Day of the Dead and Festival Arts of Oaxaca . . .
October 25 - November 3, 2008
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Visit potters, weavers, graveyards, house altars and more all under the ambiance of Oaxaca's most colorful festival time. . .

lorious!! The most beautiful and wildest festival of the year! One of the most wonderful places in Mexico and the most beautiful season. Fall in Oaxaca means clear, vibrant air, green hillsides and field after field full of wild flowers.  And Day of the Dead means the markets, house altars and graveyards will also be filled with flowers. This is a journey to celebrate the best of places during the best of times.

Our travels will take us into rural Mexico and into the homes and workshops of craftspeople, cooks and artisans who create the items that are necessary to make a festival happen, ever surrounded by the celebration of Todos Santos or Day of the Dead. We’ll visit the potter who makes the stew pots, the cook who makes the stew, the baker who makes the sweet breads, the candle maker who makes the ceremonial candles- (but we’ll skip the butcher who gets the turkeys ready for stew).  We’ll visit with mescal brewers and chocolate millers, we’ll look for the nervous men who make the fireworks, and visit the pinyata maker.

We travel into the hills of Oaxaca during the most beautiful time of year.

And of course, this being Day of the Dead, the annual celebration of the return of the souls of the deceased, we’ll visit the bright graveyards to see each and every tomb adorned with flowers, candles, sugar cane, oranges…In every household we visit there will be an altar piled high with food, scented by copal incense and the memories of the dead.

And since everyone is coming for the party, living and dead, this is the biggest feast you can imagine. Please come prepared to eat. There will be tamales, stews, corn beverages, hot chocolate with almond and cinnamon, mescal, sweet breads, fruits and the ever present and unsurpassable fresh made tortilla (we’ll even give tortilla making a try).

Our travels will take us first into the Mixteca highlands where we will immerse ourselves in a the large Saturday market in Tlaxiaco. Our plaza-front hotel offers us ringside seats. We will visit remote and crumbling convents, hearing exploding rockets in the distance as the dead are called home. We will enjoy a rural feast of simple food on a swept earth patio under the shade of a fruit tree with a country family where the mother is a weaver, the grandfather a potter and the father a farmer, leather smith, carpenter and mason.

Fine potters, like Angelica Vazquez.

Then we travel to the town of Mitla, the center of which is marked by the famous Zapotec palaces of the same name, with some of the most ornate rockwork in Mesoamerica. Mitla means “place of the dead” and so is a fitting place to spend the most important days of this festival. We will visit the cemetery, partake in a local feast and the sharing of food. We’ll meet town craftspeople who make such things as paper ornaments and pinyatas. If the baker and cheese maker are home we’ll visit them as well, trying their wares and learning how they go about their crafts. We’ll also visit the neighboring village of Teotitlan to visit a ceremonial candle maker and see how fine wool rugs are woven. We will travel across the valley to San Marcos to visit potters who make the best cookware in the area. And we’ll head up the hill to the mineral springs of Hierve el Agua to take in the spectacular views, share a meal with a family of basket makers and stop by a mescal still to learn how cactus is turned into firewater (and try a bit as well).

Altars are filled with the foods that the dead loved.