Oaxaca: Where the Real Indians Are….
Edward Rothstein, last seen at LGM deciding that the state of Colorado actually does have history, drops a real stinker today. Rothstein goes to Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and tells us why it is so much more authentic and real than listening to Native Americans in the United States tell stories he doesn’t want to hear.
Most of it is almost boilerplate wealthy east coast elite condescenion toward romantic places with brown people, whether it is the Taos School in 1912 or Santa Fe today or places in Mexico that are Santa Fe-esque without all the annoying tourists or whatnot, like Alamos or San Miguel de Allende or Oaxaca. Ooh, everything is so bright. The people are so charming. The food is so hot and spicy. I can buy handicrafts. Etc. Etc.
But the real issue is in Rothstein’s discussion of why indigenous history is so real in Oaxaca compared to the United States:
In the United States, in institutions ranging from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington to regional natural history museums, the real arbiters of indigenous history these days are representatives of contemporary tribes. They oversee the display of a museum’s tribal artifacts and reshape accounts of the past, in many cases relying mainly on frayed strands of traumatically disrupted oral traditions. And everything is meant to increase self-esteem with promotional banality.
But here, something else happens. When you stand on a flattened hilltop above the village of Atzompa, some seven miles outside of Oaxaca, and look over at a nearby peak, you can glimpse the immense ruins of Monte Albán, a pre-Columbian plaza of breathtaking expanse used for ceremonies and games. Below those ruins, where perhaps 25,000 people lived in the early part of the first millennium, you can make out faint remnants of terraced farming on the hillside. The past is visible in the landscape.
I’d glad Rothstein, as a wealthy white elite, can summarily dismiss the National Museum of the American Indian and every other attempt for Native Americans to tell their own stories because they don’t suit his aesthetic desires as a cultural arbiter. I suppose the Lakota and the Crow and the Nez Perce should have to hold meetings with Rothstein and other New York elites before telling any story that might help them reclaim their past after four centuries of oppression and genocide. I’m not saying that one can’t criticize the NMAI, but it’s galling and near racist that Rothstein has so little sensitivity for the half-millennium of genocide that has created a situation where a lot of Native American peoples are trying to hold on to what they have about their history while telling stories that make modern Americans remember that they are still alive.
Moreover, both in that second paragraph quoted above as well as elsewhere in the piece, he talks about Mexico being superior because he can see state indigenous power on the landscape in the form of ruins. He makes a passing nod to places like Cahokia in the U.S., but those aren’t nearly as cool as Monte Alban I guess. So I’m glad Rothstein is judging indigenous peoples on their ability to construct large buildings. But there isn’t the first attempt to understand why Indians are so visible in Oaxaca today, as opposed to the U.S. Some of it is the ruins of massive structures of course, but there’s also the enormous 4 million pound gorilla that the United States committed systemic genocide against its Native American populations in ways that Spain/Mexico was never able to accomplish. So Oaxaca, traditionally isolated from the center of power in Mexico City, remains majority indigenous today.
And that leads to yet another problem with Rothstein’s piece. Like many Mexican elites and foreign tourists today, he loves the ruins and the Indian culture and the food and the pottery. But he doesn’t seem to care one iota about the poverty in which they live. Being indigenous in Mexico is not just about providing a background for wealthy whites to play out their fantasies. It also means endemic poverty, racism, disease, alienation from traditional cultures due to massive economic pressures unleashed by NAFTA and policies in Mexico City, no recourse to the government, etc. Rothstein couldn’t care less about any of those things, or at least there’s no evidence he even began peeking below the surface of Oaxaca.
Finally, there’s Rothstein’s bizarre decision to conflate Oaxaca’s indigenous past with the Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca. It’s a cool place but it’s not indigenous in the least except that the plants are native species. So maybe native peoples and native plants are all the same in Rothstein’s mind. Moreover, it’s housed not in some indigenous area but behind Oaxaca’s largest Catholic structure, a vestige of Spanish colonialism. But Indians, Spanish, it’s all the same so long as it’s old and Rothstein can have his authenticity sensors stimulated.
Really, it’s good that the Times still employs a museum critic, but Rothstein is about as out of touch with the everything outside of New York City as one can be. And he certainly shows little understanding of Mexico.
Actually, there are many places in the United States that you can stand and see the cultures of the indigenous inhabitants.
I would also add this, right near where I grew up.
Two weeks ago, in Georgia, I stood on top of Mound A at Etowah (I think it’s the second largest Mississippian site after Cahokia). Pretty goddamned impressive. These places can be visited, and admired, if the author deigns to do so.
