American tourists flock to the town to buy the uniquely Mexican art right off the artisans' front porches. Boys are dispatched by their mothers to run alongside tourists' cars as they wheel slowly down the tidy, paved roads. We have big ones. Arrazola is a peaceful town built in the shadow of Oaxaca's mighty pyramids, where a holy city called Monte Alban was inhabited by Zapotec Indians about 2,600 years ago. Men with straw hats pushed down on their foreheads sit outside their front doors shaping wood into chunky figures of eye-catching beauty.
Roosters strut in purple.
Monkeys with beady black eyes come in yellow. And rabbits baring long, fanglike teeth are a brilliant shade of blue. He remembers how poor, how abandoned, how isolated his town was before the animalitos, or little animals, made the community famous. People lived in cardboard houses along dirt streets. There was no electricity, water or telephones.