Oaxaca means 'Land of Huajes,' but to me it's always been clear that the city is an inframundo, past the teeth and down the throat of the gape-toothed, grinning Earth monster, sliding through the insides to a place only Persephone knew before me.

When I woke up I was cradling your cranium, my head turned backwards, soft cheek to bone. Dreams are hard to banish in the underworld, and mine stood around me like ghosts--our faces painted, our bones showing, an altar, a confusion of flowers and time, and something I had to tell you, rolling in our matrimonial grave.

Things filter back slowly with the rising of the sun--literal is a useless term when your deams sleep like ghosts inside your bones. You threw up last night. "Six times!" you cried. "Only six? Órale puto stomach, bring it to me! I can take more than this!"

Mouths that were too hungry, biting down on windpipes and your teeth clattering against mine, your tongue trying to slide down my throat as if Oaxaca were my belly, the skeletal grin of the Earth monster in my face and you, bones and ghost of my soul, trying to get back in.

He had doctored his past, of course, like everyone does, and it seemed as foreign to her as her own. [Persephone] had visions of him in a black felt hat, standing like Cool Hand Luke in his manta ray boots, squinting and cockeyed. But these images were strange; silent and flickering, like movies before the film melts and burns through.

What had his voice sounded like in those Deadeye Dick days, what words could have slid from his lips? He told her he used to start fights in nightclubs, sixteen and lockjawed and angry.

She ached to see backwards, through time. There was a hunger growing inside her, a desire to eat his past, to ingest it, feel the sound of his steps like sledgehammers on her eardrums. She wanted to stare through windows long shuttered, pry into ancient history, straining to read the lips of his past. She wanted to see videos of his old lovers, and devour them.

It wasn't jealousy, exactly, it wasn't suspicion--she wanted to ingest all of him, entero, she wanted to swallow his past.

The tabloids had spilled their guts on the day the underworld split open, and [Persephone] was swallowed by the Earth. In the belly of Hades, she felt his hunger swell in her, huge and recursive. She wanted to devour time; she wanted to swallow the Earth.

The video showed the sun setting into the ocean; no special effects, no cut aways.  No corny Montauk couples, no freezeframe or fastforward.  It was just the sun, orange and sinking slowly in a red sky, the waves like they always were: a slate grey that betrayed the freezing temperature she had once, in a surge of adolescent machismo, called 'refreshingly chilly.'  

It was a music video, or something equally easy and mundane, a handheld camera recording the sun setting into the ocean of her childhood home, recording the way the sun had set when she still knew where home was. Her childhood home: a city which anchored her in ever increasing ways, despite the distance and her ebbing disdain.  It was something silly, a music video; she started to cry.  She thought in a way she had never considered in the scraped-up rage of her childhood about how beautiful that home was, and how long it had been since she had felt her skin turn electric sliding under a freezing ocean.  She thought about how long it had been since she had seen the sun set in the only way which meant something real to her, the only tangible reality, the way the it should be: a sun setting into an ocean which was only hers when she hadn't noticed.  She started to cry: for all the things she had felt, lost in the static of misunderstandings. For the distance, for the way voice seemed to have faded, seemed unable to reach into the past.  She cried because she knew her father could no longer hear her. She started to cry for that heartbreaking distance which comes when we understand too well what went wrong, when we know too much, the unwelcome knowledge that human beings on both sides of a divide always feel equally shredded.  Equally incapabale. For the things that got lost in between, for the static that eats all good hearts from the inside, for the sunsets she hadn't seen and the time she had seen too much. "I know how it feels to need," the video sang, and she was crying for the ocean.

When you grow up next to the sea, it can comes to mean too much.  She hurt for the ocean in a way that she was helpless to explain, incomprehensible to those who had not opened their eyes in searing salt water, who had never seen the bottom of the Pacific the way a lover sees her own heart. 

authentic is like democratic in that the more you feel the need to put it prominently in your name, the less likely it is to be an accurate assesment of what's going on.

Learn to make Authentic Mexican Tacos! in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

There's something innately disgusting about the romantic comedy.

Now, those of you who have been around me in a drinking way have I'm sure heard this lecture before: unrealistic expectations, prince charming syndrome, blah blah blah.

