Intersections

Saint Jude's

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

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

Tijuana nights

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

Acamonchi in Mexico City

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

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

Checking out the swap meet

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

ERRE pulls out of Tijuana retrospective

Marco "ERRE" Remirez has pulled out of a planned retrospective of his work at Tijuana's CECUT, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported on Sunday. The move was the latest salvo in an ongoing debate among the arts community in TJ over the appointment of the (federal) center's new director, Virgilio Muñoz. Sandra Dibble has details, suggesting the dispute reflects the scene's growing maturity.

ERRE's retrospective would have been a milestone on several levels, and would have traveled to Mexico City. Mike Davis was preparing a text for the catalogue. Now the show's future is uncertain, but let's hope it lands somewhere. ERRE is the most prominent contemporary artist working in Tijuana, famed for his "Trojan Horse" installation at the San Ysidro international border crossing during inSITE '97, seen above.

Crusing the old colonia, La Libertad

We drove around my dad's old hood, Tijuana's historic Colonia Libertad, right against the U.S.-Mexico international border fence on the dry hills of the city's east side.

Saw my abuelita's old hill-top house, where I personally spent so many weekends as a kid, just me and Esperanza. Who knows who lives there now. Dad pointed out all the old barbershops and the abandoned theater, near where the Opera Festival now happens.

* For more, check this Tijuana photoblog by Omar Martinez.

Graduation day in San Ysidro

Six hours after leaving the bustle and midday heat of the center of Mexico City, with three hours of soaring through the high blue atmosphere above Mexico, I found myself on the bleachers of Cougar Stadium at the very new San Ysidro High School, facing a breathtaking sight.

The wide golden Pacific on the horizon in front of us, the crumpled beauty of Tijuana to the south, that red sunset, everything in view for hundreds of cheering friends and relatives. Representing: TJ people, South Bay people, Pinoy San Diego, African American San Diego.

Sharp ocean breezes.

A cousin I haven't seen since he was a kid was graduating. I was given video-camera duty. Wild hollers, noise-blowers. The principal talked tough, and people listened. But the families ignored pleas to stay in their seats during the recessional, rushing out to meet their graduates at the gates. There were photos to take.

By nightfall, tables were hard to come by at all the South Bay franchises of Hometown Buffet.

Return to Los Angeles, via Mexico City

* Above, Mexico City youth in resistance, on the 40th anniversary of 1968.

After a full year in exile, in forced total-immersion in Mexico, I'll be back in my native California later this month. I plan to see family in San Diego (and hopefully by then greet a new nephew), attend a wedding in L.A., and speak at the invitation of the Zócalo public lecture series, a wonderful civic institution in Los Angeles. The invite is such an honor.

Here's the event link, and the text:

Swine flu, a contracting economy, rising unemployment, a wild and bloody conflict with drug traffickers, the constant threat of natural disasters and ransom kidnappings — Mexico faces several serious challenges. Since the contested 2006 presidential election there, the country has suffered crisis after crisis, constantly testing the Mexican people's ability to realign their everyday lives. Some seek economic refuge in the United States, but most remain home, adapting, tuning out, dancing with Death. Daniel Hernandez, a former Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly writer who has spent the past 18 months blogging Mexico City, visits Zócalo to share his insights on that sprawling capital, its youth culture, and the alternately defiant and detached, resigned and resistant approaches of Mexican people to threats always looming.

For the talk, I'll keep it loose and simple, and probably bring up themes I'm tackling in my upcoming book.

But I'd like to envision a different kind of dynamic for this lecture. Bring the kids. There are few things I enjoy more than speaking about my work to audiences of young people. I am constantly amazed by the sophistication of their thinking, by their ability to quickly synthesize new information and challenge assumptions.

So if you're around and can encourage teens and students to stop in at MOCA on the evening of June 25, please, by all means, do. The event is free -- and I promise not to bore you.

Mexico's drug violence as a creeping contagion

* Free press: A police training exercise in Tucson, via NYT.

