Kate Ingold: The Border: Mexico

Update Oaxaca

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 02:44:38 GMT

So since this is the land of Moctezuma, he has taken revenge on me just as he has on thousands before me. I've been pretty sick the past couple of days. I took a cipro last night and another this morning and that seems to have kicked it, though I still don't have the confidence to eat like a normal person. Ah, how wonderful it is to be in a place with little governmental infrastructure! All those small government types back home can kiss my ass.

(Ew.)

Of course, it's not just travelers who get it. My spanish teacher was sick this week too (and he's on antibiotics) and today I went with him to pick up his wife and son from the doctor's office -- his son is just under 2 years old and he has dysentery. Poor little kid. Now he has to take flagyl to get rid of it. I went with my teacher because he had to pick them up, drive them home, then come back to the center to teach an english class at 4. He asked if it was okay and I said yes, of course. We spoke spanish the whole time anyway. He and his wife live in subsidized housing, which is apparently how most Oaxaca City residents live who aren't wealthy enough to have homes in the city center. This government has nothing but contempt for its people. The corruption runs so deep. It's incredibly sad.

The teachers are still in the zocalo and the surrounding area protesting, but supposedly they're going back to work on Monday so the kids don't have to repeat a whole year. Everyone besides the wealthy here (the PANistas, surprise surprise) are supportive of the teachers, even though their protest has led to horrible traffic and ugly graffiti, even in the historic area (which used to be spotless, especially compared to the rest of the city). There's a lot of talk about how Calderon and the PAN stole the election. Even Subcomandante Marcos made a statement saying he had been contacted by people who witnessed the destruction of over a million votes in favor of AMLO, Obrador (you can see it on DemocracyNow!). The Zapatistas are apolitical -- they don't participate in elections -- but Marcos said that he felt he had a moral obligation to tell what he knew. Given that Calderon is another Harvard technocrat who received oodles of "assistance" from the GOP's International Republican Institute, it's no surprise that votes were "lost" in a way that makes it all seem legitimate, and makes the opposition seem unstable, shrill, and unreasonable. Since so many Mexicans are paranoid and expect bad things to happen (and rightly so -- corruption is everywhere), there's all this talk about needing to "respect the results", blah blah blah, just like in Florida 2000.

It's all so suspicious. I find it particularly so because of the way the US press has been covering the whole thing (and to a lesser extent the Mexican press). Calderon is the "conservative" who is "pro-business" while Obrador is "leftist," a total pejorative in the states. And then there's the whole thing with IFE (their federal election commission) declaring Calderon's victory before over 3 million votes had even been counted, and how they kept insisting that even with the official count nothing would change, even though the difference between the canidates was miniscule at best. I mean Calderon "won" by around 0.5%, or less than 200,000 votes out of 41 million (that were tallied, that is)! Calederon was hand-picked by Fox, like the old "dedazo" or big finger days of the PRI, and Fox campaigned for him heavily, even offering up all sorts of government money to communities in excange for votes, which I've read is illegal. What the hell is our government doing meddling in other democracies?! It makes me furious.

Oh well. I've had some time to read the web since I've been home sick, which is both good and bad. Good because I know what's going on and bad, bad, bad because I know what's going on. Apparently there's all kinds of American Taliban creepiness happening right now. It's been on Jesus' General, Daily Kos, and Crooks and Liars. This crazy organization in Delaware, StoptheACLU.org, printed the names and addresses of a Jewish family who had asked the ACLU to help them deal with the harrassement they were getting in their increasingly Christian fundamentalist community. They received so many death threats they had to move! One of these fundamentalist wackos even said that someone should "disappear" the family the way an atheist had "disappeared" a while ago. Apparently the woman (I don't remember her name right now) had been a client of the ACLU too and had successful sued to get prayers out of public schoools (going all the way to the Supreme Court) and then she "disappeared," her dismembered body found six years later. These people are as crazy as Bin Laden and the Taliban. They are terrorists -- spreading so much terror that they're driving their neighbors out of town. Sickening.

And on an even worse note, S found out that the last man to go to Afghanistan from his unit (also as an ETT) was killed there yesterday. And that's our "good" war. What a disaster.

We leave on a 7 am bus for Juchitan tomorrow and we've still got to finish packing. I've heard that Juchitan is muy feo (ugly) but has beautiful culture, and is hot hot hot, even when it's not the dead of summer. There is a cultural center in the middle of town that supposedly has wireless internet, so hopefully I'll be able to update from there, and let you all know about the ladies who wear live iguanas on their heads and the proud muxes (transvestites) who work in the markets. We'll see!

Hola de Mexico

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 15:03:31 GMT

We made it to Oaxaca late Thursday night. We're here until the middle of August. S is studying Zapotec and I am studying Spanish for one week, then working on my other projects the rest of the time. Next Friday we go down to Juchitan, a matrifocal town in the Isthmus that is famous for its iguana-crowned women. Wow!

Oaxaca's zocalo is under siege by the state's teachers who are striking for better pay, etc. The governor, a PRI hack who was elected in 2004, raided the teachers with police and tear gas a few weeks ago, resulting in two teachers dying. Now the teachers are demanding Ulises step down. Francisco Toledo, a local artist and community activist/developer is the intermediary in on-going discussions with the state. The teachers strike every year, and the only difference we can see between years past and this year is the amount of space around the zocalo that is also used up -- there are blue and red and pink tarps strung between buildings in a one block radius around the square, with groups of teachers, their spouses, and their children living beneath them. It's a peaceful protest. As is consistent with most governments these days, the reaction by governor Ulises and his thugs has been dramatically inappropriate for the actions of the teachers. How familiar a story is that?

Hopefully I'll have internet access a time or two again while we're here to update. Our service is spotty at best right now. But the weather is fine!

Calaveras de Calabasas

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 04:17:09 GMT

My jack-o-lantern this year, made from a too small pumpkin, too small to throw through stone hoops in a ball game.

In the Mayan book Popul Vuh, the hero twins, who are the sons of twins, find themselves born in the underworld after their mother, Blood Woman, was impregnated by spittle and chased out of the upper world. The twins, Hunahpu and Xblanque, are clever enough not to lose against the lords of the underworld at a ball game, so they are sent to six different houses for six nights of challenges. The lords were determined to defeat them just as they had their father, Hun Hunahpu. They are sent to the Dark House, where they outsmart the lords with the help of a lightning bug. The next night they are sent to the Razor House filled with knives which they feed with the flesh of animals so they aren't fed on themselves. Then came the Cold House, where they seal off the drafts and survive the ice-center chill. In the Jaguar House, they gather bones and feed them to the jaguars so their own bones are spared. Next, the Fire House, where the twins manage to be merely simmered in a vat of water, not boiled to death. Finally they enter the Bat House, and it is here where their cleverness is not enough. Hunahpu is decapitated by a bat and his head is taken to the ball court to be used in the next game between the lords of the underworld.

Since this is myth, Hunahpu is not dead though he is in the land of death and disease and he is headless. Animals come to aid him. Possum keeps the light away by painting the dawn while the others turn a calabasa, a pumpkin, into a head for the headless twin. The animals and the twins go to the ball court where Rabbit distracts the lords. He points them across the field and while they look, Hunahpu and his brother switch the calabasa-turned-head and the head-turned-ball, righting Hunahpu finally. The game begins again, quickly, and in an instant Xblanque kicks the calabasa, breaks it into countless pieces, and in doing defeats the lords of death and disease.