But they were playing Hitch on the television tubes tonight, and it struck me that even a romantic comedy which sets itself out to hammer you with the moral that being yourself will bring you true love and equally saccharine bullshit comes out inherently disgusting, and this is why:

Romantic comedies, as a genre and a general rule, are too damn pat.  The man always realizes he's commited some wrong act because the romantic comedy is marketed to (and consumed by) women as a general rule.  Women, simple creatures that they are, are supposed to identify with the female character.  Being also widely publisized and generally accepted as irrational batshit crazies, these women are also somehow supposed to ignore the (in the case of our dear production Hitch) grievous fucking errors committed by the female character in favor of accepting the spontaneously poetic outburst of our revised Prince Charming (now charmingly "realistic!"), drop obligingly into his arms, and stroll off into the nauseatingly inevitable movie closing wedding scene.

Here's the problem: there are errors that there is no fixing.

Screwing a man's career, his job, his life, and his project: not really something he needs to apologize to you, female character, about.
Everything is wrong! Now everything is fixed! is an inconstant reinforcement technique which is a addictive (and twisted) as a gambling addiction, and true to form, the American Female Character dumps dollar after dollar in the virtual fulfillment of fantasies which will never become real because they are at their heart distinctly fucked up in their basic essence.

You come to think that anything is fixable--a fight should lead to an immediate reconcilliation.  Or worse: a woman comes to think (pride apparently not being enough without social conditioning) that "her" man needs to apologize for the wrongs SHE has done him (or circumstantial wrongs, or any other non clear cut types of wrongs) in order for her to feel like a Modern Woman as she gets swept up by her newly revised and no longer guilt ridden but still clearly life(and self) defining Prince Charming.

How does this not make you want to vomit?

I call bullshit, America!

class dismissed.

How do you make a good man bad? yaya

Ladies and gentlemen of the scurrious corners of the internet,
punctuation fanatics,
general moviegoing public:

I've come back to you.
In repentance and recompense for so unceremoniously abandoning you, Im bringing you the Easy Star Allstars as an offering. They are something else, America. They are, as they say in the underworld, de lo que no hay. They are what there's not. Most cover artists, and cover songs in general I suppose, are pretty shitty mostly because they dont change anything about the song they're covering. A shittier version of an original.

The Easy Star All Stars, America, as I'm just now discovering, are by contrast fantastic. They do reggae covers of popular musical bands! Specifically, they have a full album cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon called Dub Side of the Moon. Also I like their covers of Radiohead's album, but I dont remember what it's called.

°

She had begun to grow roots, like some sort of decaying Daphne. She had started to put out roots, and it wouldnt be long before pomegranites dangled from her fingertips, tiny flowers blossoming like bullets on impact, pollen everywhere, her bones exploding into fat round fruit, the marrow sliding sticky down the sides.

The night was a stranger to her. She had turned her back on it, for lack of money mostly, but also lack of desire. Desire was strangely missing from her life, and she found herself going back, combing through dates and memories, calling up her past on expensive late-night phone calls, reeling from the busy tones and wrong numbers.

Where had it gone? That desire which once burned within her like some sort of unbeckoned chemical reaction, the desire which had made her unique if unemployable (by the internet and her mother's standards), which had lit her like roman candles?

She wondered if it wasnt the drugs. Suppressing life has its price, inevitably, though usually that price is its own failure. Was it a chemical issue? Had something gone insane in the membrane? She had hazy memories of mitochondrial highschool science classes, something about a video game and a mitochondrial Eve. Had that ardor which seared her before been as alien as ancestral mitochondria? And what could she do, now that it was gone?

It occurred to her that it might be boredom, might be monotony, might be stress, might be any number of quotidian and unbearably boring possibilities. She didnt want boredom. She was tired of boredom. Its strange how the underworld grows familiar--routine becomes devouring, an earth-monster in its own right.

But still she was full with fruit. Her attraction to pomegranites had never really gone away, and she found herself pushing Hades farther and farther, just one more inch, one more centimeter, three fingertips, to have that oozing red fruit ripped off its branch, to feel it against her teeth, its color staining her tongue. He counldnt reach it. She pushed him harder.  His hands stretched, strangely violent, his fingertips barely touching it, a millisecond caress, and then the fall, catastrophic, tumultuous, the fall as he ripped it down, that pomegranite she had been aching for, the fall and its sides were sticky, oozing, the fall and red, red, fervidly red. She licked her lips. They tasted sweet, and faintly, very faintly, of something that she might call desire.

