The problems of Mexican are many and complex and there is a tendency to over-react. But, as Elena Poniatowska tells us, sometimes the solution is is simple: dialog and direct action.
Entries categorized as ‘Elena Poniatowska’
The stalled donkey: a Friday Night video
29 January 2010 · Leave a Comment
Categories: Animals · Burros and mules · Children · Ciudad de México · Elena Poniatowska · Mexican writers · Real Mexico
Trivial pursuit of trivial people — nailed!
24 September 2009 · 4 Comments
WE HAVE A WINNER!
Sort of like “Jeopardy”, my trivia question was in the form of an answer –
Princess Katherine Amelia of Holland and Prince Guillaume of Luxembourg share something in common with every Mexican president EXCEPT Vicente Fox.
“…” got it right: the two royals have Latin American born mothers (and Vicente Fox doesn’t).
I’ll be sending a $10 (US) donation in”…”’s name to their favorite charity (and here’s hoping it’s not something bizarre like The Minutemen) OR — if it’s “…”’s druthers — and they have a mailing address in the U.S. — I can send them a copy of Gods, Gachupines and Gringos from Barnes and Nobel (which just started listing the book, but isn’t going to post reviews until they have orders).
When I was hunting down the weird connection between Porfirio Diaz’ troublesome son-in-law and the Princes of Monaco, I ended up on a paper chase (er, pixel-chase) through Wikipedia.
Princess Katherine Amelia of Holland is the oldest child of the crown prince of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange-Nassau. Her job in life is to wait for her grandmother, Queen Beatrix to die, so she can sit around waiting for her dad to kick off.
Mrs. Prince Orange-Nassau is the former Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti, of Argentina. There was some controversy at the time of their marriage, Máxima’s dad having been a cabinet secretary during the Videla junta and was wanted for questioning in a case before the international court in The Hague (where the Dutch royal family happens to live)… which would have made walking his daughter down the aisle a bit awkward.
WhenGrand Duke Henri of Luxembourg goes to the big palace in the sky, Prince Guillume moves up from mere Duke to Grand Duke. His mom, the present Grand Duchess, was born in Cuba in 1956 as María Teresa Mestre y Batista-Falla was raised in New York and Switzerland after her family moved (rapidly) in 1959.
I’d already known about Elena Poniatowska (born Princess Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor in Paris in 1932). Royalty, but only sorta. The family produced most of the kings of Poland, but Poland had elected kings and it went out of the kingdom business when it was partitioned in 18th century. When Poland reappeared on the map after World War I, it was a Republic, and by that time there were passels of Poniatowkis had scattered around Europe. Her father was a Polish, however, the Republic’s Ambassador to France.
Poniatowska — on top or her descent from the Polish family — might squeak into the Euro-royal class (at least the minor leagues) on her Mexican mother’s side alone. She is a distant descendant of Augustín the first (and last) emperor of Mexico (the Empire of the self-proclaimed emperor, and his empire, only lasted from May 1822 until March 1823, but long enough to get his heirs into the royal club).
Despite those handicaps, she grew up to be a normal Mexican lefty intellectual … she may have royal blood, but as a Lopez Obradorista, she doesn’t have to wear a silly hat.
(Plain Elena Poniatowska, Grand Duchess Maria-Teresa, Princess Máxima)
Categories: Argentina · Cuba · Elena Poniatowska · Luxembourg · Mexican History 1810-1824 (Independence) · Mexican writers · Uncategorized
Leonora Carrington: not the English way
9 April 2009 · 4 Comments
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is only 80, was busily (and angrily) denying rumors this week that his creative life was at an end. Another of Mexico City’s intellectual and artistic elders was also in the news this week, with no questions asked about possible retirement.
Leonora Carrington turned ninety-two last Sunday. One’s ninety-second birthday normally would not be considered a memorable event outside of one’s own family, but Ruth McLean and Rachel Rickert Straus (Happy Birthday, Leonora Carrington!) took notice and for a good reason: not many people had the foresight to write a novel ahead of time about a ninety-two year old. Carrington’s 1976 novel, The Hearing Trumpet is the story of the aging Miriam Leathersby, who, thanks to her new hearing aid discovers what her relatives really think… mostly that she’s around the bend. Where Alice fell into a looking glass, Miriam falls into her trumpet… or more prosaicly, ends up in an old-folks home, and a liberation of her mind.
