Intersections

Excavations: 'Pobre de Ti,' mi querida Tijuana

* Above, crossing over, round the clock, into TJ.

Oh, Tijuana. A lot of signals lately from TJ. An incredible video documenting TJ 90s rock bands pops up on Facebook. A journalist publishes a nice site on TJ's recent transformations. And I finally catch "Sleep Dealer," but that's another post entirely.

As I type, I'm having visions of landing here again, seeing Mom or Dad smiling on the other side of the glass as usual, then crossing that pesky border, butterflies in the stomach every time. I can never get Tijuana out of my head, yet I remain unsure on where TJ fits in my story, or where I fit in its.

In celebration of this ambiguity, tonight, "Pobre de ti," which in my book is the most significant jam ever generated by the Mexican ska-punk movement, by the legendary Tijuana NO! Here, the band reunites with singer Ceci Bastida and fellow TJ native Julieta Venegas to reignite "Pobre de ti" before the slamming masses at Vive Latino 2010. La Jornada reported the "rola" generated festival's "mayor slam." Without question.

But go back to the original and take another good listen. For years now, this song still defines a city, a sound, and -- dare I say -- a generation.

The work: Still no sign of 'Diego the Boss'

Here's a recent post at La Plaza, the L.A. Times Latin America news blog, on the disappearance of one of the most powerful men in Mexico, Diego Fernandez de Ceballos. The former presidential candidate for the PAN went missing on Friday night on his ranch in Querétaro.

Five days later, pretty much the entire security and law enforcement apparatus of the center of the country has been mobilized to find him, but still no sign of the man they call Jefe Diego. Tracy Wilkinson updates the story today: "Fernandez de Cevallos was more feared than beloved, and if he was the victim of kidnapping, as the evidence suggests, the list of suspects is a long one."

Other recent posts I have up at La Plaza:

• On attacks against in journalists in Honduras.
• A critique on the obsession in the U.S. with Cinco de Mayo.
• From Haiti, on the question of where to place the displaced.
• A look at a report on the struggle for balance in Mexico's narco war.
• On UNAM canceling an exchange program with Arizona.
• On the rise of 'Chavez fatigue' in Venezuela.
• On Costa Rica's first female president.
• On a less smoggy Mexico City.
• On Tijuana's reawakening -- question-mark.
• On a controversial port plan in Colombia.
• Placing some mapable context over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
• Surprise! Mexico keeps a corporate-friendly tax structure.
• And, Brazil's Lula takes a win on nuclear talks with Iran.

As always, I appreciate the link-ups, the feedback, the tips, and the comments! Posting here at Intersections remains light while I finish final edits on the final draft of my book manuscript.

* Photo above, Diego Fernandez de Ceballos, by European Pressphoto, via LAT.

An imaginary bridge at the border

Above, a rendering of a proposed border bridge museum by Mexican architect Fernando Romero. The museum, designed by Romero's firm LAR in 2000, would link El Paso and Ciudad Juarez over the Rio Bravo. Take a good look at the structure and the scale of imaginary humans besides it ... and imagine.

With the U.S.-Mexico border looking more and more these days like a locus of hate and division rather anything else, Romero's museum vision feels like it landed from another planet. There's a discussion of it here in Metropolis magazine.

Romero's new Soumaya museum design, however, will see the light of day soon in Mexico City. The new Soumaya will house the art holdings of Carlos Slim, world's richest man, and, Business Week notes, the architect's father-in-law.

* LAR had an exhibition last year at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

Black responses to the Arizona immigration law

* Above, new Americans, rallying for justice, by Irfan Khan, L.A. Times.

The signing of SB1070 in Arizona has sparked a wave of negative reaction across the United States and across the political spectrum, from Barack Obama on down. There are numerous calls for a boycott of the state, a pledge against the law for people of faith, and a statement from the Major League Baseball players association condemning SB1070.

Some high school seniors are now deciding against going to college in Arizona. One comment on the New York Times blog post on the topic struck me as particularly intelligent, and hinting at the root of African American disdain for SB1070.

Barbara, a Duke alumnus, writes:

When I was a student at Duke there were many male African-American students who felt like they were being profiled because of the relatively high rate of crime on campus, and the fact that a disproportionate amount of it was attributable to young black men in the community. In some cases students were held even after they proved they were students. It made their college experience a lot worse than if they gone elsewhere. It's a legitimate consideration.

