For more than a century, the people of Oaxaca, Mexico, have gathered every December to celebrate something that can spoil quickly: the radish.

by Andrea Grimes | July 05, 2011 | (0)

“OH MY GOSH, THIS PLACE IS SWARMING ON FOURSQUARE!”

The exclamation is music to an event planner’s ears and second only, perhaps, to the dulcet tones of Twitter stardom: “Our hashtag is trending!” Still, there’s little in this world more ephemeral than a tweet, and tonight’s swarming hotel bar may be nothing but a fuzzy memory by next weekend. Fleeting 21st-century social media successes don’t necessarily lend themselves to building great, time-honored traditions. 

But for more than a century, the people of Oaxaca, Mexico, have gathered every December to celebrate something that can spoil just as quickly as a trendy hashtag: the radish. December 23 is the Noche de Rábanos, a night that brings out thousands of Mexicans and foreign tourists alike to the capital city of Oaxaca de Juarez to view intricate carvings, both secular and religious, made from the root vegetable. In the Mexican state best known for its handicrafts, radish night is an especially celebratory time—a public party, verbena popular.

“Oaxaca is the cultural heart and essence of the whole of Mexico,” said local hotelier Sergio A. Bello Guerra, and the Noche de Rábanos brings together all of the things that are important to Oaxacans: family, music, food and religion.

The night began in the late 19th century when families would make pilgrimages to attend Oaxaca City’s misa de gallo, or midnight mass, on Christmas Eve. Demand for fresh food to feed the many gathered families was high, and vendors began setting up stalls in the city’s zocalo. Competing for business in the teeming square, the farmers carved figures out of their produce and adorned the sculpted scenes with flowers. 

To outsiders, the radish may seem to hold a strange place of honor in comparison to the historical importance and geographic beauty of the mountainous state. After all, Oaxaca’s capital city itself and the nearby pre-Columbian archaeological site Monte Alban, which was the capital of the ancient Zapotec empire, are designated UNESCO World Heritage sites. Bello Guerra says it’s common for his intensely proud people to remind outsiders that their state was the birthplace of the progressive statesman Benito Juarez, and Bello Guerra himself calls Oaxaca City “one of the most magical cities in the world.” With so much to brag about, why celebrate a humble radish?

Bello Guerra, who is also the vice president of education for the MPI Mexico Chapter, says traditions like radish night are “totally authentic … passed from fathers to sons and [remain] exactly as they were originally.” Radish carvings were how things were done a century ago, so that’s the way they’re done today. 

In 1897, the Oaxacan mayor made the celebration at the Christmas market official, and over the past 100 years the event has become the combined effort of city officials, folklorists and farmer-artists who specially grow radishes of up to 6.6 pounds. Sculptors must carve their vegetables in less than 24 hours, lest they rot before an effigy of Jesus, Mary or Frida Kahlo has a chance to woo radish night partiers.

Beginning in the early afternoon, artists pack into more than 100 booths in the zocalo. Bello Guerra, whose Hotel CasAntica is just a block from the main square, has watched for decades as hopeful viewers queue, two and three blocks thick around the square, waiting for the event to officially open. To keep their work fresh, artists spend the evening spraying their perishable statues with water, hoping to make them last through the late evening, when city officials and local celebrities tour the booths to judge the best work—“a really hard thing to do,” says Bello Guerra, because each statue is so intricately carved.

“It is a time for celebration and happiness,” Bello Guerra said. 

Throughout the day and night, restaurants are filled to the brim with partiers listening to three-piece bands tour the streets playing traditional music. For outsiders, Noche de Rábanos is a chance to see, taste, smell and hear what it means to be an indigenous Mexican. For native Oaxacans, it is a time to remember their roots.

