Oh yes, it sounds exactly like Oaxaca. I’ve seen that walking clockwise/counter-clockwise too, maybe there. It is also represented in some of the typical dances. We took a tour bus/ small, south of there to an Indian market. Our son was about 10, blonde. The Indian ladies there followed him - reminded me of Cortes’s stories - and they came up to about his upper arm. VERY short Indians there.
We passed a guy plowing his fields with an oxen and one of those very basic plows - wood + a point/ hand-held. As we drove south towards Chiapas (but not INTO Chiapas), there was a road block - tires burning on the hiway and guys with guns. Our bus driver stopped and talked to the guys, and we took off into the field to make a detour. It was unsettling and seemed, at that moment, very far from DC.
The big shopping area was one long tunnel of tents and tin shacks, connected together, within walking distance of our hotel. A straw hat salesman was convinced he could find a hat for my size 8 and a half head but no luck. I did find some sandals that fit and bought those with American money.
The people at the hotel were different than the local natives and spoke rapid Spanish. Locals spoke in “chants” that to my ears seemed to rhyme.
Curiously, there are Oaxaca locals, short, brown Indians, working in a local Mexican cafe and at a local nursery here in mid-Missouri. When I mention the radish festival, they seem to make a connection.
There was some kind of sewer gas coming up in the shower of our hotel room and my wife got a little woozy. The hotel called a local doctor and he showed up, carrying his medical kit in a nice Plano tackle box. He listened to her lungs and throat and concluded it was “all in her head.”
He wrote a prescription but we never filled it and checked out the next day...