It's not possible to cheat death, not even when you are twins born of Blood Woman in the underworld of the age before people, so they are challenged again and they answer the challenge by placing themselves on the fire. Their bones are ground and thrown into the river, where they reincarnate into catfish, and then into wanderers who hold the magic to bring back to life all that they have destroyed.

It's curious, isn't it, this cross-cultural desire to correct the most uncorrectable injury, the loss of one's head. Perhaps it is not about denying death, but about losing one's mind, a metaphor for a temporary lack of sanity such as that brought upon by grief, and the necessity to make yourself sane again and therefore right in the world. Or perhaps it is what it is, a story of death and sacrifice and trickery and resurrection and destruction and loyalty, a story not so different than those that pepper our days at the beginning of the 21st century.

I first learned this story and other Mayan stories from S. As a mesoamerican archaeologist, he has had to study the creation stories and ancient books of the Mexica, the Zapotec, and the Maya. He can read the code of the Dresden Codex (at least what has been deciphered so far; many, many glyphs have not been yet), and found a pattern in the Venus Table that no one had before. Venus is the one who is resurrected. Five patterns of travel that star makes, tracked throughout time by civilizations across the world, including the Babylonians who had their trinity of the sun and moon and Venus, a trinity not so different from that other one we all know about according to some archaeoastronomers. Venus comes and goes, appears to never be steady. The five patterns are predictable, but it takes time and patience to find them and track them. It is one star yet seems to be more than one. It appears to die and come back to life, the dream of every person who's ever loved and lost.

Jack Skelington, the Pumpkin King, from one of S's favorite films, The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Santa Muerte, Saint Death

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 13:26:54 GMT

Santa Muerte/Saint Death

When she gives gifts,
it is said that she makes
no distinction between the rich
and the poor, the powerful
and the powerless,

and neither does Death,
life's mercurial mistress who dangles
our dumb hearts around her neck,
a collection of blood red jewels.

Her face is a Guadalupe X-
ray: cheeks raised, mandible spread
in a constant, wicked smile.

I assure you she is moonish,
                                             unstable.
Even after her struggle with the night
she appears
                  aloof.

She may be

La Chingada, the raped; or perhaps
La Llorona, the crying one; but certainly
she is not La Madre, the one and only
Mother.

Her womb is a cobweb, littered
with empty cocoons.

One night I saw her on the edge
of a broken-down river where
no water flowed.

Overhead, a murder
of crows flew. Their feathers
fell with every wing-tapped
breath, made the sky
                                 moonless.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans.

Las Lloronas, The Crying Women

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 01:00:22 GMT

Coyolxauhqui, daughter of Coatlicue, as a broken woman at the base of Templo Mayor.

Las Lloronas/The Crying Women

As she cried,
she drowned her children,
wrung them breath-
dry in the river
after he left.

He left with cudgels, rifles, and short knives,
perhaps with another woman's
                                                wet
on his lips, she tells me.

I know about crying.
I tell her my words left
under river stones and broken-
down bridges failed
to come up that day.
I found only an inadequate list:
weep, wail, bawl, keen,
a collection of girl-words
soaked in absurdity.

Yes, I killed them, she tells me,
like a man, then I wept
like a woman.

We part at the end of the river
where the water turns
                                  brackish.

Her laments follow me
home, entangle in my damp
hair, sway me to sleep.

I wake when the night
                                   dawns
with a splatter of stars across the ink-blood sky.
Outside, the mourning
                                   doves speak little cries,
feed the young and feather-
cover their eyes. Tear-
stripped naked, I swim
in the river next to her, run
my fingers in the hair
of her first-born son
as he descends.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans

S and I spent the summer of 2003 in Oaxaca City, a colonial town of 75% indigenous population in the thick of the largest state in Mexico, the state Cortes described to the Spanish crown by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on a table. To walk through the mountains of Oaxaca, he said, was to walk through that crumpled parchment.

That summer I studied Spanish and S worked at an archaeological site on the road to Mitla about 35 miles outside of the city. The site was an ordinary household in a Zapotec suburb of 1,000 years ago, a collection of patios surrounded by rectangular structures each with the family's dead entombed beneath the patio and in front of an altar. Many of the men S worked with were from a nearby Zapotec village, Maquilxochitl, which means "Five Flower" in Nahuatl. Some day in the future, after he's done with this war, S will do his doctoral research in Maquilxochitl, where families live in the same patio-structure compounds their relatives did those years ago and where the tlyudas are made on adobe stoves fired by craggled mesquite.

I was flooded with the stories of the women I met there, particularly the women of Maquilxochitl who fed us stewed squash with onions, chile, and Oaxacan string cheese, and those miraculous tlyudas made from corn they'd ground themselves on volcanic metates. So many of the stories were about goodbyes. Women had said goodbye to their children years ago before the children went north to cross the border, and some hadn't seen them since. Others had said goodbye to their chidren before they had left to cross the border themselves, returning years later when their children were no longer children. One woman had four daughters and only one was still in Oaxaca. The other daughters were scattered from San Jose, California down to Baja and Mexico City, where one daughter worked in a plastics factory. This woman had crossed the border herself several times, outwitted coyotes and was beaten by one, but ended up coming back to Oaxaca for good and married one of S's good friends, Procopio. Her cousin crossed fifteen years ago and she never heard from him again. He was presumed to be dead.

How many have died in the river of two names, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, or in the dusty, waterless desert? Can you imagine how many?

I had been reading about Mexico for a few years before that summer we spent in Oaxaca, including books about Mexico's rich religious and cultural heritage. The country is crawling with stories. legends, myths. When I got home, I started a series of poems about women facing what we face at this beginning of the third millennium, and how these stories relate to the histories of our anscestors and my own life. Las Lloronas is one of these poems.

I wrote this poem the day after S was "called up," one week and two days before Thanksgiving last year. They really did call. Early, before 7. We were both still in bed in our leaky New Orleans apartment because it was a Tuesday and neither of us had class. They called on the cell phone we shared and they told him he was to report to his base in Indiana the following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. We were supposed to leave that day for New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with S's family, but suddenly everything was uncertain, unknown. S was in his final semester of classes in his PhD program. In just a few months he was to take his comprehensive exams then his orals, and then the following autumn (right now in fact) we were to go back to Oaxaca where S was to begin a dig at the temples ringing the small chapel on top of Cerro Danush, the symmetrical mountain that sits prominently inside the village of Maquilxochitl, a mountain that the entire village ascends on May 3rd to celebrate the Festival of the Cross. Now we weren't even sure he'd be able to finish his semester. I was a full-time instructor at University of New Orleans and I knew I had to make some decisions too. Should I stay in New Orleans or go back to Chicago to be near my mother? This all happened in an instant, and as a stark reminder that nothing is constant, all is change, our lives were changed instantly.

Yes, you'd think that there would have been a little more consideration for national guard soldiers, an understanding that they would have to "tie up loose ends" and make arrangements at work, school, home. But no. There was none of that until S and the other four men who were called (the unit had been split up and splintered the previous August, with some of the group sent to Afghanistan and others ordered to stay home to help train new members) complained so bitterly they were given a reprieve. But this happened a few days later, just before we were to leave for New Jersey, and just after we called the airline to see if we could change our tickets (the answer was no, by the way). It was the first of several mid-play changes, some good, some not, that would define our next several months and demonstrate how absolutely incompetent and confused the military brass were.