Emigration to other parts of Mexico, and immigration north to the U.S., has made December one of the only times of the year many Oaxacan families are able to gather and visit with each other. That’s what’s happened to Guillermo Antonio Cardenas, the strategy director at meeting planning firm Grupo Destinos in Mexico City. Originally from Oaxaca, Cardenas says the time surrounding Noche de Rábanos is one of the most “special dates” for his family to gather and celebrate their cultural heritage—lucky for him, he describes it as a “super street party” where he can eat some of his favorite traditional Oaxacan dishes. There’s amarillito, a spicy orange broth served with poultry, and fried pastry buñuelos, served with brown sugar and cinnamon.

Cardenas says he particularly remembers a radish night when he was 15 years old. Served buñuelos on a clay plate, Cardenas finished his snack and then, to his surprise, was told to throw the plate down, breaking it on the ground. “I didn’t want to do it,” he remembers, but after the satisfying smash found that it was “super fun.” Cardenas says it is old traditions like these that, for him, preserve Oaxaca’s small-town feel. In fact, it’s that precise small-town friendliness that attracts visitors from the world over.

Tourism is Oaxaca’s main industry, and its beaches—made famous in the film Y Tu Mama Tambien—frequently attract meeting groups, especially the tourist-friendly Huatulco development, though there are several large hotels in Oaxaca City that can accommodate anywhere from 10 to 1,000 people. Guillermo Cardenas recommends the five-star Camino Real Oaxaca, a restored Spanish colonial property from the 16th century. But while Oaxaca was, like the rest of Mexico, colonized by Western Europeans for several hundred years, the state has maintained its indigenous pride and is notable for its 16 different ethnic groups and five native languages.

The thousands of visitors who come to Oaxaca for radish night can fly from Mexico City into the state’s domestic airport, just south of the capital city’s center. Access to sites such as Monte Alban, the ancient Zapotec capital, and Mitla, another historic archaeological site, is available by bus. Of course, Cardenas says, many visitors to Oaxaca may prefer just to stay in the city and salsa dance at any number of packed nightclubs, such as La Candela, where talented locals show off their folklorico skills. No matter where tourists go in Oaxaca, say Bello Guerra and Cardenas, they’ll never mistake it for anywhere else. Oaxacans are simply that proud of their state—the state’s wide variety of local festivals is a proud testament to that.

Whether it’s radish night, the internationally known Day of the Dead or the Guelaguetza, an Oaxacan celebration of indigenous dance in costumes that melds Catholic and native traditions, Bello Guerra says “[Oaxacans] open their hearts to all people,” and are happy to help “without any hesitation” to make outsiders feel at home, just as they do.

Because Oaxacans celebrate traditions over trends—even if those traditions involve rough root vegetables—the Noche de Rábanos reminds Oaxacans to celebrate the little things in life, Bello Guerra says. Yes, he says, “there is poverty in this state, [but] we understand life as something that is worth living and enjoying when you can.” One+

Oaxaca Travel Safety
Increasing violence along the U.S. border and Mexico has, very understandably, made many Americans leery of traveling to their southern neighbor. However, Americans traveling to areas other than the border—to Oaxaca, or to other predominantly tourist-oriented locations—are advised by the U.S. Department of State to simply take the same common-sense precautions they might while traveling to any other popular tourist destination: leave valuables at home, avoid traveling at night and to use well-traveled routes and roads whenever possible.

To be sure, border violence continues to escalate due to the spread of what the U.S. Department of State ominously calls “transnational criminal organizations,” or TCOs, that traffic both drugs and people between Mexico and the U.S. However, the majority of the threat remains to be directed at Mexican nationals and individuals directly involved in the drug trade, and the U.S. Department of State itself says in its most recent travel advisory, issued in April 2011, that there is “no evidence that U.S. tourists have been targeted by criminal elements due to their citizenship.”

In the latter half of 2006, Oaxaca did see a series of sometimes violent conflicts between disenfranchised Oaxacans and the state police, instigated by an incident in which the police fired upon a non-violent protest by a teachers’ union. At that time, the U.S. Department of State did caution Americans to stay away from Oaxaca; however, the political dissonance has largely calmed in the five years since the uprisings. Today, Americans will find Oaxaca perhaps quieter than it was in the years before the protests, but as safe as ever.

TAGS: events , festivals , One+ July 2011 , Oaxaca