True Tales From Another Mexico

Newspapers trumpeted Vicente Fox’s election as Mexico’s president with the headlines “Ya Cambio” — Change has Come. Fox ousted Mexico’s ruling party, the PRI, and ended its 71 years in power. But as Sam Quinones convincingly shows in this book, much of Mexico was changing before the July 2000 presidential elections. Fox’s victory marked the triumph of another Mexico, a vital, energetic, and creative Mexico, tracked by Quinones for over six years and perceptively presented in this book.

“The press, other governments and tourists are most aware of the official, elite, corrupt Mexico; the Mexico that won’t allow a poor man a chance; the Mexico behind the sunglasses. I’ve even been told by people, including Mexicans, that this is Mexican culture. But I know that’s not true. There is another side of Mexico.”

Here are its stories — stories from the Mexico that exists far from the headlines, beyond Cancun and tequila, mariachi bands and Carlos and Charlie’s. Some of the tales Quinones brings us are strange and exotic; but more often they are from mainstream though ignored parts of Mexican life.

Chalino Sanchez was a migrant worker who became a underground singer of narcocorridos — ballads about drug smugglers — until his murder, which remains unsolved. Two traveling salesmen trundled through a sweltering small town one day, plying their wares. The next day they were hanging from the town’s bandstand lynched by a mob, a thousand strong.

True Tales From Another Mexico takes us to the Bronx — the rude boys of Mexico’s Congress. It immerses us in the world of Oaxacan farmworkers in Baja California. We see how a bunch of illiterate rancheros invented the Michoacana ice cream stores and turned it into the most successful small-business in Mexico. We visit the cult of Nueva Jerusalen, a theocratic village run by a charismatic excommunicated Catholic priest, where residents receive voting instructions from the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Thanks Michael

By Frank Rich

SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.

To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.

McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?

Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.

The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.

There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)

That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.

Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning McCain’s medical status, Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published last Tuesday by The Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.

It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.

This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.

In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.

But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.

After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.

You can understand why they believe that. She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with Larry King, for heaven’s sake, in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.

We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”

Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.

Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.

So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

Below: comment on Jennifer Doyle’s article, el Resto del Mundo

Jennifer,

What intrigues me most about your entry/article is the section that covers local footballing culture. I currently play regular pick-up at Pan Pacific Park (usually on Wednesdays), but am constantly in search of better grounds. Though there’s always the option of joining a league or even an officiated formal meet-up, I really can’t commit to anything of the sort. Pan Pacific Park, or “P3,” has but one proper “field,” (i.e. one w. goal posts) one that’s all dirt, dust, rocks, pitons, and storm drains. Everything but hierba; yes, it’s a total favela. This means no firm-ground boots, just the thick-soled hard ground type. When you’re done for the day, you look like you’ve just been teleported from Black Rock City.

The rest of the park is pure green, but littered with those infamous signs. The only sanctioned green areas: mine fields booby trapped with boulders, storm drains, and mini palm trees, all in an effort to deter any would-be 5 v 5 action. OK, so the conspiracy theorist in me ascribes authoritative intent to the random placement of said obstacles. We used to play in these areas, but…

About a year ago, a guy slipped and collided with one of those trachycarpus mini-palms, cracked his head right open down to the gray. Pools of blood. See, this type of palm is squat with no shaft, just an armor of godendag-like stegosaurus plates evolutionarily equipped to render you a Regarding Henry Memento type. Dude didn’t have insurance, much less a green card. Refused to go to hospital; just laid there, supine and motionless. So much for the blood-brain barrier.

Partially at fault for this tragedy, I might add, was the lack of illumination. At P3, only the field and designated football ‘patches’ lie unequipped for nightly use. The baseball diamonds, by contrast, transform into veritable film sets come sundown. This brings me to the war: America’s Pastime vs. The Beautiful Game. Yes, the BASEballers hate us. They won’t return shanked balls, or even respond to our calls. Worse, even when there’s no game on, they’ll kick us off the outfield. I’ve even seen the free youth clinic being booted on a number of occasions. Why? The coaches are in with the management, who, in turn, never hesitate to call LE (similar experience at Cheviot Hills Park and others). One P3 baseball coach called us out:

“You guys have no self-respect. Whenever we reseed the soccer field, you guys tear it all up by slide tackling and over-playing and not respecting the reservation protocol.”

Wonder if by “you guys,” he meant foreigner/imigrant/Euro-trash? Rather than responding with irresponsible accusations of veiled-racism and the like, I’ll say this: the one time they fenced off the area and reseeded, yes, it was beautiful. They manually watered till the leaves grew to knee height and then mowed. But here’s the thing: they used the wrong type of seed. We needed zoysia or plastic; they gave us some stunted bahia strain. And worst of all: after they mowed, they never watered. Within 2 months it was desert again. Sabotage.