After that call I yelled at S, told him he clearly didn't love me since he had put our relationship and our future in jeopardy for the army (why he was still in is for another day). I cried and yelled, then cried again. He said that of course he loved me and that he regretted this as much as I did. I had to get away from him. I was too angry, too upset. I went into our roommate Rebecca's room. She was awake and had her coffee, which was curious. Usually she woke much later, but she was studying for her comps too and at the side of her bed was a mountain of books she was studying from. Her days were beginning early and ending late as she filled out note cards and typed out synopses of anthropology and archaeology texts. I went into her room and she took me in her arms and said "What's wrong, honey?" and I told her and she cried with me.

That day S and I talked a lot. We talked about what would happen. We talked about how much we loved each other and how surprised S was because he was certain, dead certain, that Kerry would win and he wouldn't get called up. He apologized and apologized again, and then I forgave him.

The call had come after weeks of disappointment. The three of us were still in mourning over Kerry's loss, still stunned and stressed and dreading another four years with Bush in office. Election night we had sat together in the living room batting away brown june bugs and the occasional flying cockroach that had moved in through the open windows, and watched the results come in. When it started to look bad, Rebecca and I ran around the house and found things that represented the contested states: a Pretenders disc for Ohio; a chunk of cheese for Wisconsin; a book of poems by Florida poet David Kirby. Rebecca had spent eight years in West Africa working with Doctors Without Borders, so she gathered up her super-fine African juju sculptures like the two figures with nails and shanks sticking out of their bodies, and I gathered my Zuni fetishes (buffalo, toad, bear, Corn Mother). We placed it all on the table in the living room then rang the booty with La Virgen candles, curios, small bowls of our just-finished dinner, and several shots of tequila. Rebecca got sage out of the refrigerator and burned it, blew the smoke across the table and at the windows, and we both begged the spirits to help John Kerry win, to help all of us escape the Bush-born madness. As the night wore on and things got even more dire, we knocked on the door of our neighbor George, a voodoo practitioner who had helped Rebecca rid the apartment of evil spirits when she'd first moved in two years before. George wasn't home, which we should have taken as an omen, I guess. When we knew it was over, Rebecca went to her room and we crawled into our bed for a sleep deep enough, we'd hoped, to erase the night and start us over again.

Well, obviously it didn't work. S knew it wouldn't, but then he's much more practical than me. It was that morning after when I started to worry. I knew it would take more good juju than we had in our leaky apartment to prevent S from being called up. Three weeks later I was proven right.

The story of the La Llorona, the Crying Woman, comes from Mexico and it varies from the scorned harlot who kills her children out of revenge, to a scorned woman who kills her children to protect them from poverty, to a woman whose children are murdered by their father, to a woman who has a vision of her children being wisked away by floodwaters, only to wake up and find her nightmare had come true. In every version La Llorona dies, usually from her own hand, on the banks of the river that also took her children. For her crime she is condemned to die and to walk the banks as a ghost. In most versions of the story she feels regret and remorse for her rashness, and cries in longing for the children she will never see again. In the version of the story told around fires and at bedside by malicious babysitters, she roams the banks looking for children to snatch and take as her own.

When S was called up, I became a crying woman myself. The original version of the poem had allusions to the fact that we hadn't gotten pregnant yet (and that I therefore had no children to drown), but the wise ladies in my poetry workshop urged me to take that stuff out, and as usual they were right. But when I let loose the river inside of me and mourned for the forced separation that was to come, I felt an affecton for las lloronas who had come before me, and the thousands who are struggling with difficult goodbyes right now.

(I wonder, even, if Cindy Sheehan feels like la llorona too. She is trying to 'right' the wrong of her son's death, a death she feels all of us, including herself, are responsible for because we allowed Bush to be elected. She is wailing for her dead son on the banks of concrete rivers across the country.)

The photograph above is of Coyolxauhqui, the daughter and murderer of Coatlicue. She is part of the web of legends and myths that La Llorona is a part of. In this picture of the stone at the base of Templo Mayor in Mexico City, she is a broken woman, beheaded and shattered to pieces, the work of her just-born brother. Wikipedia has decent versions of the stories of Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue, and La llorona.

I decided to post this poem and this story today after reading two excellent posts yesterday about Lashaun Harris, a severely mentally ill woman who drowned her children and who faces execution for her crime. Dr. Omed's wife Elsbeth has a powerful personal essay about living with a manic-depressive, knowing a man who'd "sacrificed his arms to a train," and the possibility for mercy. And Phila at Bouphonia talks about Harris and the question of hearing voices. Of course Lashaun is a version of la llorona and Coyolxauhqui (she is certainly a broken woman), and sadly, her fate may be the same as the women of those legends. She may not die by her own hand, but rather by the groping hands of the state.

The Uncertainty of It All

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 16:12:38 GMT

Last night I saw Copenhagen at the TimeLine Theatre on Wellington Avenue on the border of Lakeview in northern Lincoln Park. The play, by Mark Frayn, attempts to reconstruct a meeting between two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in German-occupied Copenhagen in 1941. Bohr, the "father of atomic phsyics," was a mentor to Heisenberg, who authored the "Uncertainty Principle" which according to the notes (I'm no physicist, so please bear with me!), says that we can't know both the position of a particle and it's velocity simultaneously. Heisenberg stayed in Germany during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, working for the German government at the university in Leipzig, while Bohr was forced to flee from Denmark by the Germans because of his Jewish ancestry. In the course of a short visit between these two old friends, a conversation ensued that may have changed the course of World War II, though the details of the conversation are to this day unknown.

It is the question of this uncertainty, the uncertainty of what the two men talked about that afternoon, that is the crux of the play. Heisenberg stayed in Germany and worked for the Nazi regime, developing a nuclear reactor but no weapons. Bohr fled to the US in 1943 and ended up working at Los Alamos and ultimately on the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago this year, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In the play, Bohr and his wife challenge Heisenberg (in the reconstructions of the visit and perhaps in the afterlife -- the opening scene has Margrethe, Bohr's wife, talking about how they are dead now and finally safe to tell all) and accuse him of trying to develop the bomb for the Germans. Heisenberg, who never developed the bomb and claimed to have stayed in Germany to maintain control over Germany's program as to ensure they never did develop nuclear weapons, challenged Bohr to defend his role in developing the bomb and unleashing it on the world. During that afternoon in 1941, Heisenberg supposedly asked Bohr what moral responsibility scientists had during times of war (basically if their loyalties should lie with humanity as a whole or with their country) and the question alone made Bohr think Heisenberg was trying to find out if the Allies were developing the atom bomb and admitting that the Germans were. In the end, Heisenberg was villified for working with the Germans and Bohr and the other Allied scientists were seen as heroes for developing and dropping the atomic bomb. The play challenges us to review this logic by showing both men as they question their own roles and the consequences of their actions. Heisenberg, who by living in Germany throughout the war saw the destructive power of conventional bombs, said he would never have developed the bomb because its victims "could have been my widowed mother...my wife, my son." The two wonder if there will one day be a quantitative physics, one that decides how many are too many and when horrors are justified.

