La Gringacicleta

Day of the Dead Redux

2010-11-04T22:11:00.001-07:00

All right chav@s, we've survived another year and now the time has come to hang with those who haven't. So, this means a few things: a little Ofrenda in my house, first of all. Just a little thing, on my nightstand. Marigolds, "cockscomb" flowers, some pears for my granpappy ol' reliable (who, okay, maybe never wanted to see another damn pear in his life, being a pear farmer, but give me a break, I never met the guy) plus tangerines, sugarcane, a little water, a little salt, some grapes (who doesn't like grapes?) a couple candles... and a little incense thingy that I couldn't figure out how to use properly despite technical advice from many angles. I successfully filled my house with smoke, but that's about it, to be honest.

Anyway, the epic aprovechamiento of the Day of the Dead began on sunday, when we did a mad-dash grocery run followed by an attempt to go to the town of Mixquic (at a bus stop where the bus never came, but on the other hand there was a very cute puppy). We saved the day by jumping on a shortbus to the center of Xochimilco. We got in and there were people EVERYWHERE. In the plaza they were just barely starting to put up a couple of ofrendas in the first plaza (here it's common to put up colossal ofrendas in the plazas as display pieces), and in the second plaza there was a honey fair, where oddly we bought coffee and pan de muerto ("dead guy bread") and this circular bread covered in pink sugar (so it looks like fungicide-coated seeds, so I call it "pan de fungicida", though I remain ignorant of its true name, and which, by the way, I've only ever seen in Xochimilco and its surroundings). Then, passing the honey fair, we found the main square of Xochi, where they had some colossal ofrendas, and, like last year, a life-size pulquería diorama, including drunken papier-mache skeletons, witty sayings, pulque-extraction tools, a real-live agave in a heap of soil and educational labels explaining the history, process and culture of pulque. We got there a bit late but in the early afternoon they have pulque-tastings and such things. There's also a giant list of all the pulquerías in the Xochimilco area.

Then, crossing that plaza, we encountered the Dance of the Silly Gachupines ("Gachupin" is a derogatory term for Spanish person here in Mexico) which has a real name but I don't actually remember what it is, but the concept is that (in this case they were mostly schoolchildren) dress up in big, elaborately decorated velvet robes, giant inverted-truncated-cone hats, and bearded wooden masks and dance around in circles in the street. Originally this was to make fun of the Spanish, who, for mala onda ("being jerks") never invited the indigenous people to their parties. So, the snubbed indigenous people took it upon themselves to make an elaborate satirical ritual of it. The band and the dancers (the smallest of which was a kid of no more than six years, who continually got distracted and had to be repeatedly dragged back to the group by older kids) were followed up and down the streets by firecrackers and photo-snapping crowds. Thus was traffic impeded and were many children and grownups amused.

As it began to get dark-- the power went out! So we were on our way out of Dodge when we passed the darkened, candle-glowing market and I insisted we go in. Candles wedged among piles of tangerines, burning pieces of sugarcane stuffed between fans of bananas, illuminating (or not) the vendors, who continued as normal, barking their goods in the darkness. It was pretty cool.

Then, we stopped in at a prehispanic restaurant which we'd seen on the way into Xochi, where we had a delicious grasshopper soup and corn-smut pasta, with tiny mugs of mezcal on the house (I'm pretty sure we were drinking from a dollhouse tea set) with grub-salt, and an agua-fresca with lime and chía seeds. It was a pretty tasty dinner. Furthermore there was this awesome ambience because of the power outage, just listening to the festival on the street outside, the evening breeze through the window, watching the candlelight move around on the paintings on the wall. It's a very beautiful, and only slightly expensive restaurant that I highly highly recommend to tourists.

Then we went home.

BUT! The Day of the Dead adventure is not over yet. On Tuesday we went to Mixquic, a little bitty town famous for its adherence to traditions. From Tasqueña station we took two HOURS to get there on a two-peso RTP bus, passing the entirety of Tlahuac (which has awful traffic because they're building a new line of the Metro there) . On the bright side, we saw a ginormous skeleton in the center of Tlahuac, which was cool. Anyway, we got into Mixquic hungry and tired, but enjoyed the fair that they had set up around the perimeter of the cemetery before going in to check out the dead. The church of Mixquic is prehispanic in origin, which is to say that it has an archaeological site in the courtyard containing skeletons, carved rocks and ancient statues. It's one of the loveliest churches I've seen yet in Mexico, one of the ones with the outside all stone and serious and the inside drenched in gold-leaf, so beautifully decorated it's sort of hard to cope with. I just sat there in the pews for awhile, staring. In the pulpit there was a long and elaborate ofrenda with all kinds of fruit and candles and everything, and of course on the front wall behind the pulpit was a giant statue of Jesus with, of course, a Virgen de Guadalupe suspended above him. Along the walls were various wooden statues of Jesus in different stages of his life; though as usual, the anguished crown-of-thorns stage appeared most favored.

But outside and all around the church was where it was at. Throngs of people buzzed amongst the graves, composing flowery magna opi to their dead relatives on top of their graves. Whole families, children still bedecked in Halloween costumes from several days before, arranged marigolds, cockscomb flowers, little white flowers that here are called "clouds", candles, sometimes making patterns or designs of the dismembered petals, on the slab of concrete, pile of dirt, mausoleum, tiled surface or whatever that marked the grave.

This, I should mention, is the most tightly-packed cemetery I have ever seen in my whole life. It's incredible. Only one person can pass at a time between the graves, and I suspect that families may bury one person atop the previous on the family site. There is literally zero real estate available in the Mixquic cemetery and I promise you that no grave goes undecorated. For this reason it's a well-known attraction for Chilangos and foreigners alike in this season. And that was how, as it got darker and darker, I became trapped and unable to escape among the graves. The incense smoke rose into the air, clouding my vision and inundating my olfactory sphere. The rumbling of thousands of voices, the silence of the old ladies who sat watching the candles, the sound of camera shutters on all sides... and no escape! I believe I spent a good half an hour twisting amidst the graves after deciding I wanted to leave. But it was nice, actually. Guitars, barkers from the fair, ladies selling cotton candy between the graves... it's sort of weird, really.

Now the one thing we noticed, and maybe you're taking this as tourist advice, so listen closely, is this: there were a ton of police in the fair. So, our conclusion was this: be careful in Mixquic. The fair itself and the cemetery are safe, but definitely watch your back, because if they're putting that much security in place, it might be for a reason. That's it.

Next time: the collapse of Hacienda Mixiuhca. Stay tuned!

So much whatnotting.

2010-09-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

HACIENDA MIXIUHCA

The hacienda, due to circumstances described below, has been somewhat neglected of late. Regardless, I'm gratefully pulling tomatoes off the whitefly-infested vines on the daily. I gave one of my Cherokee Purples to my friend Mizraim for his birthday and he was pretty excited. I won't lie-- I talked it up quite a bit... Of course when Marcos found a little heap of them in the kitchen, he asked me if they were purple because they were full of smog. Very funny, Marcos.

The chickens are bigger on a daily basis. They seem to display normal behaviour despite extremely abnormal conditions. The duck is totally neurotic, but she's another story. Anyway, my students and friends are curiously asking me about my weird plans for chicken dinner. The okra is irreparably stunted and still upside down. The upside down cucumber trick was working remarkably well until it sort of dried up (see: period of neglect).

Natural disasters... many times, when it rains, the drainpipe clogs with feathers. This sucks, because my job then becomes chicken-feather scraper (by means of my broom, because I have to do this by half-sticking myself out of a hole in the side of the cage, which I normally cover with a lovely piece of corrugated fiberglass which I found one day on the roof). This means mucking around in chicken-poop mud. Fun and disgusting, all rolled into one. However, this does mean I've got to be pretty timely about sweeping that stuff up. BUT! But my compost bucket is, as of today, full to the brim. I guess I have to get another one? My worms died of chicken shit overload, I think, and so I think anaerobic fermentation is the only option for me. Anyone got any suggestions???

MY BORING LIFE

Since my last post I've gone through a series of iterations of a daily schedule. I'd taken a job with another company, teaching an advanced English class at the National Polytecnic Institute's Centre for Investigations and Advanced studies. I loved the class, a bunch of scientists: a physicist, two geneticists, a couple of biotechnologists and a few scattered others. It was a really fun class to teach and I learned a few useful things from that school's teaching method. However, I happen to think sleeping is really amazing, and it simply wasn't working for me that I was getting home at ten or eleven at night, and waking up at 5 to be out of here at 6 to get to Politécnico at 7:30. I just wasn't going to hack it anymore. So, three weeks of working that gig (see also making some good money—at triple the pay rate of my current job, I certainly couldn't complain about money!) just about did me in. But now I'm giving private clases to this Argentinian dude, who, (are you ready for an AMAZING COINCIDENCE?) in fact, is working on a documentary about the Ginger Ninjas. Yes, the very Ginger Ninjas that biked into our backyard in Davis, camping out in various of our beds, amusing us with their bicycle-powered music, amazing us with their crackpot journey to the southlands.... so, yeah, that's cool.

Okay, you ask, but what about my free time? And I respond, “WHAT free time??” That's right, folks. Working six days a week pretty much kills any “life” you may or may not have had previously. Regardless, I try to take advantage of the scraps they throw me as much as possible. Chiefly this takes the form of adventure-grocery-shopping (1), wanderings in the center of town (2), and eating, nerding out and sleeeeeeeeeping (3). Later I will recount the doings, seeings and beings of the only trip I've taken out-of-town in many moons, but for the time being let's stick with the quotidian.

The Merced (GPG: Mehr-SEHD) is a big damn market. The following is a collaborative piece by Ricardo and yours truly. We wrote it together on the way to Morelos last week. On your mark, get set, go!

The weather's clear and fresh. It's about ten in the morning. We're groggily going towards Mixiuhca station. Instead of sinking into the metro, however, we catch a shortbus heading to San Lázaro. From on the sunny, bumpy ride to San Lázaro we're laughing and talking in Spanglish, both of us pretty lazy about choosing just one language to speak. Then we jump over some puddles to get to the station, flying down th stairs just in time to watch one of the orange trains disappear. Merde. Well, now we have to wait. It feels muggy in the Metro. Some announcements on the bulletin board call my attention. I'd like to attend some of the events posted, and even firmly promise myself I will. However, I won't; that I can take for granted. God bless the 48-hour workweek. The next train has arrived and we get on it. People generally stare at each other like mortal foes on the Metro (says Ricardo), and I try not to be a part of it. Then a guy selling pop CDs breaks the silence. Cat of course starts to dance, which is more than a little embarrassing, especially when she tries to act like she's with me. We get off in the next station, and again we can see the sunlight.

It filters through the multitude of grimy skylights in Merced Station and we maneuver through the masses and rotating gates, ever closer to the throbbing center of barkers, vendors, pickpockets and shady types, old ladies, pirate goods, housewivery, and deliciousness that is La Merced. Tacos de Canasta, fly sneakers, peanut butter, raw meat, plastic everything-you-can-imagine mah-day en cheena. Anarchy: capitalist anarchy at its hairiest. It's this sort of twisted freaky commercial paradise vacation at a toxic waste pond. This photo is of the feet of a clown and his ever-so-many fans in the center of town.

We more or less know where we're going: first to the old lady in the middle of the shoe part, who sells from buckets of multicolor mole, pastes of every kind, a shrewd grandmother with braids who shovels spoonfuls of the stuff into polyethylene sheets by the quarter-kilogram. We get our PB from her, and snake around distracted

clients clogging the passages to buy some cemitas. The Cemita is the holy grail of Mexican bread products: a circular roll, perfect for these amazing deli sandwiches they make in Puebla. Oh god, they're way way way too delicious.

It's a lazy sunday, of course, so then it becomes extremely necessary to dilute the coffee sloshing in our stomachs with some greaseball tacos from the stand with indifferent and snotty taqueros (GPG: tah-KEYR-ohs) but amaaaaaaaaazing food. I order some carne enchilada tacos, and load them down with fried potatoes, salsa, onion and nopales. Then I merrily proceed to stuff my face.

Then we carry our now quite full bellies with us around from one side of the Merced to the other, not listening to the crooning of the sellers. There's one part with mostly fruit, mostly candy and nuts and seeds, another with mostly veggies, another with specialty veggies, and one side hallway which appears to consist exclusively of nopales, giant heaps of cut-off spines accumulating on the floor as the sellers deftly swipe their knives over the surface of the cactus pads.

We come here because it's cheaper, and not so far from my place. Ricardo and I are coöperating on the food front, so into the front lines we go every Sunday. It's kind of exhilerating, between the split-second bargaining, the risk of being run over by a dolly loaded down with ice, carrots or potatoes, the constant worry of pickpocketing or worse, and the general overwhelming goodness of being surrounded by FOOD, glorious food! Heaps of carrots, tumbling piles of tomatillo, buckets of powders, barrels of beans, glass cases of nuts and candy, racks of mangoes and starfruit, crates of tunas, stacks of jars of honey... anything you want, nearly, you can find it. Ruffly, fragrant mountains of leaf vegetables and herbs, delicate displays of oyster mushrooms, fluffballs of alfalfa sprouts.

GETTING OUTTA HERE: an adventure in Morelos with the Usual Suspects.

The last-minute planning, the running from here to there, the dropout. This, the

dramatic backdrop for our Very Rigid Journey. Then we went to my house (happy independence day?) and ate eggplant and drank guava-ginger agua-fresca. It was admittedly not very patriotic of us.

Oh well! Next day we boogied at some early, but less-early-than-we'd-hoped-for hour, dashed off, ate a way-too-spicy taco at Tasqueña station, and jumped on a bus. On the bus I called Lilia, and asked Chato, who picked up the phone, if I couldn't escape from my pals a bit to spend some time with them, at which point he very kindly invited Ricardo and Karen to come eat with us. We then proceeded to miss our stop. We asked the driver “Scuse us, do you know where the next stop is?” to which he responded simply, “Yes.” and left it at that. What a dick. Well, he let us off at the next town, some nowhere place where we threw ourselves in the grass and happily

wasted half an hour soaking in the sun... anyway, caught the next bus back to We ate at this amazing elegant restaurant with a KILLER view of the town, which is situated in this incredible verdant valley, just luscious with vegetation, life spewing with impunity from every foothold. THIS, this this, is indeed paradise! More next time on our adventures in paradise... it's sleepin' time now.

But as a final... thingy, a study in tropical fruit. I dissected a mamey and a black sapote from the Merced on our amazing new electric-blue tablecloth. This is the result of an intensive, even invasive, study of their physical forms. Both are very specifically mexican. The mamey is Enjoy

My Freakin Uniform

2010-08-16T20:57:00.001-07:00

Look at how silly and formal I have to look at work. My mother should be proud of me...

Hacienda Mixiuhca Update, plus Hurbanaventuras

2010-07-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

First, the bad news. Then, the good news.

It's been a fungal massacre, with all this damn rain. I lost ALL of my basil plants.

There has also been a chicken massacre, and in this way I lost ALL of my salad greens.

Regardless, I still have a bunch of okra, all my tomatos, two of my cukes, and some marigolds (though I did have to sacrifice some of them for reasons of exaggerated competition). I'm trying out this upside-down hanging planter idea that NPR told my mom about. Furthermore I have abandoned the idea of organic ag in the city. It's not space efficient. Ergo, slow-release granular fert from Mercado de Jamaica. Tomorrow: photos.

Now, Hurbanaventuras:

I helped one friend give a basic bike-repair workshop downtown today, near the Monument to the Revolution, and brought Marcos' grandpappy's bike to fix that sucker up a bit. The plan was then to quickly drop it off at home, then go meet my other friend in the Coyoacan metro station. However, the plan was somewhat derailed when we took too long on the bike, so I had to go straight to Coyoacan, bike and all. Which practically isn't a problem, since on Sundays they let you take your bike on the Metro. Regardless, the problems came after I decided the metro was lame and rolled the whole way there on two wheels (which felt SO GOOD after three and a half months of total bikelessness!!). The guy just didn't show. I however took the opportunity to chitchat with an old man selling tiny pueblan pies and then the Metro police (who are less trigger-happy, fortunately, than BART police...) and suddenly this guy with a funny accent shows up and asks where the center of coyoacan is. I tell him I can help him get there, since I am at this point TOTALLY done with waiting for my no-show buddy. So I give him the mini walking tour of the joint, and he invites me to eat, to which proposal I wholeheartedly agree. He then picks this hella trendy spot right on the Coyoacán plaza, all typical Mexican colors and dishes, all girls with scarves and hip boots and guys with intellectual glasses and stylized hairdos, and we order some of the best chilanga tlayudas I have ever eaten, a glass of pulque (which he found disgusting, though I like it), and a couple caballitos of strong-as-hell mezcal. It turned out he's a Colombian lawyer, and he was leaving for his home turf this very night. The point is, it was this sort of Universe-speaking-to-me kind of moment and it was kind of fun to share some of the Mexico I've discovered with a lost foreigner. It was this weird consolidation exercise... okay. to bed. tomorrow i'll post hacienda pictures... buenas noxes.

I'm Cultured like Yakult, Sucka!

2010-06-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

*Note, this post was written several weeks ago, in fact DURING the Argentina-Mexico game, which brought us all to the conclusion that that we needed was for Chicharito to make fewer damn sandwiches and play more damn soccer. ** --The Editor

In light of the iminent slaughter of the Mexican team by the Argentinians, I think I should direct the topic away from fútbol and toward, uh, other pursuits.

Now, onto more intellectual issues. A museum exposition that I saw semi-recently was "The Invisible World of René Magritte" at Bellas Artes. Maybe I haven't posted a photo yet of Bellas Artes' magnificent orange dome, but I shall do so soon. Regardless I have a photo of the facade, and of one of the amazing wooden sculptures in exhibition outside. These 12 giant wooden heads are supposed to be the Apostles. As far as I can tell each is carved from a single piece of wood, which is to say they used some big damn trees to make this project, which makes my inner environmentalist a little sad, especially knowing a bit about the state of Mexican logging policy ("Log the fuckers!!!!"). Oh well. It's also quite close to the Torre Latinoamericana, an impressive skyscraper with a big antenna on top. Furthermore, the electric buses pass right by on Eje Central/Lázaro Cárdenas. Their little antennae fall off all the time just like the SF buses. Ah, a little bit of home right here in Mexico City.

Okay, so the Bellas Artes building is cool for various reasons, the first and most obvious of which is the exterior architecture, very old-and-made-of-stone looking, big, impressive, with the dichoso orange dome. Secondly, it's another prime and excellent example of the amazing sinking soils described in one of my July posts from last year (holy goodness, I've been here very nearly one whole year!!), as the building is in a funny little well. Thirdly, lots of people hang around in its marbly plaza, and I might remind you that México DF is make-out city, so sometimes you have to observe more tonsil hockey than you'd really like. Fourthly, it's right next to the Alameda, the park in downtown that is the subject of an amazing Diego Rivera mural available for goggling in a nearby museum. Fifthly, the interior contains these amazing art-deco-mexica designs and luxurious period interior design.

The permanent exhibit consists of 2 floors of murals: my favourite is the Diego Rivera one which features a serious-looking Charles Darwin hanging with his homie the chimpanzee, as well as various communistic, scientific and artistic figures of the pre-WWII 20th century. Giant cells and such.

Now, Magritte. The art of course was wonderful, because it was absurd, smooth-textured, oddly soothing in that trippy wild kind of way. BUT the coolest part, aside from the detailed descriptions of the artist's social life and personal history, was the interactive absurdist-art section. It was mainly designed for kids but we overgrown kids found it quite delightful ourselves.

First it featured a shelving unit for mislabeling things (as Magritte enjoyed doing in his day...). It contained everyday objects with profound or ordinary words pasted on labels in front of them, with a kid-friendly explanation that you don't have to call something what it really is, but that you can also use it as a placeholder for another idea. Cool, right?

