Mexico

Arrest Of NYU Professor

Posted on by Laughingnomad

He was picked up outside the “Curtaduria,” a space for arts and performance in the next-door barrio of Jalatlaco.

Last week, a professor of German citizenship from New York University was arrested, photographed, finger-printed and interrogated by elements of the State Judicial Police.

It is unclear whether the professor was harassed because he was in town to participate in an international forum on democracy and press freedom in Oaxaca (and Mexico), or as part of an ongoing series of harassments aimed at the Curtaduria itself, where painter Francisco Toledo has sponsored a show considered to be very anti-Ulises Ruiz (the unloved governor of the state). What is clear is that the administration of governor Ruiz is still doing its best –not very successfully – to stop independent observers and media from telling the truth about what is going on here.

Monte Alban & The Miss Universe Contest

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I had worked with my friend Maria, psychologist & nurse practitioner, for some ten years in Oregon. On Saturday February 24 she arrived for a ten day visit with me. I have been leading her all over Oaxaca ever since…beginning with Monte Alban, the Zapotec ruins high on a hill overlooking the city.

Around 500 BC ancestors of Oaxaca’s present day Zapotecs founded what many experts believe to be the Americas’ earliest metropolis. Today the ruins of platforms, pyramids, palaces and ceremonial ball courts still remain…much of it decorated with inscriptions in a language yet to be deciphered, recording the exploits of their god-kings. Monte Alban flourished as a city for a millenium with as many as 40,000 people at it’s height. The city was repeatedly reconstructed over the centuries, like a peeling onion, first by the Olmecs, two periods of Zapotecs and finally succumbing to the Mixtecs by A.D. 1000 who used it mainly as a burial ground.

So it is with anguish that Oaxacans are anticipating the besmirching of this ancient site. Mexico’s national tourist bureau has decided to hold the “costume competition” phase of the annual Miss Universe contest at the Zapotec shrine of Monte Alban in May.
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Protestor In The Zocalo Fountain

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Last Friday Ana and Steve saw a man take off his clothes down to his shorts and climb into one of the fountains in the Zocalo. I got a call from Ana: “Eunice get down here with your camera!”

it didn’t take very long before two municipal police told him to get out. He carried a sign that said, “señor gobernador, necesitamos agua.” He was from Santa Ana-one of the many communities and colonias here that have no supply of water at this time of year. When the drought kicks in people have water trucked in to fill cisterns…just as we do in the Centro.

Unfortunately, just as I arrived, a group of 5 officers talked the man out of the fountain, watched as he got himself dressed again, and then calmly escorted him away in their truck. So no photos. He probably will be beaten.

Why is it that we can have fountains running, but people don’t have water for washing??

Contemplating Going “Home”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I was quickly stopped by a policeman. “Have you been drinking? Have you been smoking pot? Your eyes are all red! Then he made me stand, in high heels, on one foot and count to forty. Then follow his finger moving back and forth with my eyes. Then he let me, shaken, go.

Last time I got off the plane in Portland from almost a year in Asia, I found myself jet-lagged and completely disoriented…driving on the “wrong” side of the road.

Found this blog by a Chinese-American on Bootsnall. He is probably much younger but his experience is none-the-less very similar to mine.

Coming Home: Sharks Also Need Constant Motion
By: Jeffrey Lee

“Coming home meant coming down. It was easier to stay up. I’d return home to piles of bills and an empty refrigerator. Buying groceries, I’d get lost – too many aisles, too many choices; cool mist blowing over fresh fruit; paper or plastic; cash back in return? I’d wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion.

Out at night, weaving through traffic, looking for trouble, I’d lose myself in crowds. Gaggles of girls with fruit-colored drinks talked about face products and film production. I’d see their lips move, look at their snapshot smiles and highlighted hair. I didn’t know what to say.
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Following Trouble?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Good grief! Either I am following trouble around the world or trouble is following me! First a violent demonstration on a university campus in Istanbul…then the tsunami in Thailand…then the coup in Thailand…then the subway strike in New York City…then the teacher strike in Oaxaca and now this just as I am planning on returning this fall. Or maybe it’s just that there is always trouble all over the world!

Security in Bangkok To Be Tightened
Bangkok Post 2007-02-21
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Solitude In The Sierra Norte

Posted on by Laughingnomad

In search of a little alone time yesterday, I drove 40 miles (but two hours) north of Oaxaca City up into lush, pine-clad crests descending deep into river canyons to the Sierra Juarez, the birth-land of Benito Juarez, Oaxaca’s beloved favorite son.

Born in 1806 in the municipio of San Pablo Guelatao in the village of Santo Tomas Ixtlan, his parents died tragically when Benito was three. His uncle took him in and his childhood was spent mostly herding his uncle’s flocks in the surrounding hills. But Benito left for Oaxaca city in 1818 to live with his sister in the genteel, well-to-do Maza family where his sister worked as a cook. He gained exposure to music, books, politics and people that was not possible for a poor boy in the country. He ended up studying law and eventually entered politics…rising from state to federal legislator, then Supreme Court judge, and finally was unanimously elected governor by Oaxaca’s legislature in 1849. He was elected Mexico’s president for three terms…interrupted first by civil war and then by the French Intervention. He toiled day and night to realize his dreams for Mexico but died “from exhaustion” in 1872.

