Since yesterday I didn’t complete my initial exploration of downtown, I decided to spend the day doing nothing but simply walking around. I started with a breakfast of tacos de canasta, which I had not enjoyed since my college days. It is basically a big basket that is filled with tacos that under the residual heat and the weight of many layers become flat and acquire a certain metamorphic foliation. There are some traditional fillings such as refried beans, chicharrón en salsa, mole verde, and papas con salsa, but after metamorphism all look pretty much alike (although the flavors are different). I used to buy tacos de canasta outside of the School of Engineering at UNAM, circa 1975, as a cheap lunch. Yumm!
I am staying at a small hotel in the eastern proletarian part of downtown, which interesting on its own right, is not exactly charming and magic. I could have sworn that Oaxaca was more bohemian and artistic. Well, it is, but the nice district is a few blocks away in the northern and northwestern quadrants, and I rediscovered it while walking to the Church and Convent of Santo Domingo. Oaxaca was the adoptive town of Don Benito Juarez, one of the most important historical figures of Mexico, both because as the lawful President he fought against the imperialists that brought Maximilian from Europe to be Mexico’s emperor, and because after that war was won he enacted the Laws of Reform, which stripped the church of its bast material holdings. Santo Domingo was one of the first ones affected, and the ornate church was stripped of its gold-leaf altars, and the convent became the casern of the Equestrian forces. A hundred years later the property was returned to the church, who renovated the sanctuary which is now one of the most beautiful in all of Mexico (which I visited), the convent was turned into a museum (which I also visited), and the parade grounds now host the city’s Botanical Garden (which I will visit in a couple of days).
Wandering aimlessly I noted that, in contrast with Campeche, the city has buildings that go back to the XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX centuries (no pirates in Oaxaca), with many being built of a green sillar (a peralkaline ignimbrite) that I will have to track down to its quarry. This mountainous part of Mexico, the so called Nudo Mixteco, has some old metamorphic rocks and Paleozoic limestones and sandstones, but I was not aware that there were any volcanic rocks.
At some point I hopped on the tourist bus, and learnt all sorts of trivia about Oaxaca, which started as an encampment of some Aztec soldiers in 1490, and which was formally established as a Spanish city in 1532 (that is 490 years ago!). I also found out that the green sillar is only found in the valley of Oaxaca, and that the main quarry was in a city 10 km to the east, appropriately named Ciudad de las Canteras, which I will see tomorrow when I go to Mitla. Much was said in the tour about mezcal and chocolate, so when the tour was over I headed to the market to learn about chocolate (partly because Moni asked me to get her a kilo of cacao seed). I got both the dried cacao seed and an education at one of the chocolate factories: The first step is to harvest the cacao pods across Tabasco, Chiapas, and certain parts of Oaxaca, and then let them dry until you can see the seeds rattle inside them. One then cracks the pod, which is maybe 15 cm long and 5 cm in diameter, to get the seeds out. They are maybe 2 cm long. The seeds are then dried under the sun, and in this way transported to the factory. Once here they are toasted and ground together with a few almonds and cinnamon sticks using something that looks like a large meat grinder. The resulting oozing paste is hot and not very tasty (even a little bitter). Sugar is then added to the paste and worked in with a spatula, and the whole mix is ground together once more. The chocolate is now sweet and can be mixed with water or milk to make a comforting drink, or is allowed to set in molds to form thick delicious tablets about 6 cm in diameter and a cm thick. The bars of smooth chocolate require an additional “conching” process combining heat and frictional shearing.
For today, at least, I am going to skip my mezcal research
because tomorrow near Mitla my tour will be visiting a mezcal brewery.
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