A sort of “magic realism” for the aging? Not at all, but a projection of Carrington’s own continuing liberation into what was then the future.
Born into a proper, upper-class British family, Leonara spent her early years getting herself thrown out of a string of English and Irish convent schools. Her Irish mother, with some exasperation, finally packed her off to Mrs. Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, Italy… a proper English school for improper Englishwomen. Still, the family tried their best to reform their daughter. She was presented at court in 1936, but not in the least impressed, found herself a quiet corner and read Aldous Huxley’s new novel, Eyeless in Gaza.
A proper upper-middle class Englishwoman might dabble in art, and might even dabble seriously, but Carrington, against her family’s wishes, continued her studies, and — rebelling also against the British art establishment — developed her style as a surrealist. By 1936 though, surrealism was well enough accepted in Britain that a thousand people a day came to see the London Surrealist Exhibition in June of that year. The highlight wasn’t Salvador Dali nearly killing himself when he decided to lecture in a deep-sea diving suit and got stuck, but Carrington’s introduction to the work of Max Ernst.
The attraction must have been mutual. Ernst abandoned his wife and ran off with Carrington the next year, fleeing to the south of France. The artistic couple were a team until the German invasion. Ernst was briefy detained as an undesirable alien, but released only to be arrested by the Gestapo. He managed to escape and eventually made his way to the United States, where a timely marriage to arts patron Peggy Guggenheim allowed him to remain. A devasted Carrington was unable to leave France until 1943, when she managed to make her way to neutral Spain.
Proper Englishwomen, of course, did not become artists, did not run off to France with married men, were not abandoned in France by said married men, and did not end up as distraught refugees in Spain. She must have been nuts. Or, so her proper English family decided, having her committed to a Spanish mental hospital.
Gilberto Bosques, the Mexican diplomat who saved so many from the Nazis was imprisoned by this time, but the Mexican diplomatic service — with an assist from Pablo Picasso — still did what it could to rescue those threatened by Fascism, and — as on other occasions — showed unusual creativity in finding a loophole.
Diplomatic service in Mexico, as in other Latin nations, has always attracted the artistic and eccentric. Attending to Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito Publico business in Paris, was not particularly time consuming or onerous overseas duty for Renato Leduc. He had plenty of time to devote to his “deliberately romantic” poems, and to indulge in his very undiplomatic habit of — as a fellow poet once said in admiration — dropping in two obscenities for every conventional word in conversation. Those conversations were often as not with his fellow Spanish speaker (and afficianado of grocerías) Pablo Picasso. Before the Mexican diplomatic corps was clapped in detention after breaking relations with occupied France, Leduc had managed to escape to Portugal, where he was given some vague consular duties that let him keep his diplomatic immuity.
Though their mutual acquaintance, Picasso… who was still in France, Leduc learned that Carrington was locked up in Madrid. When Carrington managed to escape the asylum through a bathroom window, and seek out the Mexican Embassy, Leduc was prepared to stave off the Nazis, the very proper Carringtons and the Spanish nuns who managed the mental hospital. Mexican diplomats in Madrid arranged for Carrington to travel to Lisbon where Leduc cut through bureaucratic red tape very neatly. He married the artist and escorted her to Mexico City.
Andres Breton may have found Mexico City too surreal for him, but Carrington at last found a place where she was appreciated for her own abilities, and where she could make a life on her own terms.
The marriage of convenience (or desperation) wasn’t expected to last, but it was an amicable parting, as the two continued to remain fixtures in the Mexico City intellegencia, mutual friends of composer Augstin Lara, poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, journalist and novelist Elena Poniatowska and actress Maria Felix (to whom Leduc would later propose marriage). Carrington would eventually marry Emerico (Imre) Weiz, a photographer and fellow European refugee.
In Mexico, Carrington finally found artistic recognition as an important surrealist. Since 1947, when she was mis-represented as “England’s only female professional artist”, she has been consistently listed as a major English painter, though her work was never recognized there until after she became a Mexican citizen. In addition, she has published a number of her “adult fantasy” novels and illustrated books.
As a Mexican, not English, intellectual, she has taken an active part in national issues. Although physically unable to participate, Carrington — in common with other Mexican public figures — protested the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In 2006, she contributed art work to Andres Manual Lopez Obrador’s Presidential campaign, and continues to support the “legitimate presidency”.
