Oaxaca: Crossroads of a Continent. Project Narrative
by George Scheper and Laraine Fletcher

I. "Maize Has a Soul"

No aspect of the study of the origins of civilization in the Americas has absorbed more continuous scholarly attention than the domestication of corn, or maize, the most productive crop ever generated by human agricultural intervention. Corn as we know it, selectively bred from the wild grass teosinte, and unable to reproduce itself in the wild, is wholly dependent upon human cultivation. In turn, human life in Oaxaca, as in other regions of Mesoamerica, has been understood for millennia to be so dependent upon corn that in one version after another of indigenous origin stories, people are declared to be, as the novelist Miguel Asturias has put it, "Men of Maize"; or, as anthropologist Alan Sandstrom titled his classic study of contemporary Nahua culture in central Mexico, Corn is Our Blood (1991). The multiple existential meanings of corn in contemporary agrarian Zapotec culture are explored in "Maize Has a Soul," chapter four of González's Zapotec Science. The story of corn and the numerous other cultigens utilized over the centuries in Oaxaca is displayed in the innovative Ethnobotanical Garden of the Regional Oaxaca Cultural Center, which will be visited by participants.

The subsequent development of Mesoamerican civilization depended upon the domestication of corn. Following Mangelsdorf's life-long studies of these origins, a consensus today holds that this crucial intervention, one of just half a dozen instances in global history of the primary or independent development of agriculture, occurred seven or eight thousand years ago in the Tehuacan Valley, between the present Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca. In turn, this innovation led to the first experiments in permanent urban settlements. Institute scholar Marcus Winter will address the topic of agriculture and its attendant ceremonialism in formative-era Oaxacan culture in classroom seminars as well as in field study at San José Mogote, the earliest of the ancient urban sites (c. 1000 BCE).

Readings for this unit will include excerpts from Flannery and Marcus' Zapotec Civilization (1996) as well as other selections dealing with formative-era archaeology of Oaxaca. In addition, the on-going importance of corn-based culture, "from milpa [cornfield] to tortilla," in modern times is addressed in assigned readings from Roberto González's previously mentioned Zapotec Science, which shows how contemporary agricultural practices of the Zapotec region represent a creative combination of traditional and thoroughly modern approaches, making contemporary Zapotec farming techniques more like structural models for the future rather than "quaint survivals from the past" (González 238).

II. Urbanization and Primary State Formation: the Archaeological Record

Hard upon the development of an agricultural way of life, came the shift to permanent urban settlements with monumental ceremonial precincts, and, once again, archaeological evidence points to Oaxaca as the site of early urbanization and primary state formation. While the Olmec have often been credited with being the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica, more recent evidence, such as the dating and provenience of formative-era pottery, increasingly points toward what Flannery and Marcus have called the "sister culture" concept (see John Noble Wilford, NYT: March 15, 2005, C 1,4; cf. Richard Diehl, Science: 18 February 2005, 1055-71), according equal status of primary development to the Zapotec culture of Oaxaca. Thus, it now appears that not only the domestication of corn but the earliest occurrences in Mesoamerica of urbanism, state-level polity, and the innovations of writing and the calendar all can be documented in the Valley of Oaxaca, notably at San José Mogote and at Monte Albán, the largest and most dominant pre-Columbian city-state in Oaxaca from about 400 BCE to 700 CE.

Evidence and arguments for this primacy of civilizational development in Oaxaca were presented forty years ago in John Paddock's Ancient Oaxaca (1966) -- which drew on still earlier Mexican scholarship -- and in Joseph Whitecotton's The Zapotecs (1977), and were subsequently substantiated by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus in The Cloud People (1983) and in Zapotec Civilization (1996). Selections from the above works are included in our Institute Readers, along with Institute scholar Marcus Winter's Oaxaca: the Archaeological Record (2004).

