Juchitán is about 5 hours by bus from Oaxaca City, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. I spent the last few days there visiting Radio Totopo, a community radio, in the seventh section of the city, that broadcasts almost exclusively in Zapotec. The seventh section of Juchitán is quite unique and it isn´t uncommon to go a whole day without hearing a word of Spanish spoken. There is a lot of mixing in the languages and more and more Spanish has crept in over the years. For example, numbers and times of day are often spoken of using the castillian vocabulary. Forces of Spanish influence are very strong, but there are always counter-forces. Carlos Sanchez, the heart of Radio Totopo and a fellow student of anthropology, explained to me using his chalkboard how numbers were written and spoken in Zapotec hundreds of years ago.
They also try to use colloquial terms for times of day like "birth of the sun". All this in an attempt to reinforce their local culture, which, like all other non-mainstream cultures in Mexico and Latin America, are in danger of being overshadowed by capitalist-driven popular culture and forgotten by each successive generation. In between meals of fried fish and totopos (the isthmus' take on the tortilla: a hard chip-like corn bread with holes in it, and the namesake of the radio station) we talked about relations between men and women, myths, magic, and religion, and death. I was lucky enough to experience the preparation of an offering to a dead family member in the house of a friend. It occupied an entire room and took the work of the entire family (men doing the heavy-lifting and women doing the food preparation and final decorations). This picture really doesn't do reality justice (what pictures do?) but at least you can see the spectical of the thing.
All the doorways of the house were arranged similarly so that the dead familiy member could find her way back and partake in the fruits and sweetbreads hanging from the alter. They say that after the celebrations are over (oct30-nov2) if you bite into one of the pieces of fruit, it will no longer carry a taste, supposedly sucked away by the spirit of the dead.
Juchitán is about 5 hours by bus from Oaxaca City, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. I spent the last few days there visiting Radio Totopo, a community radio, in the seventh section of the city, that broadcasts almost exclusively in Zapotec. The seventh section of Juchitán is quite unique and it isn´t uncommon to go a whole day without hearing a word of Spanish spoken. There is a lot of mixing in the languages and more and more Spanish has crept in over the years. For example, numbers and times of day are often spoken of using the castillian vocabulary. Forces of Spanish influence are very strong, but there are always counter-forces. Carlos Sanchez, the heart of Radio Totopo and a fellow student of anthropology, explained to me using his chalkboard how numbers were written and spoken in Zapotec hundreds of years ago. 
They also try to use colloquial terms for times of day like "birth of the sun". All this in an attempt to reinforce their local culture, which, like all other non-mainstream cultures in Mexico and Latin America, are in danger of being overshadowed by capitalist-driven popular culture and forgotten by each successive generation. In between meals of fried fish and totopos (the isthmus' take on the tortilla: a hard chip-like corn bread with holes in it, and the namesake of the radio station) we talked about relations between men and women, myths, magic, and religion, and death. I was lucky enough to experience the preparation of an offering to a dead family member in the house of a friend. It occupied an entire room and took the work of the entire family (men doing the heavy-lifting and women doing the food preparation and final decorations). This picture really doesn't do reality justice (what pictures do?) but at least you can see the spectical of the thing. 
All the doorways of the house were arranged similarly so that the dead familiy member could find her way back and partake in the fruits and sweetbreads hanging from the alter. They say that after the celebrations are over (oct30-nov2) if you bite into one of the pieces of fruit, it will no longer carry a taste, supposedly sucked away by the spirit of the dead.
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