PJ Rountree is a visual artist based in Mexico City who makes work about the news, about the city, and about color and shapes. That's about as plainly as I can put it. See here, here, and here.
His current central project is Punto de Reunion, a study of the evacuation spots outside buildings in Mexico City that ... You just have to see, because you can also wear it.
** Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Gatopardo magazine, with photographs by Eunice Adorno (gallery here).
* The following is an excerpt. Gatopardo is on newsstands in Mexico now.
Sábado 15 de diciembre de 2012
[11 Ix o 12.19.19.17.14]
Finalmente conseguimos aquí una información clave. En el pueblo llamado Ticul, al sur de Mérida, un poco antes de llegar a Oxkutzcab, vivía un experto en garabatas, como se le llaman a los huaraches en Yucatán. Uno de los curanderos que conocimos en Kambul, Jorge Coronada, nos dijo que el maestro José Ortiz hacía los mejores zapatos de la península. Nos lanzamos para allá.
Un lugar se revela por el carácter de sus caminos: a lo largo del periférico de la ciudad de Mérida —una vía moderna repleta de fábricas y oficinas de gobierno— era común la presencia de la policía, fuerte aunque nunca amenazante. Pasamos por uno de los varios retenes que se instalaron para seguir manteniendo el orgullo de Yucatán: el estado más seguro del país. Al llegar a Umán tomé una calle que nos llevaría al centro, pero se convirtió en un camino cuyo sentido era opuesto al que veníamos. Del otro lado venía un joven en un taxi-motocicleta y cuando nos pasó me miró con desdén y me dijo: "¡Vete a la verga, vato!". Pensé que nunca se puede decir de un lugar que "la gente es tan amable y tan acogedora", porque siempre hay excepciones.
Cuando llegamos a Ticul ya era de noche. El cielo estaba despejado y un mar de estrellas brillaba arriba con intensidad. La luna estaba majestuosa y los caminos entre la selva oscura eran largos y rectos. Este pueblo era como los demás en Yucatán: tenía un mercado, una estación de camiones, zapaterías, tiendas de ropa y de teléfonos celulares, además de casas de piedra de un piso que parecen haberse construido hace veinte o doscientos años. Todos los pueblos de la llanura de la península son iguales; están edificados alrededor de una plaza con una iglesia que parece un fuerte. De hecho, muchas funcionaron como tales: las iglesias de pueblos como Tizimín, Muna y Ticul son altas, con pocas ventanas y están construidas con muros de ladrillo de grandes dimensiones; un recuerdo del pasado, cuando los mayas se resistieron a la conquista española por generaciones —mucho más tiempo que los aztecas.
[Previously, "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, Part 1."]
Un viajero del siglo XIX, John L. Stephens, describió a este pueblo como "el perfecto retrato de quietud y descanso". Íbamos en el coche por el centro polvoriento, cuando giré a mi derecha y enseguida me detuve junto a un hombre de mediana edad, que estaba sentado afuera de una zapatería. Buscamos al señor José Ortiz, el zapatero, dije. Aquel hombre tendría unos sesenta años, el cabello blanco y unos extraños ojos verdes y cristalinos. "Él es mi padre", contestó y explicó cómo llegar a su casa.
Unas cuantas cuadras atrás, sobre la misma calle, nos topamos con el taller del señor Ortiz. Había un pequeño letrero pintado a mano junto a un poste de madera que marcaba la fachada de la casa. La puerta estaba abierta, y dentro se veía todo iluminado por un foco fluorescente pegado a una mesa de trabajo, que bañaba la habitación con una luz azul pálida. No había nadie adentro. Tocamos y llamamos a la puerta, tocamos y llamamos. En la ventana de la calle se veía una serie de luces navideñas que formaban un altar a la Virgen de Guadalupe, de esas que vienen con música de villancicos con un solo tono. Poco a poco nos fuimos metiendo y esperamos dentro. Viejas fotografías y mapas colgaban de las paredes, como si no hubieran sido tocados por décadas. Estaba claro que el taller del señor Ortiz era un lugar especial. Me sentí satisfecho por estar ahí.
[Previously, "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, Part 2."]
Una mujer pasó por la calle y al vernos preguntó qué estábamos buscando. Un minuto después, José Ortiz Escobedo llegó y se acercó a mí y mis compañeros.
Era un hombre viejo y muy delgado que vestía pantalones y una playera de trabajo. Tenía un rostro bien parecido, moreno, y una nariz triangular puntiaguda. Nos saludó con amabilidad, y pudimos entonces presentarnos. Queríamos ver, le dijimos, las garabatas que vendía. Al principio fue un tanto difícil comprender lo que decía. Tenía noventa años de edad. Su acento maya era fuerte —el turbulento y entrecortado castellano, que hierve en la punta de la boca para luego estallar en sus cus y kas.
El señor Ortiz explicó que no podía vendernos ninguno de los huaraches de piel que colgaban en la pared. Parecían objetos delicados, pero resistentes. "Te pueden lastimar los pies", dijo. Ortiz sólo hace sandalias a la medida. Dijo que podría tomarnos la talla y tendríamos que regresar mañana o el día siguiente, si así lo deseábamos. Me probé un calzado y me quedó perfecto, pero el señor Ortiz insistió en que no nos vendería ni un solo par que no estuviera hecho a la medida. Ni un cinturón, además, aunque también intenté llevarme uno. Por un momento me resultó imposible entender que, a diferencia de la ciudad de México, aquí el dinero no podía comprarlo todo.
[Previously, "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, Part 3."]
Le pregunté si había escuchado algo acerca de la supuesta predicción de los mayas sobre el fin del mundo. "Si se acaba el mundo, me voy para Mérida", concluyó.
El señor Ortiz, que no había ido a Mérida en muchos años, nació en esa casa donde estábamos parados, lo mismo que su padre. Ha trabajado como zapatero por más de setenta y cinco años. Se casó a los veintidós, y su esposa aún está viva y tiene la misma edad, noventa. Tienen ocho hijos, aunque sólo sobreviven cinco, y doce bisnietos, dijo. Se puso a traducirnos ciertas palabras mayas como che para madera, o eck para estrella. Los mayas de Yucatán siempre han dicho lo que piensan, dijo. Y como él es un hombre de edad, no fue nada tímido para enunciar lo que pensaba. "Los mayas lo que ven, lo dicen —dijo—. Lo que hablábamos ahora es mestizado, no es la verdadera lengua maya. La verdadera es ofensiva, ofende a la mujer".
"El apellido que tengo no es maya… Es español… Y a pesar de que soy maya porque nací en tierra maya y nuestro estilo es maya, el apellido no lo es".
Le preguntamos qué comía para estar tan sano y despierto: chaya, lechuga, espinaca, rábano, chayote, nada de carne. Se movía por la habitación libremente y usaba sus brazos para hacer énfasis en sus ideas. "Tengo que trabajar —dijo—. Si uno se acuesta, envejece más pronto".
Cuando le pregunté de nuevo sobre el significado del "fin del mundo", contestó que "el sistema de ellos termina. El sistema de los otros, ahorita, es lo que va a terminar. Y empieza lo de los mayas".
[Previously, "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, Part 4."]
* English-language posting is forthcoming ...
** Originally published in Domus México No. 4. No direct link. This is the original draft submitted to the magazine for translation to Spanish.
MEXICO CITY – In the photograph, Enrique Flores Magon is seated at a table facing a bank of angled mirrors. His white, wavy hair is tousled upwards wildly, as if he had been submitted to a rain of static. His expression is morose. Flores Magon is reflected in the mirrors four times, and so at the top of the print, a winking caption is written in cursive ink, in Spanish: "Mis cinco cuates."
And below, in English: "Who said that a haircut was needed?"
When I first saw this photo – in the personal archive of Enrique Flores Magon, which is being revived by his great-grandson – it filled me with wonder and amusement.
For anyone familiar with Mexican Revolutionary history, the dominant image of those called its "intellectual authors," brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon, is that of stalwart, driven journalists who challenged the regime of Gen. Porfirio Díaz and sought justice for the working classes through the power of the printed press. Of course, the lives of any historical figures are in truth far more complex than the heroic legacies that they leave behind.
How did the Flores Magons interact with the world around them on a day-to-day basis? What were their domestic concerns and challenges? In their interior lives, how did they respond to the growing pressures and persecutions of the Mexican and United States governments that led to their repeated imprisonments?
The photograph of Enrique and his "cinco cuates" – modeled on a 1917 Duchamp self-portrait photograph using the same effect – is among one thousand photographs that exist in his personal archive. As an image, it offers a window in the dissident writer's sense of humor and sense of self. It is undated. The exact location of where it was taken is not known either, although Enrique’s great-grandson, historian and writer Diego Flores Magon Bustamante, believes that it was probably taken in Los Angeles around 1923, when the brothers were in exile north of the border and raising revolutionary trouble there as well.
Diego is spearheading an ambitious project that will permit all of his great-grandfather’s materials, including some 15,000 documents, to be available for viewing to the general public in the form of a digital archive. It is perhaps one of the most significant archival projects undertaken in Mexico in recent years.
The digital archive will be housed at the restored building at Calle Républica de Colombia 42 in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City where the Flores Magon brothers and a committed group of lawyers, artists, and writers – including Daniel Cabrera, Jesús Martínez Carrión, and Juan Sarabia – published an opposition newspaper to the Dáiz regime, El Hijo del Ahuizote.
