The Markets of Oaxaca

A beautiful city known for its rich history and home to Mexico's artistic culture, the city of Oaxaca is alive with galleries, art museums, artisan markets, theaters, music, and colonial history.  The brightly colored buildings are crumbling and peeling just enough to expose layer after layer of paint, revealing its colorful past, but still hiding its secrets within its walls.  Posters plastered everywhere advertising music, art openings, and protests, only add to the beauty, giving the colonial structures a modern, urban art edge.

We wandered about each day in Oaxaca, always discovering new markets, galleries, or churches, a never-ending maze of hues, textures, and smells.  The large markets, housed often in giant warehouses, are absolutely packed with vendors, selling everything you can imagine.  Flowers, fruit, ripped off CDs, traditional Oaxacan handicrafts, meat, smoothies, hats, vetrinary equipment... You name it, you can find it.

Often I can close my eyes and begin swirling into a sea of radiance.

Despite the Blessed Virgin statues and grandiose architecture of the Oaxacan city cathedrals, it is still the markety atmosphere that I am more drawn to, that I find more spiritual.  I am more touched by the aura of the market, or am more filled with what I find in the chaos rather than the austerity of an empty altar.  The markets give my heart that happy, content feeling, that I believe is often associated with a spiritual experience.

Every sense is, in a way, "maxed out" at these markets, giving me a great sense of joy.  The colors of the handicrafts are vibrantly intense, dots and stripes of neon on small wooden animal carvings swirls of reds and pinks and blues on carefully embroidered skirts and tops.  Bananas ranging from the most brilliant yellows to soft lime greens, and avacado skins from deep charcoal to a sort of forest green.  And of course, flowers, as far as the eye can see.  Marigolds of striking oranges and golds and deep fushias.  Often I can close my eyes and begin swirling into a sea of radiance.

The smoky ambiance from the cigarettes and insense give the whole market a sort of sweet, familiar smell, and when combined with the dust in the air, the smoke catches the stray rays of light struggling to find their way to the ground through the spaces between tarps or the holes in the corregated tin warehouse roof.

There is a wonderous sense of camraderie at the markets as well.  On a Saturday afternoon, three generations migh be there together, meticulously laying out necklaces in color-coordinated rows, or carefully arranging pineapples in a pyramid.  Vendors in booths next to each other share the week's dramas and joys, laughing over comedies and consoling over tragedies.  Familes share sodas and tamales while alternatingly hassling passers by that their specific cheese or necklace or seasoned grasshopper is infinately superior to the twenty other identical items in neighboring stalls.

There is also a certain sadness I find in these markets, a sort of humbling reality about the struggles of life.  Womes with babies on their backs and two more little ones in tow constantly try to pawn off an assortment of goods - anything from razors and cigarettes to bracelets and paintings.

All these things, the sights, the smells, the sounds, the voicing colliding in every direction, of families living and working, of trash littering the ground, of the stench of stall after stall of meat, or the sweet smell of breads or chocolates or marigolds, of the wealthy tourists wandering the same paths as the poor... it is all this and the things that have gone unmentioned here that make these markets more of a spiritual experience for me than the cathedrals we have seen.  Oaxaca has been a treat in every way.