Here’s the official site for Etowah: http://www.gastateparks.org/EtowahMounds
there’s a Mound Builder site with a golf course in Ohio. http://www.spanishhill.com/whatis/typesofmounds/DevilsLake/Newarkgolf.shtml
Crap! Too many links and I got caught in moderation. Just saying that there are lots of places where you can stand in the US and see the signs of Native cultures, but this asshat doesn’t care about that.
in many cases relying mainly on frayed strands of traumatically disrupted oral traditions.
Since the people who would have ensured the continuity of those oral traditions were slaughtered, guess that we should just forget about them and whatever is left of their stories.
And speaking of reshaping history from frayed strands, Thanksgiving?
Ah, feck him!
He’s still pissed that Carlisle Indian Industrial School beat a whole bunch of lily-white boy colleges in football early in the last century!
he’s probably also mad that Little Big Horn is no longer considered a massacre but Wounded Knee is
OK, fair enough, but wasn’t this essentially a travel piece promoting Oaxaca? And isn’t tourism to the region probably the best thing individuals can do to help the region’s economy? I mean just because he talks mostly (entirely) about the shiny side of the penny doesn’t mean it isn’t worth talking about, no?
If Rothstein wants to go write for a travel agency, then fine. But this is the museum critic for the Times and one expects higher standards.
There are many ways to write about Oaxaca.
Also, many ways to be a douchey NYT writer.
I grew up in the coastal pacific northwest, where perhaps Indian cultures are more intact than elsewhere in the US – white folks got there later, active genocide had become passe, and the natives could hardly be pushed west. Even so, because of local displacement, of disease, and simple numbers if you’re in Seattle you don’t often see Indian communities; you have to try a bit to find individual Indians. But you do see a highly advanced and celebrated artistic culture – and one that for the last few decades has been thriving and and has been evolving and growing in popularity, in wealth, and by incorporating new inspirations and new materials.
Still, even in the northwest where there was and remains a spectacularly advanced art form, the materials traditionally used in art and architecture and the depredations caused by the arrival of Europeans mean that there are very few monuments to the former inhabitants that date past the last few decades – and that’s in a part of the country that didn’t have Bull Run or The Trail Of Tears. So I guess that by the criteria Rothstein chooses to apply there’d be nothing of the native cultures worth writing home about.
It seems to me that he’s fetishising Agriculture over nomadic and hunter-gatherer lifestyles, and he’s managing to punish people for the failing of having been more comprehensively wiped out by the arrival of the Europeans. Neither makes a lot of sense.
“active genocide had become passe”
Although Isaac Stevens did the best he could in 1855.
Sorry. The genocide was as bad there as anywhere. It just didn’t make the history books which ignores the western genocide.
The interesting thing about the NMAI is how and what it chooses to present as an expression of what the tribes want. It is different
In the United States, in institutions ranging from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington to regional natural history museums, the real arbiters of indigenous history these days are representatives of contemporary tribes. They oversee the display of a museum’s tribal artifacts and reshape accounts of the past, in many cases relying mainly on frayed strands of traumatically disrupted oral traditions. And everything is meant to increase self-esteem with promotional banality.
I don’t disagree. I look at the Indians on the Round Valley Reservation. What they do has virtually no bearing to their old cultural practices.
They’ve, essentially, stolen ton of ‘culture’ from the plains Indians. They do things like put on “Buffalo hunts,” they’ve co-opted some plains spiritual beliefs. They dress like plains Indians when they do their tribal holidays. That sort of thing.
And why did they do this? Because six tribes got stuffed together in a small area after a reign of brutality that almost destroyed them (and did make many tribes. like the Yahi, extinct).
No group of people, with tribes numbering in the mere thousands spread over tens-of-thousands of acres in small units is going to withstand this:
http://www.militarymuseum.org/Massacres.html
Or this:
… the Indians of the area and the whites were involved in a good deal of trouble. One of the Indians had stolen a horse belonging to a white man.
This was too much for the white people who forgot about their sale of liquor to the Indians, the fact that whites had taken the Indian women for immoral purposes, had beaten the Indians whenever it suited them, and had squattered and seized the Indian’s land and game. The Indians had to be punished for the taking of this one horse, and the whites organized a party armed with guns. The group went … and hid in the brush surrounding the village….
As the Indians, men, women and children, came from their homes, they were shot down as fast as the whites could reload their guns. The Indians were unable to defend themselves as the attackers were hidden in the brush. A few of the Indians who survived the massacre at the village ran toward Lake Earl and plunged into the water. The angered whites followed, shooting at every head that appeared above water, so fierce was their determination to exterminate the entire village as a lesson to other Indians in the area.
