Mexicans who have migrated to the United States from rural villages have been forming online communities to stay in touch with their families and friends back home. They log onto specific websites (such as that of Tlaltenango.com, above) to share photos, memories and send Yearbook-style greetings. In the process, they are reinforcing cultural, historic and emotional ties.
In some cases, the online communication is also providing a way of reinforcing democratic practices and political debate in Mexico. According to one study about the village of San Martin de Blonan~os, 13.26 percent of messages on that village’s independently-run web site included discussions about politics and accountability (A few examples: The alleged corruption of one of the mayoral candidate members and mine contamination in a local river). The study, by Mexican researcher Miriam Cardenas Torres, provides a fascinating look at the online dynamics of this particular Jalisco community and the technological barriers and benefits to such interaction.
A video of this lap-dancing police officer was forwarded to me in recent months from my Mexico contacts. I’m posting an abridged (and Rated G version) above, but there is another video mash-up of this called “Policia de TJ” that is is all the rage.
The “Policia de TJ” version frames the video in terms of how these days the Tijuana police officers may not be earning enough money to go to the strip clubs and so they are having to find new ways to collect some cash. Then the video of the gyrating officer begins. It’s followed by a video ending with clown music of an apparent robber escaping in front of a squad of officers.
The videos are a little grainy and you can’t actually make out the word Tijuana on the insignias, so who is to say they are even officers. Still, if true, I wonder what happened to this officer after he became a YouTube star. I dug around for videos of dancing police officers in the United States and came up with just a few – traffic cops – who were profiled on the news. Other countries’ police forces seem to have a greater propensity to swish their hips in front of a camera. Judge for yourself who is the better dancer.
This is the time of year when people in Mexico - and in other Latin American countries – honor the dead by visiting graveyards and creating homemade altars to departed family members and friends. But the “Day of the Dead” festivities also have a literary tradition. Pick up the local newspapers and you will find short poems called calaveras that are written as epitaphs for the living.
It may seem a little morbid to find such a poem for U.S. President Barack Obama, but these clever and often politically-motivated calaveras are simply reflections of the cultural differences in how Mexicans view death and the deceased through playful mockery. The subjects of these poems are often picked for their relevance to current events, and sometimes reflect inanimate characters such as ” the 3 percent telecommunications tax.”
The poems start appearing before and on the Day of the Dead celebrations, which occur Nov. 1-2. In the most recent edition of the Tijuana newspaper Frontera, the featured poems include one for Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano. Here is a snippet from the one for Barack Obama:
“Although the Nobel prize he won surprised them all, death wasn’t perturbed. It took him anyways…The death of the president was in difficult moments because he left many people with poor health and without documents.”
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is the author a memorable poem about an artichoke, in which the vegetable is infused with military meaning but eventually emasculated by a shopper called Maria.
If I were a poet, I would probably write an ode of my own to the pitaya – the fruit of a cactus plant that is also known by the name “dragonfruit.” I first learned about the pitaya when I lived in Nicaragua in 1996. It was a scary-looking fruit on the outside with a spiny armor. But once you got past that tough exterior, the insides were dripping with a sweet magenta pulp that was loaded with tiny black seeds. Nicaraguans typically made the pitaya into a fruit juice, but sometimes slices of it ended up on salads and other food items.
I got to thinking about the pitaya recently because in one of my graduate classes we are looking at the company that produces POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. POM has funded a lot of research into the health benefits of the pomegranate and I would love to see the same thing happen with the pitaya (this study seems to suggest that the pitaya also has high antioxidant potential). Like the pitaya, I found Nicaragua to be a country with a rough, complicated exterior. Once you got past that, though, the country – and the pitaya – was full of surprises and wonders, which made it well worth the challenge.
Being a former border reporter and an eager student of social media, I am always keeping my eyes open for ways that these two interests of mine intersect. A couple examples from this year demonstrate how social media is playing a role in cross-border investigations.
And now a story in The Guardian sums up why it’s a good idea to understand what’s public and what’s not in Facebook – especially if you are a fugitive hiding out in Mexico.
According to the story (which I first read in Mashable), Maxi Sopo fled the United States earlier this year after allegedly getting involved in a fraud scheme and learning that investigators were looking into his possible involvement. Rather than lie low online as well as offline, Sopo started updating his Facebook status with descriptions of the good times he was having in Cancun. One of his Facebook “friends” was a former justice department official who apparently met Sopo at a Cancun nightclub and had no knowledge of Sopo’s fugitive status, according to the story. Read The Guardianfor more details, but I would venture to guess that Sopo’s updates from jail probably aren’t so pleasant.
Thalia is a well-known Mexican singer and former TV soap star. I remember watching her in the Maria la del Barrio series that was on Mexican television in the 90s in which she portrays a trash picker rescued by a wealthy benefactor and eventually finds true love after tearful betrayals and misunderstandings. In real life, Thalia Sodi Mirana married music executive Tommy Motolla.
According to The New York Times, the event will be rebroadcast Thursday on PBS stations as part of the series “In Performance at the White House.” It is also to be shown Sunday on the Telemundo network.
QUESTION: Was the president’s dance out-of-bounds? There seems to be a lot of chatter on the Internet about whether or not Michelle Obama looked annoyed or gave him the cold shoulder afterwards. Thoughts?
Tijuana’s painted donkey-zebras have some distant counsins – in a Gaza Strip zoo.
Here in Tijuana, visiting the famous donkey-zebras is a time-honored tradition for tourists to Tijuana’s Avenida Revolucion. You get the family and friends together around the painted donkey, don some sombreros and ponchos, and SNAP – a photo is taken. The city’s unofficial mascots were apparently painted with black strips as far back as the 1940s so that they could show up more clearly in the black-and-white photos.
Across the world, donkey-zebras are now appearing in the Marah Land Zoo, though in this case the painted stripes for educational purposes. The idea is to teach Palestinian kids about zebras. According to this Reuters story, the donkeys were painted with women’s hair dye using a paintbrush after it became clear that importing a real zebra would cost $40,000 or so.
Rosarito Beach held a sand sculpture contest this weekend, and the builders were still busy at work by the time I got there around 2:30 p.m. that Sunday. Shortly afterwards, the mayor of Rosarito Beach, Hugo Tores, inspected the 30+ entries as journalists chased after him with their cameras. The winning entry for the Baja Sand contest was an octopus. Second place went to a version of the Titanic and third place went to a design with an eco-friendly message created by employees of the Baja California water agency. Here are a few of the other entries:
The twice-a-year Rosarito-Ensenada bike ride – celebrating its 30th year – takes place this Saturday,Sept. 26. About 5,000 riders are expected to participate in the event, according to a press release from Rosarito Beach’s communications office:
If you are more in the mood to loll around than to flex your calves, another option in Rosarito Beach this weekend is a sand castle contest on Sunday, Sept. 27, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in front of the Rosarito Beach Hotel.
According to Rosarito Beach’s communications office, registration and further information is available at info@rosarito.org, rosaritotur@baja.gob.mx or by calling 661-612-0200 or 661-612-0396 in Mexico or 619-730-1871 in the United States.
Video of Rosarito-Ensenada bike ride posted by BajaGeoff on YouTube.
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