Yesterday, we took a drive to a number of small pueblos that are well-known for their folk art. One pueblo, Ocumicho, is famous for its devilish whimsy caught in clay with devils flying airplanes, devils driving buses, devils dancing with death, devil doctors treating the sick, devils riding bicycles, etc., as you can somewhat see from the photos that I copied from the internet:
We collected Ocumicho pottery when lived in Mexico. Unfortunately, it doesn’t travel well, and we now have a collection of broken devils. Evidently, it is far easier to break the devil’s hold than religions have led us to believe.
As a result, we were very excited about going to Ocumicho and the other pueblos that the guidebooks had raved about. When we arrived, however, we found a poor village without any stores selling their folk art or any other indication that they made anything at all. 
While Toni was scouting Ocumicho and looking for interesting things to photograph, she did find someone who took her to his workshop, where his wife (an award winning artist) was working on a large piece. It seems that the artists send all there work to stores in larger cities with more tourists, such as Pátzcuaro and Morelia. We drove about six hours only to find that the best pieces were in nearby shops. It is also unfortunate for the artists, as I am sure that they got less money from the store owners than they would have from hapless tourists like us.
Our trip reminded me of a problem with our Garmin GPS. We bought the 2010 map of Mexico to help
us get around, as a similar GPS unit really helped us in Costa Rica, a country without any road signs. Unfortunately, the country map that we bought is a complete piece of junk. Over the last 20 years, Mexico has invested in a series of really excellent toll roads; however, there are very few of these toll roads on the Garmin map. Far too many times we have been driving along, only to look at the Garmin GPS and see that we are driving in the middle of emptiness or crossing lakes on invisible roads. Oh, well.
As it has gotten warmer here, we have also spent more time walking around Pátzcuaro and visiting nearby pueblos, in part because of Toni’s on-going photography project and in part because we like to experience day-to-day life in the area beyond the tourist attractions. The people of Michoacán seem to be much friendlier than those in Tepoztlán, the village where we lived when we first came to Mexico.
The people of Tepoztlán were Nahuas, the same people who gave us the Aztecs, human sacrifice on a mass scale, and the perforation of their own tongues and other sensitive parts as a petition to their various gods. Indeed, anthropologists (such as Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis) studied the people of Tepoztlán as they were considered to typify a Nahua culture in Mexico.
Tepoztlán is another “pueblo mágico,” but when we lived there in the late 1970s, many of the Tepoztecos are very resentful of outsiders (both foreigners and Mexicans from Mexico City) who they saw as invaders of their territory. One Tepozteco told me that it would be better if Tepoztlán didn’t have its beautiful cliffs and was ugly like Cuatla (a non-magical town just down the road), so that they could have their village and their lives back. I can only wonder what they think now, as developers have put in a golf course, high-end hotels, condominiums and high-walled mansions for the rich.
In contrast, the people of Michoacán are friendly and warm. Toni traipses around with thousands of dollars of camera equipment without any worries. Instead of the hostility that often greeted her in Tepoztlán, here people smile at her and ask her to take their picture. Many ordinary people also greet us in English, having gone to the States to work and are proud of their ability to speak English. Even people who don’t want to show off their English are ready to strike up conversations, particularly with Toni and her excellent Spanish.
Ethically, the vast majority of the people in Michoacán are Purépecha, which is also written as Purhépecha to better reflect how it should be pronounced. This Native American people used to be known as the Tarascos, which according to one authority is a Spanish corruption of the native word for goodbye. Other experts say it was derived from the name of one of their gods. Whatever the exact origin, they never referred to themselves as Tarascans in their native language.
It is surprising that so many of the names we have been taught for Native Americans are wrong and in fact are names given to them by their conquerors. In recent years, we have seen Natives beginning to correct these old names. For example, the people who were once known as the Navajo are officially the Diné, which simply means “the people.” Some authorities suggest that the name Navajo derived from the description given them by early Spanish chroniclers as “Apaches de los Navajos,” or the Apaches who farmed. Navajo (or in modern Spanish Navazo) refers to a small garden or a small plot of land. Other authorities say that Navajo refers to a knife or knife handle. Who knows what the real story is, but I figure that every kid should be free to choose what other people call him.
Last week, we also spent the couple of days looking at houses for sale, not that we have made a decision as to whether we are moving to Mexico, but we wanted to get an idea of the costs, the various residential areas, and the quality of the homes. Generally, we were very pleased with the houses we saw, as there were very nice colonial style houses ranging in price from $150,000 to $295,000, with a median price of about $240,000. There was one place we would have bought at the drop of a hat, but since there aren’t mortgages here, you have to have the entire amount in cash. We will have to sell our home first before buying anything, which is a built-in cooling off period.
Housing prices here are depressed, as many of these houses have been on the market for well over a year. One old Mexican saying is that when the U.S. has a recession, Mexico has a depression. This recession/depression has had a marked impact on 
the types of houses that we were looking at, those houses which are normally marketed to retirees and snowbirds (Canadians and Americans who flee the winter snows). Many retirees saw their savings and therefore income decimated, and either had to go back to work, postpone their planned retirement or learned to exist very cheaply. I believe that any recovery in the Mexican housing market will lag substantially behind that of 
the U.S., which should work in our favor if we decide to move here.
Tomorrow we are off to a fiesta on one of the smaller islands in Lake Pátzcuaro. I don’t know if the lake was blue at one time, but today it is muddy and contaminated. Further, it is much lower than it once was. Some of the small pueblos that surround the lake were once islands and are now firmly part of the mainland. There is another lake nearby, Zirahuen, which is blue, clean and edged by a thick pine forest. It reminded both Toni and I of lakes in Austria. There is a new road around Lake Zirahuen and a number of houses and lots for sale, but it would be far too isolated for us to live. It is a perfect escape for people working hard in the city, but then we aren’t working hard, much less at all.
