Those of us in Oaxaca more than three years recall the vibrancy of the pre-renovation zocalo, from the little naked kids bathed in buckets of cold water and screeching while their Loxicha mothers maintained their encampment, to the daily strolling of vendors with all manner of pesky offerings for innocent tourists, the zocalo stood as the center of a spinning hub. It was indeed spinning, and as the marches, banners screaming assassins!, and the encampments increased, the  governmening rulers, first Murat and then Ruiz (and we don’t even mention the municipal mayor Jesús Angel because he’s merely a pudgy puppet whose surname is so rarely heard in Oaxaca that at the moment I can’t remember what it is) – the two governors in succession devised a plan to cleanse the place. With support from the restaurant and tourist owners, the Loxicha women were seduced into taking their laundry off the bushes and moving to a building equipped with beds for their children, several blocks away; the “renovation” closed the zocalo down; the vendors were sent off to the government-donated indigenous vendor’s zoo on another side-street; and to cap it off, the state government palace was emptied and turned into a museum.  
    Thus we saw the cleansing of the zocalo, a place one now might not desire to visit more than, let’s say, downtown Cincinnati.
     And so, you ask, what am I cheering for? Aaah. The teachers’ strike. Somehow, in the mass of tents and bodies, a certain order has appeared, spaces have opened, and in that small orderly space the vendors have returned. You can buy plastic bags of watermelon, grapefruit or mango. You can buy drinks concocted from almonds, rice or fruit and ladled from buckets into plastic cups. The cotton skirts and embroidered  blouses, the rebozos, the jewelry, the stenciled T-shirts are all available once again, and among this bounty they’re selling balloons and plastic toys for the kids.
    So, what I want to know, Governor Ruiz, is how has this come about? The shops are all empty. The restaurants are filled with vacant tables. The nice new flowers you planted at public expense are wilting, and scarcely a tourist is in sight. But the encampments, banners, signs screaming assassins! and yes, the banished vendors have all returned, while on the northwest corner of the zocalo three young fellows are playing their drums.

    I know it won’t last. The banners will come down, and the garbage trucks will sanitize the area once again. But jeez it’s nice. The people united will never be defeated, and sitting among the sprawled and dozing teachers I could only smile and smile and smile.