* Above, a very old-looking retablo image (check the all-seeing eye on the deity in the middle) near the altar at the baroque temple Santo Domingo, Ciudad de Oaxaca, Oax., Mexico.
In Oaxaca these days there is no sign that not too long ago the city was in a state of civil conflict between the state and federal government and the APPO. Nothing. No standing monument to the dead, no memorial to Brad Will. Not much ghost graffiti, minimal police presence, and not a protester in sight. What lessons were learned? What will history say? A two-day pass-through won't render much perspective, I know, but still, something about the place made me feel uneasy, distrustful.
Over the New Year's week Oaxaca City was pristine, sparkling, and filled with a lot of foreigners and tourists, primarily Americans. When foreigners and tourists in a Mexican city spot each other they often exchange a silly, suspicious look-over, a glance that vaguely expresses a sentiment of competition and mutual disdain, like, 'What are you doing here?' Curiously, many of the women tourists wear the indigenous huipil at a far greater proportion than actual indigenous or mestizo people, a fact that seems to register no irony among the younger tourists who move in dorky packs of ten or twelve and gather at the only club that's open on a weeknight in the dead-except-for-tourists Centro Historico, Freebar, to dance wildly to bad remixes of Eminem and Shania Twain.
Suffocating, we returned to Mexico City desperate for the noxious smog, the noise, the traffic, the familiar, unfiltered contradictions of extreme poverty butting against extreme wealth, the pulse. Anything to get away from that college kid from New England in a highly self-aware leather jacket who proudly announced under the pulsating Freebar disco lights: "I'm here shooting poverty. I'm shooting a family a few villages from here that's living in poverty."