Is the U.S. media being "sensationalist" in its coverage of the narco war in Mexico? Earlier we argued for more coverage, however nasty, of the situation. But at what point do the daily dispatches of narco ultraviolence become a smokescreen, merging into another, falling into tonal and structural formulas? How does it read back in the United States? If it's only flashes and pings of blood, fear, and a rudimentary name-dropping of the Santa Muerte, then we're obviously not getting the complete picture.

In fact, the press has lately been characterizing Mexico's narco violence as a kind of contagion "spilling over" the U.S.-Mexico border. This is the critique of a New York Times reader in North Carolina on a recent story on drug violence in Tucson, as pointed out by The Mex Files. Heather Williams in Durham makes some other pretty damning points:

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. Drug transshipment is a 35 billion dollar a year business in Mexico, but it’s estimated to be a 70 billion dollar a year retail industry here in the U.S. 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.

[...]

On this story, you've got a reporter here who's repeating some bloody anecdotes but no universal statistics. Russia, for example, [has] a violent crime rate 50 percent higher than Mexico, and their gangs are unbelievably violent and yes, transnational (according to the FBI, a Russian gang likely has access to your credit card number -- they have most of the world’s numbers on file right now), but we don't have front page news about Russian gangsters "spilling over" into Brooklyn and Queens and slitting throats and cutting people up with chain saws because that would get the NYT in trouble with some sensitive constituencies, no?

You could also say the stories people like Williams are critiquing echo the hysteria over the "spilling over" of Mexicans back when. Or ... waaaaay back when. In "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds," Gregory Rodriguez reminds us that internal Mexican struggles have long been depicted in the United States as contagious threats:

By the summer of 1915, the Plan de San Diego had become national news. "Mexican anarchy," wrote The Chicago Tribune, "now thrusts its red hand across our border and with an insane insolence attempts to visit upon American citizens in their homes the destruction it has wreaked upon American persons and property abroad."

Does this sound a little familiar? The comment above does not currently make the NYT's "editor's selections" of reaction to the Tucson story, but its readers recommend it. The whole thing is here.

Meanwhile: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on a mission this week to mend fences with the Mexican political establishment, the investigative journal Proceso says [no direct link], citing sources in Washington. The magazine says Clinton's visit is part of an effort by the White House to take control of the message on the narco issue after a series of troubling hearings led by members of Congress.

Clinton visits President Felipe Calderon in Mexico City tomorrow and then checks out Monterrey on Thursday. You can bet that along the way she'll also be hearing plenty of complaining from Mexico's touchy elites.

The drug tienditas of Monterrey *

* 'A couple baggies, please.' Via Exiled.

Industrial, modern, forward-looking Monterrey in northern Mexico is Zetas territory. The L.A. Times's Tracy Wilkinson was recently there, reporting up close on the deep hold that the Gulf cartel's enforcement wing has on life in the city's roughest barrios.

You can get a first-person look at what that's like by checking out the work of Pancho Montana, the nom de plume of a guy who lives in Monterrey and has been writing these raw yet totally engrossing dispatches of the narco scene there for Exiled, an online magazine. From Montana's piece on the drug store (not drugstore) tienditas of his hood:

The inventory is simple, too. These aren’t boutique medical marijuana shops I hear you have in California that offer 50 types of weed. No, the main business of a tiendita is piedra, slang name for crack cocaine. But after a drug shop becomes more established, the management expands into powder cocaine and pot. The quality is not very good. They cut it too much. That’s why a bolsita (baggie) of zetas pase (blow) is usually called rabia (rabies). Imagine why.

The magazine itself makes a pretty confrontational case against what it terms "boring progressives who cover the War on Drugs" as if they were doing a "freshmen Chemistry paper on hydrogen bonds." Read the whole entry on "Pro-drug Journalists" over there. It makes an analogy to closeted gays. Of course, there is and always will be a space for a general-audience, mainstream narrative for this kind of story (we hope), but ... thoughts?

Here is Pancho Montana's description of a friend's kidnapping. The writing is assaultive and almost cruel -- but forgive me not doubting a single detail.

The Queen: 'Wipe out government to wipe out the narcos'

* She asked to touch up her make-up before taking the mug shot.

