Intersections

Overwhelmed at the Haitian embassy in Mexico

Above, unused and undelivered water and supplies piled up outside the Haitian embassy in Mexico City, around 1 p.m., 26 January 2010. Volunteers and authorities at the embassy say they can no longer receive donations there; they are overwhelmed.

Today, another Mexican naval ship left port with tons of aid for "Puerto Príncipe." President Felipe Calderón had said the day after the quake struck that "no one knows better than us" the current plight of Haiti. Calderón was on hand Wednesday in Acapulco to see the ship, the 'Zapoteco,' depart port.

* More later.

Bicentenario Watch: A reassuring statement, kinda

Above, a non-commercial announcement from the Mexico City metro workers union, stuck where some company's advertisement should be. In English it says:

National Union of the Collective Transport System, January 2010.

In celebration of the Bicentennial of our Independence and the Centennial of the struggle that gave meaning to the Mexican Revolution, the Metro Workers have prepared ourselves to permanently maintain the trains in which you travel.

-- National Executive Committee.

The message gave me pause. What is the union saying here, stripping away the laborese?

Here's the meaning I took, purely as interpretation: The organized workers of the metro -- one of the busiest in the world -- are reassuring its users that if some kind of phantom-like social upheaval hits Mexico this year, or next, or the year after -- and who's to say that's unlikely or not, either way? -- the workers will keep the trains running. No matter what. Heavy.

The one-way fare, by the way, is now 3 pesos, up from 2.

* Related at TFT, "New Subway Line Redraws Mexico City's Map."

Slim as master of Mexico's digital future *

Above, a visitor to Carlos Slim's Telmex Institute in the historic center of Mexico City, using an interactive map showing wireless Internet locations for Telmex customers in the area. Check out my take on Carlos Slim as master of Mexico's digital future at The Faster Times.

* NOTE ON THE FASTER TIMES: I update at The Faster Times Mexico page about once a week, with selective "quick links" added more regularly on the page's left-hand column. Consider clicking around, and supporting the new-media experiment. The Faster Times is a rare online news source with contributors based around the globe. Check it out.

* NOTE ON INTERSECTIONS: More than three years of nearly uninterrupted updating, hundreds of posts, nearly two thousand comments, thousands of weekly visitors, I still rely on your PayPal contributions or helpful clicking of my "Commercials" to keep Intersections going. This is just another friendly reminder.

Browse around my archives based on dates or categories: Art, Tribes, Sexualities, Justice & Society, Borderlands, and so on. You can also still catch my feed on the news page at LA Weekly.com. In the coming weeks, I'll be revising and organizing my links bars. As always, your feedback is sincerely appreciated.

Evo!

Above, the head of state of Bolivia, Evo Morales, during a ceremony at the Tiwanaku site marking the "re-foundation" of his country. More here. Evo, an Aymara, also marked the start of his second term today by fortifying his hold on Bolivia's natural resources.

Go here for a Democracy Now! interview with Morales during the Copenhagen summit, where he said, "We cannot end global warming without ending capitalism." Heavy.

Sak Pasé **

A song for Haiti, "Sak Pasé," by The Welfare Poets. Listen.

* Thank you, Anita K. ** NOTE: Intersections remains dark for "quince días" for new year house-cleaning and other deadlines.

Help for 'our brothers' in Haiti *

As China suffered so terribly in 2008, and Indonesia last year, Haiti is suffering right now.

Tuesday's shallow 7.0-earthquake has devastated Port-au-Prince and nearly destroyed the civil infrastructure of a nation that has seen enough pain in the span of its free history. The UN mission director in Haiti, the Port-au-Prince archbishop, and hip-hop star Jimmy O. Barikad are believed to have been killed. Tens of thousands more are feared dead.

From Bob Poff, a Salvation Army director in Haiti, on experiencing the quake:

When the earthquake struck, I was driving down the mountain from Petionville. Our truck was being tossed to and fro like a toy, and when it stopped, I looked out the windows to see buildings “pancaking” down, like I have never witnessed before. Traffic, of course, came to a stand-still, while thousands of people poured out into the streets, crying, carrying bloody bodies, looking for anyone who could help them. We piled as many bodies into the back of our truck, and took them down the hill with us, hoping to find medical attention. All of them were older, scared, bleeding, and terrified. It took about 2 hours to go less than 1 mile. Traffic was horrible, devastation was everywhere, and suffering humanity was front and center.

Here is roadside video capturing the shaking and collapse of buildings. More video here of the aftermath. You can hear people screaming in agony and shock among the rubble. Aftershocks are still terrifying survivors. Journalist Erik Parker is tweeting updates and photos.