What culture survives genocide? So of course they’ve done what they’ve done. There are no records of their old life. The traditions are destroyed. The people virtually wiped out, if not entirely wiped out.
The answer is, they’re not. So they’ll rebuild by borrowing from other cultures. I don’t look down on them for it. But it’s not ‘authentic’ in a museum sort of way.
Or I look at the museums themselves. Full of their wonderful baskets. But do you see their houses on display? No, you see tee-pees from plains Indians. Or wigwams from the Apache, or long-houses from the Northeast or Northwest.
Those Coastal Indians were migratory, they didn’t build permanent structures. And they didn’t make tee-pees and the wigwams they made were nothing like the Apache or other Southwest wigwams you see in most exhibits.
But that doesn’t look so good in the display or sell well in the gift shop. So they romanticize them.
And I have yet to see one museum deal the massacres. I’ve been to a score of museums/exhibits that are supposed to be about the California Indian tribes. They’re almost all bullshit and none of them is completely honest.
You’ll see baskets and arrowheads and stuff taken from other Indian cultures from 2000 miles away because they need an exhibit. Oh, and you exit through the gift shop where you can buy the bow-and-arrow and Sioux Warbonnet.
So, yeah, you don’t like what he said. Yeah, he’s a poser.
But he’s not all wrong. No matter how you want to make him so…
Insofar as any of this is true, it’s completely irrelevant to how douchey the article is. Standing on a hill overlooking Majestic Monte Alban and feeling super-authentic just like Castaneda or Huxley has absolutely nothing to do with whether California Indians used wigwams. And BTW when I was a kid visiting Point Lobos, they had tule boats and acorn grinders, which is perfectly valid, and no tipis or wigwams, and that was like 30 years ago.
And yeah my keyboard has an “ñ” but Carlos Castanets doesn’t deserve one, pinche ñoño pajero.
There are also many tribes in this country who preserve much of their cultures, sometimes as much as the Zapotec or Mixtec of Oaxaca. There are 13,000 native speakers of Cherokee in Oklahoma today for dawg’s sake.
But they have casinos so they aren’t properly authentic for Rothstein….
It’s not a fucking competition. As I’m sure you know.
But if you want numbers of native indigenous speakers, Mexico has more.
As you say, it is not a competition and the Zapotecs had an aboriginal population in the millions, while there are as many native speakers of Cherokee today as there were total Cherokee in the 1840s (a much smaller percent of speakers, however). Scale matters in these issues and it is not merely language (where a higher percentage of Zapotecs speak theirs), but other features as well. The Zapotecs retain many features of aboriginal folk culture, but have totally lost most elements of the high civilization. They have been impacted by both the impacts of the Spanish conquest and by continuous interaction with Hispanic culture. To claim that they are “authentic” in a way that US tribes are not is simply misleading, and not all tribes have undergone the near complete culture loss of some of the California tribes (not even all of the California tribes), which was my point.
Authenticity is a useless analytic category. Cultures are not static, and as a rule a good deal of their change isn’t entirely internal. All cultures are constantly and always products of interaction with, domination of, and domination by others. This is true of both American Indians in the US whom Rothstein finds insufficiently aesthetically pleasing as it is of Oaxacans who meet his exacting aesthetic standards.
… historians are supposed to care about things like ‘accuracy’.
Authenticity is part of that; saying “This and that were so” when they weren’t is inauthentic.
Authenticity and accuracy are not the same things by any means.
How can something that’s authentic fail to be accurate and vice-versa?
Bearing in mind that when I say “authentic” I mean it in the sense of “this is an authentic historical relic” or “we have done our best to re-create the living conditions of this culture as authentically as we can so as to gain as accurate picture as humanly possible.”
I know that there are people who use the word to mean “some nebulous sense of authentic-ness that conforms to what I consider to be a pleasing aesthetic,” the same way they mean it when they talk about whether a band or a movie or a novel is “authentic” or not. The fact that those people are idiots and corrupting a perfectly cromulent word is no reason I have to accept their terms.
I think the problem we are having here is that we are talking about two different things. The museum on the Mall in Washington is authentic as a representation of modern Native American culture. As a historical museum, it sucks. Or at least it did the time I visited it soon after it opened. It didn’t have much historical material, and what it did have was poorly explained. I particularly recall a display of European manufactured trade goods with labels that might suggest to the naive viewer that these are native artifacts.
The point is that if you go in expecting a museum about Native American history you will be disappointed. This isn’t to say that what the museum actually does isn’t legitimate, but it is something else.
How can something that’s authentic fail to be accurate and vice-versa?