I stopped in nearby Ixtlan de Juarez, quickly perused the small rotating Monday market but skipped the huge baroque church built with fortunes made with slave labor growing cochineal (used to make the magnificent red dye) where I would have seen this:
ixtlan-1.jpg
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Wedding In Teotitlan del Camino

Posted on by Laughingnomad

My friend Bardo is from Teotitlan del Camino near the Puebla border and his parents, three brothers and a sister still live there. Bardo’s father, Don Bardo, a furniture maker, and Dona Mari raised six children in their big open-air three story house in this town of 6000 so there was plenty of room for all of us who made the four-hour trip: me, Ana and Oscar from next door, Bardo’s wife Mica and her two children, Pavel and Angelita and Bardo’s sister Pilar. At the last minute Bardo didn’t go and missed the trip entirely.

We took the four lane Mexico City toll highway NE to Tehuacan and then through Puebla back down into Oaxaca again to Teotitlan del Camino (or de Flores Magon) and Pilar drove ahead with Pavel so that we could follow – which did us no good as I drove faster than she did. When it was time to leave the carretera Mica directed us to Miahuatlan instead of the road to Teotitlan so we ended up detouring slowly on pot-holed dirt roads through a couple tiny scenic villages…San Sebastian and Coxcatlan, the birthplace of corn…which was fine with me.
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CoCo’s Cantina

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The last time Max partook of his Brandy Presses at Cocos, a working man’s bar with classic swinging louvered half-doors near his apartment, he met with an altercation with a burly self-professed “communist” Mexican who insisted on appropriating Max’s drink. Max is a gringo…spread the wealth…I guess was this guy’s thinking. But Max, who subsists on a small social security check, was not to be outdone. It ended up with Delia, the bartender, who is incidently quite a lovely woman, walking Max home…cane and all. Embarrassed, Max had not been back for several weeks. So one night this week Steven from next door and I met Max at CoCo’s to help out with his reentry. Max is a great storyteller and the evening was enjoyed by all…if it just wasn’t for the music they apparently assumed would be our preference. We laughed when the minute the bill was settled up they switched to Mexican rancheros. We will have to let them know next time that we really didn’t come to Mexico to listen to old sappy American soft rock especially when we can revel to the happy sounds of drunken Mexican sing-alongs…and that high-pitched “campesino yodel” as I call it. Am going to have to find out what the Mexicans call it…certainly not a “yodel.”

Yesterday I watched “Babel” on my computer…borders and boundaries…subjects I could certainly relate to. Now I’m getting history in the HBO series…”Rome.”

This morning Bardo, Mica, Pavel and Angelita and Steven, Ana and little Oscar and I are driving to Teotitlan del Camino, a small village up by the Puebla border, for a “la boda”…a Mexican blow-out wedding celebration over the weekend. We are taking a hundred dollars worth of Tequila. If I stop blogging someone send out the Green Angels.

The Looming Tower

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Have recently finished the acclaimed “The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright which is a history of Islamic radical fundamentalism beginning in the 1930’s and 40’s and ending with the bombing of the World Trade Center. Including the ridiculous and ultimately tragic machinations of the CIA and FBI, it reads like an unbelievable novel…and it left me drained and feeling hopeless.

The Christian Science Monitor reported today that Al-Qaida said in its monthly magazine posted on an Islamic web site that “cutting oil supplies to the United States, or at least curtailing it, would contribute to the ending of the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.” The group said it was making the statements as part of Osama bin Laden’s declared policy. It was not possible to verify independently that the posting was from the terror faction, said the Monitor.

Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for last year’s attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia and Yemen after bin Laden called on militants to stop the flow of oil to the West. The group also was behind the 2002 attack on a French oil tanker that killed one person in the Gulf of Aden, according to the paper.

Also reported today was that Egypt has arrested nearly 80 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What really frightened me recently was the sight of a young artist, on his knees in front of Santo Domingo, working on a gigantic poster of Bin Laden. It was never put up because the next day the PFP routed and burned the planton in the Santo Domingo Plaza.

What Now For Oaxaca?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Local analysts argue about whether the causes of the popular social movement here in Oaxaca are utter corruption and the history of political bossism by the PRI party, the effects of transnational/neoliberal policies created by NAFTA, the lack of economic development by federal and state authorities…or just plain infighting between any and all political and social groups.

In Oaxaca State, the main employer has been the government.

Outside of Oaxaca City the lost jobs are mainly in agriculture and that results in a huge migration to the US and Canada. The Isthmus is in an uproar over the wind farms. They were “rented” by intermediaries who gave the local owners next to nothing (100 pesos annually per hectare) and then turned around and rented the land to the transnationals at hefty prices. They are making grand profits while the local people are left behind.

This last weekend the APPO met, while other APPO activists are in Mexico City or the USA or Europe or somewhere, trying to get support. The biggest decision now has to do with how to approach the elections.
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