From Xico

A really exceptional blog: Bracing Views

I know some of my friends think I'm a raving lefty, a signed-up member of Antifa WAAAY to the left of Bernie Sanders, a very vocal supporter of Alexandria Ocasio.Cortez and her squad.  Even if you do, I urge you to take a look at a blog called Bracing Views written by William J. Astore, a twenty-year veteran of the US Air Force who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the US Navy Postgraduate School.  He is a captivating writer as well as extremely insightful.  LOOK HIM UP!

Amos Moore should be alive today to see this published correction to African and American history

In this week's New York Review of Books, Howard W. French reviews several recent books of African history which very successfully banish the common and incorrect stereotypes of the African past that many Europeans and USAers have held: that Africa was "primitive", without states, etc.  I have known this.  I have a Master's degree in African History from the University of Minnesota where the research we were exposed to made this clear.  Nonetheless, I heard nothing at that time about Africans in the Americas before slavery.  There has been a lot of quite reasonable speculation about the possibility that Africans landed on the coast of the Americas a long time ago, but none that has been, as far as I know, acknowledged by "main stream (white?) historians. The book that finally presents this in a way that legitimizes it is  The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François-Xavier Fauvelle, translated from the French by Troy Tice, Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $29.95. Our friend here in Xalapa, Amos Moore, one of the very few black Americans here, had read huge amounts on the subject and talked about it with increasing weariness to his skeptical friends.  So here from The Golden Rhinoceros is some documentation for him to add if he exists in some netherworld where he can read it.  I still miss Amos more than I can say. 

The most intriguing story in Fauvelle’s book comes from the kingdom of Mali in the early fourteenth century. More than a century and a half before Columbus’s voyages, a Malian ruler named Abu Bakr II was said to have equipped an expedition involving two hundred ships that attempted to discover “the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean.” The expedition failed to return save for one vessel, whose survivor claimed that “there appeared in the open sea [as it were] a river with a powerful current…. The [other] ships went on ahead but when they reached that place they did not return and no more was seen of them.” Some modern historians (Michael Gomez, Toby Green, and John Thornton, among others) have interpreted this to mean that the Malian ships were caught in the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Current, which sweeps everything in its path westward at about the same latitude as Mali.

Abu Bakr II supposedly responded not by abandoning his dreams of exploration but by equipping a new and far larger expedition, this time involving two thousand ships and with himself in command. That was the last that was seen of him. We know of this story only because when Abu Bakr’s successor, Mansa Musa, was staying in Cairo in 1324–1325 on his pilgrimage to Mecca, the secretary of the chancery of the Mamluk Dynasty asked him how he had come to power and recorded his reply. There are no other traces of Abu Bakr’s attempt. (New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019 issue).

Attitudes towards gays and lesbians in Mexico (plus a link to Patheos on why some Catholic officials and Franklin Graham are opposed to buying Girl Scout Cookies)

Consulta Mitovsky does many surveys of life and attitudes in Mexico. Below I´ve translated the recent survey of attudes towards gays and lesbians. Here is the link to the PDF file of the survey. . As usual, I would like to remind you that there are various places in the country more liberal than others, but that there haven´t been any of the angry demonstrations nor angry rhetoric that you find in the US, especially now, where in the US gay marriage has once again turned into a campaign issue accompanied by the usual vitriol. I´ve translated "homosexual" as "gay or lesbian" because they are the more common terms in the US.

1.  Do you have any gay or lesbian family members (man or woman)?

                Yes:  26.8%

                No:    70.4% 

                Don´t know/No opinion    2.8%

      2.       Are gays and lesbians born being gays and lesbians?

                Strongly agree:  55%

                Agree a little or not at all:  32.2%

                Don´t know/no opinion

      3.        A gay/lesbian couple ought to have the same rights as a heterosexual copy.

                Strongly/somewhat in agreement:  51.1%        

                A little/not at all in agreement:  39.7%

                Don't know/no opinion 9.2% 

                Strongly or somewhat agree by age group:

