Tom Graves / Tetradian

I’m sorry, I just can’t laughing at the absurdity, despite the lack of sleep. It’s full moon in Tepoztlan – a small ‘pueblo magic’ town about 60 miles or so to to the west of Mexico city – and boy, do I know that it’s full-moon here…

Yep, I have to say it – this town is crazy. But the right kind of crazy, perhaps – a happy kind of crazy, for the most part. My work for this trip is all but done here – a great workshop on the Labyrinth model of the skills-learning process yesterday evening, an identity/business-model workshop for an NGO today – but I’ll certainly be sad to leave here tomorrow.

The town square is usually invisible, hidden beneath the stalls of the market, with only the fountain discoverable seemingly by accident in the midst of the maze. For the past few days, though, it’s been cleared – I’ll admit I had no idea it was such a large open space – for a whole bunch of assorted ‘happenings’ vaguely centred around the town’s own centenary of its involvement in the last ‘viva la revolucion!’ a century ago. And that seems to have triggered even more not-so-quietly-joyous craziness than usual.

Sitting in the open square for a late breakfast we were interrupted by a small local equivalent of a mariachi band – one portable drum-kit, one trumpet, one rattle-player. Loud. My colleague’s toddler-age son wanted to join in – he’s all but obsessed by drums, he can hold a one-two-two-one-two-two beat consistently for at least a couple minutes before his attention wanders off to something else, which for a sixteen-month-old is pretty close to amazing – he jigged on the spot, and (this being Latin America) he was promptly invited to play the drums too. Enraptured. Then in the midst of that came a mad procession, looking like something only a bunch of hippies could cook up, with wafting incense-burners, various Inca-type figures, various mythical figures (including Pancho Villa, of course), most of them high up on stilts, some of them doing a synchronised kick-dance across the square to blaring music from the town band. But it wasn’t just a bunch of hippies – it was something that came from the town itself, in response to, well, just something, I guess.

Likewise when I walked back into town later to do some last-minute shopping before the evening’s work, I heard more loud blaring from the town square. Anyone interested in processes of ‘emergence’ should see – and hear – something like this. Without warning, the square was suddenly filled not just with a seemingly random mixture of brass-bands playing at least two different tunes to slightly different rhythms in a raucous yet infectious energy, but also with ‘chinelos’ – a particular tradition of dance and costume parodying the arrogance of the Spanish overlords. Heavy black wrap-round ‘dress’, a high crown-like headpiece with dangling jewelry, a mask with a European-white face, staring eyes and upcurved pointed beard, and tabard with beautiful tapestry/beadwork panels front and back. Dozens of dancers, appearing from either side of the square and from anywhere within the rabbit-warren of the market off to the side, mostly men (though difficult to tell with the masks, of course), some children too in their own costumes, all shuffling to the beat in a strange mincing walk/dance, moving slowly around the square, other ordinary-dressed families joining in, all preceded by a guy wildly waving a local flag. Two or three times round the square, then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the dancers just wandering off into the crowd. Most of the costumes looked newly-made, but apparently some had been handed down through the families for at least a couple of centuries. Bizarre – yet also an interesting form of quiet rebellion, in the times from which the tradition arose – and a proudly held tradition at that.

The one big downside of Tepoztlan’s craziness is its inordinate love of loud noise. Particularly thunderflashes – wheeee-flash-booom! Which is why I didn’t get much sleep last night. Someone perhaps only a house or two away was still letting them off at 1:30am. I woke up again at 3am, to be greeted a few minutes later by another enormous explosion close by. And since the bright moonlight was bathing the town and the hills all round, the cockerels started crowing with the all-night dawn. And some other raucous bird that from the sound I guess was some variant on a peacock. And just after 6am – still before dawn – the whoosh of firework rockets followed by, yes, more enormous bangs. Then the drumming started from up the road… well, you get the idea.

Right now it’s perhaps a few minutes before dawn proper, when the sun comes peeking over the sill of the mountain-ridge directly in front of me in this office where I’ve been staying. The peak of Popocatepetl is just visible over another part of the ridge, the plume of the volcano just visible from this distance as a small white cloud drifting with the wind towards Mexico City.

An amazing place. I’ll be back here if I can.

But right now it’s getting close to the time when I need to pack up and be gone.

Sun up. Time to get to work. Another day in Tepoztlan.

Juxtaposition of two different themes this morning.

One was a Tweet that caught my attention:

RT @oscarberg: RT @hnauheimer: When leadership takes risk and opens space, vision emerges and people come together in dialogue. Then, things take care of themselves.

The other was how well this dovetailed with what happened yesterday in this town where I’m working at the moment, Tepoztlan in central Mexico. (I’ll admit my Spanish is best described as rudimentary, so I’ll have to describe the background as I understand it, which may be some distance from the actual detail.)

In some ways this town is a spiritual heart for Mexico. (If you’re British, think of a combination of King Arthur and Glastonbury; if you’re American, perhaps the Alamo and Sedona combined; for Australians, think of the Eureka Stockade with Nimbin.) It’s a stunning place, ringed all round by vertical cliffs, on one of which stands the Tepozteco pyramid, clear air, birdsong, hummingbirds darting around (I’ve just been watching one as I wrote this). It’s also little more than an hour’s drive or bus-ride from the sprawling smog of Mexico City. So, as can be imagined, it’s a key tourist town: and, in turn, tourism is a key part of its economy, as city-folk swarm up here on the weekends for the market and the ‘traditional’ Mexican atmosphere – especially on this weekend, the key sort-of-religious festival of Dia del Muerte, the Day of the Dead, that actually lasts for several days and is assigned its own long public holiday.

All of which should, I hope, explain why it’s definitely non-trivial that the town was all but blocked off yesterday – by the townsfolk themselves.