During intermission, my mother and her friend and I talked about the state of uncertainty in our country right now, and our seemingly limitless tolerance for chaos. Her friend said that he thought the neocons, through privatization and wars of choice, are trying to "starve the beast" of government and make it completely ineffective and bankrupt, as Grover Norquist has proposed. I argued that though their rhetoric talks about this it isn't what they actually want, and that instead of dreaming of some sort of libertarian/anarchic hollow government, the neocons actually want our government to be a capitalist/conservative version of the Mexican PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled the country for nearly a century until Vincente Fox was elected in 2000. The PRI is still very much in control and are poised to take back the presidency next year. Unlike the dream of teeny tiny government, the PRI believe in gangster government, one that is about laundering money, filtering it from the people to the corporations and their elite directors. Our government is doing the same thing. We have the largest deficit in our nation's history, yet we have an atrocious lack of services and support. Our government is growing monetarily in ways few "conservatives" could have fathomed five years ago, and most of the money is going to private corporations, subcontractors, who do the jobs goverment used to do less efficiently and clearly at a higher cost. It is a brilliant money-laundering scheme: tax the people, putting a higher burden on the middle class and working poor, and spend that money on corporate contracts and handouts. Say that it is through privatization that a more "lean" government will be produced, and convince legions of "conservatives" that it will lead to "smaller" government while growing government spending exponentially. The money changes hands seamlessly from the people to the government to the corporation, therefore "cleaning" it no differently than Al Capone did in the 1930s or Salinas in the 1990s when he sold Mexico's resources for a handful of campaign contributions. My mom's friend said that this made no sense because it wasn't sustainable -- eventually the system would collapse and the elites would suffer too -- but I pointed out that it seemed it was sustainable, since Mexico, though it is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, goes on and on with its elites gaining more power and more money even as the average person continues to suffer.

If we are going through a "Mexicanization," then our future is even more bleak than we can imagine, seeing that Mexico is going through its own transformation, its "Colombiazacion" as the drug cartels take over law enforcement and other governmental positions. Imagine a future like Colombia's present. My only hope is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to politics and economics too, and that because we're in the middle of this thing we can't know how fast we're going, so maybe we're not careening off the cliff as we seem to be but rather taking a slow enough sail we can turn ourselves around before it's too late. I'm becoming more of a cynic, but I have to have some sort of hope.

Yes, the uncertainty of it all. I talked to S yesterday morning and he's back in Kabul where he'll be for about ten days before heading back to his FOB near the Pakistan border. He told me that he went to take out $200 from his account and was told that he had to have a "permission slip" from an officer E-7 or higher. A permission slip to take out his own money that he's earned!!! It's so completely outrageous and it's new. Before he left for his two week R+R, no one needed "permission" to access their own bank accounts. Also new are soldiers wearing electronic monitoring anklets. He saw two on base yesterday. Apparently they are under house arrest at home, but that doesn't preclude them from being called up for duty in Afghanistan. What the hell is going on?!

We're both rather down these days and our conversation was pretty brief. "I'm feeling pretty bad," he told me, "so I'll have to call you tomorrow. I just want to go to sleep." The initial rebound was easier this time, but I think we're both feeling our loneliness more acutely because we had so much fun together. Two weeks out of an entire year is not enough. We're holding onto the certainty (false, perhaps) that he will be home by mid-February or maybe sooner if by some miracle Afghanistan settles down between now and then. He's ready to come home. And I'm ready to have him home again for good.

Friday Baja Blogging

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 05:13:58 GMT

Just as Friday turns to Saturday, a photo of decay from San Quintin, Baja.

Friday Baja Blogging

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:39:53 GMT

If only Rita could produce such beautiful and gentle waves. Instead, some have already died and the worst has come to pass in New Orleans, again. The only good news is Rita is weakening and most people have gotten away from the coasts, hopefully to areas that won't be subjected to the storm's land-locked watershed the experts predict will come in the days after. I think the weather-worry is that much worse since we now know (and many of us have known) that we have failed leadership, an atmosphere that compounds disaster again and again.

S and I are having a wonderful time together, though neither of us can stay away from the thrice-daily hurricane updates. In between though, we have gone to some of our favorite eating places, seen The Corpse Bride (wow!) and tonight we're headed to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum for the opening of their Día de los muertos exhibit. A friend of ours, Luis De La Torre, has a piece in the show.

Our friends are safe -- most still scattered across the country after being left homeless after Katrina -- and hopefully Rita will drift away from the most populated places. And this weekend is a massive protest against the Iraq War. (We'll be there in spirit.) If you've not seen it yet, check out Phil Donahue's mop-up job on the O'Reilly Factor. It's almost enough to give me hope.

Friday Baja Blogging

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 22:42:08 GMT

Being followed by my own footsteps in Baja California.

Friday Baja Blogging, on a Saturday

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 18:43:14 GMT

Here's a Baja photo one day late. I talked to Selma, and Fred is finally home from the hospital. How wonderful! He's feeling great, though tired. I'm so happy he's home. Over three weeks. Horrible. Hopefully he will be well enough by New Year's to go to Baja, where we will celebrate the new year together with cheap Trader Joe's wine, ripe mangoes, and lush mole.

This person lives near my old apartment here in New Orleans. I have parked behind their SUV countless times. Maple Street Book Shop is an independent, small bookstore in Uptown near Tulane. You see their "Fight the Stupids" stickers everywhere, but this is the only one I've seen that has it next to a "W The President" sticker. And with no apparent sense of irony, no less! The "I Care" sticker is one that the city put out in their on-going attempt to advertize how much they care about the problems in this city without having to actually do anything about them. The sticker matters most, I guess. If you say "I care" does that mean you actually do? In our crazy Bush World, yes. "Mission accomplished," "compassionate conservative," blah blah blah. Perhaps he learned how to bleed words of their meaning at one of his many fundraisers down here in the Big Easy.

Cindy Sheehan has had to leave Camp Casey in Crawford to care for her mother who has had a stroke, but grieving parents continue to go there and as she said in her most recent note, the Camp Casey Peace Movement has a life of its own separate from her, and no amount of crazy conspiracy theories made up by Rush, or badmouthing by Matt Drudge, can stop it. Here's an excerpt of her most recent post:

Some Gold Star Moms from Oregon joined me today and another from California. Another mom whose son was killed this past February arrived last night. Then we had a Gold Star Dad whose son had died this past June 15th show up at Camp Casey today with his family. Ruben said he just came to give me a hug. He said until today he had felt so lonely. Every time I meet a Gold Star parent whose son died after Casey, I feel so badly. I have been struggling for months to call attention to this mistake of a war to end it sooner. Every new death is like a stab in my heart.

I'm staying with two close friends here, Margarita and her fiance Neza. Margarita is from Cuernavaca, Mexico and is studying to take her comprehensive exams next month at Tulane (she's getting her PhD in Latin American Studies). She told me about Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers of the disappeared in Argentina who, one by one, camped out in the middle of the town square to demand answers from their government during the height of the dictatorship there. The totalitarian regime thought that if the bodies were never found, they could keep the reality of the disappearances from the bulk of the country by denying that the disappeared ever existed at all, not unlike our government shielding us from pictures of arriving coffins, or Rush's newest claim that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey never existed. Will Rush insist that every Gold Star family member is a fraud? It's impossible! There are too many, and sadly, more join their sorrowful ranks every day. Las Madres de Mayo confronted the government and made the rest of the country acknowledge their loss. They were the truthtellers, the unquestionable demonstrators of reality, and they forced Argentinians to accept what was being done in their name.

Cindy Sheehan is not a madre de Mayo, she is a madre de Western White House, but her power is the same. The tide has turned. More and more will continue to speak out and no amount of crap from the chickenhawk right will stop them or silence them.

I will try to write again tomorrow, either a last post from Fair Grinds, or a late-night post from a motel on the Mississippi outskirts of Memphis. On Monday I am going to the Civil Rights Museum before heading north. I'm going to call them and make sure they are open. I can't miss it again.

Friday Baja Blogging

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 17:26:08 GMT

So close and yet so far...