Having touched the lives of so many men — poets, painters and politicos — from Max Ernst, to Picasso to AMLO, you’d expect to hear more paeons of praise from the men. But, as Carrington said in 1983:
I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.
And she is still learning.
Self portrait, 1936
Categories: AMLO · Artists, Writers, Philosophers, etc. · Elena Poniatowska · France · Gabriel Garcia Marquez · Gilberto Bosques · Great Britain · Leonora Carrington · Max Ernst · Mexican History 1921+ · Mexican visual artists · Octavio Paz · Pablo Picasso · Renato Leduc · World War II · Writers, artists, philosphers outside Mexico
The “magical reelism” of Carlos Fuentes
12 November 2008 · Leave a Comment
Although yet to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Carlos Fuentes (born 11 November 1928) , remains at the top of anyone’s list of major Mexican writers, Latin American writers, late 20th century writers… writers.
Fuentes, like Elena Poniatowska, was the child of a diplomat and spent the first several years of life outside Mexico (Fuentes was born in Panama, not living in Mexico until he was a teenager). Perhaps the foreign childhood was essential to their clear-headed embrace of their people, and their city. La región mas transparente (in English, Where the Air Is Clear) is, as Amazon reviewer “A. Reader” wrote:
Considered by many to be Fuentes’ all-time masterpiece… a roller-coaster tour of post-revolutionary Mexican urban history. It’s all there, from roughneck taxi drivers and prostitues trying to make their daily bread, to bored members of a fading aristocracy, of which only the double-barreled names remain. The novel’s diverse characters meet and unmeet in a bizarre range of social situations, ever-observed by the Spanish-Indigenous hybrid Ixca Cienfuegos. Cienfuegos, a type of Greek Chorus character who watches the ups and downs of the novel’s cast like a mad-scientist doing an experiment, doesn’t hesitate to drop in for a chat to the characters, provoking them to pour out their hearts in sometimes tedious monologues. If you have a basic grasp of Mexico’s history you’ll understand this novel better, although if you don’t know the history, a stack of not too subtle symbols will help you out. … If you want to see how the thinking behind Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude would work, applied to a TV mini-series, and have a few days to spare, give it a go.
I would have said “telenovela” instead of “mini-series” — something developed the same year La Region was first published and destined, with their interlocking stories of social class conflicts, coincidence and recurring themes, to be the defining Mexican style of story-telling.
Like La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) or the 1999 complimentary novel (featuring some of the same characters) Los años con Laura Díaz, Fuentes writes of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath — the triumphs, tragedies and ironies of the nations’ always uncertain modernity with a filmmaker’s — or telenovelista’s — eye.
Regrettably only “The Old Gringo” (El viejo gringo) has made it to the big screen, but that novel deals with a minor incident of the Mexican Revolution (the disappearance of Hearst correspondent, Civil War veteran and short story writer Ambrose Bierce) and — probably making Fuentes cry all the way to the bank — was only made because the Italian producers could use well-known Hollywood actors and could deal in Mexican stereotypes. And, two of the three protagonists are gringos.
Gachupines and Gringos have caught Fuente’s eye in the last few years. As a companion piece to a television series on Latin America’s Hispanidad, he wrote El espijo enterrada (The Buried Mirror), his reflections on Spanish colonialism. “His black comedy “Eagle’s Throne” tells the story of a futuristic “war on drugs” with U.S. President Condaleeza Rice resorting to magic to manipulate the election to replace multi-term President Vicente Fox. A 93-year old Fidel Castro still holds power in this novel, set in 2020. In 2006, he wrote “Contra Bush” — which is what you’d expect from a Mexican, though Fuentes is a bit further to the right than most of his contemporaries and the main current of Mexican intelligencia. Like many others, he backed Vicente Fox and the conservative PAN party’s attempts to break the stranglehold PRI had on the presidency in 2000. Unlike the others, he continued to support the Fox administration, though with some distaste, now — as in his childhood — viewing his country from abroad.
Perhaps best able to view his people and his city, like the God Tezacatlipolco, only through a smoky mirror… or though a foggy one. Fuentes lives in London.
