Oaxaca Journal Read Free

land, wanting to show it, explain it, to a stranger.
    It is an incredible view of Popocatépetl, its caldera nakedly visible and next to it a range of high peaks covered with snow. I am puzzled that these should be snow-covered, while the higher, volcanic cone is not—perhaps there is sufficient volcanic heat, even when it is not erupting, to melt the snow. With these amazing, magical peaks all around, one sees why the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was established here, at 7,500 feet.
    My companion (now on his second rum and coke, in which I join him) inquires why I have come to Mexico. Business? Tourism? “Neither, exactly,” I say. “Botany. A fern tour.” He is intrigued, speaks of his own fondness for ferns. “They say,” I add, “that Oaxaca has the richest fern population in Mexico.”
    My companion is impressed. “But you will not confine yourself to ferns?” He speaks then, with eloquence and passion, of pre-Columbian times: the astonishing sophistication of the Maya in mathematics, astronomy, architecture; how they discovered zero long before the Arabs; the richness of their art and symbolism; and how the city of Tenochtitlán had more than 200,000 people. “More than London, Paris, more than any other city on Earth at the time, except the capital of the Chinese empire.” He speaks of the health and strength of the natives, how athletes would run in relays four hundred kilometers without stopping, from Tenochtitlán to the sea, so that the royal family could have fresh fish every day. About the Aztec’s amazing communication network, surpassed only by that of the Inca in Peru. Some of their knowledge, some of their achievements, he concluded, seem superhuman, as if they were indeed Children of the Sun, or visitors from another planet.
    And then—does every Mexican know, dwell in, his own history like this, this aching consciousness of the past?—and then came Cortés and the conquistadors, bringing not only new weapons but new sicknesses to a people who had never known them: smallpox, tuberculosis, venereal diseases, even flu. There were fifteen million Aztec in Mexico before the Conquest, but within fifty years only three million—poor, degraded, enslaved—were left. Many had been killed outright, but evenmore had succumbed, defenseless, to the diseases imported by the Europeans. The native religion and culture were diluted and impoverished too, replaced by the foreign traditions and churches of the conquistadors. But along with this came a rich and fertile mixing, a miscegenation which was cultural as well as physical. My neighbor goes on to speak of the “double nature, the double culture,” of Mexico, the Mexicans, the complexities, positive and negative, of such a “double history.” And then, as we are landing, he speaks of Mexico’s political structures and institutions, their corruptness and inefficiency, and the extreme inequity of income, how Mexico has more billionaires than any other country save the U.S., but also more people living in desperate poverty.

    As we descend from the plane in Oaxaca city I can see John and Carol Mickel—my friends from the New York Botanical Garden—waiting in the airport. John is an expert on the ferns of the New World, of Mexico in particular. He has discovered more than sixty new species of fern in the province of Oaxaca alone and (with his younger colleague Joseph Beitel) described its seven hundred-odd species of fern in their book
Pteridophyte Flora of Oaxaca, Mexico
. He knows where each of these ferns is to be found—their sometimes secret, or shifting, locations—better than anyone. John has been to Oaxaca many times since his first trip in 1960, and it is he who has arranged this expedition for us.
    While his special expertise lies in systematics, the business of identifying and classifying ferns, tracing their evolutionaryrelationships and affinities, he is, like all pteridologists, an all-round botanist and ecologist too, for one