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.
Tijuana has more than its share of charming oddities, but this one was definitely a head-turner. While driving near the Otay Mesa port of entry, I saw this giant hot dog literally roll to a stop on a side street.
I have seen giant condoms, a giant Jesus, and giant beer bottles in Mexico – but not a hot dog. So I immediately went back to look at it more closely. As you can see, the truck has been decorated to emulate the physique of a hot dog topped with chile peppers, avocados and tomatoes. Mustard and catsup artfully drip from its sides. I chatted briefly with the owner, a guy who gave me his name as Jose, who said that he moved to Tijuana from Arizona a few months ago. He has big dreams of creating a whole fleet of these super-sized hot dog trucks, but right now he’s just starting out with this one that offers hot dogs prepared with options for his cross-border clientelle: New York style, Chicago style and Sonora (Mexico) style. It was too early for me to eat a hot dog that day but I plan on returning to check it out some other time.
This reminded me of a post I recently read by the blogger at Masa Assasin, who wrote about the way that Mexican hot dogs have taken U.S. hot dogs to spicier and colorful new heights, i.e. the bacon-wrapped hot dog that appears to form the basis of the Sonoran style hot dog. You can read more about that at this Masa Assassin link.
Almost overnight, Mexico has jumped to the top of the U.S. diplomatic agenda – at least momentarily overshadowing Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is visiting Mexico this week, paving the way for a scheduled visit next month by President Obama.
To be sure, the violence appears to have taken a particularly savage turn over the past few years. Missing in some of these assessments, however, is that the backlash comes from the Mexican government’s own success in attacking the country’s drug cartels over the past eight years. Dismantling long-standing drug trafficking organizations, unfortunately, creates instability . Drug trafficking was a major problem during the 1990s but it may not have attracted this much attention because the drug groups operated with comparatively minimal meddling from the government. This created a false sense of order.
With so much attention on the violence in Mexico lately (I can’t seem to turn on the radio or read a news media source without hearing about it), Mexican authorities have lashed back. In recent weeks, they have pointed out that the U.S. demand for drugs is fueling the drug trade. They have accused the U.S. of not doing enough to curb the flow of firearms south of the border into the hands of drug traffickers. Mexican president Felipe Calderon also suggested that the U.S. do a better job of attacking drug corruption in its own agencies.
Things have gotten testy, and the visits by U.S. diplomats are clearly meant to soothe the bickering and focus on the cross-border collaboration efforts. Whether this actually translates to a reduction in the violence is unclear, especially when we consider the unabated demand for drugs in the United States. Instead, stability may be more dependent on the ability of Mexican drug groups to re-negotiate their roles in a way that gives us all the illusion that the underlying problem has been fixed.
The quebradita is a dance style that is a combination of county western steps, merengue, and cheerleading stunts. Some see influence of the Lindy Hop, as well. At first I thought it originated in Mexico, but now I’m not so sure. According to this book by Sydney Hutchinson* , the dance evolved in the Mexican-American community and it is seen as a backlash to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that was taking hold in California in the early to mid 1990s. The dance has developed a strong following south of the border, as well. The first time I saw the quebradita was a few years ago when I was watching one of those Mexican television dance contest shows. I’ve tried it myself, but not with much success. The last time I checked, the Las Pulgas nightclub on Tijuana’s tourist strip of Avenida Revolucion was one of the places south of the border to go see regular local people doing these moves.
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