by Paul Theroux
“But it’s worth it!” he said. Pero vale la pena!
Yes, because standing on the steps of the sixteenth-century church of Our Lady of Remedies (Nuestra Señora de los Remedios), I looked north and saw Popocatépetl in the distance, in Malcolm Lowry’s words, “plumed with emerald snow and drenched with brilliance,” looking in the fading sunset as simple and severe as Mount Fuji, like a pyramidal mountain drawn by a small child.
As with many of the most ancient and historic churches in Mexico, Our Lady of Remedies was built to displace a temple to a potent deity, to rid the people of their old beliefs and insert new ones. “Upon its top there was found by the Spaniards a temple dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, which, with characteristic promptitude, they threw down, and substituted in its place a Christian temple,” wrote Thomas Janvier in 1887 in his Mexican Guide. (One of Janvier’s other books is a strange but little-known novel of disorientation, In the Sargasso Sea.)
Because Cholula is also noted for its highly decorated baroque churches, I made a little tour of them, guidebook in hand, admiring the Talavera tile inlays and the gold-encrusted walls, the tortured saints and the gory crucifixions. But this was merely an interlude, a way of working up an appetite for another meal in Puebla, and stretching my legs for the road trip south.
More Detours: Roadblock, Back Road, Hitchhikers, Yanhuitlán
The road from Puebla to Oaxaca begins near the Walmart, cuts through the industrial areas and poor neighborhoods—small children in the street and starved dogs—passes small shops and garages, extends through farmland and vegetable fields, then rises, mounting into the distance, leaving all traces of humanity behind, and continues after the town of Tehuacán into the heights of the rocky past, not a person in sight, the summits of these nameless mountains looking scalded and bare and terrifying in their flinty emptiness.
I drove contentedly on the narrow road, hardly any traffic, except for the occasional blue long-distance bus or an eighteen-wheeler chugging under its load of steel girders, big, slow-moving vehicles, maddening to pass on the tight curves. The road wound through one of the most dramatic mountain landscapes I have ever seen—past declivities of precipitous ridges, the mile-high Sierra de Zapotitlán, and climbing to their flanks, the steep cliffs and rocky slopes of the Sierra Mixteca, no towns, few villages, perhaps a lone figure leaning against the slope here and there, many goats, and the rest of it a bleak and beautiful expanse of lifeless isolation. I was following the route of Río Calapa, which partly forms the border between the states of Puebla and Oaxaca, a region of outstanding beauty, the high sides of the valleys baked brown, their deepest parts darkened in the shadow of a river trickling south. To the east, more rivers and tributaries swell into the much wider Río Papaloapan—the River of Butterflies—flowing into the Gulf.
I passed long, narrow valleys, eroded hills and mountainsides, meager soils, so sheet-washed and thin from being sluiced with rain, the water pouring across them and carrying the surface away. In the winding river gorges that Mexicans call barrancas, the clinging vegetation—yucca, organ pipe and prickly pear cactus, tenacious, bristling with spikes—looked strangely metallic. To the east was the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve, cloud forests at the higher elevations, and on some lower slopes, tall columnar cactus in mazy green colonnades.
I was in no hurry, blissed out by the light and the sky and the precipices, the configuration of mountain ridges, the vertiginous sides, pathless, looking unclimbable—and if these single peaks had names, they were not on my map, or on any I could find.
Descending through valleys of grayish clay and bone-white cliffs, I came to a gas station and saw that the nearest town was Tepelmeme (pop. 419), in the hard-pressed Mixteca region that produces many migrants, to Mexico City, to US border factories, and beyond. But all I saw were the infertile slopes of the sierra and the puffs of blowing clay dust, like hurrying and decaying ghosts.
I had gone about 150 miles and, seeing a diner, went in to find something to eat. Not a soul in the place eating—and it was noon—but three solid Mixtec women encouraged me to order. I had a queso fonda, a bowl of roasted cheese with tortillas, and a coffee, and made notes on my progress through the mountains, which had thrilled me.
