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

2. Crafts and Tourism in Oaxaca

35 2. Crafts and Tourism in Oaxaca Indian hunter-gatherers lived in Oaxaca as early as twenty thousand years ago and added agriculture to their strategies for survival as early as 7000 BC. The “three sisters” that sustain many peasants today—corn, beans, and squash—have been staples for at least as long as villages have existed, that is, since about 2000 BC. To hunt they had spears and bows and arrows; to cultivate they had digging sticks. Many other tools must have been part of daily life long before traces of them were left for archaeologists to find. At some point the Indians began making their everyday objects with techniques and results that reached beyond the purely utilitarian; they added creative panache to the building process and thus were making crafts artfully. Crafts in the History of Oaxaca through the Advent of Tourism The oldest surviving exemplars of the main southern Mexican craft categories are shards of pottery; a few ceramic figures that also bear depictions of cloth skirts, sandals, and jewelry. The need for furniture required carving wood. Burials with jewelry, favorite possessions, and food and drink constitute our first evidence of ritual. By about 500 BC, villages grew from handfuls of dwellings to clusters of several hundred residents, and social classes began to emerge. For example, a village near the current site of the city of Oaxaca housed specialists who cut and polished magnetite into mirrors for trade (Whipperman 2000, 18). And some of the early pottery illustrates differentiation between rather plain, functional pieces and finer, more decorated ones for the upper classes. 36 crafts and tourism in oaxaca The fertile Oaxaca valleys nourished an increasingly stratified society , one headed by priests and soldiers but also including architects and artists. A calendar rationalized the yearly cycle of events, and written script eventually came into being. Ancestors of Oaxaca’s Zapotec Indians founded Monte Albán above the junction of the three central valleys. This and a dozen smaller ritual and administrative centers flourished on defensible hilltops through about AD 750. During the peak of population, roughly AD 500 through 750, social differentiation was also relatively great. As one consequence, pottery became relatively elaborate (Murphy and Stepick 1991, 14). War was a constant, but why this civilization dissolved remains unclear, as mysterious as the demise of the Mayan empire in Chiapas and the Yucatán, and of Teotihuacán in the central valley of Mexico. Throughout Mexico, cities that had been vassals became independent states. In this Zapotec territory, the lack of focused power invited invasion by the nascent Mixtec people, gathered together by the warlord known in surviving codices as Tiger Claw. Mixtec nobles forced marriage with Zapotec heiresses. Although few Mixtec speakers remain in the central valleys today, both ruins and modern crafts display a fascinating mix of Zapotec and Mixtec artistic traditions . The Aztecs arrived in the valley of Mexico around 1250 and ruled it within a century. As part of a general expansion of their territory, they subjugated the city of Oaxaca during the 1400s, establishing a garrison at the site of present-day Oaxaca by midcentury. Tribute paid by the Zapotecs took various forms depending on what a village had to offer. Teotitlán del Valle, located about thirty kilometers outside Oaxaca, sent four hundred bundles of embroidered cotton fabric and eight hundred bundles of wider fabric every three months, according to an exhibit in modern Teotitlán’s municipal museum. The Aztecs’ energetic combination of war, diplomacy, and forced political marriages was never enough to subjugate the entire state of Oaxaca . The conquistadores would be more successful. The chronology is compelling: Cortés and his band of adventurers arrived from Cuba near present-day Veracruz in 1519 and took over the Aztec capital of Tenochtitl án by 1521. A central strategy was to gather allies from peoples subject to the Aztecs, including the Zapotecs (though the Mixtecs initially crafts and tourism in oaxaca 37 resisted). By the end of 1521, the Catholic mass had been celebrated in the region of Oaxaca, and the Spanish were firmly in power throughout the state within months. When Cortés presented New Spain to his king, he claimed a reward: the valley of Oaxaca. He received rights to most of the good valley land and would himself grant encomiendas (rights to land and the labor of the resident Indians) to friends, relatives, and children...