It is true that I told two lies at the end of my last blog entry. The first was that I wrote “in next week’s blog…” well, that was 9 months ago. And the second was that I said I’d share the riveting story of how I learned to eat a tortilla. There will be no tortilla eating in this blog called The Third Village. Both of my lies where unintentional, I swear. I could tell you boring stories about why it has been 9 months and not a week. The best laid plans… Meanwhile, this actually IS the story of how I learned to eat a tortilla, but I realized that to tell it properly requires more than a paragraph about eating a tortilla. So bear with me, we will get there. And it might even be worth the wait.

And now, without further ado,

The Third Village

Three? Really? 

Pedro Guzman told me about the third pottery village that semester in Oaxaca. I listened as if he was giving me the keys to Shangri La.

A third village? It seemed unfathomable to me that there could be so much richness, so much heritage and history. As a point of reference, there wasn’t a single pottery village in the entire state of Nevada where I was born.  That might not come as a shock to many people, Nevada is largely rural and not very populated. Despite that, however, it is home to many casino villages. But I should also point out that there aren’t any pottery villages in the massive and populous state of California next door where I was attending university. Before going to Oaxaca that year, I’d hardly been anywhere else. Wonderfully provincial you might say.  So I had no context for a place on earth where there were villages that specialized in necessary trades, like pottery, and that had been practicing those trades for two, three or four thousand years, and were still at it to this day.  Nevada’s oldest casinos date to the early 1930’s. 

Santa Maria Atzompa, just beyond Oaxaca City was the first pottery village I ever met. In household after household potters were at work creating a style of pottery that seemed to be the village's trademark. Their work was made of a beige clay with a copper-green glaze. Wood-fired,earthen kilns perfumed the air of the village with their distinctive, dusty, acrid scent. I would later learn that the potters knew what was going on inside the kiln by different scents the smoke made. Here was an entire village of masters dedicated to the trade of making pottery! 

Thousands of pots a day were probably made in Atzompa. You might think of it like a factory.  Except it wasn’t a factory at all. It was many hundreds of households, artisanal workshop after artisanal workshop all working in some kind of ancient unison to produce a very specific style of pottery in predetermined shapes and sizes to fit the kitchen needs of the region. And there was no CEO, each potter was their own boss, following their own rhythms, finding their own ways to sell their community-styled work. 

Above the village on the hill were the ruins of a Zapotec ceremonial center called Monte Albán which was a nexus of power over a thousand years ago. Potters from this village made cookware for that kingdom long ago. 

I stumbled around this village, not only the first pottery village I’d ever been to, but the first village that I’d ever been to. I was in a daze, staring at the adobe walls, marveling at the turkeys and donkeys and stunned and thrilled by the stacks of pottery in the earthen patios and the smoking kilns. The whole place was disheveled, there were no tidy lawns, no white painted fences, no barbecue grills or freshly washed trucks in the driveway. It was a place made by humans for humans in order to live and work in with apparently little care for curb appeal. It felt so real, like a painted lady without her makeup with her true and glorious nature showing through. 

I clicked pictures of everything and was gape-jawed the whole time. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more tourist than that. But then, at it’s best, being a tourist is about having your mind expanded, or better still, blown, by things you had no idea existed on earth. For the distinct kind of human being that I was, this was a pinnacle experience. I didn’t need anymore, my life was an immensely better thing because I knew Atzompa existed. 

And yet, there was more. 

On the other side of Oaxaca city, heading south past the airport where alfalfa fields grew, there was yet another pottery village called San Bartolo Coyotepec. Coyotepec was perhaps the best known pottery village in all of Mexico, famed for its glossy black pottery. Like Atzompa, this was a pottery center with an ancient heritage in clay. They fired their pottery in subterranean kilns and in the process smoked them to achieve their inky black color. Mythologically, this was the pottery of the underworld, the pottery of the night. They used to make well jugs, colander pots, mixing bowls, irrigation pots, mezcal jars and canteens. With the change of times (the arrival of factory-made everything) and the fact that a major road passed through the very middle of town drawing in tourists since the 1940’s, they’d adapted their work to the changing tastes of the outside world. The old utilitarian pieces had largely been replaced by decorative pieces that ranged from elegantly ornate to extremely kitsch. 

I’d managed to arrange a few pottery lessons in Coyotepec and so I’d come and go on the bus from Oaxaca city as I felt called, and wander over to my teacher, Pedro Guzman’s house. If I found him at home I’d sit down and work with him. If he wasn’t home, I’d do something else with my day.  The first time I ever went to Pedro’s house I had my stereotypes shaken (this was a daily, if not hourly, occurrence during that semester in Oaxaca) when I walked up to the house only to hear Chicago blues emanating from his workshop. I’m not 100% sure what kind of music I expected him to listen to, something folksy and Mexican, but certainly not Chicago blues. 

So one morning we were sitting there working with clay and listening to the blues when Pedro mentioned this third pottery village, somewhere out there in the ancient reaches of the Oaxaca valleys.  “It’s called San Marcos Tlapazola” he said, as if repeating a sacred rune, “those potters, they don’t show up in Oaxaca city much and they hardly speak Spanish, but…” and, like describing the coordinates to a hidden land, he continued, “the village is not so far away, somewhere past Tlacolula.  You can find them there, selling their pots at the Tlacolula market. It is red pottery.”  

A third pottery village… could life be so generous? I day dreamed about this place for weeks and poured over maps of Oaxaca trying to find it. But it did not reveal itself. So finally I broke away from my Spanish studies and commitments and got on the bus to take the bull by the horns. The big market of Tlacolula was in my sights, and meeting a potter from this secretive village of red clay was my goal.