It's not that I don't understand that border states face special challenges and find the lack of progress frustrating, or that I don't agree that Mexico has long shown lack of inclination to face its social problems because it has a safety valve next door -- I share those concerns. But there is simply no way to enforce this law without targeting Hispanics. I don't care if that was the intent or not, it is almost certainly going to be its practical effect.

Indeed, history runs in cycles, and the U.S. has seen far too many discriminatory and hateful laws or practices that have targeted and abused African Americans for generations. Yes, we know that African American anxiety about Latino immigration to the U.S. exists, and exists widely. But Arizona's new law burns at the boundaries of our notions of justice and fair treatment under the law, which assaults any reasonable person's sense of decency -- regardless of color.

This is why so many prominent black Americans and black organizations are standing up against SB1070. At the top of the pack, for pure inspiration, is Chuck D, the former frontman of Public Enemy, who released a special track against the bill called "Tear Down That Wall." (Public Enemy, of course, has a track that has gone after politics in Arizona before.)

Arizona, look into your future

* Illustration above, by Lalo Alcaraz.

Here's a summary of my response to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signing on Friday a monumentally degrading anti-illegal immigrant bill: So stupid.

SB1070 is not some kind of anomaly. Rabidly reactionary anti-immigrant bills pop up across the country and even in Congress. Remember what happened after HR 4437, the so-called Sensenbrenner bill? Massive, massive demonstrations of millions upon millions in cities and towns across the great United States -- the political awakening for scores of immigrants and their families.

HR 4437 subsequently died, and four years later, the demonstrations continue.

And remember what happened after Props. 187 and 209 in California? A political backfire that is still felt today: the state is dominated by Democrats now, much of them "brown and proud."

Could SB1070 beget the same future for Arizona? We'll find out if the good citizens of the state and its neighboring entities heed the call of Zach de la Rocha, and move upon the state capitol on Sunday to express their displeasure with Brewer and the Arizona legislature.

Rage against the machine, indeed.

* All posts in Immigration.

An earthqauke on the borderlands

From my current post at La Plaza, on the Easter Sunday earthquake centered south of Mexicali:

It is the strangest thing about life in the far northwest of Mexico and far southwest of the United States. The international border is there, policed and guarded, its crossing coveted by millions -- for Mexicans, to work, for Americans, to "get away from it all." The boundary divides the First World from the developing world, the wealthy neighbor from the poor one. But in so many ways, the line is invisible, not there at all.

Read the rest there. And, did you see the botanical garden ponds at Balboa Park in San Diego, normally as flat as plates of glass, rocking around like artificial amusement park surf?

* All posts in Borderlands. * Photo above via the AP.

Mexico's northern border, on fire once more

* Military on the streets in Reynosa, via Gringa-N-Mexico.

Narco-related violence in Mexico is dominating the news once more. Three people with ties to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez were killed on Saturday. At least thirteen were killed over the weekend in Acapulco. And with scores dead in recent weeks, Reynosa is on fire due an apparent split between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas. Things are so bad there, journalists are going missing, or just turning away from the story.

Getting a sense of what things like are like on the ground is becoming harder and harder. But there are some voices coming through.

If you can muster checking in on reality, the blog Ontobelli meticulously accounts for narco-related gun battles across the country, mostly via amateur YouTube clips. Many if not most of these battles go unreported in the mainstream press. The blog's author offers this narrated video explaining the background on the current outbreak of violence in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, and all of Mexico's northeast.

For an achingly frank ex-pat account of the situation in Reynosa, check out the blog Gringa-N-Mexico, by a young woman named Lindy -- "born and raised in southern Michigan, just a little country gal" -- who followed her husband to Mexico after he was deported. In a Feb. 24 post, Lindy writes about how completely the Gulf Cartel controls the streets of her adopted city:

I guess the cartel wanted to make the citizens of the city feel better so a few days ago they made a gigantic banner and hung it from an overpass near where we live. It read something along the lines of - Citizens of Reynosa, you are safe. We the cartel so-and-so are here to do our job and we do not wish to harm any people of your city, we only want to do what we have to do and not hurt any civilians. ... How nice of them?

The kicker is when she realizes the meaning behind the acronym "C.D.G." that she spots on some police-looking vehicles.

* UPDATE: Looks like the post has been taken down. Too bad, but not unexpected. Suerte, Lindy.

