Intersections

A taco's taco in Polanco

Let's say it's half till 5 -- in the morning -- and you're wandering the streets of swanky Polanco with four friends, because you'd rather walk where you're going than pay an outrageously expensive Polanco cab rate. You're desperately hungry. And not rich.

Ultimate nightmare scenario?

On a corner of Presidente Masaryk, considered the wealthiest commercial real estate strip in Latin America, the gods provide. It is a taco stand operating from the back of a parked van, complete with a gas-powered grill -- as paisa as you can get. The sidewalk is packed with Polanco people rummaging for food after a night in any old antro charging thousand-peso bottle service.

What's going on here? "Mari, Mari," the regulars call to the woman taking orders and collecting coins.

You wander close, inspecting with your nose. Mari and her grill workers are offering not only a good mix of meats -- bistek, suadero -- but a full selection of D.F.-style taco fixings. Beans, cactus, potatoes, radishes, several kinds of salsas. You're rubbing your eyes, unable to believe it. They even have Lulu soda pop.

Saved by the taco, and the lesson bears repeating: Never judge a neighborhood by its cover.

Future home for the Jumex Collection

This is a rendering of the new Jumex Collection museum planned for the Polanco-Irrigacion area, as designed by David Chipperfield Architects. Chipperfield was himself in Mexico City a few weeks ago to present the plans to the press (the red dot near the bottom of the photo is the architect's moving laser pointer).

That huge vase-like structure behind Chipperfield's limestone design is Carlos Slim's planned Soumaya. The challenges facing Eugenio Lopez in this setting may sound almost insurmountable. His new museum will be set in a small wedge-shaped parcel, on a hectic boulevard, and buffeted by commercial high-rises and a guaranteed dazzler in the Slim project.

This will force the collection to exert its pulling power -- great contemporary art, and lots of it -- almost as strenuously as it did when it competed for attention an hour north in Ecatepec. We'll see how it all turns out in the coming months and years.

* Previous posts covering exhibits at the Jumex plant are found here, here, here, and here.

Pyramids behind fences

Two new friends, visitors to Mexico City from New Orleans, are seen above observing the remains of ancient structures belonging to the Cuicuilco ruins, behind fencing and barbwire, on the campus of the Villa Olímpica.

We wandered through the old 1968 Olympic village in the south of Mexico City with a feeling of ... flatness. Cuicuilco is the earliest known human settlement in the Valley of Mexico. The main site, with the rounded, circular pyramid, is across busy Insurgentes Sur, a relatively new boundary, as Cuicuilco was constructed about 2,000 years ago.

These fenced-off pre-Hispanic pyramids that now lie within Villa Olímpica look pretty sad -- unreachable, covered in weeds, and sitting inside a site that is itself sadly retro. 1968, the glossed-over glory days, is a long time ago now.

Cheech Marin on 'Born in East L.A.'

Last Tuesday I moderated the Q&A with Cheech Marin at the Guadalajara screening of his greatest hit, "Born in East L.A." A lot of pochos living south showed up. They asked Marin how he view Tijuana, and asked about the future of Mexican American film, why there's so little still. Cheech's response was, given the demographic shifts happening in the U.S., "It's gonna change no matter what."

"Born in East L.A.," which Marin wrote and directed, remains the model, I think -- along with Luis Valdez's "La Bamba" and "Zoot Suit." I remember going to see the film at the drive-in theater in Imperial Beach with the whole family, and experiencing such a thrill even at six years old to see people like us, and places we knew, on the big screen.

At the Q&A, Marin told us that the inspiration for the film was a small news story he had read about an L.A. boy who had been wrongly deported to Tijuana. I mentioned to him afterward that incidents like that still happen. Off this case, I wrote a long feature for LA Weekly about Pedro Guzman, the Lancaster man wrongly deported from the L.A. County jail system in summer 2007. Guzman was eventually reunited with his family.

Above, the 'Waas Sappening' scene from "Born in East L.A."

