Our morning started on the light side today. My fellow teacher, Jennifer, and I asked the Oaxaca baseball players who were staying at our hotel if we could take a picture with them. Awesome. We loaded the bus to find Jaques playing the National anthem and waving a small American flag. Nice.
What questions do I have?
Throughout our first week in Mexico, I have found myself thinking a lot about the presence of the Mayan culture and history in everything that we have seen. Some of the places we have visited, like Chichen Itza, seem to be an obvious place to discuss the Mayan population. It surprised me to hear the number of people who speak Mayan, the way that Mayan slang words are incorporated into Spanish, and the acknowledgement of Mayan history throughout different towns we are visiting. It leaves me with the questions: What misunderstandings do people outside of Mexico have about the prevalence of Mayan culture in Mexico today? and How do we integrate all of the voices of American history into the present?
These questions, along with others came to my mind during our journey today.
What connections did I make?
Our first stop today was to the Hacienda “Sotuta de Peon”. This was a working Hacienda until 1950, growing plants that produce sosquil, a fiber used to make ropes. The farm has been restored to show people the process of making this fiber into natural ropes and still has a small production. It cannot sustain itself as a farm alone because it takes too much land to grow enough of the plants to make a profit on the harvest. Synthetic ropes are made much cheaper and faster. Being on the Hacienda and photographing every step of the process exemplified the struggles of creating natural products and food. This stop highlighted the challenge of meeting needs that grow faster than natural processes can create.
What did I observe?
Just when I thought Sotuta de Peon couldn’t get any more interesting, we loaded wagons pulled by mules and rode through the fields to get to our stop. We unloaded from the wagons and made our way into a cave with a natural cenote (sinkhole) at the bottom. A hole in the top of the cave let a circle of light shine onto the naturally warm water. We could see through the deep water to the rocks below us and look up to the formations on top of us. It was incredible.
Our last stop of the day was in a small town called Becal, where we climbed into an entirely different kind of cave. We took bike taxis to a hat shop with a man-made cave. This time, the cave was for workers to create Panama-style hats. The air in the caves keeps the material soft and easy to work with. The result of the meticulous work of weaving for two and a half days in a hot and crowded cave is one hat. I made my first purchase today.