Kudos to Hoang for pulling off what I didn't
http://www.c-spotmagazine.com/index.html

enjoy, America

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/weekinreview/07lacey.html

Although they didn't really point out the fact that the word muxe is kind of loaded, in the way that the word "queen" or "nigga" is. You know, those words which can be used affectionately or hatefully depending on context. Context is all, America, and don't you forget it.

"When I first heard about San Miguel in the mid-’90s, the knowledge was shared by a friend as a precious secret. Soon afterward, on our first morning there, my wife and I ambled through the most guileless and sweet-natured place we’d ever seen, authentic right down to the donkey-drawn carts carrying water and firewood. Its appearance of being unaffected by its own beauty gave it a quality that was irresistible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/greathomesanddestinations/21expat.html?em

Keep it up, New York Times, your douchebaggery will surely save us all.

AMERICA: "quaint" is as of now officially considered a racial slur. fucking STOP IT.

In a sort of side-note followup of my dissin on the asinine reviewer of American tourist entitlement below, one of the comments brought up an interesting point:

Hi! I read your article only because I saw a picture of my cousins, David (Drum) and Franco (Guitar) on your first picture, thicture, at cafe Revolución.

Now, Sancris is so small that it's not in any way unlikely that someone would see a picture taken by a stranger at any given time and recognize the people in it. What is interesting about this comment, though, is that by naming and identifying the people present in a picture which is clearly supposed to be "ambient"style or exoticly enticing, the characters in the picture are turned from exoticised "natives" with about as much agency as the buildings or the scenery, to real people with real names, protagonists of real stories. It's that change that sort of highlights the depersonification (to take liberties with language--dehumanization seems a bit extreme) of the people represented in the photo. The fact that it was in the comments section that this reversal of object to subject took place is certainly interesting as well--meaning making is, in some small way and slowly at least, being chipped out from under the definitive possesion of those who traditionally have it--those rich white bastards up north.

I'm sure Bertrand Russell's little heart would explode if he could have seen this.
Also, it sort of highlights how important it's going to be to develop an anthropology of online speech and meaning-making, since it's so hugely prominent in all of our lives; yet, to my mind, such a field is just barely beginnning to emerge, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes.

If this sounds pretentious, it's cuz i'm tripping balls.
Love,
your Calaverita.

Because I suspect it's going to be deleted from the Times website (for length at least if not for scathingness), here is my cry of indignant rage at the dick who wrote this article:
http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/frugal-mexico/?apage=2#comments

So let me preface this by saying that I am an American who lives in San Cristóbal, and that I found both your pride in getting ripped off and your cavalier condescension really particularly offensive.

As far as specific inacurracies go: Oaxaca is a 6 hour bus ride, not a 12 hour one. It is absolutely absurd that you paid 220 pesos to get from the airport to downtown Tuxtla in order to pay again to go to San Cristóbal when the ADO (the major bus brand in Mexico, with onboard bathroom an luxe seats, etc) runs directly from the airport to Sancris every hour for 100 pesos. Not to mention that you went backwards to go forwards.

The Zapatistas revolution didn’t fail–as anyone who has spent more than a cursory amount of effort getting to know the region could tell you, (or frankly, even reading the quite numerous signs on the highway between Palenque and San Cristóbal), the majority of towns in Chiapas are autonomous communities, which means that the Mexican police do not go in, for any reason. The land that makes up most of these communities was siezed during the 90s from its previous owners (to the delight of some and dismay of others, obviously).
Na Bolom is known mostly as a museum and library, and only secondarily for the rooms it rents. I certainly would not classify it primarily as a “hotel.”

“Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few American tourists venture there.”

This is actually quite an impressive sentence–you manage to insult the Maya, the tourists, people who went to college, and to imply that the massive amount of American tourists who come through here somehow do not count because they don’t fit into your age group? Or is it your financial group? Because for a frugal traveler, you managed to spend about 10x more than is necessary to have a really nice time in San Cristóbal.

Not to mention that the most awkward hairstyles I’ve seen are a few kids who dye their mohawks pink at not-quite-frequent enough intervals, and they are most definitively local as well as Mexican.

San Cristóbal is an amazing city with a very particular magic to it–you can ask anyone who lives here, for however long or short, or even less pig-headed travelers who are passing through, and you’ll get something of the same response: Sancris keeps those who are good to it, and kicks out those who disrespect. From your entitled spendthrift airs to your downright condescension, frankly, I’m quite glad you’re gone. You and others who share your insidious attitude are the reason Americans have a bad name in Mexico. So take your “unspoiled” and smoke it.

