It’s been far too long since I’ve written an update here (sorry mom and dad!). I think I keep feeling intimidated by all there is to say, and I know I won’t be able to convey the full depth of what I’ve learned in the past few months. Maybe scratching the surface will allow space for more thoughtful writing to come.
I spent the month of October in Oaxaca, completing a month of Spanish school and spending time sitting in huge and ornate churches, visiting Mercados, and taking day trips outside of the city with friends to sites like El Tule (the widest tree in the world!). Being my first stop, this was where I started to get my way points for traveling and had some of my first tastes of homesickness. I came to miss deeply the routines of my life in Washington and my friends and family, while at the same time growing more comfortable and excited with my life in a place so radically different from what i’m used to. If I had to share one takeaway of what i’ve learned in my 4 months away, it’s that any place you go you can find complexity and tenderness and struggle and connectivity, and likely a friendly face too.
Oaxaca felt to me like a place existing in the space created where modern demands meet tradition and push up against one another. In downtown, where business owners are not permitted to use neutral paint colors so as to remain ‘authentically Mexican’ for the tourist crowds, women are making tortillas by hand all day, punctuated by the sound of cohetes (like fireworks, but without color) going off at all hours. An active leftist political presence facilitates murals and graffiti which can be found on almost every block of the city. Many of these call attention to femicide in Mexico, the rights of Indigenous peoples, the Genocide in Palestine, or Queer and Trans rights. There is also a host of experimental art spaces and independent book stores. As a tourist, it’s easy to spend time in the curated downtown and take away an image of Oaxaca as a progressive paradise that has liberated itself from the history of state repression and class divide. The progress that has been made and presence that does exist as the result of grassroots activism and insurgence movements is deeply important and real. But there’s also another reality that exists outside of the tourist eye. Political activism is heavily criminalized in Mexico, and many locals I met feel afraid to participate in organized struggle. The city collects the trash from the downtown and, because the landfill is full, takes it to other communities far from the eye of tourists eyes and dumps it. The city also rounds up migrants who often go downtown to panhandle and takes them to the cities Migrant Movement Camp, a facility without food service or adequate shelter, where hundreds of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Honduras, and Venezuela are all waiting for a chance to catch a bus north. The majority of other tourists I met, whose buying power is shaping the motivations of many of these efforts, had no idea that any of these things were happening all around them. This dynamic between tourism and reality, tourism working in many cases to preserve boundaries around what local culture is and can be, is something that I have found reflected in many of the places I’ve been, and something I’m still learning how to contend with.
The last few weeks that I was in Oaxaca, I rented a room from an older woman named Rita. When I think back on my month there the image I have of her in my mind is clearer than anything else, even despite the fact that I had very little Spanish at the time, and her even less English, so we didn’t do a lot of talking. Part of me felt bad that I couldn’t be better company. Her husband and her had separate bedrooms, and she saw her daughter who lived outside of the city once a week. I thought maybe she started renting out this room in her huge and airy house so that she had someone around to pass the time with. We lived mostly separate lives, chatting a little in the morning when we saw each other in the kitchen. During Dia de Los Muertos she set up an alter in her living room. Every day there were more magnolia flowers or oranges or fabrics on the table downstairs, always surrounding a black and white photo of a young woman. I wondered if it was her mother. I wish I had asked. Most things about her are still a mystery to me. Despite the distance between us facilitated by a lack of shared language, on the day I turned 22 I told Rita in passing that it was my birthday. and she lit up, grabbed me by the shoulders, said something I couldn’t understand, and then wrapped me in a huge hug.
A few days after I moved out and left the city she sent me a text that said “Creo que las cosas no son casuales, por algo bonito nos tocó cruzarnos en el camino“, “I think these things are not casual, it’s because of something beautiful that we had to cross paths”.
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After my time in the city, I headed to a town called Guadalupe Etla about an hour bus rides east. There I met Alex, a Oaxaqueño who owns a little plot of land just outside the town of less than 200, where he lives with his wife Suzanna and their 9 rescue dogs. I lived there for almost two weeks, helping Alex with projects around the property and digging a huge hole in the yard in order to harvest the loamy soil to make bricks. Alex migrated to the US without papers when he was in his 30s, and met someone who helped him and his brother get Visas. Normally, he returns to the US every 8 or so months to work and save money so he can live and work on his property in Oaxaca, but he says he doesn’t want to return to the states anymore. Instead, he is building a pizza oven so that he can make some money by turning his house into a restaurant. This is quite a common practice in Mexico, which is free from many of the food handling and business laws in the US. One afternoon I helped him mix clay, horse manure, and water to make what would become the bricks for his oven.