“I am from Tepel,” one of the women said to me in answer to my question.
“What happens there?”
“We are campesinos. We have goats. We grow our food.”
“And the church,” another woman said. “It is old and beautiful.”
“Do you go to Oaxaca?”
“Yes, sir. For the fiestas. And to buy things.”
“Is there a bus?”
“Yes. Expensive, though,” the woman said, the peso equivalent of $5. Living in a state with the lowest per capita income in Mexico ($3,400), $5 was around half a day’s wage, and for this woman probably much more than that.
I left enough of a tip so that they could each buy a bus ticket, and when I explained this, they laughed and said that when I came back, I must visit their village.
In a sunny mood, I continued south, and hardly ten miles down the road, at the beginning of a long valley, I saw a line of cars—unmoving—from where I had to stop, and winding along the floor of the valley and rising along its sides, to the highest point at a notch, a mile or more of narrow road made visible by the bulky cars and buses and big trucks—a solid, sinuous snake of traffic lying against the land, defining its curves.
After hours of hardly any vehicles, this astonishing traffic jam. I had seen stopped traffic in Mexico before, but never on a road this narrow, all the drivers and passengers lolling by the side of the road, picnicking, drinking beer, some loudly complaining, others walking agitatedly, stiff-legged, shaking their fists into the distance and calling out in futile barks, as though at some unseen villain.
Two mustached bus drivers, uniformed in peaked caps and buttoned-up bumfreezers, were conferring near me.
“What happened?” I asked. “An accident?”
“It’s a blockade.”
“Up there?”
“No—it’s far. Maybe at the tollbooth.”
“Where’s the tollbooth?”
“Maybe the one at San Cristóbal.”
I looked at my map and found the crossroads of San Cristóbal Suchixtlahuaca (pop. 200), about ten miles ahead. This meant ten miles of backed-up traffic.
“Who are the people who made the blockade?”
“The teachers,” said one bus driver.
“It’s always the teachers,” the other one said.
I sighed, grumbled, kicked at roadside gravel, and slapped my head. Noting my frustration, the first bus driver said, “You don’t have to stay here. You can take that road.”
He was pointing, but I saw no road, only the rubbly hillside beyond the safety fence and the scabious vegetation of nopal and low, twisted leafless trees.
The man led me to the fence and, pointing to what looked like an arroyo, an eroded gully leading up the hill, said, “That’s a road. You can take it. Go that way. My bus is too big, but your car can do it.” He took my shoulder and twisted my body around, the way a schoolteacher directs a small child. “See those men? Go through there.”
Fifty yards down the road, a group of men in thick ragged coats sat on the metal fence, beside a break in it that seemed wide enough to accommodate my car.
“Go!” the bus driver said. He slapped my car. “You’re lucky!”
“Then what?”
“Just keep going!” He flapped his hand, and when the men sitting on the fence heard him, they perked up.
I made a U-turn and drove back to the opening in the fence and the group of men. As I entered, one man gestured for me to roll down my window.
“Thirty pesos,” he said—a quick thinker. It was $1.50. I handed it over and the other men laughed at this man’s enterprise, or his impudence, or perhaps at my gringo acquiescence.
I drove up this rutted hillside next to the highway, and at the top of the hill entered
a wilderness of dead trees, following what was no more than a bumpy pathway—and thinking, of course, If my car breaks down here, I am out of luck. No villages were indicated on my map, only the tollbooth at the crossing at San Cristóbal Suchixtlahuaca, ten miles ahead. Ten miles is nothing on a highway; on a dirt track (my axles bumping against the ruts, stones kicking into my undercarriage), it is a great distance.
So I drove very slowly, in a state of mild anxiety, somewhat alleviated by the happy thought that I was circumventing the traffic jam of the blockade. I could see a deep gully to my left, a riverbed inside it, obsidian on this overcast late afternoon of blowing dust. And after twenty minutes of washboard gravel I came to a better road—not paved, its ruts apparently filled with cat litter, but signposted to San Miguel Tequixtepec, a community I could see, a scattering of squat, clay-colored huts, a church, two steeples, a red dome, and low hills in the distance, softened by greenery.
