Intersections

Mexico's ice prince

Mexico's lone Olympian competing in the Vancouver Games, which end on Sunday, is 51 years old and is officially a "Prinz." Read more about Hubertus von Hohenlohe --and his bodysuit -- at my current post at La Plaza.

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.!

Skull rack on the ceiling

Above, a view of a very life-like (the puns write themselves) tzompantli on the ceiling of Las Duelistas, my neighborhood pulquería. The artist, who is always just ... hanging around, applied skulls and one human-looking face in relief above his painted ones.

The entire pulquería is frescoed in this fashion. It's really a sight to see, and it looks like lately, more and more are coming to check it out. Randomly last Friday on my regular stop-in, I noticed a few wandering gringos in for a fresh curado. The joint was packed, loud, and smelly -- just as it should be.

Las Duelistas, by the way, has a Twitter feed. * Previously, "Pulqueria love."

Reading: John Ross and his 'El Monstruo'

* Above, a visitor to the Templo Mayor museum, with the ruins, Metropolitan Cathedral, and Torre Latinoamericana in panorama.

I'm about two thirds of the way through "El Monstruo," the new book on Mexico City by John Ross, right at the part where he describes the aftermath of the great 1985 earthquake. It's an important personal date for Ross. That was when the author and former Beat poet moved into the Hotel Isabel in the historic center of D.F. -- where he's lived ever since, as he so vividly tells it in his opening chapter.

So far, it's an enormously entertaining read.

Ross, an unapologetic "activist journalist" well into his senior years, offers a spirited people's history sort of take on the city he calls 'The Monster,' starting all the way back with visions of the first land animals and later humans who wandered the Valley of Mexico.

His description of the Aztec custom of ritual sacrifice at the Templo Mayor is especially startling:

Every year, tens of thousands of young men, brainwashed into believing the sacrifice of their blood would keep the sun up in the sky, were herded up to Tenochtitlán, lined up at the foot of the great twin temples to Huitzilopotchtli and Tláloc, and led one by one up the 114 steps to their doom.

At the apex of the altar, four priests would spread-eagle the prospective victim upon the blood-caked killing slab while a fifth would plunge the obsidian tecpatl deep into his belly, burrow upwards through the soft flesh, and yank out his still steaming heart, holding it aloft for a fleeting moment for the sun to feast upon the bloody, palpitating organ and then stuffing it through the Hummingbird god's gore-encrusted mouth hole. Then the body was released, rolling down the stone steps to the base of the pyramid, where the butcher boys hacked off its choice parts and tossed the torsos into the canoes to be distributed in other temples to feed other gods. The leftovers were thrown into the wild animals in the Emperor's menagerie.

While Ross writes with refreshing passion and verve, his excitement sometimes leads to some light fact-fudging.

He says early on, for instance, that the Torre Mayor is 85 stories tall, although it is actually only 55 stories. Later, he pegs the assassination of guerrilla rebel Ruben Jaramillo to 1963, then just a few pages later, says it happened in 1962 (when it actually occurred, as I double-checked in Laura Castellanos's "Mexico Armado," the definitive history of guerrilla movements in Mexico during the PRI era).

These are just a couple easy examples of accuracy issues in Ross's book, and from what I hear, other journalists in Mexico have noted factual quibbles in some of his other work. Thankfully, the bibliography at the end of "El Monstruo" is extensive, and Ross is clearly well read.

In the end, it is clear that Ross knows Mexico City -- particular the story of the Centro Histórico, and the people who populate his favorite hang-out, the historic Cafe La Blanca -- as well as someone knows their own home. His "El Monstruo" is an active urban history, written with true love.

* I'll be posting more excerpts from "El Monstruo" later. Here is a strong review in the San Antonio Express-News, and an interview with Ross during recent stop in Berkeley. The author is currently touring with his title in El Norte.

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.

Sonidero on the streets

Urban D.F. cumbia is a very particular dance style and subculture, known colloquially as "sonidero." As you can see in the above Grupo Kual clip, it's jerky, jumpy, and yet fluid. That means gender roles, too. At Mexico City sonideros, seeing a trans woman working a circle of eager male partners is always a highlight.

