Literary Oaxaca: Vasconcelos, Henestrosa, Rulfo, Calvino, Lawrence, and Lowry

Most people come to Oaxaca for the food, the mezcal, and the light. I came for the work and stayed for all of it. But Oaxaca also has a literary side, the same as Paris does for me, and it’s easy to walk right past it.

Here are the writers who came from here, the ones who passed through, and where you can still find them.

José Vasconcelos

Vasconcelos was born in Oaxaca City in 1882. He became Mexico’s first Secretary of Public Education, and he’s the one who handed the walls of public buildings to muralists like Diego Rivera. He wrote La raza cósmica, and a long memoir that begins with Ulises criollo.

Andrés Henestrosa

Henestrosa was a Zapotec writer from the Isthmus who went to Mexico City as a teenager, barely speaking Spanish, and became one of the country’s best-known writers. His first book, Los hombres que dispersó la danza, retells the Zapotec legends he grew up with. His own books are now the Biblioteca Andrés Henestrosa, a public library in the Casa de la Ciudad, near my office. I’ve shown my own photographs there.

Macedonio Alcalá

Not a writer, but you’ll walk his street. Alcalá, the pedestrian street that runs up to Santo Domingo, is named for the composer of Dios nunca muere, the waltz that is Oaxaca’s unofficial anthem.

Juan Rulfo

Rulfo wrote Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas, two of the most important books in Mexican literature. He was also a serious photographer, and in the 1950s he photographed in Oaxaca. His pictures are quiet and full of stone and light, and they look a lot like his writing.

Italo Calvino

Calvino’s short story Under the Jaguar Sun follows an Italian couple traveling in Mexico. In Oaxaca they stay in a hotel that used to be a convent, and spend the story eating. That’s the old convent of Santa Catalina, now the Quinta Real, a couple of blocks from Santo Domingo. I’ve photographed weddings there.

D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence arrived in Oaxaca in November 1924 and stayed into early 1925, in a house on Avenida Pino Suárez, near El Llano park. He finished The Plumed Serpent here and wrote much of Mornings in Mexico, including essays on the Saturday market and a walk out to the village of Huayapam. He also got very sick here, and never fully recovered.

Malcolm Lowry

Lowry came to Oaxaca in the late 1930s, drank a great deal, and spent part of his stay in jail. The friend he made here, a Zapotec man named Juan Fernando Márquez, found his way into Under the Volcano. Lowry wrote about Oaxaca again, years later, in Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid.

Aldous Huxley

Huxley passed through in the early 1930s and wrote about Oaxaca, Monte Albán, and Mitla in Beyond the Mexique Bay. Stand in the Great Plaza at Monte Albán and it’s easy to see why he stopped.

Sergei Eisenstein

In 1931 the Soviet director was in Mexico shooting ¡Que viva México!. Part of it was filmed on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the south of the state, and after the earthquake that January he filmed the damage in Oaxaca City itself.

Oliver Sacks

In 2000 Sacks came with a group from the American Fern Society, and wrote about it in Oaxaca Journal. It’s a short, happy book about ferns, chocolate, mezcal, and the pleasure of being curious somewhere new. It’s a good one to read on the plane.

Francisco Toledo

Toledo was a painter, not a writer, but he did more for books and images in Oaxaca than anyone. He founded the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) on Alcalá, across from Santo Domingo, with its library. He founded the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a few blocks away. If you visit only one of these places, make it IAGO.

His daughter, Natalia Toledo, is a poet who writes in Zapotec and Spanish. Her work has been translated into English, too, and it’s a good way into the Isthmus her father and Henestrosa came from.

The photographers

Toledo named the photography center for Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Mexico’s great photographer, who worked in Oaxaca and the Isthmus. Edward Weston and Tina Modotti photographed here in the 1920s, and Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed in Juchitán in 1934. For a photographer, this is good company.

Walk it with me

Most of this fits into a couple of hours on foot in the Centro. It’s the route of my Walking Photo Course: Literary Oaxaca, if you’d like to see it with a camera in hand. And if Paris is more your city, here’s the Paris I love to photograph.