Dos Vatos Palabras

PRODUCTION JOURNAL from our year of living in Juchitan, Oaxaca.

Check out two of the shorts that we created while living in Juchitan here:

www.youtube.com/elvatouno

SON JAROCHO in Juchitan, Oaxaca

I went out on the town last week with three beautiful Tecas.  If you hail from Juchitán you are called either a ‘Juchiteco ‘(for the guys) or a ‘Juchiteca’ (the female persuasion) or better yet, I like the short version of ‘Teco’ or ‘Teca’. 

Mariana lives right down the street with her mom and a big Rottweiler named Gorda.  She has a beautiful way of dressing and I can tell she thinks a lot about the whole package, because she always looks so pretty and nicely put together.  She usually wears a combination of the old fashioned traditional clothing of the region with a piece of modern day stuff.  Her traditional gear included wearing a huipil, which is a hand made blouse, and hers was made out of rustic looking white cloth and embroidered with fine red thread in an elaborate design.  Her skirt was a red floral diaphanous thing and she always wears really smart jewelry, usually made out of chunky pieces of polished amber. 

Mariana’s mom is in the gold and ‘stone’ business, and apparently is a very good saleswoman.  We discussed our passion for the color red, in fingernail polish, clothes, and household accessories.

Her younger sister, Pati, came along, decked out in thoroughly traditional garb, wearing a bright yellow ‘juchi’ girl skirt (very flattering to the figure) and the famous huipil from the region, which is made out of black velvet and covered with an explosion of embroidered flowers.  Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun and she looked really beautiful. 

We drove to town in Ari’s big truck, which is not so big, but the dainty and tiny women of Juchitán always have a hard time getting up into it.  At 5’6’ I am a giantess and tower over most of the local women, whereas, in the U.S. I feel kind of short.

We picked up another friend who was wearing a green velvet huipil stitched with off white thread and also a long and flowing skirt.  I was wearing a long pink cotton skirt, a super shiny green and gold blouse (all gifts from my mom), and simple gold jewelry.  I wish I had taken a photo because we looked like a bouquet of flowers together. 

We were going to town to celebrate Mexican Independence Day and do El Grito in the Palacio but first we went to a little club called El Puente to hear some music.  There was not any one there, other than the super cool looking musicians, and the Tecas said the emptiness could be explained by the rain.  

It took the Tecas forever to order drinks and they were very bossy and nice with the waiters, “What!  You can’t go back there, chop up some fruit, and make me a fresh drink?!!”  I quickly ordered a Victoria and they all settled on fresh lemonade.

After the rain died down we went into the courtyard full of almond trees to listen to some folkloric music from Vera Cruz, otherwise known as the “Son Jarocho”.   When listening to the “Son Jarocho” you can feel the influence of the Spanish conquistador, the African slave who was brought to the coast, the slaves of the Caribbean, and also the people who were already there, or the local indigenous folks.  This sound dates back to the eighteenth century. 

The musicians were dressed liked elegant campesinos, with straw hats, guayaberas, hand made trousers, and huaraches. They sang beautiful melodies together and one of them was singing in a high falsetto voice. One musician strummed, with a lot of gusto, the five stringed Jarana like a ukulele.  Another played a Requinto, which is another rustic looking guitar, and is used for playing arpeggios, or chords played in rapid succession rather than simultaneously.  Another was picking a violin (I think). The coolest musico was playing a Quijada de Burro or a donkey jaw.  Percussion instruments, like the donkey jaw, the turtle shell, or a box, became important to musicians in the old days, because drums were outlawed for slaves during Mexico’s Spanish colonization.  This music is earthy, rustic, and I like it a lot.  One famous song that originated from this ‘jarocho’ tradition is “La Bamba”, although the music played that night did not really sound anything like “La Bamba”.

