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My favorite Colombian
This is my all-time favorite photo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He’d just been punched out by Mario Vargas-Llosa at a literary do at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (I’m across the street...
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Downloads for Garcia Marquez
Via Regeneracion: 1- “CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD” http://aristobulo.psuv.org.ve/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/garcia-marquez-gabriel-cien-anos-de-soledad1.pdf 2- “DEL AMOR Y OTROS DEMONIOS”...
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“Profanity Pop”
Mexican artist José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros, at a showing in Los Angeles, mixed Disney characters with Mexican (and Catholic) imagery to create not just another cultural mash-up, but a succès de...
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The Revolution is out there…
It is one of the strangest facts of a strange country that the Mexican Revolution was rooted in ghosts. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in the very real one. Or, so it would seem, if once considers...
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As far to the left as the Constitution allows…
Today is the 45th anniversary of the death of Adolfo López Mateos, who presidency seeems so remarkable in retrospect, only because, as leader of the Party of the Institutional Revolution, he really did...
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Who were they?
As the saying goes “without corn there is no country”. Without our young people there is nothing. Elena Poniatowska summed up her speech at the Zocalo last Sunday by saying: We are facing a national...
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Romance! Intrigue! Mystery! Daniel Thomas Egerton
Apparently, it’s “National Novel Writing Month”… somewhere or another (never heard of it myself)… but for those stuck for a plot: from “Fashionable Bores, or Coolers in High Life, by Peter Quiz’ 1824...
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Chomsky on Latin America
From an interview by Greg Granden, published in The Nation (31 October 2014): GG: Immigration from Mexico and Central America is an issue that, in the United States, reveals the close connection...
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Diego Rivera and the Indian
It’s considered retro to use the word “Indian” when speaking of indigenous American people, and one asssumes that were he alive today, Rivera would speak of “indigenos” and not “indios”… unless he was...
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La Llorona 43
I just returned from a few days at the Feria Internacional del libro de Guadalajara… one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) “intellectual” gathering in Latin America, where… of course… there were a...
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Big Red
Looming above Chimalhuacán, Estado de México is the new 60 meter, 870 ton “Guerrero Chimalli”. Inaugurated 13 December, the Mexican sculptor Sebastían and the local administration who commissioned...
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Itskhk Berliner , mexikan dikhter
Sombrero tip to Esther Klein Buddenhagen. As with so many of our hemisphere’s intellectuals in the first half of the last century, his cultural foundation was laid as a European survivor of that insane...
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Jesus saves, but the Jesuits invest
Back to working on a revised (and expanded) Gods, Gachupines and Gringos. One who felt [the prejudice and discriminatory policies against Mexican-born colonial elites] keenly was the criollo Jesuit...
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Writers welcome!
English-language travel writing about Mexico goes back to the notorious Thomas Gage — the renegade monk turned Cromwellian propagandist, and has always been full of cliches and “ango-centric” views of...
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We’ve been here before….
A friend of mine recently said that the “greatest generation” in the United States was not those that lived through the Depression of the 1930s, and fought in Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s, but...
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Reading Thoreau in Mexico
Thoreau has been interpreted in many ways … which is only right, given that as a New England Transcendentalist, one’s intuition about an experience is the path to wisdom. Given that On The Duty of...
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You have the courage to be afraid
Juan Villoro’s El Puño en alto was published the 22 September 2017 in Reforma. Translation by Peter Davies published in Latin American Focus, 23 September 2017. A raised fist is normally seen as a...
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Mercedes Olivera, D.E.P.
Although we never managed to meet up in person, Mercedes Olivera and I were regularly running across each other, as “facebook friends” and reading each other’s work. She passed away last Friday (29...
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