Acatlán de Osorio

The fuel gauge persuaded me to stop in Acatlán de Osorio. That was on a January Thursday, somewhere between Oaxaca City and Puebla, and I had the vague plan to stretch my legs and be back on the road within the hour. I ended up sitting in a weaving workshop for most of the afternoon, watching a woman named Lucía fold and split palm strips with a rhythm so practiced it looked more like breathing than craft. By the time I found a coffee, the light had changed and the forty-minute stop had quietly become an overnight.

The Weavers and Their Palm

Acatlán’s weaving is not performance craft. The workshops are houses with their front doors open: a woman at the threshold, bundles of palm stacked against the wall, a plastic bucket of soaking strips on the floor. The process begins in the fields outside town, where young palm leaves are harvested, stripped of their spines, boiled, spread on concrete to dry in the sun, and then soaked again before anyone touches them with purpose. What comes out the other end is a material simultaneously pliable and strong — capable of becoming a simple market basket in an afternoon or an architectural sculpture of a peacock over three weeks, depending on who is holding it and what they have decided to prove. The Mercado Artesanal on the edge of the main plaza sells finished pieces at prices that will quietly rearrange your ideas about what skilled labor is worth.

The Market and What Comes In from the Mixteca

The central market runs every day but reaches its full density on Sundays, when vendors from the surrounding Mixteca Baja communities bring in dried chiles, piloncillo cones, jamaica by the kilo, and regional cheeses that rarely make it to the tourist stalls in Oaxaca City. I ate at one of the comedor stands near the back — a blue-corn tlayuda loaded with quesillo and tasajo, assembled by a woman who was simultaneously managing a toddler and a queue of four people. The quesillo came from a stall three meters to her left; she had an arrangement. Alongside the produce, weavers sell small animals and flowers they make while they wait for customers — a palm rooster, a palm turtle, a palm bunch of cempasúchil that will outlast the real ones. I bought a rooster for thirty pesos. It is somewhere in my apartment in Puerto Escondido and I remember exactly how it was made.

Showing Up Without an Appointment

The best approach to the workshops is not to have one. Walk the streets north of the zócalo — Calle Independencia and the surrounding blocks — on a weekday morning between eight and noon, and you will find doors open. Most weavers are glad for company if you arrive without expectations and without haste. Bring small bills. Speak slowly. Don’t photograph anything before you’ve spent ten minutes just watching. The larger workshops, identifiable by palm bundles stacked outside like firewood, often have pieces for sale at the source, which is where the prices finally make sense relative to the labor involved. The town has at least one decent posada off the main square if you want to catch the Sunday market from a standing start rather than a two-hour drive.

Getting There

Acatlán de Osorio sits on Federal Highway 190, the main Oaxaca-Puebla road, roughly three and a half hours from Oaxaca City and two from Puebla. ADO buses on the Mexico City-Oaxaca corridor stop here. There is a Pemex on the highway — which is how most people meet the town — and parking near the market if you are driving. From Puerto Escondido via Huajuapan de León, plan around five hours.