Celebrating Oaxaca

Photograph by Manu Bastien www.manuphotos.com

Oaxaca  captured my soul since my first visit there in 1985 and I have since  felt that it is my spiritual home.  This intense fascination with the many different indigenous people and their food and traditions  led to the book ,The Food and Life of Oaxaca (Macmillan 1987).

My first visit there made such an impact  when I wrote my first book, Food from my Heart (Macmillan 1992) I wrote about my first impressions that I would like to share with you.

Stand at the Juarez Market in Oaxaca City Photo by Laurie Smith www.LSmithPhoto.com

When I think of the great Juarez Market of Oaxaca I think of the delicious taste of crisp-fried chapulines, tiny red grasshoppers that are synonymous with high summer in that part of the world. I’ve been hooked since my first taste of them on a summer day about six years ago, which was also my first glimpse of the market.

It is July l6, the feast day of the Virgen del Carmen (Our Lady of Mount Carmel), just before the citywide festival called the Guelaguetza. I am staying with a friend at the Hotel Presidente, a great landmark that began as a sixteenth-century convent. In the nineteenth century it served as headquarters of Benito Juarez, a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca who became Mexico’s first Indian president. Later the place became a jail before being turned into an exquisite hotel. From the Presidente to the Juarez Market is a walk of five or six blocks through very clean cobbled streets filled with vendors — everywhere you look is another tray of wares. The streets are a shopper’s paradise, but also a window on the fierce traditionalism of the Indians who live in and around this old southern city. Many tribes come to sell their goods, each clinging to its own language and tribal costumes. They also continue to cook their own foods.  But Oaxaca is also home to a more assimilated population of mestizos, those of mixed Spanish and Indian blood.

We get no further than around the corner from the hotel when we come on
a mestizo woman leaning against a wall. The little girl beside her stands up when she sees us coming and walks up to me smiling shyly, outstretched hands filled with handmade wooden combs, letter openers, bookmarks, and decorative little picks. The work is beautiful.

She gestures us over to her mother’s stand. They are Hortensia Paz and her daughter Victoria, and Hortensia explains that her family has been doing this for generations. Her grandfather taught her father and aunts and uncles, they in turn taught their children, and now the younger generation is learning the trade. Most of them still whittle their lives away. As she talks Hortensia is staining wide-toothed combs with a rag soaked in dye while Victoria sands away rough spots with a pumice stone.

A few steps away Margarita Ruiz, age thirteen, presides over an artistic arrangement of some pineapple-shaped fruit (but only the size of a walnut) heaped in pyramids on a wide, shallow handwoven basket decorated with bunches of freshly cut alfalfa laid out in graceful arches. The fruit doesn’t really look edible and I ask if you can really eat it. She replies with a very dry yes. Thinking I’m about to make an exciting discovery, I ask, “And the alfalfa?” She disdainfully answers that only pigs eat it, it is only para el lujo de la canasta — to lend a more luxurious look to the basket. The fruit is jiotilla, she informs me, and is used in some Oaxacan versions of the aguas frescas  (fresh  fruit drinks) enjoyed throughout all the hot regions. Jiotilla and mangos by Laurie Smith LSmithPhoto.com

We make our way toward the market. But first we come to the Plaza Mayor, surrounded by government buildings. Today and every afternoon, it is a forest of vendors and offerings.  I thread my way past Indians of many tribes in their different costumes, sellers with trays on their heads, civil servants taking an afternoon saunter, families on outings, students, tourists. The scope of different items for sale is overwhelming. So is the range within each category, whether it’s toys or candies or corn. Dazed with the riot of colors and aromas, I partly stop comprehending what I’m seeing after I’ve noticed hot corn on the cob, small balloons like beach balls or huge ones like giant animated cartoon figures, colored gelatinas (jelled desserts) in jewel-like tones, and some stuff for making bubbles.

Calenda Marissa and Emmanuel’s wedding

I buy some of this last and start blowing bubbles.  A young family walks past and a little girl dressed in Sunday-best blue chiffon starts running after my bubbles, squealing with joy every time she catches one. I still have the photographs my friend Laurie took of her innocent and lovely pleasure.