** INTERESTINGLY: In the case of the consular official in Juarez who was killed along with her husband near the border with El Paso, the local NBC affiliate across the border notes that whatever the victim Lesley (or Leslie) Enriquez did exactly at the consulate has not been specified.

Robert Cason, victim Arthur Redelfs's stepfather, also told KTSM he did not know what his step-daughter-in-law did at the consulate. Meanwhile, Diana Washington Valdez in the El Paso Times quotes a former DEA agent who says he knew Redelfs, a local Sheriff's Office detention officer, "since 1990."

Speaking to The Takeaway, expert narco reporter Ioan Grillo says the Enriquez-Redelfs slaying appeared to be a "very organized hit."

However, unnamed sources in the State Department led The Washington Post to conclude that it "did not appear that the slain consular employee was involved in counternarcotics work."

Officials are saying now that it looks like a case of mistaken identity.

Chuntaro style?

Above, raw video of "sureño" cholos dancing to Celso Piño -- together, without women -- during an outdoor concert in Houston. The person who uploaded this video (in 2008) seems aware that the dudes open themselves up to macho mocking, dancing so close and free to one another. "Look cabrones," the uploader writes, "before you start talking shit, if these guys are from Monterrey, Colombia, or Chicanos, recognize that these vatos dance con madre."

Con madre. As in, with balls? Guts? Soul? I'd agree, 100 percent.

Technically I'm from "El Norte" myself (from a southern Mexico angle, I mean), but I've never spent much time in Texas and have yet to see Monterrey. My focus in the last two years has been set intensely on urban D.F. Nonetheless, let's do some excavating. The style of dancing above reflects a style celebrated in the video for "Chuntaro Style" by El Gran Silencio, where norteños in cholo-like outfits, both men and women, dance a poppy, low, gangster-y rhythm to a polyglot beat. Looks like a Monterrey thing.

More: Mexico City photographer Carlos Alvarez Montero has shot a subculture in the deep barrios of Monterrey called "Colombianos." These are urban dudes who are obsessed with Colombian cumbia and Colombia in general. In Montero's post, he says he was introduced to the subculture by the incomparable -- and again, norteño -- DJ Toy Selectah. Montero tells me he still has to hit up one of their parties.

Check more of the photographer's work on transnational Mexican subcultures at his site. He and I are agreed. We're looking at hints here of an uncharted "urban tribe" phenomenon.

* Previously, "Sonidero on the streets." * Thanks, M. and A.!

Critiquing the narco coverage

* Image above via Foreign Policy.

Well, more like critiquing the critique coverage of Mexico's narco war, itself a subset of media writing these days. Here's what I mean.

I recently came across a piece from last fall that somehow fell through the cracks of my feeds as I was completing the main work on my book manuscript. It's Michael Massing in the Columbia Journalism Review, bemoaning what he calls the slanted coverage of Mexico by U.S. correspondents who he says are hellbent on portraying this country as falling apart in an orgy of narco-related bloodshed. An excerpt:

When it comes to Mexico, U.S. journalists seem interested in only four things: drugs, traffickers, violence, and corruption (with an occasional nod toward immigration). Journalists peddle a sort of drug-war pornography, salaciously and insatiably dwelling on the most lurid aspects of the trade: narcos, gangs, smugglers, pipelines, cells, mass graves, severed heads, torture chambers, dirty cops. Journalists promiscuously quote DEA agents, eagerly accompany undercover cops on ride-alongs, descend daringly into drug-infested neighborhoods, and intrepidly interview members of the drug trade.

At the bottom of the piece, there are several head-nodding 'right on!' comments from current or former American residents in Mexico, who are very often far more reflexively defensive of all things Mexico than the typical Mexican native. But the piece's flaw is its inability to readily admit that the narco violence in Mexico -- more than 16,000 dead in three years -- is a serious, serious problem, no matter how you slice it. And the Mexican government, no matter what Felipe Calderon says, keeps failing, and failing, and failing, in its efforts to stop it.

So how should the U.S. cover Mexico's narco war?

This made me think of a similar piece I myself wrote, for the journal Extra!, which is published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. I never got around to linking to it, but the piece came out in June, a few months before Massing's in CJR.

I take his critique one step further. Using key examples from the sudden surge in "spill over"-themed coverage of Mexico in the U.S., which I'd date around spring 2009, I point out the gaping hole in the narco war reporting. Mainly, that official corruption in cartel-like organization patterns is by necessity present within the United States, but we rarely ever hear about it in U.S. papers (except when someone gets caught).

