Random Descriptions of My Travel Adventures

These are pictures of the silent procession that wound its way through the center of Oaxaca on Friday of Semana Santa or holy week. Not being of religious ilk I was fascinated by the sheer amount of jesus (I'm not capitalizing on purpose and spell check doesn't like it!) occurring around Oaxaca. The silent procession is quite interesting despite being so jesus-themed. It is quite a large and long procession and as the name obviously indicates, it is silent, at least those marching are silent. The crowd tries to be silent but as is typical in any large agglomeration of people, this is only mildly successful. My pictures are not the best, I still haven't figured out how to take effective pictures at night but they will give a sense of the event.

I have been going on a lot of visits to homes around Oaxaca for the Centro administering socioeconomic surveys. I wanted to post a few pictures of the poverty I'm encountering, not because it is unique, rather because it is ubiquitous. These are not isolated cases, these houses sit in neighborhoods surrounded by others dwelling in the exact same conditions. This house was on the side of a very steep hill, we had to walk up a dirt path to reach it. The sides of the home and the roof are made of " lamina" as they refer to it here in Mexico, basically corrugated tin. Despite what we might think of as deplorable conditions the woman who owned this home remarked "es de lamina pero es mio" which basically means "it is made of tin but it is mine." Another house in the "suburbs" of Oaxaca. This place actually had two rooms made of cement behind the room of lamina you see here so they are doing much better than the family in the photo above. This fam...

The town of San Juan Copala is quite small, I heard one estimate of 500 people. I believe I have mentioned the violence between Triquis that has marred the region for many years. This violence has been between two competing groups, the MULT and the UBISORT and now a third splinter group the MULTI. San Juan Copala recently declared itself an autonomous municipality with the encouragement and support of the APPO. They seem to still be figuring out what this means but the model for this declaration is of course the autonomous communities in Chiapas created by the Zapatistas. I was there during their annual fiesta so there was no direct evidence of violence and they claim to have stopped the violence since declaring themselves autonomous, at least according to my fellow researcher. If they have stopped the violence then it is literally only within the very small borders of the town itself because violence has definitely continued. In fact, upon returning to the city of Oaxaca I was alerted...

Click here to view a map of Tlaxiaco and San Juan Copala , roughly anyway.

Last week I went out to San Juan Copala, a small (very small) town in the Triqui region of western Oaxaca. I caught a suburban out of Oaxaca around 6am on Wednesday morning and took a 3 hour ride (mas o menos) to Tlaxiaco a town in the Mixteca region of western Oaxaca. Once there I met a fellow researcher and after a quick breakfast in the market we hopped on another van for a ride on some very twisty mountain roads. After about an hour we jumped off of this van and hopped in a small truck for the ride to San Juan Copala. On the drive there we passed this sign advertising their annual fiesta. After some confusion about where we might stay that night we finally dropped our things off in the municipal president's office and began wandering around the small town. San Juan Copala recently declared itself an autonomous municipality (they are still figuring out what this means to them apparently) and since this declaration, according to the researcher I was with, the violence in the t...

A 6.4 magnitude hit Oaxaca this morning! Of course I was still in Colombia so I didn't feel anything. To those of you who emailed me asking if I was okay, thanks, I'm okay. To those of you who didn't, where is the love!?! Click here for the USGS information about the quake.