Intersections

The attack of the global cities *

London's Tate Modern is featuring an exhibit right now on "global cities," focusing on Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo through the broad themes of size, speed, form, density, and diversity. There are interesting videos accompanying these themes at the Tate's webpage on the show. By next year, half of the world's population will live in an urban zone, BBC reports, with this cool interactive map showing how megacities have grown in the last fifty years. From The Guardian:

The great thing about cities is not how awful they are, but how wonderfully well they work, considering that putting more than 20 million humans in close proximity to engage in serial acts of competitive individualism could not be considered a reasonable idea. If you put rats into claustrophobic circumstances, they become cannibalistic in no time at all. But humans find ingenious solutions: Maglev trains, underground car parks, Korean supermarkets, pizza delivery, cycle lanes, very tall buildings.

I don't care about seeing the show as much as I care about seeing the cities included, which I think is the point. The inclusion of L.A. is another sign that our town is on the international radar more than ever before. If anything, it's another reminder that a better perspective on living in and absorbing L.A. is to try to see it as part of a broader picture, a happy product of huge forces in technology, trade, media, culture, migration, etc. The museum brings together some great work by international artists for the exhibit, such as photographer Andreas Gursky, author of the above image, "Copan, 2002." * Links via Curbed LA.

'Art Outlaws of East L.A.' draws letters

My feature on the history and legacy of Asco brought loads of letters, calls, and emails. Some congratulatory, some reprimanding, some critical. The Weekly published a couple this week in print and more online. Because the letters published are mostly scathing or critical, blogger's prerogative here at Intersections dictactes that I reproduce the only friendly letter below, from Sean Carrillo in New York:

If I had a hundred hats I would take them off to Daniel Hernandez for his brilliant, insightful and thoroughly engrossing article. As a member of “Asco B” and witness to this spectacular debacle I must say he has captured some of the perfidy, drama, madness, careerism, exploitation and mania that were hallmarks of the Asco that I knew and lived. It is not his fault that he was not able to conjure the many performances when we held the audience in the palm of our hand followed by Rat Pack–esque after-parties, the effortless collaboration, the unbridled laughter, relentless joy and youthful exuberance that I knew and loved. Nonetheless, the article was like a bullet train to one’s past where the destiny is known, cherished and avoided. As I sit alone at my computer writing this I hear a faint rumble in the background like the murmur of a roomful of ghosts. Maybe it is just the sound of a hundred hats hitting the floor.

The rest of the letters are here. Along with corrections on the piece. See also 'A Dada daydream in Chicanoville, U.S.A.'

* And while we're indulging here, I would like to note and congratulate my friends and colleagues at the Weekly who swept up all kinds of awards at the L.A. Press Club and AAN this year. Shout out also to Adolfo Guzman-Lopez for winning "Radio Journalist of the Year" at the Press Club. And, on the blog front, to my former editor Alan Mittelstaedt for kicking butt as guest blogger at WitnessLA recently.

Former Mexican queer bars in L.A.: We will never forget

Access to cheap beer, a sticky floor, and a drag show is a basic neo-American right, so when places to buy such amusements begin disappearing, someone must stand up and say something. Enter the Pocho Research Society. Adolfo Guzman-Lopez of KPCC early Sunday rode along with the semi-anonymous group for a night of guerilla historical memorializing at formerly Latino queer bars and/or sites of gay club nights in Silver Lake, Echo Park and downtown that in recent years have been flipped to hipster-yuppie bars. Here's the story that aired this morning. The group's latest project, "Echoes in the Echo," involved the placement of unpermitted historical markers on The Echo (formerly The Nayarit), Bar 107 (formerly The Score) and Cha Cha (formerly Le Barcito). Go here for previous interventions by the Pocho Research Society that in some measure recall the practices and strategies of Asco.

