rainfall | Martha's Genteel Decline

Oaxaca, the Historical Setting—Continuity and Diversity

Martha Rees

Figure 1. Gabina making tortillas (San Agustin Yatareni) Gabina making tortillas yatareni

Table 1. Language and Maize Domestication

Topics:

Environmental Setting

First Settlers (10,000 BCE-1500BCE)

Empire (1200 BCE-800CE)

City-States (800CE-1500CE)

Conquest and Colony (1521-1810) to Independence (1810-1910)

Revolution and Reform (1910-1940): Tierra y Libertad

Boom and Bust (1940-1990s)

Globalization (1990…)

Cochineal Production

Continuity and Change

Oaxaca is theoretically important because ecological, linguistic and economic diversity facilitate a regional comparative study, so dear to the anthropological heart. For over 10,000 years, people in the central valleys of Oaxaca have collected and produced crops, crafts and other products, as well as labor for regional, national, and international markets. This overview of the history of Oaxaca from the first human settlements shows how work and production have changed, not in a linear progression from ‘traditional’ use to ‘modern’ exchange production, but back-and-forth in numerous combinations. Oaxaca’s crafts, as well as its rich archaeological and historical record, contribute to Mexican national discourse, that, like international tourist discourses, use ‘tradition’ to characterize Oaxaca. Both discourses see ‘tradition’ as unchanging, indigenous, mystical and primitive. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his book Oaxaca Journal (2002), gives these misconceptions a layer of scientific legitimacy with his romantic vision and errors of fact: the mysterious ‘trance-like’ state of the tourist guide (p. 125), and their “primitive” lack of the wheel (p. 151), among others (Rees 2005). Anthropologists, including this author, can only avoid the tendency to exoticize and stereotype the ‘other’ by questioning our assumptions, including our perspective on the past. We romanticize the past by creating an imaginary of positive images; at the same time, we separate ourselves from that past by constructing differences between then and now. We create, transform, and reject ‘tradition.’ This chapter starts with a discussion of tradition and custom in order to analyze the historical record in terms of women’s production of use and exchange values. This analysis shows that in the history of Oaxaca, there are both continuities and change, and that tradition is a dynamic process.

People invoke tradition to refer to a practice or object that exists in the present in an unchanged, ‘authentic’ form that represents the past. Every practice and tradition undergoes constant interpretation and change. García Canclini (1995) criticizes the romantic tendency as conservative of the status quo and elitist, and notes that anthropology has tended to study ‘tradition.’ He goes on to point out that the tension between tradition and modernity is especially strong in Latin America, since many in Latin America see it as backwards and traditional. The search for the authentic primitive and traditional is a search for meaning at the same time that it is resistance against the hegemony of western cultural values. The very dichotomy between traditional and modern is a way of creating and emphasizing difference. García Canclini is talking about cultural production such as crafts, but his ideas are relevant to the study of tradition in general.

All traditions change. Imputing stasis to them is a political position than historical analysis. Take Thanksgiving, for example. The food, the justification or origin myth, the participants, the division of labor—all of these have changed dramatically since the first Thanksgiving. In the case of practices labeled ‘traditional’, the label may represent desire more than reality, a fantasy about the past and a way to characterize the ‘other’ as not us (e.g., not ‘modern’). Peoples or groups are not ‘traditional’—everyone today is modern, and those we call ‘traditional’ often behave more ‘modern’ than we do.

So-called “traditional” characteristics are dynamic and persistent. For example, community assemblies grant land to male household heads, who must cultivate it continuously as well as keep up with community obligations like cargo and tequio (p. 80), or risk having those rights taken away. Male children inherit rights as long as they, in turn, continue to meet their community service obligations. This system keeps people in line and encourages migrants’ return. Structured reciprocal exchange (guelaguetza, see p. 86ff) leaves everyone but the richest in debt to everyone else. Children inherit the guelaguetza debt of their parents, so this, also, encourages people to fulfill their obligations and encourages migrants to return home to fulfill their obligations. These ‘traditional’ community institutions support ‘modern’ practices such as migration, just as migration supports ‘traditional’ fiestas. Tradition (community, crafts, language, ethnicity, fiestas, and labor exchange) is not the opposite of, but part and parcel of “modernity” (e.g., wage labor, migration, and urbanization). Tradition is a symbol of community, but individuals, households and communities contest its practice, resulting in the formation and reformation of identity over time.

Customs are part of tradition; like tradition, they are dynamic, and respond to changes in external conditions, to style and to resources. Food and dress vary around the valleys, but there are important commonalities—and these are similar in both Spanish- and Zapotec-speaking communities. The same goes for food. The triumvirate of maize, beans, and squash has been the staple in Mesoamerica for over five thousand years. Foods like the tortilla, tejate (a delicious nutritious drink made of maize, cacao, the seed of the mamey fruit, flower of the chocolate vine, and sugar), tamales, salsa, and mole have not changed much, but many new foods—including instant coffee, cola drinks, bread, and potato chips—are found in the most remote stores. If food were an indicator of ethnicity, then everyone in the valleys is Zapotec, and everyone is global: eating the ubiquitous local version of the tortilla, the tlayuda, downed with a Coke. This extends to the city, where middle class urban folks claim that they ‘hardly ever eat tortillas,’ and eschew chile even though they eat toasted tlayudas with black beans every day. In rural areas, local food may be devalued as “poor people’s food”—for example the addition of garbanzo to tortilla, initially done to make maize go further, but incidentally providing a complementary source of protein, making the tlayuda with garbanzo, not only a tasty, but nutritious food. In 1997, Inés in Tilcajete told me “before when we were poorer, we stretched the maize by adding garbanzo.”

Squash flowers, chapulines (grasshoppers), and field greens (quelites) are much-appreciated seasonal delicacies. These play an important role in diet and in ecology, since all three are abundant in the summer. The summer is the period of highest nutritional stress, because households have eaten up or planted all that was left of last year’s harvest and the rains increase gastroenteritis (Kappel 1977). With little food, people eat quelites, greens that grow in the fields, excellent sources of protein, iron and vitamins A and C. Their harvest fills an important nutritional need during the summer months, as well as clears the fields for the squash and maize crops. Male squash flowers (revered from the southwestern US to Mexico) are another good source of vitamins and protein (Gijón 1996). Their harvest does not decrease the squash yield. Grasshoppers are small mobile packets of protein (think of them as land shrimp) that can seriously damage the maize crop. Their harvest in July alleviates nutritional stress at the same time that it rids the crop of pests. (Almost) everyone savors unique local chiles—the chile de agua and the Oaxaca pasilla, yellow mole, the guaje—concentrated packages of vitamins A and C. These food customs reflect local environment, history and economy.

History conditions how we look at women and their work. Anyone who visits the central valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico, or practically any place in Mexico, sees women working in the fields, making and selling tortillas (see Figure 1), tending goats, weaving straw mats, carrying out a world of activities. Aranda (1985) first reported data on this for Oaxaca, in a book of papers presented at the first national meeting of research on Mexican peasant women. Women in rural or urban Oaxaca engage in a multitude of productive activities. Subsistence and commercial crops are the most important, but crafts and other small production, wage labor (mainly domestic service, described by Howell 2000), petty commerce such as taco stands on the street corner, as well as migrant labor—all are important women’s activities (Murphy and Stepick 1991; Cook and Binford 1990). Women’s activities have changed over time, as is shown in this review of Oaxaca’s history. The thread that runs through this description of resources and history is use and exchange value.