The largest market in Mexico said to be the Abastos in Oaxaca. There you can buy almost anything that you might need for living in this country, and buy it cheaper than anyplace else. Thousands of people visit hundreds of stalls every day. It's a must see for tourists visiting the city.

We didn't go there.

Instead we visited three or four mercados in nearby towns; places where mostly indigenous people were buyers and sellers. Here mother and daughter check out some apples. You can bet they have sharp eyes for quality and value.

Women in particular wear traditional dress. Our local friend Eric says he can tell which village they come from by their costumes.

Of course, not all women dress in the old style. The older woman on the left makes a nod to tradition with her head band, but her apron is exactly like those worn by anyone doing housework anywhere in Mexico.

The woman in the flowered dress clearly dresses in modern style, while to her right, another woman creates a scandal by wearing pants. Young people. What can you do?

Many rural Oaxaqueños wear braids interwoven with ribbons.

Ends of her braids tied together, this woman reminds me of the girls in Diego Rivera's painting, Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita. The look hasn't changed in 70 years, and probably many more.

These vendors from a remote village, don't like to have their pictures taken. Had I realized this before I shot, I would have respected their wishes. As it turned out, I got a photo of women holding cloths over their faces.

Disabilities abound in the mercados. The crawling woman is paraplegic. She is a vendor, selling items woven from palm fronds.

Her life must be incredibly hard. But I later saw her sitting up with a group of women, gossiping and smiling. Her debilities haven't broken her spirit.

Men tend to look like cowboys. Most work in fields or the jungle.

You rarely see people with prominent birthmarks in the States; they're removed, usually at an early age. This man almost certainly had no choice in the matter. Cosmetic surgery isn't available for people like him. I would have liked to ask him if his markings bothered him, but how could I have done such a thing?

This young cholo looks much like one of his peers in East L. A., except he doesn't quite manage to carry it off. The ragged pants and the Goodwill golf shirt spoil the effect. Still, he's doing what he can with what he has.

Staffing a stall can be stultifying, especially when you're merchandising a low volume commodity like lime, used for boiling dried corn to remove the kernel coverings.

That's the wooden handle of a hammer sticking up in front of her. She uses it to break the lime into consumer-sized pieces. Notice the white dust on her hands.

Some vendors just can't stay awake.

It's not all old women in the stalls. Here. a young mother sells cantaloupes.

Another young woman sells garlic. She and several other ajo sellers have no stalls; they just wander around and push bunches of bulbs in shoppers' faces.

If you want to meet real Mexicans, the place to do it is in the mercados. Here, Clint is engaged in conversation with a woman preparing tostadas.

Toward the end of our trip, Clint came down with a case of food poisoning. He thinks he got it from a mercado restaurant selling grilled chicken, and I have to defer to him, on account of it's his system that took the hit. But I can't get rid of the feeling that it might have been food from an operation like this one.

This is not to say that Clint or I avoid this kind of food stall, as all the wussy tourist guides advise. Every day millions of Mexicans eat food prepared this way, and so can we. Being overly cautious, we'd be cutting ourselves out of one of the great pleasures of visiting or living in Mexico—sampling the incredible variety of street food.

We didn't visit the greatest of markets, Abastos. But we didn't miss anything. The places we visited offered more than we could absorb. Nor did we miss the tourists who troop along in docile groups through Abastos. Nor the pickpockets who prey on them..