Fred and Selma had hoped to go down to Baja this week. That was until they mentioned it to Fred's doctor who asked them why they couldn't pick some place in the US. No matter, of course. He's in the hospital still. But the memories of Baja are strong!! I'm going to visit him today and I'm sure we'll talk a bit about that magical place along the lagoon where octopus swim near the cliffs and northern birds come down to winter. In the morning, we're awakened by the pitter patter of quail on the thin roof. It's amazing how much of a racket a handful of small birds can make.

La Loteria: Help Me Create a Web-based Exquisite Corpse

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 18:55:22 GMT

La Lotería is a game of chance similar to Bingo that is played at ferias, carnivals, and parties across Mexico. In Oaxaca, and I'm sure elsewhere, the caller speaks poetry when giving the image to mark on your tabla. Often these are only several lines and give a complex look at the contradictory nature of the images, or personalizes them in some way. Here is a great site about La Lotería and here is a tabla from the set I bought last summer:

Looking through the tablas last night I had an idea for the blog, a media made somewhat interactive by comments. I've noticed there are a number of other poets out there in the blogosphere and a number of writers who may not be poets by name but are by their insight into our precarious, peculiar condition. Why not collaborate?

Please join me in creating an exquisite corpse, an expression of chance itself, out of this tabla in the comments. Choose a square and write your own poetic "call." Here are the choices on this tabla: La Rosa (Rose), La Calavera (Skull), El Mundo (The World), El Apache (Apache -- a representation of the native peoples of the Americas), El Pescado (Fish -- this one is already caught on a hook), La Palma (Palm Tree), El Sol (Sun), La Corona (Crown -- royalty), El Paraguas (Umbrella), La Sirena (Siren of the Sea), El Gallo (Cock), El Diablito (Little Devil -- playful and not entirely sinister, perhaps...), La Muerte (Death with her scythe), La Pera (Pear), El Arbol (Tree), and El Melon.

Your "calls" can be political or not. They can be serious or ridiculous, or even dull. They can be poetry or prose or polemic. All are good.

I think this will be fun. Please join me!

Bouphonia on Julie Powell's Editorial on Organics

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:18:55 GMT

Bouphonia has an excellent analysis of former Salon blogger Julie Powell's editorial from the NY Times this week about the "elitism" of organic farmers' markets and grocery stores.

I have written about our thoughtless consumption and how we rate "cost" over the past couple of years (you can read the entries here, here, here, and here.). Our culture teaches us we are entitled to the shiniest, newest product whenever we want it. Many of us give no thought to the consequences of our purchases or the true "cost" in environmental degradation and human suffering, only the cost to our pocketbooks. Apparently Julie Powell is no exception.

Friday Baja Blogging

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 15:32:15 GMT

Friday Baja Blogging

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:02:42 GMT

Ah, Baja. How I miss you.

Friday Baja Blogging

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 06:25:35 GMT

Again, this is a "found object" photo. I didn't move the stones or manipulate the image in any way.

Exvotos and Giving Thanks

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 04:53:32 GMT

Two summers ago S and I lived in Oaxaca for a couple of months. I studied Spanish and he worked on an archaeological dig at a site near Mitla, one of the more famous ancient Zapotec sites in Oaxaca. His site was a suburb, really, a place where the regular people of Mitla lived. Their houses were made of adobe brick and were more like compounds than the houses we're used to. Several rectangular rooms surrounded a patio that often contained an altar. Beneath the patio were the bones of the family's ancestors, sometimes bundled, other times laid out in the manner we think of when we imagine corpses buried in the ground.

Some of the men S worked with are Zapotec and they live not so different than their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Their houses are also made of adobe brick; they are also more compound than house, with rectangular rooms surrounding a patio. Some of the compounds are for extended families, with two or three generations living next to each other and sharing the same patio. Now, though, the bones of the dead are buried in the church graveyard, not under the patio. It's been that way since Catholicism arrived on the backside of Cortes' horse.

But the Catholicism of Oaxaca is syncretic, not "pure." It's bundled up with Oaxaca's past, creating a whole new religion that allows for a chapel of "Black Saints" in Talcolula, or a chapel on top of a mountain in Macquilxochitl, the town S works in now and where so many of our friends live, built directly on top of a thousand-year old Zapotec temple.

Last summer we visited some of our friends there, Procopio and Thomas. Procopio's wife served us a simple, magnificent lunch: stewed zucchini with onions, cilantro, and fresh Oaxacan cheese; nopales with peppers, a bowl of ripe yellow plums, and fresh tlyudas, large Oaxacan-style tortillas, which she'd made on her adobe, mesquite-burning oven from corn she'd harvested in their fields, treated with lime, and ground herself. There is no electricity in Macquilxochitl, no running water. There is little work, too, so Procopio's children are scattered across Mexico and the US, each one picking fruit or soldering parts or fitting plastic into molds. They have a handful of pictures to remind them and not much more, since there is no mail service to Macquilxochitl and Procopio and his wife, while bilingual, aren't able to read or write. We have sent them pictures through other friends in Oaxaca City, two other archaeologists, one Oaxacan and the other Canadian, who have their own struggles since they're paid so little by the Mexican government.

One of the beautiful things about Mexican Catholicism is the exvoto, a gift to La Virgen or another saint for a prayer answered or a blessing received. Traditionally they were painted on tin by a specified town painter and scribe. This is still true today; if you go to the market in Oaxaca City you will see a man sitting at a desk with a typewriter. For a handful of pesos he'll draft a letter for you and even fill out the envelope. Frida Kahlo loved exvotos; at her blue house in Coyoacan, the atrium at the foot of the stairs leading up to her bedroom is covered, floor to ceiling, with them. Some answer little things -- a failed mole made right just minutes before the wedding party was to arrive; an argument straightened out among friends. Others big things, like a fight against illness, or recovery from an injury. I remember one that showed a man falling from the church tower. He'd lived, miraculously it seemed, so an exvoto was made to give thanks. Here's one I bought a few years ago in Oaxaca:

The woman, from Puebla de los Angeles, hurt her herself in 1924 while grinding corn on her metate, but with a saint's help, she got better and was able to get back to grinding.

Our friend Margarita gave S a blessed Virgen de Guadalupe image from the Basilica before he left for Afghanistan. She'd made a promise to Her: if S returned alive, then we'd have to make an exvoto to give thanks. My mother is a painter, so Margarita said perhaps she could paint it, but she understood that it would probably be me.

I've long been fascinated with virgin sightings and spontaneous religious events. I wrote about the overpass virgin here a couple of months ago. I don't believe in God. In fact, I have no "faith" in the religious sense. But I have an appreciation for tradition and mystery, and I like the communal aspect of urban grottos, and the idea of giving thanks when something's gone right. If S comes back alive, I will make an exvoto to honor Margarita's promise and our commitment to her. Perhaps it will involve photos instead of a painting, but its spirit will be the same. I don't pray, but I do hope. I hope he comes home.

This picture is from Toussaint, the Louisiana version of the Day of the Dead. In creole country outside of New Orleans, families gather at cemeteries to honor the dead by lighting candles around their graves and tombs, and sometimes drink and celebrate around them. I went out to a few cemeteries with two wonderful poets from my workshop, Beverly and Bonnie. What a night it was. Rain, fog. The candles were sniffed out nearly as fast as they were lit. We knelt down and helped relight them. I remember we got stuck in the mud at the last cemetery we visited and a young woman named Angel helped push us out. I remember, too, a young man with his son visiting the grave of his wife who'd passed away just a few months before. He was there with her parents and they seemed to be genuinely celebrating her life. It was beautiful.

I came upon this the other day in my neighborhood. I think it's related to a virgin sighting several years ago in Rogers Park. She was seen on a tree. I love the chairs -- red, brown, pink -- sitting there in waiting.