Anderson Cooper, on assignment in Mexico for 60 Minutes, walked into visiting hours at the federal prison where Sandra Ávila Beltrán is behind bars and had a sit-down with "La Reina del Pacífico" as part of this extensive piece on the drug war. Ávila Beltrán repeatedly pressed into Cooper the idea that the Mexican government is not the solution but part of the problem behind the current wave of bloodshed here.

Can they win? he asks her. "I don't think so," the Queen responds. "You'd have to wipe out the government to wipe out drug trafficking." Watch the exchange here.

With this piece and many others filtering through since last week, it was as if the United States suddenly sat up and realized there was a problem brewing south of the border. Janet Napolitano, the new Homeland Security Secretary, sounded the alarm before a committee in Congress. And the Justice Department announced more than 700 arrests across the U.S. in a crackdown on the Sinaloa cartel. New U.S. attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. used his first press conference to issue an open warning to Mexican cartels operating distribution cells within the country, but it sounded a bit hollow; how long have the cartels been building networks of distributors in the U.S.? Two decades, at least? Three?

Check out this L.A. Times Flash map to see just how deeply a part of the criminal landscape Mexican druglords are in gringolandia. And we're only talking about this now?

Could it be that a more general fear factor is taking hold? One U.S. poll suggests so. Last week The Wall Street Journal appeared eager to fan the flames, directly comparing Mexico's battle against the cartels with Pakistan's battle against Islamic radicals. The rest of the piece takes us through Monterrey, detailing the Zetas' hold on the streets, but as a work of journalism it read as overtly hysterical. (Let me know where this place known as "Tepitoto" is located, if you find it.)

What's needed is a far more honest discussion on the United States's several points of responsibility for what is happening in Mexico. The U.S. is the biggest narcotics market in the world. A large majority of the weapons and cash that fuel the war come from the north to the south.

President Felipe Calderon meanwhile will to continue to insist that Mexico is not a failed state. But all signs right now point to the country's vast state of failure. Maybe we should start listening to former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and his friends on this one. As an Intersections reader pointed out, things are so hairy in Ciudad Juarez that its mayor is hiding out across the river in El Paso -- and is considered in danger even there.

* Photo above by Bloomberg via NYT.

Mexico's drug war: How weird will it get?

Mexico lost its ability to be surprised by its own chaotic nature probably, oh, a few generations ago, but the start of 2009 is seriously pushing the limits on our tolerance for wacky atrocities. So far: Televisa in Monterrey was attacked. Federal authorities detained the police chief of Cancun in connection with the killing of a retired general. El Pozolero coolly admitted to disintegrating at least 300 corpses for his narcos bosses in Tijuana. In Reynosa, a reporter was caught in the cross-fire of a gun battle. And just on Sunday night, the Chihuahua governor's convoy came under attack, resulting in one death.

Things have gotten so surreal, absurd, and downright twisted, that now the cartels themselves are believed to be organizing street protests to "denounce" the military, saying its anti-narco operations in hot zones in the north are unwanted. Imagery of popular street protests against the Mexican military certainly do nothing to help the president's counter-offensive against declarations that his country is a "failed state." If in fact the protests are manufactured by the criminals, the sheer subversion, defiance, and psychic disorder of the whole charade says it all.

The state is doing the best it can to sustain its control. But could something else be happening to Mexico right now? A different, more abstract kind of break-down? If the military hadn't entered the war against the narcos, the Secretary of Economy said in Paris last week, by now we'd have a "narcopresidente." Chilling, but ... by now?

Yet Felipe Calderon insists we march on. On Thursday, he labeled cartel-organized street protests as "cowardice." It was national Military Day. In the next day's paper La Jornada led with Calderon's statements -- and a photograph of schoolchildren gleefully playing with unloaded automatic weapons at the Military Zone in Tijuana.