I thought with relief that someone in the village would help me if I had a problem, and drove on feeling more confident, further encouraged by a harder-surfaced road, and another sign, San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca to the left, San Cristóbal to the right. I turned right for San Cristóbal, reasoning that if the blocked tollbooth was there, I would be first in line when the blockade was lifted.
A mile farther on, I came upon the blockade. A crowd of men and women were milling about, many of them sitting, barriers set up to prevent cars from passing, and about fifty cars parked by the roadside. It could have passed for a yard sale, with roadside junk and people chatting companionably, some looking at their phones, others playing with children. But from their postures, the way they were sitting on the curbstones and leaning against the fences—from the very air of indolence and fatigue and unhurried conversation, not much movement—I sensed that nothing was about to change. It was a relaxed group, no sign of confrontation. The tollbooth had been dismantled, tree limbs had been dragged into the road, vestiges of meals were strewn about—paper plates, plastic cups, crumpled napkins, crushed soda cans—a reminder that in Mexico, political action such as a roadblock or a protest is also a social occasion.
“What’s happening?” I asked a man leaning against his car.
“Blockade.” He shrugged.
“Any idea when it will end?”
“Maybe soon. Maybe some hours.”
“What are they doing?”
“Talking,” he said, which I took to mean they were negotiating—in any case, creating enough of a fuss and a backup on the main road to make their point. Like the medical workers I’d seen in Puebla, the teachers had a list of demands for the government.
I went to my car, got my map of Mexico, and approached the same man again, unfolding it. I circled San Cristóbal with my pen, saying, “We’re here, right?”
He put his finger on the circle and chafed the map with his fingertip.
“This road,” he said. “It’s there.” He pointed to where the cars were drawn up on the shoulder. “You can go that way. It’s the free road.”
A road designated libre was usually a side road, a country road, or one crowded with local traffic.
“Will this one get me to Oaxaca?”
“Sure.” Then he looked unsure. “After a while.” Después de un tiempo.
Reasoning that I would rather take a detour for hours on a bad road than sit in my car in a traffic jam, I thanked him and drove away, past the parked cars and the children and the protesting teachers, through the bowl of a green valley and into the hills that looked rockier and drier in the distance.
The road was paved but potholed. In places the ruts were a foot deep and very wide, some of them filled with water where goats were drinking. But I was moving, and that was a great thing, and I was in the heart of the country, passing through the small village of San Cristóbal, with its flat-roofed huts, wooden animal pens, and donkeys tethered to dead trees. Skidding on the loose rocks, I was approaching cliffs of spectacular skeletal erosion.
At the far edge of the village, three young, well-dressed women—long wool coats, wide-brimmed hats—stood under a big, thick-limbed tree, looking tense and expectant, as though waiting for a bus. Their shoulders were wrapped in shawls, because we were in the uplands, where it was cool, and the sky had darkened, clouds in the distance threatening rain. I stopped and said hello. We exchanged the polite and disarming greetings that are customary in Mexico among strangers in a country setting.
I then asked, “Do you want a ride?”
Yes, they did, and smiled, looking relieved. They pressed against my car.
“Where are you going?”
“Tejúpam,” one said, but the name meant nothing to me and I could not find it on my map.
“Is it far?”
“A little bit.”
I told them I was trying to get to Oaxaca.
“We’ll show you the way.”
“Let’s go,” I said, and the three of them got into the back seat, none daring to risk the passenger seat with the gringo, laughing softly, unwrapping their shawls, and wriggling to get comfortable.
“What are your names?”
They said they were Shirley, Lucia, and Vianey—Vianey had to spell it slowly for me to grasp it. Not a common name, she said, but her parents liked it.