Categories: 2000 Mexican Presidential Election · Americas (outside U.S. and Mexico) · Artists, Writers, Philosophers, etc. · Carlos Fuentes · Ciudad de México · Elena Poniatowska · Gringo(landia) · La Raza (Mexican cultures and peoples) · Mexican History 1910-20 (Revolution) · Mexican History 1921+ · Mexican writers · Movies and TV · Octavio Paz · Panama · Politica (Mexicana) · telenovela
2 October 1968: A scene straight out of Hell
2 October 2008 · Leave a Comment
Malcolm Beith in today’s The (Mexico City) News:
“The soldiers fired at the buildings, from the buildings, and then, into the masses,” Félix Hernández said. “The plaza was full, there were kids there. We could see that many were dead. The massacre was brutal.”
The bullets were indiscriminate, according to eyewitnesses who lived to tell their story. Women, children – even the white-gloved special forces, by some counts – were fired upon.
“In a few minutes the whole thing became a scene straight out of hell. The gunfire was deafening,” recounted one witness in Elena Poniatowska’s “The Night of Tlatelolco.”
Unable to get past soldiers and Olympic special forces to help those below, Félix Hernández and his fellow students ran to the third floor of the Edificio Chihuahua, and knocked on a friend’s door. About 20 of them crammed into the friend’s apartment, sneaking glances out the window every now and then to survey the carnage in the square. The soldiers were firing everywhere.
Categories: Ciudad de México · Crime and Punishment · Elena Poniatowska · Evil-doers · Human Rights · Manifestaciones · Mexican History 1921+ · Mexican writers · Politica (Mexicana) · Tlatelolco · Tlatelolco 1968
Creative License
22 October 2007 · Leave a Comment
SOMEBODY’S not quite telling the truth here:
There’s a whole sub-genre of Mexican literature, the fictive biography. Carlos Casteñada (ok, he was Peruvian, but his subject was Mexican) inspired a whole generation of gringos to come looking for Don Juan (or at least hallucinate about him; Diego Rivera entertained himself (and the rest of us) making up his life story for his official biographer, Bertram Wolfe; Princess Salm-Salm milked her brief Mexican experience for all it was worth in her untrustworthy (but eminently readable) biography of Prince Felix; Martin Guzmán’s “Eagle and the Serpent” is sometimes listed as a biolgraphy of Pancho Villa, and sometimes as a novel about Pancho. It’s both. Elena Poniatowska and Carlos Fuentes have both written fictional biographies, which may or may not be true.
I don’t know that it’s a “Latin thing” — after all Emily Dickinson (about as un-Latin as you can get) once wrote “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Burro Hall — who like Miss Dickinson — is from Massachucetts (which must mean something, I’m sure), is delighted with the latest contribution to Mexican fictography, Vicente Fox’s Revolution of Hope: The Life, Faith, and Dreams of a Mexican President (Viking, 2007. Listed at 27.95, but already marked down to $16.65 at Amazon).
Delighted, but not completely sold on it:
Ex-presidente Vicente “Fat Tony” Fox, the American-educated former executive for the American Coca-Cola Company, has written his life’s story (co-authored with his American political consultant Rob Allyn) about how, when he was president, he kept it real by wearing cowboy boots. He’s currently on a book tour in America. Why not Mexico? Because the book is written in American, not Mexican. After six years of Fox’s rule, the adult literacy numbers apparently aren’t high enough to justify publishing a book here.
Very odd to have the book that claims George W. Bush speaks “grade school Spanish” co-authored by a guy who sells the idea that George W. can speak coherently in English or Spanish:
“One of the first phone calls George W. Bush made after the inauguration was to Mexican president Vicente Fox. The men chatted amiably in Spanish. Perhaps President Bush ought to keep Rob Allyn’s phone number nearby, too—Allyn helped put Fox in power.
Burro has great fun in looking at Don Chente’s own reality-challenged claims, but he’s a politician and, we’d expect his autobiography to be at least half-bullshit, and 100 percent self-serving. Rob Alyn is only the co-author, but given Fox’s well-known aversion to reading, one suspects Alyn contributed something more than fifty percent of the total project.
Alyn is a professional sleaze-bag political media consultant. As Sourcewatch notes about his affairs in the U.S.:
Allyn was a key player in the George W. Bush campaign to discredit his rival for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination Senator John McCain. Millionaire Bush supporter Sam Wyly funded Republicans for Clean Air to attack McCain in key states during the 2000 primary campaign. Rob Allyn was paid $46,000 to help create the ads.
