Cozy Mexico: Naming Our Oaxacan Home

Welcome to Casa Secreta.

It took us over a year to pick a name for our house but after much consideration, we christened it Casa Secreta.

Many homes here in Oaxaca have names emblazoned on the walls and gates that guard a person’s compound from prying eyes, and while that’s certainly more common with larger homes it’s not just a thing done by those who are rich and vain. Oaxaca is a place where it’s very common for people to run small and unofficial businesses out of their homes. Naming where you live isn’t just fun, it also can make it easier for customers to find you.

Here in San Agustín Etla, naming homes is a particularly common practice. As you drive through our village you’ll see names like “Los Gatos” and “Villa Loohvana” emblazoned outside of homes with high walls and solid gates. Naming our house felt cozy and mysterious, exactly the feeling that’s in short supply these days

It turns out, though, that giving our home a unique name wasn’t entirely an easy task.

“How about Casa Colibrí?” I asked Penny one morning not too long after we’d moved to Mexico. She had stopped by to say hello after a pilates class we’d taken together, and we wanted her advice.

Colibrí is the Spanish word for a hummingbird and naming the house after them felt particularly appropriate. When we’d first visited Oaxaca and stayed in the house as guests of Penny and Victor’s Airbnb, we’d been enchanted by the dozens of hummingbirds flitting around the property. Later that trip, after mentioning them to Penny, we’d lapped up a story she told us about how whenever they kept the upstairs windows open on both sides of the house the hummingbirds would fly through as if they were following an invisible flight path that the house inconveniently interrupted.

“No, that’s far too common,” Penny said. “There are at least two other Casa Colibrís in this town alone and it’s a little trite.” Hmph, ok, we thought to ourselves.

“How about Casa Loohvana?” we countered. Loohvana is our village’s indigenous Zapotec name and the word roughly indicates that we live in an area of great natural fertility. That name also got turned down, but this time the rejection was accompanied by a terse headshake from Edgar. Not only were there multiple homes named Loohvana in our town, and throughout the entire district of Etla, one of them was said to belong to some expat drug dealers. “You don’t want people showing up at the gate looking for drugs,” Edgar said in Spanish.

One after another the names we suggested were turned down by Penny, Victor, Edgar, and even Edgar’s wife Adi. Casa Flores (“Flower House”), Casa Mariposa (“Butterfly House”), and Casa Jardín (“Garden House”) were all rejected for being too common, too clichéd, or even just too boring.

We had wanted to add a fun bit of flair to our house but really what we’d given ourselves was a chore. Picking a good name became so annoying and unsolvable that we eventually gave up thinking about it entirely and turned our attention fully toward our many house projects, our ongoing Spanish lessons, and preparing for the arrival of our son Leo. We should have known that this was exactly what we needed to do to begin with. Sometimes to solve a problem you simply have to stop thinking about it so hard and allow some room for serendipity.

Many of our friends were excited about our move to Mexico and have since followed the circumstances of our new lives with great interest. Few, though, have been more enthusiastic or curious than my lifelong friend Eli. He and his wife Brandi had years ago grown tired of the repressive and dismal New England winters that they slog through every year and even before we moved they started telling us about how much they’d love to visit, especially during the winter.

This past winter was a particularly miserable one, and after multiple storms and many feet of snow Eli’s enthusiasm surged. He began using Google Maps Streetview to “walk” around our village and one day he messaged me to ask exactly where our house is. Even though I’d sent him the pin with its location, he wasn’t quite able to find it.

“You actually won’t be able to find it,” I explained to him over the phone one afternoon. “If you look at the pin I sent you you’ll see a road that seems to be where we live, but that’s actually the road of Fonseca, the neighbor whose house lies on the hill beneath us.”

Fonseca’s house was often mistaken for our own due to two errors. The first is that people hugely overestimate how wealthy we are. While our house in Oaxaca dwarfs our old, beloved, and compact two-bedroom apartment in NYC, Fonseca’s compound is gigantic, many times larger than our own, and the entrance to his property is marked by a gargantuan metal gate set into a large, brick archway that’s capped with an ornate Spanish iron cross topped with a crown. We’re hardly claiming to live a life of poverty here in Mexico, but no, the sprawling, manicured compound that lies beyond the titanic gate is not ours.

The primary reason people can’t find us, though, is that when you look at Google Maps—or seemingly any map website or application, for that matter—what appears to be our road is actually part of Fonseca’s compound. I suspect the reason for this is that, over time, Fonseca and his family purchased every single piece of property on a formerly public road, and once those acquisitions were finished he sealed up the entire thing with his colonial gate of Biblical proportions. What looks like a public road isn’t, and to reach our road you have to drive about 50 feet past Fonseca’s house and then make a right onto a narrow and crumbling one-lane camino that, as far as the maps are concerned, doesn’t exist.

Our house is secret and almost impossible to find, but we’d never really thought about it that way before. In an indirect way, it’s Eli who deserves the credit for the name of our house. Had I not had to explain to him that our road doesn’t exist on the map, and what looks like our house is actually the house of someone much richer than us, I doubt we would have ever come to think of our house as being hidden from people trying to find us.

Casa Secreta—Secret House—feels like a good name too, both because it’s slightly mysterious and because it’s accurate. It’s supremely unlikely anyone would end up here without specific guidance. You must know where we live, and we guard that knowledge closely.

Admittedly, we did blow the secret a bit when we asked Victor if he’d make us a sign saying “Casa Secreta” to hang outside of our home, and when he delivered it to us only a couple of weeks before he and Penny moved back to the United States we were beyond thrilled with his artistry. But doesn’t letting people know that you have a secret make that secret just a little bit juicier?

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