An Early Morning Trip to Cuetzalan: Feria de Cafe y Huipil

After spending Friday driving around the area of study for our Valsequillo project with one of the Peace Corps staff, I spent Saturday stuffing my face with tacos al pastor at Adriana’s borther’s birthday party. He hired one of the tacos vendor to set up in his house, which can definitely lead to consuming more tacos than really necessary. Bright and early at 5am on Sunday morning, Adriana, her daughter and I, as well as another pc vol and his girlfriend, headed out on a tour to Cuetzalan. The 4^th of October (Sunday) is the saint’s day for San Francisco de Assisi, the patron saint of Cuetzalan. In honor of this, they host the Feria de Café y Huipil (Fair of coffee). The problem with going to the fair for the whole weekend is that the hotels sell out and double and triple their prices, which is how we settled on a tour. The first stop was the town of Zaxapoaxtla, in the Sierra Norte of Puebla. The town is famous for 2 things, tlayoyos (which we ate for breakfast) and it’s participation in the battle of 5 de mayo. Adriana’s grandfather is supposedly buried in the town’s cemetery, but our brief search didn’t turn up his grave.

Tlayoyos!

Mushroom season is beginning, but I’ve been warned on numerous occasions to only buy mushrooms that you can identify since evidently they end up selling poisonous mushrooms in the market.

After that we have a quick stop at a waterfall called Cascada de Olla. Probably better to have headed right to Cuetzalan, but oh well. (the tour was actually cheaper than paying roundtrip bus fare)

We finally arrived in Cuetzalan for the fair. We headed directly to the church on the town plaza. Cuetzalan is a highly indigenous municipality and on Sundays, one of the masses is given in the local indigenous language. People pour into town from the surrounding villages for mass and for the Sunday market. We entered the church without problems and found that the archbishop was there to do a year’s worth of confirmations. So as you can imagine the church was packed. In addition, all the dancers that would be dancing throughout the day were in the church….dancing in front of various saints and virgins. Getting turned out be a quite a challenge as there were other people trying to enter for the next mass and in true Mexican fashion, no one wanted to wait in either direction. I almost ended up falling down on a little tiny old woman, and felt bad about it until she clothes lined me with her forearm trying to get into the church. After that it was really everyone for themselves.

Outside the church there was a complete mixing of cultures. Catholic images from San Francisco were mixed with indigenous symbols and as the voladores flew overhead, other dancers were performing at the base of the pole.

We ate a ridiculously large comida…the regional plate that had enchiladas, tlayoyos, cecina, local mushrooms, and beans.

View from the bus on the way home.

We got back at about 9:30 on Sunday night and then on Monday, Adriana and I had a 5pm meeting in Mexico City. Arriving and the meeting went well, but our boss got a little turned around on the way home and we ended up in a semi-sketchy area. We figured asking a taxi driver would be the best idea, too bad we ended up stopping the drunkest taxi driver in Mexico City that night. We finally made it home, but it was almost midnight by the time we arrived.

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.