More Sunday readings…

25 May 2008

When I was 18 I joined a in-yo-face gay rights group based on Mexico city who was well know for its rude, raw and loud tactics to rise awareness on HIV , civil unions and some other stuff. The lesson I learned from that was: Mexico wasn’t ready to come out of the closet.

It was in the mid 90’s when before AMLO anti-gay politics and corruption invaded the local congress and ended a lot of initiatives some of the NGO’s and the historical gay movement in Mexico had be trying not to pass as law, but at least discuss it as a possibility in the national agenda. The group would gather in the long-time-gay bunker “El Taller”, located in the hearth of the city, on Tuesday nights there would be readings and conferences on several subjects that had to do with the movement, the HIV crisis and obviously, there would be “onda” and music and booze after that.

Speaking of booze… where were the first wineries in the United States?

…in 1629 the first grapevines were planted along the banks of the Rio Grande on a Piro Indian Mission at Senecu in central New Mexico. Sacramental wine production began there in 1633 and continued for the next 40 years. Meanwhile, vineyards spread along the Rio Grande Valley.

A Taste of Southwest Wine, Becky Brooks, Carmen Estrada, Elvi Nieto and Ruth Vise, Borderlands (El Paso Community College).

Texas may be “the laboratory of bad ideas,” as Mollie Ivins famously put it, but even in Texas, some civil servants try to do the right thing, only to run afoul of Homeland Stupidity, as the Texas Observer reports:

Across Texas, state and federal workers are clashing over children. Toughened federal rules designed to deter illegal immigration are creating unintended consequences for Texas’ Child Protective Services (CPS). Caseworkers along the Texas-Mexico border are struggling to navigate the new policies. It falls to them to care for undocumented children who have been removed from abusive families. Child welfare is a state issue. Immigration is a federal issue. State workers run the risk of five years in prison and several thousand dollars in fines from the federal government just for shepherding their young undocumented charges.

Dang… you know it’s bad when Ronald Reagan was absolutely right: Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

XicanoPwr — with his usual flair for writing on both pop culture and scholarship — looks at Afro-Mexican culture, and what it means for Mexican-Americans:

African roots go beyond Latina/o pop culture. African roots can be found along side with our indigenous heritage. The long-established Siete Partidas laws of Spain granted slaves the right to select their spouses and during that time, the majority of slaves brought to Mexico were male.