Of Salamanders and Spirits

I probably could’ve chosen a better day to visit the CIIDIR-IPN for the first time. It was the last week of September and the city had come to a full stop. Citizens barricaded the streets with tarps and plastic chairs, and protest banners covered the walls of the Edificio de Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, all demanding fair wages for the state’s educators. It was my first (but certainly not my last) encounter with the fierce political activism that Oaxaca is known for.  

It took me several hours to weave my way out of Oaxaca City and toward Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán. When I finally arrived, my research advisor, Edna González Bernal, greeted me with a smile and immediately invited me on a field expedition later that week. I hadn’t even learned all of my peers’ names, but I heard my voice say “yes” before I could second-guess myself. 

Just two days later, I found myself bouncing along a mountain road toward La Esperanza, a Chinantec community in the municipality of Santiago Comaltepec. The community safeguards a precious fragment of Oaxaca’s montane cloud forest, one of Mexico’s most biodiverse and fragile ecosystems and home to several microendemic species. Among them is Pseudoeurycea saltator, a critically endangered salamander found nowhere else on Earth. 

I joined my labmate Tereso López, who has devoted the last couple of years of his PhD to understanding everything about this species, on his “salamander-ing” trips. We spent our nights scanning ferns and bromeliads for the faint glimmer of salamander skin, hiking through fog so thick it swallowed our flashlights whole. We exchanged urban legends to keep each other awake. I learned about the spirit of an elderly man said to wander the cloud forests of the Sierra Norte. Armed with a woven satchel and a wooden cane, el señor del monte is believed to tend to the forest and ward off anyone who enters it with ill intent. Before leaving the forest, Tereso reminded us to thank the spirit for allowing us to work there, as failing to do so could invite insomnia or unsettling dreams.  

On our second morning in the field, curiosity led us down the opposite side of the mountain. The descent was nearly vertical. My hands clawed at the dirt for grip, and I felt thorns dig their way into my palms. At the bottom, a waterfall trickled through the mist. The water was so cold that it numbed our fingers as we cupped it in our hands to drink. The climb back up was slow and quiet. Halfway through, we heard an animal’s agonizing cries below us, followed by the unmistakable roar of a large feline. We froze, wide-eyed, and hiked faster. 

A lightning storm swept across the mountaintop on our final night there. Inside our tent, my labmates joked that I would finally understand why that site was known as El Relámpago. I watched the sky flare through the tent fabric as the ground rattled beneath us. 

After our time at El Relámpago, we shifted our search efforts to the rivers at the base of the mountain. There, we reunited with the rest of our team, who had been recording frog vocalizations in a nearby community, and loaded our gear into the truck. Our colleague Carlos Flores had just parked when the truck began to rock from side to side. I stared at my friend Yedani Ruiz in panic. She laughed, grabbed my hand, and congratulated me on experiencing my first earthquake.  

On our last night in La Esperanza, as Yedani and I rushed to finish photographing some tadpoles, Tereso wandered off to check the roadside for any late-night surprises. He returned cradling a pregnant Charadrahyla esperancensis. 

The species was discovered by our lab in 2017 and has since become a symbol of pride for the community, inspiring a frog festival and a mural painted with her image. To find her there, heavy with new life and in the same mountains where she was first named, felt like a quiet affirmation of why this work matters. 

I returned to the city just in time for the Día de Muertos festivities. For weeks, calendas – parades filled with music and dancing – took over the streets of Oaxaca. One afternoon, I tried to return home from the CIIDIR only to find my street blocked by a calenda infantil. A brass band played kid-friendly versions of popular songs while children with painted faces and handmade costumes danced their little hearts out. Fireworks cracked from every corner. 

Although I’m from Guanajuato and grew up with our own Día de Muertos traditions, I’d never experienced anything quite like Oaxaca’s celebrations. For the entire month of October, the air in the markets is thick with the smell of copal and cémpasuchil, and you can find ladies selling handmade candles and all sorts of sweet bread on every street corner. I remember standing in the middle of a calenda one night amid cheers and laughter and feeling very confused when tears began stinging my eyes. The feeling returned when I visited the dozens of altars arranged throughout the historic center of the city. Each one glowed with candles, marigolds, pounds of food, and the faces of those being welcomed home. There was something profoundly moving about celebrating the return of one’s loved ones with such force, such joy. 

My friends Yedani and Miguel Chan later invited me to the city of Etla for las Muerteadas, where el Día de Muertos becomes a nearly two-week-long marathon of twelve-hour-long street parties. We arrived to find the entire city in costume – lloronas on stilts, catrinas in flowing black veils, and even bloodied doctors and demonic bunnies. Satirical costumes of political figures carrying machine guns reminded me that in Oaxaca, art and political protest are often inseparable. 

We danced for hours, following brass bands from neighborhood to neighborhood. Eventually, we reached an intersection where the Encuentro de Bandas began. I can only describe this event as a chaotic band-off where three bands compete to see which crowd can dance and shout the loudest. Fireworks erupted, sparks (and even flames) shot out from tubas, and clarinetists climbed onto the shoulders of drummers. Children and elders alike threw themselves into the chaos.

By the time we stopped for tacos at dawn, our feet had entirely given up on us. We had danced ourselves into absolute exhaustion. It was at that moment that I came to terms with the simple fact that no human physiology can outlast an Oaxacan brass band.