The project is being funded by a mix of support from the Fidecomiso del Centro Histórico, CONACULTA, and private foundation grants. Diego, now 32, explains he is a fervent believer that the archive that his father passed to his care should be available to a viewing public that is as wide as possible. The idea is that with new readings of the materials that Flores Magon left behind, fresh interpretations and applications of the brothers' ideas could emerge.
The historical value of the archive is immense. Ricardo Flores Magon, the more historically prominent of the two, died at a U.S. prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1922, facing espionage charges for publishing pacifist materials in the U.S. version of Regeneración, the brothers' second newspaper. Any known archive belonging to him, Diego believes, was lost in Ensenada, Baja California, in the 1940s.
"Ricardo no tuvo una vida que le permitiera coleccionar nada," Diego says. "Llevo una vida de martir y de perseguido y de fugitivo. No tenía nada."
Continue reading "Domus Mexico: Introducing la Casa de El Hijo del Ahuizote *" »
On the question of political art in Mexico, one of the best places to turn in recent years has been the Internet. Simon Pecco, of Tijuana, tells Steven Rodriguez at LA TACO:
I did not burn down the Peña sign / I applaud the person who did. That’s more or less an invitation. Fuck the law! Those kinds of heroes are needed so that people can become aware that they need to get with it.
** Originally published in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
MERIDA, Mexico -- Contrary to any Hollywood doomsday scenarios or a variety of less-than-optimistic New Age theories, the world will not end Friday, Mexican tourism authorities and Merida residents assure anyone who asks.
Yes, the end of the 13th baktun cycle in the so-called Long Count of the Maya calendar corresponds more or less with Dec. 21, this year's winter solstice.
But the event merely signals the "end of an era" and the start of a new one, locals and scientists say. Or, as some academic Mayanists have explained, the end of the 13th baktun — a date deciphered from totem glyphs and written numerically as 13.0.0.0.0. — is a sort of "resetting of the odometer" of time.
It has become reason enough for people of this flat, tropical region of Mexico to celebrate their Maya culture and history and make mystically minded calls for renewal and rebirth. Officials and residents have also expressed high hopes that foreign tourists will be inspired to visit the Yucatan Peninsula through Friday and beyond. (Assuming the world is still here.)
A handful of residents and officials from Merida, the capital of Mexico's Yucatan state, gathered Saturday at a small cenote, or freshwater sinkhole, for a "Blessing of the Water" ceremony. A man dressed in white and described as a shaman stood before an offering marking the four points of the compass, saying prayers in the Mayan language for Madre Tierra, or Mother Earth.
"We must reflect on how humanity has conducted itself, what we've done to the Madre Tierra during this cycle," said Valerio Canche, president of a local association of Maya spiritual healers.
Canche walked among the people, singing in Mayan in a low voice. He took a handful of herbs and dipped them in water drawn from the cenote, then splashed droplets on the heads of those gathered — a cleansing ceremony.
"Let us conduct ourselves, as brothers all, for the common good," Canche said. "Not only for the Maya people, but for the entire universe."
This cenote, in a community called Noc Ac about 14 miles outside the historic center of Merida, sits inside a dilapidated, unguarded government lot, little more than an opening in the ground shaded by a large tree.
Continue reading "Merida, Mexico, says: Hope to see you after the world doesn't end" »
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- The city that was once considered one of the world's most polluted and crime-ridden now boasts that it is a haven from Mexico's drug violence and has gone so "green" with new mass transit lines and trendy vertical gardens that it is hardly recognizable from its former self.
Miguel Angel Mancera, the newly sworn-in mayor, vowed this week to continue the socially progressive policies of his predecessor and make Mexico's gargantuan capital "safer, freer, more equal, more progressive" during his next six years in office.
"My government shall be humanist, truthful, honorable, transparent, democratic and united with the people," the mayor said in his first speech after taking the oath of office Wednesday.
Mancera, 46, the former attorney general of Mexico City, holds a doctorate in law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a single father and fitness buff who boxes regularly. The society magazine Quien called him "the golden bachelor" in a recent cover story.
Mancera won the July 1 mayoral election by a whopping 63% of the vote, a margin of victory considered partly a referendum on the liberal Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and its uninterrupted run at City Hall since 1997, when the position of mayor was created for the Federal District, the formal name of Mexico City.
Mancera took the reins of the city's government after the largely successful term of outgoing Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a popular figure who is credited with reducing crime in the capital even as violence soared in other parts of the country and who legalized same-sex marriage and abortion on demand in the city.
The position of mayor is considered a launching pad for higher office in Mexico, but it is also a frustrating barrier for the PRD. Its presidential candidates in recent national elections, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, have both been mayors of Mexico City but have been unable to capture the presidency in a total of four attempts.
Ebrard, a product of the more centrist wing of the PRD, was sidelined as candidate in the 2012 presidential election by the populist stalwart Lopez Obrador, who finished second after Enrique Peña Nieto, the new president.
After his swearing-in, Mancera said he would install thousands more high-tech surveillance cameras to further reduce crime. He also proposed the creation of a post in his Cabinet, a U.S.-style city manager, to answer citizens' needs.
On Thursday, his first full day on the job, Mancera waded into the capital's current major controversy, the alleged abuse by police and abitrary arrests of dozens of protesters in clashes during last week's swearing-in of Peña Nieto. The city's human rights commission said Thursday that more than 20 people who weren't involved in the violence had been arrested, including a Romanian journalist taking photographs of the events, and that at least four may have been tortured or beaten.
Mancera urged residents to be patient with legal proceedings for 69 people who face charges of vandalism and disturbing the peace on Saturday. "To say that no one disturbed the peace or public order would be out of touch with reality," he said.
However Mancera's term as mayor turns out, it may not be enough to catapult him higher if he harbors aspirations for the presidency in 2018. For that election, his former boss, Marcelo Ebrard, has already indicated he's in the running.
* Photo via Chilango.com.
The talk at DePaul was about the processes in which the populist-progressive current leaders of Mexico City, under the administration of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, have re-socialized the core of the city into a "user-friendly" urban enthusiast's playden. The process I think at least partly reduces or represses some of the instinctual, genetic cultural ticks of improvisation and negotiation that define the true capitalino or chilango. "Safety first."
I'll have more about these ideas in future pieces. In the meantime, thank you Hugh Bartling and the DePaul community for the invitation. And thank you, Ector Garcia, gifted artist, for showing me around.
Chicago is impressive and I am eager to return.
** See Chicago diary, Part 1, Part 2.
It's amazing how deeply communities in the United States have embraced the Días de Muertos of Mexico. There are now hundreds if not thousands of Day of the Dead-related events in cities across the U.S. "Average American citizens" know about the holiday and understand its meaning. In a way, it's probably the most successful cross-over act in recent U.S./Mexico binational relations.
I'd say the phenomenon really took off in about 2000. At the time, the Day of the Dead festival at Hollywood Forever cemetery began popularizing, drawing non-Mexican, non-Latino folks' curiosity. (Check out an archival story I did for the L.A. Times in 2002 on the Hollywood event, which started in 1999.)
From there, the gospel of Muertos spread, helped likely by factors such as increased Mexican migration northward and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which undoubtedly had the effect of reminding Americans' about the fragility of life.
This year, I went to the Day of the Dead festival in Old Town San Diego with my family. The setting is great. Old Town is the city's original Mexican core, settled after the 1769 founding of a Spanish imperial fort on a nearby hillside. On Friday night, Nov. 2, the crowds were only dotted with mexicanos. The rest of the skeletons were everyday coastal Californians.
Here are some photos.
** Originally published at World Now:
Maria Guadalupe Garcia usually spends two hours traveling from her home in southeast Mexico City's Tlahuac borough on bus and microbus to reach the city's west side.
On Tuesday, Garcia, 60, was one of the first riders of a new subway line inaugurated by the mayor and Mexico's president. She said she expects that those two hours of commuting will be reduced to 45 minutes.
"It's going to benefit us so much," Garcia said, standing with her husband, Angel Hernandez, on the platform of the Mixcoac station. "Now, we'll go with calm."
The 12th line of this city's moving hive of a subway system -- the loved and loathed el metro -- opened to the public in what leaders called the most significant and complex public-works project in recent Mexican history.
The new Line 12, or Gold Line, cost about $1.8 billion and is a capstone for the administration of outgoing Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard. The line also represented an unprecedented test for engineers, planners and politicians who had to fend off vigorous protests and legal challenges from some residents.
For riders, the line makes a crucial alteration to the transit landscape of Mexico City: It adds a lateral connection across the southern end of the metro map, crisscrossing four lines and creating transfer points where previously none existed.
The line also connects Tlahuac, a large, semirural expanse on the southeastern end of the metropolis, to the subway grid. End to end, Mixcoac to Tlahuac, the line stops at 20 stations across 15.5 miles of tunnels and elevated tracks.
More than 380,000 people are initially expected to use Line 12 daily. Overall, nearly 4 million passengers ride Mexico City's subway every day, making it one of the largest such systems in the world.
"This is an immense project for Mexico City," Ebrard said. "It is the longest line and turned out to be most complex. We are very proud of our engineers, our workers."
President Felipe Calderon said he was proud the federal government supplied funds for Line 12, meant to commemorate the 2010 bicentennial of Mexico's independence.
