Mexicans aren’t color shy. Driving around a city like Tijuana is a lot like taking a detour onto a Candyland board game where yellow doors, mint-topped roofs, and violet walls are all the norm. Watch any Mexican soap opera to get a sense of how color infuses clothes and the interior of homes from the very rich to the very poor. Spend enough time in Mexico and you will return home, look around, and realize everything is just so…beige. Not even the Christmas tree appears to be exempt from the inclination to dress up and color up most anything in sight, as can be seen in these photos I took last weekend at a Tijuana tree lot.
I wish it were this kind of a break (photo from from a summer outing in Baja California’s Guadalupe Valley). But no – I need to finish up my final project for my final master’s class at USC and that looming deadline has kept me from updating this blog lately. I will, however, be responding to messages left on this blog, and I will return to blogging in about a week…Thanks for your patience!
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.
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.
Last month, I went to a quinceanera (15th Birthday party celebration) in Tijuana that included a clown on stilts who walked through the dance floor and did circus tricks. It was very Cirque du Soleil. Lucky, a Tijuana dog I take for occasional walks, didn’t have that kind of celebration for her own coming-of-age moment (see photo on right), but she was one of hundreds who participated in the city’s first-ever “Perroton” spay & neuter clinic that took place a few weekends ago.
There were no clowns, but outside the facility the atmosphere was very circus-like with a pet costume party, music and outdoor movies.
The “Perroton” (basically a play on the word ‘perro,’ which means dog, and ’marathon’) was a 24-hour all-nighter that took place at Tijuana’s Universidad Autonoma de Baja California with a team of veterinarians and volunteers dedicated to reducing the number of street dogs and cats in the Tijuana area. It is also an example of the cross-border collaboration that one sees along Baja communities like Tijuana and San Felipe - check out what’s going on with animal activists in Felipe- where U.S. expatriates have become active in working with local activists in addressing the problem of large numbers of street animals by holding adoption services and reducing the population through spay & neuter clinics.
More than 300 animals were spayed and neutered during the first-ever Tijuana “Perroton” event that was sponsored by a number of civic organizations, such as the Tijuana Humane Society, which regularly holds smaller-scale clinics for free or reduced prices, and the Preventive Animal Brigade. People came to have their cats and dogs spayed or neutered for under $30. The money is being collected to build a new animal shelter so that dogs like Lucky (who was rescued as a puppy from the streets of Tecate) can prosper and find new homes.
When I heard that American football was being played in Tijuana, I had to double-check my semantics. Soccer, the more popular ball sport here, is commonly called “Football” or “Futbol.” But, no, I was told that actual American football - not the soccer variety – was becoming increasingly popular among the city’s younger generation.
Last month, I got a chance to see this for myself when I went to an American football game in Tijuana against two junior high teams representing Tijuana (the Jaguares) and Mexicali for the state championship. The moms of the Tijuana kids had made up their own cheerleading chants in English and Spanish (see video below). A drum-pounding dad provided back-up to the cheers as the Tijuana kids took home the trophy.
My initial theory of how American football ended up in Tijuana was that a fair number of Tijuanans cross the border regularly go to San Diego Chargers games. But it turns out, according to this ESPN story, that American-style football was started in the state of Veracruz where some Mexican students who had been studying in the United States organized an impromptu match in 1896. The article explains how football has taken root in Mexico slowly but surely over the year, even becoming established in certain Mexican universities.
This past weekend I joined a group of food bloggers, writers and chefs from Los Angeles in what turned out to be a non-stop eating and drinking tour of Tijuana and Ensenada that was organized by cross-border food blogger Bill Esparza and other Tijuana associations (full credit in message from Kenn below).
While I had already been to most of the Tijuana places on the itinerary – La Querencia, La Diferencia, Villa Saverios, L’Apricot, Cien An~os, Lorca, Tacos Los Salceados and Cheripan – I wasn’t familiar with all their offerings. A Saturday morning breakfast stop at the Barbacoa de la Ermita Tijuana, which is run out of a family home, was a surprising treat.
Ostensibly, the tour was to introduce these L.A.-based food experts to the wide variety of food options just south of the border, but it also was about relationship building and creating word-of-mouth buzz about the region’s more positive offerings. Several of the Los Angeles chefs expressed interest in participating in cross-border culinary reunions that Plascencia said he is involved in organizing.
Watching the food bloggers and freelancers snap photos of their food and scribble notes, I couldn’t help but feel a little envious of them. In my previous work as a reporter in Tijuana, I got to know the city’s darker side intimately, equating certain places and street corners with horrible crimes committed by the region’s drug groups. It’s a parallel universe, but one that is typically separate from the lives of ordinary tourists – and it certainly hasn’t stopped me from visiting the region regularly. Intently focused on the food, the visitors from L.A. couldn’t have cared less about such details.
And after a while, as my stomach became full with even more tasty morsels of foods, I started to understand why.
(Chef Javier Plascencia, who has a number of restaurants in Tijuana and Chula Vista, serves up some special tacos during a picnic outside a winery in the Guadalupe Valley).
Here are several posts from the 20+ food bloggers and writers who went on the trip:
As Mexicans prepare for elections next weekend, it’s not unusual for campaign teams to crank out the circus-like entertainment to get people to rally behind their candidates. I’m not sure if the green creature is supposed to be a dinosaur, a lizard or an alligator. I think the point is that he is green and that’s one of the main colors of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. He was campaigning for candidate Liliana Sevilla, who is apparently running for a seat in the national chamber of deputies. As the fuzzy mascot handed out flyers, a couple members of the campaign team danced on top of a car to the beat of salsa music and Rock-en-Espanol.
That’s the same gym I used to go to when I lived in Tijuana, and to be honest I’m a little surprised he wasn’t going to the swankier Sports World Tijuana gym (the Arellanos’ recreation budget must have been cut). I remember visiting both gyms and deciding not to got to Sports World because the monthly membership was closer to $300 (someone correct me here, if needed…) and because it seemed to be the kind of place where people looked great but didn’t seem to be capable of sweating.
At Total Fitness the equipment area was a little more cramped but there was a lot of sweating going on. Both places had some similar details, such as rock scaling areas and lap pools. At Total Fitness, I had a membership for about $100 a month and a personal trainer who was preparing for a body building competition. At times he seemed more interested in his own physique, but he dutifully kept me from cutting corners with the weights and sneaking off the bikes too early.
Both mega-gyms opened sometime after the year 2000, providing an alternative for wealthier Tijuanenses whose exercise options had previously involved jogging at public park facilities or crossing the border to work out in Chula Vista. For me, the main impetus to work out was to stay fit in my jeans. The stakes are probably much higher for someone like Parra, who was reportedly part of the Arellanos’ killer squad.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a4697ef8-1222-44a0-acd0-7153ef4214d7)