For starters, ‘authenticity’ is about artifacts or practices whereas ‘accuracy’ describes a particular kind of linguistic practice known as the factual claim. “Robert Farley has two daughters and drinks bourbon” is accurate, but is neither authentic nor inauthentic. I really don’t understand why you think the concepts are related in the way that you do.
To describe a culture, or particular manifestation of it, as “authentic” is to judge the speed and scope of cultural change as sufficiently slow such that it can be said to be “real”. The implied premise is that the only cultures that are “real” are those whose pace and scope of change is below a certain level. The notion that this makes this culture more “real” is incoherent, but it’s a mode of incoherence that’s frequently applied to indigenous peoples. (A good example of this was the initial restart of the Makah whale hunt in the 90′s, when many people came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a “real” cultural thing because they were planning to use speedboats rather than traditional canoes).
Not a very fair example, in that the people raising that objection to the Malah Whale Hunt weren’t really opposed to the betrayal of Makah culture, but rather to the hunting of whales. They did indeed raise that objection, but then they’d have raised any objection they could possibly think of.
Indeed, many opponents of the Makah’s resumed whaling used this argument strategically and disingenuously, but that the argument had a fair amount of salience is a fair bit of evidence that the notion that (indigenous) culture is real insofar as it’s frozen in amber is a fairly widespread notion.
I would add that I taught this case a few times back when I taught an Environmental Politics class, and had a lot of liberalish students who came to the issue with vaguely pro-Indian and anti-whaling sympathies, and didn’t really know what to think. A lot of them latched onto the “speedboats = not real cultural practice” line of thinking.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for indigenous drag queens, Oaxaca (well, Juchitan) is hard to beat.
Now I have to ask the wife why she’s never taken me on her trips to Juchitan….
Viva las Muxe!
Sorry. Not authentic. Too much self-esteem, wrong flour in their tortillas.
Whereas Rothstein puts the “Nick” back in “Nick’s tamal”.
And everything is meant to increase self-esteem with promotional banality.
I visited Oaxaca in 2007 and loved it, but the guides did as much promotion at Monte Alban as anywhere else, claiming the Mixtecs were monotheists, the “Hall of Dancers” was a hospital (rather than a site for human sacrifice) and other nonsense. It’s still a wonderful place to visit, but read up on the history, as well brush up on your Spanish, before you go.
While I agree with most of what you are saying, I’d add the following:
The EthnoBotanical Garden is not simply “native plants” dominated by a 16th century Dominican monastery and church. The story behind the garden’s creation it is actually pretty amazing.
20 years ago, the Oaxacan state government wanted to build a parking lot,hotel and convention center in that historic space since the army was no longer using the former monastery as a barracks. Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo fought hard against that plan and another plan by city planners who wanted to make it a 17th century style European garden. Toledo helped design a garden that would privilege pre-Hispanic landscapes and indigenous peoples’ interaction with it. As Oaxaca not only is home to 25% of the total number of indigenous peoples in Mexico, it also is home to the most diverse languages (16 distinct indigenous groupings in Oaxaca alone)and finally, it’s also home to the most diverse plant species in Mexico (30,000 different species that make up 5% of the world’s total flora).
http://www.gardendesign.com/travel/oaxacas-ethnobotanical-garden
It’s good to see someone with real expertise about the ostensible subject of the NYT article chiming in here!
I absolutely loved my visit to Drúadan Forest. The Ogor-Hai are delightfully authentic. I’ve been to all those museums of Orcish culture around Mordor, but they always have those orcish blacksmiths, when we all know the Orcs only learned metalworking from Morgoth.
I’m not sure how many north american tribal people have commented here.. Certainly I am not one of them, being Irish of descent. What do I or my ancestors really know or feel, of their individual or collective experience.. and what the various tribes suffered in the past or currently are dealing with?
No matter how hard I try to empathize, care, identify with.. I cannot and never will.. know their experience, their present, their future.. their pain, their tragedy .. the crimes
Do I care ? Oh yes.. that I do. Do I recognize what was committed against them.. yes I do. Do I see how the government of Canada just is dying to screw them over again ? Yes.. I do …
Would I stand in the rain forest or the boreal, the Canadian Shield.. or in Fort Chip or Labrador, against those who would repeat history and attempt to steal what will never belong to them .. Oh, yes …. Just like any caring Canadian would… and I expect I would have to line up just to have a spot in the confrontation …
The Americas continue to be a theatre of war, a reality .. of quasi christian/white or free enterprise/governmental assaults on indigenous peoples, their environment.. our environment .. the f’n LAND …. and WATERS …
Don’t let your Hummer, or BMW, your Corn Flakes, your bible, your cel phone, your mortgage, or your little Bo Peep BA degree lead you to assume .. ‘you know what it feels like to be an Indian’ .. unless you are one. Mexican – Huron – Inuit – Navajo – Haida – Cherokee – whatever
That’s like thinking you understand perfectly.. what its like to be a whale or dolphin or any sea creature with almost incomprehensible aural acuity when a VLCC oil tanker or a nuclear submarine blasts a full strength sonar signal to paint any vessels, marine creatures, shorelines, or sea bottom obstructions on within 25 miles on their sonar displays. That’s an acoustic event and output that essentially dictates that you leave the water to escape it .. ie ‘beach yourself’ .. leave the water.