                        18 to 29 years old: 62.0%

                        30 to 45 years old: 47.7%

                        46 and more years old:  46.1%

        4.  A lesbian couple should be permitted to adopt.

                        Strongly/somehwat in agreement: 47.6%

                        A little/not at all in agreement:  43.3%

                        Don't know/no opinion: 9.1%

        5.   A gay couple should be permitted to adopt,

                        Strongly or somewhat agree;  41.8

                        A little/not at all in agreement:  48.1

                        Don't know/no opinion: 10.1%

        6.   A gay couple should be permitted to get married.

                         Strongly or somewhat agree: 47.6%

                         A little or not at all in agreement: 43.3%

                         Don´t know/know opinion:  9.1%

             Attitude by sex: Men

                         Very/somewhat in agreement: 42.3%

                         Little/not at all in agreement: 47.7%

                         Don´t know/no opinion: 10.0%

             Attitude by sex: women

                         Very/somewhat in agreement:  52.3%

                         Little/not at all in agreement:  39.6%

                         Don't know/no opinion: 8.1%

            Attitude by age

                           Very/somewhat in agreement:

                           18 to 29 years: 50.8%

                           30 to 45 years: 47.3%

                            46 years and over: 45.5%

            7.  Would you be willing to meet the partner of a gay or lesbian son or daughter?

                            Very/somewhat: 40.3%

                            Prefer not to meet the partner: 26.7%

                            Do not want to meet the partner: 16.7%

                       

 Here is a link to an article in Patheos discussing opposition to Girl Scout Cookies by the St. Louis Archdiocese and Franklin Graham because of the Girl Scout positions on gays.

 

    

       

                            

 

                        

                        

 

                   

               

 

                                                                            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

Ear piercing, car-fixing, not eating pork, and some miscellaneous photos.

Last Wednesday I went to get my ears repierced.  The holes had closed up some time ago, and I´d wanted them restored.  About the only jewelry I like to wear is earrings, so we´d been looking for a place to do it.  And besides, Jim had gotten my a lovely new pair for Christmas.  Anyway, we were visiting our ahijados (godchildren) to see their lovely new baby and it turned out that the baby had had her ears pierced ALREADY, and her mom had had another pair of piercings put in her own ears.  Their friend, a nurse, had done it for them.  I just had to buy the right earings to do it with.  Jim and I blithely went to the store that sells lovely gold jewelry in the little mall that has the Coatepec Chedraui.  They no longer do piercings there, but the saleslady rummaged around and found just what I needed.  SHE said, nowadays they use a pistola (you can guess what that is so it´s really fast and relatively painless. She actually gave us the earrings gratis, for free.

We went to our ahijados' house for the deed to be done.  They live with our ahijado's parents in a very pretty house filled with all kinds of interesting things.  Now it was filled with an audience: the ahijados, their parents, and a friend and the baby and Jim.  My ahijada had said, "Nah, it doesn´t hurt."  Last time I believe her!  The nurse, a very pretty young woman had me sit in an armchair and then she went to work pushing the stem into my earlobe by hand.  Oy!!! And all these people were watching!  I want to tell  you, I was brave, brave, brave and turned all the screams I really wanted to let out into funny noises that made everyone laugh.  It felt like hours, but a few minutes later it was done.  "Why didn´t you tell me it would hurt," I wailed.  "You wouldn´t have come to have it done," my ahijada said.  

So Sunday we went back so our ahijado could fix the dent in our pretty new Nissan X-Trail.  NOT my fault, by the way.  Just the scrape on the back door is my fault.  Jim would dispute whether it should just be called a scrape or whether dent might be more accurate.  ANYWAY, Jim backed up into a short post in Plaza de las Americas, the fancy shopping mall in Xalapa.  Even dent is too kind for the cavern he put in the bumper.  Our ahijado said he could pour hot water on it and pull it out!  We were skeptical, but we thought we´d let him give it a try so Jim pulled the front end of the car into the garage. It was one of the few sunny times we´ve had lately.  People were walking up and down the road with their groceries and all kinds of other stuff.  Horses clip-clopped by with riders and laden with firewood.  A lone chicken went over to look questioningly at the chickens in our friends' ample pen where turkeys also displayed their finery.  I was nervous and not really happy watching what looked like major surgery on the car but I drifted over from time to time to watch our ahijado remove what seemed like a hundred screws and six or seven car parts.  It turns out that access to the bumper wasn´t easy.

