A Year in Oaxaca: Part 2 — A New Home
After landing in Oaxaca we head to our new house.
Author’s Note: Today’s entry is part of a recurring series excerpted from the book proposal I am working on. The same type and variety of other posts I’ve been writing will also continue to appear. The previous entry is linked below. Thank you for reading!
Finally free from the clutches of customs, we walked through the opaque glass security doors into the surprisingly large and airy foyer of the Oaxaca airport, where Mexican families stand and wait for loved ones who are predominantly returning home from the United States.
Suddenly, we saw them. Standing there amongst the eager Oaxacans were Penny and Victor, from whom we had purchased our home.
More than a year had passed since we first met them in the darkened driveway of the home we would now be living in, but since then they looked like they hadn’t aged a day. Victor was still tall and lean, a graceful and weathered man with a slightly rumpled air in his late 70s. Penny, in her mid-70s, looked cheery and elegant. “Welcome to Oaxaca!” they said, embracing each of us before introducing us to Lupe, a local tour guide and driver whose van would carry our enormous pile of luggage.
Seeing them at the airport made us feel a bit like a weight had been lifted. While we knew ahead of time that Penny and Victor would be at the airport to welcome us, the reality of their presence made us feel less alone, and as our car pulled away from the airport and entered the busy traffic of the city of Oaxaca de Juárez I was struck by how alien and unfamiliar everything felt.
When we moved to New York in 2017 it was a brand new home for Andrea, but for me, it was a homecoming. Even though I hadn’t lived in the city for almost a decade, with the return came a sense of deep familiarity. The ocean might have changed in the time I was gone, but the currents remained the same, and the sounds, smells, and even the pace of life echoed patterns that had shaped my life since the moment of my birth. But we’d only ever visited Oaxaca as tourists and the rhythms of the place were foreign. At that moment, driving through a city I didn’t know, becoming an expat felt like an impossibly enormous experience, huge and unknowable and terrifying.
As we pulled off the highway and began the 15-minute drive to our house, I began to remember why we’d moved.
While you wouldn’t know it while driving, the highway that leads northeast from the city of Oaxaca de Juárez to the municipality of Etla is Route 190, the famed 19,000-mile-long Pan-American Highway that runs from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (the northernmost tip of North America) to Ushuaia, Argentina (the southernmost tip of South America). Our section of that fabled road is a mere blip on the map and the turn that takes you into San Sebastián Etla, one of the towns you must pass through to reach our own, hidden corner of Oaxaca, is not famous enough to make a tourist take note and add it to their itinerary.
From the very first time we visited, though, we had been captivated and had unexpectedly found beauty and adventure in things that really are very normal. Against the odds, we were romanced by some of the most commonplace aspects of Oaxaca.
Unless you’re fleeing for survival and don’t have the luxury of being all too picky about where you’re going to live, I think you have to have a sense of romance to find yourself a new home in a new country. Simply in practical terms moving across town is hard, an endeavor that will drain you of money and energy so rapidly you’d think you ran a marathon that charges you heavily for every mile you’ve completed. Moving across state lines, or across a country, is diabolical, requiring you not just to pack up all of your stuff and find a new place to live, but to deal with a whole new set of utility companies, rules, and government bureaucracies. Moving to another country takes all of that and amplifies it a hundred-fold. It’s not just hard, it will make you question your sanity. You have to be in your heart at least a little bit of a romantic (or a lunatic) to know all of that and think, regardless, “This will be fun.”
Not everyone can do this. We’ve known a lot of people who despite their love of vacations and travel cannot picture themselves anywhere but where they’re from. It may be that they only have room inside of themselves for a single place, or perhaps their experiences have made it so that the idea of the outside world, a world outside of their understanding, is too large for them. Regardless of the reasons why, they’re built for just one place, and leaving makes the return that much sweeter.
We always felt we belonged to the second category, those people for whom travel is about more than just new and beautiful sights, long and pleasant lunches and dinners on shaded patios or next to unfamiliar oceans, and time spent browsing the racks and shelves of quaint stores and boutiques. With every trip we took we found ourselves wondering, “Could we live here?” and in that regard, we’re not special. A person with the right combination of desires, fantasies, and circumstances may find themselves mentally and emotionally testing the waters of each place they go, imagining what their common, daily life might be like. They see a beautiful home and fantasize about what it might look like if that home were their own, if the furniture inside was their familiar, comfortable furniture, the pots and pans the ones they know the shape and heft of, the shower one that they’re learned to bend to their will, the pillow the one that helps them fall asleep the quickest.
The very first time we visited Oaxaca and drove late at night in our shitty rental car to the town we’d end up living in, we felt an inkling of that fantasy. The turn into San Sebastián, which has you pass underneath closely planted and towering pine trees whose trunks are painted white, made us feel like we were exploring and not just turning into a small, bedroom village near the state’s largest city. As the road wound and twisted, gently climbing in elevation toward San Agustín Etla, we felt enveloped by the Mexican night that was filled with the sound of chirping crickets, singing frogs, and faint music.
Even though it was past 9 pm and we were over three hours late, Penny and Victor met us at the gate to their house and escorted us to the first floor, which we’d rented. They’d prepared black bean soup for us and stocked the fridge with locally made yogurt, some fresh vegetables, ripe fruit, locally baked bread, and fresh eggs they’d taken from the henhouse that sat next to where our car was parked. We marveled at the art in their home, the handpainted mural covering a wall, and the beautiful, handwoven rugs on the tile floor. We went to bed transfixed by the immediate and free-flowing hospitality we had received and the fantasy of a small, mountainside village in the center of a place known for its food, culture, art, and history.
The next morning, the fantasy did not dissolve. The house was even more spectacular than we’d realized.
