Intersections

Mexicans confront racism with white, black doll video

** Originally published at World Now:

Is Mexico's an inherently racist society? Does the culture overwhelmingly favor those with light skin over those with dark skin? And if so, is that a legacy of European colonialism or present-day images in television and advertising?

These are among the thorny questions emerging in online forums in Mexico since a government agency began circulating a "viral video" showing schoolchildren in a taped social experiment on race.

The kids are seated at a table before a white doll and a black doll, and are asked to pick the "good doll" or the doll that most resembled them. The children, mostly brown-skinned, almost uniformly say the white doll was better or most resembled them.

One child in the video with mixed-race features says the white doll resembled him "in the ears."

"Which doll is the good doll?" a woman's voice asks the child.

"I am not afraid of whites," he responds, pointing to the white doll. "I have more trust."

Mexico's National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, in mid-December began circulating the video, modeled on the 1940s Clark experiments in the United States. The children who appear in it are mostly mestizos, or half-Spanish, half-Indian, and a message said they were taped with the consent of their parents and told to respond as freely as they could.

Mexicans who saw the video said online that they were dismayed but not surprised by its results, and also offered some criticism for the agency that produced it.

Commenters have noted that the options were "very limiting" by offering only black and white, or good and bad, when in Mexico the majority of the population is mixed-race, mostly European and indigenous, and to a lesser extent African and Asian backgrounds.

"It is a poorly formulated question, it is pretentious," one user said on the website VivirMexico.

Yet many also said the video reveals a deep-seated prejudice that is taught to children in Mexico from an early age.

In 2010, the Televisa network was criticized for showing actors in black face during the World Cup in South Africa. In May, the case of a black man who died after a confrontation with police in Mexico City led to protests against Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.

Wilner Metelus, a sociology professor and leader of a committee advocating for Afro-Mexicans and black immigrants, said the doll video shows how far the country must go to recognize the prevalence of racism and the need to educate young people. 

"The Mexican state still does not officially recognize Afro-Mexicans. There are few texts that talk about the presence of Africans in Mexico," Metelus said. "We need a project in the schools to show that the dark children are just the same as them, as the lighter children. And not only in schools; it is also necessary in Mexican families."

On Friday, the daily La Jornada published a report saying black immigrants in Mexico and the Afro-Mexican minority still suffer racism and discrimination that is not adequately acknowledged by the government.

"[Dark] skin color is still associated with foreignness," Luz Maria Martinez, a leading anthropologist on Afro-Mexican culture, told the newspaper. "We do not know how to value the indigenous culture, which is very rich, or the African culture, which is as great as any in the world."

Slow days in San Diego

Heading into Ocean Beach, San Diego, Thursday afternoon. Right where the San Diego River hits the coves and basins of Mission Bay, a gleaming cloud of white mist was heading toward the coastline, enveloping everything in its way.

By the time we got to the pier, it looked and felt like we were in San Francisco, everything wet, the sky gray-dark despite the sunlight above the clouds. The fog made the ground wet. Respite: BBQ burrito and onion rings on Newport Ave., the strip of bars and beach shops.

I tell my friends and family here to not ever forget that they basically live in Paradise. I mean it.

* Previously, "Coastal high."

Coatlicue in Chicago

A friend sent over this image of a hand-cut stencil representing Coatlicue, posted in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago around December 12. The artist says: 

I spray painted through the stencil on paper, then pasted it up late at night, its still there, haven't talked to people about it, have noticed guys checking it out though, my roommate took a photo of it while waiting for the bus and talked to a local who said he liked it, and it would make a nice tattoo.

The Coatlicue statue, now on view at the National Museum of Anthropology, is one of the most terrifying and mysterious Aztec structures unearthed in Mexico City during the Colonial period. From a piece for Nero Magazine, by the artist Tania Perez Cordova:

After some research, the university scholars realized that the sculpture was the Coatlicue goddess. The viceroy of the time, Viceroy Revillagigedo, had the sculpture placed at the Catholic University as a monument to ancient times. After a short while, the scholars realized that some locals where secretly worshiping the sculpture and thus decided that having it in public view could revive old Aztec beliefs among indigenous people. In order to protect the catholic Spanish colony, they chose to bury the monolith once again, this time under the university’s patio. However, before it was dug in, the scholar Antonio de Leon y Gama had time to make a detailed description of it.

