I am facing the prospect of two days of leisure in Oaxaca before I move on to Veracruz, and since I am not very good at leisure I decided to go on a geologic expedition of my own, to see if the green ignimbrite that I saw in Ciudad de la Canteras is the same as what has been called the Etla Ignimbrite. The best place to start would be, of course, the municipality of Etla, so I sked around and found I could take the colectivo to Etla at the central market, a few blocks away from my location. This is the real market, not the one for tourists, and probably the one location of the city where you want to secure your wallet and your iPhone. Once I got there I found out that Etla is a very large municipality, so I asked about cantera quarries and was told to take the colectivo to Magdalena Etla, of which there were few and far between because that is the far side of the municipality.
Eventually I got there and had the colectivo drop me where the hills with the prominent cliffs were. There is no question, the Etla Ignimbrite is the green ignimbrite, and the outcrops are a bit like the pink ignimbrite of the Ricardo Group in California: A Miocene sequence of continental fluvial sandstones and lacustrine siltstones, once interrupted by the emplacement of the pyroclastic flow of the ignimbrite, and then continuing with the sediments. The sediments contain fossil bones of pigs and horses of Miocene age, and K-Ar dates on the ignimbrite range from 20 to 17 Ma (Urrutia and Ferrusquia, 2001). The sequence has been tilted and is cut by some faults, which shear the ignimbrite and make it less desirable for stone carving, so the oxidized zones are left behind as “ribs” crossing the quarry.
Happy with my geologic observations I walked back to the highway, had a glass of cool tepache (a slightly fermented sweet drink made by steeping the cut skins of pineapples), and made a tour of a nearby cantera workshop, where all sorts of beautiful columns, facades, and fountains were being carved by gifted stone masons, in addition to any number of polished slabs and construction stone.
Another colectivo and a moto-taxi (a tuc-tuc) brought me to the main Etla Village, where I spent a good hour walking through the streets and the market. Etla has the slightly negative call to fame for being the birthplace of Mexico’s most controversial dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who started by distinguishing himself as a reliable coronel repelling the French invasion and the empire of Maximilian, and a few years later, now with the rank of general, was first governor of Oaxaca, and eventually was elected President of the country 1876. He was reelected a couple of times, and finally in 1884 declared himself dictator until he was ousted by the Mexican Revolution in 1911. The sad thing is that he was a good president, and if had quit at the end of his 1888 mandate he would be remembered as a national hero. He introduced Mexico to the railroad and was a great promoter of economic development based on sound economic and technological theories of his time. Unfortunately, he and his cronies found the Mexican Indians were a cheap uncomplaining source of indenture labor, and the prosperity of El Porfiriato was built on the backs of slave labor (the henequen haciendas, the caoba wood production in the jungles, the sugar plantations of the Gulf coast, the new mines). It is for this that he will forever be remembered as a black figure in Mexican history.
The colectivo back to Oaxaca took the most convoluted route back to the central market, so I had a good chance to see the other part of town. For a long while we paralleled the Río Atoyac, which reminded me a lot of the old Río Monclova. A sad and neglected waterway, overgrown with reeds and collecting discarded tires, which is crying for intervention of some community effort to convert it into a promenade that Oaxacans can be proud of.
The walk back to downtown took me through the Red Light Zone, the Handcrafts Market, and eventually past a bakery where my sweet tooth prompted me to ask for a slice of pastel de tres leches. They didn’t have a slice, but would I be interested in a small full cake. Small was at least two times bigger than would have been good for me, but I couldn’t resist. I took my purchase and a plastic spoon and walked to the zócalo to find a shady spot and gorge in my sinful purchase. As it happened there was a group of ethnic dancers in the zocalo, twirling like dervishes at the sound of an oompa band. Great, I thought, I would have a display of native dances while I ate my cake. Unfortunately the oompa band only knew one song, which they repeated over and over, and the dancers were not dancers but country folk who had come to honor Mother Mary and who, like dervishes, were dancing in a sort of trance repeating the same twirling over and over. Eventually I moved one, now unencumbered from cake, and called it a day.
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