A few days after arriving in this colonial town in a high valley, justly celebrated for its beauty and its traditions, I was reminded again of how “the past of a place survives in its poor”—how the poor tend to keep their cultural identity intact. They depend on its compass and continuity and its pleasures for their self-esteem, while the rising classes and the rich tend to rid themselves of their old traditions, except in a showy or ritualized way, because they became wealthy by resisting them and breaking rules. Oaxaca, with its powerful and visible identity and its living culture, was
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