"The past casts a sharp shadow here, wherever you look. You see it on mountaintop plateaus, where the ruins of ancient pyramidal staircases and capital-I-shaped ball fields hint at mysterious rituals that disappeared over a millennium ago.

You see it during market days in nearby towns, whose traditions may be even older than those Zapotec ruins. Stalls with cheap contemporary kitsch — SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirts and bootleg Snow White baskets — are juxtaposed with culinary offerings from other centuries: crunchy grasshoppers laced with chili peppers, and mounds of black mole paste used for making spiced sauces.

You see it too in this town’s astonishing botanical garden of native plants, whose exotic cactuses and succulents are bounded by the walls of a 1500s Dominican monastery, the Spanish colonial structure shaping plangent counterpoint with indigenous flora.

For a visitor from the United States used to different kinds of exhibitions, it is startling how different the effect of the displays is here, how crisp certain contrasts seem and how brightly illuminated some familiar controversies become. It has something to do with the indigenous past, which has a different weight here, a different character. "

Get the Story:
Critic's Notebook: The Past Has a Presence Here (The New York Times 6/16)

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