Leaving Tijuana: The blogger's lament

Blogger and photographer Kinsee Morlan, who abandoned San Diego for the postmodern wilds of Tijuana, is crossing back for good. In her last post at Tijuana Tales she laments the stereotypical and blood-obsessed views of visitors and journalists alike. Morlan writes: "I'm not leaving Tijuana because of the violence -- let's just get that out of the way. I love TJ and, no matter how hard the mainstream media tries, I refuse to be afraid." More:

The only thing I do not like about Tijuana is actually no fault of the city itself. The line — the bastard-ass intolerable line to get back inside the U.S. — is a nuisance. It disrupts the natural flow of the city and turns all Tijuana drivers into nuts. It's embarrassing and disrespectful, unnecessary and a giant waste of money. I still can't believe that, in modern times, we have walls keeping people apart. It makes me giggle until I start thinking about how serious and horrible it really is.

Morlan tells me she's moving farther north to start a family. Her farewell post generously lists all the things -- restaurants, dishes, galleries, artists -- that made living in Tijuana so enriching. Sniff around her links and the links at Across the Border for more -- and, whenever possible, avoid both the fear-mongering and the over-thought, over-labored theoretical gibberish that is currently in vogue about our beautiful TJ. If you go, just go!

* Photo above by Tijuana Tales. Here's Kinsee's Flickr stream.

** Previously, "Leaving Tijuana: Everyone is doing it."

Breaking borders in 'Neza York'

* Above, reggae and dancehall, live mixtape, Ciudad Neza.

At a reggae club in Ciudad Nezahaulcoytl, dancing, free, I'm thinking about my musical influences, the sounds I was raised on. In other words, what my older siblings fed me. The older sisters, Lisa and Sandra, were cholas back in the day: In the 80s we were surrounded by freestyle and early hip-hop, electro, and R&B. From San Francisco, the Central Valley, and New Orleans, Ernesto brought us ska, post-punk, and new funk. From Tijuana and the barrios of San Diego, Luis Gaston introduced us to Chicano hip-hop and the most quality subterranean reggae. Through Sergio I absorbed classic rock -- Santana, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors -- and pure 90s hip-hop -- Dr. Dre, Too Short, Snoop, Ice Cube, Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang, Fugees, De la Soul, Rakim, Nas.

Later came the electro and indie waves, and then my current obsessions with psychadelia, weirdo electro, tropicalia, and all forms of shaggy rock. But in Southern California I experienced my true cultural formation, the sounds in the car on the way to school, in the driveway, in our rooms, BET on blast every afternoon after school. Now as I explore the cultural underground of Mexico City, in certain worlds the beats come back to me. They echo through the clubs, parties, toquines. They belong to the archeology of the moment, the fluidity that exists between North and South, the unifying thump.

What drives us are the in-between spaces, the ripples, and the intersections.

* Readers, I'm taking a couple weeks off again to focus on some pending assignments and reach a necessary signpost in my manuscript. In the meanwhile, please be informed that FM-SHADES is now streaming its entire library live online. Everyone wins.

SITAC 2009: South, south, south, south

Below, the introduction to the opening session of the boldly titled SITAC VII, the annual Mexico City conference on contemporary art theory that opens this afternoon. This year it is organized by Cuauhtemoc Medina, the prominent D.F. art theorist who in his role shifts the entire focus of SITAC to Sur, sur, sur, sur -- referring to Latin American postcolonial subalternity, more or less:

In spite of the inequalitites of institutional and symbolic power, the South has acquired a new prominence in the fabric of global imagination. This is shown not only in the expanded geography of cultural activity, but also in the super-positions, tensions and currents of thought, ghosts and shadows that inhabit the South. These changes have not been the product of a generous concession: they are the result of a cultural counter-offensive that since the end of the 1980s has been questioning the geographical division of cultural power and the critique of the effects of colonialism.

An abundance of panels, screenings, cocktails, and events are scheduled at or around SITAC VII. The clinics are headed by Roberto Jacoby, Mariana Botey, Jorge Munguia Matute, and Daniel Garza Usabiaga. * The SITAC program graphic, above, is by Ricardo Basbaum.

* See all posts in Art here.

Mapping the bloodshed in Tijuana

Under those little red dead-man icons lies the word "Tijuana" in an ordinary Google Map. Here my family's ancestral city is shrouded by the towering evidence of death in one of the most active fronts in Mexico's infinitely gruesome and ever spectral "drug war." The interactive map, available here, is by the journalists at KPBS. It's part of a comprehensive online package of media, smartly rendered in English and Spanish, on the mounting toll in TJ. Check it out.

