Over the centuries, the sea had claimed many a Mixtec “snailer” who didn’t know enough about currents or weather, wasn’t sure-footed enough, or was simply unlucky. There was only a three-hour “window” each day, when the tide was low, but even then, the work was dangerous.
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Barefoot, carrying thread skeins and a wooden prying stick (less invasive than metal), young Habacuc learned how to balance himself against crashing waves and the occasional swooping heron. Murex purpura snails live in secluded coves in intertidal zones along the Pacific shoreline, wedged between large, craggy boulders. “When the food ran out, we hired ourselves out as local day laborers, bought more supplies with the money we saved, then returned to our own work.” Habacuc, his uncle and several other locals carried as many tortillas, and as much beans and coffee, as they could manage, along with large skeins of native cotton thread hand-spun on drop spindles by their wives, daughters and neighbors. The harvesting trips, which always took place during the dry season to allow for camping out, lasted two to three months. In 1956, getting from Pinotepa de Don Luis to the small fishing village of Puerto Angel, on Oaxaca’s southernmost coast, required an eight-day walk, crossing the occasional river by canoe, and stepping over miles of remote, rocky coastline. It was the start of his apprenticeship as a tintorero. Seated in the dirt courtyard that separates his two-story cinderblock home from the outdoor, wood-burning kitchen, he recalls the first time his uncle introduced him to caracol purpura. Today is Habacuc Avedano’s 78th birthday. Alexandra Szerlip, will examine some of the under-the-radar stories, personalities and techniques that inform our 21st century lives.
Without an awareness of the past, “the sense of time falls in upon itself,” writes Lewis Lapham, “collapsing like an accordion into the evangelical present.” It’s sometimes easy to forget that our technologically complex world wasn’t created out of whole cloth.
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