More Adventures on the Peninsula and Under the Gulf

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.

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!