Ode to Foodstuffs!

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

1. Luz y Fuerza

2. “Fin de Cuentos, es Gringo, y Piensa Como Gringo...”

3. La Marcha y Tlatelolco

4. 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!

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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.