----------------------------------------

This is the thing, America, this is really what pisses off most of the world at American tourists more so than say, their Japanese or Mexican counterparts--the same "white liberal guilt" which was coopted by the Senior Black Correspondant on the Daily show on Nov. 6th (a really damn good parallel, if I do say so myself, and interestingly enough, about Hispanics), is the OH HOW QUAINT YOU ARE YOU UNTOUCHED UNSPOIED PIECE OF EXOTICISM FOR ME TO CONSUME AND COLONIZE. Untouched? Really? Do you SEE how many people live here? Not to mention that the American response to indigenous people is, if this is even possible, more offensive and colonial than the Mexican one.

It's the kind of logic where you cry, MY GOD I CANT BELIEVE YOU DIDNT GET SICK FROM THAT when you see your local friend eat an item of local food. You don't know better just because you're from the goddamn united states, and if you're going to be roaming around Zapatista territory particularly, you better pull your head out of your ass unless you want to get it permanently relocated there. I can honestly say that this guy irritated me more than any of the hundreds of annoying toursits (i'm not counting the cool tourists, or the open minded tourists, or the people who are actually interested in getting to know a different place or culture or traditions, rather than the effing jackasses who wander around here with their fat and their accents and their idiot sense of superiority) that are in Sancris at any given time. Seriously. Score another one for the New York Times--you guys are so going on my shitlist.

Ok, America. We've talked about your selective reporting and manipulative rhetorical shaping of the American impression of Mexico, but this has really gone too far. The article in the NYT that i linked to in the update below is frankly, and most especially in light of the ACTUAL news in Mexico today, horrifying. So let's break it down.

Our dear journalistic liason Marc Lacey, who since he is reporting directly from Mexico City, one would hope would speak with some accuracy and some respect for the dead, has instead the kind of willfull jingoistic ignorance that makes me want to punch him in the face.

Let us backtrack.

At 10:59pm on September 15th, 2008, during the celebration of national independance which takes place across the nation at 11pm (known as the Grito, or Cry of the Revolution) in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán, looked just like it did everywhere else in the country: a very, VERY large gathering in front of the city hall of happy excited men, women, and children ready to kick off the independance festivities. Picture the entire population of a fairly large city in one major plaza. Flags, fireworks, cotton candy, the works.

At 11pm, as the Mayor of Michoacán shouted the last words of the Grito (which are "viva mexico," if we're being specific), 2 handgrenades exploded in the middle of the crowd, leaving 8 people dead and over 100 injured.

All of Mexico stopped.
The ONLY thing being discussed on Mexican news networks for the next two weeks was this, what has been described as the first appearance of terrorism in Mexico.

Now, normally after a bombing (as an American I can speak to the "normal" process of bombings? Lord), some group or another takes credit. Generally it is not very effective to enact a terroristic plot if people dont know who you are and why it happened.

But no one stepped forward. No one took credit, and the country was left in lurch, not knowing who commited this massacre, or why. Generally, though, more and more people came to the consensus that it was a response by the Narcos (narcotrafficking cartels) to the escalation in the Security Reform being enacted by Calderón's government. Specifically, most people considered it to be the work of the Cartel del Golfo, one of the largest and most powerful in the country.

Now, before I go on to what happened today and what SHOULD have been the subject of dear Mr. Lacey's report, let me just directly reference a few lines here:

He quotes someone who is apparently not an idiot pointing out that a lot of this whole bulletproof clothing thing had to do more with ostentatiousness than actual security relevancy, which is a very good point. This person also cites the fact that the violence of the drug cartels is usually directed at other narcos of competing cartels, which is also true.

And then our glib little friend feels it necessary to say this:

"The clothing is not designed for the kind of warfare that is breaking out in some parts of Mexico, where drug assassins have used rocket launchers and grenades to wipe out rivals."

The WHOLE POINT, the whole horror that the ENTIRE COUNTRY has been going through in the last month rests ENTIRELY on the point that the grenades were used to kill uninvolved civilians, in a mass gathering with obvious patriotic connotations. To be so lazy or uninvolved in his surroundings as to imply (after littering his article with morbid exagerrations and macabre inventions of Mexico as "littered with ... grotesque bodies riddled with bulletholes" see below) that the victims of the bombings of the 15th were not a MASS NUMBER of civilians but rather narco rivals, and business as usual, is on its own unforgivable.

But what is so much MORE unforgivable is that this article is the FRONT PAGE of the New York Times on a day when something much more important and relevant to the reality of Mexico since the massacre of 15th happened, frankly.