Friday Baja Blogging

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 17:12:05 GMT

In honor of Bouphonia's Friday Nudibrach Blogging that has brought me so much pleasure the past few months, I'm offering Friday Baja Blogging, with images from the beaches near San Quintin in Lazaro Cardenas, about five hours south of the US border.

These come from a beach near five sleeping volcanoes on a bay that stretches into the penninsula from the Pacific Ocean. The beach is covered in beautiful stones, many striped. I'm trying to document them before they are gone. Stone poachers have taken over the beach to package the rocks and sell them to Crate and Barrel, among other retailers. Soon, I worry, there will be few stones left.

The photos are "found object" pieces. I don't move the stones or manipulate the images. They are exactly as I found them.

Baja holds a lot of wonderful memories for me. I met my dear friends Fred and Selma there. S is an amateur astronomer so he brings his telescope with him when we visit. During the leonid meteor showers, we take out an air mattress and sleep outside with the meteors jetting over us through the milky way. There is little light pollution to cloud the view. It's spectacular.

In some ways these stones are like stars. They hold the universe in them.

The "Colombiazacion" of Mexico, the "Mexicanization" of the US

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:38:05 GMT

The media is finally waking up, however slowly.

I saw two excellent programs last night: the debut episode of Morgan Sperlock's "30 Days," and "Nightline."

"30 Days" is sort of a continuation of the documentary conceit Sperlock established in "Super Size Me" -- he does something for 30 days and reports on his experience. For the first episode, he and his girlfriend Alex move to Columbus, Ohio, one of the poorest cities in America, to live on minimum wage for a month. They take a modest nest egg with them (less than $200) and leave their credit cards behind in New York. What they discover along the way is how impossible it is to live on minimum wage.

The minimum wage, Sperlock tells us, was established in the 1930s to give a guarantee that if you work for a living you won't starve. Our current minimum wage is $5.15/hour, and it hasn't been raised since 1997. A day's wages, after taxes, is less than $50. As Sperlock shows us, it's actually not possible to live on minimum wage, which is why a number of activists, including Senator Ted Kennedy, have been trying to get the minimum wage raised with inflation, if nothing else. The deposit required at their slum apartment, the deposit required by the electric company (based, no doubt, on where they live), their lack of health insurance, and the cost of public transportation added up to Sperlock and Alex being in the red by the end of the month, even though they ate a vegan diet. There is a movement calling for a "living wage" instead of a minimum wage, but in our current political climate where "compassion" is a word used to buy votes and "life" is only in reference to those who have no capacity to voice their own opinions, there is little hope it will be established.

The show was powerful for a number of reasons. It not only showed the practical impossibilities of living on so little, it also showed the good works of people and organizations who are trying to make up for the negligence of our government and our larger society. They aren't always successful, because there just aren't enough services to go around. Sperlock and Alex get free furniture and dishware from the United Methodist Free Store, where everything is free, but when they go to a free health clinic, they are turned away because there are too many people there and not enough doctors. Sperlock talks about how he would have to miss at least one day of work to go to the free clinic, an impossiblity for many families who live paycheck to paycheck.

At the clinic and elsewhere, they interview people who are struggling to make ends meet, like an uninsured couple who both have diabetes, and a family of three who are homeless though the father works. To demonstrate how it is to live on next to nothing with children, Sperlock's neice and nephew come to stay with them for a weekend. Even in the short visit, we see how it is that much more difficult to support two more people on such a measly salary. Daycare, food, health care, how can a family afford any of it on $5.15/hour? The homeless family that they met at the clinic point out that our government's policies seem designed to tear families apart, an excellent point in light of Bush's "pro-family" presidency.

Watching the show, I was reminded of the Class Matters series the New York Times has been running this month, in particular this article about the "hyper-rich" and the growing gap between the rich and the poor. My friend Margarita, who is from Cuernavaca, talks often about the "Colombiazacion" of Mexico, how her country is being taken over by drug cartels (this article in today's Post talks about this). Sadly, I think we are undergoing a "Mexicanization" here in the US. Our minimum wage is nearly as unlivable as Mexico's and with Bush's tax cuts we are further establishing a monied artistocracy, therefore putting to rest our longstanding myth of the American meritocracy. The kinds of health issues, mental and otherwise, that come from abject poverty; the wholesale abandonment of entire communities; the esablishment of castes impossible to breach; all of this makes our country weaker, not stronger.

Sadly, our government looks to the poor to provide most of the sacrifice in war time, too. As Bob Herbert points out in his column today, the military makes a point of recruiting in poorer public high schools, thereby putting a heavier burden on families who are already challenged. They don't recruit as often at private, elite schools. They assume that the kids won't join when they have other options.

My husband, like so many other soldiers, joined the military for money and discipline right out of high school. He served as an active duty Marine before joining the Army national guard. He was the first person in his family to go to college and he paid for it himself. In many ways, he was no different than the public school kids the recruiters go after today, except that when he joined the test requirements were more strict and you had to have a high school deploma. Now you only need a ninth grade education (with a promise to get your GED within your first years of service) and your test scores can be exceptionally low. (I wonder when we will have to redefine what a "volunteer" army is when some of the soldiers join out of economic necessity and so many others are kept in beyond their contracts.)

Interestingly, Ted Koppel's show last night was somewhat related to Sperlock's. Koppel talked about child labor and exploitation worldwide through interviews with the makers of Stolen Childhoods, a documentary, and footage from the film. The go to Kenya and see nine year old picking coffee beans all day. The children are exposed to pesticides that cause horrible health problems, including debilitating skin diseases where the pesticides have touched them and respiratory problems. They also go to the United States, where Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) points out that there are no child labor laws governing argriculture, and as a result thousands of kids (nine, ten, twelve years old) work the fields handpicking our radishes, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, etc., and like their Kenyan brothers and sisters are exposed to harmful pesticides every day and are denied education.

I've never seen Ted Koppel so passionate about a topic. Beautifully, he and the filmmakers tell us what we can do to help the situation. As the world's most gluttonous consumers, we can make a huge difference simply by shopping smarter and more compassionately. This means buying only fair trade coffee (and other items, for that matter) and organic produce. It's that simple!

A couple of years ago on Broken Windows I wrote about why I eat organics, talking about my experience in Baja, Mexico and their tomato pickers. You can read it here. (BTW, the LA Times "Wal-mart" articles I point to in that post were written by my step-sister, Nancy Cleeland. She won the Pulitzer and the Polk for them. Isn't that cool?!) We have an incredible amount of power because we consume so much; it's time we start using our power wisely. Frankly, most americans can afford to pay a little bit more for their groceries. Not everyone can, of course, but the rest of us can and should. If we buy organics the price will naturally come down, making them more accessible to everyone. Organics are better for everyone, from the picker to the consumer, and clearly are better for the environment too. There are other ways to "shop smart," like being aware of who made what you buy and what conditions they had to work under, and also questioning whether or not the price you pay for something is actually "fair." Most of the prices in Wal-Mart and Target and other large discounters are too low. They aren't actually fair because too many people have suffered for us to get that low price.

Sperlock's show, while it didn't give particular actions we can take, showed what's possible with some generosity and kind spirit. I was so impressed with the "Free Store" idea. Imagine if there was one in every community. What a gift to so many families! I've taken buckets of clothes and household goods to resale shops over the years (not to Salvation Army anymore -- not only am I opposed to the whole idea of an "army" of "salvation," they also received an outrageous endowment worth billiions of dollars from Ray Kroc's widow. They don't need my stuff.). How wonderful it would be if my stuff, which I give away for nothing, was then given away for nothing to people in my own community. I'm going to explore this idea here in Chicago and see where it leads. I don't know of any free stores here, but perhaps there are a couple already. That doesn't mean we don't need another...