An excerpt:

The term treats Mexico's violence as a kind of "contagion," as one of many critical reader comments noted of the March 23 New York Times article. "Fact is, the drug trade is a transnational commodity chain that links consumers [in] the U.S. with a pyramid of distributors, processors, financiers and growers. In that sense, the violence is a product of the trade itself, not a disease vector from Mexico," wrote a Times reader identified as Heather Williams of Durham, N.C. "Do we really think that all the people profiting from this trade are colorful (and brown) cartel leaders walking around with TEC-9 pistols in their coats? Give me a break. You can't move that kind of cash without bankers, real estate agents, trucking firms, lawyers, bureaucrats, cops, border patrol agents, etc. helping out at every stage of the game."

I then go on to quote Laura Carlsen at the CIP Americas Program. Carlsen is probably the most effectively skeptical and comprehensive writer on Mexico's drug war today. Time and again, she gets to the underlying contradictions and cynicism that drive so many narco-related policy decisions on both sides of the border.

Here's her take on the recent teen massacre in Ciudad Juarez.

Where does this leave us? What should we read about Mexico's drug war, and how? I like Gancho, for starters, when Corcoran posts on narco stuff. You can also check out other Mexico-related links on the right, some in Spanish.

For now, however, these are questions that I'm going to have to table on Intersections, as I'm no longer a free agent. I'll be starting a new job soon, back in the media machine.

* Details later.

Jaurez, and Mexico, drowning in death *

We are drowning in death in Mexico. Over the weekend, dozens killed in the country's internal narco-military war. Ciudad Juarez, in agony.

An execution in this state, a drive-by shooting in that state, a grenade attack on a police station in that one over there. A kidnapping, a beheading. Ten people are shot to death in a bar in Torreón. Then eight more are killed in a battle and chase the night after.

Sixteen people, mostly kids, are gunned down at a party in Juarez. Dead. Teenagers. Shot down while scrambling over fences to save their lives.

Where was all that military? All those federal police officers? The guy they think ordered the massacre then dies, supposedly, in a gun battle with Mexican soldiers. But then four people who might have witnessed the party massacre -- as in, survived it -- just today get "picked up." When narco-paramilitary death commandos kill people, they often go back to kill the witnesses. As it happens, one of the youth initially killed at the party had apparently been a witness to a previous massacre.

See how that works?

When will it end? Families of the high school victims in Juarez are burying their dead, and telling President Felipe Calderon that he is the assassin. They're saying the same thing on Twitter right now, scores of people, using an unkind slashtag. Since the start of the new year, 1,000 people have died in Mexico's drug war, the quickest accumulation of that benchmark ever. At this rate, 2010 could be the bloodiest year we've ever seen.

When will it end?

Come on now. Everyone knows that right now there's no end in sight. None.

* Image above via Reuters.

'Tijuana para los de Tijuana'

Above, the spinach and strawberry salad, with iced cafe de la olla on the left, at Cielo, a mellow and crisply designed little restaurant in downtown Tijuana, on Calle 11. I met up last week with my friend Acido Espumo a.k.a. Wonka, a Tijuana native, to check out a bit of the "Tijuana para los de Tijuana" scene, or, 'TJ for TJ people.' This is where we landed for lunch.

Cielo is part of the "hip new Tijuana" phenomenon that sprung up with the worldwide recognition of Nortec Collective and other Tijuana musicians, artists, and writers who have been redefining the city since the early 2000s. After lunch here -- finishing with a nice chicken breast and a potato mash, and a lemony cold desert -- we checked out some of the bars on Calle 6, headed by the newest hot spot, La Mezcalera, and the old stand-by, El Dandy del Sur.

It was too early to party, though, and, sadly, Tijuana felt deadened by its current state of terrifying internal warfare. So after a few beers, Wonka drove me back to la linea.

Crossing north by foot at the busiest international border in the world is always a head-trip. It's almost anti-climactic when there aren't a lot of pedestrians. Sometimes the U.S. customs agents can tell if you've done this, oh, a few hundred times in your life, and they just wave you through. You stick any bag through a scanner, pass through a door, and, 'Welcome to America.'

Here I do not have a car or a cell phone. So from the San Diego Trolley terminus I walked about two miles to my mom's house in San Ysidro, getting completely lost along the way. Hybridity is tiring.