* Also, see the interactive map of smugglers' border tunnels along the U.S.-Mexico border, at the Union-Tribune, via Across the Border.

What is Obama's Mexico agenda?

** APRIL 16 UPDATE: See fresh post, "The distant neighbor: Barack Obama in Mexico."

With the amounts of goods, money, migrants, media, tourists, and the endless intangibles of culture that flow between Mexico and the United States on a daily basis, there is hands-down no country more important to the future prosperity of the U.S. than its southern neighbor, and vice versa. Yet we've rarely heard Mexico mentioned on the 2008 presidential campaign trail. And particularly not from front-runner Barack Obama, who has not visited Mexico -- unlike rival John McCain, who was in Mexico City as recently as July -- but did find time this summer to go to Europe for whatever reasons.

Journalist Franc Contreras goes to the border for Al Jazeera and finds many more questions than reassurances among people on both sides of the border on how an Obama presidency might seek to mend the damage done to U.S.-Mexico relations under eight years of Republican rule in Washington. From immigration reform to trade and narcoterrorism, people excited about an Obama victory on Nov. 4 must keep in mind that border-related issues facing the next president will be every bit as challenging as anything the executive might face in the Middle East or in Asia.

What's Obama's view on the death of the binational border park, for symbolic starters? Or America's domestic Guantanamos? Who knows. But here is a boilerplate op-ed piece Obama published in February in The Dallas Morning News that lays out a general Mexico agenda, and a bit of analysis from Foreign Policy Association.

'Phantom Sightings' arrives in Mexico City

The Tamayo is the Mexico City host for "Phantom Sightings," the LACMA-originated exhibit on "art after the Chicano Movement." What's that? That's art made by Mexican Americans in the decades since the height of the Chicano political movement and, through the curators' filter, work that is mostly conceptual in nature. The foundational influence running through much of the exhibit is the ground-breaking Asco collective.

Curator Rita Gonzalez and several of the artists were at the Tamayo on Tuesday for a press conference and a walk-through with arts reporters from the D.F. dailies. True to the Chicano social reality, much of the back-and-forth happened through an English-Spanish translator. Above, Ruben Ochoa discusses his "Freeway Wall Intervention" as it is being mounted.

Here is Mexico City's chance to see cutting-edge contemporary art made by its hyphenated cultural compatriots north of the border. "Phantom Sightings" opens as "Aparaciones Fantasmales" on Thursday night, October 16, at the Museo Tamayo in Chapultepec Park.

* Check out reviews of the show at LA Weekly, Frieze, and Art Review. Previously, "'Phantom Sightings' arrives in Los Angeles."

Manu Chao: 'Hasta siempre, Mexico!'

The borderless French-Spanish activist hippie-punk world-beater Manu Chao ended his huge concert Saturday night at Foro Sol by ceding his microphone to the campesinas from Atenco. The women called for the release of their political prisoners who have been held since the battle with government forces in 2006 in the small but active municipality outside Mexico City. (See more here.) The last time Chao was in D.F. was that year when he recorded live at the Foro Alicia.

On Saturday, the stellar Mexican post-pachucos Maldita Vecindad opened; half-way through front-man Roco led the stadium in a raised fist for the dead at the U.S.-Mexico border. The rain poured down on us for much of the night. Hamburgers were $35 pesos, a double Indio went for $60, and pirated tees outside were $50 pesos and up.

* Falling James interviewed Manu for the LA Weekly when he was last in L.A. Above, "Welcome to Tijuana." See also this personal favorite, "Me llaman Calle."

End nears for binational border gatherings

Construction begins next month on a new barrier at the Border Field State Park in San Diego, across from Playas de Tijuana, where the U.S.-Mexico border meets the Pacific. The Union-Tribune reports that the new wall will effectively end the cross-border family meet-ups, volleyball matches, yoga sessions, and human cannonball stunts that have made this spot of Earth a completely unique binational social space that is internationally known and studied. The paper says:

Work in the park has begun. Visitors once could set up their chairs along the fence on the beach or on a dirt strip between the fence and the parking lot. Recently installed plastic mesh blocks access to all but the monument area and the lower section on the sand.