I think we can stop the "Mexicanization" of America if we are conscious of our actions and fight for social justice, which includes a living wage. One of the lessons of zen is that "our actions are our only true possessions." It's never too late to start acting more responsibly, is it?

Our Lady of the Kennedy Underpass, Chicago

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 03:24:36 GMT

I went to see the underpass virgin this morning before heading off to New Orleans. I've been intrigued with la virgen for years now, in particular Mexico's reverence of her. As Chicago is now 25% Mexican, it makes sense that this vision was first spotted by a Mexican-American woman and that most of the visitors, at least today, were Mexican. In fact, you can see from this photo that there is a large Mexican flag with la virgen de guadalupe in the center where the eagle/serpent/cactus image is usually found, just to the left of the virgin. Notice the flowers, candles, and cakes on the ground around her:

I went to see her solely because of my long-time interest in spontaneous virgin sightings, but I was surprised by what I found when I got there. I was actually moved to tears. So many people approached the image, gently touched her, brushed their hands down her image, then knelt down to give thanks or ask for favors, or perhaps just tell her a story or two. To two women standing next to me, there was nothing more than a water stain on the side of a concrete wall. Others posed for pictures, like this mother and son. Surrounding her were pictures of the recently dead (including John Paul II, his name in Polish) and a poster of a $5000 reward for information about a missing woman. I don't know if it was the fact that I haven't talked to S in days (he's out on missions every night, finding weapons caches, other things), our unfulfilled desire to have kids, the wonderful play I saw last night ("Living Out," from Teatro Vista) about a Salvadoran nanny and the loss of her sons, or a combination of all of these mixed together with the pain and sorrow around me. Whatever it was, tears came while I stood in the crowd under the freeway.

There were a number of women wearing shawls. They could have come straight from the market in Tlacolula, Oaxaca. I felt like I knew them. I've met some of their sisters, women who have had to abandon their families and risk their lives for money, who have had to leave everything that is dear to them in order to feed their children (whether they were lucky enough to take their children with them or not). In Baja, I've seen women dressed head to toe in clothing, even in the hot midday sun, to protect themselves from pesticides. In Oaxaca, I've met women who could line their walls with posters of all their missing relatives who went north and never came back. One of our friends crossed the border four times before finally returning for good. Of her four children, only one still lives in Oaxaca.

Here is a long view of the shrine. The area was somewhat protected by blue police barricades. One officer sat in her squad car parallel to the shrine. Leaning on her car's bumper was a worn-out bike:

The makeshift shrine was scattered among "Emergency Parking Only" signs and whitewashed graffiti markings. A highway grotto:

Here is one of the shawled women who could be from Oaxaca (or perhaps Chiapas, Yucatan, Guerrero...there are so many women who could be her), coming to touch la virgen:

A small selection of the flowers and candles left for her:

The children seemed nervous. They ran up and touched her, then ran quickly back to their parents, skipping over the candles and cakes:

I love Mexico's reverence of The Mother. It's really separate from the church, it seems, and much more steeped in indigenous traditions. The worship of this overpass virgin is spontaneous and, in its own way, rebellious. While the catholic traditionalists were in church praising the new pope, these people were in the grunge of an overpass, leaving gifts for a watermark.

Down the way from Our Lady, across the street from Los Recuerdos Night Club, was this woman selling flowers. I didn't ask her how much. She was eating a doughnut and smoking a cigarette when I passed her.

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 23:55:54 GMT

As promised...Jesus Malverde. Finally. I bought this at the border last week in Tijuana, to the HUGE embarrassment of both my mother and S. We held up traffic a bit, which meant I paid more than I should have for this Jesus Malverde bust/piggy bank (yes! There's a slot in the back of his head!!). I just couldn't resist. As I said a while back, Jesus Malverde is one of the new saints, one that's not ordained by the Church but manages to have a huge cultural presence regardless. He's considered the patron saint of narcotraffickers and his shrine is in the heart of Mexico's drug trade, Culiacan, Sinaloa. He was a turn-of-the-century Robin Hood/bandit who was hung in 1909 by the governor of Sinaloa, the legend says, and since then has been the saint to appeal to for safe passage across the border if you're carrying drugs. I first read about Jesus in Sam Quinones' book, True Tales from Another Mexico, and later in Elijah Wald's Narcocorrido, a fantastic book about the corrido, the most popular music in Mexico (which represents the largest sales in latin music, BTW), songs that recount the histories of bandits, revolutionary heroes, and like its counterpart, gangsta rap, the lives of drug traffickers. Wald compiled a CD with many of the songs he discusses in the book and also has the lyrics available on his website. (Read the chapter about Jesus from Quinones' book here.) Drug traffickers and others go to Jesus' shrine in Culiacan to offer not money or candles but corridos, songs. A band will sing commissioned songs and standards in honor of Jesus after a successful run up north. You can read more about Jesus and the shrine on Frontline's Drug Wars site here and here. The most famous Mexican drug cartel is run by the Arellano-Felix family, a cartel that was featured in Frontline's Drug Wars special of several years ago. Posters were hanging up at the border crossing with pictures of nine of the Felix brothers and a bounty of $5 million for information leading to their arrests. I guess they've given quite a bit to Jesus' shrine...what else would explain their eluding capture all these years? The customs agent didn't ask us about the Malverde bust in the back seat; I suppose we weren't the first, or the last, to by a road-side plaster saint. If you want to read more about Jesus Malverde, a MIT student has an excellent archive of articles on his website here. We're working hard at loading up Jesus with all the pennies we have laying around the house. Perhaps it will give us a little luck in our next border passage (no, we're definitely not drug traffickers!), or help us capture a Felix brother or two and collect that 5 million dollars!

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 19:15:15 GMT

We're back!! And we're actually settled. For a few days at least. We're in Chicago for a week, then we drive down to NOLA for the spring semester. We've spent much of the past twenty-four hours cleaning house, doing laundry, and waiting for the Sears repair guy to come and look at our humidifier. What a life! Here are a few photos of our trip. We had a fantastic time, as you'd expect. From New Year's in Baja to the wedding in Pasadena, every event was marked by wonderful food (we eat REALLY well in Baja) and stimulating conversation. Here's America's wall. With all of the discussion over Israel's proposed wall to separate itself from Palastinians, perhaps they will look to ours for inspiration. This picture is actually of the old wall. There is another about an eighth of a mile north that is futuristic, prison-like. It's a series of scattered steel pillars topped with concertina wire. Imagine looking out of your house each morning at this! What a view. What we see when we drive from San Diego down to San Quintin. This is north of Ensenada. The day was particularly clear; normally the curvatures of the earth jutting into the water are obscured with fog. And the view out the back of our little Baja cottage. The lagoon stretches around to the west into a marshland area, and then back around to the ocean. We take a nine-mile dirt road to the house. It's often easier to drive in the wash on the side of the road than on the road itself. There seems to have been an influx of money into the area recently. The road had been recently graded and many of the shops in town were freshly painted. Also, there was at least one new restaurant: San Quintin Chow Mein, painted red and gold. There has been an increase in Chinese immigration to northern Mexico the past five years or so, which I suppose the new chow mein restaurant reflects. The maquiladoras pay so much more than their Chinese counterparts that workers are willing to sail for days to get here to earn 42 pesos a day. Perhaps the immigration will slow down in the coming years; many of the factories are closing in Mexico and opening in China to match that Wal-Mart promise of cheaper cheaper cheaper.

