First week in Oaxaca

I'm dying to get this first post out of the way.
I'm staying in a great old colonial house in Oaxaca City owned by a friend of mine for the month of October. This is a picture of the courtyard outside my room. I'm spending the first month at libraries like The Welte Institute for Oaxacan Studies, and La Casa de la Ciudad which houses the private library of the late Oaxacan author Andres Henestrosa. I'm trying to learn all I can (from books) about La Costa, the region where Zipolte is located. So far I've found out that in the larger municipality of Pochutla, there used to be a large Nahua-speaking population. Nahua is descended from a language spoken by the Aztecs. Apparently the anthropologist Frans Boaz did some field work in Pochutla in the early 20th century, interviewing children of some of the last speakers of Nahua (actually a lot of scholars call the language spoken in Pochutla ¨Pochuteco¨, because of its unique characteristics). He declared the language dead (I couldn't find this in English but here's something else about it) long before I arrived on the scene but I suspect that Zipolite is actually a word from Pochuteco. Zapotec speakers, who populate the South of Oaxaca around Pochutla, don´t seem to recognise it.

I attended a radio workshop this week organized by Ojo de Agua de Comunicación Comunitaria. Among many highlights was an afternoon of story-telling about the El Salvadorian Civil War by one of the operators of the guerrilla radio station, "Radio Venceremos". He said for twelve years they only transmitted two hours a day but it was obligatory for every guerilla unit to tune in for those two hours to hear news, stories, love messages, music and soap operas. He told us that they were constantly on the move and had to use gas generators to power their equipment.
As at all of Ojo de Agua's workshops, there was a tangible sense of community. Many of us commented at the closing that we felt very motivated to continue with work aimed at serving local communities.
This week I continue to research La Costa, Pochutla and Zipolite, hoping to discover some more recent publications. I'm also planning on making contact with the founding director of Piña Palmera, (the rehabilitation clinic in Zipolite) who lives in Oaxaca city now.
In addition I will begin to experiment roasting chiles, having received an interesting recipe for salsa at the radio workshop.