Showing posts with label Mexico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mexico. Show all posts
Monday, October 28, 2024
El Chapo plays his last cards from prison: ‘The inefficiency of my lawyers cost me my freedom’
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Saturday, August 27, 2022
Lucia Berlin / Memories of Mexico
Memories of Mexico
Lucia Berlin was a writer whose work went under-read for much of her life. For many readers, “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a collection of selected stories published in 2015, eleven years after her death, at the age of sixty-eight, was the first introduction to stories that, as Lydia Davis, long an admirer of Berlin’s, observed, “are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch.”
Friday, January 15, 2021
Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck / My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature
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| Myriam Gurba |
Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature
Myriam Gurba
December 12, 2019
December 12, 2019
When I tell gringos that my Mexican grandfather worked as a publicist, the news silences them.
Shocked facial expressions follow suit.
Their heads look ready to explode and I can tell they’re thinking, “In Mexico, there are PUBLICISTS?!”
‘American Dirt’ gets Mexico very wrong / It’s the latest in a long trend.
‘American Dirt’ gets Mexico very wrong. It’s the latest in a long trend.
Friday, August 9, 2019
The curse of the Mexican avocado
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| A worker collects avocados from a farm in Uruapan. GLADYS SERRANO |
The curse of the Mexican avocado
The state of Michoacán is the world’s top producer of the fruit but the commercial boom for the superfood has brought with it violence, deforestation and job insecurity
La loca is to blame. When you walk up the hill, you spy little white designer homes built in the Bauhaus style and wineries with English-sounding names. Even higher up, everything turns a pale green as the buildings make way for a forest of trees filled with small yellowish flowers with five petals each. Mexican growers call this flower la loca (the crazy one) because it is unpredictable: it can bloom any time it wants, in summer or winter.
Friday, January 4, 2019
The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK / No 9 / Coco
The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 9 – Coco
Mexico’s Day of the Dead unearths family secrets in a Pixar animation whose impact has grown since its relatively low-key release
L
ast year, on its US release, this charming Pixar animation didn’t even make our American top 50 films of 2017 list: that may have been a simple oversight or a reflection of the fact it arrived late in the year. But more likely its presence in this year’s UK top 10 owes something to the incremental increase in affection and reputation of a film that – compared to the likes of Incredibles 2 or Finding Dory – failed to ignite the hysterical advance buzz that tends to accompany most Pixar releases.
On the face of, Coco may have been hampered initially by the fact that it looks pretty traditional by Pixar standards: notwithstanding the Mexican setting and clear interest in providing a corrective to standard white-bread animation. (But in truth it might have gone a little further; had it started production now it would undoubtedly have had a girl as the principal character.)
Twelve-year-old Miguel is one of those big-eyed Disney moppets who hail from an almost pre-Pixar world – we’re a long way from, say, Riley in Inside Out – and Coco might have buckled if he and his yen to play guitar had been the film’s sole attraction.
But no. Miguel has a convoluted family life, mostly involving a bevy of relatives still enraged at the disappearance of his musician great-great-grandfather decades ago and consequently loathing all forms of music. He picks up a guitar inside the family sepulchre on Mexico’s Day of the Dead and bingo – he is transported to the underworld in the company of the actual deceased.
Rather like in The Book of Life – another Dia de los Muertos animation, from 2014 – this brain-frazzling plot point allows the animators to go bananas: a luridly imagined dead zone, overrun by frenzied hordes of skeletons and packed with enormous, ramshackle buildings. It really is spectacular, beautiful stuff, picked out in DayGlo colours and intricately detailed design.
Miguel’s story – which involves lifting the strummer’s curse, and the exact identity of the person whose face has been ripped out of an old photograph – allows the storytellers to get into some profound areas about life and death, and the function of memory. These concepts perhaps are not sketched out with quite the brilliance and elan of Inside Out, but are nonetheless rendered a feelingly intelligent way, and perhaps just right for the tweenagers in the audience. In stepping back from the zappy, kidult-orientated entertainment-complex it pioneered, Pixar crafted something rather lovely.
Monday, June 11, 2018
Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry
Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry
Bitch. Sauvage. Icon. Barbie doll: the grotesque exploitation of Frida Kahlo... and the artist behind the myths
Valeria Luiselli
Mon 11 Jun 2018
F
rida, the unapologetic bitch. Frida, the disabled artist. Frida, symbol of radical feminism. Frida, the victim of Diego. Frida, the chic, gender-fluid, beautiful and monstrous icon. Frida tote bags, Frida keychains, Frida T-shirts, And also, this year’s new Frida Barbie doll(no unibrow). Frida Kahlo has been subject to global scrutiny and commercial exploitation. She has been appropriated by curators, historians, artists, actors, activists, Mexican consulates, museums and Madonna.
Over the years, this avalanche has trivialised Kahlo’s work to fit a shallow “Fridolatry”. And, while some criticism has been able to counter the views that cast her as a naive, infantile, almost involuntary artist, most narratives have continued to position her as a geographically marginal painter: one more developing-world artist waiting to be “discovered”, one more voiceless subject waiting to be “translated”.