The next part had a desk full of magazines, with instructions on the wall to cut out words at random and make absurdist poetry. Past that there was a series of giant plywood cards with pieces of images on them: fish head, horse shoulders, lady chest, business-suit crotch, chicken knees, mermaid tail, etc. which you were supposed to use to create physical non-sequiturs on your own body (for the photographic enjoyment of your friends and strangers!). Then there were mirillas, little diorama-boxes built into the wall with the tiniest peephole to see the tiny universe within, sometimes a little figure, or a rock, or whatever. Then , the ginormous blackbord. whereon you were supposed to draw figures. Finally, there was the wall of birds: in the center of the room was a long table with colorful pieces of paper and pencils, with instructions to write and/or draw about a dream you once had and cut out the piece of paper into the shape of a bird, and stick it to the wall. It was pretty cool, seeing little kids' dreams all over the place. I can never remember my dreams so I cut out a bird shape (okay, a duck, really...) and handed it off to marcos, who commenced to draw cockroaches with eyes on their backs (a super cool image, which later he created realistically in photoshop...). This we stuck to the wall.

Now of course for the life update. I'm still working like a dog 6 days a week, trying to live it up on my half-weekends (boy do I feel robbed!) but it's all good. My colleagues are awesome and so are most of my students; today I had an interesting mixture of students: an 18-year-old Nepalese girl and an army liutenent (who's one of my favorite students because he's just so out of control-- he's freakin' hilarious, even in his half-English). I teach kids pretty much every day for at least an hour, and they use this book called All Aboard, which is a pretty cool series, actually. Most of the adults use the book "Interchange" which is a sort of general-purpose life-English, with lots of stupid dialogues and things. Then there's "Market Leader," a British book about business and shit like that. They give me a lot of those classes because they're really into the jive of "hey look at us we have a Gringa! Aren't we special?" But it's cool; most of those students are pretty advanced and there's sometimes cool readings and interviews to listen to; and I can find cool stuff on the internet to supplement the book's hella square attitude (like the other day when I gave one student a short reading on Grameen Bank and microloans, and to another I gave an article about Gross National Happiness... you know, things like that).

Meanwhile, the fowl are getting fowler, fatter, and more sexually dimorphous. I'm bummed to announce that El Morado is indeed going to be a rooster, which means probably eating him younger than I'd like... and that means deciding how I'm going to do the slaughter and fast (where the hell can I go that nobody will see me?? Yargh). The tomatos are tired of growing and although they're small I think I'm going to go ahead and let them flower, throw on some more of the old NPK and see what happens. Next post I'll go on with my special fish-waste/crushed-corn prepared feed which is going to go on hiatus due to the fact that it makes the apartment smell like ASS even though it saves me a bucket of money. Le sigh.

Ah, last bit, tying chamba together with hacienda: the school is offering a summer day-camp in which there are about ten kids who I spent my friday teaching to garden, making little milk-carton seed beds, learning about plant anatomy, guessing plant smells, generally frolicking with dirt, and daring them to touch worms. All told, a pretty successful event that kept the kids rapt for a good hour and a halfish.

Okay, I send long-winded nostalgic greetings to California and all the many people I love who are still there. I toast the pecan-pulque I am currently guzzling to all y'all. Goodnight!

Viva México, Cabrones

2010-06-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czDDfAh67gs

Mexico 2, France 0. Take that, First World.

All the kids were running around during the first goal (62nd minute), which was an amazing clean goal, and I had invaded another teacher's classroom to watch the magic happen... his student didn't have homework for that very reason (they had made a bet: if Mexico wins the game, I won't give you homework). The guy who scored is called "El Chícharo," or, "The little pea", and he's very popular with my kids. The second was a penalty kick by Cuauhtemoc (GPG: KWAO-te-mock) Blanco, also lovely but a lot less exciting than an in-game goal, don't you think?

Guess what?

2010-06-15T22:05:00.001-07:00

Chicken butt!

The Tianguis in Jardín Balbuena

2010-06-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

Need a bra? Tianguis. Need sewing needles? Tianguis. Need your sugar high? Tianguis. Need groceries? Tianguis. Need breakfast? Tianguis.

Soy totalmente del tianguis.

Mondays and Thursdays are tianguis (GPG: TYAN-geese) days, and I'm not a religious tianguis-goer since most everything can be found cheaper at Mercado Jamaica, but it is a hell of a lot closer, a mere 3 minutes' walk from my bed, compared to the 15-minute schlep to Jamaica. Whatever, the tianguis remains awesome, because you get some sunshine, they sell clothes hella cheap (I mean 15 peso cheap, in the case of my work pants...) and blankets and shoes and other such second-hand essentials, these things being the exception to the everything-cheaper-at-Jamaica rule. Anyway, the tianguis has a distinct aesthetic advantage, being as it is a trippy tunnel of color with natural light and thick crowds of people (and of course, with Darach in mind, I must mention the magnificent sound collage of barkers barking, ladies chit-chatting, parents scolding children, children screaming and running around, dogs panting and yapping, comales (GPG: co-MAHL-es = basically a griddle or skillet) spitting and steaming, and tamale- or agua fresca-sellers wheeling their carts around, ice clattering in its jars.

There are several specific details worth mentioning:

1. Mexican candy is amazing. Like, really amazing. Because they sell it out of little colorful plastic buckets or baskets bulk-style, or maybe because it comes in every color texture and flavor you can imagine (though I will be the first to admit that the Mexican obsession with mixing fruit and chile will never cease to turn my stomach [especially after my barfy disaster with a chile-powder coated tamarind ball in La Reforma, Sinaloa two years ago], though regardless of my opinion it is an institution and not going anywhere). Or maybe because it's so cheap, obviously resulting in my future case of major diabetes (damn sweet tooth...). I just can't shake the feeling of happiness that scoops of rainbow-colored, multi-flavored candy brings to the deepest reaches of my soul.

2. Clothing. From old-lady bras to majorly fashionable shirts, hyphy funky-colored Nikes, hippie woven or leather bracelets, socks with cartoon characters, and huge piles of secondhand clothes with barkers screaming Bara bara bara bara baraaaaaaaa! (Cheap! => short for "barato" => GPG: bah-RAH-toe). So many damn colors, styles, patterns, fabrics, textures, and brand-fakery, you could never lose interest.

3. Pirated everything. Need I say more?

4. Food, glorious food! From basic foodstuffs, sacks of corn, sunflower seeds, flax, little bags of blue and white tortillas, tlacoyos and sopes (GPG: SOH-pays => fat tortillas with a tiny little rim of dough around the edge, for piling up with deliciousness), to arrays of leaf-on radishes, stacks of nopalitos (spines removed, of course), piles of pears, heaps of guanábana all spiky and green, hiding white sweet sticky pulp and big buttonlike seeds inside (often seen with plastic cups of pre-extracted pulp in little pyramids in front of the displays), ruffly bales of squash flowers, and fingery piles of carrots... mmm, oh and let's not forget the pollerías, the chicken stands, where they sell the emblematic yellow chickens of Mexico. Incidentally, the chickens are yellow because in the last stage of their lives they are fed the flowers of cempazuchil, the Mexican marigold, which imparts that sunny hue to their skin.

5. Finally and probably most importantly there's the element of the immediately edible: the food stands. Lots of vitamin T of course: tacos, tlacoyos, tlayudas, tortas and the like. Special food includes cemitas poblanas, which are effectively giant circular sandwiches on amazing sesame-dusted rolls with piles of Oaxacan string cheese, and a lovely little herb called pápalo (GPG: PAH-palo) (Porophyllum ruderale) which tastes, yes, like plant, but with kind of its own zing. Then there's the pre-cut fruit of every color you like, and the carnitas, the barbacoa, the seafood... okay, I'm going to bed before I drown in my own saliva.

Merkado de Trueke and the Friendly Hippies I Found There

2010-05-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Things have been pretty mellow around here, just working my butt off and trying to have some fun in the in-between spaces. In the latter effort I have been taking pictures of the few friends I'm able to see these days. In the following pictures you'll see me with Pamela and Lupita in my kitchen (in two lovely portraits with microwaves and water heaters...in which you should also note that my hair has grown long enough to put in two awkward-tiny french-braids! Though I will be the first to admit my lack of braiding skills, resulting in very weird hair situations sometimes), Alfredo (who recently learned to wrap a turban, much to his delight and much to my amusement at his colour choices... and in this photo is featured with a living example of how Mexico City is the public-make-out capital of the Universe) and Marcos, with whom we discovered a freakish double-banana at the corner store, which required a proper digital portrait.

This is Hacienda Mixiuhca's first trip into the wide world: yesterday some hippie group put up a little one-day-only bartering market in my hood, so I dropped in after school (would have brought some plants and participated but I saw on the Internets that you had to be "registered" to participate-- lame!). Anyway I dropped in, as I said, saw the middle-aged guy that runs the cooperative coffee shop near Jamaica, and met some kids who live in this crazy 6-story co-op in a squathouse in a nice neighborhood, with about thirty people, called Chanti-Ollin, which is Nahuatl (language of the Aztecs and related linguistic groups) for something like "Living Movement". They have composting toilets, gardens, bike-powered technology and other bitchin' projects. Worth checking out if you're a domie (or post-domie, though I say that once a domie, you're always a domie, so there's no such thing as an ex-domie, with very few exceptions). Anyway, the point is that I'm finding some good sources of anti-civilization vibes, sweet urban resistance projects, etc...

And then I talked to some kids who live in the Honorable National House for Students, which is a co-op, and houses kids from other states who come to study in the Federal District and have limited financial resources and they have a big hydroponics project on their roof. I visited them today, so the photos you see here are from that particular place. It was built in 1911 for that same purpose, but it, like any co-op, has gone through some rough moments in its history. Regardless, it seems in good spirits today. It's located in the infamous neighborhood of Tepito, a region of beautiful and dilapidated colonial architecture, pirated (insert any noun here)s, and the most barrio of the barrios of Mexico City, supposedly. I've never been scared in Tepito, but I've never been scared anywhere in the city, to be totally truthful. Regardless, it's supposed to be very dangerous. I must emphasize, however, that Tepito is NOT a "ghetto." Ghetto implies an isolation, a desperation, that comes with having no economy. Tepito is a buzzing economic microcosm of illegal everything, but very successful, despite the endemic poverty and rampant violent crime, robberies and other such delights. Anyway, so you squeeze between some street stands selling backpacks and batteries and keychains and other sundries, and knock on the beautiful and seriously degraded old (and gargantuan) wooden door. One of the locks is missing so you can see right in through a sort of accidental peephole. Figures move around within, in the sunlit entryway. The doorframe is a marvelous carved stone affair with images of various disciplines, which you can see in their photostream, which is pretty cool. There's a small plaque at 3m above the ground, that declares the building, buried though it is in a mess of informal commerce, the historic institution that it is (actually, it has been declared a Historical Monument by the National Institute of Anthropology and History). A bespectacled boy with a ponytail answers the door. I explain I met some of his housemates at the Barter Market in Mixiuhca and that I wanted to see their hydroponics project. I indicated that I had brought some seedlings to make it worth their time. He told me he was already headed that way and invited us in. He took us up to the tippy-top terrace, a wiggly-floored brick affair with a view of countless concrete rooves and the plants that grow in their accumulated muck, water cisterns, and two or three old church bell towers. On the kneewall of the terrace were small paintings of mushrooms and things with wings. A collection of tomato seedlings sat around in pots of dirt on one side, and a plastic-enclosed hydroponic system hid behind them. It's constructed of a series of 4-inch PVC pipe with holes in the top. Elbows on one end of each pipe permit each to be filled with nutrient solution, and a connector on the other with a 1-inch elbow sticking out permits the water to drain when directed downward, into another 4-inch pipe, that drains the excess downward into some kind of catchment to be reused. It's really cool! They germinate their lettuces in petri dishes and let the seedling grow up in little tiny dixie cups in some kind of mix of coconut husk and vermiculite with what I suspect is humus mixed in there. Then they stick them in little round holes in the top of the 4-inch PVC. It's pretty genius. The kid said the hard part was coordinating people. Yeah, tell me about it (can I get a witness, domies?). But he was really nice for showing us around, and even though he didn't seem to want my plants (though another kid took me up on my offer of basil plants, I learned that eggplant and okra are not too popular). Anyway, so that was that. I hope to see more of those folks, because it seems like an interesting place.

I hope to be able to visit Chanti-Ollin next weekend, so you'll probably be seeing shots of that crowd next week.

Hacienda Mixiuhca in Photos, plus, Quejas y Sugerencias

2010-05-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

It's raining hard tonight, and through the window I can see the lightning flash and hear the thunder growl. I spent most of the afternoon arming my third planter box and transplanting things into it. Frankly I have more plants than space, but ain't that the way. Maybe I can find somebody who wants some seedlings...

Whatever. The biggest news in my life is that my mom is awesome and generous and for this reason I got the most badass graduation present of all time: a Nikon L110 digital freakin' camera. That's right fools, be jealous. Okay, but more importantly it means that I can photographically document my existence.

Okay, let's start with the fuzzies. You can see in the first photo the three trememdous birds that seem to be taking over my life: their names are El Verde, El Morado and La Pata. They are roaming around on the living room floor as I allow them to do a couple nights a week, which of course is followed by an intensive floor cleaning. It's worth it though to see them run around so cute in the house. They chase each other; we throw them crumbs and scraps and then they fight over them. Then suddenly they panic and go scrambling across the floor like maniacs. And of course, they never. shut. up. Then I have a picture of the little buggers in their "corral" which is actually just another planter box with a bit of netting over it. I'm going to have to block the holes under the cage so that they can run around loose in the cage without escaping. But for now this is the best I can do. There are some queries and questions I have about their proper alimentation and rearing. I have read that they need "grit," sand or fine gravel to mash fresh food up in their gizzard but I don't know what kind is acceptable. As far as calcium sources, I'm not sure what to do, maybe I can get some spare oyster shells from the marisquerías in the Jamaica market and crush them in a stone molcajete (Mexican mortar and pestle) or something. I don't know how fine the oyster shell has to be, or anything like that. I suppose I'll have to keep researching...

As you can see, the cage is a total wreck right now. We have all of Marcos' house painting supplies up there, plus dirt (which I brought home by taxi in a rainy Sunday adventure with Marcos to the Jamaica market, which I promised will be featured in a near-future post, because it's famous for its flowers, so it's kind of amazing), plus crates, dirty duck newspaper, "watering cans" of various materials... a whole slew of god-knows-what that is making the neighbors complain. Just the other day Marcos and I were on the roof before work and this man comes up from apartment 8 to tell us he thinks we're going to ruin the waterproofing on the roof. I say we've got it under control because everything is going to be elevated on upturned bricks, but he keeps preaching, and Marcos gives me these looks from behind the guy's back of "tell him he can suck it!" but of course I keep diplomatic and run the "don't panic sir, I'm an engineer" line, and he eventually goes away. Regardless, gave me a scare. I worry about being hated for my antics, and have fever dreams about evictions and angry townspeople bearing torches.

Regardless, there is a bright future ahead (I mean, just look at that gorgeous view from the rooftop...). I nearly have the third box built and it's all going together soon. Photos soon.

In the meantime I'll go through the inventory of photosynthetic beings: we have approximately 15 baby little basil (albahaca) seedlings (--> pesto and bruschetta in my future...) and some little cilantros (slow-germinating little buggers!), a bunch of recently-germinated sunflowers (though I think they're going to be part of my guerrilla project down by the Metro entrance once they grow a bit, more on that later), an oregano and a lavender in the apartment, about 20 eggplants, six Armenian cukes in a paint can, a ton of marigold (cempazuchitl), some "rooster crest" (another flower, Celosia argentea var. cristata, according to a not at all intensive or academically acceptable investigation I just did in Google; photo gracias a http://www.flickr.com/photos/29280961@N03/2992976166/, whose flikr album includes the appropriate comment, "joder, que flor más rara!"), about thirty okras just barely pushing their fuzzy cotelydons skyward, four tomatoes, and a bunch of mustards and Asian greens. It's not a bad variety, really. I just soaked and planted some more cilantro, so I'm hoping for a continuous crop... I just gave a cuke to the fruit vendor in front of the Metro entrance, and he told me he'd bring me a guava sapling (WTF am I going to do with a sapling if I don't even have space for herbaceous plants? But, hey, I'm stoked that little practical detail notwithstanding). So I'm kind of thinking about trying to rig up some kind of hydroponic doodiddy, you know, like those hanging bags of strawberries and tomatoes-- holy goodness, I gotta get me some strawberries.

Then, of course, there's my muchachas, my worms, who may have to be moved to avoid the intense heat of a Mexico City roof in summer. I had bought them from a little garden shop run by Gringa expats in the swank Colonia Roma, at 50 pesos for 40ish worms. Anyway, so I passed them of to Alf and we set them up a little crate on his begardened roof and there they lived, and so he passed me some recently and I think they're taking off though they might have suffered a major blow from the heat... I'll have to check on their population tomorrow. Regardless, I definitely have plenty to feed them, so if they survive they'll put me a step closer to a decently improved level of sustainability, or so I hope.

My belly is cheeping

2010-05-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

Mi panza está piando.

There are three birds inside my t-shirt, a little yellow female duckling, and two chicks, green and purple, of unknown sex. They are hiding from the cold world as it rains outside, and as the gross color of city lights on smog replaces the stunning blue of the daytime sky (okay, it's only stunning if you look straight upward, because from any more oblique angle you can see the sewage-coloured film of smog between you and the stratosphere even on the clearest of days...).

I think the duck just pooped in my belly button. I guess it's a shower night.

Today's post is about livestock management. Clearly, integrated livestock management in the city involves two important details:

1. Reading the newspaper a couple times a week, and
2. Eating more greens.

And sharing your t-shirt with infant poultry, of course, but that's just a bonus. The newspaper element is all about substrate: it's the floor of their "corral" (aka wooden fruit crate I shamelessly dug out of the garbage-- more on the dumpster diving schtick later), plus I shred it up on top so that they have something semi-comfy to sleep on/search for food under, which is their favorite pastime, other than escaping and consequently freaking out. The part about greens is good for your health but also about creating lots of stems and funky gnar leaves for the chicks to eat (which is amusing to watch as they have not mastered the technique and spend a lot of time throwing around the tiny bits of green stuff). I feel like it's good practice for the steady diet of scraps they will soon be getting.

In economic terms, these animals are not at all expensive: initial investment of animals + a kilo of feed ran me fifty pesos, a bit over four bucks. I'm still using the same feed. Since the corral was dumpster dived, the infrastructure has cost me zilch (though during the day I put them in one of my planter boxes on the roof so they can have some "fresh" air and a bit more space... regardless of which I will not include the cost of building that planter box in the analysis), but the newspaper investment is not negligible: i pay ten pesos (slightly less than a dollar) per paper (for good quality reporting and quality and quantity of newsprint: the cheapest bullshit newspaper you can get runs at three pesos, but it's about a third to half the total paper of La Jornada, Mexico's best newspaper, the one that all the intellectuals read and it's kind of crappy quality paper, all color-printing too, so NOT absorbent), and I've got to buy one every three days or so. So we're talking about thirty pesos a week and I haven't figured out what to do with the used paper. Right now it's all rolled up in another, smaller fruit crate that both chicks are very capable of escaping from. Ideas would be appreciated; otherwise I'll have to throw it out. Maybe I can find something to mulch. Furthermore I don't know what to do for nesting substrate once they get older. I'm planning to build them a little laying hutch in one of the wooden things, using the wooden tray (1m x .5m, 5 cm deep) as the nest and then constructing some kind of angled roof out of wood and Congling the sucker with Tetrapak milk cartons. Thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

Finally, the topic of the richness of the garbage. This is a middle-class neighborhood, so people throw a lot of shit out. At about ten AM on weekdays, you can hear the chubby ponytailed garbage guy holler, "BASURAAAAAAAAAA" in the parking lot, where he waits around with his little garbage cart. with big objects tied around it, from which blessed apparatus I have scored the following:

1. A coffee table
2. A strange and ugly piece of furniture of which I will eventually post a photo and which I use as a nightstand
3. Three fruit crates (a little one and two big ones)
4. a stool base with no seat
5. a giant waterbottle which is now a pot for salad plants.

