Whitewash in Oaxaca… and reality bleeds through

Sombrero tip to The Unapologetic Mexican for picking up on this. 

Vibrant as the Paint on the Walls

John Ross

The walls of this city of painters have been freshly whitewashed on orders from a much-lampooned governor, the whiteout financed by transnational tourist moguls to promote the illusion that peace has returned to Oaxaca.  …there were seven months of dramatic confrontations between striking teachers and their allies in the Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO) and security forces backing the despotic governor Ulisis Ruiz whose removal from office the insurgents demand. Over 200 prisoners were taken during the skirmishing and another 60 are listed as disappeared. 19 dissidents have been gunned down by Ruiz’s death squads.

But despite the savage repression, if one keeps an ear to the ground and an eye to the whitewashed walls once plastered with revolutionary slogans, tags, full-length murals, throw-ups, and ingenious stencils, it doesn’t much sound or look like the Oaxaca Intifada is done with yet.

…The bitterness of those who have suffered seven months of depravities at the governor’s hands finds distinct outlets…

Oaxaca is a city of painters, the cradle of the late master colorist Rufino Tamayo and the very much-alive Francisco Toledo who stands with the resistance movement, and during the long struggle the walls of the city were transformed into a dizzying open-air gallery of popular art.  Despite the thousands of gallons that have been expended to blot out the rebellion in a doomed campaign to assure tourists that “no pasa nada aqui”, that nothing is happening here and it is safe to return, the images, like the anger, endure just beneath the surface.  “The white paint cannot erase the blood of our comrades” defiantly advertises a spray-painted wall scrawl.  A remarkable archive of over a thousand images of the struggle for the walls of Oaxaca offers poignant witness to the ongoing resistance.

Some of the works were spray painted freehand, others stenciled onto every available space, still others printed out on paper and fastened to the walls with a wheat glue tough as steel so that to remove the offending art requires dismantling the buildings to which they were affixed brick by brick.  Although Ulisis’s obliteration teams stalk the streets, new art goes up every day right under the noses of the police.

Indeed, Ulisis is everywhere on these walls – as a burro, as a rat, a raccoon, a chimpanzee, a skull and crossbones, with shit on his head. A mammoth Mayan head was painted to scale by an apparently well-coordinated team of throw-up artists, a Playboy nude appeared curled up on the wall of the Cathedral rectory and tagged as “The Pope’s Girlfriend” – the Church played an equivocal role in the Oaxaca uprising.

…

Zapata in a gas mask is still up there just under the whitewash, Benito Juarez with a Mohawk. Mug shots of Gandhi, the old anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon, the martyred guerrillero Lucio Cabanas, the Zapatistas’ Comandanta Ramona.

This ebullient outpouring of graphic resistance to the caprices of a governor whose sanity is openly questioned, and the connivance of a government under the “hard hand” of a president much of the electoral considers a usurper, is firmly rooted in the popular traditions of Oaxaca, the most indigenous entity in the Mexican union …

I’m of two minds about what to tell people.  I know too many foreigners of limited means who live in Oaxaca — they can’t pack up and leave, having become Oaxaños themselves, and are (for the most part) sympathetic to the people’s demands.  But, as foreigners, they can do nothing overt. 

These foreigners have been the best witnesses (and, in “Mark-in-Mexico’s case … the worst).  And, yes… Oaxaca is a very safe place for a foreigner to travel.  If nothing else, a tourist on the spot will likely keep the goons from acting out (I admit once having invited a Mayan ambulanta to share a coffee at my outside table on the Mexico City Zocalo during a Granadero raid.  No copper was going to seize her beads and trinkets that were shoved under the table … and not a damn thing the cop could do but stare daggers at me.  We had a leisurely cafe til the coppers moved on with their three or four human sacrifices to the Gods of international commercial patents). 

I don’t begrudge tourists going to other places with much more repressive governments — Guatemala or Haiti.

 Do go… but buy from street vendors and tip the waiters.  Shop til you drop… but get away from the tourist quarter and buy where the locals buy.  You have a better time in Mexico that way anyway.  

The Oaxacaños are wonderful people.  Talk to them… they’re friendly.   You’re not a missionary bringing “light and democracy” to those sitting in darkness.  The Oaxacaños are trying to build a democracy, under difficult conditions.  If anything, we should be humbled, and are the students, not the teachers. 

Hey, but since when can’t students have fun?  Eat, drink and merrily subvert the mal-administration… and please… do everyone a favor and send us back your adventures, even if it’s only a post on a tourism message board or a comment in some obscure blog…Sunlight is the best disinfectant.