The Oaxaca region has some of the most impressive archaeological sites in Mesoamerica. Foremost among them is Monte Albán, which is prominently sited atop an artificially flattened mountain top, and consists of an array of monumental structures, including temples, palaces, tombs, ball courts, plazas and inscribed stelae, some bearing emblems of conquest along with as yet undeciphered glyphic inscriptions. Monte Albán encompasses several centuries of occupation, until its demise from unknown causes in the eighth century CE, although the site was subsequently re-occupied in later centuries, partly by incoming Mixtec peoples, who moved into the Oaxaca Valley from the Mixteca Alta, and who are known to have appropriated earlier Zapotec tombs for their own burials. One of these re-used tombs at Monte Albán, Tomb 7, excavated by Alfonso Caso in the 1930's, yielded what is to date still the richest excavation in North American archaeology: a spectacular trove of Mixtec gold artifacts of the most exquisite workmanship, now displayed in the Regional Museum of Oaxaca in the former convent of Santo Domingo

Another major Oaxacan archaeological site that our project will study and visit is Mitla, whose highly distinctive aesthetic is based on the masterful use of inset facing-stone mosaic work in palatial ground level buildings completely different from the pyramid-platform architecture of Monte Albán Mitla. is usually interpreted as a later Zapotec religious center, which flourished after the waning of Monte Albán around 750 CE. But Mitla is also associated with the Mixtec migrations of the 14th century, a population movement that was still in process at the time of the arrival of the Spanish. In-migrating Mixtec lords are known to have inter-married with the local Zapotec, thus producing the somewhat mixed indigenous culture we see in the Valley of Oaxaca today. Nevertheless, in consequence of the pressures from the Mixtec migrations, the center of gravity of Zapotec culture moved in historic times from the Oaxaca Valley south and east to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which remains to this day the locus of Zapotec cultural revival in the State of Oaxaca.

Impressive monumental sites such as Monte Albán and Mitla readily capture our attention, but it is also important to take note of the cultural information embedded in the more modest residential sites in the Oaxaca Valley, many of which have yielded tombs rich in artifacts such as terra cotta incensarios of deities and deified ancestors and, in many cases, rich mural paintings. These murals have been documented and analyzed by Arthur Miller in The Painted Tombs of Oaxaca, Mexico/ Living with the Dead (1995), raises interpretive questions about their implications for understanding pre-Columbian Oaxacan attitudes toward the dead, and about possible continuities in contemporary indigenous Oaxacan rituals and festivals for the dead. Anthropologist Ben Feinberg's Institute seminars, based on his book The Devil's Book of Culture:  Mushrooms, Caves, and History in the Sierra Mazateca.  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), will explore cultural continuities involving attitudes towards death, the natural world, and spiritual power.

Another aspect of archaeology in Oaxaca is site-management, and the relation of archaeological priorities to the perceived needs of tourists and of the local populations who are next-door neighbors to the sites. Nelly Robles Garc’a's "The Monte Alban Management Plan" (SAA Archaeological Record [2005]) analyzes the site management policies of INAH, the national institutional authority for historical/cultural patrimony of the Mexican government, and of the major regional archaeological site authorities, such as the Santo Domingo Cultural Center, in comparison with Oaxaca's distinctive indigenous-governed communitarian museums. These diverse policies provide rich material for the discussion of cultural policy and of museological practice -- topics that have been given a fresh global impetus by the innovative policies of the recently opened Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in Washington.

III. Writing and Cultural History

To the innovations of agriculture, urbanization and primary state formation, we also need to add writing and the calendar to the "firsts" of Oaxaca. Precise evidence for the earliest examples of writing in the New World changes frequently with new discoveries. For example, the ten-glyph Maya inscription discovered just last year at San Bartolo in Guatemala dates to about 300 BCE, pushing Maya writing back a couple of hundred years earlier than previously known (see John Noble Wilford, NYT January 10, 2006, D3). Nevertheless, the earliest evidences of writing and calendric notation in the New World still clearly point not to the Maya but to still-undecipherable Zapotec, Isthmian and Olmec texts dating even earlier in the first millennium BCE. And while the Maya famously showed more commitment to the production of written texts in the Classic era (c. 200- 900 CE) than did the innovating Zapotecs, writing traditions not only continued to flourish in Oaxaca, but ultimately gave rise to an extraordinary body of illustrated screen-fold codices by the Mixtec people, in the Post-Classic era in the centuries immediately preceding the arrival of the Spanish. As there are no known surviving pre-Columbian Aztec books, these Mixtec codices are all the more precious in giving us a glimpse into what indigenous writing in central Mexico looked like, in the centuries after the Maya had long ceased using their own very different glyphic writing system in southern Mexico and Central America.