From a Reuters dispatch:

Scattered bodies were laid out on sidewalks, neatly wrapped in sheets and blankets. Voices cried out from the rubble. "Please take me out, I am dying. I have two children with me," a woman told a Reuters journalist from under a collapsed kindergarten in the Canape-Vert area of the capital.

We can help. The NYT Lede blog lists relief organizations taking donations. On Twitter, Wyclef Jean is asking people to donate quickly via Yele. The Matador Network, an independent travel magazine, is organizing a volunteer mission. The Haitian diaspora is mobilizing. Check out also the efforts of Architecture for Humanity.

In Mexico, the president asked citizens to stand in solidarity with the people of Haiti. Relief and donation centers are opening up, centering on the Haitian embassy in Mexico City. Three Mexican Air Force planes tonight are carrying 50 tons of aid to Port-au-Prince. On AM news radio, announcers are referring to "our brothers" in the Caribbean.

* ADD: Oscar Garza posts a song for Haiti: "That's my blood down there." 

* Previously on Intersections, "Mourning in China," "A Friday shake: Earthquake in Mexico City."

* Image above, widely circulated, via FT.

'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.

Paquita la del Barrio: 'I respect the narcos'

The iconic Mexican singer Paquita la del Barrio caused one of those minor celebrity scandals when she admitted a few weeks ago that she has performed for narcos, and isn't shamed by that in the least: "I've performed for drug dealers. They're cultured people. My respect goes out to them."

She added that one "doesn't realize it until you get there." In any case, her comments reflect the double-mind that artists face in a society touched top-to-botttom by the narco cartels. Sing for them when they ask you to, or face consequences for turning them down. Or worse.

'Plata o plomo,' as they say. 'Money or gunshot.'

Take the case that Paquita was reacting to when she made her "work is work" comments -- the arrest of a colleague. Norteño singer Ramon Ayala and several other performers were detained during a raid of an exclusive narco party in Tepoztlan in mid-December. Ayala is currently serving 40 days of "preventive" jail time, authorities said. The singer apparently missed the community-friendly "festival of lights" he puts on for the kids in his home city of Hidalgo, Texas.

* Above, Paquita doing her incomparable hit, "Rata de Dos Patas."

Back to the water

Sunset at Imperial Beach a few days ago. At the beach at sunset heaven and earth become one. I keep telling my local friends and siblings, "The beach is just two miles that way. Why aren't you there, like, everyday??"

Call it the perspective of the urbanly land-locked. Today, it's a lazy mid-week afternoon. The beach -- again -- is just a couple of miles away. I'm grabbing my chanclas, and I'm out the door ...

* Previously, "Sunday at the beach."

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.

The Burj Dubai, our saddest super-tall

On Monday the tallest building on planet Earth -- by a lot -- opens in the tiny and troubled Arab emirate of Dubai. Designed by Chicago-based Adrian Smith, the Burj Dubai tower is more than 2,600 feet and 160 stories of astounding engineering. But more than anything else, it's ... just sad on arrival.

From Christopher Hawthorne:

It is mostly empty, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Though most of its 900 apartments have been sold, virtually all were bought three years ago -- near the top of the market -- and primarily as investments, not as places to live. ("A lot of those purchases were speculative," Smith, in something of an understatement, told me in a phone interview.) And there's virtually no demand in Dubai at the moment for office space. The Burj Dubai has 37 floors of office space.

For a local look at the tower's rise and Dubai's fall, go to Arabian Money. And for a discussion of the Burj Dubai's "meteorological variability" -- as in, its diverse weather -- see Geoff Manaugh's BLDBLOG.

So when can we all go to the observation deck?

Gabriel Orozco, eager to disappoint New York

* Above, the artist at his Manhattan studio, 2001, via Life.

From the review of the current Gabriel Orozco mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker:

I vividly remember being outraged in the proverbial manner of a philistine exposed to modern art when, for his first solo gallery show in New York, in 1994, Orozco displayed, on the walls of the main room at Marian Goodman, nothing but four Dannon yogurt lids. I recovered, by and by, to take the artist's point, which amounted to disappointment as aesthetic therapy. The transparent, blue-rimmed, date-stamped, price-labelled little items were -- and are, at MOMA -- rather lovely, when contemplated without prejudice. Are they art? No. They are Dannon yogurt lids. The art part is a triggered awareness that the world teems with vernacular loveliness. If you overlook that, it's sad for you.

The NY Times piece on the show, by Deborah Sontag, goes into some of the debate over Orozco's relationship to the Mexican federal government in recent years. The retrospective is up until March 1. Here is the exhibition's intriguing interactive site, as well as a MoMA blog post describing the challenges inherent to the site design.

* Previously, "Gabriel Orozco takes on the desert."