From Xico

A Tree, a Box Store and a Bridge

The former owners of our house left us what I thought was a dieffenbachia.  I looked up dieffenbachia just now and discovered I was completely wrong, though dieffenbachias do grow here.  The plant we have was languishing from lack of sunshine, so Jim moved it outside where it has flourished and is now small tree-sized and looking anxiously to be transplanted in the ground.  It is still confined to the pot in which it was languishing.  So we will.  Anyway, today on our walk, I realized that this plant grows as trees in the countryside around us.  There they were, leaning over just waiting for us to realize they were siblings of our house plant.  What are they called?

Our house plant/tree.

The Bodega Aurrera opened near the glorieta in Coatepec on the Xico side of the main road, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago.  We ventured into it Saturday.  It is as I suspected: large, colorless, dull.  As Jim says, it pretty much looks like a big Aldi's.  I don't even know if Aldi's exists anymore in the US.  It is/was a chain of stores offering reduced quality stuff at reduced prices, and it did nothing to make you feel happy to be in one of the outlets.  Bodega Aurrera's non-food stuff looked to be a cheaper version of what Chedraui offers.  The foods were not much different in price--often just a matter of a few cents, and I mean Mexican cents.  Some friends are glad to have something on the main road so they can avoid the traffic going to Chedraui.  They work late at night sometimes and I can see the advantage of having a place to just drop in, especially since they have a fairly twisty route the rest of the way home.  I'd rather spend a few extra pesos at tiendas near our house.  At least more of the profits go into local hands.  But maybe these workers get health benefits. Are they part-time or full-time workers?  Or perhaps double time?  I don't know.  I am cynical.

The one good thing you can say about Bodega Aurrera is that whoever designed it took greenery into a little bit of account (in spite of destroying a nice hunk of pure greenery).  The parking lot is paved with perforated bricks which allow grass to grow and water to drain and some (little) trees dot the intersices between parking rows.

The bridge.  

A road (I guess paved) is planned from maybe Xico to maybe Cosautlan or maybe Teocelo or Cordoba (in Veracruz...).  Or maybe all three places.  Or none.  We were just talking to local people so I don't really know.  I DO know that the bridge looks like it could be four lanes, that they will have to cut away some of the countryside for part of the road since the bridge pilings are constructed in such a way that it couldn't be accessed from the existing road, and that the workers are understandably proud of the job they are doing.  The old bridge was really just a one car wide very basic causeway with drainage pipes underneath that sometimes got plugged.  In the rainy season it was often impassable.  But it didn't disturb the beauty of the place.

View from near the old bridge from 2010.

I don't really like to condemn this road building, especially if it helps lower- and middle-class Mexicans improve their lot in life and if it helps them do so while staying near where they came from, which many really prefer to do.

Jim, Happy and Daisy on remains of old bridge with new bridge rising.  Detritus fills the right side, bloccking much of the stream's channel.

Construction work mixes old and new methods.  

A giant funnel and a homemade ladder.

Construction workers pause for a picture.  They are constructing flats to hold poured concrete in place.

You can see one of the flats sticking out on the right side of the bridge construction.

A lot of rebar goes into this bridge.  Below are some varieties.

 

 

T

Thus far, two enormous trees have been victims of the construction.  Their skeletons lie in the stream to the left of the old bridge, an area which has not, as of yet, been filled with building junk.  New life is springing from one of them.

 

 

Hugo Chavez, Role Model

Now that Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, has died, it has finally become respectable in at least some quarters of the US to print favorable articles about him.  This opinion piece by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, former president of Brasil is one of them.  Another excellent article by Jon Lee Anderson appeared in the New Yorker.  Both described the genuine warmth and caring that Chavez embodied, his strengths as a leader for the very poor in his country, his real achievements and his dreams for Latin America.  He was instrumental in bringing together countries of the continent.

In the US (and I might add also among some PAN people in Mexico) he was viewed with, at best, hostility.  Often a bogeyman for US policies, the US really has no one to blame but itself for his turning on our country.  What a shame.  As has been pointed out elsewhere, the US has supported and supports far more villainous and far less humane leaders than Chavez.  I don't know if our country is capable of opening its eyes by itself. Certainly Obama has not provided the hoped-for leadership in enlightening Americans, at least as far as Latin America is concerned.  As a Latin American pointed out not long ago, Obama's neglectful attitude towards the south may turn out to be a blessing.

Day of the Dead Edition

Note: I threw my camera into my backpack and when I got it out, it was not the same cqmera I had put in.  I forgot that there was sand in the bottom of the pack from my various collections.  I cannot get it clean.  I am very sad.  I will get another one, but for this post, what pictures there are will be from Jim and his camera.