Read more here.

* See also, "The anthropology museum, reconsidered."

The captions will remain in present participle

He's looking at a sweater. He's looking at cotton. He's looking at rubber boots. He's looking at a door. This is what Tumblr is made for: Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things. I went through 14 pages and decided to stop (and resume later).

Above, he's looking at a soft drink. From the In Memoriam page, added since the unexpected death of the "Dear Leader":

at last the dear leader has quit this mortal coil. i have decided, nonetheless, to keep the blog running as long as my photo archive will last. i don’t how long that will be but i figure that if you’re reading this, you never minded the lack of good taste in this form of humor, which i’m very proud of, and the fact that he’s dead will make little difference.

i have also decided to make no change on the captions. they will remain in the present participle, as always. much like his father still is, and forever will be, the ‘eternal president’ of north korea, so will kim jong-il forever look at things on this site. well, not forever, it’s not like i have infinite photos of the guy, but you know what i mean…

you may tune-in as regularly as before, or if you prefer, join the myriad of successors that have appeared. or do both, if you don’t suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder, which i hope you don’t.

The author of the blog professes to be based in Lisbon. On Facebook, more than 43,000 people like it.

I know about the knock-off, Kim Jong-Il Dropping the Bass. It's amusing and all. But I must say, nothing can compare with the purity of Kim Jong-Il ... simply ... Looking at Things.

* Elsewhere, an amazing set of photos from inside North Korea, at The Atlantic.

Five years of Intersections *

Today, Intersections turns five years old. Wow. How did this happen?

The blog started on 20 December 2006, in my apartment in Echo Park, Los Angeles, while I was a staff writer at the LA Weekly. I wanted to add more context to my stories and also share stuff I've read or watched online.

As the days and weeks passed, Intersections began evolving. I wanted it to be about media, food, music, art, sex and sexuality, spirituality, fashion, film, politics, a sprinkling of sports, on the planet, on literature, and on the future.

Almost immediately, Intersections started making an impact on the conversation in Los Angeles, thanks to early inter-webbing for which I remain grateful. In all my work, I had to consider a new dual role, a staffer producing copy for the machines, and an independent voice, answerable to no one but myself. 

Once I moved to Mexico in autumn 2007, Intersections turned into a running first-draft of my book, the place where I posted an early photo, interview, or observation that would turn into a chunk or chapter in "Down & Delirious in Mexico City." Since then, the blog is where I re-post and share my reporting work for the L.A. Times foreign bureau in Mexico City, where I am a contracted news assistant.

The blog has also sometimes been a platform for righteously pissed-off protest. There is, after all, nothing more valuable for a trafficker of facts than the freedom to say exactly as one can conclude bearing all the information at hand.

Sometimes I've wanted to quit this exercise, let it have an expiration date. Even in the lowest moments of frustration or stagnation, however, I end up reminding myself that this blog is now a part of me, my web with the world.

Intersections was and remains about the cross-currents in our cultures, the bridges (and divides) that exist between black and brown, North and South, high and low, the Tribes, and the cities that many of us call "home" -- Los Angeles, Mexico City, the San Diego-Tijuana border complex, the global sponge that belongs to all of us.

Like, the blog has rights. In other words, killing it would be unjust.

The first posts inside the blog are here, starting at the bottom of the page. All the archives and categories are here. Thank you, readers, friends, colleagues, for going along for the ride! I hope you keep checking in with me through 2012 and -- hopefully -- beyond.

* Photo: Blending in at the ruins of Mitla, Oaxaca, Nov. 2011.

Margarita Zavala, Calderon ask God to change the hearts of 'violent ones'

** Originally published at World Now:

President Felipe Calderon and First Lady Margarita Zavala on Sunday appeared with their children at Mexico's most revered site for Roman Catholics, the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and prayed for peace in a public display of devotion.

Calderon, a year from the end of his term, attended Mass at the church less than a week after the feast day for Our Lady of Guadalupe, the deeply charged national symbol dating to the conquest of the Aztec empire and a unifying cultural icon today.

