Solexico in Oaxaca

 

I want everyone to know what a great week I had with Solexico in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was a very intense time: I stayed with a family, attended classes three hours a day, did the special activities the school organized, and hung out with another advanced student who was wanting to practice Spanish while we went to restaurants, went shopping, and visited tourist attractions. I came back forming responses in Spanish in my mind to every situation for about a week, having to stop myself from speaking Spanish when English was called for. I really want to go back. Soon!

 

My post "In Mexico, They are Still Loved," a reflection on the sculpture, Almas de Migrantes, was from this trip. I learned everything about the background of that sculpture, the situation with the villages that have been losing population, by listening and reading in Spanish. Doing it in Spanish greatly deepened the esperience. It would be good to experience more of this, more easily.

Anyway, the class I took was small and well tailored to my level. I enjoyed getting to know the other students, especially Mary from New York, and I really appreciated the precise and skillful management of the class by our instructor. It was a little challenging to drop in on Book Three with some folks who had been there through Books One and Two, but I tuned up my vocabulary and remembered the grammar pretty well. So go, I say! And go to Oaxaca. It's fabulous!

In Mexico, They are Still Loved

 

The sculptor Alejandro Santiago was saddened by the reality of the little village near Oaxaca city, the one that still makes the handmade rugs for which it is famous. It is emptied of working age people, especially men, populated by old women and men, children, and some non-aged women. The working men are all away, in the United States or elsewhere, working to send back remittances that keep the family going. When I was there recently, his installation "2501 Almas de Migrantes" had taken over the plaza in front of Sto. Domingo, the streets nearby, and was said also to be occupying municipal offices. The clay figures, male and female, look uncomfortable, distressed, but they stand there in the plaza and on the street, representing creative energies and participation that are missing from the community because all those people were forced to leave.

I am sure they were forced to leave, because this is a truly beautiful place. The landscape is gorgeous. The people have lived there for millenia, attested by the Zapotec and Mixtec ruins that mark the mountaintops. Great treasures were wrought here in ancient times. It is said that these are the people who invented corn, breeding it selectively from a grassy grain that grows wild in the area. What happened?

The fields are still fertile, growing an abundance of vegetables and fruits and coffee. The people's hands are skilled, creating rugs, other textiles, beautiful embroideries, pottery, and amazing painted wooden fantasy animal figures. Still, somehow, the people are too poor for the men to stay. They must go and work in the fields harvesting crops in other countries, or enduring the rigors of industrial meat processing plants, or cleaning houses, or whatever.

Nearly half the population of Mexico is poor in the sense that they don't have enough to eat or a secure place to sleep. Many of those are children. This drives their fathers and/or their mothers to leave them to find jobs wherever they can, enduring hazards to get there, and putting up with difficult working conditions so their children can have food, clothes, school, medical care.

They leave their souls in the villages, says Alajandro Santiago. What can be done?

At the Detention Center

 

Every month on the first Monday of the month, the American Friends Service Committee and some other organization sponsor a vigil at the privately owned detention center that houses people awaiting deportation hearings in Aurora, Colorado. This month it was Regis University and the theme of the gathering was love, because we are so close to Valentine's Day.

It was moving to be part of a group of so many young and old, anglo and latino, of numerous different faiths, carrying signs and lighted candles. Chanting. We walked about a block from the corner where we started, showing our signs to passing cars, receiving honks of support, watching our step on the ice while keeping the candles upright and trying to sing lustily.

We came to a place where the public road was near the chain link fence and the chain link fence was near the building. We stopped. A student, Alejandro, spoke a poem he had written about the meaning of the desert, that desert that people cross, the place where so many die, a place with deep meaning in his own family. A woman who was known to those who come regularly spoke to say that while they had known her as someone who came and knelt at the fence to pray and cry out to God for her son's release, she was now there in gratitude. He had been released in November. What a blessing!

The students festooned the chain link fence with Valentine's Day balloons and paper streamers. Many signs were left on the fence with love as well. There were two carloads of Unitarian Universalists from Boulder in attendance with their yellow "Standing On the Side of Love" signs, and several more of our kind from other area congregations.

As we came to the end of the section where the public road was near the fence and near the building, we stopped again. In the driveway, one of the ominous white pickups was parked, with someone watching us. We chanted, there were announcements, and then a prayer. We walked back to the corner where we started, showing our signs again and chanting, our symbolic mission accomoplished.

There will be Valentine's cards for the detainees and for the workers in the detention center. And as always, encouragement for those who wait. Some of us will go to a deportation hearing ten days from now to show support. The struggle continues, with love and occasional glimmers of hope.