i hope this finds you well as spring approaches

Yesterday marks the beginning of too-full bellies and struggling to sound halfway intelligible in Spanish as I talk to Elena, my new host abuelita and her huge extended family. The community here is located at the base of La Malintze, one of Mexico's largest mountains. "The community is close-knit and mainly non-indigenous campesinos. At least one member of most families migrates to urban areas or the US for work. The Consejo Nacional Urbano Campesino (CNUC) has a community center in Toluca [where we have class]" (from my syllabus). Tlaxcala reminds me of how I would imagine the plain states to be, or maybe like a much more temperate Arizona, only with more lushness and less cacti. The air smells like burning cedar and dust. For the first time on my trip I have my own room with a bed.

Oventic ended with the International Women's Day celebration. Indigenous and non-indigenous women from all over Mexico and internationals alike came to the caracol for the conference. We watched as women played all sorts of sports while men were in charge of cooking, cleaning, and childcare. I had left the day before the political speeches and other events, but I was pleasantly surprised to run into Gracie Janove who is also traveling in Mexico. I introduced her to my group and it turns out she knew one of the kids from middle school. ¡que weird!

I went to Oaxaca City and Mazunte this past week for spring break. Some highlights included discovering a new type of coconut that's green on the outside, swimming in too-big waves in the Pacific Ocean, eating tacos on the street in Oaxaca City, and discovering a dead spotted fish on the shore in Mazunte with mammalian-looking teeth: hard and defined, looking nothing like you'd expect on a fish. It seemed more like the teeth of a beaver, really. All week I ate tons of fresh fruit and fish, left with only a mild sunburn on my back, but an alarming amount of mosquito bites. I have so many bites that it's somewhat unsettling. I feel ok though, so I don't think I'm at risk for any sort of insect-born illness.

Once we got to Toluca de Guadalupe here in Tlaxcala, we introduced ourselves and were welcomed with a delicious meal of hot rice, shrimp soup (complete with shrimp heads with tiny beaty eyes) and pineapple juice. I was assigned my family and toured around the neighborhood with Lourdes and one of the other cousins who's name escapes me. After our walk I sat down to watch Anaconda with the family and ate a bag of cheetos con chili which was basically prepacked cheetos with hot sauce moistening each one, all slimy-like. Although the texture was so snot-like, I decided I liked these pre-soggied cheetos and ate the whole bag, not realizing Elena would soon offer me more food. I had a huge jelly-filled pastry with tea before retiring to my new room with hopes of writing my homework for the week.

Every day the women in the community prepare a huge, amazing lunch. Yesterday we had this soup made of tiny bits of spaghetti, zuccini, carrot, brocolli, tiny little k'nishes on the side, and whole pieces of chicken cooked in a salty, spicy tomato sauce. Handmade tortillas and limeade were served on the side. Host family situations is making me nervous, but I can rely on the fact that my Spanish is so bad that awkward conversation is inevitable, right?

Today we went to a worker´s center and learned about braceros. Most of us had an unusually difficult time understand the accent of the video, but the men there were super friendly and I look forward to learning more. Afterwards, Hannah and I went to the art museum here in Tlaxcala and saw some super early Frida Kahlo works. It was really cool to stumble upon such beautiful art in person.

"Fancy a rabbit without any hind legs!" And he began to laugh.

Claudia and I on top of the mountain

Dan walked past one of the new chicks the other day and on his way back he saw it squished with its guts hanging out of it's butt, so we think someone stepped on him. In the amount of time it took him to tell us, the little bugger was discarded somehow by one of the compañeras.

This week at Oventic some of us planned our vacation weeks. I will be in Oaxaca City for a few days starting 3/7 and then end the week in Mazunte on the southern coast of the state of Oaxaca. Claudia, Hannah, Nick, and I will swim in the clear water and go harpoon fishing. It'll be great, and after that we're going to Tlaxcala for the next few weeks of our semester.

I learned how to do a simple stitch with a backstrap weave this week. It felt like lanyard for grownups. I hope to finish the bag before we leave Oventic. It's really a pleasantly repetitive process once I got over the difficulty of learning the steps as they were told to me in Spanish.

We went to an autonomous municipality yesterday called Magdelena de la Paz and I've decided that the word “autonomous” is just as elusive as a collective or co-op in the US. It seems like they're autonomy exists in the way that they are collectively reject any involvement from the government because of the lack of rights and respect Mexican bureaucracy grants them. This reminded me of our class earlier in the week.

My notes read,

“* - but how do we change? Not by modifying current system, but 1. by rebuilding alternatives to capitalism at community levels and 2. fighting exploitation through cooperation at local levels

in Zapatismo: the state loses relevance, therefore loses power”.

Autonomous communities are the first steps towards this.

At Magdalena de la Paz, we visited a weaving cooperative, a metal shop, and a tiny schoolroom. I bought a small patch of a burgundy flower with one coral leaf embroidered onto it that probably took a lot of time and patience, yet it only cost the equivalent of less than $2.

Today we hiked one of the smaller mountains overlooking the caracol of Oventic and sang “...and the green grass grows all around...” and learned about how infertile the land is and how houses with red roofs are part of some government project that gives them out (yet barely anything else...). The skies were clear and somehow even at the top I heard a rooster crow.

I'm back in San Cristobal for the weekend and guzzled soymilk on the street when we discovered it at some natural foods store. Before today I was reconstituting powder with water and simple syrup.

PS: I met another Sara(h) Louise this week. She was staying at Oventic for their language school program and had recently worked on this documentary, Crude Independence, about oil drilling in North Dakota:

"...through revealing interviews and breathtaking imagery of the northern plains, Crude Independence is a rumination on the future of small town America—a tale of change at the hands of the global energy market and Americas unyielding thirst for oil"

trailer below:



P.S.S:


Read The Velveteen Rabbit with illustrations here.

“

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

"