Two separate but related concerns seem to have been the trigger. The taxis are a lifeline here, omnipresent, rattling round the cobbled backstreets, ferrying the elderly, the young and just about everyone and everything else – including my colleague’s drum-kit – up and down the steep hills of the town. Yet recently two taxi-drivers have been murdered – I don’t know how or why, though perhaps by small-time narcos. (Not it seems, by the serious big-time narcos, who apparently regard such attacks against ‘civilians’ as anathema.) The other trigger was the abduction of a young girl: just in time, the perpetrator was caught in the act near a cemetery by a funeral party, who dealt out their own rough justice. Yet in each of these cases, I was told, the police had done nothing: not interested.

Policing here is a political hot-potato, to say the least. There’d been a reshuffle a couple of years back – perhaps as part of the government’s ‘war against drugs’? – and a new police-chief imposed from outside. Whatever the cause, the reputation of the police amongst the local populace had been falling steadily ever since – and now it hit rock-bottom, with a bang.

So as in that Tweet above, “When leadership takes risk and opens space, vision emerges and people come together in dialogue. Then, things take care of themselves.” And yes, they certainly did.

Somewhat before midday yesterday, on what would probably have been the busiest tourist weekend of the year, all of the streets into and out of the centre of the town were suddenly blocked by taxis. No-one could get in by car, and no-one could get out – entrapping a few annoyed tourists in the resultant mess (and also a woman in labour, which was not such a good idea…). The usually-thronging main market-space was almost empty; instead, there was a huge crowd outside the town hall, audibly angry. Off to one side, I saw a couple of people in bright yellow uniform, who turned out to be paramedics; also with them was a member of the ‘Policia Preventiva’ with an assault rifle, which was not the worry that it sounds because I’d seen him often around town on other days, including giving first aid to an elderly woman who’d fallen in the market, with the rifle at that time slung awkwardly across his back. Other than that, there were no police to be seen: which was probably wise, as they were the all-too-overt focus of the townsfolks’ anger.

The crowd demanded the immediate resignation of the police-chief: they got it. They presented a list of ten other police officers that they demanded should be fired at once: they got that promise too. They also got the promise that the police would be responsible to the people of the town – not the other way round – and that the people themselves would determine the priorities of the police. But the promise alone was not enough: they didn’t move from in front of the town hall until, some four or five hours later, they not only had the official order in writing from the mayor, but that the mayor had signed it in front of them as well.

As my colleague here put it, “Like most places, most of the time people will keep their heads down and ignore the everyday injustices, out of fear perhaps, ‘nothing to do with me’. But underneath that surface indifference is real strength, real commitment: so when they do reach that point of ‘enough is enough’, this town will move.” A bit like that well-known quote by Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Yet here this wasn’t “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens”: this was almost the entire town. Interesting indeed…

A popular escape from Mexico City, Tepoztlan is a smallish rural town nestled in the top end of a steep valley that slopes downward for a thousand metres or so towards the open plains to the south-east. (The huge cone of Popocatepetl is just about visible down in that direction, amidst many other lesser and less-active volcanoes.)

Described in the tourist literature as one of Mexico’s ‘Magical Towns’, it’s also popular with the magical crowd: signs everywhere for ‘masaje’, ‘fotografia de aura’, ‘luz azul’ and suchlike wonders well-known to the Glastafari (aka the equally mad denizens of Glastonbury, back in England). And in many ways it is magical: it’s very friendly, it’s easy to wander safely amongst the cobbled streets, it has a wonderful open market in the centre of town and an even busier street-market at weekends, for example, and high up on the vertical cliffs that tower above the town stands the Tepozteco pyramid, a survivor from Aztec times. To my great relief, most of the police here do not carry guns – a hugely pleasant change from Guatemala! And whilst the place I’m staying in is quite a long way up a very steep hill, and the colleague I’m working with is based on the far side of town, everything is compact enough that I can walk anywhere I need – or take one of the many taxis that seem to be everywhere, and cheap (even though the fare can often miraculously all-but-double on the first sign of a tourist-like face!)

But there’s one thing that Tepoztlan doesn’t have: silence. There seems to be an almost religious avoidance of it, more like. Right now the bells at each of the churches are clanking out the hour, preceded every quarter-hour by a slightly mangled version of the Westminster-chimes sequence. Dogs bark all day, all night, everywhere. Cocks crow for a couple of hours before dawn, and often an hour or more after dawn too, just in case you hadn’t heard them the first time. Huge B-double gas-tanker trucks blare their exhaust-brakes all the way down the grade of the autopista on the far side of the valley; smaller trucks grind up and down the impossibly steep cobbled streets of the town, announcing their wares loudly through huge built-in megaphones. The church – which has an apparently unquestioned right to do whatever it likes – sets off enormous thunderflashes at any time of day or night, apparently at random, sometimes two or three in a row. And some mad evangelist has taken to gathering the faithful with a mixture of loud pop-music and even louder religious ranting, amplified to fullest distorted volume, frequently up until 1:30am or later, and starting all over again at 6:30am with massed drums and a marching-band. And since this town is in a natural bowl with thousand-foot vertical cliffs all round, every single sound echoes and echoes back and forth; and, of course, also bounces off the almost perfectly sound-reflecting blank walls and polished tiles of every house in the district. The resultant cacophony can be very hard to block out, even with ear-plugs and noise-cancelling headphones combined. The final result: no sleep. And no sleep. And more no-sleep…

After this, even the strain of Guatemala City – where I’m going back to at the weekend – may seem like a rest!

But other than the lack of sleep, Tepoztlan has been a great place, with great people that I’ll miss. Quieter next time, perhaps?