Weather: Dreary.  We had a week or so of beautiful weather in the middle of October, and since then, we've had some sunny, crystally mornings, but by afternoon, we've settled into gray and rain of one sort or another.  This is a fairly normal pattern here, or it used to be, or it never was, depending on whom you talk to, though the relatively bright days of recent years are generally considered an anomaly.  I have a small treasure of a book called Leyendas de Xalapa: relatos y narraciones filled with small stories and descriptions and anecdotes provided by some Xalapeños in their tercer edad around 2006.  One is simply called El Chipi-Chipi.  We heard about chipi-chipi and experienced it on our first trip here which was in perhaps 1987 in November, just after the Day of the Dead when the golden cempasúchil (or any other number of spellings)which look like large, densely-petalled marigolds lay everywhere, wilted and smashed by passersby where the excesses had been abandoned by vendors, and drooped over the remains of altars and tombstones in panteones, or cemeteries and public places.  I had, at the time, little notion of the Day of the Dead and found all these flowers, now bedraggled and lost, puzzling.  Every day we spent here that November week dawned sunny and bright and ended gray, the sun and stars hidden in gossamer sheets of drizzly rain, chipi-chipi.  Nobody seemed especially bothered, there were few umbrellas.

This year's days of November rain and chill seem early to me, but apparently they are not.  In my small book, Sr. Carlos Álvarez Ramírez who was 66 years old at the time he recounted this, said that "the climate of Xalapa was very rainy by 1930, with many weeks and even months of rain, but they were powerful downpours in which there was much lightening and thunder.  The seasons of the year were clearly marked so that one could prepare for cold or warmth.

"At that time in this area the famous chipi-chipi predominated, which was a very dense drizzle, so dense that you couldn't see even a yard ahead of you, worse than fog, because the light from the cars which continued to drive....could not penetrate the thickness of the drizzle so typical of our city.  The chipi-chipi we have today is very different....With the chipi-chipi of old, one might not wear the same shoes for three days and then would find them full of mold....At night, the bed clothes were damp, the sheets felt cold because of all the rain."

This year we've had fierce storms and heavy rains and now, chipi-chipi, though lighter than that described above.  But shoes get moldy, and clothes in drawers often smell damp. And the fog and drizzle embraced us, too, on the Day of the Dead.  

A VERY few bits and pieces about The Day of the Dead you might or might not have known.

• It is not a Catholic holiday, nor does it have Catholic elements as any official part of it. It is purely indigenous, being most intensely celebrated in the south and east of Mexico (like our area).
• It is very old, having existed long before the Spaniards arrived.
• There are many variations, from group to group, area to area, and even family to family.
• It is a school holiday.  Mexico has very strong prohibitions against introducting religious matter into the public schools, but perhaps fifty or sixty years ago, it became obvious that this celebratiion was actually deeply woven into Mexican culture.  It used to be spread over several days for different kinds of people.  A friend said there was even a day for animals.  The Spanish moved it to November 1 and 2 to coincide with the Christian All Saints' and All Souls' Days.  Here, November 1 is for children who´ve died and November 2 is for everyone else, though the celebrations seep into the rest of the week (at least).
• Apparently the tradition of las calaveras, the skulls, exists because in some places people kept the skulls of their dead in accessible places.
• It doesn't celebrate saintliness; it isn't a time of commemoration.  Before Christianity, many groups held that the dead went to the underworld, not far from the living.  On the Day of the dead, they returned to mingle with their families and friends.  I don't think today at least people believe they can see the dead, but rather know they are there. Sometimes people eat the food on the altars knowing it pleases the dead to see them sharing in it.
• In our Colonia, Day of the Dead seemed a bit subdued this year.  I'm not sure why.  In past years, altars have blazed from most houses
• The cemetery celebration in Xico (which many people from our Colonia go to) takes place on the morning of November 2.  In some places, it is the night before.

On the Day of the Dead, we visited new friends at their rancho on a hilltop outside Xico.The husband is Czech, raised in Canada, the wife is Mexican.  The altar was Mexican and we had cabbage and mashed potatoes along with baked chicken and rice and peas and frosted cakes for the meal. The wife taught us a bit of Mexican dancing while she wore a beautiful traditional dress.  We toured the slopes of the ranch where animals roamed pretty freely.  The electric fencing kept them out of garden areas rather than within pastures.   

Below are some pictures.

Our hosts finish preparing the meal.

 

The meal almost ready

 

Our hostess teaching us to dance (sort of)

 

The Ofrenda, or Day of the Dead altar.

Not surprisingly, it was a misty gray day.  In real life, the colors seem deep and soft. Unfortunately it seems impossible to capture this lovely quality in photos.

