From Xico

Mexico's Night at the Oscars

Those of you who watched the Oscars last Sunday probably saw Alejandro González Iñárritu give his very short speech. In case you didn't, or in case you forgot, González Iñárritu won the award for best director and his film for best film and I don't remember what the third award was for. He said, "I want to dedicate this award to my fellow Mexicans, to those who live in Mexico, and I pray that we can find and build the government that we deserve." 

He also said, "I just pray that they [immigrants in the US] might be treated with the same dignity and respect as those who arrived before and built this incredible nation of immigrants."

Quite a lot of people in Gringolandia as in Mexico noticed and commented.  My favorite column is by Jorge Ramos writing in Reforma.  Anderson Cooper is the US version of Jorge Ramos, but Jorge Ramos has Andersoon Cooper beat by a mile (or maybe 1.61 kilometers), although maybe because he has such varied places to express himself and those places don't mind references to writers like Octavio Paz..  

Among other things, Ramos said,

"It isn't easy being Mexican these days. If you live in Mexico, you are live in one of the most violent countries on the continent and, possibly, one of the most corrupt."

 

To me it appears as if the President and some of his cronies don't even realize they are corrupt: it is a fairly small club they belong to, and they only talk to each other, or so it seems.  Maybe they say, "Well, everybody does it."  And perhaps everyone they know does.

 

Ramos goes on to talk about undocumented workers (or what a lot of people in Gringolandia like to call 'illegals' or worse:

"And if you live in the United States without a work permit, visa or residence permit, it is very possible that at some point you might have been discriminated against and even persecuted.¨

 

Because we live in a largely working class colonia we know some people who have gone to Gringolandia and returned.  Not too many, maybe one I can think of, really wants US citizenship or wants to return because he prefers life there. Legal immigrants have to return to keep their legal status in case they ever want to go again to work.

Ramos continues, "There is little to celebrate. But when there is, no one stops us. So the cyber fiesta for winning four Oscars—film director Alejandro González Iñárritu (3) and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki—is attention-grabbing. These Oscars follow the two won last year by Emmanuel Lubezki [his first] and director Alfonso Cuarón.

"We Mexicans are good at partying. Our fiestas are inversely proportional to our squabbles. The more problems there are, the more we enjoy partying. In Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz wrote:

'It is significant that a country as sad as ours has so many and such lively fiestas. For us, the fiesta is an explosion, an outburst ... There is nothing more lively than a Mexican fiesta.'

"But, also, our fiestas are a form of protest. We take advantage of them to complain and let off steam. Once again Paz:

"In the swirl of the fiesta, we explode. More than opening up, we tear ourselves open."

"Iñárritu's speech in accepting one of the Oscars channeled the anger and frustration felt by many Mexicans on both sides of the border:

"Having come to office via an election questioned for tricks and serious allegations of conflict of interest, Peña Nieto is not an Oscar-winning President. If we have two Oscar-winning filmmakers, why haven't we been able to find a good director of the country?

"The second part of Iñárritu's remarks, about Mexican immigrants living in the United States, was equally strong:

'I just pray that they might be treated with the same dignity and respect," said Birdman's director, "as those who arrived before and built this incredible nation of immigrants.'

"More than half the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States are Mexican. They live persecuted and in the shadows. And the current Congress and Republican governors, mostly, are trying to block President Barack Obama's executive action that would try to help millions of these Mexicans. It is difficult and frustrating being Mexican and undocumented in the United States.

How could Sean Penn have joked,'Who gave a green card to this bastard?' Fortunately, the audience   didn't laugh."Ït went over so badly because It reflects many Americans' xenophobia and rejection of Mexican immigrants."  

 

Or maybe worse, total lack of interest in Mexico and Mexicans.  A relative, a well-educated successful man said he doubted many people in Boston where he lives ever thought about Mexicans.  This didn't seem to be an issue of concern with him.

 

Ramos went on, "In a television interview after the award, Iñárritu was asked about how weird it was that two Mexicans, consecutively, have won an Oscar for best director. 'That's suspicious,' he responded with humor. But, actually, these Oscars destroy many of the stereotypes about Mexicans.

