Oaxaca

Looking for belonging during a month spent living and painting in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico. Teacher strikes, The 2026 World Cup, and a quarter life crisis.

(Vista de Gral. Ignacio Zaragoza 06/26)

Oaxaca

The store a few minutes walk from my apartment is called Coppel and sells just about everything you can think of. Brand new shiny pots and pans, all sorts of appliances straight from the catalog, new motorcycles, new phones, new clothes, and new children's toys. These are not the products found in the local markets which are decidedly dusty, grimey, and coming from wherever second rate made-for-impoverished-countries goods come from, these are the real deal products. Every price is two part, the cost upfront, and the price of the monthly payment when purchased with a store credit account. You can put ten pesos down on a frying pan that you will pay off over 6 months. Entrapping impoverished families in frying pan debt is certain to secure you a spot in hell, but my landlord says they have the best price on electric hot plates which I will need to cook on the barren cement floor outside the room I have just rented for the month on the top floor of Hotel Ayala. 

Hotel Ayala is an odd little building that seems like it was beautiful in the 80’s or at least wanted to be. It’s baby blue with a swinging little white hotel sign hanging just below the first floor of picturesque balconies. The inner staircase is lined entirely with ornate flower pots half empty and half filled with fake poinsettias. The entrance of the building is a restaurant that serves expensive continental-like breakfast. Seemingly the only regular at this restaurant is the owner of the building, a woman I only know as La Señora. She is an older lady, significantly slow moving up the stairs, but holds a commanding presence in her elaborate silky shirts and overall put togetherness. She employs a work force of two or three grown men and a teenage girl who work tirelessly to maintain the building so that its aspirational grandiosity should not be forgotten. She even employed me for an afternoon, paying me 150 pesos to carry 10 large sheets of drywall up the four flights of stairs with one of the worker guys. The building's maintenance is an all consuming job made only harder seeing as we have no running water here. In fact almost no one in all of Oaxaca has any running water except for the tourist hotels and restaurants. I asked a local if that changes during the rainy season when heavy rains come every day. It does not, he told me with a chuckle. 

There are a lot of tourists in this city. They pack into the couple of little blocks around the city center and slip with distracted curiosity through the streets constantly checking their phones to ensure they are heading the right way. They wear baby tees, chunky jewelry, and plenty of fine line tattoos. Peering under baseball caps and through little colorful sunglasses, they explore Oaxaca. They visit the cute downtown mezcal bars and coffee shops with prices that are cheap to them but entirely exclusive to locals. Stopping into one coffee shop I coughed up 90 pesos (5 dollars) for a drip coffee. Enough money to buy an entire day's worth of groceries here. This coffee shop was only a ten minute walk from the street of brothels where rain or shine scores of scantily clad young women stand looking bored and exhausted at the entrances of hotels.  

The foreigners in Oaxaca are a specific brand of tourist, a cool tourist. The Americans I meet live in Wicker Park or Logan Square in Chicago or Brooklyn in New York. They are here to see the real Mexico. They are creative types or at least hate their work-from-home corporate job just enough. They hate the US just enough too. A sentiment that is shared by the graffiti which lines the streets of the city these tourists find themselves in.

“Yanquis de Mierda” is written in various corners of the downtown center. There are also signs advertising a town hall and protest over the gentrification and touristification of the city and a local artist collective wheat pastes block prints of Trump, Elon Musk, and even Obama as heads on disgusting cockroaches. 

The graffiti is not only anti-American imperialism and over tourism, It is also anti Mexican government, expressing frustration at the lack of care over the countless disappeared people who are yet to be found, or the unceasing violence against women. The city’s air of resentment finds another physical manifestation in the teacher’s unions who are on strike for better pensions and pay. In hopes to leverage the eyeballs drawn on Mexico for hosting the upcoming world cup, teachers across the nation have gone on strike. In Oaxaca they are camping in the streets of the city center. For about a five by five block square around the main plaza they have covered the streets in low-hanging tarps and set up tents, turning the entirety of the historic center into what looks like a mix between an open air market and a refugee camp. The tents are organized by county specific teacher unions, and each section has set up food stalls and grills selling snacks with signs saying all proceeds go to such and such sectors. They arrived three weeks before the opening world cup game on June 11th and seem to have no plans to cave in anytime soon. 