We walk along the hillside from the  house to where the animals are.

This burro is named Lady.  I thought I'd gotten over being the city person who thought burros were "cute" and who wanted one.  Lady was cute and I want one again.

Animals grazing.  They are all mixed in with each other.  The horses don't have shoes because the owner believes they hurt the horses' hooves.  They seem very happy without them.

 

These pigs are domestic-wild (jabalina) hybrids

 

Domestic spotted pig portrait.  Pigs are pretty cute.

 

So are goats.  All the animals were treated lovingly, and it showed.

 

Turkeys (obviously).

 

You know what these are.

There were also sheep, but for some unkown reason I didn't get a picture of them (unless the goats are actually the sheep). The dueño buys and sells sheep for meat, not wool.  But they are happy until the end.

Returning to the house.  The white dog was an especially charming one.

We say good-bye.  The host and hostell and dog outside the workshop.  We hope to see them all often. 

 

 

 

 

 

Mexican views of US elections and some odds and ends.

First, I want you to please look at the website of my deceased sister-in-law's art.  It is worth the visit many times over.

Second, I want to tell you that the rainy season has come to an end.  This doesn't mean we won't have more rain, just that it is likely to be  softer, sometimes steadier, sometimes lasting for days, sometimes absent for days.  The mornings dawn crystalline and cool.  The mud is drying up on the dirt roads and narrow paths we hike along.  We have just started taking our baby dachsund, all seven weeks of her, with us, and much to our suprise she wants to trot along with us, dodging Jim's heels. She climbs over little rocks and skips around slightly larger ones.  She sticks very close.  The other animals are bit by bit getting used to her.  Her name is Daisy. Here are far too many pictures of her.

Daisy and me

Daisy and jim

}

Daisy and Rita

Daisy and Rita again

Daisy looking over a very, very low wall.

Daisy walking on our regular walk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, I thought you might be interested in what at least some Mexicans think of the upcoming US elections, at least those who answered the survey questions of Consulta Mitofsky, a Mexican polling firm.

According to Mitofsky, 36 percent prefer that Obama win, 6 percent prefer Romney. For more details, you can visit the site (in Spanish) here.  The 42 percent is obviously nowhere near 100 percent, largely because of the knowledge of many Mexicans about US elections.

Sex Ed

Recently we were talking with our friend the doctor about the success Mexico has had reducing its birthrate from something like 7 or 8 children per woman during her childbearing years to slightly over 2 children per woman in her childbearing years.  He said indeed attitudes towards birth control have changed dramatically with each new generation and that now, with this generation of child-bearing women, birth control has become almost universally accepted with a few exceptions.  Jim asked if perhaps people in rural areas were resistant.  Our friend said no, acceptance was high in most rural areas. I´ve mentioned before that sex ed materials in the public schools are direct and very informative. There are, however, a couple of states, notably Guanajuato, where resistance remains high to anything deviating from the teachings of the Church.

I think before I mentioned that in our local pharmacies, educational promotional materials from (of course) drug companies were prominently placed.  Now there is prominently placed

information on the "day after" pill.  I asked the pharmacist if you needed a prescription for birth control pills of this sort, or just regular birth control pills. She looked at me as if I was nuts.  "Why would you need a prescription," she asked.  

Here are the first three pages of the little brochure on the day after pill, with some translation (by me).

THIS page says, Okay, you know a lot about sex...Do you know about contraception?  PILDORA for the next day.

 

THIS says:

Plan

decide

act

and

live

 

I like the graphic.  Very interesting

 

 

This says

 

 This says,

In contraception there are man options.....eve for the emergencies such as the day after pill ....Ask your doctor.

What contraceptive methods exist?

The contraceptives can be divided into temporary and permanent depending on whether you want to have children in the future or whether not to have them is a permanent decision.....

The brochure, which as I said, is available on the counters of local drugstores and repeats information available in schools.

Abortion is a different issue.  Abortion is legal in Mexico City.  I am not sure about other states.  Here people are not violent when the issue is brought up, but seem reluctant to pursue it when a woman gets pregnant, although clearly some do.  One does not hear about backroom abortions.  I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that obgyn's perform them, but do not publicize them.  In our colonia there has been a rash of young "marriages" recently due to pregnance.  I put "marriages" in quotes because civil and church weddings are very expensive so people often set up households and consider themselves married without official blessings.  Families accept these.

In my next blog, I will give you a rather opposite example from the state of Guanajuato which I've mentioned before and which seems to pride itself on being the most conservative state in Mexico.  As Carlos Fuentes pointed out in "Buenas Conciencias", conservative religion does not appear to have much to do with holiness, more to do with power and getting along with the society.

