Oaxaca

When I think of the great Juárez Market of Oaxaca, I think of the delicious taste of crisp-fried chapulines, the red grasshoppers that are synonymous with high summer in that part of the world. I’ve been hooked since my first taste of them on a summer day about six years ago, which was also my first glimpse of the market.

It is July 16, the feast day of the Virgen del Carmen (Our Lady of Mount Carmel), just before the citywide festival called the Guelaguetza. I am staying with a friend at the Hotel Presidente, a great landmark that began as a sixteenth-century convent. In the nineteenth century it served as headquarters of Benito Juárez, a Zapotee Indian from Oaxaca who became Mexico’s first Indian president. Later the place became a jail before being turned into an exquisite hotel. From the Presidente to the Juárez Market is a walk of five or six blocks through very clean cobbled streets filled with vendors—everywhere you look is another tray of wares. The streets are a shopper’s paradise, but also a window on the fierce traditionalism of the Indians who live in and around this old southern city. Many tribes come to sell their goods, each clinging to its own language and tribal costumes. They also continue to cook their own foods. But Oaxaca is also home to a more assimilated population of mestizos, those of mixed Spanish and Indian blood.