One day recently we escaped the city of Oaxaca for the mountains that tower over it to the north. An hour’s ride on twisty roads in a shared taxi (collectivo)—three people jammed in the front seats and three in the back—brought us to the mountain town of Ixtlan de Juarez.
“Ixtlan” is thought to be an Aztec word meaning “place of the agaves,” those spiky plants whose leaf fibers are used to make rope and cloth and whose insides are used to make tequila, mezcal, and other potent liquors. Juarez refers to Mexico’s beloved 19th-century president Benito Juarez, who was born in these mountains.
Deposited by our taxi near the main square on a quiet Sunday afternoon, we made for the chief landmark in Ixtlan de Juarez, the church of St. Thomas the Apostle, built between 1640 and 1734. I wasn’t expecting much in a sleepy town of 7,000 people in what felt like the middle of nowhere. And indeed, the church looks plain on the outside, with only a few simple carvings above the doors.
But the interior is a different story: a testament to the riches of the Spanish Empire and the zeal of the Dominican friars who came from Spain to convert the local people to Catholicism. The church’s walls are adorned with ceiling-high altars covered in gold leaf, paintings, and carved wooden statues of saints, Jesus, and the Madonna. It’s hard to imagine how little Ixtlan must have bustled when Spanish and Mexican builders, carvers, painters, and gilders labored for almost a hundred years to create a place of such soaring beauty.
After marveling at the church, we wandered around town, popped into a plain little Franciscan chapel that looked very old, and helped a fledgling organic farmer’s market in the town square by buying quesadillas and homemade blackberry jam.
For a town that has existed since the 1400s, Ixtlan looks like an up-and-coming place. There’s a big covered basketball court with bleachers next to the square, a library, a hospital, a soccer stadium, a new market building with permanent stalls bearing neatly painted signs, and not one but three ATMs! Most important of all, perhaps, is a new university just outside Ixtlan serving all of the hamlets of the Sierra Norte mountains.
Having seen the sights, we headed for the highest point in town, a lookout called El Mirador. The motorcycle taxi that took us up there reminded us of the tuk-tuks we rode in so often in Southeast Asia. This one held a surprise, though. As the driver picked his way up the rutted road, the jostling woke a baby sleeping in the back seat—his daughter Gabriella, maybe six months old. Experienced godmothers that we are now, Melissa and I took turns holding and comforting the baby during the ride.
At the top, while Gabriella sat on a blanket with her dad, we looked down on Ixtlan and picked out all the places we’d been. The air smelled of pine, the trees were draped in Spanish moss and long pink epiphytes, and the mountains stretching in all directions seemed to go on forever.