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 03:34:32 GMT

More Wal-Mart news, this time from the New York Times. The article's first line says it all: "The company that ate America is now swallowing Mexico." Wal-Mart has become the Blob of retailers, ever expanding and consuming everything in its path. Another notch on their belt of "accomplishments," I guess. By the way, the other two articles are up at the LA Times. The second part is about Wal-Mart's effects on suppliers, focusing on factories in Honduras, Bangladesh, and China. Pretty shocking, as you'd imagine. Wal-Mart demands lower prices or increased quality every year, and if they don't get one or the other, they move their business elsewhere. The Times artfully presents the factories in their Wal-Mart pecking order -- the Honduran plants pay their workers the most and the Chinese plants pay the least. Bangladesh often gets undercut by China. What a world. Marketed to Mexicans by the country's largest retailer: "American-style" jeans made in Bangladesh; LA Lakers tees sewn up in the sweatshops of Dongguan, China. And in every store, of course, that 89 cent jar of Ragu. Juice squeezed from freshly picked Baja tomatoes.

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 18:26:18 GMT

The evidence mounts. We must stop Wal-Mart. The first of three articles in the LA Times about the leviathan in our midst. Wal-Mart, that mecca of cheap products and groceries, the union-breaker, the slave-wager. The place so many of us go to buy what we want at the price we can't refuse. It's all there, they assure us, shiny and new and most of all CHEAP. But nothing's really that cheap, is it? With every purchase, our hands are further covered in blood. A few low-priced examples from the article tell it all: Ragu tomato sauce for 89 cents, a computer for $498. Not mentioned, this season's hottest gift item: the camera-cell phone. We don't ask questions, we just buy (the patriotic good-deed of Christmas, CNN assures us.). That cheap Ragu means women and men in Baja picking tomatoes while planes fly over head and spray them with pesticides; that $498 computer means silicone mined by kids in horrific conditions. That cheap new super-cool cell phone? Contains cobalt, the new diamond of the African blood trade, not to mention electronic parts made by maquiladora workers for pennies. We spend time each summer (and sometimes in the winter too) in San Quintin, Baja, a small coastal community about five hours south of the border. San Quintin, like most of Baja, is a desert landscape peppered with agaves and dead volcanoes. Dirt roads lead to the colonias from the dusty downtown, a collection of small shops and markets, a zocalo with a ratty gazebo and a few fish taco stands. The town runs into the next with no break in between, San Quintin and Lazaro Cardenas joined at the hip and basically indistinguishable from each other. To the south of town are the fields: acres and acres of tomato plants covered in black mesh tarp and strawberry fields divided by lines. Walking the lines are women and men, most from Oaxaca and other parts of southern (and indigenous) Mexico, their bodies covered head to toe with layers of clothing to protect them from the chemicals and the sun. In the mid-nineties the tomato growers of Baja discovered a new irrigation technique and this combined with NAFTA has meant a booming business. Company representatives walk the streets of Oaxaca and Chiapas offering the poorest of Mexico a living wage and free transportation to Baja, just as Wal-Mart entices potential workers with friendly ad campaigns and the promise of good benefits. Neither delivers, of course. While Wal-Mart leaves more than half of its employees without health insurance, the fruit growers of Baja pay their workers next to nothing, leave them to live in clapboard shacks, and shower them with pesticides while they pick. I remember going to the grocery store in San Quintin last summer. In front of me in line was a woman in her head-to-toe tomato picking outfit. It was a warm day, but she was wearing layer upon layer, at least three, and across her face was a handkerchief draped from beneath her eyes down to her chin. On her head, a straw hat. She looked no different from her Zapatista cousins in Chiapas, who cover their faces to protect their identities. (I'm sure the visual imagery is not lost on either her or her sisters: the farm workers and the indigenous rights fighters are no different, their struggles are the same. Her covered body, her covered face left nothing to the imagination: I'm the one, her clothing said, that's fed you. It's my handprints on your fruits. ) Because of NAFTA, the prices in grocery stores on both sides of the border are nearly the same. The woman in front of me paid 11 pesos (about $1) for a two liter bottle of soda, a price I've seen advertised in the Sunday paper by Wal-Mart and other large chains. The tomatoes for sale in the Baja store were not the pristine ones we see on our grocery shelves. They were the bruised and broken ones, the ones that were dropped or bumped or left too long on the vine; those not even good enough for Ragu. The picker in front of me had several in her basket. I imagine she would not be able to afford the ones she herself picked, those pretty ones reserved for stores up north. And that's the irony of Wal-Mart, I suppose. The prices are low enough to allow the poor a slice of the "good life," but at the hidden, horrific cost of having to buy products made by those even poorer who live in other countries. (I know -- most of Wal-Mart's US customers are not the poorest of us -- they are a cross-section of the nation: the poor, the rich and everyone in between.) Now there are Wal-Marts in developing countries too. I wonder, where do the tomatoes sold in the Wal-Marts of Mexico and Brazil come from? Who's picking them? (It's not just in Mexico, of course. I remember seeing a group of pickers bused to a Safeway in Naples, Florida to buy their groceries for the month. If they wanted an orange, one they may have picked the week before, they had to buy it at the Safeway just like everyone else. Suddenly "competition" and choice" lose their meaning when you see pickers having no choice at all and competition knocked out by the grower. I don't think the pickers were asked by their bosses whether they wanted to go to the Safeway or the Piggly Wiggly. The deal was made without their input, no doubt. On Saturday mornings the bus would come, take them to the market, and bring them back to their company-owned housing. And this is HERE, in our country, not way down south in those "other" countries.) When people ask me why I buy organic, I tell them about that woman in Baja. Yes, organic produce and small farm-raised meat is good for me and the environment. That's obvious. But organics are also good for the pickers. Organic fruits and vegetables mean pickers who don't get sprayed. That's enough for me. Yes, they cost more. Am I rich? Do I make a lot of money? No. Can I afford an extra 20 cents a pound for my tomatoes? Yes. Can most Americans? Of course. I don't know if it's possible to slow down our country's insatiable appetite for the newest, shiniest, cheapest. Perhaps if we can see ourselves as those women on the border asssembling our $40 DVD players, picking our $2/pound strawberries, or see ourselves as the young kids mining cobalt at gun point. Perhaps it will take an appeal to our better selves, that part of us that's not full of greed and run by gluttony, but instead driven by compassion. Perhaps. I should say that this first LA Times article is not about the human costs in other countries, but rather the cost of union jobs here in the US. I personally don't see a separation between them. Both American union workers and Mexican farm/maquiladora workers are hurt by our insatiable appetite for cheap stuff. According to CNN, last Friday was Wal-Mart's best single day ever. Wal-Mart, that most American of companies, made richer by our nation's favorite pastime, shopping. Newsworthy indeed. The Wal-Mart story is related to Juarez, of course, and the town's countless murdered women. The maquiladoras that spit out cheap TVs and electronic goods for Wal-Mart and other discounters eats up young girls and leaves them dead in the desert. I've written about it in past posts here and here.

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 04:59:09 GMT

More news from our in-country parallel universe, the border, in today's NY Times: The drug traffickers have turned to trafficking human beings. On the brighter side, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed suit against Ranch Rescue, a border vigilante group, and two of their vigilante colleagues are going to jail. (Scroll down to story dated October 13.) "Ranch Rescue" purports to protect ranches from "tresspassers" by abducting Mexican immigrants and holding them prisoner.