What happened today, America?

Today the Cartel del Golfo put up huge signs (now being refered to as Narco-mantas) in Oaxaca, Tamaulipas, Cancun and Michoacán, saying:

"El cártel del Golfo condenamos enérgicamente los atentados del 15 de septiembre contra el pueblo de México", señaló el texto de una de las numerosas mantas que aparecieron en horas de la mañana del sábado en los puentes peatonales de los principales bulevares de Reynosa.
"Ofrecemos nuestra ayuda para detener a los líderes que se hacen llamar de 'La Familia'"

"We the Cartel del Golfo emphatically condemn the attacks of the 15th of September against the people of Mexico," read the text of one of the numerous cloth signs that appeared in the early hours of saturday morning on the pedestrian bridges of the main boulevards of Reynosa. "We offer our help to detain the leaders who call themselves 'The Family'."

(you can read the rest of the article and see photos of the Narco-mantas here: http://www.noroeste.com.mx/publicaciones.php?id=415884&id_seccion=)

The signs go on to name explicitly the perpetrators of the bombings, and the reason behind them (according to the Cartel del Golfo, desperation as a result of addiction to a synthetic drug called Ice known for driving people crazy), and to OFFER FIVE MILLION DOLLARS as a reward PER PERSON on the list.

"'Cualquier informe que nos lleve a su captura usted ya sabe donde encontrarnos, somos gente de palabra, a todos los encargados de la plaza de Michoacán los exhortamos a que se unan y tendrán todo nuestro apoyo', agregó el mensaje que en Cancún fue colocado a unos 500 metros de un módulo de la Policía Municipal."

"'[If you have] any information that leads us to their capture, you know where to find us, we are people of our word, and to all of those [narcos] in charge of the Michoacán area, we exhort you to join together; you will have our full support,' added the message which in Cancun was hung some 500 meters from one of the municipal Police Stations."

THIS, America, is what should be on the front page, or at least what should make up the content of the report from Mexico City. THIS is relevant, THIS is newsworthy, THIS is important.

This is not the first instance the the cartels have openly spat on the ability of the government to properly manage the affairs of Mexico, nor is it the first time that they have offered to take on such a role themselves. Rafael Caro Quintero, head and founder of the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1980s, upon his arrest in 1985 famously and publically offered the government of Mexico to pay the entirety of the external debt if they "let him work unhindered."

In light of a little context, the meaning of the Cartel del Golfo's signs is very clear: The attacks of the 15th were an atrocity against the Mexican people, and the Mexican government is incapable of appropriately responding, therefore we the Cartel will supplant its function. We will be in charge of administering justice, since the government is inept.

Obviously, this is not really a positive in terms of the progression of governmental reform and control. Obviously this is HIGHLY CRUCIAL to both the history of Mexico and its people and an even BASIC understanding of the current national situation.

This would have been something that I would hope that a journalist for the New York Times would actually be involved and aware enough to write about. Hell, there is NO WAY that you can be UNAWARE of this and be in Mexico unless you 1. Don't care 2. Are blatantly attempting to skew perspective or 3. Don't speak any Spanish and are completely out of touch with your surroundings, both on the local and national level. Isn't the point of having a foreign correspondant to have someone to report on what is HAPPENING in a location (as opposed to distorting truth and fearmongering?)

Since then, it might interest you to know, America, there have been more signs put up by different cartels, directly addressing President Calderon and accusing him of protecting the leader of the Cartel del Golfo, and then a whole series started cropping up between self-identified members of the police and the narcos, respectively. It's like naro text messaging taking place in a very public, very pointed way across (and in the face of) the whole country.

So, no, Mr. Lacey, I don't want to hear how you think a man "pulling out [...] his fingers in the shape of a pistol" is "random street violence, of the kind [that seems] as if it just might break out." And if you were actually reading ANY kind of newspaper, which you assure me are "every day, [...] full of victims, bodies lying out in grotesque poses with bullet wounds all about," then there is absolutley no excuse for you writing this kind of propagandistic fearmongering drivel to the absolute exclusion of actually crucial events.

Bitches.

future posts:

-weird feminism/anti feminism in television ads in mexico
-expatriotism and being a border brat
-La India María
-hyperreligiosity and christian rock

America, I have some things to tell you.  Listen: we're going to do this Field-Guide thing for real, not just for smarmy kicks.  Well mostly for smarmy kicks, but you know.