* Of course, if you itch for a I-can't-believe-it's-not-her Alejandra Guzman impersonation, a form of nightlife entertainment as egalitarian in Mexico as futbol-watching, you can still search and find: Le Bar on Sunset in Silver Lake on Sunday nights, for instance, still serves the goods. We'll check today to see if the latest PRS markers are still up.

The kill-bill gamble: A final push for immigration reform? *

** THURSDAY UPDATE: The bill is dead. **

Heavyweight Latino leaders held a media conference call today with reporters to make a final push for the Senate to pass an immigration reform bill we can all at least live with. If the Senate does not, the leaders argued, the insane status quo will lumber on, meaning more bigotry and divisiveness, more suffering of broken families, more troubles for the economically struggling communities left behind, more people in the endless limbo of Kafa-esque detention centers, and more raids and mass deportations for businesses and industries that remain desperate foreign workers.

On the call were names known in L.A. as familiar power-brokers: John Trasviña, president and general counsel of MALDEF; Maria Elena Durazo, secretary-general of the L.A. County-Fed; Arturo Vargas, executive director of NALEO; Arturo Rodriguez, president of the UFW; and Supervisor Gloria Molina. Also on were Cecilia Muñoz, senior vice president of NCLR, and Eliseo Medina, international vice president of SEIU.

"All Americans send people to Washington to do the hard work," Trasviña said. "Our message to senators is, keep at it, don't give up." Said Muñoz: "While there are concerns about some of the content in the bill going foward, assuming that we can't make progress is a defeatist attitude that is unworthy of Latinos and the immigrants whose lives are at stake here."

If the Senate bill fails, they said, hope is all but lost. Summer is upon us, which means the likelihood of more deaths in the remote desert crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border. Plus, presidential election season is just around corner, and with it the temporary loss of relative reason.

Some immigrant advocates are putting their money on a less punitive bill to come out of the House if the Senate bill fails, despite House Republicans who say such a bill would be "dead on arrival" in their chamber. This is a scary gamble. Mainstream-ish Latino civil rights organizations -- such as Antonio Gonzalez's William C. Velasquez Institute, and LULAC -- are going so far as openly opposing the Senate bill. In response to this, the L.A. Mexican regional federation clubs, which theoretically more directly represent immigrant families, put out a release last week reiterating their support for the Senate bill as being better than nothing, and admonishing the mainline groups for posturing themselves as speaking on behalf of immigrants. (Gee, that attitude sounds so familiar.) "Who gave these organizations the authority to kill the hopes of millions of undocumented people?" read a statement distributed by Martha Ugarte.

Today's conference call seemed more aligned with the notion that despite the obvious flaws in the Senate bill, it remains the most plausible chance for some kind of reform this year, lest the status quo remains in place until, by at least one prediction I heard this week, the second-term of the next (presumably Democratic) president. That's after 2012. Not a pretty thought.

Republicans are battling their own internal debate over immigration reform. On one side, there are those see any kind of legalization process for undocumented workers as "amnesty" (even when it involves fees, "touch-backs," procedural hoops, but anyway) and those who might cynically see wanton anti-immigrant fervor as the only glue to rally a Republican base in future races. On the other side, there are nervous pragmatists who remember what happened in California after the passage of harshly anti-immigrant Proposition 187 -- a permanent Republican minority in Sacramento. Good luck with that, guys.

* Cartoon by Pat Bagley of The Salt Lake Tribune. See previous posts on immigration by clicking on the category link below.

The romance of petty thievery

There's a lot of transit, transglobal travel, and transition in the air right now, with more on the way, and since I take a very Proustian approach to the process of absorbing music, film, art, or literature (How does this echo something that I've felt or experienced firsthand? If it doesn't, I'm not interested. Thanks for all of 2003, Marcel), I step momentarily back from hiatus* to share with you this positively "cosmopolitan"-looking vid, for Junior Boys:

* Was there ever doubt I'd break it before day's end? Thank you for the links, friends. And now, onward.

Code red: Hipster infestation at Gold Room!

