The Life of Oaxaca

What is Oaxaca? Answers crowd into my mind, but I have trouble keeping to straight and narrow factual descriptions. Though there is much to say about history, geography, and folkways, my memory always strays back to particular scenes ...

I am wandering about an enormous, flat grassy plaza, just below the summit of a great hill set in a vista of majestic mountains and spacious valleys under a boundless, shining sky. How the huge rectangular surface was squared and leveled boggles the imagination. It is about a thousand feet long—nearly a fifth of a mile—and all around its sides are weathered gray stone buildings of a scale to put any merely human visitor in awe.