The Guelaguetza Tequio

Oaxaca prepares for its most beloved celebration.

Oaxaca, and Mexico in general, is a place of celebrations. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t encounter a random parade, fiesta, or some other form of public festivity. But the only festival we’ve seen so far to rival the intensity of Día de Muertos—The Day of the Dead—is the Guelaguetza.

Guelaguetza decorations in the Centro of Oaxaca de Juárez.

The Guelaguetza is a festival dedicated to, and centered around, Oaxaca’s indigenous peoples. The biggest event by far is a large, ticketed dance performance which takes place at a stadium built on the town’s highest hill. It’s massively popular, an exhibition of local and regional dances featuring performers dressed in the clothing of their communities. Even before we moved here we had heard about it, and also before we moved we were told getting tickets is pretty dicey. The event is so popular it’s become infamous for scalpers scooping up tickets and reselling them for exorbitant sums, largely to tourists or rich Mexicans. We wanted to go but also didn’t want to participate in a system which makes it impossible for normal Oaxacans to go to their own cultural event.

We needn’t have worried. The big, famed Guelaguetza celebration happens at the stadium, but parties, dances, and parades happen all over the state, in every single community. Thinking that it’s essential to go to the biggest, most famous event is sort of like thinking it wouldn’t really be Christmas unless you went to Rockefeller Center to see the giant Christmas tree. Yeah, it’d be fun and memorable, but the celebration’s happening everywhere you look.

What we didn’t realize heading into this holiday was the degree to which Oaxaca’s communities would band together to celebrate. Suddenly businesses and homes all across the city and its surrounding towns were host to people sweeping roads, trimming trees and bushes, and putting new paint on their businesses. Oaxaca, an already clean place, was sparkling. Oaxaca, an already colorful place, blossomed. But nothing impressed us more than when we saw the highway being painted.

Carretera Federal 190 is how we get to our home from the city and it’s part of the grand Pan-American Highway which runs from Canada all the way to Panama. Our portion is staunchly unremarkable, an everyday highway lined with used tire shops, small restaurants, and every other type of business you’d associate with the working class stretches of commercial road which appear on the outskirts of towns and cities. The agave planted on the grassy median are at times strewn with shredded plastic bags, there are guys aggressively washing car windows with pieces of newspaper and water bottles filled with soapy water. It’s not awful, but it’s not fancy.

We were surprised, then, when suddenly the highway was spotless. The concrete median was abruptly devoid of graffiti and had been painted white. The businesses lining the highway looked as if many had received fresh coats of paint. And one day the left-most lane of each side of the highway was closed to accommodate hundreds of people carrying buckets of paint, stencils, and cans of spray paint.

It was a tequio.

Tequios are a common feature of life in Mexico, a type of mandatory community service which sees people band together to complete acts which are for the public benefit. In our town tequios most often clear roads and canals of bamboo, underbrush, and dead branches. Those who are too old to participate can donate money, which is put towards buying food and beer for those who are working, but Penny told us you can also just buy cases of beer and give them directly to the workers. As a result tequios, especially towards the end, have something of a party-like atmosphere.

The end result of the tequio work was a bright, colored pattern which now lines a significant portion of our part of the highway. It’s unclear to us whether the road-painting tequio was from a particular neighborhood, given that the length of road being worked on was quite long. But we were struck by the sense of community being displayed, the casual cooperation.

The communal nature of Oaxaca is one of the things we love most about living here, and is also one of the cultural aspects which most differentiates Mexico from the United States. It’s not that Mexico is perfect, or inherently better than the U.S., but the overriding culture in the U.S. is one of individualism and Mexico is far more collectivist. Sure, people skip tequios, and I’m certain there are many who would rather not participate and who resent being told they have to. But Mexico and Oaxaca are a place of communality. It’s one of the reasons I think Mexico, in a lot of ways, is so surprisingly liberal; people do not automatically default to prioritizing themselves over the groups to which they belong.

Oaxaca is generally quite clean, even in small villages. But for the weeks of the Guelaguetza it was shining and reminded us, as it does so often, of why we wanted to move here.

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