Inevitably, hipsters have invaded the Gold Room in Echo Park. I've just received a report that "there are like 50 million kids out the door" over there right now, a sight I can't bear somber witness to because I am away from L.A. again. So long $5 beer-and-shot specials, with free tacos thrown in? Please, nooo...

It was only a matter of time, with local businesses' recent successes pressing in from all sides. Wednesday is the busiest night on our local stretch of Sunset Boulevard. The Short Stop hosts Anne Lee's Awesometown. The Echo is still doing Dub Club. And next-door to Gold Room is old-school Mexican American joint Barragan's, now permanently overrun by scenesters who only recently discovered the $2 margarita Wednesday special. Naturally, the spill-over crowd after Barragan's closes is an easy target for fresh business. For a couple weeks now, the Gold Room on Wednesdays has been hosting DJs. Where the MySpace communcation cells go, the cool kids follow. The death wish.

Why fault Gold Room for wanting to make an extra buck? Why get all haughty and neighborhood essentialist when, as someone with a blog, I'm as much a part of the problem as the kids that flipped La Cita? Because Gold Room is special. In a gentrifying city, it's stayed real -- real paisas, real skimpily dressed bargirls, and, on most nights, real danger. My four years of regular patronage have got nothing on the real cabrones who guard their watering hole with steely stares and the occasional "rough play," whether threatened or carried out.

I'm not alone in lamenting Gold Room's gradual shift. Read the current top review of the cantina on Yelp: "Dont come here.  I love this place.  And if more hipsters show up i will vomit." Listen to this guy. All the cool kids are doing it. And even if you don't, it's already over and done, because the place is now going to host a pointless nightly debate of "who's down enough to be here and who isn't."

Damn it all to hell.

* Photo above from Hadley's Sept. '06 post on Gold Room at LA TACO, which describes another interesting system to keep the invasion in check.

Man from Philadelphia rides L.A. subway, writes article

Having just spent a weekend in the grimey-at-heart Bay Area, where lack of understanding or appreciation of the L.A. universe remains a chronic ailment on the popular consciousness, I am especially feeling the wide-eyed awe of this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer tonight. It's about the still-in-process L.A. subway, which I found reason today to ride again:

L.A.'s high-speed transit is - are you sitting down, preferably on a subway bench? - based on the honor system. You can't crawl under the turnstiles to con Metro; there are none. No one collects a ticket. (The same is true of a few other systems around the world, notably the mostly new subway in Athens, Greece, and on South Jersey's three-year-old River Line.)

Granted, this is the sort of tone many -- no, most -- of L.A.'s residents would take if they undertook the same assignment. Nice to know it takes someone from "back East" to actually go and do it. (But he didn't spend much time on the "ghetto blue" line, of course.)

And for the record, Oakland's Fruitvale district really is part of L.A. and not the Bay Area (had delicious barbacoa street tacos, and consome in a foam cup). Also, that propoganda on an intra-state speed train, after the increasingly treacherous and traumatic drive down the I-5 (saw two accidents), is worth another viewing.

* Link via Curbed LA. Photo of descent into the Central Valley by akatsilometes.

Near tears, reporter recalls May Day melee *

Patricia Nazario of KPCC brought herself and nearly everyone in our enormous hotel conference room to tears with her detail-by-detail description of a confrontation with an LAPD Metro officer more than a month ago at MacArthur Park, during a panel at NAHJ:

Choking back tears, radio reporter Patricia Nazario described officers jabbing her with a baton, then knocking her over. "I have traveled by myself. I have been to Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. I have filed stories from those places and I have never had confrontations like this with the police. Nothing ever so frightening," said Nazario.

It was very intense to watch Nazario, still shaken, describe how she turned to try to identify the officer striking her and realized she could not see his face and that he wore no identification, making him as anonymous as the rest of the cops standing down on the crowd. "This guy could kill me and he could get away with it," she recalled thinking. Bratton sat three chairs away, stone-faced.

