ARTISTS/WRITERS: TOLEDO

(The prodigious Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo died six years ago this week. More than a sublimely original painter, graphic artist and sculptor, he was a towering cultural force. The following re-post is adapted from a piece I wrote for Conde Nast Traveler describing the creative resurgence of Oaxaca City and Toledo’s role in it.)

Cloud shadows checker the rooftops of Oaxaca City, ripple across the green valley, scurry up the soft Sierra Madres to the east. Even before the pilot announces it, I see below me, lit by a wide shaft of morning sunlight, the stone ruins of the supreme Zapotec ceremonial site, Monte Albán, its warm geometries arrayed across the beveled mountaintop, mysterious and perfect. Alone worth the fifty-minute flight south from Mexico City, I think. Changeless, this Mexico at least.

The rush of anticipation I feel is unlike what I experienced during my first visit to Oaxaca, which I recall as something of an anti-climax. I knew I was pounding a well-worn artists’ and wanderers’ trail: D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Malcolm Lowry had written of it earlier, of course. (“Oaxaca,” Lowry wrote in his novel Under the Volcano. “The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of a woman dying of thirst in the desert.”) Later, in the 1960’s, Oaxaca had been all about pilgrimages into the nearby Sierra Mazateca to visit the bruja Maria Sabina and imbibe the magic mushroom.

I’d stepped off a flight like this one, into the same subtropical air and little windsock airport, among residual hippies with graying ponytails and huaracha sandals, feeling a little dispirited, gripped by a sense that I'd landed in a place whose cultural moment had passed. The city's central plaza, the zocalo, with its cafes, green wrought iron benches, and costumed Indian vendors selling toasted chapulines (grasshoppers) beneath the tall laurel trees, had seemed melancholic, the marimba orchestra in the bandstand pavilion percussing in a minor key. The descendants of the small, gifted Zapotec and Mixtec geomancers who had raised the region’s operatic stone edifices, and still make up more than half of the city of Oaxaca’s 250,000 people, had appeared sullen, abstruse, under the lash of some simmering oppression. For all its wealth of history and arts, Oaxaca had seemed the end of something. I’d left after a few days, without regret.

The airport taxi rumbles past fields of tall corn stalks in the bright October light, the valley still verdant from summer rains. Last July, I'd returned to Oaxaca and found an utterly different city, the old downtown quarter around the zocalo sprouting new handicraft shops and cafes, kiosks hawking cell phones, bookstores and galleries and cultural centers thronging the blocks around Calle Alcalá, the wide pedestrian corridor between the zocalo and the grand Santo Domingo church. Citizens seemed speedier of step, the torpor of a decade ago broken.

July’s week-long folkloric festival of Guelaguetza, when Oaxaca's regional tribes descend upon the city to parade and dance, charged the place with festive energy, fifteen distinct Indian dialects spicing the air, Spanish a second language if spoken at all.

I’d discovered courtyards of old colonial buildings transformed by Mexican architects and artisans, blending contemporary ideas and elements with adobe, local flora, and the undisturbed pentimenti of yard-thick, lime-washed walls. At an opening of a new show by Oaxaca's reigning contemporary artist, Francisco Toledo, at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, I'd sipped pale, peppery mezcal among students, artists, curators from Mexico City and New York and Berlin, and elegant Mexican women dressed in exquisite huipiles, woven shawls.

Along Calle Alcalá, across from the great plaza and church of Santo Domingo, I’d entered the small Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO), an edifice donated to the community by Toledo. A poster on the IAGO bulletin board listed that month's schedule of free international films showing at El Pochote, yet another building donated by Toledo. Who was this man Toledo? During that second visit in July, I’d twice seen his slight, white-clad, sandaled apparition along Calle Alcalá and noticed that he could hardly walk ten yards without someone calling out “Maestro!”, importuning him with a request for a photograph, a conversation, a contribution. Over breakfast one morning I heard that Toledo had recently fled Mexico for California in order to get some of his own work done.

A few days later, at a lunch given by Oaxacan painter Laura Hernandez - beginning at two in the afternoon and, in the Mexican fashion, stretching until past midnight - guests conversed in Spanish, Zapotec, English, French, and German. In the city's vibrant markets and stalls, I found traditional artisans thriving in spite of the onslaught of machine-made goods. Oaxaca, brimming with energy and innovation, seemed in the thrall of a new cultural efflorescence, some scintillating mix of Mexican and international influences, a salsa I hadn't quite tasted before - a glimpse of a multiculture that might even work. What led to this transformation? I knew I had to return to Oaxaca and further explore how the puzzle of old and new fit together.