As Elizabeth Boone has shown in Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (2000), these pre-Columbian Mixtec manuscripts represent two very different genres: books of calendric divination (such as the Borgia group, including the Codices Borgia, Cospi, Fejervary-Mayer, Laud and Vaticanus B), and historic/ descriptive annals (such as the Selden, Bodley and Nuttall Codices. These latter historical codices offer amazingly detailed accounts of the lives and deeds of named historical characters, including such 11th century Mixtec royal personages as the princely conqueror Lord Eight Deer, or the warrior princess Lady Six Monkey, who successfully defended her right to succeed her father to the throne of Jaltepec. Amazingly, as John Pohl has pointed out, at the time of the arrival of the Spanish in 1521, "every noble house claimed descent from the epic heroes Lord Eight Deer, Lady Six Monkey, and Lord Eleven Wind.Ó (Pohl 2002:21).

Institute scholar John M. D. Pohl, co-author of In the Realm of 8 Deer: the Archaeology of the Mixtec Codices, will offer workshop-seminars on the reading of these Mixtec codices, in the context of on-site field study in the Mixteca Alta region, in the actual locale of these codex narratives. During this unit, Pohl will work in collaboration with ethnographer John Monaghan, an authority on colonial and contemporary Mixtec society, and author of The Covenants with Earth and Rain (1995). Thus, in this joint, interdisciplinary unit of the Institute -- on-site "in the realm of 8 Deer" -- Pohl and Monaghan will provide the opportunity for participants to engage with both archaic, colonial and contemporary Mixtec cultural forms and traditions.

IV. Cultural Continuities and Contemporary Cultural Renaissances

Just as there are contemporary cultural continuities in the matters of indigenous Oaxacan agriculture, and household and village social organization, so in the matter of oral and written literary tradition, there are manifest continuities in contemporary Mixtec and Zapotec writing and story-telling. The final unit of the Institute will focus on contemporary indigenous cultural and social issues in Oaxaca, including encounters with local writers and community representatives, as facilitated by Institute scholars Selma Holo, Lynn Stephen, Howard Campbell and Jeffrey Cohen.

Mixtec literary tradition, for example, continued into the colonial period with documents, such as the Codex Yanhuitlan, which preserved local community history and tradition. Such continuities are documented in detail by Kevin Terraciano in The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca (2001) and by Ronald Spores in The Mixtecs in Ancient and Colonial Times (1984). Mixtec cultural expression is supported today in publications such as the journal Tu'un Savi/ Palabra de la Lluvia: Historia y Cultura de la Nacion Mixteca, published by the Asociaci—n Cultural Mixteca. In the Spring of 2001 the Universidad Tecnol—gico de la Mixteca organized a conference to celebrate and promote Mixtec literature and culture, and published the proceedings in the volume Presencias de la Cultura Mixteca, (2004), including articles on language, popular culture, migration, and religion ("Los s’mbolos en la cosmovisi—n de los mixtecos").

Zapotec cultural activism has been even more visible and intensive. Zapotec creation myths have been published, dramatized and analyzed (for instance, in a recent study of indigenous Oaxacan rock art by Roberto Zárate Morán, Un Mito de Creaci—n Zapoteca en las Pinturas Rupestres De Dani Gu’aati [2001]). In the 1990's the indigenous dance troupe Los Vinnigulasa performed masked recreations of Zapotec origin stories in Oaxacan venues, and oral traditions have been given written form by the Zapotec writer Ismael Dom’nguez L—pez as Cuentos y Leyendas Zapotecas (2004). Meanwhile, the Instituto Oaxaque–o de las Culturas has published a bilingual Spanish/Zapotec literary series, including such works as Javier Castellano's novel, Relaci—n de haza–as del hijo del relámpago  (2002).

Institute scholars Lynn Stephen and Howard Campbell have devoted much of their careers to documenting and supporting Zapotec cultural production. Stephen, author of Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca. (2005), will focus on the cultural/economic story of the women of Teotitlán del Valle, a town that has become renowned for its entrepreneurial development of a weaving industry that has gained international renown. Stephen's seminars and study visit to Teotitlán will explore the social setting of the community, and analyze how ethnicity, class and gender are played out in the context of the town's weaving industry, with an emphasis on how women's participation in ritual and fiesta has opened new socio-political spaces (Stephen's work was featured in Smithsonian magazine ["Dream Weavers," November 2003]). Participants will also read and discuss an important essay on the current craft scene in Oaxaca, "Crossing Indelicate Lines: Artisanry in Oaxaca," which appears as chapter five in Institute scholar Selma Holo's book Oaxaca at the Crossroads.