The attendees at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists' annual convention in San Jose were clearly still eager to hear about what happened at MacArthur Park on May 1, although here in L.A. we've generally moved on to more important matters like Paris Hilton's jail-time and who the mayor might be sleeping with -- although, indeed, at least one of those topics was also in heavy rotation in the cocktail chatter. On Friday, Bratton got points with people I talked to for showing up and tackling the questions head-on.

Other news from the student reporters at NAHJ: Schwarzenegger telling an audience of Spanish-language news reporters that people shouldn't watch Spanish-language news, an audio piece on the outsourcing of ethnic media in San Francisco, and another audio piece on the beefs between immigrant sureño and pocho norteño gangs in city of cholos San Jose, with interviews with gang members.

* On NAHJ: The convention looked thinner than other years, some noted. Think the $290 on-site single-day registration fee might have something to do with that? People come to NAHJ to meet recruiters and network for employment, which theoretically means they don't have 300 dollars lying around to pay to do this, nevermind hotel costs and travel. Or the fact that the convention is sponsored by huge, huge corporate firms.

* Photo by AP.

** THURSDAY update: The Daily News' Rachel Uranga wrote the story I quoted above and also blogged the Bratton panel at NAHJ and Nazario's emotional comments. Bratton told the audience the LAPD was working on putting identification on officers' helmets.

Schwarzenegger hits snag at NAHJ -- surprise

The governor did terrible at the opening plenary session of the NAHJ convention, according to the LAT:

The governor drew gasps from some of the 700 people in the audience by suggesting that undocumented immigrants "have got to turn off the Spanish-language television" programs in order to learn English.

According to people still buzzing about the remark today, Pilar Marrero of La Opinion responded with something to the effect of, 'They're not learning English because they're busy working." More updates soon. Previously, "Silence and outrage on Schwarzenegger's 'Mexicans.'"

The gathering of the 'Hispanic' journalists

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists' 25th anniversary convention opened yesterday in San Jose, fitting for a such a large (and heavily sponsored) media organization that sprung from the founding of the still-kickin' California Chicano News Media Association. Twenty five years later, NAHJ is so modern, so mainstream, even Lou Dobbs is a member!

I'll be there starting later today, to cover some sessions and to speak on a panel about how to write "about" "Hispanics" "for" "Hispanics." Or, in other words, on the process of merging the gringo lens with the Latin lens in telling a good story about the new realities in our cities and neighborhoods. The panel is moderated by Cynthia Garza of The Houston Chronicle and is scheduled for Friday afternoon. I hear there's lots of good panels and workshops planned, as always. Also on Friday, LAPD chief William Bratton is scheduled to speak on the May Day melee and fall-out. Gov. Schwarenegger spoke at Wednesday night's opening plenary. (The same opening plenary that the freshly elected -- and not divorcing -- Antonio Villaraigosa spoke at two years ago in Fort Worth.) Of course, a big reason so many people, Latinos and non-Latinos alike, look forward to the NAHJ gathering is all the corporate-sponsored parties and cocktail hours. Latinos + journalists = lots'a wholesome boozin'.

Thank you, readers and friends, for all the comments and feedback lately, particularly on the Asco feature. Really good letters and calls have been coming in. And thank you, NAHJ, for linking to my first May Day post on the NAHJ homepage.

* Here's a pertinent post from the Intersections archive: "Talking immigration and the media, Part 2."

This week in gangs: No Guns, brought to you by lots of guns

Some L.A. politicians and anti-gang workers probably can't wait for Hector Marroquin to just disappear. According to Jeffrey Anderson's story on the scrambling away from responsibility for the alleged gun-runner behind the gang-prevention organization No Guns, lots of people seemed to have an idea that Marroquin never left the life. But, did anyone do anything about it? Barely. See "This week in gangs: Once a banger, always a banger?" for more details.