On Sunday, the first lady offered the third prayer of the Mass, saying, according to one report, "In our family we have prepared this petition. We pray, Lord, for our dear Mexico. Give the Mexican nation the peace, hope and justice that it so needs."

Zavala also asked in prayer, "Touch with your love the hearts of the violent ones," a reference to the ongoing conflict embroiling the government, organized crime and paramilitary groups. News outlets later published photographs of the family crossing themselves in prayer.

The two are lifelong members of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, which was founded partly as a haven for devout Catholics during the long and aggressively secular rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Calderon has not shied away from referring to his religious ideology in public. Last year, he told U.S. journalist Charlie Rose in an interview that he expects to reunite with his father in heaven, in response to a question about whether the president thought his deceased father would approve of his government.

Calderon is the second PAN president to occasionally cross into religious territory while in office. His predecessor, Vicente Fox, sparked criticism in 2002 when he bowed and kissed the hand of Pope John Paul II during the pontiff's final trip to Mexico.

Sunday also marked the launch of campaigns of the three major parties in next year's presidential election and, in a way, the beginning of the end of Calderon's six years in office.

Since assuming the presidency in December 2006, amid chaos over disputed election results, the Calderon administration launched a military-led campaign against organized crime that has left at least 43,000 dead. Some peace activists here place the figure as high as 60,000.

Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City, speaking on Sunday, said there was a healthy separation of church and state in Mexico, and asked Mexicans to not give in to fear in face of threats from crime groups.

"Imagine if our president fell into fear," the bishop said.  

The sharp division that once existed between Mexico's PRI-led governments and the Catholic Church has blurred in recent years, said George W. Grayson, a Mexico specialist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

Pope Benedict XVI is expected to visit Mexico for the first time next spring. He has already met presidential front-runner Enrique Peña Nieto during an audience at Vatican City in 2009.

Grayson noted that the church has had known ties to the country's drug cartels, most notably in the practice of some drug lords of funding construction or renovations of local churches. "So the church has contact, and maybe they can reach out and touch a capo's heart," he said. 

* Photo via La Primera Plana.

El bajón y el delirio

The Spanish-language translation of my book, "El bajón y el delirio," is going on sale in Mexico. I'm excited and nervous. Starting in January, I'm going to have to re-live the book all over again, this time in chilango Spanish, which automatically takes the intimacy and immediacy of the book to other levels.

I'm also super happy with it y espero que los lectores lo disfruten. The design is beautiful, a worthy match to the terrific design of the original edition. For the Spanish edition, the celebrated Alejandro Magallanes devised a double-flap sketch for the cover, with the title in relief, as if the words were tagged with a scriber. He has more on his design at his blog, here.

(I love it. Gracias, Alejandro!)

The translation of "Down & Delirious in Mexico City" to Spanish is by Elizabeth Flores (an old friend from the Survival Brigade). Liz and I worked closely all summer on the translation, meeting in person to review each chapter line-by-line, discussing every possible outcome for a translation we both wanted to ring as true as possible for D.F. readers, yet while also retaining some of my native pochismos.

The editor of the translation is Guillermo Osorno, an associate editor at Editorial Oceano, my publisher in Spanish. Osorno is also editor of Gatopardo magazine, where one of two early sneaks of the book is published, in the December issue. Here is the chapter titled "Originales del punk," in its entirety, a journey through Mexico City punk, to the other side of Santa Fe, and back.

I hope you like it. I re-read it in the magazine with lots of trepidation, then found myself moved by it in a totally new way. You'll see.

At the news site Animal Politico, the book's first chapter is published as a downloadable document. Here is "Guadalupanos pachecos," in honor of December 12, the virgencita's feast day. 

Of course, there will be another big-ass party. Thank you. Y saludos a la banda de la caseta a Cuernavaca, a Reyes y su familia, y a los Agudos Crónicos y Vegetales.

* Elsewhere, "Gringo, chicano, chilango, y delirante."

Woman candidate in Mexico says she comes home to check the fridge

** Originally published at World Now:

The lone female candidate contending for Mexico's presidency described herself as one of the millions of Mexican women who go home at the end of the day to check on the refrigerator, in comments that played on the touchy subject of gender roles in Mexican culture for the first time in the campaign for the 2012 election.

Josefina Vazquez Mota made the statements this week while responding to a question during a radio interview with one of the country's most prominent female journalists, Carmen Aristegui.