The Universe provides. Marcos and I are scheming of ways to get into the dump (which is right across the street) to go on more advanced dives. Further updates as information becomes available.
.
Okay y'all, that's the latest on Hacienda Mixiuhca. Be safe, be courteous.

SB1070

2010-05-05T21:13:00.000-07:00

Get your Gringo Mask! It's another political diatribe! Up and at 'em, folks, we're going to talk about racism!

I suppose this is as big of a news item back in Califas as it is here, the new Arizona law that allows regular police to do what the immigration police are supposed to do (deport visaless workers). Here, obviously, it is very unpopular. Based on the photos of the protest in LA, opposition over there is pretty damn gigantic.

Since remittances (money sent from across the border) are the second most important source of income on the national level (http://www.americaeconomica.com/portada/reportajes/enero07/120107/clmexicovi.htm, right behind petroleum and right ahead of foreign investments and tourism), I can see why people are upset, even outside the basic offense of declaring that by existing in a certain place at a certain time, suddenly people are criminals. I mean, economically, it's essential that Mexico send people north of the border: people here have referred to this mechanism as an "escape valve" that keeps the lower classes from starting a second revolution. This is why the Mexican government is falling all over itself to condemn the law.

The people I talk to day in day out, however, have more basic human reasons to denounce the law. It appears to give "probable cause" to any pig on the street to stop, search and demand papers of any brown person they may happen across (like the Gestapo in Nazi movies, "Papiere, papiere!!"), which is kind of giving the green light to racial profiling, and furthermore potentially humiliating to a lot of innocent people (though I'll stick my neck out and suggest that illegal immigrants are not in fact "guilty" of anything other than a totally gnarly commute).

My co-worker Alejandro started to lecture me about how crossing borders is a very important legal issue, and how the gringos have the right to exclude people, because, you know, how would you feel if some random came into your backyard... I didn't bother explaining how my backyard was basically a hangout for randoms, weirdos, homeless folks and can collectors, drunks, addicts, dirt hippies, children, and abandoned roosters. I went straight to the point: you're a big fat malinchista! (Let it be known that I didn't make this comment in mala onda and that he is neither big nor fat, though malinchista maybe a little...). But... I had to bring up that the palefaces are indeed tecnically illegal immigrants themselves, and of course to support my point I used this cartoon. It's valid to support your arguments with cartoons, right?

Anyway, so I read recently that Sonorenses (folks from Sonora, Mexico, the state just south of AZ) are boycotting (haciendo boicot) Arizona stores, which has actually made a significant impact on the borderland's economic landscape, according to the Mexican newspaper El Universal. A Mexican-American baseball player on the SD Padres has refused to play a game or tournament or something in Arizona... it's a pretty big deal.

So... defend human rights: snub Arizona.

Hacienda Mixiuhca: Cultivo y Cría Clandestina

2010-04-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, so my 6 square meter farm is still kind of theoretical at the moment, but it's definitely in the works. So I live in one of those soviet-style groundscraper complexes, but what we've got aside from a really lovely looking and smelling magenta rose in the parking lot is a cage on the roof for drying clothes. This is the space I have to work with; it is my hacienda.

Hacienda Mixiuhca is rather unimpressive at the moment, with four tomato seedlings (Cherokee Purples! "imported" from la Gabacha (aka Gringolandia, aka El Otro Lado...etc), fancypants lettuces, Asian species of mustardy thing s (tatsoi, mizuna, bok choy, etc), ten or so eggplants, and marigolds. All of this growing in gutted, white-painted waterbottles lying on their sides. The infrastructure consists of 5 wooden trays (1m x .5m) that have been there since Marcos moved in 8 months ago. The plan is to build them up into containers; I'm thinking maybe 18 inches deep (though I'd only fill them to 15 inches-- that should be deep enough for tomatoes, right?). They're pole tomatoes, so I'm hoping to take advantage of the cage situation. The Armenian cukes I plan to swipe from Alfredo (whose roof garden will be the subject of a later post, once I have a digital camera, (which shall be a gradumation present extraordinaire!) can climb up strings I plan to tie to the top of the cage (because I'm going to have to put them on the walled-in side of the cage). The green stuff will have to go in the shadier part of the cage. But since the planters are pretty big, I think it should all go swimmingly. The issue here is cost, of course: the construction of these planters is going to run me from 140 to 280 pesos a piece. (A short one for lettuce, flowers and mustard)... That means about 90 bucks total. Then there's the issue of filling them with soil. At Home Depot (yes, capitalist bullshit palace, but the only nearby resource for such things) a gunnysack of soil runs about 13 bucks (145 pesos). In Tlanepantla, close to Alfredo's house (and about an hour and a half from here without traffic: bus to metro line 2 or 7, transferring to line 9) costs about 2 and a half bucks (30 pesos) piece. Slightly coarser texture, and farther away. I can only carry about one sack at a time, and it's tiring as hell, because they're really heavy. The bus costs about 10 pesos, the metro 3. So that brings the total per-sack cost of soil to 56 pesos, plus a lot of trouble. But considering that's less than half of the cost buying from HD (CBP), and I'll need about two sacks per planterbox, that will make a big difference. So let's see, say I build 4 boxes, one short, three tall: 920ish pesos plus (56 x 8) = 1,368, or about a hundred and ten ish bucks. That's a bit less than what I make per week. But at Hacienda Mixiuhca, we know that these things can be overcome.

Okay, in these harsh times, waste is unacceptable, especially on fabulous haciendas like mine. I have also swiped some worms from the worm crate we rigged up at Alf's place as well. They are currently writhing around in a yogurt tub in my bedroom with some seriously befungused papaya skin. I have a collection of frozen worm food in my fridge for when their population becomes ready for it. I'm trying to decide whether it's better to get a sealable plastic bin from the Home Depot nearby (a semi expensive and cop-outty option) or try to use the wooden crate I picked up off the street, which would have to live on the roof instead of in the kitchen for smellular reasons, is less easily sealed, more complicated, but cheaper and with more street cred. Any thoughts, opinions, designs and other inputs would be appreciated.

And what is an hacienda without livestock? I broke the news of my fowl conspirations to Marcos about a week ago when his Yucatecan buddy came to visit. We were sitting around drinking wine and suddenly I go: "Hey Marcos, what are your feelings about ducks?" And of course he gave me his drunken "what" face and I said, "You know, as animals. What do you think of them?" And of course his response is, "I don't know, I guess they're okay. Why?" So I had to tell him that I was going to buy a couple of ducklings, and asked if it would bother him if I kept them in the clothes cage. "Uh... sure. Why?" "Marcos," I told him in all seriousness, "The best pets are comestible pets." And he considered this for a moment, probably wondering what the nicest way to call me a sick bastard might be, before saying, "That sounds okay. Do you know how to cook duck?" And, okay, the answer is not really, but I mean, this is the age of the Internet. How hard could it be? Furthermore, I have a book of fowl-and-lagomorph rearing instructions from the British Ministry of Let's Not Starve written during the second world war, which is awesome because it's how to grow aminals on the most limited resources possible.

So the plan is to go the market La Merced on Sunday or Monday, pick up some little fuzzies and see what happens.

Viva La Hacienda Mixiuhca!

Hurbanistorias

2010-04-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

Mi Rancho

Well. Here I am, center of the Universe, Mexico City, Mexico. Land of deaf-dumb subway singers, endless environmental disasters, lost lonely people from anywhere else, hundreds of years of history, swank hipster hangouts, yuppie rent-a-bike, one of the richest men in the world, starving drunks, singsong accents, and uncountable other oddities. It's the land of constant stimulus.

I live in a neighborhood called Jardín Balbuena, actually a very pleasant place to exist in the bourough ("delegación") Venustiano Carranza (see map), a block away from the metro station Mixiuhca, across the four-lane Eje 3 Sur from Jardín Balbuena, a big park where they put a big tianguis every Monday and Thursday, where you can find anything from forks to blankets and curtains, 15 peso pants, used digital cameras (and good ones!) to produce, tlacoyos and raw chicken (whole or in pieces!). I'm also within walking distance from the Olympic Velodrome they put up in '68. It's a funny neighborhood because though rent's relatively cheap, we're just a couple blocks from some really nice houses. Must be the screaming of landing airplanes...

My roommates are graphic designers. I actually only know one (the one with his name on the lease), because the other one's been in Guadalajara for the last few weeks apparently. I don't even know that one's name. Well anyway, the one I do know is called Marcos, a very San Francisco boy with rectangular glasses and a sort of reserved demeanour (till you get half a bottle of wine in him anyway). He keeps the place very clean and hangs out with me when I get back from work all grizzled and tired. Smiles a lot.

La Chamba

Oh yes, work. The thing that permits me to stay here... I found a job doing the most obvious thing possible: teaching Ingrish. I'm teaching at a private company in the neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec (=> Cha-pool-teh-PEC), which is kind of like Pacific Heights on a Dubai acid trip, all colonial and modern mansions with jararandas in bloom, shiny cars, and glass-and-steel high rises hovering around. Writhing masses of three-piece suits. But the place I'm working at is by and large okay; my co-workers are funny and interesting, the pay is all right, and I feel like I'm doing something useful.

The Metro is my friend. I clock into work just before 1pm every day except Saturday (when I start at 9am) and Sunday (which is obviously God's day of rest so I don't go to work), so I have to go running out of the house around 12:45. Fall down the stairs, two stories down to the door of my building, sprint across the parking lot/playground (go figure) open the front gate and hundred-yard-dash to the Metro stairs, past the fruit stand with the middle-aged guy who greets me every time ("buenas tardes güera!"), the torta stands, and down into the belly of the Metro, that swallows me up as I slip my ticket into the slim silent mouth of the turnstile, disappear into the gum-on-the-ceiling tunnel that leads me to the other platform, the Tacubaya direction platform, where an orange train will sweep me away to the next stage of my trip. Every morning an adventure, the same vendor selling Danzón CDs (I already bought one, but still I always want to dance when he busts out his Benny Moré and Pérez Prado...). Seven stations later I'm in Tacubaya, scuttling around the twists and turns, following the orange arrows to transfer to Line 7 toward El Rosario. Two stations later there I am in Auditorio, probably the deepest station in the damn Metro system, and I'm bounding up shit-tons of stairs, embarrassingly tired as I reach the top, panting like a dog in the summer, and crawl out into the world and onto my Palmas bus, which ten minutes later has me spilling out onto the sidewalk next to the Iglesia Covadonga and the taquero who greets me every day as he unloads his delicious fare from his truck. "No vas a comer tacos hoy, güera?" "No señor, hoy no puedo, voy con prisa, pero mañana seguro." Crossing Palmas is the last dangerous task of the afternoon (provided I have no kids classes scheduled for the day...) and then I wave through the glass door and Rogelio lets me in with the buzzer-button, usually greeting me with some sassy comment or other.

All images come from the Internets. The station symbols are from the Metro website: http://www.metro.df.gob.mx/ and the map is from Wikipedia (the brains of society...)

More Adventures on the Peninsula and Under the Gulf

2010-02-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

The world is clouding over again; 4 days of gorgeous sun and running around, but all things must pass, as a great English coleopteran once said.

Back to business...

Part 3 Cont'd: QUINTANA ROO

Moving along from Pet-cakab, we went to see a parcel of pitahaya, commonly known in Gringolandia as ''dragonfruit''. It's a cactus, but in vine format, and they grow it on giant posts. The parcel was owned by a little old lady, and the soil was red.

Part 4: YUCATÁN

A kid from Mérida once told me that the best hammocks are Yucatecan hammocks, and that was the first thought on my mind rolling into Pisté, Yucatan in the afternoon. After food. Because food is always first... so a few of us went out to find food. There are a couple of typical dishes we tried, one being cochinita pibil which is like pulled pork in a delicious sauce, and sopa de lima, which uses a fruit similar to the meyer lemon for flavor in a tomatoey brothy soup with meat and vegetables. After food came the hammock search. Well, I'll go ahead and tell you that there's not a whole lot in Pisté, just motels and tourist shops, and in one of them I found a beautiful cotton hammock and sat around chatting with the little old shopowner, who lowered the price a bit for me (or that was his claim), but it seemed reasonalble at about 25 bucks so I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Later, the lot of us went to Chichen-Itza for the Espectáculo de Luz y Sonido, which I very much do not reccomend, because though it's cool to see pyramids at night, they don't let you wander around, they just sit you in one spot and talk at you with colorful lights.

The following day we went to see a henequen (sisal, as it's often called) hacienda called Hacienda Sotuta. We did the whole tour, which included a walk around the giant beautiful Spanish-tile laden, wooden-furnished house, and a ride on the little donkey-pulled carts they used in the old days to move the henequen around. Henequen is funny, it's an agave that they use for fiber, so after cutting off the oldest leaves, they bundle them, move them, unbundle them, smash them, brush out the fibre and dry it, then they make twine and rope and such things out of it. It's incredibly strong material.

This photo of a little old man I took outside the

hacienda, where he was selling his peeled oranges: I'm including it in the blog because he has this cool little springloaded orange lathe which is what he uses to peel them! Fun machines!

Part 5: TABASCO

Ah, Tabasco, land of mosquitos and chocolate. We arrived in Comalcalco in the late afternoon, at the house of a friend of the professors. We were to camp on his porch and in his backyard in his outskirtsy and pleasant town. This friend studied with them at the University in the '70s, but two years ago he got multiple sclerosis and now he's paralyzed from the neck down, in a wheelchair, barely able to speak. But he chatted with us students, and even gave us a little motivational speech on our last night at his house. It was pretty incredible.

We spent three days in the chocolate orchards, looking at problems with diseases, learning about exports, and of course, the process of making chocolate, which is one of the most amazing-smelling things I have smelt in my life.
The cacao tree gets to be about 5m tall maximum (COMMENT: THE CACAO PHOTOS ARE

NOT MINE, I STOLE THEM FROM THE VAST BELLY OF THE INTERNETS), though often it's pruned shorter. There are various varieties, but supposedly the most precious and cocoa-

butter-rich is the creole cacao. It's native to Mexico, and traditionally made into drinks, such as polvillo, a mix of ground cacao, cinnamon and toasted corn. It's delicious... Tabasco is the most important state in cacao production, but Oaxaca appears to be more important inasmuch as the production of chocolate (processed cacao). Let's see, it grows in giant pods, or 'cobs' on the

trunk of the tree, and these pods house about 20-ish seeds per, which are surrounded by a fleshy white pulp that tastes a bit like

a litchi. These seeds are dried in the sun, or fermented,

these processes producing different flavors. Normally the fermented grains are mixed with the dried grains to get a nice mix of smooth and 'robust' flavors. I ought

to mention that it's a shade plant, so they plant a variety of nurse trees, usually banana when the cacao are saplings, later establishing leguminous trees and mangoes, chico sapote (chicle, or gum tree) or other species to not only shade the cacao but also provide other sources of income.

Finally, I'm going to make mention of a tree worth mentioning, the noble ceiba, of which there are several examples in the UCD Botanical Conservatory (though they pale in comparison to the real deal in its rainforest wonderland...). This is a ceiba portrait I took in Palenque.

The Viajezote: a glorious 3-week disappearance from civilization

2010-02-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

Today the rainwater is running down the stairs of the lonely basketball courts across from my house. It winds between the cobblestones in the street and out of the poorly-gauged drainpipes of the rooves, up through the soles of my shoes (all of which, I have discovered, have secret capillary entrances designed for discomfort on rainy days), and down through my hair onto my face, neck and glasses. And what do we do on days like this? We drink! No, wait... we blog.

Bueno, so were did we leave things? Oh goodness, we abandoned then so long ago...

Introduction: The Viajezote

5pm, 2 January 2010: Arrive at school with two overstuffed backpacks. Meet up with Alfredo and Jacobo, and we basically have the run of the vacation-swept, abandoned school. But as the weather totally sucks we mostly sit inside a classroom we've taken over and eat and shoot the shit. 11 pm the same day means the arrival of the buses that will take us all away to various parts of the Republic: I am off, in the absence of my closest friends, to the tropics: Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. We load up.

A full night of fitful rest later, I awaken to a Oaxaca sunrise, a good stretching session in the humid cold of the roadside, and another long haul out to Tapachula, Chiapas.

Part One: CHIAPAS

We arrived at about 6pm, everyone groggily unloading their stuff from the 17-hour torture chamber into the Tapachula Youth Center gym, where we were to spend the following three nights. Then we all hungrily set upon the town, to wolf down not-very-good food (why the food in Tapachula is so bad I will never know, but everyone agreed that Tapachula sucks, foodwise). The next day we set to work: day 1 was a visit to a mango and rambutan farm (the photo of a rambutan, which is like a furry lichi, is not mine, it is from the vast belly of the INTERNET). The kid who showed us around the farm (the farmer's son, actually), was right out of the '70s for his haircut, moustache and cowboy shirt, loaded us all into his pickup truck and took us rollercoastering around the semi-rainforested landscape to get to the orchard (because the bus obviously wouldn't stand such a rough trip). So we went crawling around in his orchard a bit. The soil in that orchard was SO gorgeous... they don't use machinery and they don't sweep the orchard floor, just cut down the weeds with machetes, so the soil was this black, deliciously friable substance with hordes of earthworms writhing within... and since it was the off-season the weeds were growing these beautiful pink flowers (it's some kind of Apocynaceous plant that you see all the time in gardens and nurseries, but in this orchard it's a weed). Furthermore, he fed us the famous and yet little-known jackfruit, a 10-pound mofo that looks disturbingly like a durian. It tastes like a mix between cantaloupe and banana, and has a wet, slimy, resistant texture that makes it kind of an adventure to eat. Furthermore, the inside of the rind produces latex, so you wind up helplessly sticky after you've eaten a piece... it's sort of exhausting.

Anyway, that night we stopped at the Guatemalan border, for the mere thrill of setting foot on foreign soil: frankly, I think northern Guatemala looks a lot like southern Chiapas, but whatever, it was novel to change pesos for quetzales and look out over the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala, see people (illegally??) crossing that river with giant boxes on their backs. I think the border patrol here is a little more relaxed than what I'm used to...

Next day to the papaya factory, and I say it like that because not only is it one of these high-tech operations with its own packing plant and the whole enchilada, but also because of its tendency (welcome to capitalism, Cat...) to convert people into machines. Pay 'em cheap and work 'em to death, then go to Guatemala and get some more. And congratulate yourself for it. The people picking papaya went shoeless in the fields, and the women who washed the papaya in dilute bleach work eight-hour shifts with their hands in the bleach bath. I asked the engineer who gave us the Grand Tour if they switch jobs during the day or at least during the week, and he said, 'Oh, no! These workers are highly specialized. ' Can you imagine working half-drenched in bleach eight hours a day? Imagine your hands, you eyes, your nose, your neurons... The engineer that toured us around was an incorrigible twat with no respect for the earth or human life, as it turns out. But he did give us boatloads of free papaya, so though I don't forgive him, I do have fond olfactory memories of the occasion.

I should mention how unbearably humid Tapachula is. It's one of the low-elevation zones of Chiapas and for that reason totally unpleasant if you're from California.

From there we went to Comitán, where we stayed at a coffee farm. There we learned nothing about management, because the guy in charge was basically an accountant who had bought the farm and had no idea what he was doing, but he was trying to establish an agrotourism kind of thing. There were ziplines and little palm-roof palapas for guests to hang their hammocks. There was also a gorgeous river in which we all did our bathing at night (which is to say we swam around in the dark, floating on our backs and staring at the stars and mars and the moon through the canopy of trees, listening to the chorus of birds and bats and bugs). Here are some observations: 75-kilo sacks (that's how much I weigh) of fresh-picked coffee: both adults and children (all of them Guatemalan imports because they put up with less pay and lots of abuse) carry them out of the hilly fields on their backs, strapped to their forheads. Then they pour them out to dry on the concrete patio... but bueno, the kids have to work with their parents, because what are they going to do, leave their kids alone in the forest while they go pick their coffee all day? They reach their quota faster if they've got a little help anyhow...