The sonidero takes place on the street, usually in "rough" barrios such as Tepito or La Merced, and includes a unique transnational element. Shout-outs and messages on signs are transmitted to the M.C., who reads them back. The entire sonidero event is recorded and then turns up on the streets in the form of bootleg discs. The discs make it across the border, and the shout-outs reach their destination.

There's a New York Times article from 2003 about it. Here in D.F., the Proyecto Sonidero is documenting the sonidero subculture, paying special attention to its roots in Colombia. Myself, I'm a fan of Sonoramico (check out their dramatic site intro), but I'm glad I don't feel the urge to over-document this subculture. At a recent event in Tepito, three foreigners I ran into were later held up for their photo equipment.

Sonideros on the street can be ... overwhelming. People are often smoking cigarettes, smoking herb, inhaling paint solvent, and doing a lot of drinking. Speakers keep their bass on blast. People are pressing up against you on all sides, and, late into the dance, fights are not uncommon.

There's a lot more to the scene, of course, so if you're a resident expert, feel free to chime in.

* Thanks for the clip, Mario!

The everyday, resplendent in aluminum

The Casa Barragán is a museum that still feels lived in. The home of Luis Barragán (d. 1988), one Mexico's most revered modern architects, is maintained just as he left it, an intimate homage to his stream-lined, integrated design idiom that earned the architect the second-ever Pritzker Prize, in 1980. His books, his bedding, his religious icons, all in their place, as if waiting for the master's return.

Above, how it all looks under aluminum, for an intervention of the space by artist Francisco Ugarte. As curated by Viviana Kuri, the project consists of wrapping or covering nearly every object and piece of furniture inside the house in aluminum paper. Just about everything.

The effect is resplendent. As much of Barragán's work plays with opening and abstracting space with natural light, Ugarte's intervention finds light bouncing upon new corners and surfaces throughout the structure. Here is a Barragán's austere bed, under aluminum. And here's a view from inside a sitting room to the cocktail crowd on the rear patio. Ugarte apparently found nothing worth wrapping on Barragán's spectacular roof patio, where there is no shortage of light by any means.

La Jornada says the Ugarte intervention is up for two weeks, meaning it would close this Saturday, February 20. Casa Barragán is located just a block from metro Constituyentes, near the presidential residence at Los Pinos, on the south side of Chapultepec Park.

On Alexander McQueen *

Alexander McQueen, who died on Thursday at the age of 40, was a true genius of fashion design. He was a visionary, an innovator, an unabashed showman, and not the least significant, a master tailor, beginning as an apprentice on London's famed Savile Row at the age 16.

Many of his collections are outstanding and vigorously push the boundaries of their moment. And they were only getting better and better.

His last, the Spring/Summer 2010 collection (called Plato's Atlantis), saw McQueen's innovative streak reach a climax. The robotic track crane cameras fed live footage of the runway show and audience to a digital screen and to the Internet, bending the technological boundaries of the very experience of a fashion show like never before. But the clothing -- the sort of synthetic reptilian/alien quality to the fabrics, the graceful yet dynamic cuts, and those famous claw shoes -- are what really engulf the eye. Watch it in parts here and here.

You can browse McQueen's collections going back to 2001 at Style.com. His witchy Fall 2007 collection was the most gothic and hardest to swallow for some; the models walked along a red pentagram.

Read New York Times critic Cathy Horyn's tribute to Lee Alexander McQueen here, with narrated video. The NYT review of another recent showstopper of a McQueen collection, Fall 2009, is worth reading again. The slideshow is here.

* Photo above via the Alexander McQueen Fan page on Facebook.

Return to Monte Albán

Above, visitors to the Monte Albán archaeological site near Oaxaca city, January 30. The site is breath-taking -- rising 1,300 feet from the floor of the surrounding valleys, a mountaintop shaved away by the Zapotecs who built upon it a grand, complex city that shone for one thousand years. The last time I was here was in 2002, when I took my ritual post-university solo backpacking trip through southern Mexico.