The added bonus of all this fine music is that groups from Vera Cruz tend to perform with two dancers, who are part of the group.  The young dancers used a hand strewn elevated wooden platform, called a tarima, and did percussive dancing on top of the platform.  They wore lovely cotton blouses, long full skirts, and dance shoes that could really add sound to the ‘zapateos’, or foot tapping of the dances.  They were very good dancers who got all sweaty due to the physicality of their performance.  The dance had a flamenco type quality but was quite different.   

It was fun and really much better than any song and dance that I get to see in the U.S.    We missed “El Grito” entirely and this had something to do with the time thing in Juchitán, which means that some people follow the rules of clock changing for daylight savings time, and others do not.  Therefore, in Juchitán there is a ‘tiempo normal’/normal time and ‘tiempo del verano’/summer time, which are an hour apart, and adds the confusion of what time it really is.

We lived and worked in Juchitan, Oaxaca, for a year with the support of a Fulbright.  Juchitan is a very interesting and magical place.  Check out some of our shorts:

http://www.youtube.com/elvatouno

This journal accompanies the short

Taladxi en la Séptima

  We finally whipped out the big camera (a Sony DSR-130 Camcorder), the tripod, and our sound gear and started shooting again. It’s not like we are rusty or anything . . . we did the final ‘martini shot’, for our Kentucky Theatre documentary on the 20th of July.  A martini shot, is the last shot of the day on a film set, and the final one is always bittersweet for documentarians.  It is a wonderful moment when you know you have enough footage to tell your story and the shooting is finally wrapped.  However, we had just spent months with Fred and Raymond, who are the stars of “The Kentucky Theatre” and were privy to their day-to-day routines and obsessions.  When you take the time to shoot a person, in such an intimate and intense way, you really get to know them and enjoy being a part of their life.  The martini shot brought an end to the live connection with Fred and Raymond.    

We jumped right back into the field by shooting an event called, “Pelota de Esponja” or in Zapoteco, which is the indigenous and most commonly used language of the region, “Taladxi”.  We were accompanied by our neighbor, Herman, who has appointed himself as our Production Assistant and my son Max, who guarded the tripod, when not in use, and ate corn on the cob with chile and lime juice. 

Sponge Ball is just like baseball, but the players use their fists to hit the ball, which is as hard as a racquetball.  The Sponge Ball field is often near a graveyard so ‘the dead can watch’. It was the final between the “Septima” (the seventh district which is the most populated and notorious for crime and wild life) and a team from “Cheguigu” (famous for strolling musicians). 

The crowd consisted of almost a thousand men who had arrived by foot, horseback, bicycle, and tricycle.  The appointed Presidente of Juchitán made a brief appearance and left in a shiny truck with a couple of rough women. The leftist press has recently reported that the Presidente is alleged to have had a political rival assassinated.  The rival had been drinking at a popular cantina called, “Lola’s” and had his head bashed in with a brick while staggering home.  The locals claim the murder was about ‘amor’ and not about politics. We were introduced to the Presidente who spoke to us in English, having gone to school at The John Hopkins University in Baltimore.   

I could feel this was a dangerous place to be shooting and I trust my intuition a lot.  It is not easy to work in front of a thousand drunk and rowdy men (thank god I was properly clothed), but sometimes you have to dive in and hope for the best.  As well as being a producer, I am also a sound recordist, and I get to wield a big boom pole.  Having studied karate for many years I know how to use a stick as a weapon and I always feel more confident when carrying the boom pole.

One forthcoming man, who was wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt told me I needed to be careful because, “there are a lot of dangerous people here . . . they can find out where you live, slice you up with a knife, and steal your expensive equipment”.  He then told me to “take it e-see” in English. 

It was hotter than you can imagine and some players were barefoot.  A piglet briefly interrupted the game by scampering on field.  Ari and I try to make sure we have the game covered with visuals and sound.  Ideally, the audio should tell a good radio story. However, a live baseball game is not easy to shoot with one camera and one sound set up.  You are constrained spatially by the playing field as well as the fans.

The heat and a six-hour drive to Oaxaca City, to renew Ari’s visa, pull us away. It feels good to be back out in the field.