After a visit inside to see Doña J and our ahijada and the baby, I went back outside to find that the cavern had actually been eliminated!  Jim always pays even though our ahijado would never ask him to.  In fact, Jim and I have learned that even people we don't know won't give a price for individual work where we live.  "How much?" we used to ask.  "Whatever you think it's worth," or "whatever you want was usually the answer.

So anyway, a few days ago, our neighbor had a pig butchered and sold the pieces from a table outside his house.  With the bad coffee harvest and the fact that here, too, or even more, it's really only the top one percent who are doing well, a lot of people are doing stuff to make themselves enough to get by on, or maybe to cover an unusual expense.  So the butchered pig.  The guy across the street from us has four concrete stalls which sometimes hold horses and sometimes pigs he raises to sell for butchering.  When the pigs are moved, bathed, or, yes, slaughtered, they make terrrible, rending sounds which I can barely stand to listen to.  I want to run out and save them.  So the neighbor´s nieces came up to our house with some small ribs wrapped in a styrofoam dish for us and it was impossible to say no.  It turned out neither Jim nor I could bring ourselves to eat it.  The dogs got lucky!

Below are some random photos which I don´t think I've posted before.  

Chedraui, our supermarket, generally has a flamboyant display of produce. We like to go to the market or one of the small vendors, but we are too much Amerkans not to sometimes yield to supermarket temptation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a lot of garlic, also in Chedraui.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the interior of the church in our colonia:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clouds building outside our window.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below are some youngsters at their primary school leaving ceremony.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How the weather has been here lately. Not like a tropical paradise!

 

 

Not Just about Jews in Mexico. Also about Samuel von Basch, the Emperor Maximilian, Mexico during Maximilian's Short-Lived Empire, Jews in Austria in the Nineteenth Century, etc. etc.

I have this pattern I now recognize to my chagrin.  A topic grabs my attention, preferably one about Mexico, even better one about our area, and I mean just to read a bit about it, talk to a few people about it, maybe look around and look at pictures and tell you about it.  But in the end I follow threads -- glittering threads which I can't let go of and which lead me to this nexus and that, to that thread and yet another.  And I spend hours and hours on these journeys, and the information from them> only a bit of it makes it into blog posts.

I guess I have to say "so be it." Or maybe "So what."  

The last topic, and the one at least theoretically lighting my way, was/is Jews in Mexico, particularly the Yiddish poet Yitzhkok (Isaac) Berliner whom I discovered in an article in Tablet Magazine.  I wrote several posts about him.  Richard Grabman picked up on him and wrote a good, concise biography.  I'm not so good at concise.  Anyway, through Berliner I discovered the Diario Judio de México (who knew?) which had a series of portraits of Jews who were either Mexican, immigrants to Mexico, or involved in some significant way in the life of Mexico as residents, at least for awhile. I read a number of the portraits, and for some reason I don't understand, fixed on Samuel von Basch, Maximilian's personal physician in 1866 and 1867, the year in which he was executed.  

But to understand this sliver of time, I found I wanted to know how von Basch's Jewish family got to Austria, how he became a doctor, what he was like.  Vienna is the city which embraced him, medicine is the field in which he excelled.  And of course how did he get to Mexico? First to Puebla where he was a physician to the French troops billeted there, and then to emerge to become not only the personal physician but a close confidante of Emperor Maximilian first in Mexico City (with an important short side trip to Cuernavaca) and finally in Querétero where the Emperor met his end?  

While I suspect his time in Mexico was the most intense of his life, von Basch returned to Austria and became an extraordinary physician and researcher considered now the father of the blood pressure measurer (sphygmomanometer is its proper name) and of circulatory system medicine.  Doing these things is what he spent most of his life at.

I am, of course most captivated by the Mexican period.  I hope I can put down my reading long enough to share some stuff with you before I find myself rushing down another path.

