I hadn’t been to San José Mogote since 1998. I came back in 2025, and it was hotter this time. I climbed the mound and found shade under a tree — a few cacti, some dry dog poop, and a wide-open view of the Etla Valley: San Agustín, the city of Oaxaca, and, on clear days, even Monte Albán. A thin grey haze (humidity or smog, it’s hard to say) sits over the Valley. I imagined the spot cleaned up, with a small table and simple chairs. This tree would be the perfect refuge for a coffee or a hot chocolate.
The proximity of the graffitied pyramid to the houses catches you off guard. The clotheslines with freshly washed laundry, kids playing, the highway, the gravel extraction — all of it in a town that is organised and proud of what it carries. The tree became a regular, almost mandatory, stop on every visit after that. It gives shade, holds our hats, and is my namesake Adriana Giraldo’s favourite spot to read the Valley and tell the story of San José Mogote.
I went to San José Mogote three times before I ever saw the museum; it was always closed. “Come on a Thursday after 7 in the evening,” they told me at Don Agustín’s father’s small shop, “that’s when the municipal agent is in.” I showed up the following Thursday and introduced myself, and that’s when I met him. Don Agustín is a police officer in downtown Oaxaca, but that’s not all he has been. He spent ten years working with Enrique Fernández Dávila, the archaeologist who knows this area better than anyone, and he holds stories of every kind: the ghosts that still visit the old hacienda; the community’s fight to keep its most prized archaeological pieces; the kids who played here in the 1980s, when the pyramid was basically their backyard. And now, whenever I visit the community, we meet at his father’s shop, just across from the municipal agency. From there, we walk. The other day, we made it all the way to the ruins of the old train station. Don Agustín talks about his childhood and what the town used to look like, and points out his family’s houses along the way. “Most of us here are related,” he says.
Under that tree at the top of the mound, Don Agustín showed me how vast the archaeological zone really is. Most of it is unexcavated, uncleared, and likely to stay that way for a while. You can’t take it in without paying close attention, without someone who has known this place since childhood walking you through it. The low hills covered in huizache that we’re standing on are actually pre-Hispanic structures.
The Community Museum in San José Mogote is exceptional — it surprises you at every display case (don’t tell the British Museum). It holds the diablo enchilado, a jade-carved figure; Monument 3 — the oldest known glyph with Zapotec writing; and funerary urns. “A few years ago, someone offered the community millions of pesos to take some of the archaeological pieces away. We all said no,” Don Agustín tells me. Stone carved for eternity. Lipovetsky wrote that luxury is “a mediator between man and immortality.” Standing here, that lands.
Athens, Sparta, and Corinth were entering their classical period. Rome was being founded. The Phoenicians ruled the seas. And here, around the same time, the water from the basin made it all possible: crops, a growing community, the first structures of power and the origin of what we now call Mesoamerica. Two thousand seven hundred years later, Don Agustín carries the story.
* This post was sponsored by TOE Travel Studio *
Gracias por las descripciones del lugar y de las piezas, lo hacen a uno viajar en el tiempo y soñar con conocer ese lugar.
Vale la pena tomar un tiempo para conocer San José Mogote por su importancia arqueológica y por su museo comunitario que alberga magníficas piezas. Les invito a disfrutar este paseo.