"It was worth it," Calderon said. "This ... is a sustainable solution to the problems of mobility and transport in Mexico City. Moreover, it minimizes the impact of pollution on the city, and that's fundamental."
By noon, smiling, cheering riders were joining the inaugural train on which Calderon and Ebrard briefly rode. An hour later, at Mixcoac station, commuters were already moving about the transfer point as hardy residents of this city do: earphones in, bags held close, eyes alert to the journey ahead.
* Photo: Juana Cisneros, 59, and Jose Hernandez, 52, were among the first riders of the new Mexico City subway line, Line 12, on Tuesday.
** Originally published at World Now and re-published in the Sunday, Oct. 28, 2012, print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
Will the last wailing, stumbling drunk person on Mexico City's Plaza Garibaldi please turn off the lights on the way out?
The government of Mexico City, where drinking until dawn has long been a competitive pastime, has banned the sale and drinking of alcoholic beverages on the esplanade of Plaza Garibaldi. Public drinking was a previously tolerated custom at the meeting point for hundreds of struggling busking mariachi musicians and their glad-to-be-sad customers.
Authorities said alcohol would still be sold at the bars and cantinas that ring Garibaldi, but the practice of chugging beers or downing mixed drinks outdoors in the early-morning hours with mariachis crooning nearby will halt under Operation Zero Tolerance, said Alberto Esteva, subsecretary of public policy at City Hall.
Under the administration of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, the city has invested about $26.8 million to revitalize Plaza Garibaldi, mostly on the construction of its Museum of Tequila and Mezcal and the repaving of the square. The outdoor alcohol ban is one more step in that plan, Esteva said in an interview.
"We gave the vendors alternative options, they didn't respond, and the city had to make a decision," the official said. "Garibaldi is about evoking that Mexican-ness, those customs, but permanent drunkenness is not one of them."
Alcohol sales were first barred Wednesday night, and by Thursday afternoon, without a vendor in sight on Garibaldi's wide expanse, mariachis and business owners expressed ambivalence about the new policy.
"There will be fewer people, because that's why they come downtown. To drink, drink here, and go somewhere else," said Soledad Diaz de Dios, whose family owns a recently renovated pulque bar on the square, La Hermosa Hortencia. "But [the drinking on the plaza] is also bad, for the tourism aspect."
Complaints of violence, public vomiting and marijuana smoking have grown. The plaza has also seen large brawls and confrontations with police involving semi-homeless youths, identified as "punks" by some of the musicians. Reportedly, drinks on the plaza are also sometimes spiked with substances meant to alter drinkers' mental states and thus make them vulnerable to assault.
"[The policy] is good, in quotation marks," said trumpet player Jesus Rosas. "Every Thursday through Saturday night, the party starts. And what's the party? Fights, breaking bottles, robberies."
But without the open-air drinking to go along with the mariachis, norteños, and jarochos, will Plaza Garibaldi ever be the same? Mariachis have complained to the city that the museum, for example, blocks access to the plaza, reducing their customer base.
"It hasn't been reformed, it's been completely tronado," huffed old-timer David Figueroa, a guitar player, using a slang term for broken, failed or flopped.
* Photo: Soledad Diaz de Dios, a vendor at the pulquería La Hermosa Hortencia on Plaza Garibaldi, Oct. 27, 2012.
** Originally published at World Now:
They rallied and railed against the dominant media duopoly in Mexico during a crucial election campaign, but now former members of the student movement known as #YoSoy132 are set to appear on a new talk show produced by the Televisa network.
The revelation Wednesday startled observers and sparked outraged and mocking commentary on Twitter in Mexico, where #YoSoy132, or "I Am 132," was founded in May.
The leaderless movement emerged in protest of Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate who went on to win the July 1 election, and against Televisa and TV Azteca. Together, the media conglomerates nearly monopolize the airwaves in Mexico, making them a target of protests by #YoSoy132 for what it called the networks' biased and favorable coverage of the candidate.
"Sin Filtro," or "Without Filters," is slated to be a weekly Sunday night program on ForoTV, an arm of Televisa. The format is a round-table of university students who will discuss, "without censorship," the pressing issues facing Mexico, host Genaro Lozano said in an interview Wednesday.
Lozano, a 36-year-old international relations professor and frequent political commentator on Mexican news outlets, is not a former member of the student movement, but he helped moderate a presidential debate that #YoSoy132 organized. The unprecedented unofficial meeting with three of the four presidential candidates (Peña Nieto declined to attend) was noteworthy for being organized by citizens and not the federal electoral authorities.
The first installment of "Sin Filtro" is expected to feature Antonio Attolini, a former #YoSoy132 campus representative and one of the most prominent and recognizable student voices during the election. Later, however, Attolini was effectively booted out of #YoSoy132 after other students regarded his many media appearances -- including on Televisa -- as detrimental and distracting to the group's agenda.
Lozano said he understood the criticisms of the new program but added that he would make efforts to reach out to students from a range of public and private universities in Mexico for future on-air panels.
"There is a phobia toward the networks, and that's a historical issue in Mexico," Lozano told The Times. "But I think opening a new space of dialogue is always a good thing, and I hope other such spaces open up on other networks."
He added that he previously had taped a pilot for a similar program on another network, but only within the last two weeks did a contact with the Televisa conglomerate lead to "Sin Filtro." Lozano said he expects to sign a contract for the show with Televisa on Thursday.
Online, the official Twitter account of #YoSoy132 distanced itself once more from Attolini, saying: "#YoSoy132 does not have leaders precisely to avoid that the contradictions of one affect us all." Other Twitter users were less generous, with some dubbing the student panelists who appear on a "Sin Filtro" promo on YouTube as "traitors."
The promo itself is a study of what might arguably be called unintended irony.
Lozano identified the participants as all former members of #YoSoy132, now sitting before cameras belonging to the largest mass media company in the Spanish-speaking world, which is also currently tied to a trafficking ring investigation in Nicaragua.
"I'm tired of the fact that the old news media class gives us information in the same manner, and with bias," one panelist, a young woman wearing heavy-framed eyeglasses, emphatically declares. "That is bad for freedom of speech in the country and that's why we're here, to discuss what interests you, without filters."
Attolini, meanwhile, broke his silence on Twitter on Wednesday as the virtual booing and hissing rained down on him. By the afternoon, he tweeted: "The struggle will be infinite if we don't start gaining territory. Now we have it inside the wolf's cave. Let's say the things that are concealed."
"Sin Filtro" is scheduled to premiere Sunday, Oct. 28. Lozano said the likely topic will be media democratization, a central issue for the student movement during the campaign.
* Photo: Moderator Genaro Lozano appears in a screenshot of a promo for "Sin Filtro." Credit: Via YouTube
RELATED INSIDE INTERSECTIONS:
On voting for the first time for president in Mexico
Vendors, vendors, vendors ...
People, people, people ...
And then ...
Continue reading "Incidents of travel in the Yucatan, Part 3" »
** Originally published at World Now:
It is almost pointless to be sad about the passing of Chavela Vargas. Her entire life, through song, was about transcending and challenging death.
The singer, who passed away Sunday in Cuernavaca, lived to be 93, surviving many contemporaries from decades ago when Vargas wore men’s clothes, smoked, and carried a pistol in macho-bound Mexico.
Then she disappeared. For a few foggy years in the last century, when Vargas stayed away from the capital's cabarets and fell under the spell of alcohol in a forgotten town in the state of Morelos, she had become a ghostly myth. Many people actually thought she had died.
After the reflourishing of her career -- starting in 1991 at the Coyoacan district cabaret El Habito, but marked for U.S. audiences by her performance of "La Llorona" in the 2002 film "Frida" -- Vargas through her performances seemed to be gamely singing her way around death.
It was always a fair match, always a matter of courtly struggle against a respected rival.
In her songs, in that uniquely Latin American way of romancing melancholy, Vargas would channel the long echoes of sorrow and pain that accompany any life as long as hers, armor against its end. Few details are known about her famous affairs, but we didn't really need them. Her songs about love and loss evoked countless shivers and heavy hearts, countless borracheras -- enthusiastically sorrowful drinking sessions.
For that, audiences and listeners across Mexico, the Americas and Spain would sometimes find themselves under a surprising state of rapture in the presence of her voice. It was pleading and raspy, yet always remarkably controlled.
On Monday night, throngs of Vargas devotees filled Plaza Garibaldi near downtown Mexico City to be near her casket for a few hours and participate in a customary Mexican ritual that's become familiar after the passings of Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsivais: a public mourning session.
Howls of farewell from fans were heard across the plaza. When prominent folk singer Eugenia Leon led the crowds in the universally revered ranchera ballad “Volver,” which Vargas always delivered with fire and ruination, hundreds of voices joined in what felt like a spontaneous group therapy session. There was a lot of tequila flowing by then.
This sort of event in any context can become a platform for insincere or awkward reactions to the death of a beloved figure, and this was particularly apparent. The memorial was organized by the culture ministry of the Mexico City municipal government and included the participation of a mariachi band associated with the media conglomerate Televisa.
Against such a powerfully distinct voice as that of "Chavela," the tributes sung by Leon, Tania Libertad and Lila Downs as "offerings" before her reboso-covered casket served only as reminders of what has been lost. All are accomplished singers, but none could capture what Vargas could.
When she sang, she'd sometimes lift her chin in a slow physical gesture, as if exposing both her dignity and wounds. At a microphone, she'd take her arms and raise them past her head, palms open, as though conjuring a ghost. Vargas might have laughed out loud if she was observing the memorial Monday night from the comforts of the Aztecs' underworld.