Aristegui asked Vazquez Mota via telephone to respond to seemingly negative comments about women made by front-runner Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate for the formerly ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Peña Nieto, facing criticism and ridicule after several recent public fumbles, was asked in a separate interview to name the price of a kilo of tortillas, a standard food base in homes across Mexico, rich or poor. The PRI candidate replied, "I am not the lady of the house," or literally in Spanish, "No soy la señora de la casa."

The phrase was interpreted to mean "housewife" among social-media users and commentators who criticized Peña Nieto for what some called an example of Mexican machismo. 

On Tuesday, Aristegui asked Vazquez Mota, a 50-year-old married mother of three daughters, "Are you a señora de la casa?"

"I am a woman, and as a woman I am a housewife, I am a government official, I've been twice a government secretary, I've been leader of a parliamentary group, I am an economist," Vazquez Mota said.

"And indeed, all of that along with being a housewife, a housewife who knows what happens every day at the dining table and in the kitchen," she went on. "And although we may not be there for many hours, as is my case -- and I'm sure your case and many others of us -- every night we return to that space of the kitchen, return to check the refrigerator and see if everything is ready or what needs to be bought the next day."

Vazquez Mota also suggested that she stops at markets between public events if anything is needed in her household. Directly addressing Peña Nieto's statements, she characterized them as "pejorative." 

"Regarding a price of something, we are not obligated to know everything, but what does seem precarious for me is this disdain, this pejorative attitude toward being a housewife," she said. "We have millions, Carmen, millions, that go out to take care of their children all alone."

Vazquez Mota is one of three primary candidates remaining from the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, of President Felipe Calderon. The PAN is trailing in polls behind the PRI as it seeks a third consecutive presidency.

A former education secretary and federal legislator under Calderon, Vazquez Mota would be the first major party female candidate for president of Mexico if she captured the PAN nomination before next year's vote in July. 

The leftist Democratic Revolution Party is also trailing behind the PRI under the repeat candidacy of populist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who lost the 2006 election to Calderon by a razor-thin margin he refused to accept.

Lopez Obrador and others have hammered away at Peña Nieto  since he recently was unable to correctly name three books that have influenced his life. That appearance, at Latin America's largest book festival, in Guadalajara, bolstered the long-standing argument that the former governer of the state of Mexico is all image and no substance.

"As he does not have substance, it is not only a matter of [Peña Nieto] not reading, it is what he represents: more of the same, more corruption, more injustice, more privileges, more decadence for our country," Lopez Obrador said in his weekly YouTube address (link in Spanish).

Peña Nieto's campaign has been in damage-control mode since then, yet the candidate keeps making missteps.

His answer about the price of a kilo of tortillas came during an interview with Spain's leading daily newspaper, El Pais, in which he also could not accurately cite the minimum wage in Mexico. The full audio of that interview was released Monday.

Peña Nieto, married to telenovela actress Angelica Rivera, his second wife, has used Twitter to defend himself once more, saying in Spanish, "I said 'I am not the lady of the house' in reference exclusively to my home, not as a disparaging or offensive expression towards women."

The price of a kilo of tortillas, meanwhile, is a point of serious concern for many low-income households in Mexico, recent news reports say. That price rose this month from 8 pesos to 12 in some states, a radical increase for households that struggle to make ends meet. Overall, inflation rose in November by 1.08% (links in Spanish).

Next year, the minumum wage in Mexico will rise by about 4.2% for a number of regions and jobs, the Labor Ministry said in a statement. In the geographic zone of Mexico City, where the cost of living is among the highest, that wage will be set at $4.60 a day.

* Photo: Josefina Vazquez Mota of the National Action Party celebrates Monday after filing her candidacy for president at the PAN headquarters in Mexico City. Credit: Reuters

Two 'normalistas' dead in clash with police in Guerrero

** Originally published at World Now:

Two students are dead after a confrontation between police and rural teaching students in the southern state of Guerrero, in an incident that is reminding many here of the history of brutal crackdowns against leftist protesters in Mexico.

Authorities promised an investigation, but student groups and several leftist-identified sections of the national teachers union called the deaths  acts of "repression" and "murder" and said they would hold protest demonstrations this week.

