On Vacation

Just a quick note to wish visitors and readers of this blog a wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year!

I am leaving Christmas Day on a nine-day road trip south of the border to to explore some new places and revisit a few favorites (picture above is from previous trip along the Baja peninsula). The plan is to drive south along the Sonora coast, take the ferry across the Gulf of California to the Baja peninsula – and make our way back north to Tijuana. I will be traveling with my partner in crime, two kids – and quite possibly a sock puppet.

It should be fun, and I plan on documenting it with my video camera and come back with some travel entries for this blog, which will resume publishing in January. Until then…cheers!

p.s. If you are feeling inspired to hit the road in Baja, you can check out the travelogue I put together from my 2006-2007 Baja trip.

Could the pitaya be the next pomegranate?

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Apparently there are a range of pitayas that grow around the Southern hemisphere, including Mexico, and this site reports that there are “several” that are from Nicaragua. Some other varieties have a white flesh and yellow exterior. It can also also be found in Vietnam and Malaysia.

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.

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Painted donkey-zebras not just in Tijuana

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.

Tijuana’s Tepoznieves a tasty ice-cream spot

Have you ever craved some prune ice cream?

What about a dollop of coconut with gin, celery – or pineapple with chile pepper?

These are the kinds of funky flavors you can find at a Tepoznieves ice cream store. It’s a Mexican “gourmet ice cream” chain with two branches just across the U.S. border in Tijuana. The ice cream originated from a Mexican village called Tepoztlan where it was dedicated to the son of the God of Wind sometime before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, according to the Tepoznieves website.

When it gets hot like it has been in Los Angeles lately, I find myself thinking about Tepoznieves ice cream. The stores boast more than 100 ice cream and sorbet flavors. Sure, you can get your traditional ones like chocolate, vanilla and bubble gum. But why not try something more adventurous, like fig, cheese, rice – or tequila!

 The stores are cheerily decorated in a way that emphasizes the confetti-like colors of the ice cream itself. I spent a good hour tasting eight different flavors during a recent visit. The offerings include ice creams that are outlandish mixes of various flavors. “Xilone’s ice cream,” for example, includes the following flavors: corn cake, mango, peach, cherry, pine nuts and chocolate. And for those who find ice cream a little – bland – there are several specials that use chile pepper flavor to add a kick to the flavor.

If you go: There are two Tepozneives in Tijuana. One is at the MacroPlaza anchored by the WalMart at Plaza los Antojos, near the Morelos Park. The one closest to the border is in the Zona Rio along Blvd. Sanchez Taboada. It’s near a Sam’s Club. You can find them on this Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl&q=tepoznieves%20tijuana

 

 

ancient times.

Homeland Security starts a blog

I recently finished reading a book about blogging that mentions the Department of Homeland Security as one of several types of groups that probably should not blog. The reason: Certain agencies and businesses that deal with sensitive and confidential information have a culture that contradicts the openness that successful blogging requires.

DHS (the umbrella agency that includes Customs and Border Protection) is giving it a try anyways. They started The Blog@Homeland Security about three months ago and  recently announced the creation of “Our Blog,” a Ning-based online community that is being called  a “civic network that connects users and encourages a new kind of dialogue about issues unique to the southwest border.” 

The blog is explained as: “An inside-out view of what we do every day at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Blog lets us talk about how we secure our nation, strengthen our programs, and unite the Department behind our common mission and principles.” So far, however, the blog is relying more on links to news stories, photos of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano meeting important people, and lists of speaking engagements of DHS representatives.

Being that I’m getting my master’s degree in online communities, I am intrigued by DHS’s foray into blogging. The book I just finished reading, “Naked Conversations,” is about blogging for businesses and organizations. Authors Robert Scobble and Shel Israel take the view that a good blog is one that is based around authenticity and openness – not bureaucratic speak. The challenge with DHS is their very reason for existence can elicit such strong political opinions (immigration comes to mind), that fear over controversy may suck the blogging life out of an otherwise interesting agency. 

Then again, they might still be figuring out their voice.

There’s some hope. In their book, Robert Scobble and Shel Israel note that the question may not be so much as whether or not to have a blog, as to how to determine what can be blogged about – and what can’t. I would like to see videos and commentary that illustrate the border’s vastness and complexity.  Give me a sense of what it’s like to be a Border Patrol agent. Take us on a virtual ride-along by sea, air and land. It may be just one side of this complex cross-border story, but it has a place in our increasingly fragmented world of Internet information

Los Tigres del Norte hold a cross-border concert – on a plane!

The Mexican airline Volaris recently innaugurated its new route between Toluca and Los Angeles with a concert in the air by the famous Mexican Norten0  group, Los Tigres del Norte.

According to this article by La Vanguardia, the group played in a section of the plane where 21 seats had been removed from the Airbus 320 to make room for the in-air concert. But after two hours, when the plane crossed into the United States, the group had to pipe down to conform to flight regulations north of the border.