Capishkey ?
Wait, this dude’s job is to review museums?
So, his main criticism of Native American museums in the US, as near as I can tell, is that they celebrate people who didn’t build Monte Alban.
Which makes me wonder, if he goes to the Great Wall of China, does he spend all his time wondering, “Where’s the great wall of Europe?” Does Giza make him wonder why the Australians never built any huge pyramids?
If I had my choice I’d rather visit Monte Alban than go to, say, a museum of Impressionist art. The fact that the old shit in one museum is more interesting to you personally than the old shit in another can’t possibly be a worthwhile criticism.
Everything else he says about the Native Americans of the US is just too muddled to even understand. What a terrible reviewer.
In addition to calling this reviewer the names he deserves, I suppose one dignified response would be to point out to him Native-controlled museums that might educate him in just how very wrong he is to so denigrate North American Native cultures. From my own experience, I’d nominate Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre (formerly the Kwagiulth Museum and Cultural Centre); one of the tribes on the west side of Puget Sound (the Suquamish, maybe?) also has a museum I remember being quite good.
Dear god this man needs a dose of Edward Said badly.
The next time Rothstein writes something like this, I am totally stealing that line.
He needs to be severely pummeled about the head and shoulders with Orientalism.
Rothstein’s article views native culture through a narrow lens, uninformed by history or modern realities. I have not been to the NMAI and I am not a position to be an apologist for US native cultures, but I think there are some significant historical differences that have impacted the legacy of native peoples in the US and Mexico.
Under Spanish colonial power, native people in Mexico were looked to as a source of labor and tribute payments (i.e. cochineal and textile production were both means of exploiting native skills and resources in this way). This contrasts markedly with the situation in the US where native land, not labor, was the prize, and native people were seen as an obstacle to be eliminated, both physically and culturally.
Rothstein seems to ignore, or be unaware of, the great poverty that also exists in the state of Oaxaca– an area of rich cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity but where many of the indigenous villages have been depopulated as villagers migrate to work in the US. In the state of WA where I live there are many Mixtecos from Oaxaca laboring as migrant farm workers. In Mexico, mestizo or foreign business people are often the ones who benefit the most from the commercialization of indigenous culture as a commodity for tourists.
Finally, Rothstein ignores an area I am well-acquainted with, the southwestern US, which is rich in archeological sites (his criteria of choice for indigenous authenticity) as well as evidence of cultural identity (such as language, dance, spiritual practices, and art). He should also visit the anthropology museum on the UBC campus in Vancouver, BC to learn about the cultural traditions of the PNW coastal peoples.
What Wendy said.
If you want to see stone architecture, visit Chaco Canyon, where huge pueblos used for obscure religious cults still stand today, a thousand years after their real purpose was forgotten.
One city was built under “falling rock” a huge slab of bedrock split off the canyon, unstable the first day a footer was dug. The builders had symbolic braces against the bottom of falling rock, and they worked, because it didn’t fall until 1944, when it crushed a third of the city of Pueblo Bonito.
We have before and after pictures.
But we will never understand why these cities were built, what the people who built them believed, how their beliefs (may have) caused an environmental catastrophe, why, in the twilight of their civilization ritual cannibalism became part of their world. That world is lost to us, and we will never understand anything about it.
But the monuments remain, and pueblo indians whose ancestors (may have) built the cities are working for the Park Service, maintaining the ruins as they were when they were discovered by Europeans….
The back of the city’s rooms were dark, and low, and they used torches to get in there, a city of 1200 rooms, ceremonial burials with 50,000 worked pieces of turquoise, and only 60 or 70 full-time residents…
Hard to believe, but it stand there, a dream of deep time. This guy is an ass if he hasn’t been there and is prepared to talk about it.
Then there are the mound builders of the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys… Newark Ohio for example, look it up. Bigger than the pyramids, on a golf course in a little Ohio town. And he’s going to Mexico to see architectural archeology?