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!

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.