Anderson is also on the web-only update today on the arrest of South L.A. mega landowner and supermarket chain chief George Torres. Federal agents arrested Torres at his home in Arcadia, but the charges haven't been unsealed. With his well-documented ties to the Vignalis, chances are it won't look good.

On the fraud front, Hector Becerra details the exploits of Tony Nava, Jr., a shiny-clean hustler who defrauded as many as 80 people by leveraging his ties to the Mongols bike gang:

The alleged scheme involved persuading people to invest in "hard-money" loans — high- interest loans to people who couldn't borrow from banks. In the beginning, Ramirez said, Nava offered returns on the investments, which were not large.

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Eventually, people began to get suspicious because they were not receiving investment returns from Nava, Berger said. But he said initially they declined to go to authorities because Nava made it no secret that his brother, Art Nava, was a leader of the Mongols gang.

* Photo of Hector Marroquin from LAWeekly.com.

Death and boxing in Tijuana: Honoring El Tiburon

Abel Rojas, my mother's biological father, died in a car accident in Tijuana on June 2. El Mexicano, a daily paper, reported the following Monday that Rojas had a heart attack behind the wheel and hit a couple of parked cars. The paper said the police, in an "act of negligence," hauled him to a station instead of a hospital. His death would have been news nonetheless. In his day Rojas was a beloved fighter and trainer in Tijuana, traveling to the great cities of the world on the boxing circuit. He was known as "El Tiburon," or The Shark. Later in his life, he became a writer of short stories, commentaries, and hosted a program on AM radio. El Mexicano described him as a "legend of Tijuana boxing," and "the patriarch" of the city's boxing scene. He also once operated a cantina in downtown Tijuana, named, of course, El Tiburon.

A week or so after he died I went with my brother and mother to Tijuana to visit with two of El Tiburon's sisters who travelled from Cananea, in the state of Sonora, to collect his ashes and return them to the city where he was born. Tiburon was a true Tijuana original, raised there since he was very young. But as his sisters described Cananea, it sounded like a wonderful place to rest for eternity. They said their hometown was high in the mountains, and that it snows. I found these pictures on a local Cananea website. It was first settled in 1760, and became a center of copper mining. El Tiburon's sisters told us immigrants from the south, on their way north, have been pouring into Cananea and rapidly changing its character.

Like death, family ties are never neat and tidy. My mother was raised by a loving stepfather. But on a few ocassions she took us to meet El Tiburon at a Tijuana diner, to hear about his adventures and memories. He went to Scotland and back for a match in less than 36 hours, he boasted. He told us Tijuana was once a lovely city, not as big and hectic and modern as it is now. El Tiburon had chocolate brown skin, and bushy white eyebrows. Everywhere he went people knew him.

I've never been to Cananea, but maybe one day I'll go. Abel Rojas was 74.

'Born in East L.A.' -- in real life

A Lancaster construction worker is lost in Tijuana right now because authorities deported him, mistaking him for an illegal immigrant. It all started when Pedro Guzman, 29, was arrested for trespassing at a junkyard and sentenced to jail. About a month ago, he called his mother from Tijuana and said he didn't know why he had been deported:

His mother, Maria Carbajal, said she spent the last month in Tijuana living out of her car while searching in vain for her son. She said neither the U.S. nor the Mexican government has helped in her search for him. [...] She said she left fliers bearing her son's image at the morgue, hospitals, cantinas, churches and shelters for poor immigrants.

Guzman, who is developmentally disabled, was born in L.A. The ACLU is suing. And the movie gods are shaking their heads in sadness at this unfortunate case of life imitating art:

Here's hoping they find Pedro safe and sound.

Recalling L.A.'s Night Stalker: 'Beyond good and evil'

"I grew up in a yellow house by a freeway, a common target for the killer who terrorized Southern California in my youth," starts Dennis Romero's piece on Richard Ramirez in the current Tu Ciudad, aka Your City, informally:

To this day, on hot summer nights, he slips into my mind's window -- this shadowy intruder -- and stands at the foot of my bed. I try to yell out and fend him off, but I am frozen, my words escaping only as muffled, terrified moans, their volume increasing until they jolt me awake in a cold sweat.