Some of the crowd is here because today there is a concert. All over Mexico in every main plaza the government provides a free concert every Wednesday and Saturday. People from the surrounding villages come in, on foot or by bus, to enjoy the music. The band is playing on the second level of a kiosk accessible by an ornate, elaborate ironwork staircase. Here I get into a conversation with a young man of about thirty, dressed in white and wearing a Mixe Indian sarape. I have him figured as one who will be proud and suspicious of questions, the archetypal uncommunicative Indian of the villages. But Juan Luis Zamoras of Juquila Mixes surprises me by cooperatively opening up and talking about himself and his family. He tells me that he and his brother have come to enjoy the music with their young families. He translates my questions into the Mixe language and explains his relatives’ answers in Spanish for me.

I ask him what he taught his little girl first, meaning which language. Juan Luis misunderstands my question. He answers, “I first taught my daughter to respect her elders and to say hello!”

The children, he tells me, still learn the history and legends of their people from the oldest person in a family, or sometimes the village elder. It is what has helped them survive as a people. Their food has also survived in nearly the same form for many centuries. In Juquila Mixes, as throughout this region, the villagers usually eat tamales, beans, chile, and champurrado, a gruel made with ground corn and cacao beans. These are the basic foods that their ancestors were eating when the Spanish set out to conquer Mexico.  The tribes maintain an intense ethnic pride; the native foods of the Americas, and the still surviving pre-Columbian ways of cooking them, are a proud part of it. The attitude toward outsiders and other ways is not always warm in these isolated lands. Though the young Mixe is friendly enough, I am aware of having encountered something outside my normal understanding.

We resume our walk toward the market but are told that it is closed from three to five!  We will not get a leisurely look at it until the next day. But meanwhile we decide to see the fair of the Virgen del Carmen. This is being held in the courtyard of the church of the Carmen Alto, with bands playing and people dancing and singing. Stalls have been set up selling drinks and food. We are taken with the delicious quesadillas at one, but no one is willing to make one for us because we look foreign and the assumption is that we have come to observe them tourist-fashion, like animals in a zoo. We have to get a local to intercede for us. The quesadillas are simple but good, made with epazote and the Oaxacan string cheese so curiously reminiscent of the kind made in Syria and Armenia. While we are eating the cook’s son, a boy of about eleven, comes back from some mission. We listen to their conversation and realize that he has been sent to look for work and is here to report success. “See, it was worth it!” his mother says encouragingly. Everyone is expected to do what they can for the family.

All this is only prelude to the adventure we have really come for: the mercado Juarez, the main market of Oaxaca, set up with regular stalls selling anything from cradles to guitars. It justifies everything that has been said of it by visitors — for example,  D.H. Lawrence, in Mornings in Mexico. You walk through the entrances set all about the four walls of the market and are propelled  into a magical world of exotic sights and sensations — beginning with the shock of almost falling over a small woman selling something on the floor under your feet. What a burst of smells! At first it is all chaos, a feeling reinforced by the innumerable floor-level vendors in every aisle in among the stalls. I am bowled over not just by the diversity of wares but by the fact that I have never before seen most of the foods being offered all around the great square. I have no idea what they are.

My first encounter is with the women selling tlayudas or clayudas, large tortillas made with a special kind of very starchy yellow corn, on the floor near the entrance. The tlayudas are thick and chewy, with a rich, satisfying corn flavor, and served with various accompaniments, I taste them first with a simple spread called asiento, made from the layer that sinks to the bottom in rendering lard. People also eat tlayudas with the dried smoked gusanos de maguey (maguey worms) that are one of the true Oaxacan passions (you may have seen one in the bottom of a bottle of mezcal, the famous local maguey liquor). But maybe the best way turns out to be with the crunchy, freshly cooked insects that I find at the same floor spot. I have never tried anything of the kind.

The woman explains to me that these are chapulines de milpa, harvested in the cornfields at daybreak with fine nets. First they are rinsed in very hot water to kill them, then picked over carefully. She cooks them by sauteing in hot lard and seasons them with garlic and powdered chile, finishing them with liberal amounts of fresh lime juice. Your first mouthful is a revelation — spicy and citrusy and deliciously crunchy all at once. There is nothing like them. No wonder Oaxacans are said to be about as devoted to fried chapulines as to soul and body!

