Music of a Cherished Land

I have always loved the fact that music is a live medium here. Strolling troubadours cruise our beach-front restaurants ready to provide romance and nostalgia for a few dollars. Every community has its brass band to provide the appropriate importance to its celebrations and observances and to its joy and its grief. And at any gathering of friends and family, someone is likely to produce a guitar to sing and play into the wee hours.

It's remarkable how many classics of this great body of traditional popular Mexican music have their origins in this small corner of the country. La Llorona, a timeless lament on the legend of the Weeping Women, which literally everybody knows, is credited to the state of Oaxaca.

Canción Mixteca, the Mixteca Song, was written in the 19th Century by José López Alavés. It talks of nostalgia for a faraway homeland and is as poignant today, in Indigenous communities decimated by the emigrants in search of the American Dream, as the day it was written. There have been countless renditions of this song recorded over the years. (Check out the version by Ry Cooder and Harry Dean Stanton from the soundtrack of "Paris, Texas".)

An anthem of love and admiration for the women of Tehuantepec on the Oaxacan Isthmus, Sandunga was written more than 150 years ago. This lovely song still accompanies the activities of the Tehuanos from the cradle to the grave.

When its composer, Máximo Ramón Ortiz, died (serving as the town's military governor, he was shot by firing squad in 1856), the flowers disappeared from the fields and everybody for the most humble peasant to the most exalted aristocrat wept, so profoundly did this song captured the collective emotion of this Zapotec people.