* Looking at my archives, I've posted so much about TJ over the years. Here are some hits: "ERRE pulls out of Tijuana retrospective," "Mapping the bloodshed in Tijuana," "Tijuana nights," "End nears for binational border gatherings," "Leaving Tijuana: Everyone is doing it," "'Literally Hell': The deadly prison riots in Tijuana," "Wednesday night cantina-hopping in Tijuana."

** Tijuas, amor para siempre.

Young heir latest victim in Tijuana violence

*Above, José Fernando Labastida Fimbres, dead at 17, via NBC San Diego.

The 17-year-old heir of a prominent and wealthy Tijuana family was gunned down on Monday as he sat in his parked Audi near his home in the city's posh Chapultepec district. Gunmen fired more than 50 shots from AK-47 rifles at José Fernando Labastida Fimbres, whose grandfather founded the successful Calimax supermarket chain. José commuted daily during the week -- as many young people do in the bi-city region -- to the elite Mater Dei school across the border in Chula Vista.

Authorities said the killing appeared targeted specifically at him. An uncle to José was killed last year. Sandra Dibble of the Union-Tribune has more from the Tuesday night Mass in the boy's honor.

I was in Tijuana when it happened. On Monday afternoon, tending to family business near downtown, police vehicles were racing with sirens wailing on the streets all around us. "People are getting killed right now," came a remark. True enough, at least five other people were shot or found dead in Tijuana on Monday. One victim was only a dismembered head found in a tunnel. We've also had plenty of macabre hangings in TJ in recent weeks.

Border boosters lately like noting that organized criminal violence in Tijuana is "not as bad" as it has been before, dropping in 2009 over 2008, but I say that's pretty mediocre thinking. Violence is violence. Dropping or not, the narco war is terrorizing communities, rotting justice systems, and claiming the lives of too many innocent people.

* Related at The Faster Times: "Mexico's Drug War Hits Home in California."

New Year's excursion to Baja

Above, the view from the Mirador look-out on the highway between Ensenada and Tijuana, New Year's Day, 2010. (That's my dad's shoulder.) The shapes seen floating in the coastal waters are fishing nets. We used to stop here so often when we were little and heading south to visit cousins. The Mirador site is now run-down and abandoned. Click on the image for a larger view.

And here's for a view of the old car wrecks at the bottom of the cliff below, artifacts from the time when inattentive drivers on the Camino Viejo would just coast off the sharp road, to their deaths -- at least according to the local lore.

Here's a pulpo and ceviche tostada at a Navolato stand in downtown Ensenada, steps from the harbor. As many of you already well know, Baja mariscos are their own amazing thing. But how is the over-all situation in north Baja right now? I'll be discussing current "security" issues and urbanisms in a later post.

* MORE: See Across the Border for a post about a trip down a good length of the Baja Peninsula, a definite to-do for this and any other self-respecting pocho with a sense of adventure.

Happy New Year! *

I was trying to think of something eloquent or comprehensive to post for the dawn of the new decade, but my brain is still a little flat-lined. For now, here's wishing you and your loved ones a glorious 2010 and beyond. May love guide us all.

* Previously, my post on a New Year's Eve in Tijuana.

The hustle held

I just turned in the edited manuscript for my book to my editor at Simon & Schuster in New York City. I imagine he's printing the damn thing right now -- all 195 pages -- and carrying it down those cold, symmetrical Manhattan streets just before leaving for the holiday break.

Who knows. New York feels like another planet to me. What are they wearing over there these days?

I've been living in Mexico City for two years and two months, with almost no travel away. Since the day I landed in D.F., I've been working on this thing. We still have to finalize it, of course. I've gotta do an epilogue, notes, and a reading list. Maybe some pictures and maps? But otherwise, the book is actually, finally, just about done.

The project, as you might recall, has been ... tough. Right now my brain is so blank ("I can't see my eyes") and my heart unsure what it should be feeling that I'm just gonna go to a mall here in San Diego and stare at things for a few hours.

Then, a drink or two? They've got good, cocky micro-brews here.

Meantime, above, I am entrusting you with my book's working "thought diagram." I had this poster hung in my study space for months as I drafted and re-drafted the manuscript. It's a very intimate reflection of my process and my values. In June, in ritual sacrifice, I burned it.

Happy Holidays!

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."

