Jesuits' uniqueness
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- Published on Friday, 22 March 2013 12:24
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Suddenly it’s Jesuit season. A surprise for most of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and a puzzle for non-Catholics. The reason for the surprise within the Church is the fact, the media says, that in the Church’s 2,000-year history, no Jesuit has ever even been truly considered a candidate to take St. Peter’s throne. Actually, the Jesuits didn’t exist until 1534, and didn’t receive papal approval until 1540 (Pope Paul III – 1418-1549). Which means none were ever chosen in the 473 years of the order’s existence. That’s due in great part because Jesuits have actively shunned ambitions, or lobbying for such higher positions as bishops, etc.
‘One cannot read a book: one can only reread it’
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- Published on Friday, 15 March 2013 12:38
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Very few of my campesino friends read newspapers – or, actually, much of anything, besides the directions on livestock feed sacks, and medicines for both animals and their families.
As the year turned, many looked back at 2012, a chilly task; others chose tropical recollection, sometimes serpent-graced
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- Published on Friday, 04 January 2013 13:28
- Written by Allyn Hunt
During the holidays, many folks looked back, examining what last year meant. Being perched on a rural foothill of a mountain facing the rain and the winds of December and early January, the new year prompted a look back on warmer times. And to experiences further back chronologically.
School for skeptics
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- Published on Friday, 08 March 2013 13:09
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Among the gushers of government hyped news this week were reiterations that the January 31 explosion at the Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) tower complex was a gas explosion. The government of Mexico’s new president Enrique Peña Nieto identified the gas as methane.
Repairing roof tile and tar paper, watching the sun present the first slice of day, learning rural lessons about getting older
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- Published on Friday, 28 December 2012 11:52
- Written by Allyn Hunt
“Caray, that’s a good one.” Paco Ruiz Gonzales grinned as he squinted into the slip of early morning light. It was a couple of days before a mountain Christmas cold enough to show your breath. We turned to face a slice of the red disc growing above the distant southeastern horizon. It was a chill morning, but as soon as the sun crested the far Michoacan peaks, it began to change.
Debate about James K. Polk continues today
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- Published on Friday, 01 March 2013 13:23
- Written by Allyn Hunt
The debate (at least one of them) about James Knox Polk, the eleventh, and seemingly very efficient, president, has to do with his pro-slavery inclinations mixed with his eagerness for a “war of choice” – rather than one of necessity. Most Polk enthusiasts tend to ignore the fact that he was both a good friend of Sam Houston and a long-time slave master. And though he privately declared he would free his slaves (when the economic moment was right), one of the last things he did as he was dying of cholera in 1849 was to order the purchase, in secret, of six more young slaves.
Books, Bibles weave a far-reaching continuum of encounters, imagination and revelations in startling ways both simple and intricate
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- Published on Friday, 21 December 2012 12:32
- Written by Allyn Hunt
“The book of books” is a newly re-discovered monicker for the Bible. A lit instructor, in the early 1950s, a gaunt, knowing World War II vet, enthusiastically parsing John Steinbeck’s rightfully famed “Grapes of Wrath” for a class of unread, if eager students, used the term referring to the King James Bible.
‘A wicked war,’ Grant called the US invasion of Mexico in 1846
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- Published on Friday, 22 February 2013 13:28
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Into this season of welcome and instructive Lincoln-mania comes an evidently political-dividing history of a war that Abraham Lincoln opposed when he was still a congressman. Using the words of Ulysses S. Grant, who termed the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, a “wicked war,” for her title, historian Amy S. Greenberg’s, “A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico,” brings our attention to an often ignored aspect of an early United States “war of choice.” Mexicans called it then, and call it now, “The American Invasion.”
Surprising Mexican lessons in Houston: Texas will be a swing state in 2016, doubt that the Prez can keep his promises
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- Published on Friday, 14 December 2012 12:23
- Written by Allyn Hunt
A quick flight to Houston last week was packed with complex news, most of it post-electoral, along with some hard words for the way that state and its communities have traditionally dealt with voters. Austin (the fastest-growing city in the United States, and Texas’ most liberal), plus Dallas and Houston, traditionally rigid Republican enclaves, along with San Antonio, went for President Obama. These are the state’s largest cities. Still, Obama lost Texas, garnering just 41.38 percent to Mitt Romney’s 57.17 percent.
War breeds myths for both sides
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- Published on Friday, 15 February 2013 12:50
- Written by Allyn Hunt
This article is being started on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday. It registers comments by U.S. readers uneasy with recent columns about America’s Civil War (1861-1865). All nations, and sections of nations, live in some part on a past of legends of bravery in the face of great odds – and on sorrow, too. All regions possess such myths, cherish them and commemorate them. Some are fiercely local, some even familial. And despite this time when the lazy habit of dismissing history is popular, people still live with and by myth. Nowhere is that more true than Mexico, despite the “modern” inclination to display fashionable historical indifference.
Immigration: Stumbling out of the gate into a field of restless folk for whom government changes seem whimsical
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- Published on Friday, 07 December 2012 12:22
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Heard it on the grapevine: A continuing – and increasingly loud – unhappy reaction to Mexico’s new (and clearly complicated) federal laws and increased fees for foreigners wishing to visit or reside in this Republic temporarily or permanently.
Lawmakers: think before meddling with citizens’ lives
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- Published on Friday, 08 February 2013 13:33
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Mexico celebrated the creation of its 1917 revolutionary and “activist” constitution this past Monday, February 4. It is easy to assume that the adjective “activist” issues from the fact that, as constitutional specialist Professor Miguel Carbonell has noted, it has been amended some 600 times.