I'm surprised there isn't much public outrage at this news. The project is clearly gratuitous; this corner of the linea hasn't been a major smuggling corridor for more than a decade.

'Literally Hell': The deadly prison riots in Tijuana **

* Above: 'We want better treatment from the authorities,' by AP via OB Rag.

The Baja California state penitentiary in Tijuana is a square block of concrete that looms over the dusty flats of La Mesa. Among locals it is known as "La Peni." We used to go there when we were little to visit cousins and uncles who were locked up. Back then family-time at La Peni was basically a carnival. Because inmates are given next to nothing by the authorities, many made a living inside by setting up food stands and games and rides for little kids. La Peni has always been every man, and every family, for themselves.

Since Sunday, chaos and death has blanketed La Peni and the surrounding streets as male and female inmates rioted, leaving at least 19 dead, and immeasurable outrage and agony among relatives waiting to hear word on their loved ones inside. Numbers on the deaths have varied because for most of the week the scene has been a cauldron of absolute mayhem.

My mother, who has been inside La Peni as recently as a couple months ago, writes to me:

It is literally Hell. Women detained for three months for stealing diapers from a store. Water from the tap, if at all. Rotten food. Twenty people in a cell for six, the rest on the floor. How were they not going to finally pile up? Anyone who protests such injustice, they rip their head open with blows.

As the Union-Tribune notes, conditions at La Peni are truly horrendous, the most glaring disgrace being the facility's overcrowding. The paper says the first riot may have been sparked by the death of an inmate at the hands of guards. Women rioted on Wednesday. University of San Diego's David A. Shirk lays guilt for the tragedy squarely on the government: "It's the ugly stepchild of President Calderon's criminal justice reforms. There's been little attention in Mexico to penal system reform."

The U-T also published the names of Peni inmates transferred out after the disturbances and the names of those injured. "Who's going to answer for those 19 dead?" Mom writes. "The hundreds of injured they say are inside? No food or water for five days? The infrastructure destroyed. No guards. What impotence, not able to do a thing."

* Friday update by the L.A. Times here. * Chilling details and interviews at FSRN.

Saluting the Class of 1998

In popular lore high school reunions are worth nothing more than a groan and a laugh. Over Labor Day, while in self-imposed exile here in Mexico, I regret missing my 10-year high school reunion with the San Diego SCPA Class of 1998. From the photos and emails, it sounds like it was basically a chill weekend-long kick-back. Now that's style.

High school is the culture that begins to form you, for better or worse. For me, it was about the border, it was about hip-hop and R&B, it was ultimately about cultivating an openness to all styles and approaches. Looking back, SCPA's ghetto-glam artsy-fartsy pre-Obama post-racial Class of '98 was an exceptionally tight and diverse city-kids crew. And it sounds like everyone is pursuing their dreams with true gusto -- even the dude who ended up doing porn. No one's mad at cha!

A labyrinth of glances in a world of immigrants

"All of us are immigrants," Mexico City photographer Federico Gama surmises in this Reed Johnson piece about "Laberinto de Miradas," or "Labyrinth of Glances," a photo and video exhibit that recently passed through Mexico, D.F. "All of us are in a search for something. We would like to be on another side."

Indeed, taken together the images in the show argue that immigrants are people who cross not only national borders but also urban borders and cultural borders and sexual borders, making for the deliriously globalized world we know today. Gama's contribution to "Laberinto de Miradas" is a set of images from his project Mazahuacholostakopunk, about heavily marginalized indigenous youth in Mexico City who combine and layer several codes of borderless rural and urban dress in the shaping of their identity. (See Gama's photostream for more.)

"Laberinto de Miradas" just closed at the Centro Cultural España in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, but much of the exhibit exists permanently online at its web site. Check it out. The images are set to travel next to Guatemala, followed by Miami, El Salvador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica. Come to think of it, it'd be cool if the show eventually made it to Los Angeles, America's brown capital.