“What am I doing here?” I ask myself daily. I would like to pretend I am any different than those other tourists because I speak Spanish fluently and can only really afford to eat from my little electric hotplate or even because I bathe with a bucket, but this is a self soothing lie. Like those tourists, I too am abusing my status as a citizen of the imperial core of The States with its comparatively strong currency for my personal gain. Here in Oaxaca I can afford to rent an apartment for a month without working. It does not matter if I sit shoulder to shoulder on plastic stools at the corner tamale stand, bathe with a bucket, or pack into public transport. I can not be of the people because I am not working. 

I am here ostensibly to paint. To make as many paintings in a month as I can muster before sending off to New York to be an artist. It seems frequently a trivial and self serving goal. One night as I think about how silly it seems, La Señora comes up to my floor and catches me staring out the window into the night. 

“You must be thinking, ‘Where in the world is my country’,” she says with a smile. I burst into laughter, shocked at her ability to read me.

In the first mornings of my time in Oaxaca as the clear heat of the day builds to the afternoon rains of the rainy season, I walked into the hills that surround the city center to paint. As I walk up the hill across the river the locals pour down in the opposite direction heading to work. The river acts as a class barrier. On the city center side the cars are new, the buildings are stone but crossing the river and up into the hill the streets begin to crumble and the buildings become cement and tin. This is not an uncommon city landscape in Latin America where cities are founded in valleys and crawl up mountain sides as rural migrants come in search of opportunity, leaving the cities poorest with the best nighttime view of the gleaming promise of capitalism that is the city below from under the comfort of a tin roof. Here in this part of Oaxaca the streets are covered in gang graffiti of the Latin Kings, including more than one memorial.

It is there in the hills where I start to paint the city. I paint one woman’s tree and she jokes that the tree is so beautiful I must have seen it from the plane on my way in. I paint another man's dragon fruit flower and he in turn shows me with pride the intricately welded metal gate he made for his family home. 

“This will be my legacy,” He tells me. “That is the work of the artist.” 

As days pass I begin to find a rhythmic solitude in Oaxaca. Every weekday I paint. If I paint in the morning I will go for a run in the evening. If I run in the morning I will paint in the evening. I run at the local track which is always busy with everyone from older big-bellied men slowly huffing in jeans, to high school track teams, to hardcore short shorts and tank top marathoners gliding past on sinewy stork like legs. Behind the track is the skatepark, and behind that are a couple of trees where teenagers go to make out on hot afternoons.   

On Saturdays I go to a life drawing class with a local artist who has started his own school out of his home studio. A half floor down from the street 8 or so of us cram into his jumbled space around the model. The crowd is mixed of all ages both locals and tourists or long term visitors such as myself. As the nude model shifts through 10 and 15 minute poses the artist calls out hippie-like instructions.

“Now use your left hand… don’t look at the paper… we will message the body with our energy.”

At the end of every pose we in turn show our drawings to the class. Two of the old local guys who come regularly chirp each other like it’s a pickup basketball game. 

“What do you call that one? A stain?” One says to the other as he turns his drawing to show the class. 

Here in this studio they have developed a style that feels something like if Picasso was more thought through. They work in soft pastels layering a base of color over all the figure before brushing in shadow and then mid-tones and etching away highlights with an eraser working almost exclusively in value. Proportions are ignored but perspective is somehow maintained. The figure is pushed to the very edges of the paper to always appear in some way trapped by the canvas it lives in. The figures have a heavy, feminine, angsty sensuality to them. Despite my best efforts I am unable to make a satisfactory drawing during my four weeks of practice. I am stuck too often on the line work I am used to.  

On the 11th, while the teachers continued to occupy the streets, I watched the opening game of the world cup from a dim lit little cantina with a huge television visible despite the hanging paper decorations from the ceiling. I drank victorias as the tables of men behind me downed tall whisky sodas. Each drink came with a little snack. A soup, a tostada with lunch ham, and a single chunk of beef rib. When I went to the bathroom slightly embarrassed of my too tight and obviously new Mexico jersey, the men called out “My countryman!” and burst into laughter. When Mexico scores each of its two goals the men clap and cheer, shake hands even. On my way back to my apartment the corner store guy seeing me in the jersey asks if I watched the game.