Then we moved right along to the heart of the matter: the rainforest. Sweeping due north from Tapachula we passed through Ocosingo (Zapatista territory) and up into Palenque, home of the famous Classical city. The coolest part about Palenque if you've already seen the ruins, is that when you're hiking up the giant hill to get to the archeological site, there are all of these tiny, unmarked paths just quietly sneaking away from the main road and if you're subtle about it, you, too, can sneak off with them, and find yourself entangled with aerial roots, the screaming of the sarahuates (howler monkeys), and the creeks that carry fossilized snailshells in their rocky beds.

The next day we went to Metzabok, and saw another rainforest that's not to hot (though equally as rainy), and a nice lady Doña Cristina, took us around... I think I'm going to have to devote another post to this topic, so remind me to do so.

Part Two: CAMPECHE

Racing across the Tabascan bottleneck to Campeche, we went to Calak-mul, another Classical ghost town, and the adjascent Biosphere Reserve, the latter being the coolest part, because we got to learn about rainforest management. The trees are thick and house more howler monkeys and spider monkeys, toucans, guacamayas (macaws), parrots, and leaf-cutter ants. It's like, epiphyte-central, too. If you perch on top of a pyramid, the other pyramids stick out of the foliage like rectilinear anachronisms. It's not one of the most-visited sites so it's really quite nice to go running around there.

Part Three: QUINTANA ROO

Arriving by night to Bakalar, Quintana Roo, all we knew was that there was a laguna. It wasn't really visible in the total darkness, but we went swimming anyhow, the brave few who support cold water on a cold night. I mean, I couldn't resist, personally, because I was sweaty from rainforest-running the previous day, and that clean natural bodies of water require that I immerse myself in them, period. So I jumped into the starry water and floated on my back again, wandering around the shallows and appreciating the uninterrupted sky.

The following day we saw what a marvel we had been soaking in the night before: the 7-color lagoon of Bakalar, its white sand full of snail shells, its sparkling surface. So we jumped in again, 7 am, even colder than the night before, but who cares-- when you have a lagoon to yourself, you just have to.

So from there we split into two groups, and we went to invade two different ejidos in the region, and I went to Pet-Cakab, where we met Doña Romuela, a little old lady who is the community's traditional herbalist. She devoted the day to showing us around the roadsides, introducing us to the local vegetation and how it can be used in medicine and a little witchcraft. Later, she took us to her house to show us how it works on the treatment floor (that's to say on her bed in her house): she took Rafa, who had injured his leg playing soccer some time before and had a hard time on the hike, and informed us that she was going to heal him.

'Take off your pants, kid.'

So there's Rafa in his underwear, and she's rubbing this weird ointment on his knee and explaining to us how tendons work, massaging his calf and shin and ankle with her tiny hands, as we all sit and stare, barely fitting in her tiny wooden house.

It fits to mention here that the south of Mexico is the only part in which I have seen wooden houses. Wood is an extremely uncommon building material in Mexico, but in the tropical countryside it's the only building material you see. The houses are usually painted candy colours and don't bother with glass windows (some don't have windows at all).

I should also mention that that night began the town's fair, which consisted of a carousel, some arcade machines, a spanish-bingo game and some food stands. But it lit up the tiny square and brought the very small population out. We were staying in the ejidal house, right in front of the square, so it was pretty fun to jump outside and see what was up.

Furthermore, there is extensive exploitation of the forest for the hardwoods they have there, especially caoba. The ejido has a sawmill, and the president of the ejido took us around. It's really incredible how much wood they waste. What's more incredible is the shaved patches of forest where they go cut the trees... But what are they going to do? It's the only source of income they've got.

I'm going to stop here and keep going next week ish with more Quintana Roo, plus Yucatán, another round in Campeche, and the grand finale in Tabasco...

El Viajezote: A Telegraph From The Peninsula

2010-01-13T20:31:00.000-08:00

Lost in the Southeast of Mexico STOP Never coming home this place is too awesome STOP I mean you should see the sky here STOP I have been in the most nowhere town in the world and to pyramid central and in fields of mangos and cactus fruit and dug up soil and evaluated it like a real live scientist STOP There will be uploading of a shit ton of photos in a couple of weeks STOP I miss you all and reccomend that we all go live in Yucatán together and sleep in hammocks and do whatever because let's face it it would be awesome STOP

End Message

Ode to Foodstuffs!

2009-11-04T07:54:00.000-08:00

I wrote this on: Saturday, 29 August. Why I never posted it I just don't know.

Today I went to the market in Cuauti, because this weekend I am not going to DF, I'm staying in the Estado. This is a photo of a chile relleno I helped Gloria make at home. It is swimming in sauce.

Have I written about the markets yet?

Every neighborhood or town has its own giant indoor market with a million stands inside selling fruit and veggies, or else giant sacks of sugar, flour, nuts, piloncillo, dried beans or what have you. Some stands sell candy (including candied fruit or candied squash or sweet potatoes), others sell spices and sauces, clothes, piñatas, or songbirds, and still others sell meat or seafood or weird witch-doctor remedies (I'll try to bring something good back for Bryan). And all the vendors are barking at you:
“Que vas a llevar, güera?”
“Hay chayote, hay uva, hay mango, hay chile... que le damos, señorita?”
“Pásale amiga! Quieres probar el quesillo? Manchego? Queso panela?”

I want to eat everything.

I find it way harder to decide what I want in this situation than at home. And most of the food's pretty cheap. The only really expensive things are mushrooms and eggplant. Nobody eats eggplant in this country. Anyway, the other thing there is in these spots is lots of places to eat, little tamale-and-atole stands or comida corrida stands.

Let's break this down:

In Mexico we eat a lot of corn. A ton of corn. Tamales, in case you are not familiar, are these delightful breakfast-foods that you should go to the Mission one morning and try. They consist of cornbread, effectively, but steamed, with a filling like rajas (chopped chile in tomato sauce), verde (tomatillo salsa), mole (which is the best sauce ever and has like a million varieties each with a million ingredients) or dulce, which is just where they sweeten the cornbread and dye it pink. They come wrapped in corn leaves, because that's how they hold their shape when they steam them, in these little corn-leaf envelopes. Atole they tend to serve either out of one of those old-school steel milk tanks or out of a giant cylindrical orange Gatorade cooler. Either way it's this delicious drink made from water, milk and corn starch (which dissolves better than you'd think), usually flavored with chocolate, fruit, or rice (with bits of rice in it, it tastes like rice-pudding). If you want to feel full in the morning you have a tamale and an atole and you're good to go. You don't even want to think about eating after that.

Alas, I think about eating pretty much constantly.

Comida corrida is my new way of life. You show up, and it's like a choose your own adventure, or a dichotomous key: Consommé or cream of squash soup? Rice or spaghetti? Chicken in mole or enchiladas in salsa verde? Pineapple or papaya? And your three course meal PLUS fruit PLUS agua fresca PLUS tortillas costs you 25-50 pesos (<5 bucks in any case) depending on where you are. It's genius. And they're usually clean, pleasant little places. I love it. It's a really good way to avoid eating tacos all the time. And as much as I love tacos, they're greasy little buggers. I will hereby give the rundown on a few foods you may not be familiar with Stateside:

HUITLACOCHE
This is actually a pathogen of corn: it's a fungus that infects the kernels but it's quite tasty and black... It's really good in quesadillas.

ESQUITES y ELOTES
There are little corn on the cob / corn off the cob stands everywhere. They put mayo (which normally I don't like but I can make a big exception for esquites and elotes) chile powder, lime and this odd powdery (a la parmesan) cheese on 'em and it's so damn tasty. You can ask for them roasted or boiled, too.

FLOR DE CALABAZA
Squash blossoms. My mom puts them in risotto sometimes. They're great in quesadillas. If you don't kknow what a squash blossom looks like you need to get your booty outside more often.

CHAYOTE

This is a kind of squash which in the US is sold in individual little plastic bags. It's tasty and the texture is way better than normal squash.

GUANÁBANA and CHIRIMOYA

Eating these is like eating custard. Try to find it somewhere. It's also a delicious flavor for popsicles. I bet they have guanábana popsicles in the Mission. There's a lovely Son Jarocho song about a guanábana.

MAMEY

This is the king of fruits as far as I'm concerned: it reminds me of an avocado in the sense that it has a tough skin and a sort of creamy texture. The skin is brown and leathery, and the meat it bright orange and super sweet and delicious. It makes an EXCELLENT ice cream or smoothie flavor. This I am certain does not exist in our country. I learned that this is without exception NOT a plantation crop; all mamey growers are small-scale, backyard type growers. I got to encounter a mamey tree when I was in Chiapas last year. It was pretty awesome: it's a huge tree and the fruit drops to the ground and if it splits when it lands they leave it there and these giant green butterflies, like the size of your hand, come and slurp up the orange innards... it was so pretty. I have never seen this fruit in the States. Everything else on this list I'm sure exists somewhere but I have seen no evidence that there is or has ever been a mamey in the US. I am going to start a mamey plantation in Florida or Socal or somewhere like that and get super rich. Just you wait and see.

LICUADOS

Smoothies. It's just that here they throw fruit, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon, along with oats or granola or nuts if you like in a blender and you get about a liter of it (a quart, if you're one of the older folks reading this...) for less than 2 bucks.

TEJOCOTE
It's like a little yellow apple, but with more flavor than a yellow apple, and an orangier color. It's starchy like an apple and sweet. It's the principal ingredient of the drink they call “ponche,” which is kind of an hot apple-cider kind of drink they make around Christmas.

Acting up and Getting out

2009-10-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

Luz y Fuerza
“Fin de Cuentos, es Gringo, y Piensa Como Gringo...”
La Marcha y Tlatelolco
Indiana Jonesing It

There's a big stink getting made right now over the government shutdown of the power company Luz y Fuerza. Evidently they're trying to implement a scheme wherein some Spanish company is going to own or run the power supply. I am not totally sure of all the details... remind me to look this up. There's a lot of conflict about it, because apparently it was poorly run, but if there's one thing they hate in Mexico, it's Spain owning their shit. And Mexico produces a ton of electricity, in large part from hydroelectric dams. I get the impression that most people here are very nationalistic and would rather put up with poor electrical service than give it over to Spanish people. Which isn't to say that these are the only two options. Clearly they could just change the way they manage the company but this is what I was mentioning in my brief spiel about Calderón, that rata de dos patas who is the president right now, the neoliberal honky-loving traitor. Or that's how he's generally described here. In any case, cool logo, huh? http://www.sme.org.mx/

Speaking of which, they say Obama won the Nobel Prize. Shit, if all it takes to win the Nobel Prize is to NOT be Bush, I ought to get one too. A man in the combi this morning summed it up very gracefully as he talked loudly on his damn cell phone: “What gives?? They've got their troops in Afghanistan, in Iraq and god knows where else. What it comes down to is no matter what color he is, he's still a gringo and he thinks like a gringo. This is total bullshit.”

Two weeks ago, on 2 October, my buddy Peyote (that's his nickname anyway-- he's one of the kids with the funny hairdos et al) invited me to a protest, and I said, well, I'll have to check in with my prof, but she's an activist type so I think she'll be cool with me missing class for such an event. And I'll be damned if I didn't go to her office to turn in my homework and receive the response, “Oh, the 2 de Octubre March? You can't miss that. It's super important...” and she recounted the whole history of it and the whole, when I was in school, schpiel... It was sweet. So my buddy ran around school looking for the banners and such: “FES CUAUTITLÁN / INGENIERÍA AGRÍCOLA RESISTE!” If I find a place to scan negs, I'll post the photos. For the time being I have this image I snatched off another blog. I think it's an appropriate poster because it includes a photo from '68.

Brief tragic interlude: the stripiness of the photos has become an illegible blur. I'm so sorry I messed up your camera mom. When I come home I'll get it repaired. Though maybe I can get it fixed for cheaper here-- actually this is one of the things I've noticed, is that since people ACTUALLY repair things instead of chucking them and buying a new one, repairing stuff is fairly cheap. Maybe I'll bring your old SLR down here for fixin' since mister Hungarian fella doesn't want to do it. Long story short + back on topic → I'm taking film photos these days.

So about 15 of us went dashing out of school two hours later than expected, about 6 from Agrícola and the rest from Veterinaria. We jumped a crowded bus to Metro Politécnico and waited about half an hour for the right micro to pass by , and went tromping along about a half hour on foot to catch up to the march. We squeezed in between a high school (“prepa”) contingent and another FES campus, Aragón, and commenced to march. The scene was nuts: more people than you can shake a stick at, to say the least. I think you'd need a few hundred thousand sticks if you wanted to efficiently shake sticks at all of them, though I'm not really sure why we want to shake sticks at people, can anyone explain that phrase to me? Neima? You were always good with that. Who am I kidding, Neima's not reading my blog. Anyway, There were so many so many SO MANY cops. Lines, formations, streams, rivers of cops in full riot gear along the streets we marched through. I lot of citizen-onlookers too, but my god are cops menacing. Supposedly the reason is that there's always vandalism, and I definitely saw a bunch of vandalism, but then again, there's always vandalism... I would say the main reason was intimidation. After being tear-gassed for no particular reason, I now have an opinion on the matter. In any case the student-cop relationship was the theme of the day, and I believe it's the theme of the day every October 2. The crowd's chanting was revealing: “Hay que 'studiar, hay que 'studiar, él que no estudia policía va'llegar...” (“Kid study up, study up—if you don't stay in school you might wind up a cop...”). There was also the UNAM school cheer, the famous GOYA: “Goya, goya, cachun cachun rra rra, cachun cachun rra rra-- Goya, Universidad!” which unofficially ends with the cheer, “Pública, gratuita y para todos!!” (Public, free, and for everyone!) … and in the march even this was modified to, “Pública, gratuita y sin porros/puercos!” (Public, and free of cops/pigs!”). So that sets the stage for me to explain the past a bit. The block print is a pretty famous image now. The artist is Adolfo Mexiac.

Disclaimer: I am going to make it clear that I myself am not involved with any politics. My purpose in going to the march was to see what it was like, take some pictures and nosh on some food for thought.

Now on to my historical diatribe: if you want a more accurate version you should read “The Night of Tlatelolco” by Elena Poniatowska. If you want the Cat version, read on...

So in the '60s there was actually stuff going on outside of Berkeley, believe it or not. In fact, at the National University (UNAM) and The Polytechnic Institute (“Poli”) were just full to the brim with activists. Now in '68, the Olympics were a-coming to Mexico city and the government was busy trying to pretty up the face of the country and sweep all its “social problems” (read also: poor people and pissed off students) under the rug. Well, the pissed off students wound up in a conflict with police on campus (though there is a law against police entering the campus) and I believe they ended up slaughtering a number of students in that scuffle, but afterwards when the students organized an enormous protest in a historically important plaza called Tlatelolco, or the Plaza of the Three Cultures (the three cultures being Aztec, Spanish and Mexico) represented by the presence of an unearthed Aztec city, the Catholic cathedral built with the stones from its ruins, and the ugly '50s style apartment buildings all around. Okay, so that's the spot. But get a few tens of thousands of students piled in there in a time of political tension and what results is a massacre. Probably a couple hundred students were assassinated or “disappeared” (which is the term in many Latin American countries for “kidnapped by the government, tortured and killed without a trace”), though the official government numbers are around 40. There were snipers on the apartment roofs, and assaults all around the plaza. Anyway, so every year, that's what the Marcha is all about. October 2, 1968. And still the Olympic Games went on. It's worth mentioning that the Olympics that year saw a political message from the US players-- there were two runners, gold and bronze medalists, who had the guts to rep the black panthers on the stage thingy that they put the winners on. I think that's pretty inspiring. I'll have to look more into their story and what happened to them thereafter because of course I forgot.

So that's your Mexican history lesson for the day. Let's get back to the present for a minute...

Pamela's boyfriend is an Indiana Jones fan, and I think that's how we wound up climbing a random mountain this weekend. I met up with Pame at the church in Cuautitlán and from there we found a micro headed for Tepotzotlán. A bumpy half-hour later we were at the church in Tepo, and we went wandering a spell before winding up in the museum. The story goes that the church was a seminary school, and the place is huuuuuge. It's hard to navigate, with lots of stairs and gardens and hallways and creepy paintings of child angels. The main sanctuary is very impressive though, all sculpted walls drowned in gold-leaf, right up to the 20-meter-high cupula-ed ceilings. Anyway, we were wandering around and we ran into Pame's boyfriend who was looking for us. He's a good-looking guy with a goatee and slicked-back hair and a feather tied to the hair at the base of his head. Anyway we go up to the lookout deck of the ex-convent and we're looking at the view when Humberto points off in the distance. “Hey guys, what do you think of climbing that mountain?” Yeah, sure, why not. How do we get there? “Well, I think we just walk that way.” So we took off, stopping for provisions (a cup of coffee, a snickers bar and two liters of water) and the town dwindled around us and disappeared into the country, and as we climbed the foot of the mountain and the high-tension power-lines loomed above the wildflowers, we took a look around with great gusto and pushed ahead into the spiny frontier: dogs with spiny teeth, cactus with spiny spines, huizache with spiny thorns... the red tunas are ripening on the wild nopales, and I started to miss Davis, thinking of the times I went tuna-robbing in the arbo with Tom, with Jordan, with Chris Salam. Looking back at the shrinking town of Tepotzotlán I felt a little better. Be here now, right? Crazy giant spiders were waiting in their crazy giant webs to freak us out and get caught in our hair, on our legs, on our faces... Humberto and I are both somewhat arachniphobic and so the sounds of our cussing (in Spanish and English respectively) echoed over the mountainside as Pamela quietly laughed at us and took note of my groserías for future utility... as the dusk drew creepily near and we were still a ways from the top, we took a moment to contemplate our options. Do we keep going, and possibly get caught by darkness and rain? Or do we turn back, get ourselves a nice elote (corn on the cob that they sell on street corners, eaten corn-dog style, which is to say on a stick, usually covered in lime juice and chile powder) and a dry place to have a nice sit? Well, you know how it goes. Spiders, darkness, snakes, coyote-poo and rain be damned! We will make it as close to the top as convenience allows!! So we split the snickers bar in three, ate it with determination, slurped some water, and marched ever forth. The view from the top was pretty sick. We weren't all the way at the top, but we made it to the base of a sheer rock face, which we attempted without success to scale (partially because falling meant basically landing on an iron maiden of overgrown wild nopales (→ big spines) and huizache (→ mean thorns). We scrambled down the mountain as night fell, wandering back into town, eating a nice elote and floating back home on janky bumpy buses.

The above photos are of stencils I liked.

The end!

IN TRANSIT: now with statistical analysis!

2009-10-06T09:51:00.000-07:00

I walk a couple hundred yards to the main road, the mighty Carreterra Cuautitlán-Teoloyúcan. Here pass all the camiones (buses), micros (short-buses) and combis (volkswagen vans), which go to many useful places, but mostly to Cuautitlán and Teoloyucan... however, there are also quite a few that take the high road to the autopista (freeway) and go to other useful places, like the CITY. So if I'm going to school, I look for the Cuauti-bound micros, which I know are Cuauti-bound because there's a little placard in the window that says CUAUTI, and usually other useful details like XHALA FESC-4 , which is my school: Xhala is the town, and FESC is the school, and 4 refers to it being Campus 4. There are several other campuses of the FESC scattered around the area. I haven't been to any of them; I doubt their as cool as Campo Cuatro. Anyway, so the transit guy is waving on cars, hollering, whistling and taking notes. He sees me, waves, and stops all traffic so I can pass, like he does every single day, and we greet each other, just like every single day, and he asks me where I'm going. I tell him I'm off to Metro Toreo. So I look for the camion with the placard that says M TOREO. I will mention that this is confusing, because the station is actually called Cuatro Caminos. This comes with a funny story. Pamela is from a town about an hour out of the city, but about two hours from school. Anyway, I met up with her, Jacobo and a couple other friends the other day because there was a forestry expo in the city we wanted to go to (it fits to mention that in Mexico, it's the agricolitos that are entrusted with the nation's forests-- I guess it's a bit like how the Forest Service is a part of the USDA). I'd already figured out the Toreo-Cuatro Caminos equivalency because I had taken this bus before, found myself at Cuatro Caminos, and upon scouring the Metro map realized that there was no station called Toreo. Clearly, when the bus says TOREO, it means Cuatro Caminos. So I was cool with that already. But we get there and Pamela and I are waiting on Jacobo. I call him and he says, “Okay, so somehow I wound up at Cuatro Caminos, and I'm trying to figure out how to get to Toreo...” and I say, “Dude, no sweat, you're already here! Come find us at the turnstyle!” I tell the girls, he's already in Cuatro Caminos, he'll be here in a couple minutes. Pamela gives me a funny look and goes, “Where's Cuatro Caminos?”. The buses all say TOREO, but on the maps and in the station it only says Cuatro Caminos: there is no means of translation except personal experience. That's how confusing the damn transit is here. I love it, it's so unnecesarily complex...