The clash occurred Monday on a stretch of the federal highway that connects Mexico City and the resort of Acapulco, just south of Guerrero's capital city, Chilpancingo.

According to accounts, between 300 and 500 unarmed students and activists affiliated with a   teachers college blocked the Autopista del Sol as part of their ongoing demands related to improvements and funding for the Raul Isidro Burgos normal college in Ayotzinapa, a town about 90 miles east of Chilpancingo.

When police arrived at the blockade with the intent to clear the highway, the normalistas, as they are known, threw projectiles. Tear gas was fired, and a gasoline station caught fire, news reports said.

In the chaos that followed, shots were fired into the protesters. Two students died. They were identified as Gabriel Echeverria and Jorge Herrera.

Photos published in Mexican newspapers showed the bodies of two young men, one wearing a backpack, lying on the highway.

Federal, state and ministerial police were present, as well as armed men in plainclothes and, later, the army, the reports said. It remained unclear Tuesday who fired at the students and who ordered the use of force.

The "normal school" system -- in which rural campesinos are trained to be teachers -- is one of the few remaining socialist-styled legacies of the period after the Mexican Revolution. The system's students and teachers often clash with authorities. The powerful chief of the national teachers union, Elba Esther Gordillo, described the system in comments made earlier this year as a "hotbed for political scheming."

In Chilpancingo, at least 20 demonstrators were detained, at least two were seriously injured, and one reporter was arrested, beaten and later released, several reports said. There were also several police injuries.

Many demonstrators dispersed into the hillsides near the highway after the gunfire and remain unaccounted for, union leaders and students said at a news conference in Mexico City on Tuesday.

A witness identified as a student from Ayotzinapa, wearing glasses and a U.S. university sweatshirt, described the incident in detail, saying the federal police fired first toward the demonstrators. The man, said to be 22, was not identified by name for fear of reprisal.

"We never had arms," said the student witness, speaking at a local teachers union branch. "When the aggression started, we used what we had in our reach -- stones and sticks."

The incident led to promises of justice from Mexico's federal Interior Ministry and Gov. Angel Aguirre of Guerrero. On Tuesday, Aguirre said in a radio interview that he had fired his top prosecutor and the head of public security in the state and asked federal authorities to take over the investigation.

Amnesty International released a statement condemning the violence, and Mexico's national human rights commission also promised to investigate.

"Some [protesters] managed to make it up to the hills, and some came down, but 20 others, we don't know where they are," the student witness said Tuesday. "We don't know if they're still up on the mountain or if they were picked up by authorities."

The student also said one female activist from the community was missing.

* Photo: A 22-year-old man identified as a teaching student from Ayotzinapa describes the confrontation with police in Guerrero.

Tepichulos y Guapiteñas?

Entonces, which is it? Watch above as Samantha leads the way. Again, a deeper investigation is necessary here! But whichever it is, I'm in.

* Previously, "Hipstertitlan ... o chakahipsters?" "The pachucos of Tepito," "Sonidero on the streets," "Human madness for San Judas Tadeo."

Despite policy changes, smog still afflicts Mexico City

** Originally published at World Now:

When you're above it, it might look like brown smoke. From far away at ground level, it can shine like a sheet of white ice. And when you're under it, which is most of the time, you can't really see it at all.

It is the famous air pollution of Mexico City, causing countless cases of scratchy throats, stinging eyes and mucus that looks like it came from outer-space.

It is, in a word, nasty.

And while it may no longer be known as the worst in the world -- these days Beijing's pollution problem is attracting that sort of global attention -- Mexico City's smog becomes particularly intense at the start of every Christmas season.

The effect persists even after two decades of aggressive anti-pollution policies that have dramatically cut down smog overall in Mexico's gigantic capital.

Last Saturday evening, while the mayor inaugurated the annual ice-rink downtown to kick off the holiday cheer, the city's contamination monitoring system recorded a high of 136 points on its pollution scale in Mexico City's southeast quadrant, and graded the air quality over the entire metropolitan region of 20.1 million people as "Bad."

The IMECA, as the scale is known by its Spanish acronym, has hit "bad" levels across the city all week since. The air is expected to be just as "mala" through December and into the new year.

