The Guadalajara Reporter

Education effort gets stalled

When Concha Rosales was 16 she did something she hated.  She asked someone to help her without getting angry about it.  Something she hadn’t done since she was six or seven, she later said.  Her false siblings were too surprised to make fun of her. Chema and Guadalupe Rosales, the man and woman who had (unknown to Concha) informally adopted her, gave each other quizzical glances and later agreed it was just another odd bump along the road to growing up. 

Infant bus wreck survivor grew into feisty young girl

Concha Rosales had perhaps sixteen years the day she sent her bay gelding up into the portales of the Rooster’s Soul pulqueria to confront a bocon (loudmouth) who had insulted her. No one could remember any female ever doing something like that. And certainly it was hard to recall seeing such a mature, short-tempered male challenged like that by a sixteen year old. Just about everyone who knew the Rosales family well thought Concha was fiften or sixteen; they didn’t really know for sure.

The hollow crown and governance by ‘iron whimsy’

This new century began with Mexicans’ average consumption of books scored at less than one a year.  Mexico subsequently was tagged by some as “the country that stopped reading.”  Yet today books offering impolitely well-documented assessments of the rulers of the Republic are breaking records, popping into being like popcorn.  But truth’s a risky business. Today’s rulers tolerate truth no happier than their New Spain forebearers in Father Miguel Hidalgo’s time.  Take for instance Anabel Hernandez’s investigation of government officials’ allegedly profitable relations with the nation’s raft of drug gangs.  Her book, published in English this month, is titled “Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers.” 

A heretical take on the Zeta bust

Like many people, initially I was elated that the Mexican Marines caught Zeta jefe Miguel Angel Treviño Morales on Monday, July 15.  Yet when I expressed a modest bit of that cheer to Mexican friends, I often got somber glances. 

A wet and dark Sixteenth of September

Setting out to check on the local pueblo celebration of Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 grito launching Mexico’s war of independence, was a stormy errand. True, it was a mandatory national celebration, and one that the corps of folk who waveringly operated the local cabecera (county seat) vehemently promised to conduct — despite a long-running series of rainstorms of Tlalocian persistence. The downhill dirt road was steep and as slippery. Much of the citizenry believed local officials, despite their strutting and loud words, would call the game due to weather. Such citizens decided to forego this example of frail patriotism. My own chance to observe this bit of weak-heartedness was foiled by a late evening version of Chuma Chavez’s cow-lot cabaret. Chuma’s cow-lot in the mornings as he milks his small herd, offers laborers on their way to work a clay cup — or three — of freshly warm milk spiked with straight alcohol, for an easy price.

Election echoes a brutal past

Mexico held elections in 15 states Sunday, and the results did not cheer a large portion of the Mexican electorate.  One might think this wouldn’t matter. That’s because 60 percent of Mexican voters abstained. But the results will matter both sooner or later.  And the reasons are of pressing importance. 

Drought, a waterspout tand a young girl racing to rescue her livestock

Not long ago a large group of leading Mexican scholars, educators, and cultural analysts assembled by the nation’s Colegio de Mexico published a report on “the nations most pressing issues.” Among these at that time was the fact that the number of books read per capita in Mexico was less than one per year. This year the subject was doleful enough to prompt Mexican author David Toscana to write about “The country that stopped reading.” He asked: “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back some one who is basically illiterate.”

Concha, aged 16

When pueblo Mexicans first saw Concha Rosales, they were surprised.  It was because she was too young to be riding such a spooky horse jerking its head at the tight streets and noisy people. 

Education is often drowned in pessimism

When Fray Martin de Valencia, tireless organizer of the Franciscan effort to educate the survivors of Hernan Cortes’ destruction of Tenochtitlan, died on the wharf of Ayatzingo, August 31, 1534, the “indians” of the Aztec Empire lost a valuable ally, though many didn’t know who he was. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was in ruins, and there was a slightest pause in the Spanish Catholic Church’s first religious order to answer Cortes’ request for a group of friars to convert the people whose civilization he was in the process of destroying.

‘Radicalizing’ the US Revolution

English colonists in America were ruled — and protected — by an accumulation of laws set down in (and between) the Magna Carta, 1215, and the British Bill of Rights, 1689.

Education’s long, bumpy history in Mexico

On August 31, 1534, Spanish evangelist, writer and revered Franciscan leader in New Spain, Father Martin de Valencia, collapsed on the wharf at Ayatzingo, and died. August 9, 2013, Mexican students here returned to school. There’s a gnarled connection between the two.

Citizens nominate pets and farm animals for political positions

Begun by Sergio Chamorro, a 35-year-old office worker, and a company of friends also disillusioned with the transparently false promises of human candidates, the ten-year-old, adopted “Morris the Cat” is running for mayor of Xapala, the capital of Veracruz state.  