Oaxacan culture has ancient origins. Some 20,000 years ago, descendants of migrants from Asia settled among these fecund valleys, mountains, savannahs and tropical forests. Around 500 BC, Zapotec ruler-priests founded one of the Americas’ first metropolises, Monte Albán, which flourished until about AD 1000, when it was mysteriously abandoned. Culturally, the fierce energy of those early city builders never flagged. If Mexico's heady compound of Mesoamerican, European and contemporary influences - with its extravagance, color, and innate surrealism - has been a seemingly inexhaustible font of inspiration to Northern countries and the rest of Latin America, Oaxaca is in many ways its source. Here, layers of culture and history lie exposed like strata at a geological site. Living tradition informs and incites innovation in sculpture, weaving, ceramics, music, painting. It was to Oaxaca that the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein came to shoot indigenous wedding ceremonies, where Frida Kahlo turned for inspiration in art and dress. It is from this soil that Oaxaca's 20th century painting master Rufino Tamayo sprung, succeeded today by Francisco Toledo and a host of younger artists following him.

“You need a seed,” Graciela Cervantes, co-director of Oaxaca's Galeria Quetzalli, tells me. “Francisco Toledo is a seed. His presence in Oaxaca has changed everything.” His efforts, she said, contributed directly to UNESCO’s declaring the city of Oaxaca a part of the cultural patrimony of mankind. “It's a total culture he is supporting, a sensibility. The region is historically rich in art, food, music, religion. Now nearly every art form is flourishing here, creating an ambience, a sense of the entire city as a museum. Toledo has insisted that this be preserved.”

Born in the nearby coastal town of Juchitán, a prodigy trained in Mexico City and Paris, Toledo received international acclaim for his etchings, drawings, paintings and sculptures of humans, animals, and the inner regions of the imagination - work evoking Dürer and Bosch as well as the Oaxacan jungles. What he has chosen to do with his renown and resources is extraordinary. Alongside his other projects, he has founded an organization called PROOAX to preserve the natural and cultural inheritance of Oaxaca State, a library for the blind, a photographic library, a library of musical recordings, and TAPO, an operation that manufactures paper for artists.

Speaking to Toledo himself in his voluntary California exile, I asked him how Oaxaca came to be an international cultural center. In his view, there already existed great interest in the world of art among the Oaxacan public. The projects he’s helped foster over the last ten years merely "complete, inform, and disseminate,” he said, a process already begun in Oaxaca. “It is the Oaxacan artists,” he claimed, deflecting credit, “who have animated these sites and captured the attention of artists in Mexico and abroad.” He went on to speak enthusiastically of new workshops he was creating for classes in etching, photography, textiles, and paper making in an old textile mill in San Augustine Étla, a suburb of Oaxaca.

New York artist James Brown, who came to live in Oaxaca in 1995, says of Toledo: “Of course he’s pivotal in the new cultural direction that Oaxaca has taken. It is because of him that the city has become a seriously important cultural center in Mexico, for Mexicans as well as foreigners. Of course the greatest irony is that he is now a foreign artist himself.”

*

From atop the great northern platform of Monte Albán, I gaze back across the vast main plaza - a thousand feet long and exactly two-thirds as wide - at pyramids and platforms, inscriptions and murals, tombs and observatories. Built two and a half millennia ago, without the aid of wheels or animals, this site served as a cultural and religious center to some 40,000 people.

Silence, grandeur, mirror of earth and sky. Shadows advance up the stone steps toward me. In the valley far below, the lights of Oaxaca wink on. I think of Toledo, and of Rufino Tamayo before him, and the chain of artisanship running generations back to this core site, Monte Albán. I look up into the twilit sky where tomorrow a plane will take me back to Mexico City. Here on this ancient plain, I sense myself - citizen of the modern secular democracy to the north, refugee from a technoculture, inhabitant of a fraught and divided land - tapping deeper roots, intimating threads of knowledge, acceptance, and reconciliation. Here at Monte Albán, I feel I’ve unearthed another layer of my American self.

This was the Mexican moment I had sought.