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With a cast of Latinos, including the suspect, investigators, and captors, the case put the international spotlight on Mexican-American L.A. -- good and evil -- like never before.

Ramirez, the "Night Stalker," dominates an imagined L.A. of fear and darkness like no one else, and continues to fascinate people to this day. His creepy drawings from Death Row probably have lots to do it. Romero's piece details the amazing mob capture of Ramirez on a street in East L.A. on August 31, 1985: "After sunset, a block party broke out on Hubbard Street. All of Southern California, it seemed, was celebrating Ramirez's capture. [...] We shared and then shed some collective guilt. One of our own had lost all boundaries of humanity -- and some of our own had brought him down."

But in the end, whenever the end happens, Ramirez might consider himself ultimately triumphant. His famous words before his sentencing for 13 brutal killings: "You don't understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil. [...] I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within us all. That's it."

* Original drawing of Ramirez courtesy of artist Kathryn Garcia.

Report: Google, watching everything, is hostile to privacy

Of all the web firms ranked in a report by Privacy International, only Google has been pegged as "hostile to privacy." The report calls the company's practices a "race to the bottom" of privacy standards for web users, BBC reports:

Privacy International placed Google at the bottom of its ranking because of the sheer amount of data it gathers about users and their activities; because its privacy policies are incomplete and for its poor record of responding to complaints.

It's a major slam, and a scary idea for people who use to Google for searches, RSS reading, email, maps, calendar -- basically to operate their entire virtual life. The Guardian's technology blog discusses the impact to Google, which is the same company that recently peeped into people's houses all over America with their new "Street View" feature. Now's a good time to reacquaint yourself with the Mother Jones piece from last year, "Is Google Evil?" and with Googlewatch.org. And, if you use Gmail like I do, to seriously consider making a switch. Any ideas?

* Whoops, they just updated the Reader interface and it erased all my subscriptions!

Vamos a la playa, oh oh-oh oh-oh ...

The beach is better when you don't actually have to go there:

From Righeira, long-ago Italian hepcats.  (Thanks, J., K.!)

A Dada daydream in Chicanoville, USA (Updated)

My feature on the history and legacy of Asco is published this week. When you first see an Asco piece, there's that moment where your eyes widen. It's surprise at the unusual and new, but at the same time, a feeling of recognition:

Long before flash mobs, Gamboa began perfecting the practice of the spontaneous art action when he and three other East L.A. artists formed the venerated avant-garde performance group known as Asco, named after the Spanish word for “nausea.” Here you had, in the middle of the 1970s, four style-conscious art jesters — three men, one woman — cavorting in outrageous outfits around the streets and empty lots of East L.A., making a scene, actions sprinkled with cutting social commentary, then disappearing. A Dada daydream in Chicanoville, USA.

I want to thank the many, many people I interviewed over several months for this piece, for their frankness, insight, encouragement, and help in pointing me toward crucial primary and secondary research sources. It was a very intense process.

* UPDATES: Here are transcripts of interviews Jeffrey Rangel of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art conducted with Gronk, Harry Gamboa, Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herron III between 1997 and 2000. The interviews are extensive.

Here is an image of "The Black and White Mural" by Gronk and Herron, at Estrada Courts in East L.A. I paid a visit to this site one night, and also to Herron's seminal "The Wall that Cracked Open," in an alley in City Terrace, behind a very fragrant panaderia.

One point I did not expand upon in "The Art Outlaws of East L.A." is the growing academic and curatorial consensus that Asco functionally consisted of five core members. Early on, actor Humberto Sandoval participated in many key Asco actions and films. He's collaborated with Gamboa on later films as well.

* Photo above is courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr.