Howard Campbell will conduct a four-day field study to the town of Juchitán in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the center of the contemporary Zapotec cultural movement. Campbell has for many years worked with writers and other intellectuals involved in the powerful cultural movement COCEI (the Worker-Peasant-Student Coalition of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec), based in Juchitán, and has documented the movement's history in Zapotec Renaissance: Ethnic Politics and Cultural Revivalism in Southern Mexico (1994). A companion volume that Campbell co-edited with Leigh Binford, Miguel Bartolomé and Alicia Barabas, Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics, and Representations from Juchitán, Oaxaca (1993), is an anthology bringing together the voices of Zapotec poets and intellectuals, along with commentaries by academics from the U.S. and Mexico. In addition to presenting seminars in Juchitán on the topic of the modern Zapotec renaissance, Campbell will also bring together for the Institute roundtables of contemporary Zapotec writers, including such figures as poet Natalia Toledo; poet and essayist Manuel Matus (former director of the Casa de la Cultura of Juchitán); and Victor de la Cruz (editor of the Zapotec literary journal Guchachi' Reza [Sliced Iguana] and author of many volumes of poetry and writings on Zapotec history).

Participants will have ample selections of these writers in English translation in Zapotec Struggles, including translations of the poetry by the noted poet and translator Nathaniel Tarn. In addition, the Institute Reader will include selections from Beverly Chi–as' The Isthmus Zapotecs: Women's Roles in Cultural Context (1973) and Laura Nader's Harmony Ideology/ Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village (1990).

Finally, Institute scholar Jeffrey Cohen (anthropology, Ohio State University) will address contemporary social and economic issues in Oaxaca, and global issues impacting Oaxaca in the 21st century in a pair of seminars on "Cooperation and community in the town of Santa Ana del Valle" and " OaxaCalifornia: labor issues, migration and cross-border experiences of the Oaxaque–o diaspora." In addition to a seminar based on his book Cooperation and Community/ Economy and Society in Oaxaca (1999), exploring institutions of household economy and community cooperation and reciprocity (in the traditional forms of guelaguetza and compadrazgo), Cohen will lead a visit to the town of Santa Ana for discussion of how these communitarian traditions stand at the present time.

In his second seminar Cohen will explore the dynamics of Oaxacan migration, particularly to the U.S., in the era of globalization. As Cohen has recently put it in The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (2004), "Oaxaca is not an isolated place. It is not a timeless world where Indians follow ancient rituals and calendars. Rather, Oaxaca is part of the growing global capitalist system linked through tourism, development, education, entertainment, and migration."  It is a subject addressed in a recent exhibition in Paris curated by Yvon Le Bot, with a catalogue of the same title, Chiapas>Mexico>California: un monde fait de tous les mondes (2002), and also is the subject of the film Oaxacalifornia, by David Bola–os, which will be screened for participant discussion during the Institute.

Epilogue: The City of Oaxaca as a Cultural Crossroads

The capital city of Oaxaca is independently renowned as a tourist destination and Spanish language-learning center, known for its fine climate, distinctive cuisine, colorful ethnic festivals, such as Guelaguetza (a ceremony of reciprocity now celebrated as a summer folk-dance festival), and for its contemporary art scene and its world-heritage ensemble of colonial architecture and urban design. A history of the city is available in Margarita Dalton's Breve historia de Oaxaca (El Colegio de México, 2004); and the city's cultural patrimony is summarized in Carlos Velasco Perez' Oaxaca: Patrimonio Cultural de la Humanidad (Oaxaca, 1999). So much international connoisseur attention, and so much internal cultural renaissance, has focused upon this magnificently preserved colonial capital that the "Santa Fe-ization" of the city has itself become the object of academic study, as evidenced in the recent study by Institute scholar Selma Holo, Oaxaca at the Crossroads: Managing Memory, Negotiating Change ((2004). Holo focuses on the involvement of local Oaxaque–os, such as artists Francisco Toldeo and Rufino Tamayo, who have most contributed to this cultural renaissance, and to strategies, such as weaving co-ops and communitarian museums, for involving and investing local indigenous communities in the economic benefits of art-related and student-oriented cultural tourism.

 

 

rev:02/26/07