WORK: Music: > Interwoven

Banda Jimenez and Teotitlan del Valle

featured in FADER 60

story by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

In the southern plains of central Mexico, just southeast of Oaxaca City, sits the small, storied village of Teotitlan del Valle. One of the oldest settlements in the region populated by the indigenous Zapotec, its local economy is based on farming and, more prominently, the tradition of dyeing and weaving textiles for rugs. Equally important are the bandas, a musical legacy of large-scale bands that predates the conquistadors who supplanted many indigenous customs with their own as they began settling in Mexico in the sixteenth century. The tradition continues with Banda Jimenez, the seventeen-piece marching band that recently collaborated with Beirut’s Zach Condon for the March of the Zapotec EP.

“Before, we had flutes and other kinds of instruments, but when the Spaniards came they brought [brass] instruments,” says Tomàs Mendoza, a guide from Teotitlan who helped Condon coordinate the collaboration. According to Mendoza, currently “ninety-nine percent” of Teotitlan’s population earn their living as weavers, and among them there are “ten or eleven,” generally unpaid music ensembles, that are present and jamming for every fiesta, baptism, wedding, birthday and funeral.