* Image above by Sergei Camara.

Young Zeta sicarios caught on tape

The above is from a transcript read in U.S. federal court this week in Texas in the trial of a pair of cold-blooded young sicarios for the Gulf Cartel's Zetas who were recorded talking about killing two teen rivals in the out-of-control Laredo-Nuevo Laredo narco smuggling corridor. The thing "reads like two kids talking about a video game," says The Dallas Morning News.

(The dudes slashed their victim's bellies then "cooked" them.)

Graphic perfection: The 1968 Mexico City Olympics *

Part Op art, part indigenous Mesoamerican art, and wonderfully go-go, the "Mexico 68" logo for the Olympics held in Mexico City 40 years ago is considered to this day a masterpiece of graphic design, a completely integrated expression of the '68 Games's ambition that I don't believe any other Olympic logo in comparison has achieved before or since. Take a look.

There is a fascinating exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in D.F. on this logo and on the entire visual language of the 1968 Games. With the Beijing Games wowing everyone this summer, the images of that year's "Olympic Identity Program" are in the air right now in the Mexican capital. I went to see the show on a recent Sunday and it was packed with stylish kids taking photos and checking each other out. It's not just nostalgia or hype. The exhibit is a look at the extraordinary task the organizers had of convincing the world through the power of graphic design that Mexico was capable of hosting the '68 Games -- the first held in Latin America, the first held in a developing country, and first held in the Spanish-speaking world.

Curators mostly ignore the bloody repression against students in D.F. and in major cities at the time, focusing exclusively on the Olympics' central graphic system and how it was integrated into every visual aspect of the '68 Games, from tickets to events, to stamps, postcards, signs, programs, even clothing and tableware. Everything emanated from the Games' logo, "Mexico 68," like the design itself. Credit for the symbol is due to designers Eduardo Terrazas, Pedro Ramirez Vasquez (the architect who also brought you the Televisa logo and the CECUT in Tijuana) and Lance Wyman, who says in this statement that the "Mexico 68" logo helped create an image of "Mexico as an emitting or expanding centre." That's more or less the same impulse that inspired Anni and Josef Albers of the Bauhaus.

A story by Catherine Dunn at Inside Mexico has more details. Chilango magazine's piece comes with a guided tour by curator Tania Ragasol that you can download and play on your iPod when you hit the museum. Finally, in that short audio clip at Inside Mexico, organizer Beatrice Trueblood, marveling at how the '68 Olympics committee managed to pull it off, pays homage where homage is due -- to la Virgen de Guadalupe.

The show at MAM is up until October 27.

* Check out these amazing kicks by Puma commemorating the Black Power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the '68 Games. Pretty fresh.

At home, online, with Miguel Felix Gallardo **

Via Across the Border, a look at the Internet homepage of Miguel Felix Gallardo, the man credited with laying the roots of Tijuana's Arellano Felix cartel -- only the original gangsters of Mexican drug trafficking. Brazen, but, why not?

Since the posting by Anna Cearley, managers of miguelfelixgallardo.com have removed from the site homepage Felix Gallardo's working biography, a forum where he answered questions from visitors, and galleries of photos of his palatial hacienda in Culiacán (those pages though are still easy to find on the Nets). The message on the main page now reads: "Thank you to all those who take interest and worry in me, due to health problems I will no longer be able to answer questions."

Interesting: Miguel Felix Gallardo's Wiki entry as well as comments on Across the Border insist the still-jailed kingpin has no blood relation to the modern Arellano Felix brothers, who are said to be his nephews. Meanwhile, El Universal reports that the Tijuana cartel is readjusting after some recent high-profile arrests.

* Check out once more the San Diego Reader's exhaustive list of major narco-related violent incidents in Tijuana over the years. The Arellano Felix name comes up many, many times.

** BOOK NOTE: I link above to "El Cartel" by the late Jesus Blancornelas, a comprehensive history of the Tijuana cartel by the trailblazing journalist from TJ's muckracking institution, Zeta. Just came across it again in my too tall to-read pile.