His pimping consulting for Fox’s 2000 campaign (suspected of being paid for the the U.S. Republican Party) was more controversial. Narco News has been on Alyn’s back for years. As they point out, Alyn set up a front group called “Democracy Watch” and engaged in all kinds of illegal activities in Mexico before and after Fox’s 2000 campaign, in his attempt to sell the candidate from a former fascist party as a “democratic alternative” to the PRI.
Don’t get me wrong… I like Mexican fiction, and I’m just twisted enough to enjoy Mexican politics. But, I want to wait until either Vicente Fox reads “his” book and gives a cogent report on it, or it’s marked down by Amazon to a buck.
Categories: 2000 Mexican Presidential Election · Artists, Writers, Philosophers, etc. · Carlos Fuentes · Diego Rivera · Elena Poniatowska · Emily Dickinson · Evil-doers · George W. Bush · Gringo(landia) · Kitsch · Media · Mexican History 1921+ · Mexican visual artists · Mexican writers · PAN · Politica (Mexicana) · Rob Allyn · Spin doctors · Vicente Fox
And thank you, Elena Poniatowska!
12 December 2006 · 1 Comment
The Alpine Public Library isn’t a very big place, but, like any public library, it has its discoveries. I’d never read Poniatowska’s classic, “Hasta no verte Jesús mío” until I stumbled across the English translation (“Here’s to You, Jesusa!”, Farrar Strauss, 2001) looking for something else entirely.
Lyn has written elegantly, and movingly on the soldadaras of the Revolution. “Jesusa” — in reality Josefina Bórquez – was one of those tough, pistol-packin’ mamas. Pistol-packin’ anyway. Given her … uhhh… brutal lifestyle, it was just as well she wasn’t a mother in anything but name.
In 1964, Bórquez was an irrasible, anti-social tough old lady in the Penitenteria (not in prison, but the Mexico City neighborhood near Leucumberri – then the city prison, now the National Archives) living in a single room with cats, canaries and chickens. She claimed she had no friends, and to hate children. It was her pride and dignity. So many of her friends had left her or died horribly (one grusomely when she was hit by a train). The foster son who called her “mama” broke her heart.
By the time she was 11, Bórquez been a peddler, a fisherwoman and a cook in the Oaxaca woman’s prison (her stepmother was warden) when her feckless father joined the revolution and brought her along. It got her out ofOaxaca anway…
“Jesusa” spent her adolescence tramping the length and breadth of Mexico… and buried her 18 year old husband (who regularly beat her, convincing her never to tie herself to any man) in Marfa Texas. The Revolution was the highlight of her irregular and violent life: despite losing not only her husband, but the two men she truly loved – her father and her older brother – “…if there ever was another revolution, and I had the opportunity to go to war, I’d be there in a second. I want to travel again.”
A captain’s widow at 16, and for a short time a capitana herself, the Tehuana Zapotec ended up – like so many rootless young Mexicans – in the Capital. She got by – somehow. In this country, if we need a job, we figure out what we already know how to do. Not Mexicans. If there’s a job – or you can make a job – they’ll do it. But Jesusa’s resume was a little more varied than most. Besides soldiering, Bórquez was variously a maid, a nurse, a dance hall “hostess”, a factory worker, a barber, a professional drinker, a furniture maker, an ambulanta, a butcher, an “apache dancer” in a circus and a medium. And a grumpy old lady who managed to keep going into her late 80s.
Sometimes homeless, but never completely alone, though she’d argue otherwise, “Jesusa” was a hell-raiser prone to getting into fist-fights with strangers until she got got religion: in her case, becoming a devout member of the Obra Espiritual, professing a belief in God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, AND… Anton Mesmer the hypnotist, 19th Century French psychologist Pierre Charcot, reincarnation, karma and the teachings of Roque Rojas, who was reborn as the Messiah in his backyard ditch in Mexico City in 1866. In some ways, it was the knowledge that she was working off some bad karma that kept her going until 1987. She asked Poniatoska, the day before she died, to throw her body to the dogs (she found it comforting that her father’s unburied corpse was picked clean by vultures), but the author, more conventional than otherwise, paid for Josefina Bórquez’ conventional burial
It was an unlikely friendship… the former Princessa Helena de Poniatoska and a tiny old woman who made her living scrubbing down printing presses with gasoline by day and scrubbing grease out of workers’ coveralls on the roof and feeding her chickens by night… but somehow the two remained friends for 20 years. Borquez was still alive when Poniatoska published her book in 1968. At the time it was called a “novel” … but like Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night” or Tom Wolfe’s “new journalism” whether we are reading journalism by an artist, or an artist’s attempts at journalism. In the end, as Josefina – or Jesusa — would say, “pues, who the fuck cares?”
Jesusa on her military career:
A lot of people got killed out of stupidity. I think it was a misunderstood war because people simply killed each other, fathers against sons, brother against brother: Carrancistas, Villastas, Zapatistas, we were all the same ragged people, starving to dealth. But that’s somethat that, as they say, you keep to yourself.
On herself – a Zapotec in Mexico City:
If I had money and property, I’d be Mexican, but since I’m worse than garbage, I’m nothing. I’m trash that the dog pees on and then walks away from. A strong wind comes along, blows it all down the street and it’s gone… I’m garbage because I can’t be anything else. I’ve never been good for anything. My whole life I’ve been this very same germ you see right in front of you… When I was left alone I intended to go back to my homeland. I’d have a better life in Salina Cruz or in Tehuantepec…”
Maybe so, “Jesusa…” but what would Mexico City have been without you? You were not the stereotypical Chilango I like to write about, nor one I hung around with. But so very real… tough enough to get through anything, resourceful beyond all reason, and a survivor. In that, Jesusa you were not garbage… but a real Chilanga.
Thank you Jesusa! Thank you Elena Poniatoska!
Categories: Artists, Writers, Philosophers, etc. · Big Bend · Ciudad de México · Cristeros · Elena Poniatowska · La Raza (Mexican cultures and peoples) · Mexican History 1910-20 (Revolution) · Mexican History 1921+ · Oaxaca · Provincia · Real Mexico · Religion · Tepito · Texas · Traditionalists · Zapotecs
HUH? FOX News — apparently Elana Poniatowska is going to invade Arizona… or something like that
24 May 2006 · 4 Comments
Links to racist hate sites like this: blahblahblah (verdana italic typeface)
In Mexico, my favorite TV show is Los Simpsons (who doesn’t love Los Simpsons?), which is produced by the U.S.’s Fox Network. One good thing about being in the U.S. is I can catch some other Fox comedies — Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone“, John Gibson (of “make more white babies or we’ll be overrun with brown ones” fame and “Your World With Neil Cavuto“.
Watching these programs requires a “willing suspension of disbelief” — you have to buy into the American Right, and their alternate universe where two opposite ideas coexist without, as on Star-Trek, destroying life as we know it.
On the one hand, the alternative reality folks tell us, “white Mexican elites” export their “problems” to the United States. On the other, those “elites” are planning to take back their problem (and add a bunch more). You see, it’s all a secret plan for the “Reconquista”
For those of you in the Real Mexico (and in the Real World) this is the ardent belief of tho residents of that alternative universe reality that Mexican plans to take over the territories ceded to the U.S. by the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. (Why not Spanish Louisiana , which once stretched as far as Manitoba?) .
While there is a group that Mexican authorities consider a possible right-wing foreign terrorists, and that talk about Reconquista, these U.S. based neo-fascists, like Aztlan (“brownshirts with brown skins,” as one friend called them) are tiny organizations that exist mostly on the internet, or in the nightmares of “white-wing” worriers (and the folks who they worry). I half suspect that at least half their alleged members and supports just enjoy scaring the bejeebus out of these folks. No one in the sanity-based world takes their aims very seriously.
By the way, these groups should NOT BE CONFUSED WITH THIS MERRY BAND OF RECONQUISTADORS — they have a sense of humor, which is to facists what water is to the Wicked Witch of the West.
In one variant of the theory, the Mexicans will join with the Yellow Hoardes of Asia to invade California, as in a 1915 Hearst produced serial starring Paulette Godard and reprised (as a theory — Paulette and William Randolf are both long gone) by a wacko U.S.Army Major last year.
Which brings me to another film director, Ron Maxwell. I never heard of him either — his film about the Battle of Gettysburg is praised by the Heritage Foundation, and other organizations unlikely to be heard of outside of wonky Republican circles or internet political blogs. Somehow, that makes him an expert on the Reconquista — he even wrote for the (offensive, but not officially racist) World Net Daily about it.
Which, in turn, brings me back to Fox News. While Vincente Fox blathered on (presumably in his slow norteño way — the sound was off) on one side of the screen, Neil Cavuto and Ron Maxwell chatted about the Reconquista on the other. According to Ron, it’s a common belief among “Mexican elites and intelletuals” that the Reconquista is real.
Prone to gi
ving even complete morons the benefit of the doubt, I did a little googling on this. Carlos Fuentes, once talked about the Spanish language and Latin American culture shaping the United States. Carlos Monsivais during a 1999 talk mentioned that California was as much Mexican as anything else (which it is). But, really, have you ever met Carlos? He’s a pudgy, balding, near-sighted writer who ventures out to the Sandborn’s katty-corner from Chapultepec Park for his morning coffee before returning to the comforts of home, his beloved cats and his
writing. Somehow I can’t see him leading the troops across the Rio Bravo del Norte.
Carlos Fuentes? He’s pushing 80, and frankly, he’s more at home in Washington or London than in Mexico.
Elena Poniatowska, maybe… having been born Princesa Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor, I guess she qualifies as one of those infamous “white elites”. She’s a bona fide intellectual and a tough broad. Even with those Polish and French warrior ancestors, I can’t image such a nice, quiet lady st
orming the gates of San Diego either.
SO… kids… who exactly are these Re-conquistadors? Anyway care to enlighten Neil Cavuto ?
Categories: Artists, Writers, Philosophers, etc. · Border Issues · Carlos Fuentes · Carlos Monsivais · Elena Poniatowska · Evil-doers · Gatos · Indocumentados · Media · Reconquista myth · Right Wing Idiots · Trade agreements and issues · Urban legends
Name Droppers in the ‘hood (the news from Lake Texcocobegone)
18 September 2004 · 1 Comment
A friend of mine was once showing a Finnish tourist around the Zocalo and ran into Finland’s most famous movie star (as opposed to… Finland’s other movie star? Its not a very big country) at el Café Popular. And why not…? It’s probably the world’s best known Mexican Chinese French diner in the world. EVERYBODY goes to the Café Popular sooner or later. Everybody who’s anybody anyway.I USED to go there (for breakfast, not to goggle at film stars speaking an incomprehensible Urgo-Algaric language with too many vowels) but it’s in every tourist guide ever published and priced accordingly. Good tamales (Sino-Franco-Oaxacaño style) though. Besides, Mexico City has about 3 times as many people as all of Finland. And better climate and more sunshine. You’re bound to run into somebody who’s somebody somewhere sooner or later. I used to have my coffee in the same Sanborn’s as Elena Poniatowska (boy, and I though Popocatepetl was hard to spell!). This is THE Sanborn’s (the Casa de Azulejos – a 16th century palace turned into the world headquarters for the International Workers of the World – “Anarchists Unite” – decorated by Jose Clemene Orozco, now the world’s most elegant diner), but we favor the not-so-elegant coffee shop on the side. Less tourists.And Ms. Poniatowsa is a Socialist – maybe those Anarchist murals bother her. At the Café L’Opera (where Pancho Villa put a bullet hole in the ceiling trying to get those snobby waiter’s attention) – not a regular hangout, but I met an ex-cop who wanted to figure out the entry angle for Pancho’s bullethole – Carlos Slim (not as rich as Bill Gates, but up there on the same lists) came strolling in with his very heavily armed bodyguards. I guess it’s a tradeoff. If you’re the richest guy in Latin America, you have to go to L’Opera for a snack and travel in an armored SUV with a lot of scary-looking dudes. If you’re only a novelist, journalist and Polish royalty you go to the café Carlos owns and pay 11.50 for your café Americano like everyone else (free refills though).I don’t even need to buy coffee to see somebody who was somebody. I once saw Jimmy Carter walking into the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Jimmy also ranks an armored SUV and a lot of big, scary, heavily-armed hangers-on). I’m still annoyed the King and Queen of Spain (who I once ran into on the street) didn’t invite me to their son’s wedding… maybe the invitation got lost in the mail. Yesterday, I saw Junichiro Koizumi, drive by… it’s the holiday weekend, and I just happened to be walking up calle Cinco de Mayo when the motorcade came up the street. Mexicans are so laid back, it wasn’t much of an official motorcade — other than a traffic cop holding up the cross street traffic, wasn’t a lot to see — I’ve seen bigger funeral processions. The Prime Minister of Japan was the old hippie in the back of the stretch Toyota (of course). Followed by a vanload of Japanese officials (with cameras — are they surgically attached to all Japanese men over the age of 30?), a vanload of Boinas Negras (“black berets” — who out of uniform are just big, friendly guys, but in uniform look like the machine guns are for decoration — or to pound you into tamale if you fuck with them) and… one lone woman in the back of a Cadillac. Must have been the CIA contact.
