Static homepage at root

[yourenew]

I'm trying to host a static homepage, but send all other queries on to the proxy (which leads to django), but I'm having trouble getting it to work.  It seems to ignore the first location directive.  Are these correctly configured?  (I'm running nginx 0.6.35 and Ubuntu 9.04)

listen 80;
  location = / {
    root /var/www/aya/htdocs/html/;
    index index.html;
  }
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://aya;
    include proxy.conf;
  }

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,78633,78633#msg-78633