At Plaza Garibaldi, the troubled meeting-point for Mexico City’s roving mariachi musicians, several mariachis said gruffly that they were respectful but indifferent to her passing because Vargas usually did not perform with mariachis but with the solitary guitar.
She did, however, drink at the Tenampa cantina on the plaza. On Monday night, a group of longtime lesbian activists who knew Vargas gathered at a table at the Tenampa, with a bottle of tequila in her honor.
Patria Jimenez Flores, 55, described herself as a "spiritual daughter" to Vargas, who was also seriously regarded by many as a shaman.
"She was the first to break with all the stereotypes and paradigms in a country like Mexico, that is somachista. She took the criticisms, and then had the public at her feet," Jimenez said.
A comment heard since Vargas's death is that, as a chamana, she not merely died but "transcended" to another plane.
In one of her final interviews, Vargas told the El Universal newspaper's Sunday magazine in April that she was enjoying her final years in her home in Tepoztlan. She told the magazine that she would "cease living without dying."
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* Photo: Chavela Vargas performs in Lima, Peru, on Oct. 12, 2002. Credit: Jaime Razuri / AFP/Getty Images
** Originally published at World Now and re-published in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
The pay phone is tucked into a colonial-era doorway facing a busy sidewalk downtown. It happens to draw attention only because the phone is bright red. “Free calls,” reads a plain sign taped inside, along with instructions on how to dial any number in Mexico or in the world.
An installation conceived by artist Minerva Cuevas, the phone also features a photograph of a chimpanzee picking up an old rotary phone, like an open invitation. One recent day, this reporter stumbled upon the phone and did what millions of others might do when faced with a free call. I called my mother.
“Hey, mom! I'm calling you for an art piece!”
“Oh, that's great, mi'jo,” she replied, before launching into the latest local gossip.
Few artists in the world challenge the penny-for-penny profits of global capitalism as bluntly as Mexico City native Cuevas. She puts revolutionary slogans inside mass-produced fortune cookies and hands out bottles of water taped with the word “Egalite” instead of “Evian,” because shouldn't water always be free?
Her free pay phone is a new work produced for an exhibit at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, or Museum of Mexico City. The show, on view until Aug. 5, covers a career defined by Cuevas' knack at turning art into giveaways for ordinary people hustling to make ends meet in a tough city. They are particularly subversive gestures for Mexico, the artist says, a society where the very wealthy and connected usually get all the shortcuts and giveaways they might wish.
Cuevas' Mejor Vida Corp. is perhaps her most well-known conceptual project. This Better Life “corporation” distributed subway tickets inside underground stations, handed out low-price barcodes to sneak onto items in stores, and produced fake student ID cards (for transit and entertainment discounts) by request from strangers.
As might be expected, the public responded approvingly. Mejor Vida Corp. went on to become an icon of contemporary Mexican art in the 1990s.
The exhibit on Cuevas also highlights works that are surprising for their almost formal expressions in painting and performance. In a 1995 video, the earliest piece in the exhibit, Cuevas films herself through the process of drinking an entire bottle of tequila.
She does so mostly in silence. In person, Cuevas is similarly soft-spoken yet precise, deliberately measured with her words. She would describe the tequila video only as “sculptural.”
The free pay phone is a powerful piece, the equivalent of an art-world bomb aimed at the web of private financial structures that profit from our 21st century need for telecommunicating with loved ones. It is especially potent in the financial nerve center of Mexico City, where telecom magnate Carlos Slim bases the Telmex and Telcel empires that make him the world's richest man.
“It was one of the most difficult pieces to get installed,” Cuevas acknowledged on a recent bright midday outside the museum. “Obviously, in Mexico, we have the reference of the monopolies, of Telmex, but it's also about creating this oasis in the city.”
Cuevas said she is paying for calls made at the installation herself. She is keeping a registry of the calls made, but in keeping with the strategy behind Mejor Vida Corp., the data will remain private. (The artist said she can confirm that calls from Mexico City to Cuba are the most expensive.)
On Wednesday, free-admission day at the museum, the phone doorway was closed because the museum's telephone and Internet connections were inexplicably down, a spokeswoman said. It was a cold reminder for any would-be caller of the frequently unreliable nature of telephone service here, even in today’s wired world.
* Photo: Artist Minera Cuevas says her free pay phone is about "creating this oasis in the city." Credit: Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times
** Originally published at World Now:
The tiny but closely watched migrant segment of the Mexican electorate voted for Josefina Vazquez Mota of the governing National Action Party (PAN), an opposite result to her third-place showing in the national race.
The results announced Monday by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) also showed a 23% increase in voter-abroad participation over the 2006 election, the first time Mexicans living abroad had the right to vote.
In all, 40,714 votes were counted from 91 countries, with a wide majority of those from the U.S., reflecting the deep civic engagement with Mexico that many established immigrants can maintain after decades away.
Voters abroad registered with the IFE months in advance to receive a postage-paid ballot by mail, which had to be returned by Saturday. Electoral authorities on Monday noted they were also able to reduce the budget for the vote-from-abroad count by more than half.
"It was a success because the goal was to get more votes than in 2006 at less of a cost, and that's what happened," said Ana Isabel Fuentes, IFE spokeswoman for the vote-abroad program.
The news was a bright spot in the post-election buzz for the PAN.
A PAN-led government under President Vicente Fox pushed changes in electoral laws in 2005 to give Mexicans living abroad the right to vote, which migrants in the United States had lobbied for since the 1970s. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had resisted giving migrants the vote throughout its presidencies.
PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto won Sunday's election, returning the party to power after 12 years in opposition. During the campaign, supporters of the PRI opened an unofficial campaign office in the Los Angeles area, and that may have given the party a boost over its showing in 2006.
Vazquez Mota won 42.1% of the 2012 migrant vote, results showed. She was followed by leftist coalition candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador with 38.9%. The PRI finished with 15.6%, a low third place compared with its national victory of at least 38%, according to Monday's ongoing national tally.
In 2006, the PRI finished with a paltry 4% of the votes sent from abroad.
The migrant vote is minuscule compared with the tens of millions who vote in Mexico, but they often remain influential leaders in their communities here and account for a large portion of Mexico's wealth through remittances.
In an interview with The Times conducted before the election, Peña Nieto's advisor on migrant affairs said that upon winning, the PRI would maintain and expand migrant-friendly programs developed by two consecutive PAN governments.
Arnulfo Valdivia, a political economist and dual Mexican-U.S. citizen himself, said Peña Nieto's administration would also seek to make it easier for the estimated 12 million Mexicans living in the U.S. to vote in future elections. Currently the IFE does not issue voter cards outside the country.
"The phenomenon of migration cannot be a point of pride," Valdivia said. "It's fundamentally a reflection of the lack of opportunities that exist in Mexico."
[Post edited slightly.]
* Photo: Ramiro Romero shows his ballot as a voter abroad in Mexico's July 1 presidential election, May 24, 2012, in the Lynwood suburb of Los Angeles.
** Originally published at World Now:
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the veteran leftist leader in second place in Mexico's presidential election, says he will wait for a final vote count before deciding whether to concede.
As hundreds of ardent supporters chanted and rallied in an impromptu demonstration outside a downtown hotel early Monday, Lopez Obrador took to a modest podium. His speech was brief and simple, his mood mellow.
He announced that he would not concede defeat on election night in Mexico. For many, it was a flashback to 2006, the last presidential election in which Lopez Obrador refused to accept defeat, declaring fraud and sparking a series of protests that paralyzed Mexico City.
"The position that I assume is to wait," Lopez Obrador said before media and supporters in a ballroom at a downtown Hilton Hotel. "We need to know all the results. We're going to wait for those results before making any final positions. There is no final word yet."
But in a way, there was a final word. Just moments earlier, shortly after a speech by the head of the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, a smiling President Felipe Calderon went on national television to announce that the institute's "fast count" had a winner, Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI.
Lopez Obrador, upstaging the man who ultimately defeated him in 2006, began his speech before Calderon had finished his, forcing media networks to momentarily scramble between the two feeds.
"I'm not disqualifying what is being said officially, there is simply not enough information," Lopez Obrador calmly stated. "We will not in any way act irresponsibly."
The 58-year-old former mayor of Mexico City had kept much of the country in suspense Sunday in the hours after candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota of Calderon's ruling National Action Party (PAN) conceded. Lopez Obrador held what was described as an emergency meeting with senior figures in his Democratic Revolution Party at campaign headquarters in the Roma district. By 11 p.m., he was on his way downtown, as supporters gathered and chanted, "It's an honor to be with Lopez Obrador!"
His announcement came as the IFE preliminary count showed a narrowing between Lopez Obrador and Peña Nieto. At one point, it reached a difference of just 3.3%. Later Monday morning, with about 80% of the vote tallied, the margin stood at about 5%.
Campaign members said Lopez Obrador was making a good decision, and that fears of another planton protest camp in Mexico City (akin to a permanent sit-in) would be unfounded. But they also didn't discount the prospect of contesting the vote to the last possible moment, when the president-elect is formally recognized by Congress in the fall.
[ *** UPDATE, 20:11 p.m., July 2: Lopez Obrador reiterates in press conference tonight that he will not concede and will work his way through the "legal process" of contesting results *** ]
"In 2006 there were doubts about the result; what we have now is a start" to the vote-counting, said Oscar Mondragon, the campaign's social-media strategist. "We're halfway through a process that will finish in September."