Now we were in those rough-hewn hills of bluish shattered rock I’d seen, passing a poor hut and a flock of goats, in the deep countryside of Oaxaca’s Mixteca Alta, the poorest part of Mexico. None of the land looked arable, and even the goats seemed to be having a tough time nibbling at the ragged tussocks of grass growing sparsely in the hard ribs of clay soil.
“Do you work or go to school?”
“We are students,” Shirley said—she was the most responsive. “We are studying education. We intend to become teachers.”
“Were you helping with the blockade?”
“Just looking,” Shirley said—observando.
“How often do they have a blockade?”
“Almost every day. They block the airport in Oaxaca sometimes.”
“Who organizes it?”
“El sindicato.” The union. And she became specific. “Sección veintidós del Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación.”
Section 22 of the teachers’ union, well known for an action carried out a year before, in Asunción Nochixtlán, a town south of here, where buses and trucks had been burned to block the road, slogans painted on the overpass. In the confrontation with police some protesters had been killed. I had come across news stories of it when reading about Oaxaca beforehand. In a piece published by the Institute of Public Education of Oaxaca, I’d read, “The teachers’ crisis in Oaxaca is not a conflict merely destined to disappear. It has been a decades-long struggle that has now transformed into a social revolution.”
“What do they want, more money?”
“Not only money. But medical care and other things.”
“Will they get what they want?”
“The government wants to shut down the union.”
All this talk while the road was winding, but rising too, up and around the stony, battered landscape of high desert, scarred slopes, and withered thorn bushes, the whole of it smothered in low clouds—appropriate here, since the name of the region, Mixteca, came from a Nahuatl word, mixtla, meaning cloudy land. I opened my window and the chilly air stung my head.
“It’s cold!”
The young women laughed, and Shirley said, “May we ask you some questions?”
“Yes, of course.”
Was I married? Where did I live? Did I have children? How many? What was my job? How far had I driven?
And when I said that I had come from the border at Reynosa, they said they had heard that Tamaulipas was dangerous. Shirley and Vianey had not been farther north than Mexico City, and Lucia had not been north of Puebla. They wanted to be teachers here, they hoped in a school near their home in Tejúpam.
Black clouds were mounting ahead, building beyond the ridge, as dark as
smoke billowing from an oil fire, thunderheads, tall and dense, closing in as they heaped against the hills, as black as clouds could be, and really not like clouds at all but a black bulging wall about to burst.
Just as I said, “I think some rain is coming,” the first hard drops smacked the windshield, and more spattering and splashing, with a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder.
“Aguacero,” Shirley said—a new word for me. And she explained: a sudden cloudburst, a downpour, frequent here, she added. And we could expect un inundación, a flash flood. She had to shout to be heard above the clatter of the rain.
At once rainwater was streaming from the cliffs next to the road, and the road itself was awash, the whole surface lifting in the torrent.
“Were you actually going to walk all this way to your village?”
“If it was necessary, yes. We walk all the time.”
But the road was so bad, and the rain so persistent, the thunderclaps making me wince, it took all my concentration to steady the car. Across the steepness of the hillsides the runoff twisted and scarfed through the roots of dead trees and glistened, pouring onto the road. And where there was soil it coursed as mud and silt, sluicing into smooth piles that narrowed the road.
“Avalancha de lodo,” Shirley said. Mudslide.
“Muy lodoso,” Lucia said. Very muddy.
The hairpin bends concentrated the flow of water, and I drove through a creek bed of tumbled stones to the battering of the rain on my car.
“Una tormenta,” Shirley said: a thunderstorm.
“Una lección de español,” I said, and they laughed.
Here, where there were more trees, and a thickness of topsoil, there were mudslides—reddish clay tumbled to the roadside, and in places rockslides so wide there was only a car’s width between the rockslide and the edge of the cliff. Some of the fallen boulders had sharp edges, as though they’d been split by a lightning bolt. I wondered whether at some point a rockslide would broadside my car, toppling it and my passengers into the deep ravine to my left, or whether the whole unstable road would give way in a stupendous landslide of mud and stones, dropping my car into the abyss, and burying us.