America, I'd like to point a few things out in no particular order.
Let's start with a debriefing:

Expatriotism (n.): the state of being privy to both sides of the story, where each side thinks you're eavesdropping.
Also: not fitting in anywhere. 
Also: feeling clever, clever like you can relate to Edward Saïd.

America, we've spoken briefly about Mexican journalism and American journalism, and the amazing disparities between them, have we not? 
America, I have something to add to that.
Some big things are happening here in Mootzico, in case they haven't told you (and they haven't, and i'll be getting to that):

For one thing, there was a million-man march in Mexico City last Saturday called  "Iluminemos México," and publically stated to be in protest of "insecurity", which really means: government, we're tired of people getting kidnapped, y'hear?

This comes right at the heels of Calderón giving some very public and very televised speeches laying down the law.  Prezerón has started a very no-shit-accepted-here reform of the government, the military, and municipal & state police.  Some really, really amazing debates went down on open-signal (read: no cable) television between him and Joaquín The Newsman, in very impressive fashion.  But more on that later, America, that's its own rant.

Anyways, obviously if you start saying you're going to root out corruption and destroy the practise of immunity in a place like Mexico, where 98% of crimes go ultimately unpunished, obviously you're starting a war.

A bigger war or a smaller war I'm not sure, but a war is what it's at, and the narcotraficantes are certainly escalating their response to feeling cornered.  Which brings us to Chichi Suarez.

Now, forget that ChiChi Suárez means essentially Tits McGee.  Forget that it's very close to where I lived in Mérida.
What matters about ChiChi Suárez right now is that they found 12 decapitated corpses there.
A lot of the drug lords are moving out of Cancun now that it's so dangerous (IRONIC!) and to Mérida, and nobody here has any doubt that it has a lot to do with this new governmental reform.  I think something like four heads of police have been arrested in about a month.

What bothers me, America, as your expatriota liason, is this:
The New York Times had not one mention of the million-man protest in Mexico City (and smaller ones across the country), but my mother sent me an email to tell me she'd heard about the 12 decapitated bodies in Yucatán.

Now, being the good Columbian that I am, America, I've been reading a lot of Edward Saïd lately.  One particular passage strikes me in reference to this little tidbit:

"Whereas we write and speak as members of a small minority of marginal voices, our gournalistic and academic critics belong to a wealthy system of interlocking informational and academic resources with newspapers, television networks, journals of opinion and institutes at its disposal.  Most of them have now taken up a strident chorus of rightward-tending damnation, in which they separate what is non-white, non-Western and non-Judeo-Christian from the acceptable and designated Western ethos, then herd it all together under various demeaning rubrics such as terrorist, marginal, second-rate, or uninmportant (Culture and Imperialism, 28)."

Now, what this basically means in the way that it clicked a little light on in our fair narrator's head is this:
America, in the media's framing of perception of a given country, blatantly, BLATANTLY sculpts popular opinion (usually through fear) of that country through exclusion of news stories which do not contribute to the image that America wants its citizens to have of said country.

There are very few countries for which America has as much at stake in terms of representation and perception right now as Mexico and Iraq.  Let's face it: everyone's pretty much forgotten about Afghanistan by now anyway.

And this brought up a very, very good article that puts forth a rather radical point, by one Mary Louise Pratt: namely "Why the Virgin of Zapopan Went to Los Angeles," specifically the section that starts on page 5 called The Appearance of Monsters.
What Pratt basically proposes is that mythical monsters (the Chupacabra, Organ-stealers in Perú, etc) can be with pretty stunning accuracy posited against economic and international factors at the time--subconcious mythic eruptions, if you want, of "real" monster-policies and relationships.

So what do we have, America?
Poisonious killer tomatoes which are from Mexico and going to do away with your children.
but then nobody seemed to be up in arms about them, so then it got changed to jalapeños!
What could be more Mexican (and thus dangerous and unsavory) than jalapeños?

Which brings us back to the curious omission of a startlingly unified citizen protest, and startlingly promising reforms being initiated by the government, in favor of representing...the goriest possible example of the insecurity Mexico (and its immigrants) present to The American People.

I realize this isnt exquisitely rendered, America, but Ive only just started this social commentary thing, so give me some time.
My  mother called me last night to tell me about how shes heard that all the "respectable" Mexican businessmen, doctors, and lawyers are moving out of Tijuana to San Diego, because of how unsafe it is.

