Taxco and the 44th Huey Atlixcayotl

After spending 6+ hours in a car on Friday to go to the Forest Expo in Mexico city (for less than 3 hours), I got up early on Saturday morning to go on my 1^st Mexican tour. Really, it was just paying for a bus transport and turned out to be a lot cheaper than paying for the round trip bus ticket. The only bad news, the bus left at 5am and we got slightly delayed when we got pulled over by police at 5:02am. I spent Saturday in Taxco (if that name sounds familiar, I’ve been there a couple of times so the name might be familiar) for some silver shopping (Saturday is the day for the wholesale silver market).

On the last Sunday in the month of September, the town of Atlixco, Puebla celebrates the Huey Atlixcayotl, the 2^nd largest dance festival in Mexico outside of Oaxaca’s Guelaguetza. The festival takes place on the Cerro (Hill) de San Miguel and coincides with the Sunday closest to the saint’s day, September 29^th. Huey Atlixcayotl means the Gran Festival de Atlixo (Altixco’s Great Festival) in náhuatl. After arriving late last year and having to stand, I left a little earlier and was able to get a seat in the 1^st row of the general admission section. The festival features dances from the 11 distinct regions of Puebla, as well as 1 invited state.

Puebla's governor was in attendance and got pulled from his seat on several occasions to dance.





So you've probably seen the following dance before, it's the voladores from the Totonacan region of Puebla and Veracruz. They probably have one of the most impressive traditions of all Mexican dances since they swing down from a pole hanging by their feet. I've seen them a couple of times, but this is the 1st time I've seen something go wrong.






It turns out that after that the voladores' pole is only put up for the festival each year. When deciding where to place the pole this year, someone clearly miscalculated the length of their ropes. Unfortunately as they we almost to the ground, they began to fly into a nearby tree. Most were ok, but the 1st on that crashed was injured and had to be taken out on a stretcher and rushed to the hospital, an unfortuante end to the 44th Huey Atlixcayotl.

Indigenous Village projects in Cuetzalan

Early Tuesday morning, I went with my boss to Cuetzalan, a town in the Sierra Norte, to check on the progress of 2 projects that built more efficient wood burning stoves for indigenous women. It was quite a contrast to go up there after having just been in one of Mexico’s most modern cities the day before. After trekking up some almost-impassable roads, we finally arrived at the 1^st community. We walked between homes visiting the various stoves and kinda chatting with the women. Most did not speak Spanish, but the technician that helped build the stoves was able to translate between Nahuatl and Spanish for us. None of the houses have running water or drainage, but some have recently gotten electricity.

The town center of Cuetzalan (you’ll be seeing a lot more of these in about a week since I will be returning for Coffee Fair on the 4^th of October)

Estufa Lorena (a more efficient wood burning stove that always funnels all the smoke out of the house, so it’s healthier and more environmentally friendly)

Chicken in a fruit crate, what you can’t see in this picture is that the box is actually hanging in the middle of the room….it used to be used as a baby’s cradle

In addition to my boss and I, another guy who works free-lance with green technology and community development, had tagged along and wanted to show us the proposed spot for some cabins. The road down to the river was awful, but luckily the jeep didn’t have too many problems. Once we got to the bottom of the canyon, we walked down to the river, where the community would like to put the cabins. It was a nice site, but with the combination of fairly impassable road and nothing really going on other than a pretty river, I don’t think they would really get the tourist traffic required to maintain the cabins.

Then we went to Xaltipan to see the 2^nd stove project. The town was also in the middle of harvesting white pepper. It’s like the black pepper that was a used to in the states, but has a slightly different flavor. Every house we went into had bags and bags of pepper corns (or wheel barrows full of the ground pepper). The smell was amazing, and at the end of the visit the community gave each one of us a huge bag of pepper corns to take home.