Repeat after me, Eastside is ... Eastside

That would exclude, friends, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Hollywood, Koreatown, downtown, and every other neighborhood called the "Eastside" in certain lazy historical imaginations. Eastside is East of the L.A. River, a wonderful world where the powers that be have always felt it's okay to build freeways over lakes (see above).

I'm willing to let a "I'm going to the Eastside" slide every so often, when referring to Echo Park and thereabouts, if it comes from an individual who rolls the eyes knowing that what they just said is sort of ridiculous. The fact of the matter is in many cases when people use "Eastside" today, informed or not, they're referring to a cultural kind of mind-frame that belies borders. But the outright erasure of the true Eastside, especially in the print media, is just unacceptable. Read on at Metroblogging LA, where EL CHAVO! essentially dismembers the new monthly magazine that seeks to gentrify cater to the arty-boho-chic northern flanks of the city's metropolitan core:

For our first lesson, turn to the page marked Hollenbeck Park! Built in the past (how's that for relative historicism?) Hollenbeck Park came to be around the same time some of the other major city parks began to dot the LA landscape: Central Park (now known as Pershing Square), Eastlake Park (now known as Lincoln Park), and Westlake Park (now known as MacArthur Park). Central, East, West, seems quite simple to me.

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Unfortunately, Hollenbeck has been reduced from its original size, since a freeway was built right over it in the 60's. If you could see thru concrete, you might recognize this park: it's the one you drive over when you're switching from Interstate 5 to the Santa Ana Freeway, or vice versa. What a coincidence that freeways were often built over or through the neighborhoods of working class Mexicans, a truly remarkable case of hilarious bad luck!

More discussion at View from a Loft. * Photo by Lincoln Heights guru El CHAVO!

The bad wrap on the 'death' of the boompa beat

Is reggaeton dying? Sound Taste, a blog by New York journalist Carolina Gonzalez, has this smart discussion about the debate on the "death" of reggaeton. It's that driving boompa! boompa! boompa! beat that is the soundtrack of the streets from Gotham to L.A., and that lots of people, many Latin-oriented thinkers included, love to hate:

While reggaetón is not my favorite genre -- I basically stick to Tego Calderón, Ivy Queen and Calle 13 (who cross genres) -- it's definitely a phenomenon, deeply rooted in 80s Spanish-language hip hop, dancehall and "la guagua aérea," back-and-forth movement between Borinquen and the mainland. And even if it drops off the mainstream's radar, it will go on.

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Over Memorial Day weekend, had a discussion with my friend Mare about this. She made the excellent observation that reggaetón is, at heart (at least so far), dance music, and that dance music is always accused of being repetitive, uncreative. She's right. This happened to disco, to house. Heck, I know folks who say that about merengue, because to their ears, the rhythm sounds always the same. And the fact that these genres come out of and are patronized by, primarily brown and black people, gives these dismissive pronouncements a racist tinge.

It should be old news. Every generation or so a hybrid urban sound emerges in America and leaves a stamp on the culture, drawing a necessary backlash from those made uncomfortable by the new and confrontational. As Sound Taste notes, it's hard not to feel like reggaeton gets such a bad wrap because it's basically music for young inner-city immigrants. And particularly in L.A., for young Central Americans.

Could that change? VivirLatino points out a website that has an original and catchy reggaeton jam praising Barack Obama. ¿Como se dice? ¿Como se llama? Obama! Obama! the tune goes. We did the marchas, y ahorra vamos a votar! Yup, the power of the beat is irrefutable. Witness the clever Spanglishized wordplay of Calle 13, and never again say that reggaeton cannot be witty, subversive, elastic, and fun:

Sorta makes you just want to go somewhere and make figure-8's with your hips, right? * Pictured above, Daddy Yankee.