 Group member Jorge Hernandez told La Vanguardia that they instead played accoustic versions of their songs and promoted their new disc, “La Granja.”  

Here is a news report by Mexican network Televisa (note: it has since been removed by YouTube) that shows snippets of the in-flight show (and the plane’s specially-painted exterior in honor of the Tigres), but I’m not finding any other independent videos posted on YouTube.

The Tigres are a Grammy and Latin Grammy winning group from Sinaloa, Mexico that started recording in California in the late 1960s,  according to Wikipedia. While they have a repertoire of  traditional songs and love ballads, they are also well-known for their recordings about the drug trade (narcocorridos) and illegal immigration.

Screenshot of Volaris logo.

What to do in Tijuana-Rosarito Beach-Ensenada Aug. 14-16

Tijuana Eventos, a Spanish-language entertainment site for things to do south of the border, notes that this Friday-Saturday-Sunday (Aug. 14-16)  will mark the first “Reggae by the Beach” festival in Rosarito Beach.

It costs about $15. Here is a link for some information in Spanish: http://tijuanaeventos.com/eventos/details/1373-1er-festival-campamento-qreggae-by-the-beachHere is the same information in English from My Baja Guide: http://www.mybajaguide.com/eng/detail-events.php?event=2212

If you are looking for a more sophisticated weekend, the Guadalupe Valley Harvest Wine Festival continues through Aug. 23. This is in Baja’s wine country,  to the east of Ensenada. Check out this story in The San Diego Union-Tribune, with up-to-date information.

Add your weekend picks for south of the border in the comments section below:

State to get $7 million for border violence

This is a story in The San Diego Union-Tribune about California being in line for federal funds to prevent border violence from spilling into the United States. All border states are apparently getting the funds, and it will be interesting to see how the money is used. Spill-over violence is something that has existed in a sporadic sense along the San Diego border but it seems to be getting extra attention these days, probably because of the drug violence that has been going on in Mexico.

State to get $7 million for border violence

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Clunkers and cash along the U.S.-Mexico border

I have always been fascinated with how the car industry operates along the border. You have maquiladora factories set up in Mexico that piece together cars for export to the U.S. Meanwhile, cars that are stolen in the United States – particularly in U.S. border cities – often end up in Mexico. And, get this: Cars from the U.S. are sold legitimately in Mexico, but end up being stolen from their Mexican owners, crossed into the United States and re-sold in the U.S. market. 

So, with the U.S. car industry making a lot of news lately, I started wondering about what might be going on in Mexico in light of the slowdown in demand for new cars in the United States.

In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, where about 50 of 170 factories cater to the auto industry,  the slowdown has apparently forced some car factories to halt production about 40 percent, according to this article in the South Padre Island Breeze. Meanwhile, Mexico’s El Universal, reported last month that  president Felipe Calderon announced Mexico’s own  ”cash for clunkers” program to promote that country’s internal car manufacturing market. People who turn in cars that are at least 10 years old will receive roughly $1,150 towards a new car that is not worth more than about $12,300. The country is setting aside about $40 million for the program, according to the article.

And this Los Angeles Times story about the “cash for clunker” program in the United States benefitting dismantler and scrap recyclers is bound to resonate with the dozens of junkyards located in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego, which have a brisk cross-border clientele.

The Los Angeles connection to Mexico’s Arellano-Felix cartel

The U.S. media gets  flack from some Mexicans for focusing so much attention on the drug violence that happens south of the border.

“Why doesn’t anyone write about the top-level drug traffickers in your own country?”  was a question posed to me once by Jesus Blancornelas, the editor of Tijuana’s muckracking weekly Zeta newspaper when I first started working as a border reporter with The San Diego Union-Tribune nine years ago. Blancornelas, who regularly wrote about the Arellanos and other drug groups operating along the Mexican border,  had almost been killed in an ambush in 1997 that was later tied to the Arellano-Felix drug cartel.

To him, it didn’t make sense that so much attention was placed on drug traffickers and violence south of the border when it appeared to him those drugs had to be distributed through a centralized system north of the border that would require some degree of institutional corruption. I replied that perhaps it was a question of the scope of the problem being much larger in Mexico – a valuable transit area with weaker institutions –  than in the United States: Mexico had its capos, and the U.S. had smaller-scale dealers with lower profiles.

Still, his question lingered with me over the years as I occasionally wrote about the Arellano-Felix drug group’s activities in San Diego and Chula Vista. Recently, I read a story in the Los Angeles Times that explored a connection with the Arellano-Felix drug cartel in a 101-Freeway shooting in December, 2008, that left the the driver of a $100,000 Bentley dead. According to a search warrant affidavit obtained by the paper, the victim “might have been selling drugs here for the notorious Arellano Felix cartel.” (Read the article here)

I thought that when I took a job in Los Angeles last year I had left the Arellanos behind, but I guess not. They are, in a sense, everywhere.

 

Photo of car dealership in Los Angeles that has no known connection to the Arellano-Felix drug group whatsoever.