Peña Nieto, meanwhile, wasted no time in claiming victory and seeking to allay fears about his party's authoritarian past. He pledged to rule on behalf of all Mexicans and to lead a government willing to listen to criticism.
"We're a new generation," he said. "There is no return to the past."
[ *** More soon ... *** ]
* Photo: A propaganda poster for presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is defaced and vandalized on Avenida Juarez in downtown Mexico City, on election night, July 1, 2012.
** Originally published on June 27, in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
TLAXCALA, Mexico — His razor-thin defeat in the 2006 presidential election spiraled into a contentious political melodrama that divided Mexican society after he refused to accept the results.
Now Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is running again, his second and presumably last attempt to become Mexico's first leftist president in modern times.
"We are going to win the presidency of the country once more," the former mayor of Mexico City proclaimed triumphantly during a campaign stop last week in this small colonial center east of the capital.
Once again, his optimism may belie the facts on the ground. In national polls, he continues to lag far behind Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, although he says his own internal polling shows him running neck and neck.
Lopez Obrador, of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, has been gaining slightly in national polls since the race began in March, capitalizing on discontent with two successive governments under the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, and on lingering distrust of Peña Nieto and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Wrapped in a long wool serape thrown on him as he inched his way through throngs of supporters, Lopez Obrador described his "adversaries" as "desperate," detailing what he views as a conspiracy of television and political propaganda to "impose" front-runner Peña Nieto on the public.
The crowd booed, jeered and banged on drums. "May God never will it," a woman huffed near the podium.
This week, Lopez Obrador called on PRD supporters to be vigilant observers at polling places Sunday in case the PRI or PAN attempted to steal votes or stuff ballot boxes, which his campaign claims occurred widely in 2006.
Silver-haired at 58, Lopez Obrador inspires fervent passion in supporters — and profound angst among his many critics.
Continue reading "Mexico's leftist candidate has high hopes, fervent supporters" »
** Originally published at World Now:
The presidential candidate for Mexico's ruling conservative party has said she'd invite President Felipe Calderon to be attorney general if she won Sunday's vote, a surprise proposal made in the final hours of campaigning.
National Action Party candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota, the first female presidential hopeful from a major party in Mexico, made the pitch Wednesday at her closing campaign event in Jalisco state (link in Spanish).
"I want someone who will defend your children ... who is not afraid," Vazquez Mota told supporters at the Omnilife stadium in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara. "That is why I want to say here in Jalisco, with total conviction, that upon winning the presidency of Mexico I will invite President Calderon to head the attorney general's office."
In one video of the moment, some in the audience are heard gasping or laughing in reaction.
"He is a brave man. He is a resolute man. He is a man who has risked his own life and the lives of his family," Vazquez Mota said.
There was no immediate response from the Calderon administration, which has conducted a controversial military-led war against drug traffickers, nor elaboration from Vazquez Mota's team. Under Mexican law, campaigns were required to shut down Wednesday night in order to give "reflection time" to voters before Sunday's voting.
But the announcement sparked fireworks on social networks.
On Twitter, politically revved-up users described the idea as "political suicide" and suggested Vazquez Mota was throwing support to liberal candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, even though Vazquez Mota directly attacked her leftist rival in the same speech.
Polls show Lopez Obrador in second place. He and Vazquez Mota appear to be splitting votes of residents who oppose the return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which lost in 2000 after 71 years in power.
PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is leading most recent polls by at least 12 points over Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City and runner-up in Mexico's disputed 2006 presidential election. Vazquez Mota has slipped to third in most polls since the start of her campaign.
The announcement confounded observers. For one thing, Calderon and Vazquez Mota are not close.
Although she served as education secretary early in Calderon's administration and ran his 2006 campaign, Vazquez Mota has struggled to define her campaign's relationship with the president and his allies within the party, known as the PAN. Her campaign slogan is "Different," but she was forced to bring on Calderon insiders to steer her campaign after early missteps, gaffes, and a near-fainting incident.
Wednesday's unexpected move might have been a deliberate political calculation. A poll released June 20 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project said Calderon has a 58% approval rating, and that a majority of Mexicans still approve of his use of the military against drug lords.
In the same poll, however, Mexicans said they were unsure the drug war has been effective. A whopping 98% of major crimes go unpunished in Mexico, if they are reported at all, studies show.
In recent days, supporters of both non-PRI candidates have debated on social media whether PAN followers should cast their votes for Lopez Obrador in a so-called voto util against the PRI.
The 2012 campaign has also been marked by large-scale grass-roots protests against the PRI's possible return to power, led by students organized in the #YoSoy132 movement. The students announced they would hold a candlelight march Saturday, the day before voting, to "save Mexico" and push for "clean elections."
On the last day of her campaign, Vazquez Mota told supporters she was ahead of Lopez Obrador and called the PRD candidate "the face of chaos and economic crisis" (link in Spanish). On the same night, Lopez Obrador drew hundreds of thousands of supporters for his last campaign speech in Mexico City's Zocalo square and on surrounding streets.
"There is more crime, there is less employment, the country is in bad shape," said Isabel Pacheco, 46, a Lopez Obrador supporter in the front row. "But the time for change has come."
* Photo: Mexican presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota of the National Action Party waves during a rally in the Mexican city of Monterrey on Tuesday. Credit: Miguel Sierra / European Pressphoto Agency
** Originally published at Vice.com:
We’re now less than two weeks away from Mexico’s presidential election, and at this point, few people would have expected that the otherwise unsurprising democratic process of voting would be accompanied by scenes of rabble-rousing students chanting and singing along with mariachi bands outside the studios of Mexico’s leading television network.
These scenes, part of a nascent student movement known as #YoSoy132, are now becoming regular features on the nightly news in Mexico. Imagine that, young people protesting media bias and media manipulation by the thousands in a country with little precedent for such collective grievances against corporate big media.
A lot of people here are pretty excited with this development.
It all started on May 11, when candidate Enrique Peña Nieto visited the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City for what was supposed to be a friendly meet-and-greet with the student and academic community. Instead, over the course of his visit, Peña Nieto suffered a humiliating and disastrous few hours of abuse from what looked like a spontaneous student protest. It got messy.
Peña Nieto came for a normal campaign stop, to deliver a speech and answer questions before an auditorium. The thing was going nominally well until students who had managed to slip in protest signs past a security check could no longer contain themselves. According to video, photos, and accounts of the event, the shouting started after one lone guy with a poofy haircut and a lot of attitude stood up silently holding a hand-drawn sign that read simply, TE ODIO. “I hate you.”
The shouting and chanting grew. Peña Nieto sought an escape. More protesters were waiting for him outside.
The candidate with the movie-star looks and soap-opera star wife was chased through the halls and courtyards of “the Ibero” by choruses of “Murderer!” and “Coward!” as students protested his handling of a 2006 dispute with campesinos in the town of San Salvador Atenco during his term as a state governor. The shouting and chasing grew overwhelming. Peña Nieto hid briefly in a restroom with his team, trying to find a good way out. Video of the moment shows Peña’s eyes wide and hollow, his forehead tense, lips curled up with fear.
By the time it was all over, Peña Nieto was literally run off the Ibero campus. As he ducked into a dark SUV, one reporter managed to ask him what he thought of the protests against him. “It’s not genuine,” he responded with a meager smile, and took off. And with that, the 2012 Mexican presidential race—the race that Peña Nieto was supposed to win without breaking a sweat—took a major shift.
The Ibero incident put the Peña Nieto campaign in damage-control mode. The next day, suggestions that the demonstration was staged by outsiders was repeated by his campaign chief, a few sympathetic Ibero faculty, and just about every provincial and vaguely corrupt newspaper that implicitly supports Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
This turned out to be an enormously foolish move. The students responded by uploading a video of 131 of them staring into their MacBook video cameras and repeating their names and their student ID numbers while flashing their Ibero ID cards. The PRI has spent many millions of dollars on its campaign to win Mexico’s presidency, but what followed was a media coup that no amount of cash or army of consultants could have stopped. Among Mexico’s active Twitter-verse, the hashtag soon appeared: #YoSoy132. “I am 132.”
It’s worth noting that this kind of brouhaha was very unexpected for Ibero. It is one of the swankiest schools in the country, the kind of place where a slick, media-savvy politician like Peña Nieto should normally be made to be feel right at home. Hell, the Ibero produces Peña Nietos. I know, because a lot of my friends are recent graduates. Even they were surprised by what happened on May 11, but not entirely. Any decent school always has room for progressive thought and action, and while the Ibero probably costs more per year than what millions of Mexicans make in an adult life, there was an undercurrent of “enough is enough” in the anti-Peña protest that seemed blind to class or social boundaries. By the following weekend, a classic grassroots social-media movement had taken off.
#YoSoy132 demonstrations broke first in Mexico City. Tens of thousands streamed through the central corridor and gathered at the Angel of Independence monument to make it known that they, too, were opposed to the PRI regaining power.
The party ruled the country for much of the 20th Century until 2000 with a potent mix of strategies that ultimately boils down to power-by-any-means necessary. It has a widely documented history of vote-buying, fraud, collusion with drug traffickers, censorship, intimidation, election-stealing, and often fatal repression against dissidents—from the assassination of top party figures such as Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994 to the outright massacres of student protesters in 1968 and 1971. Peña Nieto says the PRI under his candidacy is a new party, and that his campaign should not be faulted for the party’s “errors” of the past.
