Between Art and Artifact: Archaeological Replicas and Cultural Production in Oaxaca, Mexico

To the Top of Monte Albán

IGLANCED DOWN AT MY WATCH: 9:25 A.M., only five more minutes until we were scheduled to leave. My gaze settled on the hot pink wall in front of me, where someone had painted a giant multicolored map of the state of Oaxaca. A connect-the-dots pattern informed tourists of the principal places of interest, namely colonial churches, craft villages, and archaeological sites. In a selective rendering of local geography, towns lacking these attractions were mostly absent from the map. Arrazola’s location was indicated on the mural by a brightly colored armadillo, its mark of wood-carving fame. I patiently sat in the lobby of the Hotel Rivera del Angel, waiting to be called to the small green bus parked in the inner courtyard of the hotel that would transport me to the top of Monte Albán. For more than a decade , this hotel at the southern edge of the city had run a regular bus service to and from Monte Albán that was utilized by tourists and locals alike. My friend Josefina sat next to me, her eyes heavy from lack of sleep. Ever since her son and daughter-in-law had left over a year ago to find work in Los Angeles, she woke up before five o’clock every morning to tend to the house and three young children they left in her care. At sixty years old, Josefina made the daily trip to sell the beaded necklaces and bracelets that she expertly strung together in the spare moments between cleaning, cooking, and caring for her grandchildren. She was married to one of the longtime replica vendors and was the only female vendor from Arrazola at Monte Albán. We sat in TO THE TOP OF MONTE ALBÁN 79 | To the Top of Monte Albán silence and waited for the young woman in charge of ticket sales to announce the bus’s departure. A dozen or so tourists milled about the lobby, some clutching guidebooks, others armed with overpriced bottled water purchased from the hotel’s small concession stand. Scattered among the German-, Italian-, Japanese-, and English-speaking mix of tourists was a handful of local men, some of them from Arrazola. I made eye contact with an older man sitting on a bench across the room, whose face I recognized from the village but whose acquaintance I had not yet made. He must have recognized me, too, because he acknowledged me with a slight nod of his head. On his lap he held a small, dusty duffel bag that I assumed contained items he would sell that day. I glanced sideways at Josefina, who, overcome with drowsiness , appeared to have nodded off in her upright position. As if by force of habit, her eyes suddenly blinked open as the young woman from the ticket desk announced that we could now board the bus. Josefina hoisted her bag, heavy with the weight of the stone jewelry, onto her small frame and we made our way out to the bus. During the twenty-minute ride to the archaeological zone, we twisted through the narrow, and at times dangerously steep, streets of the neighborhoods situated between the city’s southwestern perimeter and the hill where Monte Albán majestically towered. We passed through the gritty, workingclass neighborhoods of San Martín Mexicapan, San Juan Chapultepec, and Colonia Monte Albán, which presented a sharp visual contrast to the graceful colonial architecture and quaint cobblestone streets of the city’s downtown hotel zone. Around us, many of the tourists chatted nervously, perhaps sharing my own ever-present fear of flying off one of the hairpin curves and landing in the precipice below. The poverty evidenced by some of the homes did not go unnoticed, and in fact, seemed to be a source of voyeuristic curiosity for some of the people on the bus. An English-speaking woman sitting behind me commented to her male traveling companion that “the neighborhood is lookin’ pretty rough” and said she was glad they had decided to take the bus instead of walking all the way to the site, as some ambitious tourists did. I asked Josefina why the bus took this old road up to Monte Albán, rather than the new highway just to the west, which 80 | Between Art and Artifact was more carefully maintained and bypassed the urban sprawl of the colonias...