4/ Being, in Oaxaca
This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Adventure … excitement … a Jedi craves not these things.
-- Yoda to Luke Skywalker, “The Empire Strikes Back”
Plaza de Santo Domingo, Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, México
Although the many stresses of our departure from Seattle were behind us (or rather, mostly behind us, given that the Seattle House still hadn’t been rented), we now faced a new challenge—finding a permanent residence for a year. I had been perusing Craigslist Oaxaca, but in the end we decided that we couldn’t realistically pick a place to live without seeing it first in person. Now that we were here, how to find something suitable?
With remarkable (and uncharacteristic) foresight, I had held onto the business card of Julio Pinacho, a Oaxaca taxi driver that we had hired for a day excursion back in 2015. I called to ask if he would drive us around some city neighborhoods for a couple of hours to look for rental signs. We spotted several whose numbers I later called about properties which we visited over a period of several days in different neighborhoods around the city.
We were surprised to learn that rental prices here were generally higher than we had anticipated. The advent of Airbnb has seen many Mexican property owners converting their rentals to a short-term format, resulting in higher prices (paid mainly by foreign visitors). True, we were inclined to be somewhat discriminating—haven't we, after all, earned the right to pamper ourselves at least a little? And yes, it’s still possible to rent a 2-bedroom apartment in Oaxaca for well under $500 a month, but chances are you’ll be living with few or no services and crumbling infrastructure in a noisy neighborhood.
After making several Spanglish phone calls to establish connections with agents, we were shown a variety of apartments, including one that we actually felt pretty good about. It was exceptionally well-situated, in a quiet neighborhood mere blocks from the Templo de Santo Domingo—the epicenter of tourist activity in the old Centro. It featured good security, a very nice landlady who lived onsite, big, shady trees and, of all things, a lap pool! We loved everything about it except for, frankly, the apartment itself: smallish, with a tiny kitchen area and very little storage. The current tenants, an American couple in their 30s—“film people from LA”—were living in startling squalor, with food-encrusted dishes piled high in the sink, mezcal bottles strewn about the floor, garbage everywhere, and an adopted street cat prowling for scraps. As we were surveying the carnage, the woman tenant emerged to apologize for the condition of the place: “Our cleaning person didn’t show up yesterday,” she explained, inspiring even more vivid conjectures about their dissolute lifestyle. All this did nothing to alleviate our misgivings about the place, but in the end we realized that we had even less stomach for continuing to scour the city in search of something better—especially since, quite possibly, there was nothing better out there to be found. We reached an agreement with the landlady, who assured us that there would be no problem with moving in at the end of our stay at a temporary apartment on July 8.
When we returned later with the rental deposit, however, she grimly reported that the LA squatters’ contract in fact extended through the end of July. There was no way that she could legally dislodge them (or the stray cat) before then, which meant that we would have to scramble to find more temporary housing for the next 3 weeks. But this was July, the month of La Guelaguetza, the mother of Oaxacan festivals—a time when every hotel room and apartment has been booked by tourists eager to see the endless parades, artisan fairs and costumed dance performances celebrating the multiverse of cultures that is the state of Oaxaca. In other words, the worst possible time to be looking for a place to live.
Spoiler Alert: It would be a total of 46 days from our arrival in Oaxaca before we fully unpacked for the first time in “our” apartment. During that period we would stay in 4 different apartments and 2 hotels. It was not the quick and easy start that we had envisioned.
Calle Macedonio Alcalá, Oaxaca de Juárez
Amid the turmoil of finding a place to live, we had introduced ourselves to a 2nd-degree friend of one of Martha’s brothers, whom we'll call Harry. Harry is the expat owner of the popular bookstore in the tourist zone. Married to a local woman, he has been living in Oaxaca for 30+ years. We talked at length about our housing difficulties over some cold drinks in the café above his bookstore. His advice: Living in Oaxaca is not about Doing; rather, it is about Being. If you’ve brought an agenda, be prepared to wait patiently for it to unfurl in the direction you want it to take. In Mexico, according to Harry, “no” doesn’t mean “no”—it simply means that you haven’t phrased the question properly in the first place. Sometimes you have to back up a step or two and take another run at it.
Obviously, when negotiating a strange, new culture in a language other than your own, there can be levels of nuance at work that you may not be able to respond to or even detect. Don’t worry about that, Harry said, things will work out—but only after the requisite time, deliberation and conversation have been offered up to coax the inevitable solution into being.
Most importantly, he continued, here in Oaxaca you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief, to be open to the magic that is all around in this ancient land. Sometimes, things just happen.
Zapotec ruins, Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca
