Per EFE (via Latin American Herald Tribune, Caracas):

Jamaica’s foreign minister says his country should adopt Spanish as a second official language to foster expanded trade and cooperation with its neighbors in the Caribbean and Central America.

Growing ties between the Caribbean Community and Latin America, the Dominican Republic’s desire to join Caricom and the fact that Jamaica is surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries make it imperative for Jamaicans to become proficient in Spanish, Kenneth Baugh said.

…

“One has got to accept that the wider horizon of Latin America and the Caribbean integrating economically and in trade, is offering a much larger opportunity to Jamaica. It means that enterprises in Jamaica will need to expand and increase exports that will increase revenues for the country,” Baugh said.

In his short post “Mexico: U.S. Totem” on Secret History, Jason Dormandy hits on one reason “The United States desperately needs Mexico, and I’m NOT talking about trade and labor”:

I consider the general U.S. obsession with Mexico as a place to get cheap and easy sex and booze as serving as something of the same function as Carnival serves in Latin America. Americans take a few days to blow off some steam before returning to the norms of society – at least in their minds. Once more, the presence of an “outside” entity allows U.S. citizens to consider themselves more saintly at home than they really are, letting them address issues of consumption and sexuality they would otherwise be unwilling to address.

I wonder if this doesn’t also have something to do with our obsession with Mexico as “A Dangerous Place” (the title of a one of the worst books ever written about Mexico, by the way) — our need to project our own phobias about our carnal nature onto the “other” — something dark, mysterious and tinged with evil.

Alien Invaders!

Orson Wells’ 1939 “War of the Worlds” was probably the best hoax in the radio age. Too good to pull off once, the joke was tried again in Santiago, Chile in 1944, and in Quito, Ecuador in 1949… which led to serious consequences (Erwin C., The Latin Americanist):

…[O]n February 12, 1949 listeners to Radio Quito were interrupted from an evening of music and told that Martians landed 20 miles outside the capital city.[Radio Quito Drama Director Leonardo] Páez acted as a reporter and claimed that the aliens overran a military base and were on their way to Quito.

Predictably, word of mouth spread over the spoof alien landing and panicked citizens took to the streets. Quito’s mayor was fooled and called on people to “defend our city” while priests tended to flocks of repentant parishioners. Some didn’t believe that aliens had landed but instead blamed neighboring Peru …

Eventually, Radio Quito staff were informed of the panic and publicly admitted to the hoax. Mass fear quickly changed into collective anger as all hell would break loose:

El Comercio, the largest and most respected paper in the country, owned radio Quito and the station was housed in the same building as the newspaper. It was to this location that the mob advanced, and in what might have seemed an ironic act by the crowd, set fire to copies of the El Comercio newspaper and hurled these (and other objects) at the building. The main entrance was blocked and a fire swiftly broke out…

Francisco Franco meets the Aztec Mummy

From Inexplicata, the Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy:

Generalissimo Francisco Franco… would issue a slight cough whenever he watched a movie – a sign of his discomfiture at what he was seeing. His iron legion of censors would then get to work on a persecution that the author describes as “one of the most ruthless, extensive and arbitrary” of the 20th century…

As could only be expected, the marauding zombies, mummies, wolf people and vampires that plagued B-movies for generations were not only enemies of the state, but also of the Church…

The censors sharpened their scissors, however, not for an American B-movie but a Mexican production straight out of Churubusco Studios: Director Rafael Portillo’s La Momia Azteca (The Aztec Mummy, 1957). This time they did not bother attacking the subject of the film, but the intelligence of an entire nation, rejecting it as “a mixture of confusion and errors for the uncultured masses, which represent the majority” and “suitable to the cultural childishness of the Mexican people,” chock-a-block with reincarnation, transmigration and other “shenanigans”…

And still dead…

Chris Hawley (USA Today) in Aguascalientes:

“Mexicans have death imprinted all over their art and culture,” museum director Jose Antonio Padilla said. “So why not a museum about it?”

The museum came about because a Mexican art collector had a lot of skeletons in his closet: dozens of tiny calaveritas, or skeleton dioramas, along with hundreds of other death-related artworks he had acquired over 50 years.

The owner, Octavio Bajonero Gil, was looking for a museum to take his collection. Meanwhile, the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, a state college, was looking to found an art museum and wanted something different, Padilla said.

The museum, with Bajonero’s donation as its core collection, opened in 2007 in two buildings owned by the university in downtown Aguascalientes. Admission is 20 pesos, about $1.53.

…

About one-third of the museum’s 70,000 annual visitors are from other countries, mainly the United States.

“It’s definitely kind of bizarre,” said Spencer Garcia-Stinson, 24, of Gilford, N.H. “In the United States, we don’t like to talk about death, but here they’re dealing with it so openly. … It’s amazing.”

Comprehensive health insurance is an idea whose time has come in America.

There has long been a need to assure every American financial access to high quality health care. As medical costs go up, that need grows more pressing.

Now, for the first time, we have not just the need but the will to get this job done. There is widespread support in the Congress and in the Nation for some form of comprehensive health insurance.

Damn socialist!

Anti-imperialist hero

… If national honesty is to be disregarded and a desire for territorial expansion or dissatisfaction with a form of government not our own ought to regulate our conduct, I have entirely misapprehended the mission and character of our government and the behavior which the conscience of the people demands of their public servants.

Grover Cleveland, 1893

Writer Sarah Menkedick, who with photographer Jorge Luis Santiago, put out Posa Tigres, post from Oaxaca… often about Oaxaca… always put out something worth reading, or looking at, as in Sarah’s “My Crush on Grover Cleveland“:

Something about Grover Cleveland is funny. I don’t know why, but Grover is just one of those things you can sprinkle into the conversation for some sudden hilarity. He’s one of those presidents that we all vaguely remember from some high school history class we dozed through, but unlike, say William Henry Harrison, he’s funny. All the stiff mustachioed seriousness of White Male American History is summed up by Grover.

I realized Grover was funny when I was writing a stick-a-needle-in-your-eye boring TOEFL passage about his second presidential term. As sometimes happens writing these passages about tapirs or biomechanical engineering, I get sucked into the topic. So with this slight curiosity about why Grover was so funny I wikipedia-d him and found out that actually, his presidency contains some of the great themes of American history. Namely, fruit company barons taking over sovereign countries, American businessmen snuggling up with Congress to take over a country here, overthrow a government there, and the general subjugation of native peoples, etc, etc, etc. It also contains one strikingly NON-American theme – a president who apparently opposed imperialism.

Blow against the empire

Dr. Nagarjuna G. of Mumbai (Gnowgi) fires off a sternly worded letter to U.S. Ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer in protest of the unfair treatment of one class of visa applicants:

… namely, an imposition on all citizens to use a particular proprietary commercial software in order to submit their application for visa.This is how it happens.

All applications for a U.S. visa from India are done through the Visa Facilitation Services (VFS). The procedure is to first pay the visa fee, wait for two days or till the number gets activated, and then proceed through the filling of forms at the website (http://www.vfs-usa.co.in). As I did the above, along the way I found that the VFS site did not work with my Mozilla Firefox browser. On inquiring with VFS I found that the site works with Microsoft Internet Explorer only.

As a regular user of the GNU/Linux operating system, I do not use any proprietary software either at work or at home, hence I found this an unwarranted restriction on my individual freedom.

The growth of empire

David Mobert (In These Times) on the unlikely roots of our imperial overlords:

The success of Wal-Mart is in many ways paradoxical. The world’s biggest corporation—and one of the most technologically sophisticated—emerged from the poor, rural backwaters of Arkansas, a state regularly at the bottom of most state achievement rankings. Increasingly global in procurement and sales, it grew from a base that was racially homogenous—a result of the violent expulsion of African-Americans—and suspicious of all outsiders. A company that plays on “family values” is based in a region with one of the highest divorce rates in the United States. A region of low-income families adhering to a range of anti-materialist Protestant faiths gives birth to this colossus of consumerism…

A division of the spoils

The right wing in the United States, normally the “we’re number one!” bunch, cheered when the International Olympics Committee by-passed the United States when awarding the 2016 Summer Games to Rio de Janeiro. In the weird world of U.S. political discourse, the right decided that losing the Olympics was more important than the temporary discomforture of the President (who lobbied for his home town of Chicago). What they didn’t seem to realize is what it says about the previous President and about those U.S. visa problems:

(Think Progress)

… the International Olympic Committee (IOC) may have chosen to reject hosting the 2016 summer olympic games in Chicago due to the post-9/11 visa tourist policies established by his predecessor, George W. Bush. Michael Froomkin, Professor at the University of Miami School of Law, is convinced that the “the same stupid anti-visitor policy that is destroying American higher education” also sunk Chicago’s Olympic bid.

Imperial style

“Prairie Mary” — whom I discovered through Jason Dormady’s “Secret History:  Reflections on Latin America” — is Mary Scriver, a Montana writer and minister. Prairie Mary introduces us to the upside down discussions of imperialism in the work of world of “Eric Blair” — not the one better known by his “nom de plume” George Orwell, but University of Chicago professor Norvel Morris.

Morris’ work was focused on the insanity plea, but within the context of the hard work of trying to get justice to bear some relationship to the law — or the other way around — esp. in places where an empire-mongering nation had come in over the top of an ancient pre-existing way of doing things. In order to do this in a class discussion without either free-floating in theory or invading someone’s privacy (often legally forbidden) and in order to make sure the salient points were covered, Morris wrote up what amounted to short stories…

…

Morris decided that he would write taking Orwell’s real name as his nom de plume. Orwell/Blair is considered one of the finest of writers of his type. Morris pretended — as has often been done, maybe more commonly with paintings — that he had found a cache of long-lost manuscripts. Morris, as an Aussie, was rather audacious. The trouble was that since he could write as well as Orwell, his faux essays were picked up by the credulous media as real. So he had to get a friend to label him a hoax. It happened that I was typing for him and even answering his phone (his secretary must have been on vacation) when the media began to call about the “hoax,” which excited them as much as the original “discovery.”

Visitors to a small website:

(0 seconds doesn’t always mean the person stayed less than a second.  I just happened to grab this while looking up someone else, and the Wassilite — Wassilonian? — was probably still on line).

Hope it’s not another of those shady folks scoping out a sunny refuge:

(Via New of the Restless,  not Lorena Bobbitt )

She is the Matador

Neither Mari Paz Vega nor Eva Florencia is unique. As related in Ella Es El Matador (She Is the Matador), the new documentary airing on PBS’ POV (Point of View) series, there is a long and surprising history of women fighting in the Spanish bullring — and fighting to have the chance to do so. For all of Spain’s traditional machismo and the image of the matador as a quintessentially male figure, women have always wanted to fight bulls. A 1908 law banning women from bullfighting is testament to women’s determination to perform in the ring and not just shout “Olé!” from the stands.

Art and death

Guy Adams (The Independent, U.K.) on the murder of French film director Christian Poveda:

It was a senselessly violent end to a career spent exposing the senseless violence that has for years plagued El Salvador for years. The killing was also predictable.

Poveda had made himself a marked man, thanks to his film La Vida Loca (Crazy Life), which chronicled daily life among the 30,000-odd gang members whose activities have turned the tiny Central American nation of 5.5 million into one of the most dangerous places in the Western hemisphere…

You can’t go home (to mashed potatoes) again:

The Midwesterner in Mexico seeks sustenance during a stint in Grand Island, Nebraska:

Although a rigorous existing dinner schedule prevented us from checking out any Latino establishments for la cena, I have extracted a commitment from Mom & Dad to go suss out the coctel de camarones (shrimp cocktail) at Restaurante Ario after I leave. And we did manage to make it to El Taco Naco for a snack, arguably the most DF-esque option in town.

Tourism and its complaints

Dr. Lisa Wade (Sociological Images) dissects Washington Post travel writer Amit Paley’s article on Thailand, and gaping at the “colorful native costumes”:

The women she meets confirm that they wear traditional garb, continue traditional practices (such as the brass rings), and are even forced to remain in the villages, in order to attract tourists.  Men, largely, appear to be exempted from earning their keep in this way.

Paley says that one powerful male village member said that the women “must wear the dress because of tradition” and “spoke excitedly about its appeal to tourists and noted that half of the village’s income of $30,000 a year comes from tourism.”

A woman in brass rings told her “We do it to put on a show for the foreigners and tourists!”

The natives are … uh… restless

No need to go to Thailand for see strange and colorful native customs. Laura Martinez (“Mi Blog es Tu Blog“) presents a particularly rich example of El Paso cultural synergy:

I’ll post later on the Informe when I’ve actually read it.  I’m not sure I’m the only one who really hasn’t seen it, since it was sort of just dropped off for the Delegates and Senators — the pres, during the PAN majority having pushed through a constitutional change that makes his actual attendance optional, he’s not even bothering to deliver the thing in person, having sent about to be replaced Sec. de Gobernacion, Fernando Gómez-Mont,to drop the thing off.  El Universal actually clocked the time it took Gómez-Mont to perform what should be the President’s task… two minutes and 35 seconds.  These speeches are supposed to last about two hours and thirty five minutes.

Calderon did send me a link to a TV spot selling a new highway (I’m on his email list)… which doesn’t tell me much other than a new highway is one of the things on the Presidential wish list, but there’s probably a lot more than that… certainly hope so anyway.