Anyway so I get on the bus and I say, “Good morning! I'm going to Toreo.” And if the driver says 15 pesos, I give him a funny look and say, isn't there a student discount? And he thinks for a second and says, “12 pesos,” or “13 pesos”, depending on his mood. They're all men, sorry ladies. So I've saved nearly 20 cents. The guy gives me my change (on the camiones, micros and combis they give you change, and also on the peseros in the city. The only type of transit that won't make change are the new RTP buses in the city, but at 2 pesos per ride, who can complain?).

There are a few important characteristics of these big suburban buses that one ought to recognise:
1.They fuck up your handwriting because the roads suck
2.Jesus decals, 100 percent of the time
3.Playboy bunny details, approximately 56 percent of the time
4.Loud radio 95% of the time
1.Cheesy pop, 10% of total loud radio
2.Disco, 5%
3.Salsa, 15%
4.Norteña, 65%
5.Other, 5%
5.People get on board and try to sell you stuff (about a quarter of the time its to benefit their AA branch or drug-recovery institution)
1.Candy and peanuts 45%
2.Potato chips with Tapatio-type salsa 8%
3.Gelatin/Flan 14%
4.Motivational books 3%
5.Religion 30%

“Te han asaltado?” is a question I'm asked with relative frequency. I am aware of such events having befallen my friends and acquaintances. In Oswaldo's case (don't you love his name?!) he was walking home from the bus stop after dark. They took his wallet and cell phone and he was kind of shaken up. In the case of Itzel, Lili and Gloria, their bus was indeed jacked. This leads to the point, which is that in fact the big janky buses do from time to time get assaulted. They say the key is to keep your backpack out of sight and keep a 20-peso note in your pocket to hand off to whoever is doing the assaulting. At night the combis are perfectly safe (because it's super hard to rob people if you can't even stand up all the way, and furthermore it's not worth your trouble to rob 1-8 people. They say the Metro is super safe at night too, because there's security cameras and stuff. I'm not totally sure that security cameras really make anything safer, but whatever.

One last anecdote before I go to class: I got on a micro bound for Metro Politécnico one aftern oon, and as the sun was setting we stopped at a gas station to pick up a whole bunch of passengers. The sky was all colors and drama, and I was standing up in the back of the bus, when the rear doors open and somebody starts to get on. I turn around to take a look and it is Jesus Christ, stepping onto the bus in his long robes, angelic pained expression and uplifted hand. After a half-second freakout I realize that it's a life-size wooden statue being shoved onto the bus by a skinny kid of maybe 16. I am still totally confused but completely happy to spend the rest of my bus ride standing next to Jesus, suffering the same pothole-ridden roads and abuses of inertia as everyone else. I tried to take some pictures but it was impossible to do so subtly and they turned out awful. But that's my bus story. Cómo ves...

Danza Lika You Meanit, or, Time to Get Ill, or, Viva México, Cabrones!

2009-09-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

This is a more elaborate version of the last post, with various other temporally-related events thrown in. Photos will be uploaded when the Internet sucks less.

I'll start with Friday. Friday was the Feria Agrícola. All last week everyone was asking me, are you going? Are you going? And me, like, “well, if it's AT school, I can hardly be expected to avoid it!”. But everyone kept inviting me anyway, and it was very nice of them. So what they do is they put up a big tent in the courtyard you surely recall from last post's photos and lay out some big tables and all the first year kids sit at the tables and there's one table for some professors they gave honors to, and then they feed as many people as possible (professors and first-years first, or course). There was agua de jamaica (ha-MY-kah: hibiscus juice... super tasty and good for your kidneys. If you've never tried it, go to the Mission right now [for those Davis kids—when I say “Mission” replace it with “El Mariachi” because it's the closest we've got: even if they don't have whatever thing I'm sending you out for, the owner Victor is really nice and would probably explain it to you]) rice, nopalitos, and this dish called mixiotes (GPG: mee-SHYO-teys) which consists, in its 21^st century format anyway, of chicken and onions and potato in this delicious orange sauce whose flavor I just couldn't place... a couple kids from every “generation” were chosen to give speeches and honors and such... and there was a Danza. What on earth is a Danza? (GPG: DAHN-sah) Well, there's a group of kids on campus who do prehispanic ritual dance, specifically taken from the Mexica (who you may also remember as the Aztecs) and they make an offering to some of the big-deal gods, Tlaloc and the like, and burn incense (specifically a native Mexican resinous wood called copal [co-PAL]) and do this elaborate gratitude number toward each of the four rumbos (cardinal directions), each of which represents a different element (not like the periodic table-- think Captain Planet) and they trumpet on conch shells and then everyone starts danza-ing and they're all dressed up and one guy is on the huge wooden drum with the sheepskin on top... it's pretty cool.

Oh, I also want to take a moment to acknowledge that not everyone reading this blog is a stereotypical gringo, and I think of this because of my Gringo Pronunciation Guide. I just want to make sure the reading field is level and that there isn't anybody (read also: my mom...) who is left scratching their heads. In light of which comment I want also to acknowledge that my mom left a message on our answering machine in very well-pronounced Spanish. Good work, you've come a long way since I was in Sinaloa!

So then I have to go to the lab (which was going to start at 12, and then it was going to start at 2, but in reality-world it wound up starting at 4:30 because the prof is a little nutty-- totally knowledgeable and charming but kind of a space cadet sometimes). Anyway we get out of lab at 6:30 and the prof goes, well, I'll see you at El Depo, and of course we all get a good laugh out of that (El Depo is the janky bar where they were having the Feria Agrícola after-party dance hall thingy). Pame and I went with her boyfriend to eat something before shipping out for the Depo with Mara and Richie and I'll be damned if we didn't show up just as our professor squeezes out of the dancefloor all sweaty and beaming with his wife. We got a REALLY good laugh out of that one... Anyway, we're not there ten minutes when somebody grabs me by the hand and drags me to the dance floor-- I don't even know the guy, even though I've seen him around. Tall, awfully cute, and I tell him, look, I can't dance to save my life, and it turns out he's super drunk and goes, whatever, that doesn't matter, here we go! And in fact he's a pretty good dancer but a horrible English speaker, as I discovered when he commenced to speak to me in very broken English upon learning that I was the Gringa. But I wound up dancing for like an hour with various friends and vague acquaintances, and it was really fun despite half of it being Norteña (the music that makes me want to silently take out tuba-ists in the night). I didn't even have time to drink a drop. Mara and I left at about 8:45 because her last bus passes at 9 and I went to keep her company.

But that's not all! That Saturday, I got to go visit Irak! He called me one afternoon when I was hanging around in the Agrícola student cubicle with Pame and a second-year kid they call Peyote (one of the alternative-looking kids, I'd say the one with the weirdest looking hairdo: short little dreads on top and back of his head, short on the sides, with a very Poki looking beard going on chinwise and chopwise). Anyway the student cubicle is pretty neat, with a big old banner that says something like “Ingeniería Agrícola: RESISTENCIA” and a mural in progress on the walls, plus old posters from Otra Campaña and traditional medicine festivals. I learned later that there is a rivaling cubicle which is directly below the one with the murals and is very orderly and such... Anyway, so Irak called to let me know he published a book of his poems and that he was going to have a reading and gosh it would be nice if I came. So I went. It was at this yoga studio in Ixtapalapa, not far from Metro Ermita. There was music and Irak's whole family was there... and his poetry was very pretty. But the funniest part was when Gabriel, the fella who gave a lecture in my Mexican history class about indigenous resistance in Puebla, showed up. I was like, man, I'm certain that's the interesting lecture guy. I kind of want to talk to him, but I feel so awkward. So eventually I went inside for a coffee (they were selling coffee) and he was there and stopped me and said, hey, don't I know you? And I said, yeah, you gave a talk to my class. Anyway, we talked for a while and it was super chill. We exchanged contact information, but haven't made contact since. C'est la vie. The coincidence is worth it.

The following Sunday I went to visit my friend Laura in the town of Tepeji del Rio in Hidalgo. Mara and I took 3 buses in order to get there, and it was a beautiful post-rainy-night day and Laura lives in this idyllic little house with her mom. They have a pretty garden and a little orchard and a pregnant sheep and a puppy... we went for a hike in the hills looking for turtles and bugs in the river amongst the nopales and huizache trees...

Of course I woke up the next morning SICK AS A DOG. I got the flu pretty hardcore. It sucked because Tuesday was Independence day and of course I couldn't get out of bed. I let myself get super dehydrated and wound up at the doctor's office... needless to say there was no Grito for me this year.

..But I'm better now! I have a bunch of posts queued up so you should expect to see this blog get updated a bunch in the near future.

Viva México, or Time to Get Ill

2009-09-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

This is a mini-post to prove I'm not dead.

It's the season to squeeze everyone into the Zocalo, drink a ton of pulque, and scream "viva México!" at the top of your lungs. It's independence day. Or it was last Tuesday. Really it was Wednesday the 16th, but you do all the celebrating the day before. Then at 11pm (it was modified to coincide with Porfirio Diaz's birthday) everyone gives the "Grito", which is to say he screams "viva México". I was going to go to a house party but instead I went and got super sick and spent the whole time in bed. I watched the grito in the zocalo with the fam on TV. The president gets all dressed up, rings the bell in the Palacio Nacional, gives a little spiel and then screams "viva México". Everyone hates the president, Felipe Calderón, because he was supposedly illegitimately elected and he's got super neoliberal politics, and it's pretty much universally agreed upon here that neoliberalismand election fraud are bad. He's kind of like Bush. They need an Obama I think.

I've been missing home a lot lately, which hasn't been negatively affecting my life as much as you'd think, but still it's pretty lame. So... enjoy California for me, okay?

Igor, bring me my pathogens!

2009-08-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

This post has a bunch of pictures I took at school to make my mama happy. More pending, quite probably. The tour shall begin with the nopal forest, as I shall call it, or a field of cactus for those lay-persons among the readership of this fine blog. Since the camera randomly decides to take stripy photos, some of these are going to totally suck, but ain´t that the way. Anyway, this is a cactus pad that really wants OUT!! The nopal forest is pretty cool, and I´ll have to take a shot of the whole thing, because it just got chopped recently so it looks like a new recruit in the military (space monkey!), only with lots of new little green things poking out. For those who are unaware, plants get tired of growing once they get old, so you have to scare the crap out of them by chopping them down and then they start pushing new growth. So that`s the logic there. Oh, and they sell the stuff they grow here. How cool is that? Including bunnies: I will take a picture of the big sign that says, LIVE BUNNIES FOR SALE, GET 'EM WHILE THEY'RE HOT.

The next photo is the backside of the belly of the academic beast (the unimpressive library, also known as my home base) on a hazy morning.

Next are the shots I took while working in the orchard. This is my new fun-time in the great out-of-doors. Since I am again bikeless (boo!) I gotta get out somehow... and I get nice and dirty too. This shot features (tinily) my fruit production class. What have we been learning in the practicum hour? How to plant an orchard!! They ordered a crapton of baby trees two years ago. They've waited quite a while for the spot to be ready... one girl took initiative (as it is her dream in life to have a vineyard) and planted all the grapes and made it her Thing last year. Last year's fruti class also took on the responsibility of planting the first 400 or so trees. And they, like us, were only four people... we pretty much finished the thing last week, so that' s pretty cool. I know what you're thinking: Cat, how is it exactly that you plant an orchard? So I'll tell you. You start by digging giant trenches on the north-south axis at 3 or four meters apart. Then you measure out key points on your grid, each at no more than 35 meters from each other (because any longer and you're not going to get reliable lines), and you stick in some stakes at intervals of 3 to four meters. Then you run strings on the east-west axis between the stakes to serve as a guide for tree placement--but it's just a guide, mind you. When you start planting, you have to line up the trees by sight to make sure they are just so, both with relation to the trees in their line as well as those diagonal to them, and then you place the sapling--just so--facing north, of course... and you bury that sucker, making sure that the graft is well above soil level, because otherwise the scion will root and you`ll lose the benefits of the rootstock. Then you pat yourself on the back and move on, except that the string ends and then he had us plant trees without the string as a guide. I felt very accomplished with my well placed treelings.

On Friday afternoons I have my plant pathology lab, which is very pleasant. Last class we got to make cultivation media, which includes the use of such fun things as autoclaves, beakers, bunsen burners, autoclaves, anti-contamination chamber thingies that are kind of like fume hoods but with the power of ANTI-PATHOGENIC UV RAYS... plus, potatoes, agar, and dextrose.

There are only three of us in the class (another girl added it last week), so it goes pretty fast. Here are some pictures of the lab, for your viewing pleasure. I also provide for your amusement and evaluation, photos of the Agrícola part of the FESC campus, which is about as architecturally defunct as UCD, but they also likely blew less money building it. In the second picture you will notice a cool mural featuring various prehispanic themes. Why they don't let you rotate your photos once you've bloggered them I don't know.

This post is kind of boring (ie, There's no Pictures): School, the Underdevelopment Complex, and a delay in Return Date

2009-08-24T14:07:00.001-07:00

There’s lots of self-righteous rambling in this post. Beware.

There is a complex. I'm going to call it the “underdeveloped” complex. At the University it seems common: as they are lecturing to you they make subtle but clearly pained reference to the fact that Mexico is “subdesarrollado,” or “underdeveloped.” The scientists hate it. They want expensive equipment and new plant varieties and all that jazz. I have been asked on more than one occasion why I chose to come to a country “less advanced” than my own. What the hell do you say to that? “Advancement” wasn't really what I was thinking of when I came to Mexico; it's not like I'm wondering where the transmogrifier and the flux capacitor are. My stated reason for wanting to come here was that Mexico has the precious resources of diversity and antiquity that my country lacks. Ever since we slaughtered all those native people who actually knew all about the land and what lived on it, we've been shooting ourselves in the foot, land-wise. “Yeah, let's plow the prairie, just like we plowed stuff in Europe!” Hello, Dust Bowl. And today, hello scary rates of soil erosion. That's just one example, but I mean come ON, advancement is just another word for short-term, rapid exploitation resulting ultimately and inevitably in the exhaustion of resources and an import-economy at best, and mass malnutrition or starvation at worst. I was interested in not “going back in time” but seeing how other people have figured things out. Okay, I'll admit I had way more of an image of traditionality than I could ever have found at a university, of course, and I should have seen that coming. I'm really hoping I'll get the chance to go hang out at an autonomous germplasm repository or an indigenous university just to see what's up. I think that new perspectives on what it means to “develop” a society are what we need, not just the further prattling of privileged people who fancy themselves experts. That said! That said, I need to also acknowledge that a position of privilege does not invalidate one's opinion. I think there's a role for everyone here on Spaceship Earth. I just think that there's been a monopoly on “advancement” for way too long and things have got to change and that it's only going to happen if we start shutting up and opening our ears to people who have historically been on the margins. I don't think I even like what “advancement” has entailed up till now. We need to redefine which way is “forward”.

So here's my thing: people think that there's one way and it's called ADVANCEMENT. I think we often put our blinders on... the options for the future are infinite from any point in history. Furthermore, with so many free agents roaming around the planet (there's six billion of us now) we can see a lot of different proceedings into various kinds of futures. I'm really over the SOCIETY mentality that says that all of humanity moves in a giant blob toward one sole future. In a way it's true because we're all sharing the planet, but in another sense that limits our personal and community-scale agency just by believing it: if I'm just a brick in the wall why would I try and create a path or a perspective? I'll just get employed and follow a prevailing logic. Gross.

Something has to change in the collective consciousness such that whatever remnant mental diversity we can scratch out gets cultured and let to grow and talk amongst itself. Don't you think? How else are we going to get out of this sinking ship? TECHNOLOGY is not a single entity either, so if technology holds solutions we need to set out to develop a variety of options from multiple perspectives to actually find solutions that fit individual contexts. One kind of snake oil is not going to fix the ailment.

That`s my trip. But basically when people ask me that, I just say, ‘It isn’t really like that…’ and leave it there.

Enough with that then...

Last week my gang and I went to a sort of underground bar thing after school—major sketchball—they call it the Hotel, because ostensibly the place is a “hotel” and the bar (which is just a big room with a bar behind which are giant boxes of chelas) is ostensibly the “dining room”. Clever. It's run by the family who owns the spot, and it's sort of weird to go to the bathroom because it makes me uncomfortably aware of the fact that this is their house (there's their shampoo, and their soap and toothpaste all in there...). It's pretty funky. In any case, we mixed beer with veggie juice along the lines of “V-8” (sounds weird, tastes good, especially since I don't like most Mexican beers too much). Peter says he likes Indio, and I guess Indio is pretty good. It's nobody's Boont, though. To its credit, it is incredibly cheap, but only because it's so dilute...

Though this weekend I went out with another friend and I think Leon is pretty good. Do they even sell it in the States?

The FESC campus reminds me of a TV high school, lots of low brick buildings and grassy patches with trees; fliers on the walls, courtyards where the students wait around for their perpetually late profs to show up.

I figured out my schedule once and for all today. I dropped my soil science class (in which I was the only student) so I could keep my other six clases (mother of god! It's still a lot now that I say it out-loud-on-paper-on-the-internet). I know you are anxiously awaiting my list of classes, so here it is: Entomology, Advanced Fruit Production, Agriculture in Tropical Zones, Plant Pathology, Genetics, and Field Practicum 4. What's that? You want to know all the boring details of my academic life? Why yes, I will tell you all about it. Entomology is saving me from the hazy ignorance and confusion I acquired in Intro to Biological Control (DON'T take that class, Davisites, unless you already know entomology pretty well. They just make you memorize things that don't make a lot of sense if you aren't already an entomologist). The professor is muy buena onda, very charismatic, perpetually late, and generally appealing and friendly. He relates well with his students and cracks a lot of jokes. But the surprising moment was when he quoted “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” in perfect English: “Assumption, my dear, is the mother of all fuckups.” It was funny twice over because I was the only person in the class who understood. Most classes here at the FESC are divided between practicum and theory; we spend one session a week in the field and one in the classroom. So yesterday we went out collecting bugs. The whole thing started like this: he tells us we have to form groups by Monday. One of the kids from class, who's also one of the four students in my genetics class, asked if I wanted to join his group. The new kid does not say no to invitations. So we get together and have to figure out how to divvy up the prep work: making a net, getting jars and alcohol. I should mention that all the kids in this class are in their fifth semester, so all younger. My group is a bunch of boys and me. Oy vey. But anyway, we wind up with a net made from a mop handle, the reinforced top-three-inches of a five-gallon bucket, steel wire, and some tulle. It's pretty impressive. But here is the point: here the students are expected to be resourceful, which I think is really cool. It clearly fits in the culture... and I really feel comfortable with that—except that I don't know how to be resourceful yet, as I just got here... So at times I feel sort of useless (exhibit A, not doing a damn thing to make the net), but still I like the system. We caught a ton of cool looking bugs; I learned how to kill a butterfly; I got to peel apart a bunch of corn plants looking for beetles, and best of all we called it Science. So that's entomology. My fruit production professor is this tall (by Mexican standards—I am such a freak here) skinny, cigarette-smoking wrinkled, five-o'clock-shadowed guy who reminds me in his personality of one of those sheep-herding dogs with their eyes all different colors, and they're kind of slinky and a little bit crazy and sometimes they run around all fast and then just stop for no apparent reason and look around like something just happened... that's what he's like. He's a fruit guru, what do you want? I like his class a lot. He's really into weather monitoring and “agrometeorology” which at Davis doesn't exist but here it does. He has three weather monitoring systems in the brand new FESC orchard, one of which was developed at UCD. He also arrives perpetually late to class. But his lectures are really good and it's worth the wait. He cares SO MUCH about fruit production, and has a ton of stories and such that he throws out there from time to time. It's also an itty bitty class: me and a girl who is serious and very smart and broke her foot at football practice (yes, this school has football-- and for women!), and two other girls. I offered to help the professor out in the orchard since he manages it all alone, with whatever help he can scrape out of the students, so that`s where I`ll be on Thursday mornings. So that's fruit. Tropical Zones is way cool. The prof is this short round little lady who's very energetic and, like all my other professors (who appear generally of the same age range, 40-50), herself graduated from FESC. She talks super fast but she's always checking in with me to see if I get it. This is another tiny class: we're 6. That's the tropics. Genetics is tiny too, we're five, and it's too dull for detail work, but Plant Path deserves a blurb. There are two professors, one for practicum and one for theory. I sense that there is some kind of conflict going on among the two of them, which is sort of awkward, though it's appeared to have died down; they were double-booked for teaching the class, so there was some kind of spat about that, but there was pretext that never got explained too well. It's usually best not to ask about politics. You don't want to know. Anyway it seems like it will be a lot of work, but we get to do cool stuff in the lab, so that's fun.

