Read part 1 of this story here.
An 1858 map of Oaxaca, from Antonio García Cubas’s Atlas mexicano. Lachatao is not marked on the map, but it is three miles southeast of “Chicumezuchil,” or San Juan Chicomezúchil; roughly halfway between “Oajaca” (Oaxaca City) and Villa Alta. Courtesy David Rumsey Map Collection, Cartography Associates (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
III.
Around 250 people live in Santa Catarina Lachatao, an old mining hacienda in the Sierra Juarez mountain range. It is one of eight villages called the Pueblos Mancomunados, each connected to the next by a winding trail, a two-hour drive northeast from Oaxaca City and the historic Monte Albán. More than 2000 meters above sea level, the “cloud forest” climate is home to a wide diversity of plant species, including the hallucinogenic hongos magicos. The Pueblos Mancomunados are prized as a place where traditional indigenous life persists; the mountain range itself was named after Benito Juárez, Mexico’s only indigenous president, born in 1806 in one of the villages.
Oscar’s travels occasionally took him to these Sierra Juarez villages, where he’d hike the trails, examine the flora and fauna, and savor the relative quiet compared to his life in the city. “Their rivers are so clean. They farm, they plant organically,” Oscar told me over Skype, through a translator. “It’s such a contrast with the outside world.” Over time, he learned the town’s history and the significance in its name. Lach means four; tao means sacred.
“In the sacred calendar of the Zapotecs, on the fourth day,” Oscar explains, “there is a mountain with stairs.”
This mountain with stairs, Oscar believes, is the famed and undiscovered Hill of the Jaguar, Cerro del Jaguar — the site Eduard Seler was searching for, the image depicted in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. Moreover, Oscar believes this site exists in a specific part of the range near Lachatao.
You can see it if you know where to look. Protruding from one part of the range are three flat forest-covered terraces that really do — whether carved out by nature or by human hands — look like stairs, albeit ones built for a giant and only if you squint at them in just the right way. (Honestly, when I visited years ago, I didn’t quite see it.) This landscape is what flashed through Oscar’s mind while he was in that Mitla library examining the Nuttall codex. In that moment, this location became the only possible place where the Hill of the Jaguar temple could be located. That flash of insight has informed the rest of Oscar’s life.
He became obsessed with it. He observed satellite maps of the location and enlisted the aid of drone pilots to snap videos of the landscape. He revisited the mountain during various positions of the sun, due to the importance that equinoxes had in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architecture — on the equinox, an enormous “feathered serpent” god slithers down the side of El Castillo at Chichen Itza; at Dzibilchaltun in the Yucatan, the rising sun lines up perfectly through the portal of the Temple of the Seven Dolls. Oscar wanted to see what this Sierra Juarez mountain looked like on that particular day of the year, so he made a pilgrimage.
And: “When the sun shines over the mountain on the equinox,” he says, “it shows the jaguar.”
After a decade of sporadic trips, Oscar decided to move to Lachatao for good in 2008. Around this time, Oscar’s wife divorced him.
“She was a doctor,” he says, and the two of them had three daughters. He was 56 years old when I interviewed him, and by then his children had moved away from home, gotten places of their own in various North American cities. “I see them when they’re on vacation,” he tells me. “When they have time to visit me, because I don’t get out of Lachatao too often.” When I press him about his relationship with them all — his ex-wife and his daughters — he shies away from the topic with a shake of his head. Or maybe it was just a buffering glitch in the Skype feed; anyway, I leave it alone.
As you might expect whenever a strange single man from the city moves into a tight-knit mountain village, the residents of Lachatao were initially skeptical of Oscar and his intentions. “They didn’t want me there,” he says. “They didn’t want me to change them.” The region has had a strong history of fighting outside interests — in 2007, a Vancouver-based mining operation was kicked out after it was discovered they were contaminating the nearby river with arsenic and lead; the Pueblos Mancomunados took that a step further in 2012, instituting a 100-year ban on all mining. But Oscar stuck it out.
Time passed, trust was earned. Over the next few years, his enthusiasm for the town became evident, as was his respect for its role as keeper of the old culture. He began to assist with the region’s growing ecotourism industry, helped design a new museum, developed lessons for teaching traditional Zapotec painting, and started a program to re-introduce the Zapotec language. “We’re trying to teach the kids native dialects,” he says. “We don’t want them to forget.” It all won them over.
Meanwhile, Cerro del Jaguar never left Oscar’s mind.
He led expeditions on the winding trails that connect the old villages, a way to educate visitors while also continuing his own investigation. “I do hikes, take photographs, and that is the way I’ve found clues,” he says. Back at his home, he’d examine these photos, looking for patterns and shapes; but without funds or connections, Oscar couldn’t excavate further. One person can only do so much without the equipment and the paperwork. More years went by, and he continued to find ways to shoehorn surveys into his life.
One year, Oscar decided to lead a “ritual hike” to the hill during the next spring equinox. He was hoping it would be an opportunity for cross-pollination, with the community teaching him traditional Zapotec rituals — known as usos y costumbres — while he’d share with them what he had learned took place on that hilltop centuries ago. They didn’t entirely trust his historical account, but it didn’t matter. It was a good excuse to practice the old traditions, and the hill sure had a hell of a view.
The event went well: Oscar and the elders and the other visitors danced, swayed, communed with the spirits, watched the sunrise. It was successful enough that Oscar decided to do it again the following year. This time he and a few workers visited the spot ahead of the equinox, so they could prepare the hilltop for the dance and celebration. But when they did, they discovered something extraordinary.
“We were in one of the yards making a figure of colored soil, and I needed help to fill in the drawing,” Oscar tells me. During an attempt to gather more dirt for the image, one of the workers pried a rock from the dirt with a crowbar. Underneath, he found a hole in the ground. The group all peered inside and found that, hidden in the mountain, there was an ancient wall. It was three meters wide, one meter high, and designed with the same decorative patterns that had been discovered in the ruins over in Mitla. “Well,” one of Oscar’s helpers told him, “you’re not so crazy after all.”
Oscar had finally found proof that his Hill of the Jaguar was, indeed, where he had long thought.
Maybe.
Concluded here.