Yitskhok (Isaac) Berliner Z'L as His Granddaughter Remembered Him

On September 20 I put up a post that I started out intending to be about Isaac Berliner, a Mexican Jew, who wrote poetry in Yiddish. Having been struck by a feeling of connection that surprised me, I´m afraid I got carried away and wrote MORE about my family than about Berliner and other Mexican Jews or Jews in Mexico. 

So now I offer more on Yitzkhok Berliner, here my translation of an homage in Diario Judio de México that his granddaughter Feige Efter Berliner wrote as part of a series on outstanding Jews in Mexico for Diario Judio de México.

To speak about my grandfather, a man of letters, and an upright man, is an honor for me.  A man who left a great literary legacy and a good name for his family and for everyone who had the privilege of knowing him.  Born in Lodz, Poland on September 27, 1899, he died in México City on January 27, 1957.

On arriving in Mexico in the year 1922, he worked, as did other immigrants, as a street vendor, carrying in his mind and heart the wish to write, which he did throughout his whole life. He was one of the first writers in Yiddish [in Mexico] and so he found a place at the magazine Der Veg (The Way) where he worked for many years.

Later, with the writers Jacobo Glantz and Moisés Glikovssky he wrote the book "Drai Vegn" (Tres caminos/Three Ways) which was the prelude to more of his writings. Its words spoke of his feelings across time. "Guezan Fun Mentsch" (Melodía del hombre/Song of Man), "Ad Matai" (Hasta cuándo/Until When), "Shtil ol ain" (Que se haya el silencio/That There be Silence), a fragment of which is written on his gravestone, and "Shtot Fun Palatzn" (Ciudad de los Palacios/City of Palaces).

Given that my grandfather walked on Mexican lands, although without knowing Spanish, he fell in love with its people, with its  freedom that had been longed for by those who arrived from a Europe at war, with its landscapes. But also he worried about the poverty which he saw ruled in our country. which penetrated deep in his life, in every corner. He wrote "Shtot Fun Palatzn", a book that spoke of Xochimilco, Popocatépetl, Tepito, and all that was emblematic of his beloved Mexico, but always taking into account the neediness of its people and its vices.  When my grandfather was working at "Der Veg", the great painter Diego River needed someone to write something in Yiddish on one of his murals, and thus began a close friendship between the two, to such an extent that the painter, at learning of the publication of the book, undertook to illustrate it.

The strong and solid foundation of his great caring and respect were what, from the beginning, he gave when he married a great woman, his Nejumele.  It was a love that began in Lodz (Poland) and that after many vicissitudes was consumated in Mexico.

Like a good poet, he saw to it that every day my grandmother received a rose and a poem. Thus the love for her family was converted into something vital for her life, since her health was fragile.  In spite of being very little, I remember that on many Sundays there were gatherings in their house with the presence of teachers and writers and as part of these unforgettable afternoons it was I who sang standing on one of the stairs of the big staircase.

I visited my grandparents on many days,  going outside to the garden filled with roses where my grandfather directed me to wander through them to appreciate their fragrance.

I feel very fortunate to have known my grandparents, to have received so much love and learning from them, with which they have given me these foundations that, in the company of my husband, I can transmit to my children and grandchildren.

They say that the greatest inheritance we can leave in this life is a good name and Isaac Berliner did this many times over.

Why bother with science?

It's Friday.  First, we took two dogs on one walk and the other three on another.  Rita who is 17 1/2 years old had been languishing without a walk for a couple of weeks.  She looks old now with her fur without luster and seeming to grow in mats, But she is still cheerful and eager and loyal.  We took Jocko, too, and just went up as far as the park and walked around it and then went back the way we'd come.  Both dogs seemed satisfied.

The next walk with Hank, Happy and Lil Guy was longer.  The neighbors were surprised to see us a second time.  It was hot and dusty.  Hank got in two swims and the other two wet their feet in the rio where it crosses the road and Paul Barber's property.  Paul is the English gardener who is a naturalized Mexican.  He was clearing an area up near the road for more garden space.  

I heard thunder.  I hate being outside in thunder.  It's one of the few things that still strikes fear in me.  I don't mind it if I'm inside.  I like storms as long as I'm inside.  