Can I just say how much I like this education system? I like it an awful lot. Why doesn't Davis do this? When you start off, you choose your major and they tell you which courses you're going to take every semester, with very limited wiggle room. At some point you choose an orientation within your major, and later, a specialty within that orientation. It's a cohort system. I think it makes the University able to direct your learning so that it's cohesive and makes sense, and you have a community of students with the same experiences to help you out. Everyone knows all the professors, and the classes aren't ever bigger than 20 or so. It's a good education. Furthermore, they get you out in the world. Every year the whole class goes on a mass field trip for their Practicum class, and they all have to not only visit all these places, but each team gets deposited for a few days in a spot of their choosing (resulting from a semester's worth of research) to work on a project, which they summarize and present at the end of the trip. So the practicum that I'm taking is the last in the series, and they take you to Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, for 19 days in January.

Which leads me to my next point: it looks like I can graduate here. Ha. How nuts. Last semester of my college career. I was pretty sure it was never going to end. So since I'm going on this field trip I'm going to be coming home a little later than advertised, likely in late January. I might come visit for Christmas though, because I would probably be the only person on my own in an extremely Catholic country. Just so you know. Maya, I'm still down to be your roommate as of February. We could go live in the Bay too if you want.

NOTICE: to all Spanish speaking people who may be reading this blog: is there a word in Spanish for “sketch,” as in “sketchy” or “sketchball”? I keep wanting to call stuff sketchy but don't know the word. “Creepy” is another important one.

Next time, a short history of the FESC.

Not dead, Mom, plus 3 million other things

2009-08-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

My mom sent me a few desperate e-mails and this is a message for her: I´m still alive and kicking!

AVISO: Since it's been awhile since my last post, this is ridiculously long. Pace yourself. I'll start with a picture of a rickshaw, which are all over the blessed place on the outskirts of town, and some shoutouts copied from my notebooks:

For Darach, a note on soundscapes: It kills me that I don't have a tape-recorder sometimes: the echo of a glaucominous old man's harmonica in La Raza station, mingling with the jingle of his bescarved wife's little basket of change, and the muffling of footsteps and voices on the marble...

7 August: Dear Chris Salam and/or Congleton: I am on a bus almost as janky as yours—and not nearly as fun. There are like 7 people on the bus and the driver, who grows his pinky nails long like a narco, is blasting norteña over the speakers. The question is open: whom do I trust less, the driver (who, I am rapidly and dismayedly realizing, is majorly agro, as he guns the motor and elbows the horn), or the bus (which, I am quickly and upsetly aware, is rattling in ways I don't like and makes unhealthy noises and has too many shattered parts to its windows)?!

Dear Jordan, how many times do I have to tell them, AGAVE IS NOT A CACTUS!?

Dear Tom, who definitely is not reading this, so if somebody could relate this to him that might be nice, my entomology prof called topology a ¨stoner´s hobby¨ today (in a good way...).

Dear Chrises again, I saw a bus jankier than yours: sitting atop a mound of garbage, it had no windows, wheels or soul. Cuautitlán Izcalli, Estado de México.

And onto the rest of the post, which fortunadamente tiene mucho que ver con las bicis:

I have had the pleasure of riding Erika's bike a bunch this month, and I have learned a great deal about the City and biking therein. I will herein provide observations:

Some roads are one-lane, and that lane is usually narrow enough that fat cars can't get around you if you're on a mountain bike. Most drivers are very conscientious and will wait for you to notice and signal them on, and they'll approach nice and slow, yadda yadda yadda. But I've had close encounters sobretodo en rush hour, cuando no te esperan. I got clipped last week, by a middle-aged lady in a minivan who tried to breeze past me (how do you breeze in a minivan??). Oof. I started riding in the middle of the lane after that to make sure that they wouldn't try anything till I was ready. It works pretty well; I never felt it was necessary in the multilane roads though, because cars actually fit...

Note to self: business plan for Davis: invest in an enormous basket. make a bunch of tacos. make bomb salsa. ride your bike around and sell abovementioned food.

Pesero drivers are all out of their nut. Beware of peseros.

The left turn lane is on the right side of the road in some places. Who the hell made that up?! Help us, ITS!

Last Saturday I went with Erika and Daniel to help them teach a basic bike safety and roadside repair class to a bunch of kids. They were all volunteers at the new Centro del Ciclismo and they're going to help out with the “Muévete en Bici” program that closes off Paseo de la Reforma on Sundays to give cyclists/pedestrians/roller-skaters the run of the place. They were about 35 of them, really receptive and sweet, and I was a nervous wreck. Ah well. It was pretty sweet to have 2/3 of the experts be chicks. WTF lives!!!!

To get to this event, I had to ride down Avenida México-Coyoacan to Avenida Universidad, dogleg onto Gabriel Manceras, dogleg again onto Obrero Mundial... then you take a left onto a street whose name I forgot and you get to the Angel de la Independencia. I provide you with a photo so you can see: it's iconic of the city, and it also illustrates the sinking (hundimiento) problem described a couple posts ago: this monument is affixed below the level of the silty-squishy part of the soil so it hasn't been sinking, and for this reason serves to mark the rate of sinkage of this part of the city: those stairs? They weren't there before, because that part of the monument was underground. That's a few meters. Fíjate que this is only since 1900 ish. Yikes!

Then we got to ride through the Bosque de Chapultepec, which is pretty cool. There´s a bike route not much unlike that in Stanley Park in Vancouver, so that´s pretty cool, and there´s a spot in between the first and second sections of the park where there´s an outdoor photo exhibit, right now featuring photos from the fototeca nacional de Cuba, so there are a ton of photos

Montezuma's revenge: yeah I had a bad day last week. I still eat tacos from street stands and old men's bike baskets. Take that, sensible people. It was only one day. If I get sick one day a month, I think all the delicious and cheap food is totally worth it. God bless.

We had three guest presentations in Lucía's history class that are worth mentioning:
1. Gabriel: he came in and talked to us about indigenous people. What are indigenous people? They are classified as such if they have their own language, are marginalized, and self-identify as such. Okay, let's think about that. All indigenous people are marginalized. Good grief. They coevolve with the place and then the conquest comes and there goes the neighborhood. All indigenous people are marginalized. The gravity of what that admits (complete and ongoing exploitation) and the implicit self-fulfilling prophecy that comes along with it are mindblowing. So what happens if an indigenous group lifts itself from poverty? What do we do then, change the definition or graduate them to some other name? Stew on that. Gabriel's presentation was particularly cool because he told us about a lot of autonomous efforts to preserve culture and attain recognition and defense of their rights. This includes germplasm repositories (“fuera transgénicos gringos!”), universities that teach ethno-agriculture (HOLLA MS F!!) and traditional arts and ecological know-how. I need to go hang out in one of these places and learn how they do what they do. He was telling us specifically about spots in Puebla, where he works as an ethnographer through UNAM. Badass.

2. Fernando (though his name may have been Fransico or Federico, I'm not totally sure): He's an anthropology prof at the UAM, Universidad Autónoma Municipal (the second biggest university in Mexico, also conveniently located right here in the city). He studies transnationalism. He started off by talking a bit about the Mexico-US human-exchange, the Braceros and all that. He told us some of the things that most of us already knew: lots of Mexicans cross the border illegally, and it totally sucks because you wander around in the desert hoping not to die of thirst/get abandoned by your coyote/step on an angry scorpion/get shot by the migra. But when it started to get crazy was when he told us about the increasing phenomenon of indigenous people (folks who don't even speak Spanish) up and going to the States. It used to be that you were probably poor, but not all that poor, if you went to the states. Clearly, if you had money, why would you risk life and limb. And if you're dirt poor, well, you can't even get to the border, let alone pay the coyote god knows how much dough. But the demographics of migrants are changing more and more and are starting to include Mexico's own marginalized. So Zapotecs, Mixtecs and Mixes are making the long trek to the other end of a migrational corridor we're calling Oaxacalifornia and other peoples are forming the nation of Puebla York and changing the face and the linguistic realities of migration. He told us one story of being in a market in California someplace, and this little Mixtec girl (I hope I'm getting the details right) says to her brother, “get the gets”. Confused, Fernando asked, “What did you say?” And she goes, “I was speaking Mixtec.” In Mixtec, “get”is the word for tortillas. So their parents were Mixtec-speakers, probably with some Spanish vocabulary but nothing of English, so what they speak at home is Mixtec. But at school all they get is English. So there's this generation of migrants' kids that have hopped over Spanish, and are the unexpected Mexican-Americans: non-Spanish speaking ones. That blew my mind a little bit. There was a lot more to his presentation and maybe I'll touch on it later.
3. Don Tomás was super cool. He is a chinampero, which is to say that he grows crops on a piece of land on Lake Xochimilco (or what remains of it-- remember my rag on Xochimilco?) in a town called Tlahuac (gringo pronunciation guide: TLAH-wok). Here's the rundown: scoop mud from lakebed. Form into adorable little bricks. Put a lettuce seed in each tiny brick (the size of a plug-tray cell). Let sit under a plastic sheet mini greenhouse thingy until they come of age for transplanting. Since the silty-clayey lakebed soil has such a high water holding capacity and is at saturation when you form the brick, they stay moist long enough to support germination and early growth. Then you plant the little plugs in a field which has had lake mud spattered all over it (lake mud is also really rich in OM, like a cousin to peat moss but with mineral content) and which has been mulched with old crop-trash or straw or some such. Cover with shade cloth and let there be lettuce. Genius. Además he had broccoli, cauliflower, alfalfa for the horses, jitomate (which is what they call tomato here—GPG: hee-toe-MA-tey), chile, and some other veggies. But the awesome does not stop there, dear reader. Interspersed in nearly all his fields were verdolagas (purslane), quelites (lambsquarters), pigweed (common name pending... aguantenme!!) and pápalo (something I have yet to identify). Yes, to sell at the market. Yes, because Mexico is awesome and people EAT WILD FOOD LIKE IT'S NORMAL!! Marry me, Mexico. Some of it he seeded and some of it just showed up. The interesting thing about Don Tomás is that much of his veggie seed is hybrid-certified-blablabla. And he uses a few pesticides, in the case of his lettuce preventatively. It's a very interesting mix of tradition and technology, which I guess is a mix he's formulating to survive on his land. Good luck, Don Tomás. May your lettuce be extremely marketable and your land forever fecund.
4. Xavier took us on a tour of the CU: ciudad universitaria, which is definitely a city unto itself. It's huge, but that's what you get when you're running a school of 250,000. That's 7 Davises! Seven! Holy moly. So here we go. It's the oldest university in the Americas (both of them) and was started by the Espanish. Various facultades or schools were scattered around the city and then in the 20th century, when city planning got big, they decided they should have one spot for the thing, and they created the CU. Architecturally speaking (Xavier is an architect), it's interesting because it was designed via cooperation between students and faculty, artists and architects. Each school had its team of designers from all of the above disciplines and so every space has its own feel. They constructed it on the Pedregal de San Angel (GPG: ped-regg-GAL) or lava flow, so it's on a sturdy, 70+ meter-deep chunk of lava rock. The landscaping (this was before landscape architecture) is cool because they took the original undulating slopes of the lava rock and sculpted the place around its natural curvature, rectilinearizing it but in a kind of beautiful way that definitely respects the land forms. Xavier referred to this as topografía esculpida which sounds very beautiful to me. Much of what it built there is built from native rocks, materials that aren't going anywhere. Recently they opened a nature reserve on a big portion of campus property probably 1/3 - ½ of its area, to preseve the sparse but unique and biodiverse flora and fauna of the pedregal. Lilia had actually given me a book about biodiversity on the reserve that's pretty cool. The library, meanwhile, was designed by someone who liked rectangles, because it's a near-windowless rectangle, and you're thinking, okay, Cat, why is this cool, y yo te digo ahorita. The artist Juan O'Gorman (booyah Irish kids in Mexico! He was one of the core muralists of that age [~the fifties]) designed the intense mural on the outside, which incorporates all these diverse elements of Mexican history into a big mural burrito of imagery. The mural is a mosaic, made from rocks collected from all over Mexico. It has so many different colors in it; it's super impressive. The story according to Xavier goes like this: O'Gorman or the inspired rectangular architect or whoever sent a letter and a crate to every podunky town in Mex saying, “Send us the prettiest rocks you can find and we'll glue them to the library”. And after a while they got tired of waiting, as only a few crates had shown up, and how are you going to mural a library if you only have a couple of crates of rocks from some dumb towns in the middle of nowhere JEEZ! And so they got in the pickup truck, with their picks and crates and an old Queen tape and took off into the countryside, stopping every time they saw a kind of rock they liked, and brought a pile of rocks home. They went all over the place doing this, and when they arrived, dirty-faced and loaded down with rocks (I don't even want to think about the shocks on that pickup—did they have shocks in those days? Well they didn't have Queen or tapes in those days either so we all know the state of accuracy in this story; I think I should maybe put a Bullshit Warning sticker on the top of my blog somewhere-- if somebody designs me a Bullshit Warning sticker I'll find a way to do that), there were a bazillion crates of rocks waiting for them from all over the country. And they looked at each other, totally sick of rocks, and commenced to make this amazing mural. One critic referred to the building as una gringa en un huipil: referring to the fact that its dress was nice but its form was totally un-Mexican (gringa= “American” girl [where do we get off calling our nationality American when we are but one nation in a bicontinental complex of a couple dozen nations that have their own damn names. Cookies to whomever comes up with the best new moniker for gringos/what our country should probably be called instead], and a huipil [GPG: wee-peel] is a traditional Mayan dress that you can see all kinds of gringas wearing in Mexico). The argument being: you can find a rectangle building anywhere (remember this was a period of extreme nationalism, and though the mural is ridiculously Mexican, what about that box you put it on? Which is a good point. In any case the mural and the story are pretty cool. He went on to talk to us about space: how did they create public spaces that were conducive to student interaction (and subsequent student action in the 60s, which came to a tragic head in '68, when a couple hundred students were shot or detained or tortured or raped by police after/during an enormous rally in La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in Tlatlolco-- you will hear more about Tlatlolco as well as the student movement later). Additionally there are a lot of little spaces that are cool because they're a sort of intimate-space-in-public-space where you see little groups of friends meeting and sharing space but having their own space at the same time. Every factultad has its own private-public space and there are spaces that unite different facultades as well. Because the whole thing is built on rocks, every time there is a tree there's a lump of dirt underneath it where they had to put down more soil than the grass needed. Okay, let's talk about bikes. They have a bike-brary at UNAM. They have successfully made the campus mostly car-inaccessible, making the transportational protagonists pedestrians and cyclists. That's cool. There was this other thing he was describing, I think it's called the Pavillión de Rayos Cósmicos, that involved a thin thin curved-planar concrete arc-shaped roof that was an experiment, much like the Domes, which, unlike the Domes, actually got removed when it was planned to remove it. If anyone is interested I can do more research on that. Or you can get your best websurfing shorts on and do it yourself, I guess. I really liked the tour and it made me so jealous of the kids that got to go to school there every day...

So speaking of school, welcome to Xhala, Cuautitlán Izcalli, Estado de México, home of my school, which is part of the Universidad Autónoma de México, the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Cuautitlán. Let me begin with some preliminary impressions of the spot: most everybody I told in Mexico City that I was coming here gave me a look like I had just handed them a live squid. Like, what's that? It's gross and squishy. What's the matter with you? Those who had heard of the place and could pronounce it told me various unpleasant things: it's... conflictive... a little dangerous... try not to go out at night... it's straight-up ugly... all the way to, if you try riding a bike there, they'll kill you dead to steal it. So, my last week in the city I was in a state of mild panic. The coordinators of my program not only didn't have a place for me to live, but didn't know how to get there or anything.

First day of school, and I really felt like a TV show, where the “new kid” protagonist shows up to high school and everyone else already knows each other. Here's how this school works: you show up with all the other kids in your major and you take all the same classes every semester until you're done. Rodolfo drives me to school because we both have to be there at the same time.

Pause: who's Rodolfo? So I came to visit the place on Friday to go to what I thought was an orientation for exchange students. Turns out it was an orientation for exchange student. One, me. Ha ha. But the administrators who orientated me are super sweet and helpful and chill and such. Maru is the coordinator for student affairs and she's super sweet and she said, look, we know you don't have a place to stay yet. Rodolfo is going to give you a little tour d'campus and help you check out some possible places to live. Rodolfo is a little old man, not that old, a tiny bit younger than my dad. He walks with a little limp but is very animated. He talked and talked and toured me around campus. Then we went into “town” to check out apartments for rent. He told me the last exchange student, a Canadian girl, rented a room in his house, and that I could probably do the same. Long story short that's what I'm doing. His wife Gloria basically adopted me and she's super sweet and a bomb cook and a primary school teacher. They live in this beautiful orange-and-yellow painted house with lots of windows and a soccer field outside that they rent out for games on weekends. They told me this whole area used to revolve around dairies, mostly all of which have since gone under (probably in part because of the forced removal of subsidies despues de NAFTA). Did you know, by the way, that though Mexico has removed all but one of its subsidies (because if tortillas weren't subsidized people would probably die of hunger), the US still subsidizes various products. Some free trade agreement-- give me a break. Back to the present...

