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

3. Tradition and Tourism in Festival Life: Shaping and Marketing Oaxaca’s Guelaguetza

74 3. Tradition and Tourism in Festival Life: Shaping and Marketing Oaxaca’s Guelaguetza On two Mondays each July, the indigenous populations of the state of Oaxaca collaborate with the state tourist board and various cultural organizations to present the country’s most spectacular festival, the Guelaguetza. A dozen or more dance troupes from all over the state, accompanied by either their own small band or the state brass band—a total of about five hundred dancers and musicians—perform for an audience of over twelve thousand in an open-air hillside venue built for the festival overlooking the city of Oaxaca. Many thousands more watch on television, and the two sessions of dance and music on the hill combine with dozens of linked events in the city to create a complex and continuous fortnight of fiesta. The total event has become massive and equally intricate as both aesthetic and political statement. Without tourist money, no festival this large would be possible. The Guelaguetza is the highest point in Oaxaca’s tourist calendar and thus the annual focus for the local economy (the other, lesser high seasons being the weeks surrounding Christmas and the Day of the Dead). A broad partnership, the Guelaguetza depends on several population groups being happy with the composite event beyond its aesthetic qualities. Tourists satisfy a generalized nostalgia by considering the Guelaguetza an authentic representation of valuable aspects of an equally generalized past, the powerful of Oaxaca reassert their comfortable position at the state’s socioeconomic pinnacle, and the dancers and musicians welcome shaping and marketing oaxaca’s guelaguetza 75 both the opportunity to see their indigenous identity celebrated publicly and a free trip to the big city. Many people who live in metropolitan Oaxaca enjoy the festivities and the immediate economic benefits of tourist dollars. But many others harbor serious reservations about the event as a political and economic statement. In this chapter, I examine the Guelaguetza through 2005, and in the final chapter I touch on more recent developments. The broad outline of the symbiosis between event, government, outsider audience, and local populace is straightforward. It costs plenty to put on the festival. Participants in the Guelaguetza are not paid beyond food, lodging, and transportation, but there are lots of them—I conservatively estimate five hundred because there are an average of twenty troupes overall, each filling a bus (twelve or more troupes per Monday , with some overlap between the ensembles dancing the two days). And security involves many more bodies than does the entertainment. Police and temporary armed guards are hired liberally both because of the sheer size of the event and because it attracts some extremely high-profile visitors (one estimate for numbers of employees given in 2002 included 1,123 police, 80 cleaners, and over 200 legal vendors; see Chavela Rivas 2002). After all, every socioeconomic level is represented liberally in the audience, packed more tightly together than in daily life, with the potential for friction. Hundreds of state employees help the city prepare for the onslaught of visitors. The money must come from somewhere . The local elite supplement their own funds—although affluent, they are not numerous—by looking to points north in Mexico and also abroad, to American and a few European tourists. In 2002 the Secretary of Tourism (Secretario de Desarollo Turistico, commonly called Sedetur ) estimated that for every peso invested by the state, precisely 56.55 were earned, for a total of (less precisely, but grandly estimated) some five billion pesos (Chavela Rivas 2002). I attended my first Guelaguetza in 1995. The event saturated the newspapers, hotel prices rose, and taxi drivers charged more than usual. Oaxaca was clearly in high gear. The basic publicity campaign formed a litany echoed in newspapers, speeches, and flyers and placards distributed by the tourist office, broadcasting a formula that all visitors can soon easily internalize: “Guelaguetza” is a Zapotec word that means 76 shaping and marketing oaxaca’s guelaguetza sharing generously.1 Some sort of ceremony centered on this theme has been going on for a long, long time. The current Guelaguetza began in 1932, and colorful troupes of “Indians” from the “seven regions” of the state are delighted to dance for an audience now. Information presented and repeated in this way constitutes what anthropologists and folklorists call “memorates,” stories told so many times that not just broad outlines but also intimate details of vocabulary have crystallized...