On the afternoon I visited, I watched as a rainstorm approached the mountain from the east. I stood on the highest platform on the site's northern cluster and watched the rain roll menacingly in our direction, blanketing and shrouding the homes and buildings far below, until we were inside the cloud itself.

Soaking, pounding rain. A wall of rain. People rushed to huddle inside the Monte Albán museum, shivering. I hung back. I stood alone on the platforms and arid fields, drenched, taking my time to descend to any van that was heading back down the hill.

Rain is noisy but it also carries a curious kind of silence. It's just you and the elements. It was totally worth it.

* Previously, "Tattoo shops in Oaxaca," "Beef consomé," "Tlaloc ate babies," "Rain on Easter Sunday," "An über-hip version of the rain god?"

Holden Cualfield as Howard Zinn

Reclusive author J.D. Salinger and crusading historian Howard Zinn died on the same day this year, January 27. In honor of these two greats, Hilobrow offers a quick history of the United States in the voice of Salinger's famous young protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Here's how it starts:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is how the Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look and that kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Read it here. Hilobrow is an intriguing new Web repository for the discriminating brainiac. * Graphic above via NYT.

Tattoo shops in Oaxaca

The Zapotecs must have practiced tattoo, right? Above, a sign outside a tattoo shop in Oaxaca, speculating that yes, it must have been so. Click here for a sample of tattoos at another shop, down a rough-looking alleyway, where an old homeboy was holding court in a room that to me felt like it belonged on the border.

I was rolling around the scene with tattoo and gallery artist Dr. Lakra, who lives in Oaxaca, for an upcoming piece. * More details then.

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.

In Mexico, thousands ask about adopting from Haiti

From my current piece at The Faster Times - Mexico:

Almost immediately, officials later said, inquiries began streaming into the tiny Haitian embassy located here. More than 2,500 calls, emails, or visits were recorded between Monday and Wednesday alone, said Moise Dorce, the ranking diplomat at the embassy. Those thousands is a remarkable number given that no adoption accord or apparatus exists between the two countries. And given also that so many children in Mexico as it is are homeless or orphaned.

For a bit of comparison, only about 300 such requests were reported in Brazil.

Yolanda Martinez, a 50-year-old housewife, was one of the hopeful visitors to the embassy last Tuesday. She said she had two grown sons, and was moved by the images of suffering in Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake. "I am a housewife, my husband works, so I would like, with all my love and with all my heart, to adopt a girl," Martinez said expressively, clutching her hands together. "I don’t have daughters."

Read the whole report here. Intense images at The Big Picture of Haiti three weeks later, including a private security guard shooting and killing a suspected looter, and a shot of several photojournalists standing behind a police officer, clicking away.

For more on that, check out this raw interview with photographer Daniel Morel about the news media saturation in Haiti, at Lens, the New York Times photography blog:

No, no, no. I mean, they're playing with people here. CNN is playing with people. Anderson Cooper is playing with people. They're doing show business with people's life here. I went to the hospital. They were there. People are complaining to me. The TV's supposed to be people's voice. They're not doing that here. They're doing show business here. They don't take these stories so seriously. I don't know why. Every single day, I come out on the street and I heard people complaining to me.

The whole Q&A, here.

* A couple more interesting posts I'm seeing at The Faster Times - World: "An Ethiopian Funeral in Beirut" and "America Abandons Manned Lunar Missions, India Embraces Them."

* Image above by Daniel Morel/Corbis, via Lens.

Beef consomé

Late late night -- nearly morning -- on a marginally central corner of Oaxaca de Juarez, a food stand sent straight from heaven above. It's beef tacos but only as an excuse to offer beef consomé, as seen in the lower right of the image. Savory, spicy, hot, perfect for a rainy night on unfamiliar streets.

* Taken at some point on the morning of Saturday, Jan. 30. I'll be posting more images from Oaxaca, where I spent the weekend on assignment, later this week.