I AM JUST SOOOOO JADED… I prefer my own neighborhood. It’s not the oldest neighborhood in the city (only being incorporated within the limits in 1550) and it’s antecedents aren’t exactly grand (it was the Aztec city dump), but it has its charms…. This was a wealthy neighborhood from the turn of the last century up until about WWII and touches of the old elegance still exist. Lots of late Porfieriate and Art Deco buildings, including the very weird Museo Chopo (a transplanted provincial German railway station… originally Porfirio had it brought over to house Tyranosauris Mex … now it’s the U.N.A.M. student art museum).In the 1920s, Sta. Maria del Ribera was a hotbed of Catholic reactionaries. Don’t ever say that Mexico hasn’t been ahead of the times… or that we are stuck in traditional gender roles. Our very own Osama bin Ladin was Madre Conchita, a former nun (the convents had been closed in 1924) who led weekly prayer services at the Josephine Fathers’ church on calle Sta. Maria del Ribera. The rest of the week, she was busy running guns to the Cristero guerillas (financed by my favorite crazy oil man, William F. Buckley – Senior. Junior’s crazy in his own way, but writes much better) and fomenting one plot against the government after another. She convinced — or inspired (depends whose history you read) one of her congregants to assassinate president (re)-elect Alvaro Obregon in 1929. Torral was tried, executed and buried out of our parish church. As were the the Pro Suarez brothers, who were radical clerics, but probably not terrorists. San Miguel Pro Suarez – he got the “San” in 1992 – is the patron saint of lottery tickets. His last words to the firing squad were “life’s a lottery, and I win a Christian martyrdom”. The site is now… of course… the National Lottery building). The Madre got life without parole on the Tres Marias, gave up on the Buckleys, settled down, married and raised a family (Tres Marias is Mexico’s Devils Island, but with better food. It’s still a penal colony, but the government wants to close it – mostly because its so expensive to maintain a high school for the convict’s children … and Mexicans tend to stay with mom and dad, so you have folks who’ve lived there all their lives, simply because grand-dad was a very bad boy when he was young).What finally got rid of the reactionaries around here was Francisco Franco. All those middle-class Spanish anarchist home-buyers made the area a hotbed of both leftist politics (it’s still a safe PRD district) and the arts. Later refugees, from occupied France (the French lycee faces the park), right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, and recently, Africa and the former Soviet Union, still favor it’s less-expensive, international atmosphere. While not as well known as wealthy areas like Condessa, nor for world-famous artists like Coyoacan, it still has more than it’s share of writers, painters, poets, web designers and “bohemians”. One of my neighbors is Paco Ignacio Taibo II, whose murder mysteries are probably the best books ever written about life in Mexico City (though, no… shootouts around the Angel de Independencia are not regular occurrences). His books are available in English through Amazon.com.
Being close to the Normal school, we have a lot of normal people too. Unfortunately, we’re just a tad too close to PRI headquarters. I don’t think it’s an accident that our PRD city council decided the area around the PRI was a zona de tolerencia. The ladies (and gentlemen) of the evening don’t bother the neighbors much… they had their own Independence Day celebration (part of their on-going protest against he new “Ley Civica” – Rudolf Guiliani’s brainchild that infringes on their “legitimate workers’ rights”). Actually, the Campesino’s Union headquarters (down the street) is noiser. Last year, they threw the old leadership out – of the second story window. Anyway, it’s a “live and let live” kind of place – with, best of all… no tourists!
And that’s all the news from Lake Tezcoco-begone, where all the women are strong (except those that are men dressed as women), the men are good looking and the children are… thankfully the little darlings have run out of firecrackers and they’ll all be back in school on Monday.
Categories: Alvaro Obregon · Artists, Writers, Philosophers, etc. · Carlos Slim · Ciudad de México · Cristeros · Elena Poniatowska · Francisco Franco · Jimmy Carter · Jose Clemene Orozco · Juan-Carlos of Spain · Junichiro Koizumi · La Raza (Mexican cultures and peoples) · Madre Conchita · Museo Chopo · Paco Ignacio Taibo II · Pancho Villa · Politica (Mexicana) · Real Mexico · San Miguel Pro Suarez · Santa Maria de la Ribera · Terrorism