The phenomenon joins weather, cultural and geographic factors that combine like in no other place, explained Armando Retama, director of the city's sophisticated air-quality monitoring service, with two dozen stations recording pollution levels around the clock.

The Valley of Mexico, where the metropolitan area is located, is a bowl that sits at about 7,300 feet above sea level. That landscape produces what meteorologists call the thermal inversion effect, in which colder mountain air hangs over the valley and traps warmer air and pollution particles below it.

In the mornings, it's rise and shine for many of the estimated 4 million cars and trucks that operate here.

"As the day goes on, the sun heats up the floor, and the floor heats up the air above it," Retama said in an interview this week. The air and the toxins combine, creating a haze that often transforms into ozone in the afternoon.

The pattern hits Mexico City hard in December, when Christmas shoppers and tourists bring routine gridlock to city streets. Confounding the problem, fireworks and pyrotechnic displays, popular during the seasonal festivities, add smoke and ash to the equation.

"We're producing millions of kilos of contaminants daily, in a matter of hours," Retama said.

And you can feel it. Those particles can include a host of unfriendly pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, even lead. Will it ever fully go away?

Not unless the people of the city stop driving automobiles, Retama said. Despite improvements in public transportation, such as the Ecobici and Metrobus projects, car exhaust continues to be the chief factor contributing to Mexico City's smog, he said.

So far this week, the IMECA scale has not topped 150, which would trigger a "pre-contingency" alert for the metropolis. That would lead to restrictions on certain manufacturing sectors and on outdoor activities at schools. Every hour, the monitoring-service director said, reports on pollution levels are sent to local government agencies.

(Online, citizens can follow updates on the air quality at this live-map or via Twitter.)

Yet on Friday, the metropolitan environmental agency released a statement reminding residents of the Valley of Mexico to take precautions against contributing to the pollution problem. Locals were advised to minimize the use of automobiles, chimneys, fireworks and open fires. 

"Oh yes, I feel it, especially in the past few days," said Alejandra Abrego, 24. "My nose is dry, I am coughing and sneezing a lot."

Abrego, an archeology student strolling downtown on Friday, said she grew up in Mexico City. In her view, the smog has actually gotten worse in recent years, not better. For a generation that didn't experience the worst of the smog in the 1980s, it might seem so.

"We need more efficient public transit, so that people can start leaving their cars," Abrego said.

* Photo: Sunset from the Buenavista transit hub, Dec. 6, 2011.

Calaveras going to drag prom *

Just another shot from the Marcha de las Calaveras. I keep this person here and there, who is she?

* Previously, "Naomi."

Mexican presidential hopeful Peña Nieto flubs book question

** Originally published at World Now:

The front-runner in Mexico's presidential race stumbled in a high-profile way at a world-class book festival on Saturday, when, over several minutes, he appeared unable to correctly name a book that's influenced his life, besides the Bible.

And even then, Enrique Peña Nieto fumbled, not citing an "author" or a prophet whose biblical verse has particularly touched him. Instead, he merely made a vague reference to "some passages of it."

He also confused the names of two well-known Mexican authors, Enrique Krauze and Carlos Fuentes, in a four-minute episode that ended with the candidate red-faced, saying, "The truth is, when I read a book I often don't fully register the titles." (Link in Spanish.)

Peña Nieto's gaffe at the Guadalajara International Book Fair -- a deeply respected cultural platform in Mexico that is billed as Latin America's largest literary event -- continued resonating on Monday, with Peña Nieto defending himself in several tweets.

Adding to the embarrassment, Peña Nieto's teen daughter, Paulina, used a slur and a separate offensive term for poor people while defending her dad in two late-night tweets. Paulina's Twitter profile has since disappeared, and her father issued an apology Monday morning.

The episode has sparked a flurry of reaction on social-networking sites, including satirical "trending topics" on Twitter, such as #LibreríaPeñaNieto, or "Peña Nieto's Bookstore." Users are inventing the titles of books the candidate has "read" full of political mocking and double or triple meaning.

Peña Nieto, 45, is the presumed candidate for the formerly ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party as it seeks to recapture the presidency in 2012.

He was at the FIL, as the festival is known, partly because he's a freshly minted author himself, of "Mexico, the Great Hope." Releasing books at the start of the political season is a standard practice for presidential candidates in Mexico, and the practice attracts little scrutiny.