The space we’d rented sat on the first floor of the house, but because the structure was literally built onto the side of a hill the entire property existed on a series of terraces and platforms. As you climbed the stairs from the gravel parking area up to the house you passed by levels of gardens, and further above the floor we’d rented we could see a pool and pool house and the second floor of the house where Penny and Victor lived. At the very top of the property was a screened-in vegetable garden and a small art studio that was high enough up to be able to gaze out over the valley the town was built in.
With the house now illuminated by the daylight, we discovered that each of the two bedrooms had its own French-style doors that opened onto a walled courtyard with a burbling carved stone fountain in the center. The walls of the courtyard were lined with small palms and ferns, prickly cacti and towering succulents, and flowering tropical plants.
In between the two bedrooms was a small rectangular bathroom with a walk-in shower, and set in the far-facing wall was a window that looked into the courtyard. The rest of the apartment was made up of a generously sized living room with a wall lined with books, and there was a pale yellow couch covered in hand-stitched pillows, a leather armchair with a cloth ottoman, and handmade wooden chairs we later learned were produced by José, the carpenter who lived and worked at the end of the dirt road that led to the house.
The living room had its own set of French doors that led to a small balcony that looked out over the parking area, and another large metal-and-glass door opened onto a shaded patio holding two chairs, many potted plants, and some small end tables. The living room opened into a kitchen that was generously sized with a round, hand-painted dining table with four chairs. And throughout the apartment art was everywhere: paintings, framed textiles, carved wooden figurines, and ceramic sculptures.
As we explored our rental space we sat in various pieces of furniture, it felt, somehow, like our own furniture. It was a hot day and dry, but when we opened all of the doors and windows the breeze that flowed through was cool and perfect. We could hear a brass band practicing in the distance, the sound of tuba music punctuating the morning stillness, and the smell in the air was of dusty sunlight, woodsmoke, and, incredibly, hot chocolate.
We didn’t know it at the time but we weren’t just falling in love with the house, we were falling in love with ephemeral, very common everyday aspects of life in Oaxaca. And although it took days for us to express the thought out loud, it seems likely that Andrea and I had the same emotional experience at the same moment, and thought to ourselves at the same time, “We could live here.”
Mexico, like any place, is complicated, and that’s especially true of the state of Oaxaca. Sitting at the bottom of Mexico, Oaxaca is separated from the dangerous and troubled country of Guatemala by the Mexican state of Chiapas. This is the poorest part of Mexico, with Chiapas being the most impoverished state in the country and Oaxaca coming in at a close second. But what Oaxaca broadly lacks in financial resources it makes up for with almost shocking natural beauty and profound cultural richness.
While historically Oaxaca has been both persecuted and ignored by Mexico because it has the highest density of Indigenous peoples and communities of any part of Mexico, that same cultural heritage has proven to be a major driver of tourism. People come to this place because of its food, which is famous even in Mexico. They are drawn here by the handmade pottery and wool rugs woven on manually operated wooden looms. The local art scene, which combines modern techniques with ancestral iconography, is astounding and varied. The colonial-era churches and courtyards in the UNESCO World Heritage part of Oaxaca de Juárez are entrancing, and the shops selling generous pours of locally-made mezcal are inviting. It is a place where it is easy to picture yourself for longer and longer stretches of time.
In recent years, Oaxaca has grown in popularity. Compared to famed Mexican beach towns and cities like Acapulco, Cancun, Tulum, Playa del Carmen, Cabo San Luas, and Cozumel, the Oaxacan beach communities of Puerto Escondido, Zipolite, and Huatulco were downright obscure. Most tourists to the coast were surfers and hippies, drawn to that pristine, rocky, California-like section of the Pacific by the famously intense waves and equally tranquil and agreeable vibes. Now, though, the coast is connected to the center of Oaxaca by a large and modern highway that has cut the winding and at times harrowing nine-hour-plus mountain pass drive down to a cool two and a half. The area has retained many of its charms, but it’s far more accessible to the average tourist and has become particularly popular with Canadian retirees.
We knew some of this before we decided to move, but the particulars of tourism and how the state had changed were not what inspired us. It was how we felt in this place that moved us, and the type of life we pictured having felt real and achievable.
About two years later we had made the biggest decision of our lives. Penny and Victor’s house was officially and legally ours. Andrea’s company told her she could work remotely, while mine forced me to resign, and we said a sorrowful goodbye to our friends, neighbors, and everything we loved and hated about New York.
As our car pulled into our freshly-purchased house we saw it with what felt like fresh eyes. We had purchased it partly furnished and the palapa and the downstairs we had first rented were more-or-less as they had been when we first visited, although gone was my favorite handmade wall tapestry that had hung above one of the beds, some of the art, and the infinitely comfortable leather armchair. The next day, when we walked upstairs, it was almost jarring to find all of Penny and Victor’s possessions gone, moved to their new rental home in the nearby town of San Pablo Etla. The space felt cavernous, ready to swallow our stuff that was scheduled to arrive sometime in November.
It was an avalanche of new experiences, which is everything we had hoped for. It was our first night in our new home, on the side of a hill, in Oaxaca.
This felt nostalgic for me. All the feelings you felt and the act of taking it all in. This line: "becoming an expat felt like an impossibly enormous experience, huge and unknowable and terrifying," is exactly how I felt the first time I landed in Jamaica without a return date back to Canada. It's surreal, exhilarating, and yes...terrifying. But so worth the adventure!
I’m so enjoying reading this Jacob and looking forward to your next chapters. I travelled to Oaxaca in 1974 and stayed a couple of months on a commune set up by the poet Margarita Dalton in the village of El Vergel a few kms from the city. A most memorable time. Didn’t want to leave. Completely understand your move there!