Tales of a Female Nomad Read Online Free PDF

can’t wait to find out what’s ahead. Then I hear my name, as Miguel dedicates a song to
“Señora Rita, la escritora de los estados unidos.”
    After four days with my new friends, I decide to act on the resolution I made in the anthropology museum. I am going to leave the group and try to find a Zapotec village where I can settle in long enough to connect with the people and get a feel of their way of life.
    I know nothing about the communities in this area. I haven’t read a single book about Zapotec culture; nor have I studied any Zapotec language. If I were a scholar, I’d have spent a year learning all I could about the people I am about to visit. Instead, I know only that Oaxaca is surrounded by Zapotec villages, and that I have spent the last four years studying anthropology and yearning to live in other cultures. I’m really not interested in “studying” anybody. I just want to slip into another way of life, not as a tourist, not as an academic, but, as much as possible, as a part of the community.
    I look at a map and blindly choose a village about forty miles north of Oaxaca. There is a road that goes to the village, but no one can tell me when or where to get a bus, so I start out walking. If a bus comes along, I’ll stop it. If there isn’t one, I’ll hitch. I have never hitchhiked before, but this seems like a good time to start.
    The sun is blistering hot; the road is hilly; and the fields on both sides, as far as I can see, are brown and withered. I’m wearing sneakers, a baseball cap, and jeans; and I’m carrying a small backpack and a bottle of water.
    After only fifteen minutes, I’m dripping in sweat. Not a single car has passed. Finally, after about forty-five minutes, a car approaches. Relief, I think. I stick out my arm with my thumb up, a move I’ve seen millions of times from the inside of my car. It’s not an easy gesture. Feels a lot like begging. The car whizzes by me. Then two more pass. Then two trucks.
    Now I feel even more self-conscious. Who would’ve thought five drivers could ignore a forty-seven-year-old woman trudging along in the hot sun? I wonder what they’re thinking as they speed by. Aren’t they even a little bit curious?
    A part of me wants to go back to Oaxaca and join my friends; it’s so much easier being part of a group. But I have dreamed for years of living in another culture where I am the only outsider. I want to know what I will do and how I will go about connecting with the people. I have read dozens of ethnographies over the last four years, vicariously living in the shoes of the anthropologists, sharing their experiences. Now I want to do it on my own.
    So I keep sticking out my arm, thumb up. Two more cars go by. After a while, I’m not embarrassed any more; I’m just hot and desperate.
    I’ve been walking for more than an hour when a white rusted pickup stops. I tell the driver the name of the village where I’m going, and he motions for me to get in the back with three turkeys in a cage and about ten cases of beer and Coca-Cola. I toss my backpack in, but I can’t get my body in; the truck is too high. I can’t even get my foot into a position where I can swing the other foot over the back. The driver waits. Finally he motions me into the front seat.
    We talk in Spanish amid rumbles and rattles and a muffler with a hole in it. Where am I from, where am I going, and why?
    “I’m writing a book about life in Mexico for American children,” I lie. “I’d like to include a chapter about a Zapotec village. I’m hoping that I can stay in the village for a month.”
    The driver is intrigued when he hears that I want to live in this village. He tells me that I have to talk to the
alcalde,
the mayor. After about an hour, we rattle into a village, the center of which has two stores in what used to be living rooms. The driver stops the truck in front of a group of men and talks to them. It is twelve noon. Five men, beer bottles in hand, greet