As we turned to retrace our steps home, the heat seemed to reach a peak.  The air was still.  Dark clouds gathered as if at a starting gate, waiting for some signal.  There was a puff of wind, just a puff to stir the leaves.  Clouds poured down from Cofre de Perote into the valley just beyond us.  Suddenly leaves whipped against each other in a strong gust. The sky blackened, ominous.  We quickened our steps back into the village.  But we got no rain then or later that night.

In and around our Colonia people still use horses and mules for transporting crops and firewood and long poles and themselves. We saw quite a number of horses today, some with dogs running along side.  One had a boy and a load of grass for forage on its back.  The boy looked as if he had fallen asleep.  Maybe he had.  He was wearing shocking pink rubber shoes.  Those rubber shoes are quite popular and quite useful for working and walking on dirt that turns quickly to mud when it does rain.

There are lots of kids in our neighborhood.  I wish our grandchildren would come and stay long enough to make friends with some of them and learn a bit of Spanish.  When we walk by with our dogs, a lot of them call out, "Hello!" in English and ask us a bunch of questions. "How do you say my name in English," or "Which dog is Jocko?"  Some of the kids and I have developed extravagant arm motions for greetings.  They can go on for awhile, kind of as if they were choreographed.

Life spills onto the street. Three men sit on chairs under an overhang and gossip, I imagine.  One of them doesn't think we understand any Spanish at all and gestures to us without making a sound.  I thought that he might perhaps be mute, but when I passed closer to him and his friends, I could here him clearly.  A group of kids, boys and girls of different ages suddenly form into street soccer teams.  Dogs weave in and out and bark at our dogs menacingly but don't come close.  A line of people waits outside the community DIF store waiting for the free fluorescent bulbs the electric company is giving out if you bring a regular, working old fashioned one and two paid receipts from bills.  A couple of old women pass by, piles of neatly arranged leña, firewood, on their heads. One of our neighbors swirls past on his motorcycle: he is letting his younger brother sit in front and drive it. Two or three people clip-clop on horseback. A young woman trudges past with bags from the supermarket, Chedraui, though she probably bought her stuff here in the Colonia. A burro is tied up at someone's front door.  A couple wave.  They sit and watch their little black dog play with a rag or something similar. If it's not raining, if it's not very cold, if it's not late at night, the streets are busy.  A guy with a cart attached to the front of a bike attracts people with the smell of the guisado cooking in a pot in the cart.  Bottles of salsa line the rim. People lean in doorways and look out of windows, their elbows resting on the sills. We reach our gate and bring the dogs inside.

 

 

EPN Makes a Mysterious Change

 

¿Por qué?

Dick Cavett, Typepad, Shakespeare, Twain and Eleanor Estes

Once again Typepad annoys me.  It's NO WONDER I don't post more!  I'm just a simple little old lady blogger.  Can't they keep things simple for me?  So what happened is I started this out as a quick post on the Dashboard, and it started getting too long so I clicked to use a full entry, and what I'd written on the Quick Post quickly had completely disappeared!  So this is taking me a LONG TIME.  Anyway, all I really wanted to do was direct you to the interview with Dick Cavett in the upcoming NY Times Sunday Book Review here.  Just a couple of funny things stand out, so I am copying them for you:

"And for an instant cure for the blues, the great Robert Benchley most frequently supplied the most recent laugh. Who else could have reported that the plays of William Shakespeare had, in fact, not been written by William Shakespeare at all, but by someone else of the same name? Or that you can divide people into two groups: those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t?" 

Cavett who never sounded exactly like a young man even when he was one has settled nicely into a not-quite-stereotype of an elderly, aristocratic English teacher specializing for the most part in the comic with of course a deep well of wit.  Are you surprised that he read by himself by the age of ?  This is his account of "Rufus M." by Eleanor Estes, one of his beloved books when he was a precocious reader.

"Rufus was a hilarious kid. He planted beans for his not-wealthy family’s dinner table. Unfortunately, he also dug them up every day to see how they were doing."

His favorite book of all time is "Huckleberry Finn".  He says a couple of interesting things about race in Huck Finn and about the book being banned from a library Mark Twain knew about.

Anyway, read the article, as I said, here.