In 2012, as the July 1 election day nears and the PRI remains ahead in the polls, the students aren’t having it.
#YoSoy132 demonstrations were also held in Monterrey, Guadalajara, Tijuana, Durango, Zacatecas, Tlaxcala, Aguascalientes, Veracruz, and many other cities in Mexico. Smaller protests in show of support of #YoSoy132 have also been reported among the wide Mexican diaspora in places like Chicago, Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco, and before the White House in Washington, DC. Students at more than 35 universities and colleges across Mexico have joined the movement. What’s significant is that they’re forming a private- and public-university horizontal coalition that hasn’t been seen in Mexico with such force since the late 1960s. As thousands join their demonstrations, there’s a sense of collective dissent against the return of the so-called “dinosaurs” of the PRI, and collective disgust at the arguably biased role that the major media companies are playing in the process.
Now, this is not the Mexican Spring. It’s not a movement meant to topple the government. It’s actually stated a sort of incongruent political position: Against a presidential candidate but not in support of any other. For all we know, Peña Nieto has already won the 2012 election in Mexico. He’s about 15 points up; heart-on-his-sleeve leftie Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and incumbent party conservative Josefina Vazquez Mota, who’s all about keeping military on the streets against drug cartels, are so far splitting the anti-PRI vote.
Even if Lopez Obrador or Vazquez Mota pull off a wild upset in the end, #YoSoy132 will seek to keep the movement up, asking for media reform against the duopoly of Televisa and TV Azteca, which evidently represent an extension of the greater status quo in Mexico—all neatly symbolized by Peña and the PRI. Therefore, the natural questions are: Can it? Will it? Could it?
* Photo: Three high school friends at the Televisa studios protest on June 11, 2012, by Trevor Snapp. For more photos by Trevor Snapp on #YoSoy132, go here.
** Originally published at World Now:
Why is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador running for president of Mexico again after his politically damaging response to the 2006 election? Why isn't Marcelo Ebrard, the outgoing mayor of Mexico City, running for the leftist coalition instead?
For weeks, the question has popped up in the cocktail chatter of many residents of this progressive-leaning megacity.
As reported in The Times on Wednesday, dogged campaigner Lopez Obrador has moved up in polls but remains behind the front-runner with just days before voting.
In this scenario, gloom is rising among liberal Mexican voters who thought Ebrard would have been a more broadly appealing candidate for the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), and possibly even draw voters who might normally support the incumbent center-right National Action Party (PAN).
"Am I sad? A little. We all thought it would be Ebrard," said Javier Velazquez, 30, a Mexico City animator and filmmaker.
"Ebrard would have had the same power of Lopez Obrador but I think a lot of PAN people would have voted for Ebrard too," Velazquez said. "People who live in Mexico City know how Ebrard governs. The rich didn't get poor."
Crime has dropped in Mexico City under Ebrard's security policies, which are based on a network of 13,000 surveillance cameras. His public shared-bike program Ecobici has grown rapidly since it started in 2010. Earlier this month, he inaugurated Carrot, the city's first public shared motor vehicle program.
In 2010, he was named World Mayor by the City Mayors Foundation, an independent think tank.
In November, however, the mayor was unable to pull ahead of Lopez Obrador in an internal poll that the two agreed upon to determine who would be the PRD presidential candidate. Lopez Obrador had been campaigning since narrowly losing in 2006, and Ebrard had only recently begun to build a national profile. (For political junkies, the drama is detailed in an extensive profile on Ebrard in the current Gatopardo magazine, in Spanish.)
On the campaign trail this year, Lopez Obrador has attempted to bring Ebrard’s political capital along with him, but the effort is hampered by Mexico's strict electoral codes. Citizens serving in public office are not permitted to campaign; candidates formally resign from their posts in election seasons. A campaign spot that Ebrard recorded for Lopez Obrador was deemed illegal by the electoral tribunal and ordered off the air.
But Ebrard's absence also highlights the ideological distance that exists between the two men.
The candidate has said Ebrard would serve as his interior secretary if he wins the election, a crucial post that oversees major internal matters in Mexico. The suggestion raises a host of questions about how that relationship might actually operate.
In many ways, the two men represent opposite poles within the PRD, said Dag Mossige, a political scientist at Davidson College in North Carolina who is working on a history of the party.
Lopez Obrador, for example, has said while campaigning that he'd put the matter of same-sex marriage to a national referendum vote. The proposal is not only "absurd" and hostile to the protection of minority rights, Mossige said, but it would also put Lopez Obrador directly at odds with Ebrard's record on the issue. He legalized same-sex marriage in Mexico City in 2010.
The candidate proudly proclaims he never took a trip abroad while serving as Mexico City mayor, while Ebrard during his term has taken frequent trips on the international circuit, including an investment-seeking tour last year to Kuwait.
The front-runner to succeed Ebrard as mayor, PRD candidate Miguel Angel Mancera, has said he'd continue to govern Mexico City with an international focus. Mancera, a beneficiary of successful stints for both Lopez Obrador and Ebrard in city hall, looks to clobber opponents in Sunday's election by at least 40 percentage points.
"We have two major components in the PRD; one is a movement, it's all about winning the presidency, the cause," Mossige said, referring to Lopez Obrador's wing. "The other part is more European, it locates the party in an international context, where politics is about gradual negotiations, and they are quite more democratic than the other side."
"And the party is really fighting between the two."
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Mexico's leftist candidate has high hopes, fervent supporters
* Photo: Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard in September 2008. Credit: Mario Guzman / European Pressphoto Agency.
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- Camila Vallejo broke into the international limelight in May 2011 as the beautiful revolutionary who led hundreds of thousands of student demonstrators in a call for education reform in Chile, toppling government ministers in the process.
She was, on the surface, an unlikely leader.
Just 23 at the time, the geography student dazzled the public early on with her statuesque features, shiny nose ring, and her soft, soothing manner of speaking. More alluringly, Vallejo was often inaccessible to the press, surrounded by student bodyguards.
Underneath the image, she was clearly exhibiting sharp political skills, both on the street among the droves of students and workers who managed to frequently shut down the capital of Santiago, and also in negotiations with the government of President Sebastian Piñera.
A year later, the students' demands for a freer, more equitable education system have made some progress against Piñera's initial response that higher education in economically prosperous Chile was "a consumer good."
But overall, the movement appears to be in a state of transition, if not stalemate.
Vallejo, now 24, has also reached a point at which she must decide what her next political role might be. Could a next step be toward the electoral arena in Chile?
Last week, Vallejo visited Mexico for the first time, to speak at a conference on higher education at a Mexico City university. The visit had been planned since late last year, explained a spokesman at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (known as UAM for its initials in Spanish), but by now Vallejo's presence in Mexico had acquired politically significant overtones.
Since mid-May, Mexico has witnessed demonstrations across the country expressing opposition to the possible return to power of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the July 1 presidential election. The new student movement in Mexico, known as #YoSoy132, or "I Am 132," has won concessions from major newscasters and on Tuesday night organized an unofficial "citizen's debate," with all the presidential candidates except Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI.
Vallejo spent about three days in Mexico, speaking at the UAM's Xochimilco campus and meeting with members of #YoSoy132.
As the country bars foreigners from "participation" in politics, she made sure not to comment directly on Mexico's election. She also restrained from making any direct recommendations on #YoSoy132. "The students are their own advisors," Vallejo said at a news conference. "We're not here to intervene."
Despite the caution, she was treated like a rock star in liberal Mexico City.
UAM students clamored to reach out and greet her. At a public panel Saturday on a plaza near downtown, she was given bunches of flowers and greeted with shouts of "I love you!" from the crowds standing in the rain to hear her.
"What's happening here in Mexico and what's happening in Chile is that we're trying to repair the social fabric, organizing, mobilizing, so that we could more radically democratize our societies," Vallejo said in an interview with The Times on Friday.
"I believe the 'I Am 132' movement is in the same feeling," she added. "We are basically fighting for the same thing."
Her visit came at a moment of personal redefinition. In recent months, Vallejo may have seriously damaged her standing among less strident, more post-revolutionary young leftists in Latin America. She visited Cuba in April to attend the 50th anniversary of the Communist Youth Union, and apparently spoke approvingly about the Communist regime.
"If Camila Vallejo was born in Cuba, she'd be in prison or simply silenced by the mechanisms of power," said dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, who sought unsuccessfully to meet Vallejo while she was in Havana (link in Spanish).
Vallejo has made no apologies for her affinity to Communist thought. She is the daughter of members of Chile's Communist Party and a member herself of the Communist Youth in Chile. With her charisma and political capital among Chilean society, some are beginning to wonder whether Vallejo would seek to further tilt Chile's current opposition more to the left, as a candidate of some sort for the Communist Party.
Speaking to The Times, she did not disavow the possibility.
"I think all the youth that have mobilized have a responsibility to assume a political role at the national level," she said. "We are going to fight until the end, and not just me, but many other new partisan militants who are young and want to build a social transformation."
"I will be there," she added, "and many other youth, social leaders, in that path."