Mexicans there and here invigorated that Hispanic votes, African American, Asian American votes influenced US election
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- Published on Friday, 30 November 2012 13:03
- Written by Allyn Hunt
A lot of Mexicans on both sides of the border have a new spring in their stride. And after a multitude of threats and an avalanche of vilification that increased as the United States’ presidential election neared its culmination, they are beaming with unabashed self-confidence. The rap on Mexican American voters has long been: They may have fervent political views, but they don’t vote. Even though a vote might begin to ease their problems. But their voting record showed an indifference that bruised their cause.
Common links between Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juarez
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- Published on Friday, 01 February 2013 13:08
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Abraham Lincoln’s birth date, February 12, by government decree has been folded in with George Washington’s birth date, February 18, to constitute something called President’s Day. Living in the 1960s in a society that some said had too many national holidays, prompted the view that the United States could trivialize (and commercialize) anything. Anthropologists had suggested this concept much earlier.
GOP shock, wonder, disbelief, recrimination, and the swift embrace of ‘change’ and a mixed vision about what that might mean
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- Published on Friday, 23 November 2012 13:14
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Most Mexicans were pleased – and puzzled – with the results of the United States election. The seemingly growing acceptance of the legalization of marijuana gave them nightmares about the increasing power of drug cartels. Almost every Mexican friend has relatives living, legally or illegally, north of the border. The disaffinity for Hispanics, relentlessly declared during the seemingly endless Republican primary campaign process, all of it repeated again during the general election, put them energetically in Obama’s camp. Relatives here wrote to family members in the States urging them to vote for the president. Shyly, Mexicans here would ask U.S. citizens they knew well who they favored.
Mexico, still trying to pin down its dead heroes of the War of Independence, now is sifting through bones of infants and deer
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- Published on Friday, 25 January 2013 11:52
- Written by Allyn Hunt
In solemn and (presumed) circumstance, before an enthralled public and the politicians proud of the spectacle they were offering the citizenry, “the bones of the heroes who gave (Mexico) its fatherland,” passed through the streets of the city of Mexico September 30, 2010, in ostentatious parades commemorating the bicentennial of Independence, wrote a journalist from the Mexico City daily La Jornada. Crowds applauded Morelos and Hidalgo, the most popular founders of an independent Mexico.
Mexico’s many revolutions bred an exotic, sometimes puzzling array of new monies as regimes changed
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- Published on Friday, 16 November 2012 11:34
- Written by Allyn Hunt
It is akin to something akin to universal law: During times of peace a government’s need for money (often no matter what its real value) is merely chronic; during a revolution the need is bottomless. Throughout history as the turbulent winds of revolution raged across Mexico, countless state, municipal and national governments were rearranged. With each shift of rebellious wind, the more temporary of the affected governments were barely able to keep city and pueblo shops open. The more canny (and sometimes shifty) businesses lasted long enough to come to shrewd grips of their dilemma and began, quite literally, making money – of their own.
Rich Mexican immigrants change Texas, drug thugs send Peña Nieto a message, as critics check his anti-drug gendarmaria
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- Published on Friday, 18 January 2013 12:07
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Rich Mexican immigrants are changing Texas, Time magazine reported Monday. Thirty-eight killed in three days, reported the BBC Tuesday. Sixteen of the 38 were killed in Toluca, capital of the State of Mexico, where the nation’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was born, a state his extended family and close family friends have dominated for years. (Peña Nieta was its governor 2005-2011.) Twenty-two bodies were found in Mexico City, where he now lives, in Los Pinos (Mexico’s White House), and rules the nation from the National Palace. Many Mexicans – whose avid taste for speculation has been proven correct disturbingly often – suggest that the killings in Mexico City and in Toluca are a signal from drug traffickers to the president that any hope for a lessening in violence and slaughter is misinformed.
Hallucinations: We all have them, say neurologists, but clearly politicians shouldn’t try to sell them as policies
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- Published on Friday, 09 November 2012 12:58
- Written by Allyn Hunt
“Hearing Things? Seeing Things? Many of Us Do?” was an Oliver Sacks’ article in the New York Times this week helping launch his book, “Hallucinations.” It points out that such phenomena are experienced by nearly all of us at some time in our lives – though we tend to keep that secret. Sacks is the much-acclaimed author, practitioner and professor of neurology and psychiatry, who has written 12 books regarding patients’ experiences with neurological disorders. His most well-known books: “Awakening” (made into a Oscar-nominated film, starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams), “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and “The Last Hippie,” also made into a film. He presently serves as both clinical professor of neurology and consulting neurologist at the center of the epilepsy at the New York University School of Medicine.
Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposals appear both illuminating and questionable. Without a majority in Congress, he may face problems
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- Published on Friday, 11 January 2013 12:49
- Written by Allyn Hunt
A number of professional international and political analysts have examined Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) President Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposed new policies and found some illuminating but others unpromising. Their assessments are not couched in the sharp rhetoric that many (both Mexicans and those abroad) believe the new administration’s campaign-tainted maneuvering merits.
Saluting a long rainy season with vines of a green ‘vegetable,’ and the lessons in caution learned during Mexico’s cruel ‘peso error’
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- Published on Friday, 02 November 2012 12:59
- Written by Allyn Hunt
By Monday, the prolonged temporada de lluvias (rainy season) that was still blessing his chayote field had given Nando Flores a near-permanent grin. Nando is a campesino whose livelihood depends to good extent on a variety of agricultural pursuits. Though the year’s hefty corn harvest was finished early in October, a number of farmers and ranchers had planted chayote, a late rainy season crop that thrives on, but recently has seldom received, late October moisture. Still, vine-climbing chayote demands a lot of work: an elementary short-posted two- or three-wire support, plus a lot of irrigating. And because of current low prices, many campo families were reluctant to plant chayote this year. But those who did got an unexpected late-season gift of nourishing rains.