accessible.
An excursion that is recommended, though I never went so far, is one eastward beyond Mitla to the summit of Zempoaltepec, about 12,000 feet high. The panorama of mountains, forests, tropic lands, and opposite oceans—the Gulf of Mexico on the east and the Pacific on the west—is said not to be equaled from many points in the world. While lamenting that we cannot go out for the ascent, we may stretch our thoughts to it from having been so breathlessly near going. Another time, perhaps!
Blichfeldt, Emil Harry. Mexican Journey. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1912.
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