Teenage girl takes on adult-sized challenges

Late in her fifteenth year, when it was noticeable that Concha Rosales was beginning to get her growth, she saw the man she called tio slap the woman she believed to be her aunt hard enough to knock the woman down. Concha threw herself in front of her tia and got hit too. Her uncle swore at her for getting in the way, making him strike her, too. But Concha had grabbed a split piece of log and stood in front of Chela Rosales with that hefty piece of kindling raised, ready to hit back. The man, Guicho Rosales, was astonished: This strange girl that everyone in the Rosales extended family had taken in was threatening him with a guage limb large enough that he was surprised Concha could heft it. And just because he’d hit his wife. Guicho didn’t consider such a thing any of Concha’s business, except as a warning.

Life with bugged phones

In Guadalajara, until the kidnapping, gristly torture and eventual murder of United States Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena, launched Thursday afternoon, February 7, 1985, there was little reason for anyone to tap the business or home telephones of the editors of the Guadalajara Reporter.  

The impact on the foreign community of the Guadalajara cartel and its war with the DEA

With the release Friday, August 9, of one of the “founders” of Mexico’s first drug cartel, and a rather leisurely government response to this failure of good sense and common logic, a hefty slice of the media, both here and abroad, are suggesting that it appears as if the “bad old days” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) are returning with the fresh presidency (December 2012) of Enrique Peña Nieto.

A mixed week for Mexico

When Mexican-born U.S. citizen Yanira Maldonado, 42, was released May 30 after “only” a stretched week in Sonora’s women’s prison, everyone following what was dubbed Mexico’s “shakedown justice” was relieved. 

This undoubtedly included President Enrique Peña Nieto.  The president has recently clamped down on media outlets in Mexico, admonishing them not to deal in the number of casualties, carved up bodies, civilian deaths caused by Mexico’s law enforcement system, and associated official corruption.  In other words, no drug gang tales no matter how appalling.  That would reflect poorly on Mexico’s already well-known image – and coincidently on government’s slippery grasp of Mexican culture, though that wasn’t directly mentioned.  

The search for the real mexico continues

“Friedman Gets Lost South of the Border” announced a headline from Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank February 23. In recent days, someone has been well-meaningly scattering around the internet a boosterish piece by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman concerning Monterrey, Mexico, which contains enough spillover to, by implication, paint a picture of Mexico in general. Among others, I was surprised to receive it in July since it had appeared in the Times in February. In quick-time it was pretty well eviscerated, its innards exposed to the light of wider points of view, its bones well picked and scattered. This was accomplished in good part by Mexican analysts, academics and journalists. plus the foreign media and other experienced long-time observers of Mexico. That experience has given such folks practiced savvy in recognizing mascaraed-and-rouged public relations puffery — the flatulence of political, and board-room chest thumping and wool-gathering. (The NYT maintains a Mexico City bureau whose reporters quite consistently display quick-take skills regarding pertinent history and whose excavation of present leads is profitable. It appears the Friedman Monterrey encounter might have benefited from their input.)

A time of bitter debate

Memorial Day was fittingly celebrated, both here and north of the border, with solemnity, reverence, good cheer and elegant settings wrapped in moving the world’s “universal tongue” — music.  The occasions that many of us witnessed, rightly, and thankfully, emphasized a nation’s often awkward hand of aid to those who have served to defend the United States in ways and venues complex and baffling, most of them dangerous.

U.S. and Mexican governments vie to be the most puzzling, contradictory and inept

The governments of the United States and Mexico presently seem to be competing for the leadership of the Western Hemisphere and EU Cup for a number of widely unembraced categories.  These include, a cyber-addicted Mexican acquaintance suggested last Tuesday: possessing the most contradictions, being the most puzzling (and/or foolish), the most inept and corrupt.

The Huevos Revueltos concept of politics

Foreigners almost universally paid little attention to Mexican politics when my wife and I landed at Lake Chapala in the sixties.  Many Mexicans then seemed to know only enough to realize they were on the losing end of a very soiled stick.

Yet some “gringos” (meaning foreigners) held bountiful comidas for incoming presidentes municipales (inevitably called “mayors”) every three years when a new face took office for reasons too complicated for outsiders to easily – and accurately – uncover.  Often the owner of this new face (always male) was a merchant whose business they patronized.  The idea was for him to know them, so if a problem arose involving the law, they might have a – sometimes imaginary – sympathetic ear.  But as far as the Republic’s president was concerned, few knew what he and cohorts were up to, besides now and then complaining about “arrogant” and “unfair” Washington decisions.