Remembering the Guadalajara gas leak disaster

On April 22, 1992, in an event that would be permanently eclipsed by the concurrent outbreak of civil unrest in Los Angeles, a gas leak explosion destroyed a neighborhood in Guadalajara, claiming more than 200 lives.

The disaster was blamed on poor infrastructural management by state oil company Pemex. But since it occurred at the height of the PRI's authoritarian decadence, deaths and consequences were quickly swept under the rug and all but forgotten.

On the morning I arrived last week for the FIL, my hosts picked me up at the airport and drove me around town for a bit, telling me the stories of their city. We stumbled upon a memorial for the Analco disaster, got out, and snapped some photos.

Lowriders in Guadalajara *

* Post updated with more photos.

The U.C.E. car club from San Fernando brought two customized cars and two bikes down to the FIL in Guadalajara. Author Luis Rodriguez at Tia Chucha's Cafe organized the exhibit. He blogs about it here.

By the looks of the constant crowds around the vehicles, the lowrider presence at the book fair almost stole the whole show. Above, Orgullo Mexicano, a multiple-award-winning piece of beauty designed around a Mexican roots theme. Glass panels were placed below the car to make its bottom side visible.

* See more photos here, here, and here.

Note on Guadalajara

The building above epitomizes Guadalajara style to me, where so many modern or semi-modern structures, no matter the architectural idiom, protrude slightly outward at the second floor, sometimes again at the third and fourth, sometimes dramatically at corners. It's strange because it's so prevalent, like a mainstream design trend that sprung up locally at some point and just stayed.

This city feels more genetically similar to Los Angeles than to Mexico City. It is flat and wide like a lot of L.A., and car-oriented like L.A. is, too. Public transit is limited to two light subway lines, a bunch of out-of-date buses, and a Metrobus-like system that everyone seems to have a different complaint about. Taxis are expensive. So basically, without a car or a driver, it's difficult to get around. Worse so than in L.A., surprisingly.

They don't say "bistec" like in D.F. but "asada" like in the North. It's not "bolillo" here it's "birote." People seem more or less ... comfortable. You don't see strangers with that wild look of desperation in their eyes like you do in the big city. It feels less provincial than its reputation tells you. In downtown we ran into a tucked-away block populated by several subtle lesbian-friendly bars, with teenage girls holding hands and kissing on the sidewalk outside in the daytime.

And it's true what they say. The people of Guadalajara are generally hot. Effortlessly attractive -- good faces, good bodies -- regardless of where they landed on the class or mestizo scale.

I keep wondering, Why is that?

Curtis Hanson on 'L.A. Confidential'

In many opinions "L.A. Confidential" is considered one of the very best films made about Los Angeles. Curtis Hanson's noirish thriller is a fascinating study of power in 1950s L.A., dealing with corruption, the limitations of justice, and the thin line between illusion and reality. Listening to Hanson talk about how he managed to get his movie made last night during a Q&A at the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, with David Kipen of NEA, my appreciation for the film grew immensely.

A good director's vision doesn't quit. Warner Bros. wanted a major star in the lead, but Hanson wanted to cast virtual unknowns at the time, and have three leads propelling the story, not just one. The idea was to allow audiences' impressions of the characters to change over the arc the film. He rehearsed for six weeks with Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe in order to get their on-screen relationship just right. He met Kevin Spacey at the actual Formosa Cafe to talk to him about playing Jack Vincennes. He'd hunt for locations in L.A. with production designer Jeanine Oppewall, who had to take many security bars off windows to recall L.A. in the '50s.

In order to convey how Hanson wanted "L.A. Confidential" to feel overall, true to James Ellroy's original novel, he'd present a series of Pablo Ferro images to studio executives, actors, designers, and editors, contrasting the illusion of Los Angeles as a land of plenty with the reality of its less squeaky clean core. Those images eventually inspired the movie's opening sequence.

The perseverance paid off. "L.A. Confidential" was nominated for nine Oscars and won two.