There's no spring in Oaxaca. The bougainvillea and trumpet flowers bloom twelve months, wet season and dry. It's raining now, a daily event at five o'clock when the wind picks up and the water pours down. Thunder and lightening today. The air is fresh and cool, there's that smell of dampened dust I have always loved.

      My student Claudia came for her English lesson; she trotted into the patio late at four-fifteen, wearing her blue nylon athletic jacket and pants. I am getting ready to leave Oaxaca and must have looked a bit preoccupied. Claudia asked me if George, who's staying another two months, could manage without me, and of course he can. Not so her husband, who is old-style macho Mexican. Claudia says these men have heavy balls: they can't get up off the chair to serve themselves. If she leaves for even a day she has to arrange for a replacement to cook and wash up after him.

      The women of Tehuantepec on the Isthmus of Oaxaca are different, though. They rule. Claudia leans her elbow on the patio table; she makes a fist and flexes her biceps. The women rule. They are the vendors in the markets and streets; all the family income arrives through their efforts and into their hands. Claudia says they drop toloache into their husbands' tea, day by day, poisoning the men slowly, so the men are idiots.

      Claudia was born in Tehuantepec and it's clear to see she wishes she were there now. Her husband is more than twenty years her senior; she married a middle-aged divorced doctor when she was a nineteen year-old nurse. It was a good deal, then. The doctor was respected, and although doctors make no more than middle-class money in Mexico, still he was respected. And she was elevated over a life of vending tamales and fish. But he naps every afternoon; he doesn't want to travel or dance or go to clubs and movies, and he won't let her go. She lies. And the sex is disappearing. Her gynecologist told her the reason she has inflamed ovaries is because of a shortage of sex. I think he was thinking of a curative proposal.

      I've told her George can cook and do laundry and clean and he does. She told me her son can, too. He's eighteen. The doctor father says young Fernando is intelligent, but although Claudia thinks he actually is brilliant, she knows it's more to do with modern culture than intelligence. The culture on the Isthmus has always been different.

      I admire Claudia's biceps; she plays tennis and thinks nothing of swimming 70 laps. She's very athletic, although God knows that's no substitute for sex. She has thought about toloache. She says she'd rather have a husband with heavy balls than an idiot. Her husband the doctor speaks a kind of English. He tells me he's very interested in homeopathy, so maybe he's an idiot after all. But a kind one, who does free clinic hours for poor people, although he's officially retired. He looked at my skin for me, and recommended a specialist. The specialist told me I need a stronger sun block, but still I thought Rómulo was very kind. He's a non-stop talker. If I were Claudia I might try toloache to shut him up. Fernando is learning English too; he's planning to go to law school because there aren't too many professions in Mexico where people are actually employed - not much going on for architects, engineers or chemists. Claudia herself wanted to be a doctor, but for a poor woman that wasn't possible. She did well to become a nurse. Claudia's not thrilled by a law career for her brilliant son, but it's his choice. Rómulo studied medicine in the USA. The former president of Mexico, Lopez Portillo, is on his way to Houston for a heart by-pass.

      Lopez Portillo's wife appeared breathless with anxiety, on television. She's an aged beauty, with something on her skin that appears very strange on the screen, some sort of plastic mask or maybe it was surgery, done in Houston. She has good bones, though; thank god bones hold up when all else is gone.

      Claudia's skin is sun-weathered from her athletic life, but she's only forty-five, with this garrulous old retired doctor husband who's become interested in homeopathy. He takes afternoon naps and he won't stand up to put his cold coffee into the microwave. He won't clear off the table either after he eats. But he drives his car, and Claudia has a car too. They both drive to the "country club" to play tennis. Claudia plays in an annual tournament, and this year she's going to win because she never gets laid and she never gets to go away on vacation.

      Everyone seems to know the Isthmus is ruled by a matriarchy. The women count the money as it comes in the door in the hands of their children. The women are tall and handsome, often bigger than the men, but in fact I never see Istmenian men in the city of Oaxaca. Not that they don't come, but they don't come in costume. They look just like everyone else in their poor gabardine pants or jeans, demanding the government remedy this or that.

      The women, however, are quite haughty. They use their income, Claudia says, to put on gold: gold necklaces, gold bracelets, gold earrings, gold teeth. They wear waist-length embroidered blouses and ankle-length full skirts over petticoats. They march on little black shoes in parades with great frequency, the ones who live here in the city and those up visiting from the coast; in the parades they carry organization standards like sororities, they carry flowers on their shoulders. Each has her black hair braided with ribbons and wound in a wreath, or maybe she's wearing a white lace starched headdress. Claudia says she owns her costume, too. Although I've never seen her in it, I see she wears gold hoops in her ears when she comes from tennis.