'Jesus is my health insurance'

You tell that Michael Moore, and his little "movie," to just shut it up already. "Gladys Parker" doesn't need a universal national health plan in the U.S., the kind they use in most other developed Western democracies, so that maybe she could avoid dying on the floor of a hospital while a janitor sweeps around her writhing body. No sir! Jesus is her health insurance:

Why, just the other day I went to County General because my legs were giving me awful pains, and this nurse starting asking me questions about providers and what was my health care plan and wanting my insurance card so she could copy it. I said, "Child, I don't need all that fancy paperwork—not as long as I have Jesus in my heart."

No matter what sorts of hardships and illnesses life throws my way, I always count on the Lord to oversee my managed care. So I told that nurse to send my bills right up to heaven.

Link at The Onion. * Photo by Brian Vander Brug.

This week in gangs: Once a banger, always a banger?

Hector "Weasel" Marroquin (pictured above, with his son), the anti-gang worker who people say never really left the shadowy embrace of 18th Street, is back in trouble. This time, for selling firearms to undercover federal agents. Jeffrey Anderson at LA Weekly.com has the details of how the arrest went down. In the L.A. Times story, respected civil rights attorney Connie Rice bluntly states: "I never for a moment believed that he ever left the life. ... I always thought he was using the system." See Anderson's previous look at Marroquin's shady dealings, with Christine Pelisek, in "Broken Bridges."

Meanwhile, gang-related homicides in Los Angels are down down down, the LAPD says. But keep in mind its only June, and the hottest months of the year are not even here yet:

Police in high-crime areas such as Newton Division and the neighboring 77th Street Division are accustomed to sharp, inexplicable spikes in crime. "We go 11 weeks without a homicide, and then we'll have three in three days," Arsiniega said.

Gang violence in L.A. may be down, but it seems to be soaring in the high desert outpost of Victorville, where intervention efforts are starting earlier than ever. (With relatives in Modesto, Tracy, Stockton, and Fresno, I've learned to never doubt cholos from the interior; don't they always seem more hard-core than city cholos?)

At the S.F. Chron, ACLU Nothern California chapter director Maya Harris has a compelling op-ed about the values and priorities in the new state budget, pointing out that California pays more to incarcerate its people than to educate them. And at NPR, Mandalit del Barco files another documentary piece from El Salvador on the inexorable reach of the Mara Salvatrucha.

* L.A. Times photo above by Carlos Chavez.

The happiest kid on the planet?

While we're on the subject of finding happiness or fleeting bliss, please observe how it's done in real-time, from sea to starboard:

Link to TrackyBirthday, a singer-performer in Germany.

Reading: El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma

I thought I'd be done with the hedonism/nihilism self-destruction confession narrative after "I Pass Like Night," but months ago in Mexico, Miguel Calderon told me I had to find "El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma" by Luis Zapata, to see just how glorious rotten living can be when filtered as high fiction. The novel, which I found in the Spanish-language section of the downtown Central Library, follows the exploits of Adonis Garcia, a male street hustler in 1970s Mexico City.

Adonis -- cynical, lonesome, an addict of various substances, blissfully perverted -- wanders the city's restaurants, subway stations, parks and cinemas, collecting experiences as a prostitute, live-in sextoy for the extravagantly wealthy, and just a general fiend for sex with men. It's shocking how far he goes to satisfy whatever twisted cravings burn at his heart. Even so, anyone can come to love Adonis for his frankness and wanderlust, his verve.

"Vampiro" is written in a streaming style, without punctuation or proper sentences, as if a voice recorder were capturing Adonis' rambling recollections over several days. Apparently there's an English translation, retitled "Adonis Garcia." See this interesting post on it at The Mex Files.

"El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma" is a raw, grating story, and often very funny. The narrator has a very satisfying sense of humor and perspective. As soon as his voice trails off for good, you begin to miss Adonis, a nickname he acquires on the streets. "Si uno no es feliz es por pendejo," he says. (Basically, If one isn't happy it's because one's an idiot.)

The sick bastard, though, would surely never have been invited to join the ranks of "The Savage Detectives."