Now, on the one hand, this is not a good time to be living in Tijuana, especially if you find yourself in the upper middle class.  But its the frame in which these things are posited, America, thats troubling me:
Even the Mexicans know that Mexico is too dangerous for civilized people to live in.

Its not such a long road back to Civilization and Barbary, and Americas media machine seems to be getting more and more obvious about its cogs: the 90 dead civilians caught on videotape, for example, or the exposé about government controls on supposedly independent military advisors to newsshows recently up in the Times, or you know.  Open manipulation of content in order to paint a more terrifying, more hysterically negative view of Mexicans and thus immigrants?

Allright, America, I think ive laid down a good framework for this field guide.  Next time we will talk about Latinoness and how it is a particularly American pile of bullshit, as seen through the lens of bourgeoise expatriotism.

Much Love, and Punditry,
your calaverita


UPDATE: As if you needed more examples, the New York Times in an article two weeks late on the importation of a Colombian company which sells bulletproof casual wear to Mexico, characterized Mexico in this way:

"There is a whole lot of shooting going on in Mexico today. Every day, the papers are full of victims, bodies lying out in grotesque poses with bullet wounds all about. Some are garden-variety crime victims, but the drug cartels that control much of the Mexican countryside are behind the overwhelming majority. They pay off politicians and police officers and act as shadow governments in town after town along their transit routes. Cross them, and they do not hesitate to pull the trigger."

(you can read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/world/americas/06mexico.html?hp)

Now, is there a kernal of truth in this? Yes, of course. Mexico is in the middle of a serious, serious governmental reform which is sparking a lot of violence with the narcos. But are "the papers full of ... bodies lying out in grotesque poses" every day?

Fucking hardly.
Any more than the killer tomatoes/jalapeños/migrant workers were in any way accurately reported on instead of being manipulated to create a fearful and distrustful image of a country it is politically convenient to hate.

Good Job, America.

in my correspondance with you.  I know.  America, the world is only globalized if you have internet, and internet is so hard to steal in Mexico.  This is because the Internet, like Mexico itself, belongs to Carlos Slim.  And Carlos don't like no ladrones.

So no internet.  No skyping with you, who have apparently all magically gone on skype just as I've lost that capacity.  But soon enough, my pretties.  October, latest.  Hopefully sooner.

I have too much to tell you to be able to tell you anything.
Table business is going well.  I've sold 2 in 3 days; I seem to have found a good spot.  Or rather, I found a good spot, and then Buracrasy International showed up again with their button-down shirts and their snotty, superior smiles, and chased me out.  And i went to about 100 offices and then eventually pulled the trembling-lower-lip card (Obama, you should take note), and i have recieved Amnesty!

So long as I stay behind the wall.

Anyways.  Tabling is good; it provides a nice front for lying to strangers.  Oh America, don't look so scandalized.  You know the  national pasttime of this one-woman-island is lying to strangers.

Mostly I lie to strangers about where I'm from.  Part of it is pulcritud, sure, but most of it is just plain nastiness at being asked for the five hundreth time by a leering fat man, Hey Guera, where are YOU from?
Mexican impressions of gringas are a particularly complicated little snarl.  On the one hand, you represent an economic and social bitchslap which has lasted for the better part of two centuries.  Not to mention the increasingly racist vein of the whole immigration issue in the U.S., as well as the gallblasting callousness and ignorance of a good portion of American tourists.

(Case in point: A very nice girl from a very nice Brazilian family, who is a perfectly wonderful person in every other way, recently recounted to me an incident in which a small mexican boy asked her, as they so often do, for a peso.  For those of you not keeping track at home, that is roughly 10 american cents or 6.26 Brazilian Reais.  She expressed outrage on a number of counts. 

Now, the outrage is justified.  Trust me.  At first you feel guilty that you don't have to worry about paying for your next meal, and you give and give and give.  And then the kids start showing up that clean your windshield when you tell them not to, and demand you pay them.  And then come the ones who stick their hands in your windows and demand you buy oranges/corn/whatever.  And then come the ones who stretch cords across the highway and literally hold you up until you buy something.  If you don't buy, they start with the "give a peso.  GIve me your balloon.  Give me your sandwich." Anything they see they demand, and if you don't give it, the implicit threat is that their older brothers will show up, with you trapped in the middle of the highway, and...etc.