On Saturday, Peña Nieto was responding to a reporter who asked him to name three books that have marked his life. The candidate stammered and smiled nervously as he confused the author of a title he could name, the novel "The Eagle's Chair," saying it was by historian Krauze. It was written by Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's most noteworthy living novelist.

"There's another book by him [Krauze] that I want to remember the name, about caudillos, but I don't remember the exact title," Peña Nieto said.

Peña Nieto's wife, actress Angelica Rivera, sat in the front row and "appeared to suffer more than her husband," according to one local report (link in Spanish). Giggles and then laughter can be heard in this amateur video. Here's another video by El Universal, with a reporter's narration in Spanish. 

The episode at the FIL came with the kind of allegorical coincidences that are the bread-and-butter of Mexico's chattering classes.

"The Eagle's Chair" is a political tale set in 2020, in which the United States has cut off Mexico's telecommunications -- radio, television, Internet. The president's Cabinet is filled with stealthy characters, as the book's jacket describes, and a mysterious female figure tells a young man, "You shall be president of Mexico."

Peña Nieto also managed to make reference to another author in Guadalajara, the British conservative politician Jeffrey Archer, author of "Kane and Abel." In real life, Archer has served prison time for perjury and conspiracy to pervert justice.

-- Daniel Hernandez

Photo: Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto at the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico on Saturday. Credit: EnriquePenaNieto.com

Jodorowsky holds 'march of skulls' for Mexico's drug war dead

** Originally published at World Now:

It was billed as "the first act of collective psycho-magic in Mexico."

The call made by the cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky said the event would seek to "heal" the country of the cosmic weight of so many dead in the drug war, by gathering for something he called the March of the Skulls.

On Sunday, on a wet and frigid morning in this mountain capital, hundreds of Jodorowsky fans answered the open convocation (video link in Spanish).

They donned black top hats and black shawls, and carried canes and Mexican flags colored in black. They wore calavera face paint or masks to give themselves the look of stylish skeletons gathered in this often-surreal city in the name of Mexico's tens of thousands of sometimes nameless drug war dead.

"Long live the dead!" they shouted.

Truthfully, the Marcha de las Calaveras was a minor weekend event compared to the city's heavily publicized "zombie walk" the day before, in which almost 10,000 people playing zombies marched through the city's core. That event marked yet another one of Mexico City's recent obsessive hobbies:breaking Guinness world records.

Yet for the estimated 3,000 people who showed up to the Jodorowsky march over the course of the day, it was significant as a rare public appearance in Mexico by the Chilean-born filmmaker and tarot guru (link in Spanish). Jodorowsky lived in Mexico for many years and produced his most well-known works in the country, the films "El Topo," "Santa Sangre," and "The Holy Mountain."

The event also demonstrated that Mexicans seem willing to try almost anything at this point -- even a counterculture-era act of public mysticism -- to seek an end to the awful violence brought by the fighting between the government and the cartels, a war that has cost more than 40,000 lives since December 2006.

"The young people's call is another form of saying, 'Enough.' Enough deaths," said Angelica Cuellar, a 63-year-old teacher. "Through the psycho-magic, we are saying, for this moment, we are them."

Her sister, Dulce, standing nearby, said: "I am here in the name of someone who didn't have a voice, someone who was suffocated, someone who went north searching for work. I say, 'I'm here for you.'"

"And if we do it collectively, I assure you, at another level of energy, those dead will come awake," added Dulce Cuellar, 60.

Walking skeletons milled about in the background on the steps of the downtown Palace of Fine Arts, as the crowds eagerly awaited Jodorowsky's arrival. Perhaps out of boredom, or inspiration, some mimicked the mournful howl of the native xoloitzcuintli dog, man's guide to the underworld in Aztec mythology.

(There were also a few deep incantations of "om.")

The "maestro" arrived at the palace steps about 1:30 p.m., causing brief havoc among the gatheredcalaveras as people jostled to get near him. The white-haired Jodorowsky, fit and agile at 82, wore a black sports coat, a bright purple scarf and a detailed skull mask.