We find my classroom (10 minutes late) and nobody's there.... He goes, oh, that's just kind of how the first day is sometimes. I guess you have some free time. Enjoy! Uh... being me I just sat down and read, and contemplated buying coffee but my paralyzing paranoia of social interaction kept me glued to my kneewall until I saw María Eugenia, the really nice student-affairs lady, walk over to her office. I strategically waited long enough for her to establish herself in her office in SERVICIOS ESCOLARES before approaching. She was very kind and told me to go get a medical interview around the corner in SERVICIOS MEDICOS. So I did. The secretary was sort of curt at first so I was nervous, and when I'm nervous my Spanish fails me... but the nurse and doctor were super cool and I regained my linguistic footing with them. Entonces... en final, I did get coffee, and pretended to read some more before trying to go to the other class I was going to check out. No dice. So I went in search of someone to cling to: Bayardo, the coordinator of the Ingeniería Agrícola major. He said, well, let's have you check out the Practicum IV class. So he walks me over there and basically shoves me into a class underway and announces: look at the foreigner; she is interested in this class, so let her be here! That is all! And everyone looked at me. And it's like, I am from another planet. They are all staring at my tentacles and antennae-eyes. What the fuck is happening to me?? So I sit down, they make me announce my name, and the class turns out to be super fascinating. They separate us into groups and we're going to get to go into the field for a couple weeks after the semester ends. We have to do research and group work in the meantime, but the class is just one session a week and sounds totally badass, so I'm happy to be here. The kids in my group seem pretty cool, but I'm totally intimidated by the academics of it, even though everyone seems really chill about it. After class I talk with the prof and she seems pleased to have me around, so no problem there. Outside one girl from my group is hanging around with some other kids and we get to talking; the fruit production professor walks by (kind of a pleasantly-nutty, Tom Gradziel type), and it turns out that he's neat, so I'm stoked on fruit-production. Then the girl invites me out for a chela (a forty) with her friends and I accept. We walk into town and there's this house-by-night-pub-by-day place that we go to, where there's nothing on the walls and just a bunch of folding tables with plastic lawn chairs and a bunch of students drinking (this is 3 in the afternoon mind you). I don't have any money so I don't partake (wise anyway... this is my first day after all!). I excuse my nonparticipation with that fact and the additional one that I haven't eaten in 7 hours so it would probably upset my stomach. Two of the girls (we're a group of about 8) go to the market and come back with food for me, without my consent. We hang out for a couple hours, and the guys down an impressive amount of alcohol (officially giving the Irish a run for their money, as I was the only Irish kid there of course...). We head back to campus, me and two of the girls, and I catch Bayardo again to tell him how much I liked the class he brought me to, and he goes, oh, that's nice. And then I am whisked away by a plant path professor who introduces me to a weed science professor who is going to be a visiting prof at Davis come Spring (how I miss you, PES!). They're both very nice and talkative, and eventually I escape back to my new pals who invite me to various theoretical events as well as into their group for the field course, and they take me to the pesero stop and a very relieved Cat gets into the van and goes back to the house. I get in, and Señora Gloria feeds me, tortas de papa con frijolitos, ensalada y una salsita de chile verde y papalo. Goodness gracious that's tasty. Then arroz con leche, with a little canela on top, life is good. Family members accumulate around the table and they proceed to ask me all sorts of things about the English language. The two daughters speak really good English.

They're closing the Guantánamo torture-chamber-prison-industrial-complex according to Mexican TV news. Go Obama! Do it!

There are a ton of “Don't get sold as a sex slave” ads on TV. Gosh.

Lastly these are photos of Daniel´s answer to ghostriding. In case you can´t interpret my poor photography, he has welded an axle onto the back of his rear rack and you can just seat the fork on their and bolt that sucker together. Genius. It looks like the bikes are mating, though.

The Old Runaround

2009-07-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

Silly picture of me, compliments of my classmate Mateo:

1. Teotihuacan: A PreClassical Mexican Ghost Town, or, What´s In Store For Us
7. Museo del Estanquillo
2. De Don De Son, or, La Copia Pirata de Lo Autentico, PLUS discussion of *authenticity* as a topic
3. Ciclotón!, or, Lost in The Damn City
4 Gajillion. An Ode to Street Tacos

1. Two Sundays Ago! We went to Teotihuacan, all of us Californians, crawling around the once-time cultural hub of North America*. This was the place to be, man. If you weren't here, you were decidedly square. Here, my friends, is the story: we aren't totally sure where they came from, but they showed up on the north side of the lake system, set up shop, and eventually started building pyramids for the gods, as if to say: thanks for the hills, guys, that was really nice of you. We like them. We will make you some hills in return. No, I mean it. That was the idea. It was a reciprocity with the gods. Kind of like taking your friends out to coffee: you just do sometimes. But what wound up happening, and how the pyramids got so big was that every generation of rulers would be like, man, this pyramid just isn't big enough. (Can I mention that I figured out how to make apostrophes again? I'm stoked about apostrophes.) So they would build another pyramid on the outside of an existing pyramid. Because they were shrewd. And so their empire became the Mexico City of ancient Mexico, but they kind of outgrew their britches, overhunted, deforested, hogged all the commerce, and by 750 BC those suckers went DOWN. So when the Mexica (the proper name for the Aztecs: they were called the Mexica [pron. meh-SHEE-kah] but they always said they were from someplace called Aztlán [nobody is really sure where that is, but they think it's in the North someplace) arrived, all they found were vaguely pyramid-shaped piles of rocks: an eerie, oversized ghost town. And this city had it all: beautifully stuccoed, polished and painted buildings, a sewage system, city planning with a religious basis, bla bla bla. I'm pretty sure it gave the Mexica the heebie jeebies, but it was all for the best I guess because they went on to find their Eagle/nopal/snake experience and live happily for a while after. That was in the 1300s, so by then the joint was pretty broken down. BUT here's the deal: eventually a bunch of archaeologists found Teotihuacan, and like archaeologists, decided to break rocks and dig holes and generally poke history, and discovered that under these vaguely pyramid-shaped piles of rocks, there were... distinctly pyramid shaped piles of rocks, stucco, polish and paint intact because they had been protected all these years by the bigger-better pyramids that took all the flak from nature since the 700s. So, when you go to Teotihuacan, you go inside the pyramids (which in their heyday were not go-insideable, thank you archaologists). Basically they were totally badass engineers, but bad long-term planners.

Kind of like us.

Whatever, afterward we went to go eat fancy dinner in a CAVE!! I ate the most delicious chicken mole in the world while marveling at the beautiful irony of a fancy cave.

2. For a school project, I went to the Museo del Estanquillo downtown with two other UC kids. The exhibit was called "Te Pareces Tanto a Mí", or, "You Look So Much Like Me". It dealt with portraits throughout Mexican History. I was looking at the Benito Juarez section, and there were these two English kids with very posh accents: "I suppose this fellow was quite important." No shit, homes. So I history-nerded them. "Um, yeah, he was kind of a big deal. First elected president of Mexico. Helped oust a dictator. Wrote the constitution, Booted the Catholic Church, was indigenous+in power which prior to that was unheard of. Got replaced with an Austrian monarch. Poor guy had no idea what was going on--his name was Maximilian, and really he was nice enough, he had just been duped by a gang of rich conservatives who for god knows what reason really wanted a king so they wrote his father a nice letter and said, O King Guy, send somebody to be our Absolute Monarch, that we may too be subjected to the unfettered power of someone so wealthy and ignorant as thee! So they shipped Max over and he lived in the Castillo de Chapultepec, and did some actually okay things, but then the Liberals showed up and Benito Juarez said, okay, look, I'm really sorry, but we're going to have to execute you now. That's just how it works when you stage a coup. Gotta set an example, you know. So that's how Max got offed. Anyway, Juarez then proceeded to be president for a very short while before he suddenly died, which on some level, was probably okay, because he died before he could start to look like a jerk, which is what any politician will eventually do, and this is a country that needed a national hero worse than any other concept. So that's Benito Juarez." And they looked at me, eyes as wide as dinner plates, and said, gee, thanks...

But the point of this story is more about the exhibit itself. It brings to light questions about the manufacture and distribution of IMAGES. Okay, here we are in a blog, the land of image-mongering, wherein we create and destroy ourselves and others at will. But think of it, mass publishing of images is a relatively new thing. How do you communicate to somebody in California that they have this guy in Washington DC telling them how to behave? I mean, it's mind boggling! And humans used to live in an image-bottleneck: few images, and few avenues for their distribution. It's a miracle that people even believed that government existed. No wonder there were a bunch of militias and other such wackos back then. So I'm not going to dawdle on this much longer, but I'm going to render for your digestion the discussion questions I generated for the presentation I co-led today on this exhibit:

1. Images and power: Who controls the creation and distribution of images? How do these images have power over us? What qualities of an image determine the answers to these questions (medium, distribution channel, creator, subject....)?

2. How do people in power use their own image? How is this image manipulated and used by others? What effect does this have on their power?

3. How do artists portray themselves and other artists? Why do we even care?

4. "Los demás": how can images serve to demarginalize or further marginalize people who have no power? What does this mean for our perception of them? What power have we to change this--how do images help give us this power?

NEXT!

DE DON DE SON

I may have mentioned to some of you the seemingly sketchball friendship I struck up in the metro: leaving Jafet's place for my new abode I was fraught about by my suitcase, backpack and uke: a piece I like to call one overloaded chick descending staircase, Metro Zócalo... when... a kid stops me and says, hey, what's that instrument? I show it to him, and he breaks out his jarana, and we talk about the tuning and where they're from... we exchange phone numbers and agree to jam. Only later did it occur to me that I am in no way ready for jamming of any sort. Jeez. We wound up meeting up for coffee one afternoon, and he taught me a little jarana technique, and then last Friday, we met at the Metro, this time I brought the Uke Machine, and walked to his friend's place, and I basically got to sit in on his band practice, which was AMAZING! His band is called De Don De Son (a play on words I will explain momentarily) and the music they play is called Son Jarocho. The story is that he and one of the other guys knew each other sort of kind of in their early days because they were both in punk bands around town. Then, simultaneously and without any communication on the topic, they both got into Son Jarocho, and that´s how they started playing together. Okay, one foot in front of the other. What is Son Jarocho? It´s a traditional kind of music from the state of Veracuz, right on the east coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and so it has sustained plenty of Spanish influence, as well as Carribbean influence. In its percussion and rhythm it reminds me a lot of Cuban music. The vocals, too, actually. Maybe you can find an example on the Internets, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1VkMDWEjpU&feature=PlayList&p=CFDB9705486EDECC&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1 . Furthermore, the instruments are really beautiful. The jarana comes in several sizes, two of which were present here: the mosquito (slightly littler than a uke) and one slightly smaller than a guitar. They are organized in theory the same way as a uke: GCEA, but here's where it gets funny: each string is paired: so C, E and A come in duplicate to get a more sproingy sound, and so does the G but the G pair is split, top and bottom, I guess so you can't miss the string to ensure complete chords even when playing drunken-sloppily. Another string instrument is called the requinto, which looks in this case like a 5-string guitar whose strings you whack with a piece of bull horn which is shaped not like a pick, but a small paddle. Clearly it´s a very string-heavy ensemble, and everyone seems to play more or less every instrument (except for the tambourine guy, who seems to just play the tambourine-- but that´s not to knock tambourine guy, because I have never heard such tambourine-complexity in my entire life!). They were all really serious about the music, but they were clearly having the time of their lives. The songs are so beautiful; the verses get sung in turns, and the lyrics usually deal with very quotidian things, like food, love gone wrong, the countryside. So basically I went to a free concert. Ah, the name. They were playing once in a bar or in the metro or some such and they finished a song and somebody asked them, --De donde son?-- or, where are you from, so caught up in the contradiction that they sounded straight out of the boondocks of Veracruz but looked like Chilangos (Mexico City kids: t-shirts, skate shoes, cargo pants, weird hairdos...). Their band name is De Don (don means you´ve got a mastery of something) de Son (Son Jarocho). Last night they were joking about how they are an authentic pirated copy of Son Jarocho.

Which brings me to the question of authenticity: when you travel abroad, you find yourself seeking the holy grail of AUTHENTICITY. "Was it made by hand? Make it spicier, I can handle it! Is she indigenous or does she just dress like that?" People get these crazy blinders on. I guess there's a paranoia about getting duped, caught in a tourist trap, looking like a dumb foreigner. Well, guess what, I'm a dumb foreigner, and I think I've got to own up to it. I look around and I try to not normalize, necessarily, but think actively about how people behave, what they do to their appearances, what they eat, what they do all day, what their world looks like, smells like... I'm not here to buy The Real Mexico. You know what? I bet you fifteen pesos that there is no The Real Mexico, and that authentic is as relative as Who I Am. Cultural identity is fluid, and any attempt to put it in a box is going leave you cold.

NEXT!

Ciclotón! Sunday morning I woke up earrrrly so I could jump out of bed, onto my bike and go help Erika and Daniel fix bikes at the Ciclotón, which they've done a few times now and it's probably helping out their business to get this exposure to recreational cyclists. I figured out where to go on the map and got rolling. Down calle Mexico-Coyoacan (stopping at a spot called El Jarocho for coffee, which I brought with me in my sweet cylindrical belt-clipping thermos, thank you Margareta and Jaylee!!) to Avenida Rio Churubusco, where the roads were supposedly closed for cyclists. Gee, that's weird. A ton of cars, and no cyclists... Pass the Leon Trotsky museum... realize that Rio Churubusco is actually a big giant highway and that this is the Rio Churubusco Periferico... aha! Clumsily dash across street, climb over short fence with bicycle, y ya! But, of course, I went the wrong way, and called Erika from Patriotismo, to say, well... um... I'm on the opposite side of city? So with her instructions in mind, I bought a mole tamale, sucked down a little coffee, and took off, straying from the Ciclotón track, and rolling down Eje 4 alllllllltheway across the city. I got back to the track, made a wrong turn and in so doing had to fight the flow of traffic 5 kilometers, backtracked, and found the Planeta Cleta tent. They fed me, and I helped them out pumping tires and calibrating derailers for about an hour before I had to split. Boy was I tired. 4 hours lost on a bike in DF? Yikes. Here are some funny things I saw:

1. FIXIE KIDS!!! Just 2 of 'em. I don't know whether they were gabachos out for a jaunt or what, but they looked like somebody had transplanted them from Davis (more like Davis fixie kids than SF fixters).

2. Puppies in baskets.

3. A beaver-cleaver heterosexual nuclear family, Ma/Pa/2 kids/1 baby in trailer: all wearing the same orange and white striped polo shirts. It was the funniest thing. I laughed.

Not related, but cool: in Veracruz they do this religious dance in honor of the Precession of the Equinoxes (I pulled that term from a children's story), or the spinningness of the world, and they start of on top of a giant snag, where they are all sitting on a lazy susan, and one winds it up and then the other four go careening off as they spin around the tree. It's amazing...

Lastly, An Ode to Street Tacos:

Born of a giant basket on an old man's bike
How you are tasty.

Return to the Wrench, PLUS Holy Hydrologic Hell

2009-07-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

Who got a bike? Cat got a bike! Booyah! Iḿ now a two-wheeled machine! Don't worry for me though, I have a helmet (--> Casco). FYI these photos are not of my bike. This morning I got up late (to the extent that late-awakening exists for me), learned that nothing opens till 10am, wandered around, finally was rewarded with coffee, strolled to the Viveros (kind of an arboretum, but really just a city-run arboreal nursery), which is how I get to the Metro, and as I walk through the gates, who should I see but Jafet! O serendipity! In a city of 20 million... So we talked for a minute, but I wasnt prepared to be very talky, so he said he would keep in touch and we split. Every Metro station is surrounded by a thick cloud of vendors, of everything from socks and windbreakers to tacos, tamales, and fruit, to girlie mags and classic novels. Thereś really something for everyone at Metro entrances. Skidding down the worn marble stairs (there are decisive dips in the middle region of each stair, and there has only been a Metro in Mexico for 50ish years, so that is a LOT of feet per day) I checked the map on the wall, okay, 10 stops on the Indios Verdes-bound train to Hidalgo, then switch to the blue line toward Cuatro Caminos, just two stops to San Cosme, right in the heart of the city. Sweet. Noon on Saturday is the only time Claustrophobes are permitted on the Metro. During the week the slow period is from like, 10AM to 2PM, and the rest of the day your face is plastered against the window and youŕe breathing other peopleś sweat... Jaylee would have a cow! Anyway, so there was space to stretch out on the train today, which was nice. The other thing about the slow times on the Metro is thatś when the vendors come around (because thereś space for them!). But today in lieu of a vendor, one guy got on the train, grizzled and shirtless, and informed us all of his feat-to be: in his bundled t-shirt he had a pile of broken glass, on which he would commence to roll around, bloodying up his back and freaking everyone out. Then he strolled menacingly around the train in hopes of donations, presumably to pay his psychiatric bills... I twiddled my thumbs and stared at the ceiling until he passed me by, and then, eyes like dinner plates, I fixated on his wrecked back (a miracle! Elvis´ face in his scar tissue! Iḿ kidding) and the doors slid shut behind him. Every day an adventure, a psychological wrestling match with the world at large... Entonces, the old switch-a-roo, wherein you leap from one train, clamber upstairs, following signs like a fish follows the current: CORRESPONDENCIA: TAXQUEÑA-CUATRO CAMINOS. Back down some stairs, up some stairs, and ya llegas. Two stops to fresh air at San Cosme. Ask a taxi driver where the street Iḿ looking for is (they know the ins and the outs better than anyone, and they drive like bats out of hell). Destination: PLANETA CLETA: bike shop of Erika and Daniel, a brand new hole-in-the-wall repair gig. Erika and Daniel are prefab friends gifted to me by the lovely miss Morgan, and they are big bike advocates here in the city, involved apparently with a multitude of bike groups, including but not limited to: BiciEllas (a womenś group: bikes are for bitches here too!!), Lunáticos (who do midnight rides), and BiciRaptors. Thereś a mass ride this Sunday and the next, and one day this week theyŕe going to take a night ride to the Velodrome and ride around the ´drome. Erika wants to have a womenś bike-repair workshop there one of these days (which would be sick!). Sheś a lady of maybe 40, who is just so friendly and sweet and sassy. Daniel seems more serious; he has a lot of bike repair experience. Heś her boyfriend and this is their joint enterprise. Anyway, Erika has very kindly offered me her 18-year-old sonś bike, and we do a bit of sprucing-up on it and get it running nicely. I stick around all afternoon, and we fix some more bikes, eat tlacoyos made of blue corn (elongated gorditas, not to be confused with tlacuachis, which are opossums-- though if you lived in Arkansas you could probably order a tlacoyo de tlacuachi--yum?), and talk about cycling. What I notice right off the bat is that women are second-rank to mechanics here. Oh, what else is new. Their friend Chan-chan was hanging around the shop, and he wound up escorting me home so I would know the route. Great. Itś probably a good 40-minute ride from their shop to my place, on fairly big roads, but flat as a pancake, so it was easy enough. Too many speeding peseros is all... So basically, it was really nice of Chan-chan to bring me home, and I felt guilty because just as we arrived it started to rain--hard. I hope he got home okay in his sneakers and T-shirt.

Second part of todayś discussion: physical geography of the city and the train wreck that is its water management.

So for those of you who don´t know anything about Mexico Cityś history, I will give you Catś cut: About a bazillion years ago, there was a system of several endorheic (they don´t drain anywhere: they are in a basin with no outlet) lakes where the city (shaped just like a pear, by the way) is now. During the rainy season they overflowed their banks and became one lake. There were little mini-civilizations set up all around the edges of this system of lakes, notably Xochimilco, Coyoacan, Texcoco, Cuautitlan and Teotihuacan. These city-states did all the normal things: trade, hang out, try to kill each other. Pretty standard. And in the 1300s, a bunch of Mexica folks from down south showed up looking for a new place to set up shop (interestingly, these people were never called Aztecs, but they always said they came from Aztlán, and though nobody really knows where that is, exactly, somehow folks took to calling them Aztecs instead of Mexica). The lake-dwellerś neighborhood association nixed the possibility of making space on the lakeś banks, but okayed the Mexicaś occupation of the island in the middle. This was a pretty lucky move, as they were looking for a sign (the gods were like, get going, and settle when you get a sign; the mexica were like, okay, what kind of sign, and the gods just sort of shrugged and said, you know, any old sign...), and when they canoed out to the island (they had all gone to boy scout camp) they found an eagle perched on a nopal cactus noshing on a snake, and apparently that was sign enough for them. Problem: how to support a bunch of people on very little land: build chinampas! Chinampas are ingenious. You build a raft, tether it to the shore, pile on some potting soil and start growing crops. Itś the best auto-irrigation you could hope for. Permanent wilting point, my patootie, this soil never drops below field capacity! In this manner they were able to expand their territory, which by this time went by the title Tenochtitlán (which is Nahuatl for: place where thereś a bunch of tasty cactus), and feed everyone on it. They did the trade thing, yadda yadda yadda. They even built a giant levee to prevent saltwater intrusion, which was important during the rainy season because a couple of the constituent lakes were brackish. So basically they were a bunch of agronomic badasses. Then the Spanish show up and wreck the party. They burn, break, convert, and enslave everything in sight, and build a euro-style city on top of Tenochtitlán. Deep breath. As they continue to expand the city outward, they come to realize that with the drainage basin all covered with cobbles the water has no access to the soil and so instead goes ahead and floods the streets. After two or three disastrous floods in the 17th century, the Spaniards have had enough of this. But do they choose a better place to put the capital of Novohispana? Lord no! They drain the lake. Really, guys? Okay, whatever. So what it comes down to is that today, this very heavy city is sitting on top of these drained soils, which like Sacramento Valley floodplain soils, shrinks every year for lack of water. In the Central Valley itś an issue of oxidation of organic matter--and thereby the net loss of mass via volatilization... here Iḿ not totally sure of the soil type (people keep telling me --itś like a sponge!-- which to me implies a simple compaction , a change in bulk-density, but itś not like theyŕe soil people [help me, Dr Singer!!]). Whatever. So, the city is rapidly losing groundwater, which means that though there is all this crazy water that falls from the sky, none of it is going through soil-filtration and instead is pipelined out of the Valley of Mexico and out into the boonies where it can erode, rape and pillage all it likes: without becoming potable water. So while the city has this enormous and complicated (seriously: network of underground pipes a few meters in diameter designed specifically to drain the cityś foundation) get-rid-of-the-water system, itś now discovering that itś running out of potable water because it isn´t infiltrating into the soil. So we get a city that sinks on average 30 cm a year (some parts more than others-- thereś a cathedral downtown plus the big marble Palacio de las Bellas Artes building that are sinking faster than the areas around them...) and will likely crush the very pipes that allow them to sink.