"It isn't easy being Mexican, either inside or outside of Mexico. But when things are tough, the wins are richer, they have more impact, and the fiestas are a blow-out. For there, among the tequilas and the Tweets, I again heard the phrase: Success is the best revenge."

 

Related articles

Oscars 2015: Best Director Winner Is Alejandro González Iñárritu

Birdman (2014): A meditation on the meaning of art, success and failure,life and death, and human existence

Oliver Stone Corrected (by others) and a bit about Elections Here

I put up a mild post with some translations of Oliver Stone's statements in connection with his new movie, "Savages", which appeared in La Jornada and BBC Mundo.  But for some more explosive commentary on Stone, see InSight Crime, one of my favorite sites for violent news, which will send you to some further links.  I avoid writing specifically about this stuff.  The idea of doing so scares me, and I don't know anything more than I read in well-thumbed sources in any event.

Mexfiles offers a post from Ganchoblog.  All these folks point out that Oliver Stone's figures don't add up.  En mi opinion, los gringos who live in Gringolandia get all their (mis)information from north of the border.

Regarding the elections in Mexico. MexFiles offers some good and amusing commentary in English on the Mexican elections for those of you up north who want to know more about what was/is going on. The Americas Program offers more comprehensive coverage, also in English. Yesterday we went to our dentist whose office is on a quiet street in a pretty middle class residential suburbanish area.  The community bulletin board outside was filled with notices of peaceful activities for citizens to partake in to help AMLO in his fight against the Powers that Be.

Oliver Stone, Savages/Los Salvajes and Some of His Opinions

Oliver Stone's new movie, Savages, has received good, interesting reviews from such diverse sources as The NY Times, The New Yorker and Roger Ebert, among others. However, there is a general shadow of criticism hanging over many of them about the lack of what might be called a moral core. It is possible, though I haven't seen it, that the reviewers don't quite "get it."  This doesn't seem typical of Stone, who has loved to provoke discussion over important issues starting with (if I remember right) JFK's assassination. But maybe he is using Savages as a catalyst for expressing his views rather than presenting them overtly in the movie itself. .

In two articles, one in BBC Mundo, the BBC service in Spanish, and one in La Jornada, Stone gives some opinions.   He is no expert on Mexico, but nonetheless has some interesting if not necessarily original things to say.  Bits of both pieces below. I did the translating.

*****

Oliver Stone: The War against the Narco is a Disaster" in BBC Mundo by Valeria Perasso

Oliver Stone has experience bringing violence to the big screen: he has done it with Natural Born Killers and with Platoon. 

Now the US director has chosen to tell about a different kind of violence, that of narcotrafico and the Mexican cartels.  Thus was born Savages, the film that has reached the heights of media interest in the US and not only for its technique and cinemetography:  it provided the point of departure for Stone, always talkative and polemical, to raise his voice in favor of the legalization of drugs [is anyone surprised?]

"The war against drugs knows no limits.  It is a form of slavery to make so many young people end up in jail because of drug trafficking, it is an international problem and it isn't going to end, at least until they change the rules.  To decriminalize drugs would be the first step," suggests the director to BBC Mundo in Los Angeles.

An open marijuana user since his service in Vietnam at the end of th 1960s, Stone says he has tried grass from all over.  "The best that I have smoked in 40 years is produced today in California."

The southern part of this state in the US is the setting for a story "which is fiction for now," according to the film maker, about a Mexican cartel seeking to expand its business.  And to succeed, it needs the support of a trio of young hippies, beach lovers and marijuana sellers....

The collision between the two business models for the distribution of illegal substances is the excuse Stone chose to reflect on a truth which he considers undeniable: the narco, and this war is a phenomenon with two different faces, one for each side of the border.

"It's curious that there has been no explosion of violence on this side, except for isolated incidents.  There have been deaths and violence, yes.  But it is not a wave in proportion to the activity.  It is in the interest of the Mexican cartels that they keep it this way, because bad publicity inside the US would bring grave consequences," opined the director.

