Made in Mexico: Tradition, Tourism, and Political Ferment in Oaxaca

5. Things Fall Apart: Attacks on Tourism in Oaxaca and the Prospects for Recovery

135 5. Things Fall Apart: Attacks on Tourism in Oaxaca and the Prospects for Recovery I hoped to go to Oaxaca in July 2006 to attend the Guelaguetza. I would find out if the festival continued to evolve or had reached a stable balance between the authenticity that tourists demand (however romantically and imprecisely) and the aesthetic intensification outsiders also favor without knowing they are doing so. I hoped to visit friends who wove rugs or carved and painted wooden figures for tourists and the international market, and to see how similar issues were playing out in their work. And I expected to evaluate how the parallel world of new traditional crafts not supported by tourists was evolving. But my trip was delayed and then took a surprising turn, because Oaxaca’s longterm socioeconomic formula balancing poverty, authoritarian rule, and an economy reliant on ethnic tourism unraveled. Before booking my flight, I caught up on the news from Oaxaca. I learned that the annual teachers’ strike had been unusually large and protracted and was still escalating rather than resolving on schedule. I kept waiting to hear that the twenty-sixth consecutive strike had ended as had the first twenty-five, with a token raise and a return to the classroom. Instead confrontation led to violence, to gunfire, and to a climax that initially seemed bizarre—the Guelaguetza auditorium was vandalized just before the festival was scheduled to take place, and the event was canceled for the first time in decades. Dismayed, I canceled my travel plans. I wondered: Why attack the event that is the focus for 136 attacks on tourism and the prospects for recovery both tradition and tourism in this part of the world? What might this mean for the future of Oaxaca? Oaxaca, 1990s–2006: A Fragile Peace Frays, and Hostility to Ethnic Tourism Grows During visits to Oaxaca in 1995 and 1997, I had happened upon protest marches—or rather, these marches were routed through the central square, so that both affluent locals and tourists like me could not help but witness them. Years passed, and these two marches began to blend together in my memory. A few questions posed during later visits revealed why: the marches didn’t just appear to be similar; they had the same purpose and included many of the same participants carrying the same sturdy signs. Teachers from throughout the state were publicizing that they were on strike. They wanted marginally better salaries and, especially , money for basic classroom supplies such as books and candles. Moreover, in both years, teachers were joined by women in long huipiles bearing lots of horizontal red stripes, women who I learned were members of the Triqui Indian population. In fact, every year that the teachers struck and marched, their numbers were reinforced by members of other disaffected groups, including the Triqui. Just as regularly, when the teachers received a minimal raise and returned to work, their allies in the protest disbanded too. But the summer of 2006 was different. Many citizens of Oaxaca were extremely unhappy with Governor Ulises Ruíz Ortíz, who took a hard line with protests and any social disquiet—he departed from custom by stonewalling the striking teachers—and whose 2004 election was widely perceived as blatantly fraudulent. The Mexican presidential election of 2006, also considered to have been more crooked than the norm, further fueled the rising level of discontent. Then these seething issues piggybacked on the teachers’ strike, and—but I am getting ahead of myself . Allow me to set the scene more thoroughly. The essential ingredients in what would become a disastrous summer for Oaxaca are deeply rooted in Mexican history. Throughout the state, but especially in the countryside, per capita incomes have always been tiny, glaringly so given how rich a few families are. Little money is attacks on tourism and the prospects for recovery 137 allotted for public education and even less for other social services. Rural towns basically fend for themselves. Today families grow, but farms cannot. Indeed, due to clumsy deforestation and various agricultural blunders, the amount of productive arable land keeps shrinking. Some of the growing populace drains off through migration to slums of major cities; many villages exist both in one rural and in at least one urban location, as well as in dense traffic on the second-class buses joining those centers. And many men must migrate farther...