It takes a while to see that the market is organized (if that’s the word) into different areas selling various goods. There is a huge flower section.  Just past it are the famous nieves de Oaxaca ( ice creams in flavors like roses, avocado and corn) and the fresh fruit drinks (aguas frescas and preparados). You pick your way through aisles of baskets, pottery, painted clay figurines,  live birds, jewelry, musical instruments, leather and woodwork, cacao beans roasting on clay comales, sewing goods, pinatas, paper flowers, religious icons, herbs, remedies, maguey worms threaded on strings to be sold by the hundred. Among the riot of salesmanship in the aisles are Indian women selling brightly painted gourds of pozol, a slightly fermented beverage made with lime-treated dried corn, panela (Mexican brown sugar), and sometimes ground achiote. (Do not try unless you subscribe to my mother’s thinking that a little stomach trouble cleans your system and helps you lose weight!) Near the door and also at ankle level is another new experience, a blancmange-like dessert in layers of white and shocking pink. It turns out to be a kind of jelled pudding made by cooking corn many hours to extract the starch. When at last I reach the main produce stalls in the center of the market I confront mountains of strange greens and other vegetables,  fresh and dried red chiles unknown to me in a lifetime of eating chiles, palettes of  moles and recados, the intoxicating smell of perfectly ripe mangos and bananas.

A separate building is taken up with restaurant stalls like mini-diners, interspersed with others selling fresh bread and produce like milk and eggs. Here throughout my stay I have many an early morning cup of champurrado with a freshly baked piece of sweet bread, starting my day with the city by watching everyone arrive and set up their wares. Our early evenings are spent in one of the many restaurants around the plaza where the play of life continues to unfold.  There are fortune-tellers and strolling musicians, Indian families selling their weavings, and the roasted camote (sweet potato) cart that tells you it’s almost time to turn in. One evening Laurie and I are approached at one of the restaurants by a couple of young men who take us to be American sightseers and offer their services as guide-gigolos. When I ask them where is their Mexican male pride, they explain that they are students with no job and this is how they manage to drink a few beers and sit in the marketplace cafes! Undoubtedly it’s a good way for young guys to practice their English and get some meals out of squiring around lady tourists. (We decline their services.)

I come back again and again to the market but don’t even begin to exhaust its riches. The stalls and cafes are my education in the distinctive flavors of Oaxaca. But I am frustrated in trying to understand what I am tasting until I find a mentor, Dona Maria Concepcion Carballido de Portillo, who takes me through the market explaining what the strange fruits and vegetables are and what ingredients are used to cook the dishes at the stalls. Then I begin to make sense of the experience.

I taste all sorts of chiles that are not grown in any other part of the country — the smoky dried chile pasilla de Oaxaca, the yellowish chile amarillo (also called chilcosle), and the large chilhuacle rojo and chilhuacle negro. Often the food is accented with the lemony-scented Oaxacan oregano. Some of the local dishes are as purely Indian in character as the food of the villages, others mingle Indian and Spanish elements. Many have a sweet-hot taste resulting from unusual combinations of fruits, nuts, and chiles. I seize the opportunity to learn what I can of moles, which are as much associated with Oaxaca as Boston with baked beans. In fact, the state is known as “the land of the seven  moles.”  Different people will argue about just what these are and other states can also claim some of the dishes as their own. But one listing that seems reasonable is mole verde (green, made with epazote, parsley, hoja santa, tomatillos, and green chiles), mole amarillo (yellow, made with amarillo chiles), mole coloradito, (light red, made with both amarillo and ancho chiles),  mole colorado (a deeper red), chichilo (involving several kinds of dried chiles and avocado leaves with their wonderful anisy fragrance), manchamanteles (see recipe, p. 000), and the richest and most elaborate of all, mole negro (see p. 000). I sample them all along with other beautiful dishes new to me,  and ask Dona Concepcion to teach me some of the Oaxacan specialties that once tasted, I’m sure I can’t live without.

I have been back to Oaxaca several times since and have pored over  cookbooks as well to extend my knowledge. Probably no other cuisine has influenced my food as much — especially the multitude of sauces, which tempt me to privately christen the state “the land of the hundred sauces.”  But when I think of that teeming market and its wares, the first thing I taste is still the crisp succulence of chapulines.