 

 

My Sister-in-Law Barbara Buddenhagen Winkelstein

My sister-in-law Barbara Winkelstein.  A role model I could never match.  An incomparable artist because of the way she captured the spirit, the soul of her subjects in her work.  A San Franciscan who lived in the perfect San Francisco setting: two houses joined together, once the home of Ansel Adams, a house that I suspect was far more filled with life and color when Barbara lived in it than when Adams did.  The house survived the collapse of a gigantic drainage pipe that sucked into the earth neighboring houses.  Barbara and her husband Peter's house trembled at the edge of the abyss, but never collapsed.  

She was such a strong woman, demanding of herself, but ever kind and loving to the rest of us.  I don't know how she managed to care for so many people with such loyalty and consistency. She suffered from various physical ailments but never complained.  Even at the end, it was us she asked after, not being interested in talking about herself. 

She came from a family almost like that in an American legend: a tough father and mother who were born at the turn of the twentieth century to midwestern farm families.  Her parents turned into sophisticated travelers, ever stern and worldly at the same time, ever demanding. They lived in Holland and in rural Oregon, in Venezuela and in Portland and suburban Los Angeles. They traveled to South Africa and Mexico, Barbara's mother driving Barbara and her brother herself over the then-dusty, unknown roads from the US to Mexico City around 1940.

She died last year around this time.  When there was only a short time left, she had caregivers and hospice workers.  They treated her like a queen, she said. She deserved no less. She died at home after saying good bye to each of her children.  She was with Peter. She said she was ready to go.

Finally I can look at her pictures without feeling an overwhelming sense of loss.  I hope you look at them too, the ones collected by her husband on this website: http://barbarawinkelstein.com.  There is so much more to say about Barbara.  Maybe someday I will be able to.

 

 When there was only a short time left, she had caregivers and hospice workers.  They treated her like a queen, she said. She deserved no less. She died at home after saying good bye to each of her children.  She was with Peter.

I have definitely been remiss in writing.  Posts pile up in my head.  And then life intervenes. This past Thursday life intervened in a terrible way.  I was taking Cosi, one of our four dogs, for a walk.  She was probably the smartest and most complicated and most interesting of our four dogs, the one whom we affectionately called our "problem child" because she was so hard to understand sometimes, so insistent and bossy at others.  I got to the bridge at the Xico side of the colonia.  I was on the side of the road where the traffic comes towards me, where the road just starts to widen after the bridge, where land falls directly into the river on the other side of the low barrier.  A bus was coming.  It was at the far side of the bridge, moving way too fast. I have to get us to the other side, I thought, where we can get off the road. I pulled Cosi, I yelled, come on Cosi, come on Cosi,  and Cosi, in the middle of the road, pulled out of her collar. The bus driver never slowed.  He was so fast, so loud, I screamed, "Cosi! "Cosi!" she froze, looking right at me.  The bus driver hit her. She screamed and was silent.  I heard the bus hit her twice.  I yelled.  I yelled louder than I thought I could, "NO! NO! NO! NO!" The bus never slowed.  When it had passed, she lay there twitching, her eyes blank, the lower half of her body demolished, guts and blood lying across the road.  I went to her.  Her blood washed my hands.

A wonderfully kind woman in an SUV a rich woman, I think, stopped and ran over and hugged me and held me and brushed my hair from my face.  I sobbed.  The woman said, "Let's get her off the road. Then no one else can hit her."

A man walking across the bridge on the walkway ran over.  "I'll do it," he said, and he did.  He pulled her into the grass.  I was sobbing.  I was useless.  Two very kind people.

I thanked the man.  The woman brought me home.  I thanked her.  I wish I knew her name.  I cried out to Jim what had happened.  He was heartbroken.  He so loved Cosi.

When you are retired as we are and spend much time at home, or walking your dogs, or watching them run, full of joy, in the fields of our nearby countryside, your  dogs become part of your family.  You come to love them, to know when they are upset or happy or frightened or maybe bored.  You know, no matter what anyone says, that they have deep feelings and deep attachments.

I miss Cosi dreadfully.  Maybe there is nothing after death.  But I hope somewhere, somehow her complicated spirit is running in fields, full of joy.

We buried her in the back yard.  We are going to plant flowers we already have bought on her grave.

 

 

 

Mexico Election Protests y Dalai Llama es Numero 132

A friend forwarded this.  

MEXFILES for Election and Post-Election Commentary

Terse, to the point, witty commentary on the ongoing drama (but not violent!) of the Mexican presidential elections can be found pretty much daily at mexfiles.net by Richard Grabman. Follow him!

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."