“Yep,” I say.

“Thank god we won that one at least, otherwise we would really be done for," he says. 

A week later as I walk back from a bar late at night two men pull a switchblade on me. I had always thought about what I would do when faced with being mugged. I assumed I would calmly and cooly hand my things over. Instead it turns out I screamed in a loud high pitched falsetto, jumped, and sprinted away. Fortunately they didn’t give chase. One guy turned to the other and just disappointedly told his friend, “I told you.”

A defining contradiction of Mexico is the warmth of most everyone you meet while simultaneously living enveloped by a shadow of possible violence. When I paint in the hills the people laugh and smile and crack jokes with me while their community is filled with gang graffiti. The main city plaza when not covered in teachers tents has huge billboards of missing people posters, many have been missing for quite some time. The national guard drives through the city in pickup trucks with mounted armored machine guns, and despite this, walking through the pretty cobble stone streets of central Oaxaca during the day, I had chosen to believe it was safe at night out of pure hubris and ignorance and I hate myself for it. 

After my initial scream, I sprinted for a handful of blocks before getting to a decently busy taco stand where the older lady running the place gave me a soda and told me where to get a taxi home. She joked to every new customer that I was the new white guy she had hired. When I nervously stand to go she has the two 19 year old looking waitresses escort me to get a taxi. I am moved to find such good humored and kind people even just minutes after being threatened with a knife. 

On June 21st I ran a local half marathon that was held in honor of a bank's 25th anniversary. I had heard about the race from a runner I met at the very cantina I watched the opening world cup game at. With only a 100 peso entrance and being 10 weeks into a marathon training plan, it was an easy yes.

The race was packed with hundreds of participants. Leaving the starting gate was more stampede than run. Watering stations at every mile or so passed out plastic bags of water, Gatorade, and Coca-Cola. I saw one older guy run the whole race in a luchador mask. One supporter held up a sign with a cut out formal picture of someone’s grandma with the dialogue bubble, “Don’t stop running you good for nothing!”. I ran a hard race, I was proud of myself. Immediately after finishing though, after waving a quick hello to my acquaintance and taking a video of the cumbia band blasting away next to the finish line, I was struck with a deep sense of non-belonging. I didn’t really have anyone to celebrate with. I would now have to go home and do my laundry. That was it. 

With just days left in Oaxaca I find it hard not to feel similarly about my time here as a whole. I have made 17 paintings here. I may make just a couple more before I go. Some of them I think I am content with, others I hate. I have improved maybe some during my time here, but only in the subtle ways a month of self practice can help to improve oneself. While I could use the money, the complications of moving these paintings and the lack of time to sell them means I will likely never see any monetary gain for them. Laying them out on the floor together and I am struck by how much work 17 little squares can be. These are the products of not only hours of hiking around the city and painting, they are the products of the hours spent living within the images. There are no paintings without the early morning breakfasts at my local tamale cart or the nights in Hotel Ayala and its fading glory. There are no paintings without the hours spent doing everything else. The images are the accumulation of every load of laundry I washed by hand, every meal cooked on my little hot plate bought from Coppel. Between every one is all of the mundane banality of living and in their sum as they lie on my floor seemingly limp and uncaring is a month of my life.  

On June 21st the same day as the half marathon, the teachers were gone from the street without a trace. From what I found on the internet they simply went back to work. They didn’t receive one concession from the government. The sky of the plaza is no longer covered with plastic tarps. 

What was I doing here? It is not just a question of whether or not I belong as a privileged tourist in this complicated social puzzle of a foreign city in turmoil. I mean to ask what am I doing here with all the existential angst of someone just one month from turning 25. In some ways I think the work of an artist is like that of a tourist. The artist is an observer a wanderer. They are the ghost lingering about the emotional spaces that surround them. The artist is the hot water that turns the tea leaves of life into tea. I have learned over the course of this month that despite being confident I could build a mostly full and satisfied life here, it is not where I belong. This month in Oaxaca instead provided me with the space to simply observe. My time here has shown me what life could one day be should I manage to find a living in the arts, living simply and painting with dedication. My time here has shown me that working in pursuit of this dream is a privilege no matter how much sacrifice it may entail. These are lessons I will not forget when the going gets tougher.