Oh, but life is funny.

To tie it all up with some bike business and an inspirational piece of graffitti...

1. Weird bike No. 1: Tell me what this is for and Iĺl give you a cookie.

2. Weird bike No. 2 gets credit for being the first bike I rode this trip: it has this crazy sidecar that I very much admire, though it causes one, when not loaded, to feel as if it will flip, particularly on cobbled plazas. But the guy who owns it, Jose Luis, was nice and let me ride it around. He made the sidecar himself. He was a chavo of no more than 18 years of age, selling fruit in front of the Bosque de Chapultepec. It´s also one of those bikes with two top-tubes and solid brakelines (ie no cables), which function by pushing the pads upward onto the bottom of a very shallow wheel rim. It´s an odd but cool system, perfect for Mexico, because corrosion isn´t an issue for them, and they can´t snap like cables. Pictures uploaded! See above.

And here´s the grand finale, my favorite stencil so far, right in my own neighborhood:

We Have a Problem

2009-07-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

There is this headline madlib in Mexico:

(Number) Killed in (Mexican State) as Drug Violence Spirals into (superlative) Shitstorm: Victims Bear Signs of Torture.

So here is the deal guys: narcotráfico is a big problem.

So basically, if you know someone that buys coca products, snub them. Snub them with all your might. Make them feel small.

Why? I will explain. The Mexican government feels like the only appropriate response to violence perpetrated by narcos is of course the perpetration of violence against suspected drug runners. Um, okay, but how are we at the point where Human Rights Watch is on their case for raping women--no shit, the Mexican military has seen incidences of its rank-and-file raping women taken prisoner in the Drug War.

So hereś my thesis: the narco-industry is a purely capitalist pursuit.

Letś face it: there are few ways to get rich in Mexico. Narco dealings are a pretty accessible route, ironically enough. And why is that? Short story, the way I see it, is that as long as people in the US are shelling out big wads of money to stuff their noses full of psychotropic baby powder, itś going to be a profitable business. Ergo, this drug thing is not going anywhere. If capitalist training does one thing to us, itś this: we will do ANYTHING to make the most money we can.

Iḿ going to take a moment to acknowledge that Iḿ nobodyś economist. I passed ECN 1A by the grace of a witch doctor I hired to drug the professor. Iḿ kidding. But itś true that I by no means get economics. But hereś my primitive little foray anyhow:

Drug runners make so much money doing what they do because people pay them money for their effort.

The object of the Drug War is to make the drug economy collapse by means of impeding production, transport and sale of such using all forms of violence. The hope is that either all the drug people will die and nobody will take their place because the risk of having your eyeballs torn out by a policeman far outweighs the potential benefit of rolling in a heap of money. Iḿ pretty sure that slaughter, torture, field-burning and such are effective ways to raise the expenses of the enterprise, as well, but is it the only way?

My question is, why did they have to go the brutal violence route? There are a lot of ways for government to create economic incentives or disincentives. Clearly weŕe not going to just make the mass of coked up freaks in LA kick the habit en masse for the sake of the Mexican People. Okay, thatś out. How about lowering the price of cocaine by glutting the market? I mean, that sounds silly, but then again, so does militarizing the shit out of the country, terrorizing the people and inciting a barrage of anti-police and anti-military violence that costs the lives of dozens at a time on both sides and frankly is costing the American government shit-tons of money, which would be better used finding ways to STOP violence, not fund its institutionalization. Yes, thatś right, American Taxpayer: you are funding the War on Drugs in Mexico. Congratulations.

So thatś why I say, that in order to save the Mexican authorities some trouble, and hopefully your fellow citizens some cash, go ahead and viciously ostracise the next coke user you find. Letś be fair here: itś the American market thatś incentivizing the enterprise thatś resulting in mass murder by outlaws and authorities alike, and bringing down innocent people with it. So whoś paying the price? Puro Mexicano, y te digo que este no es justicia. Letś pick up some of this slack, and stop pretending our hands are clean. Let´s take a little social responsibility here.

In The Valley of Style and Pleasant Living...

2009-07-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

Good news 1: I can úśé áććéńtś. Well, that´s fun. But now I don´t have apostrophes. Just letterless accents...

Good news number 2: Morgan Kanninen´s friend Erika has offered to let me use her bike! I´m going to call her once I get up the guts and meet up with her. I am a big chicken when it comes to phones, and I haven´t had a whole lot of confidence in my Spanish so far. But she sounds super cool, a devoted member of the BiciEllas, a badass group of lady cyclists here in the city. Morgan, by the way, has been very helpful for this trip. Thank you Morgan, for all the prefab friends, the advice, and the Metrobus card!

On the 8th I met up with all the UC kids, and they took us out to a fine fancy dinner. That was pretty cool, except what I ordered is apparently a very finicky dish and was kind of intolerably sweet, though it was very beautiful: itś called chile en nogalada (as I remember), and consists of a chile filled with meat and raisins and such, and covered with walnut sauce. Cool, huh? Anyway, the UC kids seem pretty nice, but like usual, I feel really isolated when thrown into a group and so I kind of keep to myself. Thatś all right by me. I get plenty of time to think. I haven´t had time to think in a really long time. The program is run by a really nice middle aged fella who apparently used to teach at UCSD, and now this is his full time job. Sweet deal. So, news flash, California taxpayers: you bought a big ass mansion in a fancy part of Mexico City. Thatś where Iḿ taking classes for the next month. They were filming a soap opera there today when we went to class... Photos uploaded!

Anyway, so on Friday night I was practically airlifted out of Mexico city by my dadś friend Lilia, her husband Chato and their driver, Luis. Girl, this was DELUXE treatment I got this weekend, you have no idea. She shows up at the door, looking very distinguished and design-y (sheś pretty much got the quintissential achitect-of-my-momś-generation look: big glasses, simple-yet-elegant clothing, interesting but unobtrusive accoutrements), and enthusiastically introduces herself to me... sheś very kind. We helicoptered into Tepoztlán in her sedan while she chatted me up about my dad and talked a bit about her career (no small deal—she founded the school of Landscape Architechture at UNAM!). It was drizzling on the ride and as we came down the other side of the mountains which divide the southern end of Mexico City from Tepoztlán and Cuernavaca, which are in these beautiful green valleys which on this occasion were veiled by gauzy fog... the mountains there are very beautiful. Iḿ working on looking up the geology of the area, so youĺl have to be patient on that count. Anyway, we slowed to a crawl on the cobbled streets of Tepoztlán and stopped at this lavender-painted garage door... they have this incredible house. They have a perfect view of three mountain peaks (plus the fisheye from the back of an old VW combi glued to the window), and a sweet library that I forgot to take pictures of... a nice kitchen with some bright red tile... collections of art on the walls and tables and desks and hanging from the ceiling... They fed me a Caesar salad and pasta with butter and parmesan (life is good), and told me lots of interesting things about design and history... and I crashed hardcore and woke up and did the yoga stuff Jordan taught me (Ive been doing so every morning, thank you Jordan!) and they took me out on the town... we went to a wonderful church and got to look at all the painting on the wall done mostly by the locals as a means to convert them (how that works I dont know)... there are four outdoor chapels outside the church and this is why: most people in the Americas were used to having religion happen outside, and the Catholics pretty much stayed inside. So as a compromise, they built these structures so that the priest was under cover and everyone else sat outside, to listen to sermons. I guess itś kind of like acclimating plants to a different temperature regime? Personally I dont think I would have been any more convinced that I should change my religion just because they built these things (with the forced labor of other locals, probably). We went to another two churches in Cuernavaca, where I learned that at one point they had been ornately decorated with gold-leaf covered carvings yadda yadda yadda and then anything fancy was burned during the revolution, kind of by rote (like, hey, this is a revolution!) but apparently also to squeeze as much gold as possible out of that stuff—which of course was very little. So the stuff-less cathedrals have been refurbished over the years, and one of them was done up in a kind of modernist way, which was kind of weird. It was total chaos, the visit to that one, because Lilia and Chato were elaborating on the history of the place while some folks were trying to get married amidst the din of an organ and wandering tourists and the fragrance of hyacinths and such... At one point they tried to get me to go into this room with an altar and a sign on the door that said, THIS ROOM IS EXCLUSIVELY FOR PRAYING IN. NO TOURISTS. And I sat outside listening to them talk, trying to be polite both to them and to the Catholic Church. It was an odd spot, because really, I dont know enough about religions to be comfortable in churches ever.

Conclusion: LEARN MORE ABOUT RELIGIONS.

That afternoon we went out to the most amazing damn restaurant: it was in this fancy hotel and there were peacocks and parrots and cockatoos running around and the food was dangerous (I had enchiladas in mole rojo and almost died of happiness). I also learned of the existence of Veracruz Mint Juleps (mom, take note!). Iḿ not sure what makes them different from normal mint juleps, but I guess you could look that up if you really cared.

Then, we got back and she showed me all these cool books, including! A book of the photographs of Armando Salas Portgal featuring the Architecture of Luis Baragal. A book called Vegetación de México by Jerzy Rzedowski of the UNAM, who is the Biologist of the Century according to some science bigwigs. Sweet! And itś a really great book. I now am pursuing a copy of my own. Then there were two complementary books, one a series of facsimiles of Latin codices documenting the ethnobotanical annals of Mexico, including Nahatl names, and then a translation. Itś way cool.

Conclusion: LEARN ABOUT THE FLORISTICS OF MEXICO.

THEN, my last morning in Tepoztlán we went to another fancy hotel/restaurant, this one with the most AMAZING view of the valley, and weŕe talking about a perfectly clear morning, too, and a buffet breakfast. Oooooh... then I got to go climb up a mountain, the mighty TEPOZTECO, atop which sits a pyramid plus 7 gajillion tourists from Mexico City. Itś pretty cool, though, because thereś such a great view, and these funny little animals called Tejones that children were feeding peanuts. The rocks on these mountains are wonderful, all volcanicky and such. What I still marvel at is that anybody would want to walk that far uphill on a regular basis (said the girl from San Francisco). Of this I overheard a man say, Por este su cultura desapareció! (Thatś why their culture disappeared!),

Conclusion: learn about geology and ancient Mexican history.

I will brief you, dear readers, on the history of the Valle de Mexico, in the next entry. Ive already written too much today. But itś some cool stuff--a literally layered history....

But before I conclude, I have a PSA: send me a letter!

Cat Callaway
c/o Universidad de California
Apartado Postal 70-586
Mexico DF 04510
MEXICO

Trotsky 0, Mexican Muralists 1: Game point!

2009-07-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

No manches... I am in Mexico City. It's weird, you wake up at dawn in the Tiki Hut in the Domes garden, crawl into this transportational glory hole and come gasping out the other side and you're bombing through the city on the metro or a pesero and murals and traffic and people trying to sell you Michael Jackson compilations are all there reminding you that you are indeed a living human being. Bienvenidos al centro del Universo.

I stayed the last two nights in an apartment quite close to the UNAM campus. This is the view from the big window in the living room. Jafet invited me to stay at his place, and extraordinarily generously, as he had never met me. Greta met him at some kind of geography symposium, and, being Greta, proceeded immediately to explain to him that I was going to be in his city going to his university, and isn't that so cool?! So he said, yeah, sure, have her give me a call. Sho nuff, here I am. Jafet happens to be awesome. Last night we went on an adventure in search of groceries: it had started to rain...and lightning and thunder...but when there's groceries to be gotten, by god, we'll sally forth! We dashed in the dark to the corner where the pesero stops, which, I must emphasize, entails a frogger-like travail across a four-lane (each way) major road. The pesero deposits us and we scramble up and around this megalith of a mall and squish through it (sneakers squeaking all the way). This makes me laugh, of course, because warm rain is so novel, and the moon is all hazy and full... the city is crowded with concrete, human bodies, trees, cars, noises... and all of it is trying to outgrow its britches.

This leads me to another thought I had, which is a thought for Darach, and it goes like this: on the metro it occurred to me that every moment here is an incredible audio collage. The metro example: the sound of the rails, the blind man selling pens, the little kids running around, the smacking of teenage boys trash talking... on the pesero it's the radio, the wind from the open door, the laughing driver, the windshield wiper, the groan of the motor, coughs and sneezes... Everywhere all this noise is making something, is what I'm saying. And that's why Mexico City makes me think of you: symphonic cacaphony, just your cup of tea.

I wandered around Coyoacan today, which is a beautiful neighborhood which Irak aptly referred to as being very "fresa," or bougie. While there, I visited the Trotsky museum, so now that I am properly educated on the topic, I can give you the rundown on Trotsky in Mexico: Stalin decides he's had it with Trotsky. Stalin exiles Trotsky. Trotsky runs to Mexico to live with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Trotsky gets it on with Frida? Frida and Diego decide they've had it with Trotsky. Frida and Diego evict Trotsky. Trotsky moves, like, 6 blocks away. David Siqueiros decides he's had it with Trotsky, and sends a bunch of guys in through Trotsky's window with guns and incendiary bombs in the middle of the night. No one dies, but soon after his bodyguard is found dead in the boondocks someplace. Trotsky builds bigger walls and hires more trustworthy, and possibly burlier, people to protect him. Someone else tries to kill Trotsky and succeeds. The end. Now his house is a museum. Trotsky fun facts: he loved cactus and raised bunnies.

I also visited the arboretum, or Viveros, which is a great place to just hang out , and somewhere I'll hopefully take up running until I find a bicycle. The plantings are decidedly un-wild-looking, with long rows of trees and lots of straight paths, but regardless it's nice to have that many plants in one place. Here are the fun things I saw: huge piles of soil, compost heaps and a bee-swarm trap in a tree. That's for Jordan and Ben. There are more pictures, but Blogger is being slow and doesn't want to upload my pretty pictures, so you'll all have to wait till I have some more patience...

Basically my thesis is that this is an awesome town and no, I'm not dead, and yes, I'm happy as a clam..

Around town, separation anxiety PLUS Putah creek

2009-07-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

So... I've willed away four bikes.

My grocery bike, a real beater-jalopy-cruiser (SO legit) will be entrusted to Michelle Yates (though Jordan has it for the moment), the taxicab bike has been loaned to Claire, Trimaran-2 is safely at K-zo's place, and Woolley wanted to take care of my new pride-and-joy Bianchi town bike, the comeback kid, still yet to be officially named.

I'm getting a little bummed, to be honest, about ditching them for 6 months. I know how silly it is, but that's codependence for you.

Yeah, and Tijuana still needs a home. Anyone??

Selling Starry's old bike, that cute little ladies' bike, shiny-red like bikes are sposed to be. Donating Arlen's old lowrider to the Bike Church (due to unresponsiveness to text messages---sorry Arlen).

Enough about that. Did you ask me for my life story??

Yesterday I rode around--Encountered Francisco and Efrem, the latter of whom helped me pick up a Da Vinci donation from a little old lady. I offered (sacriligiously) to make a house call and fix up her little bike for her tomorrow. Went to drop of Trimaran-2 at Kurt's place, and wound up sticking around, shooting the shit, riding his Diamondback (which is pretty darn nice--go K-zo).

Today Jenny and I rode out to Putah creek for a spell, to swim and hang out. It was warm but kind of breezy. There was a guy fishing down at the platform, but we swam around anyway--I got caught in his line while trying to walk past him... water was surprisingly warm. I feel like it was greener than it was last year, too.

Weird leech things? 5mm long, max, skinny, wormy things cavorting on Jenny's foot. Gross. I'd never seen them before.

I must also mention the fig upside-down cake that Jordan and I made, which was so very wonderful I think it was genuinely epic.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

2009-06-23T13:31:00.001-07:00

Countdown to blast-off: 2 weeks.

Squeezed in probably twenty miles in the City yesterday, including a ride down to the Consulate right under the first exit off the Bay Bridge. That down, I dropped off my visa at my mama's house and dashed right back out again, scrambling around for coffee. Spent about an hour at that cafe on the corner of Noe and Market, Flore. Knocked out a good chunk of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: thoughts on pride and ego, on Quality (capital Q of course), how we value logic, how we self-motivate... He goes on this trip about eliminating the grading system in education. I think that might be a fantastic idea. Feedback is valuable, grades are not... If we didn't have grades or degrees at the University, everyone there would be there just because they're nerds, because they actually, you know, want to learn? Crazy. That's the short version. Which brings me to my pre-departure basket-casery. One of the things that's making me wring my hands is this fear of a new education system. I've done pretty well through this one, but in Mexico it appears that it works pretty differently: you sit in lectures all quarter furiously scribbling the professor's every word and then they give you ONE fat test at the end of the semester. Good luck, bub.

Scary!

Unrelatedly I'd like to address the application for an FM-3 visa. This form is called F-1, and includes questions about the shape of your forehead, chin, nose, and moustache. I thought these were funny questions. Is my nose concave, convex, straight or wide? Jeez. I had to get the visa-lady at the Consulate to evaluate my face for me. She was very nice about it. She told me that she'd track me down and sue me if I didn't visit the National Anthropology Museum while I was down there. It must be pretty good. Note to self...

More on yesterday: Josh came into the city and we rode around some more, meeting at 16th/Mission BART and dashing up to the Castro and back down to the Mission again. Then we zigzagged out to Golden Gate Park, hung around the Tea Garden and kicked it at the beach for awhile afterward. We also made a stop at Green Apple, where he found this awesome book for his kid. It's a Nikki McClure book-- she's the one that does all these paper cut-out illustrations that are sort of rural-themed and really beautiful, all in black-and-white.

Black-and-white. I'm really torn about the issue of photography. I want to try out this blog thing and take digital photos, but the quality (I'm not going to invest in a slick Nikon or anything)is going to suffer and I don't think those little digitals do black and white. So... I'm thinking about bringing my SLR and hoping there's somewhere that will scan photos for me. Is that ludicrous? The other issue is lugging that damn thing around. Bringing my SLR means carrying my SLR, and it means paying for film-processing and it means what the hell do I do with my photos while I'm there? But I learned from my coast trip that cheap digital photos aren't rewarding in the same way as good digital or film photos. Ah, the cheapskate's dilemma.

We then rode up Fillmore to have swanky dinner with my mom just off California, this really cool Italian place with brick and church pews everywhere. It was kind of nutty. Best part? They made their own pasta; it was amazing: delicate and eggy, in short, twisty-tie shape, really thin and flippy-floppy. That just about killed my desire to ride bikes, and that was the end of the biking day.