Fall-out from the Fernando Marti case: 'Let them rot!' **

So read the banner headline in Friday's La Prensa, the city's leading yellow-note tabloid, showing a photograph of Felipe Calderon as he intensifies the law-and-order rhetoric against kidnapping gangs who really are blanketing this country in fear, up and down the class scale.

Since the grisly discovery of the body of 14-year-old Fernando Marti last week, troubled talk of "insecurity" and "delinquency" is crescendoing everywhere, from the radio dial to the street corner. Calderon is calling for life in prison for convicted kidnappers. The president has, in a way, drawn political benefit from the chatter of scandalized voices, some of whom are calling for the death penalty for such criminals. Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City's ambitious mayor, must be a little bewildered that he is playing catch-up this week. Members of his police force are implicated in the Marti case. But so are members of the federal police. For now, the real question is, which man -- the PAN president or the PRD heir apparent -- will come out on the top in the war of security rhetoric, and posturing?

* RELATED: If you can stomach it, check out this exhaustive list of insanely bloody narco- and organized crime-related major incidents in Tijuana over the past 20-some years, from the San Diego Reader.

* PREVIOUSLY: "The Fernando Marti case: Presidents on alert," "The creeping march of narco violence in Mexico," and "Battle in Tijuana: A city 'burns' with narco violence."

* Photo above, from the July 26 edition of La Jornada, of a dead police officer in Culiacán, Sinaola, dressed up as a charro before being dumped by a road by his killers.

The Fernando Marti case: Presidents on alert **

In Mexico City it's smart to be more wary of cops than of regular hoodlums. Here's why. The 14-year-old son of a very rich man was discovered decomposing in a car trunk last week. One police commander has been arrested in connection to the murder, and more than a dozen other officials are under investigation for possible links to a kidnapping ring. Details:

Authorities have released almost no information about the Marti case. But according to press reports, Fernando was riding in a car with a driver and a bodyguard on June 4 when the group was pulled over by men who they thought were police. Armed men killed the adults at the scene and abducted the boy. One press report said the family paid $6 million for the boy's release and waited in agony after the kidnappers stopped communicating with them.

Fernando Marti's killers were apparently members of a ring known as La Flor. On Tuesday night, President Felipe Calderon attended a memorial Mass for Marti, the latest of who knows how many kidnapping/murder victims here. Many uncounted peoples are kidnapped, ransomed, and (still) killed every year in Mexico. But Fernando Marti's father Alejandro is a well-known founder of chains of sporting goods stores and gyms. High-profile police officers are implicated. Exceptions must be made ...

* Previously, "Leaving Tijuana: Everyone is doing it."

The new Mexican champ: Tijuana's Antonio Margarito

Mexico has a new boxing sensation, Antonio Margarito, also known as the "Tijuana Tornado." Margarito put away reigning WBA welterweight champ Miguel Cotto on Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I caught the last four rounds of the match at a nameless cantina in a Garibaldi alley, where the dude next to me kept saying this was the "fight of the year," given the national rivalry at play. Cotto, from Puerto Rico, walked into the fight unbeaten with 32 wins, most of them by knockouts. Margarito, born in Torrance and raised in Tijuana, was the consensus underdog to claim the WBA title. He had vacated the IBF title just so he could take on Cotto.

What happened? In the 11th round, after a relentless and smart assault from the 30-year-old "Tijuana Tornado," 27-year-old Cotto dropped to his knee twice, bloodied and beaten, forcing his corner to throw in the towel. Thrilling. Definitely read the BBC's stylish report on the bout, and Steve Bruce in The Independent. AP sports writer Greg Beacham declared that Margarito has "finally established himself as the meanest hombre in a division packed with tough talent." There's an opening in Mexico, Beacham noted, for a fresh boxing idol in that "boxing-mad nation." Maybe the ghost of Antonio's brother helped?

* Above, Cotto and Margarito, doing press for the match. Previously, "Boxing, borders, brotherhood: Meet the Molina twins."

More Lil Rob: Just one of those days

Everything's all good in the neighborhood, homes. * Previously, "The enduring allure of the romantic cholo."