A Day Hike and a Thousand Years
Tlacochahuaya, Oaxaca, Mexico
“Tlacochahuaya”, it turns out, means “The Humid Place.”
The logic of the name may be lost on you as the bus lumbers away, the dust settles on you like a scarf, and you are left facing a craggy butte jutting up like a shipwreck out of the goaty scrub. But, this is a fertile stretch of river valley and as a result, plants, animals, and people have lived on and bickered over this small and unassuming plain for centuries. The land, the old, cochineal-swabbed church, and town of Tlacochuhuaya with the western Sierra sweeping up like breakers beyond offer a stunning view of the natural and human history of the Valles Centrales.
Tlacochuhuaya is an easy day-hike from Oaxaca city: start at the pretty little Dainzu ruins on a low bluff to the east of the butte, cross the fields, hike up the butte and then down again to the little town and church.
To get there, catch a Teotitlan bus in Ninos Heroes de Chapultepec Street (Route 190) for 8 pesos. Get off at the Tlacochahuaya bus stop just after the new and gaily painted Neurotics Anonymous clinic about 25 minutes east of Oaxaca, and 10 minutes past Tule. Alternatively, catch a sitio cab for 10 pesos. Sitios are parked in groups with their destinations displayed on windshield placards at the Abastos market. The taxista will let you out in the gravel at the turn. Tlacochahuaya is hidden two kilometers from the highway beyond the butte.
The outlandishly named little town and the cactus and acacia in which it is set, have an eerie, pre-Hispanic feel. According to the Toponimia de Oaxaca Critica Etimologica, a pile of tomes compiled in 1955 that list strange and instructive statistics of all the towns in Oaxaca state, Tlacochahuaya was founded in the 1300s by a Zapotec warrior named Cochicahuala, whose name means “he who fights at night.” And fight he did. Cochicahuala and his band of followers, probably from Monte Alban, wrangled with all comers vying for this prime and watery real estate. One pre-Hispanic dust-up is said to have done in so many warriors that the soil was puddled with blood, and bones were “stacked in pyramids” and “heaped in the fields” that run along the road. The memory of those old bones still sticks up through the scrub and goat trails under Dainzu’s lonely gaze.
The little town itself is famous for its 17th century church, one of those on the Ruta de los Dominicos, a trail that Dominican friars followed looping for hundreds of miles between churches as far-flung as Nochixtlan, Hierve de Agua, and Ixtlan. Hotels and the English Language Library on Avenida Juarez in Oaxaca city frequently have guided tours of the church. Its cochineal-pink masonry still holds the handprints of the indigenous Zapotec workers who built it, leaving decidedly un-Catholic wave-shaped sweeps in the stucco, symbolizing snakes who are water lovers and life bringers in this dry valley. The church and the land around it present a startling example of how thin the veneer of Catholic civilization was, and maybe still is, over Mexico’s pre-Hispanic perception of reality.
We got off the Tlacolula bus at the turn to Dainzu, which is not a real stop, but the bus driver will charge you a prorated fare. We followed the road hugging the low hill into which the Dainzu ruins are carved like a cameo and then set off across the fields toward the church’s bell towers about a mile away.
Tlacochahuaya has always been a rather prosperous town. The Toponimia records that, in 1955, all the house roofs were made of tile and that the people of Tlacochahuaya liked to sing and were dedicated to growing corn, membrillo, and pomegrantes, and an herb called “cuajinicuil” which was used as an antivenin. As we crashed through hedges and leaped irrigation ditches, we wondered why antivenin was such a hot commodity.
We skirted young bean fields, stomped through a dry riverbed full of cannonball-sized rocks and discarded laundry detergent bottles, and burst through a hedge into a little cornfield in which three men were berating an ox which was dragging a wooden harrow. They all seemed surprised to see us and said, yes, we could get to the town on this path. I asked if there were very many snakes, the old man, who had teeth like wooden pegs, hooted, and said, “Ah muy muchas serpientes! Ha Ha Ha!”
We hiked across the fields to the base of the butte. The plain is full of plant and animal life like organ cactus and prickly pear, which was in fruit, and several acacias being browsed by herds of goats that flowed over the hills like fish. There were mounds of marigold that sent up a fragrance like opium all around us when we mashed them under our boots. We didn’t see any snakes, but were impressed and appalled by the families of yellow and black spiders the size of Oreos, spread-eagle in webs stretched between the arms of organ cactus. When we circled the cactus to look at them, their cherry-red abdomens swiveled to point at us, following us all the way around until we were so disconcerted, we went away. In 1918, the botanist Conzatti compiled a map of Oaxaca’s biological and mineral diversity, in addition to weird spiders, he listed peanuts, chile, and mescal among gold and silver as products of this region.
The butte, or magote in Spanish, hides the town from the highway and is called Cerro Negro. It is a two-humped saddle-backed lump of rusty, crumbly granite. Its high end is a 200 foot curved cliff. Coming at it from Oaxaca city, it looks like a dark grassy toe. From the tidy government building in Tlacochahuaya, a road winds up the back of the hill to a parking lot on the lower hump which has a lovely view away from the highway to the towns and fields that wash up at the feet of the Sierra. Also on this lower hump is a smashed and graffiti’d monument to the Carranzistas and Villistas who clobbered each other up and down this beautiful valley in the last days of the Mexican Civil War.
The monument is also the site of annual summer night bacchanalia during Guelaguetza week called “Lunes de Cerro.” Tourist pamphlets at the Oaxaca library say “young people come to dance, drink mescal, tepache, and eat cherries and tamales with mole negro, and beans until the break of dawn.” Dunes of smashed Sol bottles twinkled in the acacia. Under an immense and turquoise sky, clouds dragged rain like tentacles down the sunny valley.
Cerro Negro offers a moderately rigorous half-mile hike (bring water and wear sturdy shoes) up a gentle slope with a few leap-able crevasses along goat trails from the monument to its crest through a thousand years of history, semi-arid flora and fauna, and stunning mountain, sky, and Valles Centrales views.