      Claudia's first language is Zapotec. She had a French grandfather who married a woman of Tehuantepec. Claudia learned Spanish when she started to school, and I guess her mother did too. The population of the state of Oaxaca is supposedly 60% indigenous, but it puzzles me as to who's who. And who wins in the indigenous game. Claudia's not indigenous. Arturo and Oskar, whose families are pure Zapoteco, are not indigenous. Manuel is not indigenous, although his family is Zapoteco also. Venancio who speaks Mixe is not indigenous, he's a cop. They're all Mexican, and Oaxaqueño, except for Claudia who identifies herself as from Tehuantepec. She's an Istmeñia.

When we talk about the Zapatistas Claudia is enormously sympathetic. Because they're so poor. Her own mother was poor, because her father died when she was young and there were five children or maybe six, I forget. The women are vendors, not producers. Now Claudia is the only one of her siblings who has sufficient means to provide her mother food and clothing. The mother lives in Tehuantepec but comes to visit, not too often since naturally there is some antipathy between her and a man her own age with heavy testicles. But Rómulo the doctor gets even, by being a doctor. He can tell Claudia's mother that the mother has a bad heart, or skin cancer. There's an advantage there, an equilibrium. No toloache for the doctor. Claudia loves her mother more than she loves Rómulo, I think, but it's Rómulo's money that keeps her mother fed. Nothing is simple.

      Claudia tells me the Tehuantepec women learn to sell tamales or whatever produce their mothers hand them, from a very young age. They go door to door with tamales, like they do here in the city of Oaxaca. We buy ours from a hot bucket, outside our gate on Sunday mornings at 8:00 o'clock. Three kinds: sweet, chicken with mole, chicken with rojas. But the girl who sells them is probably already twelve or thirteen. The street kids (and are they indigenous?) here, as in Chiapas, start at age five or six selling chiclets, polishing shoes and begging.

      On Friday, April 27, 2001 the Mexican congress passed into law an amended and false version of the so-called Law of COCOPA, the San Andrés Accords. It gives the indigenous towns the right to autonomy, the right to associate themselves into municipalities, the right to operate their own means of communication, the right to bilingual education, and it prohibits slavery. It says that discrimination is forbidden.

It says the individual states will see to all that.

It says that translation will be offered where needed, so there will be no denial of health and education services. It defines the obligations of the nation in matters of economic and social development. It guarantees collective use and enjoyment of lands and resources. The use and disposition of the natural resources by indigenous people are called "preferential". The supreme law of the land is Mexico's.

      "The Mexican nation is multicultural, founded originally in
      its indigenous peoples, who are those descended from
      populations who inhabited the present-day territory at
      the time of [Spanish] colonization and who have kept
      their own social, economic, cultural and political
      institutions, or portions of them."

      "The Mexican Nation is one and indivisible."

      Claudia tells me what I already know, about parents in autonomous indigenous communities selling their daughters in marriage regardless of the girls' wishes. We also know that the Zapatista army is more than half women; fighting was one of the better choices. And a woman, Esther, gave the first speech in front of Congress when the Zapatistas went to plead for the Accords. In the newly passed Constitutional law, women are guaranteed equal rights with men.

And here comes the response to the law: the EZLN is pissed. Pablo Salazar, governor of Chiapas, doesn't care for it. Luis Alvarez, the COCOPA liaison, pleads for acceptance and more negotiation later on. The current bishop of Chiapas, Arizmendi, asks for acceptance, like it's God's will.

      Women will have equal rights.

      As Pablo Salazar points out in response to the Zapatistas' rejection of the new law: The country has changed. The conditions for the peace process have also changed. What hasn't changed is a mentality that remains clad in prejudices and unfounded fears...it keeps the people as objects of public interest and doesn't recognize them as they demand to be: actors in the public realm [sujetos de derecho]...If the [indigenous] peoples are objects of interest, they are limited to being recipients of public policy; if they achieve the status of subjects by right, the towns and communities will be participants in the organization of the State. The absence of the right to participation and to become protagonists in the construction of their present and of their future is what causes them to reject the approved law of rights and indigenous culture.

      Like thanks, but no thanks. I know why Claudia tells me about toloache. I know why nobody around here is indigenous. The sticking point on the new law is not men with heavy balls sitting on their latifundias while others pick their coffee. No; the issues are ownership, control, participation and paternalism. No matter how kind or generous old Rómulo may be, Claudia is thinking about what to put in his tea.