The problem with what my Brazilian friend said lies in the reasons for her outrage.  Firstly, she told me, if you're going to ask me for money, at least ask for 10 pesos.  (This shows a deep misunderstanding of Mexico.  Nobody would ever give them 10 pesos.  What is a dollar to you, the appropriate amount to give to a bum, is a tip at a nice restaurant in Mexico.  Not a super nice one, but you know.  The exchange rate is misleading--it does not directly translate to the worth of things.  10 pesos is worth a lot more than 1 dollar, regardless of the exchange you get at the bank.)

The second reason she gave was that there was enough land that they should just go plant some corn and live off the land if they were so desperate.  Which misses a big, big point: you have to  have land, which is not free. You have to have money to build a shelter of some kind to live on that land. You have to have money to buy corn seeds.  You have to have money to water your corn, time to grow it, time to harvest it, and somewhere to sell it.  Even subsistance farming requires an upfront sum, my friends, and this is a point that is very, very lost on a lot of tourists.)

But back to the point.  So we have very negative images of international parasitic relationships, both economic and touristic, and these somehow all add up to create a fetishized, hypersexualized image of the Gringa.

Gringa = will have sex with you? (probably not).
Gringa = "looser social mores" (as per so many  So Yer Gonna Live In Mexico! guidebooks) pretty certainly not
Gringa = ?

I think it has to do a lot with the highly-ignored fact that most of the time when men (in any context that i'm familiar with, mexican or american) shout things or say things or gesture things to women on the street, it is not with any hope whatsoever that it will result in a successfull sexual liason, but rather to express dominance, and agression.

In other words, they do it just to chingar.

In that context, the hyper-targeting of Gringas for gross advances, well it makes perfect sense now doesn't it.

So I lie to them.  I tell them I'm from Babylon.  Nobody blinks.  Ohh Babylon, they say.  It's close to Persia, I say.  They ask me to speak Babylonian.  I make up words.  I make up words that sound like Mexican curse words.  They try to justify their raging racism (SHE DOESNT LOOK LIKE US SHE IS NOT ONE OF US sidenote: a woman recently said to me: But you speak just like us.  It's funny, isn't it, being a different species that I would interact almost as if i were human! Doesn't every people refer to itself as "The Real People?") by making up reasons why I look Babylonian. Sí, tienes los ojos muy rasgados, me explicó un gentleman recently.  Ahh yes, of course.

I hope this didn't sound bitter, America.  I am really having a great time painting tables.  For one thing, it's an amazing way to interact with the niños atacadores (as horasio puts it) in a way which they act like human beings and not automatons who mechanically follow you, mumbling "regala un peso, regala un peso, regala un peso" until you either give them one or you get away.  They're actually really sweet little girls (and less often, boys) when they're not trying to get into your wallet.  They like to come watch me paint.  Sometimes the boys grab the paint brushes and ruin something I'm painting.  I don't like that so much.  Also, seeing a gringa (who, let us remember, is a very solidly set stereotype) doing something they never pictured a gringa doing tends to shake most people out of their immediate ONE OF US ONE OF US aprovecharismo.

Anyways, America, I really do miss you and I'd like to post on this thing more often, so let's try that for a while.  It'll be a little tricky until I get some good internet lovin, but you know.  I do my best.

How do you answer someone who tells you you speak a language you've spoken since you were a child very well?  What would you do if someone told you you spoke english well?

Love and hopefully no more Cholera,
Your Calaverita

I SOLD A TABLE!!!

Specifically, i sold this table:



the corn one.  So exciting!  ALSO, a woman came by with a camera and told me they were making a tourism video of Chiapas on sunday morning and they were looking for artisans and would i like to come.
Rock.

number 3

table number 2!

today I painted a little table in the main square outside the cathedral.

two pidgeons pooped on me
a million people talked to me
a crazy man tried to touch me
i made friends with a little girl with blue teeth
a bazillian little indian kids that sell bracelets came around to watch and wanted to help
and three people offered to buy it.  About a million people asked if i was going to sell it, which isn't the same thing.

Oh plus one jerk told me i couldn't sell things.

SO!
America, I think i've found something to do.

Think about it: if i sell these tables for 20, 25 bucks
the table itself costs me 2 dollars
the paints are each .85 cents, for a grand total of $3.50
I make like 15, 20 bucks per table.

Plus, obviously painting them in public is a big attractant, so i don't even have to shout out
COMPRATE UN TAAAAAAAABLEEEEEEE

Your opinion, America?

Faithfully,
Calaverita




the red looks kinda pink here, but trust me, it's red.