* Photo: Chilean student leader Camila Vallejo is shown before delivering a speech during a meeting with Mexican students in the #Yosoy132 movement, at the Metropolitan Autonomus University in Mexico City on Friday. Credit: Alfredo Estrella / Agence-France Presse
** Originally published at World Now, Wed., June 13:
MEXICO CITY -- The Chilean student leader Camila Vallejo confirmed on Wednesday that she will visit a Mexico City university and meet with members of the nascent student movement in Mexico known as "I am 132."
Vallejo, a popular figure, is among listed participants for a conference on public education that started Wednesday at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, or UAM.
She is scheduled to meet students in the #YoSoy132 movement Thursday at the UAM campus in Xochimilco, in southern Mexico City.
A 24-year-old geography student, Vallejo became internationally known as an early and telegenic leader in the movement calling for education reform in Chile. The demonstrations that began in May 2011 to press for more public funding in higher education have put pressure on the administration of Chilean President Sebastian Piñera.
Mexico's student movement, meanwhile, held another string of large demonstrations across the country on Sunday, along with concurrent, smaller protests by supporters in cities around the world, including Madrid, Chicago and Washington.
Demonstrators are opposed to the possible victory of presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto ofMexico's former ruling party in the July 1 election. The Institutional Revolutionary Party is leading in polls as the vote nears.
Demonstrators have declared themselves nonpartisan, but the "I am 132" movement has buoyed the campaign of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in some polls.
The movement took a hit Monday when a video emerged of students claiming to be #YoSoy132 but who were announcing a split with the group. "I am 132" organizers said the people who appear in the clip were unknown to them and had never been at movement meetings. (One figure in the splinter group told reporters Tuesday that it had only 15 members.)
"These are guys just looking for attention and the news media are giving it to them to weaken the movement," said Ignacio Martinez, a 23-year-old communications student at the Ibero-American University, where protests began against Peña Nieto on May 11.
Meanwhile, as reports of physical confrontations between alleged Peña Nieto supporters and Peña Nieto opponents have trickled into news accounts, Lopez Obrador on Wednesday said during his daily news conference that his campaign did not support violence of any sort.
"We are not in any act of confrontation," said Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor and self-proclaimed pacifist. "We are in peace, peace, peace, peace."
Peña Nieto, former governor of the state of Mexico who has also disavowed any campaign violence, reaffirmed his position Wednesday to not attend an unofficial presidential debate being organized by the "I am 132" movement. The three other presidential candidates have agreed to participate.
"It's clear this is a movement that does not generate conditions for a neutral, impartial meeting," Peña Nieto said during a television interview.
* Photo: Chilean student leader Camila Vallejo, pictured in 2011. Credit: Luis Hidalgo / Associated Press
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- It was, in a manner of speaking, the biggest moment of Sunday night's presidential debate in Mexico.
To mark the debate's start, a stunning, undeniably well-endowed model took the floor, smiling silently and carrying a box with four pieces of paper in it that candidates drew to see who went first.
The candidates managed a straight face, but at first sight of her, dozens of journalists inside the debate press room at Mexico City's World Trade Center gasped and jeered.
The woman, identified later as a model and former playmate for Mexican Playboy, Julia Orayen, almost immediately became a trending topic on Twitter.
Orayen was serving as an edecan, a role that has long been traditional to formal political, business, or entertainment events in Mexico.
The edecan is a sort of hostess who stands during meetings or parties to help guide or coordinate guests. They are usually attractive young women with long hair who wear sexy dresses and heels, a feature of Mexican public life that some consider a throwback to the culture's more macho tendencies.
"Who won the debate?" one Twitter user quipped. "Edecan: 93%."
As photos of the debate's busty model kept abuzz online overnight, analysts and even some of the candidates on Monday morning took the edecan as a topic serious enough to discuss on the morning news radio programs.
Speaking to host Carmen Aristegui, presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota said she thought Orayen was "very attractive" but that her dress was inappropriate for the generally serious nature of the debate, the first of two organized by the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE.
"The truth is, Carmen, I want to say that suddenly I was surprised, and I [thought], 'Well, what sort of event are we attending here?'"
Playing defense, a member of the IFE's governing council said that the edecan was hired by an independent production company contracted to organize the debate, but Councilor Alfredo Figueroa would not identify the producer (link in Spanish).
"We asked the producer that there be no elements of distraction, for a sober dress," Figueroa said.
Orayen had her own opinion on the matter. The model told W Radio host Brozo -- who wears a clown costume -- that she felt "weird" by the sudden surge of attention.
"I just got a call to be there, I didn't know what it was going to be about, and much less that it would have such an impact for 30 seconds," Orayen said.
"The costume ... intrigued me," Brozo replied.
"I got a call for a white dress. I took many options, and this was the one chosen by me," she said.
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* Image: In a screen shot of Sunday's video feed of the presidential debate in Mexico, model Julia Orayen carries a clear box to each of the candidates. Credit: Twitpic.com, via Twitter
** Originally published at World Now, by Daniel Hernandez and Cecilia Sanchez:
MEXICO CITY -- The four candidates for president of Mexico met in a two-hour debate on Sunday night that saw several colorful surprises but few signs that one candidate pulled away with a sure win.
Although the format was tightly controlled, with pre-approved questions written on paper and chosen from a row of boxes, a string of attacks and counterattacks on the part of the candidates offered a much livelier evening than initially expected.
Enrique Peña Nieto of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, held up a blown-up photograph of a newspaper article referring to a 2004 corruption case tied to leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Lopez Obrador, in turn, showed a photograph of Peña Nieto sitting arm in arm with former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI, a move meant to remind voters of the corruption and repression that occurred in the Salinas administration.
"Pure lies, pure insecurity, and that's how they want to impose [the candidacy of] Peña Nieto," Lopez Obrador said, referring to his long-held belief that the dominant television network Televisa is unofficially supporting the PRI campaign.
(The populist candidate for the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, however, held his photograph upside down for several seconds.)
The lone woman in the race, conservative Josefina Vazquez Mota of the National Action Party, or PAN, concentrated her attacks on Peña Nieto, who entered the debate as the front-runner in all polls.
Vazquez Mota drew attention to the tragic and seemingly unbelievable death of 4-year-old Paulette Gebara Farah, which occurred under Peña Nieto's term as governor in the state of Mexico.
"I am different because I have a trajectory of honesty and I come from two governments that have not mortgaged the lives of your children," Vazquez Mota said, referring to her party's two consecutive terms in power.
The fourth-place wild card, teacher Gabriel Quadri, tried his best to refer to himself as a "citizen" candidate, unlike his three leading rivals, while lobbing attacks across the board.
Despite the surprises, the first debate in the 2012 election was strictly moderated.
There was no live audience in the same room with the candidates, and no pre- or post-debate conference for the reporters and photographers who gathered in a press room far from the candidates' set at Mexico City's World Trade Center. The candidates stood at podiums facing cameras, not one another.
Before the debate, on the leafy streets outside the World Trade Center, some of the candidates' supporters gathered to rally and cheer on their favorite.
"We are sure that Enrique Peña Nieto is going to win the debate and the presidency," said Ernesto Alcantara, 28, an engineer. "We are here to tell him that he is our candidate, that we trust in him, and that he has our support."
Benita Soto, a 24-year-old student, said she was supporting Lopez Obrador because she said he offers an alternative.
"Enough of the bad governments of the PAN and the PRI," Soto said. "Lopez Obrador is the good guy."
Mexicans vote on July 1 in what will be the second presidential race since the PRI was voted out of power in 2000 with the election of President Vicente Fox of the PAN. In 2006, Lopez Obrador came within less than a percentage point of winning the presidency, which ultimately went to President Felipe Calderon -- results Lopez Obrador still claims were fraudulent.
Peña Nieto, known for his telegenic qualities but facing consistent criticism about his intellectual mettle, is attempting to ward off any potential shift in the race by Vazquez Mota or Lopez Obrador.
Analysts believe many Mexicans are willing to vote the PRI back into power after two terms of conservative, neoliberal-leaning PAN presidencies and the horrific violence brought by the drug war.
"I propose changing fear for hope, I propose changing Mexico," Peña Nieto said.
The next debate is scheduled for June 10.
* Photo: People watch the 2012 presidential campaign's first televised debate at Mexico City's Zocalo, or main square, on Sunday night. Credit: Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press
** Originally published at World Now and the L.A. Times print edition:
The director of child psychology at the Center for the Attention to Talent is a child himself: 17-year-old Andrew Almazan, a prodigy who was reading Shakespeare and Cervantes at age 6.
Almazan, sitting at his desk last week at the education center he co-founded with his parents, is a tall teenager who speaks rapidly, mounting phrase over phrase.
His astounding ability to absorb and process information is apparent from the moment he begins recalling his earliest years, as he breezed through the standard subject materials of Mexico's education system.
"Since I was 4 years old, I was deciding on what career I wanted to study when I became older, because I became aware that people work at something, and if you're going to work at something all your life, you should enjoy it," Almazan said.
"I ended up on medicine and psychology."
Almazan, born and raised in a middle-class section of Mexico City, earned his psychology degree from the Universidad del Valle de Mexico and is now working toward a medical degree at the Universidad Panamericana. Both schools are in Mexico's capital and had to make special accommodations for Almazan's studies.
In the meantime, he and his family are on a mission to identify and nurture niños sobredotados, as highly gifted children are known in Mexico, through their private Center for the Attention to Talent, or CEDAT (link in Spanish).
