The tallest are about 4'6'', and all are built to last, game to carry a bundle of firewood on their backs (you've got to cook, after all) or walk 30 minutes straight up to the Zapotec sacred places around town. They get up at the break of dawn, prepare whatever they do for market, and get going (In our house, this is Doña Magdalena making little blocks of chocolate for drinking (starting with the beans); at the homestay across the river it's Assuncion with tortillas). They show up at the market around 8:00* and hang out with all of their old lady friends for the next two hours, gossiping away in Zapotec (tzak shi: hello) and haggling like crazy.
*because this village has had more than 1,000 residents since 400 C.E. the folks are hesitant to switch their clocks just because the government decides there is such a thing as daylight saving time. 8:00, then, is Tiempo de Dios, not Tiempo del Gobierno.
A couple of my favorite old ladies:
Doña Isabela is Bradley and Shane's host-grandmother. She's 78 years old, and still very quick with a joke. She's been spinning yarn for over 70 years, and gave us some lessons, making it look much easier than it was. I asked her for the secret to how she is still so vibrant and awesome. She just laughed, and said that she hoped I would live this long also.
Doña Magdalena is a widow who lives at the house where Lynn, Seth and I are staying. The other day I saw her cooking tamales in a pot that she could have EASILY fit inside. This afternoon she was kneeling on gravel and smashing corn on a rock in our courtyard to make shampoo. She said that it is slower than buying shampoo, but she likes it anyways.
Doña Catalina is the woman who sells Tejate, a strangely addictive cold corn/cacao drink down by the textile market. Today we sat with her for a while and talked with the daughter of a woman at one of the neighboring stalls who likes to hang out with Catalina. Jenni (the 5-year-old) was incomprehensibly cute, showing us her school notebook. Catalina mentioned that it was nice to have this kind of company.
Not all the stories are happy. The woman with the beautiful smile who sells hot chocolate and coffee outside the food market, Doña Gertrudis, got talking to me and Seth about her family yesterday while we ate half a roasted chicken for breakfast. Seth was explaining how it was possible that he wasn't married yet. Gertrudis agreed that sometimes it wasn't wise to get married young. She had been married when she was 15. When she was in her early 20s, her husband went to find work in the U.S. along with their two children (she was pregnant with the third at the time). He eventually settled in Wisconsin, and got married again. Last she heard, he had told her two eldest children that she had died.
At least Gertrudis has a tight community of women to rely on. Watching the women in the market made me think of Gustavo Esteva's dichotomy between the Western individualistic mindset and that of more traditional societies. There is a great difference between thinking of yourself as a fully separate "I," as opposed to thinking of yourself as embedded in a web of relationships. He used the image of a knot in a net.
Because of scheduling, this was the last morning in which I'll be able to watch the old ladies at the market. I can't help but think about how much richer the final years of my grandmothers's lives might have been if they'd lived them out as a tiny woman here in Teotitlan.
-Sam
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