My time with Alex was some of my most memorable on my trip yet. Every morning we would wake up early and ride bikes into town to buy tortillas and Atole. The woman who made the tortillas loved to try and set me up with her son. Alex introduced me to all his friends, the most notable of which was Don Alberto, an artist of indiscernible age who loved drinking mezcal and had a host of animals around his house which he had rescued, including alligators, a monkey, turkeys, a horse, and a pig. We sat around his kitchen table drinking tea and mezcal and shooing away flies while the horse stood in the doorway looking for food scraps.
My relationship with Alex felt cemented after one he and I had to take one of his dogs to a vet friend of his late in the night and help perform an emergency surgery. We tended to the dog for a few days afterward until he eventually passed, and we buried him together in the hole I had spent days digging. It was, like most memorable things, a bit sad and a bit beautiful and a bit funny too.
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A month and a half later, I woke up at the crack of dawn to a shiny frost all over the tiled roofs of San Cristóbal. The coldest morning of the winter season was also my last day in Mexico, this turning felt serendipitous as I climbed into a collectivo and we careened through farmland and pueblos and headed towards the border of Guatemala.
During the month of November, I lived in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the heart of Chiapas, the Southernmost state in Mexico. I was drawn to Chiapas because of the significance it holds as the home of the Zapatista movement, an indigenous struggle for autonomy and liberation which, while rising to fame in the 90s, is still alive and well. The city of San Cristóbal was the site of the Zapatista Uprising, an armed rebellion against the state of Mexico which resulted in the reclamation of communal land stolen by Hacendados (a word for landowners, comparable to plantation owners or sharecroppers). A local I befriended named Louisa told me that while ‘Zapatourism’ was high in the late 90s and early 2000s, it’s much less common now. In fact, if not for the handful of shops which sell patches and tortilla warmers hand embroidered with phrases like “Sin mujeres no hay revolucion” and “Lento per sin pausa“, an unknowing tourist might not realize that the city is at the center of a large web of Caracoles, small autonomous communities which function completely separately from the state of Mexico, with their own economic, educational, judicial, and justice systems. This is a testament to the success of efforts to erase the knowledge and history of resistance movements by the Mexican government. Louise told me that the city of San Cristóbal moved the location of city hall 20 minutes outside of the center, so as to draw tourists eyes away from the demonstrations which often take place there. Nevertheless, the fighting heart and history of San Cris persists. It is dynamic and vibrant and full of interesting people and histories. I spent a lot of time sitting in the many cafe/bookstores and reading translated communiques from Subcommante Marcos, one of the most known figures in the Zapatista movement, and watching movies at an independent theatre downtown. The first week I was there I befriended a man who sold jewelry on the street, a strange but kind character from whom I got the sense had much more to say than what he let on. In the month that followed whenever we ran into each other downtown we would walk and talk about the Zapatistas and our favorite books and he would help me with my Spanish. One day he asked me very earnestly “Do you want to help in the revolution?” and when I responded yes he said, “Then why are you here? Why don’t you go help in the place that you know?”. I didn’t have the language to communicate to him that this had been an anxiety of mine ever since I left the U.S, virtually seeing my friends in the belly of the beast continuing to organize, protest, and care for one another in the face of a Genocide taking place with our own tax dollars and mounting cold temperatures making life increasingly unsafe for houseless communities. I’ve had to make an effort to remind myself that what I’m learning is and will be valuable for my community back home, and that long-term, on-the-ground involvement is not the only way to stand in solidarity.
After I left San Cris, I had the pleasure of spending three weeks with one of my best friends from back home, traveling in Costa Rica and Guatemala. It was such a treat to spend time with someone who is so similarly oriented to the world to share curiosity with, and so nice to have a travel companion who I love and trust deeply. Their returning home certainly made me very aware of my own inability to do so, but also gave me a renewed sense of purpose. After they left, I headed to Quetzaltenango (Xela) Guatemala, where I have been for the past week attending a Spanish school in a small mountain town two hours outside of the city. This experience has been amazing, and I’ve learned an incredible amount from my teacher and host family about the history of struggle of the Guatemalan people. Eating meals with my host mother who was born on a Finca during the sharecropping years, whose siblings fought in the civil war, and whose family recently spent the whole month of November participating in blockades in protest of the corrupt president Giammatteii who refused to step down after being voted out of office, gave the words “La vida es lucha, y se lucha siempre” a deeper tone for me. There’s much more to say about this, and about everything, but the bus is coming in thirty minutes and I’ve got to go!
With love,
Sophie xx
Sophie! 
One response to “An update long over-due”
Such a beautiful reflection from a beautiful soul. Keep searching Sophie! 🌟💙🕊️
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