********************

"Felipe Calderón is like [George W.] Bush in 2001: He Detonated his Own War"

by Juan José Olivares in La Jornada, 10 July 2012

Why did you compare President Felipe Calderón with George W. Bush, La Jornada asked Oliver Stone, winner of three Oscars and a leading light of world cinema.

The producer/director, who as much in his fictional feature films as in his documentaries rubs salt in sociopolitical wounds, answers: "I'm not a psychologist, nor do I know President Felipe Calderón personally.  Neither do I follow politics in Mexico in detail, but anyone can see that unleashing this war against the drug cartels was crazy, a disaster.

"Calderon was enamored of Bush's idea in 2001, when Bush decided to  make war against Iraq, and so, Calderóm started his own.  This violence was unnecessary...."

For this reason, Stone said, the results of the recent presidential elections in Mexico are a repudiation by the Mexican people of their current president....[The] highly political director ...is in Mexico to promote his recent work, Savages, the story of a hypothetical war, very bloody, between the producers of marijuana in California and a Mexican cartel who tries to take over their business....

For Stone, one way of stopping this war is "to decriminalize the use of drugs.  It's what intelligent people think; this is the first step.  In whatever form, the legalization of marijana would be the beginning.  But one has to realize that politics will interfere, because there are economic interests.  But the first thing to do is to say that the drug is not a demon, that it is not to blame; you can use it in a medical context or for pleasure, but in the end the financial aspect is the most important for all involved. This haas been a terrible thing: an economy of this type, which we would call an underground economy," said Stone, who returns to the theme of drugs for the first time since Midnight Express and Scarface, for which he wrote the scripts....

"We know that some governments have deals with the drug cartels, but not only them...we are speaking of corruption, which is here, right around the corner.  Many people are involved in the business.  But we can take that first step with depenalization.  As a society, we are prepared, because many of us have smoked since high school, no matter where we come from.  For many it is normal to smoke cannabis; a great many people do it.

"I recommend that the government legalize it, charge taxes and in this manner help its economy...," insisted the creator of Natural Born Killers, Nixon and Born on the 4th of July, among other films.

However, Stone accepts that there are hidden forces who don't want the legalization of marijuana because it isn't convenient for them.  There are politicans, police, corrupt labor leaders and prison directors without ethics...who only want to make money."

One of the actors in the movie who was present at the interview, the Mexican Demián Bichir, [believes] that the real problem is rooted in "corruption and impunity....as much in the United States as in Mexico, and it appears that there is no escape.  The curious thing is that those who are most affected are always the poorest people, those whom  you see in the prisons."

For the actor Sandra Echeverria, "The problem of the war among cartels is the corruption in both countries."

....Echeverria argues that Oliver Stone knows "What theme to use and in what moment.  He doesn't seek only to make movies that entertain, but he also seeks to create conscienc. Savages is a work which deals with strong ideas, but in the end, it makes you smile, because of the use of black humor.  It is a satire, a cliche of what happens every day."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Che Guevara at Harvard (sort of)

There's a neat collection of blogs at Harvard called FinalClub.org which essentially posts summaries of the lectures of various classes.  The one I've been following is on American protest literature, and this particular entry addresses the 1960s, particularly through the lens of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  It is indeed interesting, and with a very telling critique of the failure of non-Civil Rights protests. One of the main criticisms of protest in the US at the period, and to some extent since, is that it turned into a movement of consumers rather than actors.  The blog entries are summaries with commentaries on the lectures, not the lectures themselves, and boy are they tantalizing.  However, in their own way, they are also adequate for casual readers like me. 

So all of this is because the lecture addresses the commercialization of Che Guevara:

Here is Stauffer’s trenchant point: redefining protest as a cultural act (an expression of freedom through sexuality, drugs and alcohol) is the establishment’s primary method of co-opting political protest. Whenever capitalist industries figure out how to make money from the activist ethos, they effectively reroute political transformation back through the sphere of consumption. (A recent example of this was the fad – no largely past, thankfully – of plastering image on just about everything possible. I once saw the Che image on a wall clock. Talk about the vacuity of commodification. Anti-capitalism sells! The best Che shirt Your Intrepid Blogger has ever seen had a caption below the standard image that said, “Your Logo Here.”)