Oaxaca: Trimmed in Tradition.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Mexican Christmas festival threatened by tourism - Brief Article

The word is out. Christmas celebrations in the city of Oaxaca are among the most wonderful in all of Mexico. International tourism during Christmas week has flourished, and last year hotel occupancy rates were 100 percent. But with the tourist boom also comes threats to the authenticity of the festivities, which are celebrated in the least commercial and self-conscious manner imaginable in this age of "consumer holidays."

Armando Sosa Garcia, chief planner in the state of Oaxaca's tourist office, is fully aware of the threat to local tradition and frowns at the occasional Santa Claus or Christmas tree put in shop windows by local merchants. But he is also confident that Oaxaca can maintain the purity of its observations even as more and more outsiders come to town to participate in them.

One government strategy has been to "decentralize" Christmas by promoting the twelve village guesthouses owned and operated by indigenous communities in Oaxaca's central valley. This allows small numbers of visitors to witness grass-roots Zapotec and Mixtec celebrations without crushing them with cameras.

The Christmas season starts in the city of Oaxaca on December 18, with the feast of its black and diamond-robed patron saint, Our Lady of Soledad, from whose seventeenth-century church, five blocks off the zocalo, a candlelight procession begins. Heartfelt religious ritual is still the touchstone of a Oaxacan Christmas, and almost everything during the week is tied to the front door of a church.

The university glee club, Tuna de Antequera (the city's original name), performs all week long in the sixteenth-century San Agustin Church, singing the same Navarran and Andalusian carols that would have been sung by Hernan Cortes. And on any day of the week, one might come upon a posada, that uniquely Mexican reenactment of Mary and Joseph seeking lodging door to door in Bethlehem, with a veiled young girl on donkey-back and a young boy with a stick-on beard walking alongside. Posadas are intimate observances of families and friends who make no attempt to turn...