Along with his family, Jodorowsky led the calaveras up the Eje Central avenue to Plaza Garibaldi in a mostly silent demonstration. In the late 1980s, he filmed some key scenes of "Santa Sangre" at this plaza, homebase for the city's for-hire mariachi bands. On Sunday, it was easy to imagine another "Santa Sangre" scene being filmed during the march, but this time from a dark and unfamiliar future.

Someone decided the group should sing a song. It became "La Llorona," the Weeping Woman. 

Jodorowsky was displeased with the group's initial interpretation, so he asked for another go at it. A mariachi band joined in as accompaniment.

"There are 50,000 dead beings," Jodorowsky said through a bullhorn, before the sea of skulls. "They are sheep. They are not black sheep. We must have mercy for these souls that have disappeared. Let's sing this song with lament, as if we were the mother of one of these persons. Understand?"

Then he asked that all those present cross and link their arms with those of the strangers around them. The group did. They chanted "Peace, peace, peace!" until Jodorowsky asked that everyone let out a big laugh. Laughter and applause followed.

* Previously, "We're mutants: Wisdom from maestro Jodorowsky," and "Jodorowsky's Sunday comics."

A place where Guatemalan day laborers are survivors of war

** Originally published at World Now:

A day laborer outside a Home Depot hardware store in northeast Los Angeles is riding in a bright orange shopping cart in the store's parking lot, peering through imaginary binoculars, as if he were on patrol in a dangerous jungle.

Others are crawling under parked vehicles as if squeezing below barbed wire, or diving and body-rolling as if evading gunfire. Before a sale display for storage sheds, two men lie still on the asphalt, their legs spread, as if dead.

The laborers are undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, and in an unsettling video installation by Mexican artist Yoshua Okon on view at a university gallery in Mexico City, they are war survivors playing themselves.

Before Okon's cameras, the migrants are reenacting their days fighting in Guatemala's long and catastrophic civil war.

The four-channel video piece, called "Octopus," is Okon's latest and possibly most provocative video in a career in which he frequently pushes against viewers' comfort zones with the use of improvising non-actors.

A native of Mexico City, Okon has also lived part-time in Los Angeles. He bought a house in L.A. and came to participate in a rite of passage for many new U.S. homeowners in the last decade -- hiring day workers.

The men he found at the Home Depot store in the Cypress Park district, it turned out, were indigenous Maya from Guatemala. They spoke a Mayan dialect and very little Spanish or English. They had escaped Guatemala's war in search of work in the United States.

Some fought for the U.S.-backed military government and others for the leftist guerrillas. Some, he said, showed him scars of bullet wounds. Now, as laborers at the bottom of the U.S. social ladder, they fight for scraps of work in the slumping construction market.

"They're more afraid of immigration than about talking about the war," Okon said during a visit this week to the exhibition space in Mexico City's Roma district. "To me, that's what the piece is about. It's the United States. The war is not over. The war is over there."

Okon, 41, has made films with wanna-be Nazis in Mexico City, an isolated family in California's high desert getting drunk on "White Russians," and Mexican police officers who agree to make bawdy sexual gestures they probably shouldn't in uniform.

While these works usually elicit in viewers a mix of chuckles and creeps, "Octopus" is different.

The new video is guided by a polemical stance, not self-parody. Home Depot customers amble past the bizarre scenes playing out with hardly a blink, showing that workers who build homes in the United States have "always been invisible," Okon said.

The artist also had to work guerrilla-style in some form himself. He filmed on the store's parking lot without proper permission. "I had to constantly negotiate with the security guards, until they finally kicked me out," he said.

Over two days of filming in March, Okon said the men from Guatemala gradually stopped giggling through takes and began to seriously inhabit -- or re-inhabit -- their roles. "It felt like a job," one of the workers later told the LA Weekly. And indeed it was; Okon said he paid the men a double day-rate for their time.

"Octopus," commissioned by the Hammer Museum at UCLA, will show at the Casa Jose Galvan exhibition space in Mexico City through January. Next year, Okon plans to take the piece toProyectos Ultravioleta, an arts space in Guatemala City.

A single-screen version of the 18-minute piece is viewable here. In one shot, as seen above, a motorist drives past Okon's cameras with a bumper sticker that reads, "Voter for a new foreign policy."

The shot was not staged.

* Image: A still from 'Pulpo.'