Pigs' Heads, Medicinal Plants and More
Sketches from our Mexican ramblings
Cuernevaca/Tepoztlan/Ocotitlan, Morelos, Mexico

When I first arrive in a new city (at least on in a predominantly Catholic country), I am first drawn to the church in the center. When I traveled around Italy, I ended up in some 40 churches, with my sketchbook. It was always the easiest way to meet people, and go from there. This is the cathedral in downtown Cuernevaca on the right.

After a week or so of getting to know Cuernevaca, Joshua and I took the bus to Tepoztlan. Tepoztlan is a small, touristic village in a valley surrounded by moutains. At nightfall, we wandered up the path to stake out a flat patch of forest on the moutainside to sleep. An hour or so before sunrise, we began to climb higher. From our vantage, we could see the lights of the town, and hear the barking of a hundred dogs, the crowing of a hundred roosters, and the braying of perhaps a dozen mules. We lounged about waiting for the stars to fade so we had better light to keep climbing.



After a bit of exploring, we wandered back down to the town, and perused the markets for avocados (5 for 10 pesos!) and freshly baked pecan cakes. The above drawing of the butcher shop (La Carniceria) was drawn from our table at the bakery. The Pigs'´head (La Cabeza del Cerdo) was hanging over the cash register a few shops down the line.

Later that afternoon, our ramblings and a 5 peso (fifty cent) bus ride took us to San Domingo de Ocotitlan, a neighboring pueblo. There we met and stayed with our new campesino friend, Beto. When we arrived, he was working on a drum made from a hollowed out avocado tree log with cowhide stretched over the top. When asked what he called the drum, he responded simply ¨instrumentos prehispanicos." The man in the drawing was a neighbor who came over to help with the drum. According to he, beto and the other man in his company, he had just celebrated his hundredth birthday the previous weekend.

The next morning, we woke up early, and spent the day wandering around the mountains and valleys with our campesino guide. He stopped every few feet to cut wildflowers, and ask me to carry them. He would also stop and gather up pinecones and fallen leaves and admire them before handing them over to me. I recognized some of the plants to the family or genus level because of my experience with botany classes at the University of Michigan. When I offered him the latin genus names of some plants, he would smile and nod in what I could only presume was recognition.

He picked a small white flower and said "Este es gordolobo. Se usa para la tos." (This is used to treat the cough). The flower had a striking resemblance to one that grows on the shores of the Great Lakes, Anaphalis margaritacea, or ´Pearly Everlasting`. The Odawa use it as a smudge, and as a component of Kinnikinnick, a ceremonial smoking mixture. I later showed my drawing to a Mexican ethnobotanist, and he said it was Gnaphalium.
When we returned to Beto´s house in the pueblo, he gave us a delicious fleshy fruit he called chirimoya (guanabana) and made teas from several of the plants we´d collected. He has invited us back for a temezcàl, or sweatlodge this weekend.