The center claims there are 1 million highly gifted children in Mexico and only about 5% of them are identified and educated according to their needs. The rest, Almazan and his parents argue, are often subjected to bullying or suffer from low self-esteem because of incorrect diagnoses of learning disabilities or psychological problems.
Almazan developed many of the materials and programs at CEDAT himself, offering the approximately 200 students who study there supplemental, accelerated courses in literature and the sciences.
"What he needed was knowledge," said father Asdrubal Almazan, a doctor, remembering Andrew's childhood. "We gave him books, videos, classes in what he was asking for. All he needed was the opportunities to prove what he knew."
A philosophy that operates at the core of the center, the Alamazans said, is one of personal responsibility. The theme hasn't always entered the discourse and debate on education reform in Mexico. That might be changing.
Last month, a documentary film highlighting the shortcomings of Mexico's education system led at the box office during its opening weekend, beating out several Oscar-nominated films crowding Mexican cinemas at the same time.
The film, "De Panzazo," or "Barely Passing," examines crumbling facilities, absent teachers and the grip of the powerful teachers union on Mexico's broken school system. It also emphasizes the lack of parental participation in schools. Tellingly, less than half of young Mexicans manage to finish middle school, the film notes.
Dunia Anaya, Andrew's mother, said students and parents in Mexico should look less to authorities for the best education and instead turn to their households for needed support.
The educational materials prepared by Mexico's federal government are not bad, she said, pointing out Andrew studied the standard coursework at his own pace and learned the materials just fine.
"That means the problem is not there," Anaya said. "As parents, we have a great responsibility, because the children are ours. Children naturally want to learn."
For his part, Andrew said he worries many gifted young children in Mexico are falling through the cracks, suffering from isolation, bullying or misunderstanding at the hands of adults. That's why he is lobbying for a national day for gifted children in Mexico.
And he also wrote a book about the topic, which he titled "The Questions of Hyper-Active Adrian."
"We're lacking consciousness at the social level," Almazan said. "Although we know about the existence of this minority, we need to recognize all the highly gifted children that have come before."
"We also need to address their emotional needs, because many times, they arrive here already damaged," the young psychologist asserted.
"There are many opportunities here in Mexico, in work and in education, we just have go out and find them."
* Photo: Andrew Almazan, 17, at his office at the Center for the Attention to Talent in Mexico City in February.
** Never got around to posting this here! Originally published at World Now (months ago):
Like most of the mariachi musicians milling about Plaza Garibaldi this early morning waiting for work, Juan Ramon Ramirez had his hands in his pockets, not on the strings of his vihuela.
It was cold, and there weren't many customers out looking for a song. Not even just a few days after Mexico's most well-known musical tradition got a dose of good news.
Mariachi music -- who hasn't ever heard that spirited strumming? -- now belongs to the world's list of "Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity," as declared this week by the United Nations.
Ramirez, 62, had heard about the U.N. designation and it sounded good to him.
"I hope it turns into more work," he said, not appearing very hopeful. "Well, it could turn into more work."
Minutes passed, and no one approached to commission a ringing rendition of "Cielito Lindo" or "El Rey."
"Let's hope this gets fixed," the musician said.
UNESCO, the U.N. educational and cultural agency, added mariachi and 18 other demonstrations of intangible world heritage to its list during a meeting in Bali, Indonesia. The additions include Chinese shadow puppetry and French horseback riding, which is intangibly vital for the world because it "emphasizes harmonious relations between humans and horses," the agency said.
UNESCO also added 11 demonstrations of intangible world heritage that, in its phrasing, are in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. These include Yaokwa, the "Enawene Nawe people's ritual for the maintenance of social and cosmic order," in the Brazilian Amazon, and a "circular breathing" singing technique from Mongolia.
But was mariachi placed on the wrong list? Could it be considered in Need of Urgent Safeguarding?
You might think so after a night at Plaza Garibaldi, or any plaza, it might seem, where mariachis traditionally gather and busk for work. Mariachis everywhere are having a tough time.
In Los Angeles, home to the world's second largest population of Mexicans, mariachis are feeling pushed out of the traditional Mariachi Plaza east of downtown due to the looming threat of development and gentrification.
In Guadalajara, the historic birthplace of mariachi, the musicians at the Plaza de los Mariachis complain of a declining clientele due to security fears and a lack of support from the local government.
The city is the capital of Jalisco state in western Mexico, and it means business when it often proclaims itself the "cradle" of Mexican culture. Tequila, the highly tangible alcoholic spirit, is also from there.
Here in Mexico City, Plaza Garibaldi north of downtown has been completely remodeled in the last two years, with a new plaza floor and a new tequila museum. Local mariachis, however, say the imposing museum structure is unwelcoming and "doesn't have a point." The remodeling also kept customers away for months at a time, and since the project was finished, they haven't quite come back.
That's how mariachi David Figueroa put it. The 66-year-old guitar player said the fixes to the plaza are largely cosmetic. He's played in Plaza Garibaldi, he said, since 1957. His workload suffered once the city started cleaning up the area, and it hasn't fully recovered since.
Attempts at integrating mariachis into established unions have also produced poor results for the musicians, Figueroa added.
"What we really need is a good restaurant with good food where you can go listen to good music," Figueroa said. "They don't help us at all."
Indeed, mariachi's addition to the UNESCO list will probably mean little to the musicians who gather at places like Garibaldi. (The full-band price for a song, 150 pesos or about $11, has not changed since the Sunday news of the UNESCO list, several musicians acknowledged.)
Here, drunken revelers show up to hire bands or trios for whatever song they might want, in just about any genre. Few make much of a distinction between the traditional mariachis -- with their form-fitting suits and wide-brimmed sombreros -- and newer additions to the plaza who play popular nortenos from Mexico's north or jarocho from the tropical eastern coast.
"Now they think they own the plaza!" Figueroa huffed. "But here, the tradition of Plaza Garibaldi has always been mariachi. It's not norteno, not jarocho, not trio, it's mariachi."
A song wafted over the chilly night air from nearby. The men shivered.
"Hopefully the patrimony [list] will mean people will respect mariachis more," said viola player Antonio Hernandez, 55. "We only charge what you're supposed to charge."
* Photo: Mariachis perform in 2009. Credit: UNESCO
** Originally published at World Now:
He was a muralist, an educator and a civic activist who once helped save a colonial-era convent from demolition by moving in and living there. He published books, invented paints and signed his works "Dr. Atl," an imaginary honorific using the Nahuatl-language word for water.
Born Gerardo Murillo in Guadalajara in 1875, Dr. Atl is one of the most accomplished and enigmatic figures from the golden period of modern art in Mexico.
His unmistakably forceful landscapes are familiar to average Mexicans as sort of visual footnotes to an era that saw Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco flourish internationally as muralists. Yet Dr. Atl's greatest pieces have resided mostly in private collections, making them rarely available for viewing to the public.
PHOTOS: The radical landscapes of Dr. Atl
That changes with "Dr. Atl: Masterpieces," on view at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolcojust north of downtown Mexico City. It is the first retrospective on Dr. Atl in Mexico in 27 years, meaning a generation of art lovers could get to know his work in depth for the first time.
The show is organized by the Blaisten Collection, a private museum founded by collector Andres Blaisten that sits inside the renovated university complex at Tlatelolco. It features more than 190 works, many of which are privately owned and not usually shown to the public.
The exhibit charts Dr. Atl's progression from early, more conventional landscapes through his adoption of the curvilinear perspective -- as the eye sees, he argued -- in rendering innovative and sweeping views of the Valley of Mexico.
The artist clearly was fixated on Mexico's volcanoes as both subjects to paint and sources of inspiration, particularly as he sought to push the very boundaries of the landscape form beginning in 1922.
By the end of his career, Dr. Atl wanted to radicalize landscape painting entirely with his theory ofaereopaisajes, or aero-landscapes, in which artists would go up in planes, helicopters and eventually into space to create landscapes of infinity, of "supreme ascension."
Several of the most arresting paintings in the exhibit depict volcanoes at night, in a slanting perspective from high above. Glowing in aquas and purples, the paintings come close to creating a vertigo effect in the viewer, suggesting a peaceful eternal space.
Dr. Atl, who died in 1964 at the age of 88, worked in the classical method, hiking his way to peaks near the twin volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl to make swift sketches of the mountains and valley below (until he later lost his right leg). Then he would transform the quick sketches into brilliant paintings using oil and mixed wax-resin paints he made, calling them "Atl Colors."
It is a happy historical triumph that Dr. Atl was alive in 1943, when the Paricutin volcano began to poke out from the middle of a cornfield in the western Mexican state of Michoacan.
The artist recorded the rise of Paricutin as perhaps no other figure could, with dozens of sketches and paintings that showed the fiery and violent process of a once-in-a-lifetime geological phenomenon.
"For him it was important to walk among the volcanoes. He studied them from all angles," said Vannesa Bohorquez, director of the Blaisten Collection museum, during a recent visit to the show.
"If you didn't know the artist, you'd think these were done by a young [painter]," Bohorquez added. "You need a physical strength to do this, and this was a very old man who had lost a leg."
The artist was also a committed educator and activist, founding an open-air art school and living for an undetermined amount of years in the Convent of La Merced in the historic center of Mexico City in an effort to prevent its demolition. The building still stands.
"Dr. Atl: Masterpieces" is on view until April.
* Photo: "La sombra del Popo," or "Popo's Shadow," a 1942 painting by Dr. Atl on view at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City. Credit: Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times
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