The bridges of Ozomatli *

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2002 I knew nearly nothing about the city and knew nearly no one except for a few friends from college. Roaming town alone, between the L.A. Times newsroom and my corporate apartment, I'd go see my homie Valmiki, Guatemalan American and L.A.-raised, and he'd take me to parties, parks, and places to eat. First in Northeast L.A., then in Boyle Heights and East L.A., then in Silver Lake and Echo Park and downtown.

Little by little, L.A. began to map itself for me.

The bridge, in some respects, between both my college experience in the Bay Area and my early experience in L.A. was the band Ozomatli. I saw them play at the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus, where I first watched their traditional enter-from-the-audience exit-through-the-audience, a genuine gesture of solidarity, un-self-conscious and sincere. Valmiki and I then saw them about a year later at a community event in Boyle Heights, the downtown skyline rising elegantly against the sunset.

Among those folks, among those sounds, I remembering for the first time feeling ... at home.

On Sunday night when Ozomatli played at the FIL in Guadalajara, I felt an enormous wave of nostalgia for my L.A. days. I have to admit it: my heart ached a little. I know that in more cynical L.A. mindsets Ozomatli is seen as a self-repeating, or even a cliche, but one of the nice after-effects of moving to Mexico and living among "regular people" here is that you can get a refreshing new perspective on notions of community and justice.

Ozomatli as a collective of musicians are clearly committed to both.

Fifteen years later, they're still at it. That means something, beyond their ground-breaking and infections mix of musical genres. You could feel it in the sense of unity among the youth and families dancing last night. Ozo, I thought, are a true treasure of Southern California, and of the bridges possible between nations and borders.

* Previously, "Los Angeles: The future, today?" "The sounds of the barrio, from L.A. to India,"

Mexico always in L.A., L.A. siempre en Mexico *

* Photo above, "Madonna in Progress," via East of West L.A.

I travel on Saturday to Guadalajara, where the big International Book Fair opens with a special guest of honor this year, the city of Los Angeles. From the fair's official site:

A natural bridge between Mexican and American culture, Los Angeles is also a city that has been able to acquire a unique identity relating to cultural production, the trademark that distinguishes its delegation, comprised of around 50 authors, 20 academics, 14 artists and theater companies. The program also includes 7 visual arts exhibitions and a film series presenting classic and contemporary films designed to showcase the diverse perspectives on its urban landscape, its culture and people.

True enough, there's going to be so much going on I won't know where to begin.

Both "Phantom Sightings" and "Vexing" are on view at Guadalajara museums. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be in town, and so will L.A. Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold, and the Zócalo crew. One panel will have Gregory Rodriguez moderating the question of how Mexican Americans see Mexico.

The Jalisco edition of La Jornada breaks down the Encuentro Chicano, an ambitious two-day program that focuses on Mexican American arts and letters, organized by the Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the University of Guadalajara. I am excited to be moderating a panel with Luis Rodriguez, Maria Amparo Escandon, Jose Luis Valenzuela, and Ruben Martinez. Come check it out if you're in town.

Here is a blog that artist Daniel Gonzalez is running right now from the festivities. So far Daniel has posted on the Hospicio Cabañas, Mixtecas drawing on Converse sneakers, installing the "Vexing" show, and more.

Finally, here is an essay I published on Sunday in the culture section of El Páis, Spain's biggest newspaper. In it, I discuss the radical recent changes to the "vaguely Mexican atmosphere" of Los Angeles, and where us 'post-Chicanos' stand today. I'll have an English translation link to the piece later today.

* Intersections returns on December 3.

Unattended ghosts, east of the Berlin Wall

* Above, a reader-submitted photo at New York Times.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Stasiland, an award-winning non-fiction book (Granta, 2003) about the lives of East Berliners in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anna Funder, an Australian, recounts her time meeting and interviewing regular people whose lives were ensnared by the all-seeing eye of socialist East Germany, the Stasi, one of the "most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world."

Funder gives voice to a people who were essentially cut off from the rest of the planet for almost 40 years, and whose ghosts were left unattended after all the celebrations of the fall subsided. It is a vivid and affecting book, written in an intimate but not overbearing manner -- a very hard balance to strike. She also writes about encounters with former Stasi spies, whom she found living ho-hum regular lives in a reunited Berlin despite having consciously destroyed the lives of so many others.

But history is always poking upward toward the sunlight. From Chapter 7, 'The Smell of Old Men':

Here at the Normannestrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating -- those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin to buy more. In Building 8 alone, members of the citizens' movement found over one hundred burnt-out shredders. When the Stasi couldn't get any more machines, they started destroying the files by hand, ripping up documents and putting them into sacks. But this was done in such an orderly fashion -- whole drawers of documents put into the same bag -- that now, in Nuremberg, it is possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together.

Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Check out more NYT reader photos here, and also this interactive feature showing sites along the Wall before-and-after the fall. And here is the special coverage on the anniversary at the English edition of Bild.

Moms in Mexico City

Norma Hernandez visited me from San Diego-Tijuana for fiestas patrias in September. We patriotically drank and ate on a trajinera at Xochimilco, had chiles en nogada, and watched the military parade at the Zócalo, which was then overtaken by thousands of families with kids wielding enormous inflated pencil ornaments.

She loved it. Today, November 8, Norma turns ... one year elegantly older. Happy Birthday, mom!

The Days of Our Dead

It's a holiday today -- Day of the Dead -- so some places are closed and the city is mellower. There are openings this week at the Jumex Collection and Jimmie Durham at Kurimanzutto. Gang Gang Dance is playing somewhere in D.F. on Saturday. That should be interesting.

Today I'm reading about an exciting act of defiance against state censorship in Mexico, thanks to the legendary Los Tigres del Norte, and also an illuminating check-in on Julian Casablancas, of The Strokes.

It's a familiar story of exile and rebirth: Downtown New York artist rises fast, burns out, and moves to an equivalent neighborhood but a mellower and more fulfilling lifestyle in Los Angeles. Then their art ... changes:

On Tuesday his first solo album, "Phrazes for the Young," will be released on Cult Records/RCA. Cult is his own, newly started and self-financed imprint, with a handful of bicoastal employees. He wrote and arranged all the music and played much of it himself. In Los Angeles he’s been getting a band together and prepping madly for a tour that will include a series of residencies with elaborate stage shows. Evident ambition has replaced obtuse ennui.

Casablancas sounds so positive and peppy in the piece, like he's 'gone native.' It struck me; a lot of creative people in California talk this way, about valuing firstly personal happiness, community happiness, and family, and rejecting destructive behaviors.

Do we need a term for this phenomenon? California Positivism?

* Check out some recent posts of mine at The Faster Times Mexico here, here, here, and here.

Pastiche of the pyramid

The bicultural, bilingual, binational Mexico City-born artist Ruben Ortiz-Torres opened a dual show with Marcos Lopez at the Centro del Imagen last week. Ortiz-Torres, who teaches art at UC San Diego, presents his series of photographs of pyramids in otherwordly, dislocated contexts: a pyramid-shaped water-slide at a resort in the Bahamas, a pyramid-shaped furniture store in San Diego, a gym at Cal State Long Beach, as seen above.

Check out the rest of his photographs. It's an impressive body of work that combines documentary, commentary, and beautiful weirdness. * Previously, "For the gods, 'all is play': Paz on the pyramid."

Mexico in the black hole of universality

* Terminal countdown: the Templo Mayor bicentennial clock.

Why is Mexico rarely invited to the world dialogue? Why are its challenges and triumphs rarely considered "universal"? Why is Mexico never grouped as "Western," or as belonging to "the West"? (Nevermind that William S. Burroughs tossed out in his novel "Queer" the idea that Mexico is "basically an Oriental culture.")

Claudio Lomnitz argues that this historical curiosity comes partly from a domestic source. Mexican intellectuals "fetishize" their national problems, or Great National Problems, Lomnitz says, and thus remain passive participants in the evolution of world history, unable to see connectivity to issues beyond their own borders.

This creates a bunch of black holes. Sort of like how in children's books on the great civilizations of antiquity, Persia, China, Greece, Rome are all there, as our rational ancestors, but Mexico is usually absent. Now apply that same basic abstract to globalization, or even the War on Drugs. Then take it anywhere you want. The yawning absence of immigrants -- those who abandoned the nation -- in Mexico's political and cultural life, for instance.

From Lomnitz's introduction to "Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico":

In Mexico, narratives that identify the habits of the Mexican people as paradigms of rationality, and therefore as universally applicable, have had little success. The country has been hyperconscious of its backward condition for at least 150 years. Moreover, it has had to deal with a layered history of imperialist depictions: in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans could not be made into the paragon of rationality because they were racially inferior; later on, the Mexican people were portrayed as traditionalists, as fatalists whose rational capabilities, though no longer biologically deniable, were no less blinded by superstition. Today Mexico is routinely labeled a "developing nation." Because it is allegedly not yet developed, it is not in a position to speak for humanity at large. Not surprisingly, then, Mexican faculties have concentrated on contributions to the resolution of the nation's problems. These need to be dealt with first; universality will come later.