In my search for greener pastures, I’ve inevitably looked east. I live in East Hollywood/K-town, so naturally, I’ve tried Mac Arthur and Lafayette. Both are pretty crowded, but offer some rotational (5 in, 5 out) mini pick-up play. Griffith East, along Crystal Spring Drive is the only grassy expanse in L.A. where I’ve been able to find regular, no-reservation, open pick-up where the authorities are lax about the “no” rule. Cool. But the thing is… it’s very clique-y and lacks the “everyone plays” accommodating attitude of P3. At Griffith (and elsewhere), most games are dominated by one homogenous coterie or another. Completely tribal. Salvadorian, Guatemalan, Armenian, Korean, Oaxacan, Sinaloan, etc. No outsiders. No mixing. Where’s the love?

P3, on the other hand, has the best vibe and is vertically integrated skill wise. Fathers, sons, Europeans, Africans, emos, cholos, queens, jailbait, lipstick lesbians, drunks, stoners, little people, university scholars, Korean-Argentineans, middle schoolers, Turks, Armenians, and yes, Palestinians and Israelis. Players from every economic walk of life. Oh, and groupies. There’s even a lady with an ice chest who dispenses cold water to the weary, free of charge. This is true americana. And it’s crowded.

So, after this longwinded rant, here’s my question: is there anywhere in L.A. with a pick-up vibe like P3’s that features real grass?

And lastly, Jennifer, the whole MexiMoz thing is a truly awesome phenomenon. My friends and I have always been fascinated by this unlikely marriage. In a way, it symbolizes the ineffable vibe that is P3 pick-up. See you on the pitch…

Sincerely,
Solus Woodrose

September 27, 2008 2:02 AM

Freddie, Fannie and friends

BDP performing live in 1989, My Philosophy and I’m Still Number 1.

Opus — Life is Life live (1985). Similar to the Laibach version in many ways though note differences in lyrics.

Maradona showing off for the crowd with Life is Life by Opus playing in the Stadium (background).

Laibach — Life is Life (thanks Gabrielle).

Interesting article in the New York Times — even if you think it’s all rubbish.

Just a few more days and the smoking ban in France will start. I will be able to go out for a drink and not smell like an ashtray. Check here for the rest of Europe.

One of my favorite Banknotes.

Borrowed from the new (fútbol) Blog by our friend Jennifer Doyle, From a Left Wing:

“But most interesting, and forthcoming, were guys working the match as referee & linesmen, all certified by CAFLA, a training school for refs, run, as it should be, in spanish — the defacto language of the pitch in Southern California. I catch them as they are loading up their cars long after everyone else has left. And where with the others my introduction “Hello, I’m researching amateur soccer in LA” was met politely, but not exactly with enthusiasm — the ref’s spot my Club América scarf, and so start teasing me about what a disaster Mexican soccer is (”crazy fútbol!”). Turns out the three are from El Salvador. We talked about the Mexico vs Argentina World Cup match — one of the best of the summer.”

Sales of weapons to Iran (and Iraq), aiding the Contras, Cocaine trafficking and plans to suspend the Constitution under emergency authority of FEMA — no wonder everyone is nostalgic for the Reagan era…

Thomas Demand, Yellowcake at 303 Gallery November 3 — December 22 2007.

“The title Yellowcake refers to the technical term denoting a concentrated form of uranium which, when enriched, may be used to make nuclear weapons. This word was recently on the public’s mind as the fulcrum that President George W. Bush used in his 2003 State of the Union Address when he stated: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of Uranium in Africa”. The evidence for this accusation was a paper trail purportedly stolen from the Embassy of the Republic of Niger, in Rome, and then given to both the British MI6 and American CIA by SISMI — Italian intelligence counterpart. The documents were an apparent contract of sale for hundreds of tons of ‘yellowcake’ by Niger to the Iraqi authorities. As the events making up this story unraveled, it became clear that the ‘evidence’ and information passed along by SISMI were obvious forgeries.”

Saw the Kara Walker (My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love) exhibition at the Whitney yesterday with Grant and Peter. Really recommend seeing it, makes us examine our own racism in a very different way. Here is a review.

The Pirate Bay is a swedish torrent tracker - a site that helps you download anything for free. What they do is legal in Sweden, but the big media companies are not really happy they exist so they hire hackers to harass them with spam and server attacks. Now the Pirate Bay is suing the big guys.
Also very cool: a list of legal threats the Pirate Bay has received their responses.

Found on slashdot

CRASS.

Gary Leonard, 1992

There has been very little dialog about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprising. This photograph shows what looks to be some early-morning opportunity looting at a Thrifty Drug Store in Lincoln Heights, though I don’t remember looting extending that far north. My middle school (John Burroughs on Wilshire) was closed for several days, our school was about 30% African American, 30% Korean, 30% Latino and 10% White. It was especially awkward to watch some students come to class with duffel bags filled with things looted while others wept because their families business had been looted/burned. I remember there being very little dialog afterwards, except for the kind of courtesy grieving that has become synonymous with events like Hurricane Katrina. Anyway, I’m rambling.