It's a strange thing to drift through a city that, in many ways, mirrors my own. In Oaxaca, a temperate mountain town-a "dry zone" in botanist's eyes-I'm still waiting to find a waiter, a maid, a busboy, a cop who can afford to live in the historic city center. Mostly, they walk or bicycle in from outlying villages or distant housing schemes through the not-so-historic edge where cement and gravel yards sit adjacent to hulking newcomers like Sam's Club and Office Depot.
A husband and wife, expatriates from Canada who, it's clear, can live where they please and have built a sprawling home surrounded by chain link in the hills above the city, tell me with the guilty looks that people always use for such talk, "Sam's Club really is convenient if you live here."
Especially, I suppose, if you have two cars and a motorbike to pack with jumbo-sized boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, an odd commodity in a place where most families survive each year on a stash of home-grown maiz. Isn't it a bizarre thing to fall in love with a city because of its charms, its cobblestone streets, its warren of tiny mercados selling artisanal breads and cheeses and mezcals, organic produce and home-made chocolate and salsas and then to move to that city only to spend your money to the benefit of the Walton family of the United States?
Or, like in Santa Fe, to move to a beloved city because of the Old World charm of its low, close mud buildings but opt to live in a garish, architectural Frankenstein's monster of a house in a gated "community?"
I say none of this to the Canadians. Though I don't understand their life here in Oaxaca, they do appear to mean well…and we're counting on them for a ride across town. Plus, I would feel uncomfortable interrupting the conversation-Sam's Club has segued into a rant on the unpredictable nature of appliances built in Mexico.
We do finally get the ride, though. It's an exercise in high-speed "chicken," two-ton metal beasts miming bumper cars while hurtling down narrow, canted roads in a dizzy half-light of sodium lamps cut with diesel exhaust as neon-limned saints in recessed nichos judge the odds between each car making the next bend or finding the purgatory of an Oaxacan pile-up, photos of the injured and dead sure to appear in the following day's periódicos. But on one quiet side street, the dilemma of Oaxacan "progress" is summed up. A car is pulled just a little to one side of the single lane, its inhabitant talking to someone on what passes for a sidewalk. By Mexican standards, there's plenty of room for us to squeeze through-just fold back the mirrors, smile and floor it-but by Western, industrialized standards, it's just too risky. "¡Porfa!" cries our driver in a nasal whine befitting our gringo-packed Volkswagen, "Please!" And there it is: Our driver loves Oaxaca. He was enamored enough of its character and soul to pack it all in and move here. But now that he's here, well, he wouldn't mind if the streets were just a little wider, if the asphalt were in better repair. Come to think of it, those cobblestones sure are rough on the suspension-it makes for a bumpy ride out to Sam's Club.
Despite the encroachment of big box stores and wealthy residents who live like a second, ghostly community with its own agenda, Oaxaca, like Santa Fe, has made some good decisions. Anyone who visits Oaxaca and fails to tour the still-in-progress ethno-botanic gardens on the grounds of the Templo Santo Domingo is making a mistake. Though only around six acres, the gardens provide a succulent and wondrous glimpse into the flora native to the region, among the most diverse and numerous in the world, as well as a carefully crafted sense of the uses and significance of many of the plants for the indigenous peoples. In the shadow of the massive and ornate Dominican temple and former convent, the gardens were very nearly the parking lot for a huge new hotel and convention center before a grassroots movement came up with a much better idea. It reminds me of what Santa Fe avoided by purchasing the Railyard property from Catellus Corporation; we get a farmer's market, an arts and culture district and a park instead of parking lots, storage units and chain stores.
On the other hand, Oaxaqueños tell me they are staring down the barrel of inevitable spread of that beloved means of urban revenue generation, parking meters, throughout the city center. Of the few members of the car-driving populace-already an elite-with extra pesos to drop into meters (machines with an aesthetic less Spanish Colonial and more penal colonial) fewer still will have the plata to pay for violations. This will have the effect of changing who has access to downtown, to the democratic zócalo, the plaza in the heart of the city and how they have that access. Right now, as riddled as downtown Oaxaca is with tourist amenities, it's still a home for the locals (remember when you could walk up a cobblestone street in downtown Santa Fe and have your boots repaired while you got a shave?).
Every night of the week, local bands rock the house at La Nueva Babel, where the sandwiches are big, delicious, cheap and made only from local, organic produce grown in indigenous communities. The rooms are small enough that when a four-piece band fills the largest of them, only half the space is left for spectators, but it feels right and $2.50 will buy you an herb-infused mezcal that will, at last, make you steady on the broken, hilly and magical streets. Of course it's just a little wine bar and not many tourists or car drivers go there. If you knocked it down, you could widen the street.