Mexican-born Lomnitz is a professor of history and anthropology at Columbia University. He is the gifted author of "Death and the Idea of Mexico," a book that is a providing a strong theoretical basis for portions of my own upcoming book.

How is that going? My editor has returned my foreword and first four chapters, with line edits. The hardest part is yet to come. But, taking a plunge, I am willing to now disclose my working title.

The book is called "The Lake of Fire." ... And, line edits terrify me.

BLOG NOTE: Intersections now goes dark for 15 days. You can still follow my link-sharing and observations on Twitter and Facebook. I also edit the Mexico page for The Faster Times. TFT is an interesting new experiment in online journalism at a time when the only unifying characteristics of our practice are experimentation and that great black void of an uncertain future.

Trails of blood in the Mormon killing case?

* Above, the funeral in Colonia LeBarón, via Zocalo de Saltillo.

In Mexico, citizens who organize to fight their communities' culture of fear and corruption become targets themselves. In Mexico, criminals express their power through killing. Religious minority communities are not exempt in such a system. From Elisabeth Malkin in Chihuahua:

When a 16-year-old boy was kidnapped from this fundamentalist Mormon community in early May, ransom was set at $1 million. The town chose not to pay. Instead, led by the boy's older brother, members of the community traveled to the state capital, Chihuahua, to demand that the government catch the kidnappers. Nobody knows exactly why, but seven days later, the boy was freed.

Soon, from other towns scattered in the valleys that stretch under the purple-rimmed mountains of the Sierra Madre, farmers facing extortion and intimidation began pleading with the crusading brother, Benjamín LeBarón — a great-grandson of the Mormon community's founder — for help. He tried, forming a group to help towns put pressure on the authorities. And then he was dead.

As things stand now, the Benjamín LeBarón case cannot remain an isolated incident for very long. But, there's always a back story. Richard Grabman at The Mex Files excavates the curious and blood-ridden history of the LeBarón clan:

When Alma died in 1951, leadership in the community passed to his son, Joel. Joel left the Apostolic United Brethern to found his own church, the "Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times." At least some of the LeBarons, including second in command, Joel's younger brother Ervil, later moved to Baja California. Ervil moved to San Diego, California to start a second church.

And, then it gets very, very weird.

More there.

Michael Jackson on a wall in an alley

... In the old-school Sherman barrio of San Diego (read that carefully crafted official description), in process. Notice the gooey, dripping apart face make-up.

Having been so moved by the somber but celebratory BET awards the other night, this made me think, A memorial is a memorial, right?

Sunday at the beach

Imperial Beach is basically the southwestern-most community shore in the contiguous United States, right to the north of the Tijuana River estuary on the southwest edge of San Diego County.

There is a pier, an old-school sea shell shop, and the sands are crowded with multiethnic families, chilled-out cholos, and crews of gangster-ish and red-faced skater-surfers, seemingly proud to be calling this their turf. Every summer a major sand sculpture festival happens here.

With easy access to parking and an extra-heavy dose of that laid-back Southern Cali feel, IB is also an ideal place to dip into the Pacific and lie away a few hours on a vacationy sort of Sunday afternoon.

Saint Jude's

For years, in my earliest memories, this church was the signpost of our hill, St. Jude's in Shelltown, its south-facing neon cross glowing in the night, visible from the 5 freeway.

Where do you live? By St. Jude's we'd say. No wonder.

Tijuana nights

* A furry shot of some apartment towers on the southwestern hills of Tijuana, dusk, while visiting cousins.

Acamonchi in Mexico City

Tijuana-San Diego street artist Acamonchi has a show up in the heart of D.F. right now, at the Upper Playground outpost in Condesa, and we caught it before taking off to California. His work is defined by a frenetic layering of icons and textures from the urban landscape.

Also on Amatlan, an offering of really great chandeliers by Carolina Fontoura, made out of discarded bicycle chains.

Checking out the swap meet

In Southern California we have the tainguis and mercado too, only here we call them swap meets, and they aren't as crowded with humans as markets can be in Mexico. Here is a view of the Spring Valley swap meet in the southeast region of San Diego. Picked up five crisp and bright T-shirts for $10 dollars. Not bad.