This was my break from translating.  Gotta go back to it.  You can check translations of good Mexican articles about current Mexican issues at mexicovoices.blogspot.com

 

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Henry Ford (1863-1947)

In 1931, Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, accepted a commission to make frescoes for the Detroit Institute of Art.  It seems at first glance to have been an unlikely commission. He was a communist, and the funding for this project was provided by the Ford motor company, Capitalist, big C. 

We were walking down Madison Avenue in NYC, my mom and I, looking in art gallery windows here and there. I was maybe twelve. It would have been the mid-1950. In one window, there was a detail print of a mural. I can’t remember whether it was from a work by Larry Rivers or Diego Rivera. My mother was intensely interested in modern art. She thought I should be interested in it, too.  She had had just enough luck in her efforts to fan my interest  to launch into a lesson on murals. My mother wasn’t impressed with Rivers’ one mural effort by that time, George Washington Crossing the Delaware. She said she did rather enjoy Rivera's murals.  I don't remember why because she was critical of their conscious appeal to “popular sensibilities" and thought they were too political. In her mind, art should be neither popular or political, a view held by many Americans who wanted to cast their lots with intellectuals.  This shunning of the popular and the political in art has left a legacy that is still with us, I would say unfortunately.

So Rivera's mural in Rockefeller Center fit into this lesson.  In 1933 when Rivera hadn't quite finished it, Nelson Rockefeller, the benefactor of the mural, got wind of the fact that Lenin had a prominent place in it and ordered work stopped and essentially fired Rivera.  The mural sat behind cloth sheets for awhile, and some seven months later, Rockefeller ordered it destroyed.  And it was.

 My mother thought it was an example of the problems of mixing art and politics. She managed to plant a seed of interest in my mind with this story, but not because I agreed with her.  politics in art did interest me much more than what seemed to me the hyper-intellectualism of art critics and my mother.

The seed lay almost dormant for years and years although I recognized some of his work decorating posters and doctors offices and the like. Even after my then- husband and I visited Rivera's hometown of Guanajuato in the 1990s visit, he remained no more than a small part of the clutter in my brain.

My interest in Rivera burst into full bloom quite unexpectedly. I was reading the NY Times online one morning not long ago a (it becomes a way to avoid more serious projects)  and came upon a story about Detroit's bankruptcy which  told of the possibility that the bankruptcy might make it necessary for the Detroit Art Institute to sell its collection to pay city workers’ pensions. Among the top four or five works most likely to bring in large sums was Rivera’s mural called Detroit Industry.  Huh?  Who knew he’d done a mural in Detroit of all places?  I poked around a little and found a number of sites with photos of the mural.  They were incredible. For the first time in my life I wanted to go to Detroit, if only to see this mural.

I started to read, first about Rivera, then about Detroit at the time of the creation of the mural, then about Mexico at that time and earlier, and about Henry and Edsel Ford and about actual conditions at Ford plants, about the effects of the Depression, about other actors in the story of the Detroit murals: Henry and Edsel Ford, Valentiner, Frida Kahlo, and other Mexican muralists and on and on. How could I stop? It’s a growing tapestry I'm not ready to disentangle myself from.

At first,  when I thought of Rivera, I imagines him  as short, fat, and homely. I knew considerably more about Frida Kahlo, as many USAers do.  I wasn’t alone wondering how Kahlo could find Rivera attractive, which indeed she did.

 

I fit what I saw into  these preconceptions.You can see both  Rivera and Kahlo in this mural Diego painted called ”Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park”.

I didn’t realize that Diego had pictured himself as a boy in this central panel (he is standing in front of Kahlo and next to a calavera). I know, I know.  How many men would wear striped socks? Preconceived notions, etc.

As I started rummaging through material I found that Rivera was indeed an attractive man for all that people (including him) described him as having odd and ugly-sounding features.  But he wasn't short at all.  In fact, he was quite tall, over six feet. And though at his heaviest, he was just plain fat, his height balanced his weight somewhat so that in no way did he appear like the very round dwarf  I'd imagined.

In the photo at left, you can get some idea of his size. In the next posts on Rivera, I’ll show you some photos and paintings of Diego and some quotes from him and others so you can perhaps build up an idea of what he was like.