In 1938, Frida Kahlo painted Lo que el agua me dio (What the Water Gave Me), the painting perhaps responsible for launching her international career, but also her international mistranslation. In this self-portrait of sorts, we see Kahlo’s feet and calves inside a bathtub and above them, as if emanating from the steam, a collaged landscape: an erupting volcano out of which a skyscraper emerges; a dead bird resting on a tree; a strangled woman; a Tehuana dress dramatically spread out; a female couple resting on a floating cork. Kahlo was working on Lo que el agua me dio when the French surrealist André Breton arrived in Mexico for a visit. He was transfixed by it. He called Kahlo a “natural surrealist”, and in a brochure endorsing her New York debut at Julien Levy’s gallery in 1938, he wrote: “My surprise and joy were unbounded when I discovered, on my arrival in Mexico, that her work has blossomed forth, in her latest paintings, into pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of the ideas motivating the activities of my friends and myself.”
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| Lo que el agua me dio |
Though “natural surrealist” was a label that helped translate Kahlo’s paintings for European and American audiences, it was one that she always rejected. To be projected as a “surrealist” in Europe helped audiences to understand her work more immediately – more palatably. She was branded as authentically Mexican, with international flair. But to be seen as a “naturalsurrealist” also transformed her into a kind of sauvage: unconscious of her talent, unsuspecting of her mastery. After her debut, a Time magazine critic described her work as having “the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds and yellows of Mexican tradition and the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child.”
The way Kahlo’s work and persona were read in Mexico was of course very different from the way they were translated into other cultural milieux. Just as Breton had attached the category “natural surrealist” to her art and framed her work in a discourse that she herself did not embrace, many others did the same with various aspects of her public and private life.
A post-revolutionary symbol of modernity: The casa-estudio designed for Rivera and Kahlo by Juan O’Gorman. Photograph: Pawel Toczynski/Getty Images
A post-revolutionary symbol of modernity: The casa-estudio designed for Rivera and Kahlo by Juan O’Gorman. Photograph: Pawel Toczynski/Getty Images
An interesting example of this is the house and studio in Mexico City where she and Diego Rivera lived and worked during some of their most productive years in the 1930s. It was designed by Juan O’Gorman, the young architect who was then pioneering the radical architectural changes that took place in post-revolutionary Mexico City.
Before the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), 19th-century neoclassical and colonial architecture dominated. French-influenced mansions across the city stood like lonely homages to a quickly decaying European noble class, and the family life of the Mexican bourgeoisie played out in the sumptuous and darkened stages of these interiors, with their heavy drapes and excessive ornamentation. But after the revolution new ideas about hygiene, ventilation, comfort, efficiency and simplicity made their way into the city. Houses, and with them daily life, were transformed radically and rapidly.
Attuned to the ideological and architectural changes taking place, the couple asked O’Gorman to design a studio and house for them. He created a space specifically for a couple of painters – at once separated and connected. The buildings were the first in Mexico designed for specific functional requirements: living, painting and showcasing work.
In 1933, a few years after Kahlo and Rivera married, they moved in. Rivera’s area was larger, with more work space. Kahlo’s was more “homely”, with a studio that could transform into a bedroom. A flight of stairs led from her studio to a rooftop, which was connected by a bridge to Rivera’s space. Beyond being a workplace, it became a space for the couple’s extramarital affairs: Rivera, with his models and secretaries; Kahlo, with certain talented and famous men, from the sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi to Leon Trotsky. Perhaps without knowing it, O’Gorman designed a house whose function it was to allow an “open” relationship.
The house was an emblem of modernity and a kind of manifesto: a solitary example of a new functionalism in a city that was still trying to find a national architectural language that best suited its revolutionary programme. It did not encode traditional values or messages. It simply addressed the practical necessities of its dwellers, was materially efficient (primarily made of reinforced concrete), socially progressive and cheap.
With time, however, as neutral as the buildings may have been intended to be in their architecture, they ended up functioning as a site of Mexican cultural capital, especially one connected to indigenous Mexican craftsmanship. The couple were hosts to visitors who came to see their work and works-in-progress, as well as their collections of arts and crafts: Trotsky, Nelson Rockefeller, Pablo Neruda, John Dos Passos, Sergei Eisenstein, Breton.
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Kahlo’s self-portrait, The Two Fridas (1939), hangs in the background. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
O’Gorman gave Rivera and Kahlo a machine to live in, as Le Corbusier would have had it, but also a machine to translate in. Their home brought in foreignness as much as it served as a platform to project a particular idea of Mexico to the world. More than anything, it provided the stage for the power couple of Mexican modernity: cosmopolitan, sophisticated, well-connected and more Mexican than Mexico. The couple’s ultimate oeuvre was, of course, themselves. Kahlo and Rivera were, perhaps, Mexico’s first performance artists, and their casa-estudio was their very own gallery.
In 1934 the photographer Martin Munkacsi visited Mexico and copiously documented the house and studios. The pictures had been commissioned for Harper’s Bazaar, the New York-based fashion magazine which was directed at an upper-class female audience, mostly American but also French and British. In Harper’s July 1934 issue, a double-page spread titled “Colors of Mexico” displayed three of Munkacsi’s many photographs: one of Kahlo crossing the bridge from one house to the other; one of Rivera working in his studio; and one of Frida climbing the staircase to the roof. In the centre of the layout, there is a large photograph of the couple walking beside the cactus fence; a caption explains “Diego Rivera with Señora Freida [sic] Kahlo de Rivera before the cactus fence of their Mexico City home.”
The buildings were designed to embody a proletkult ideology, resembling a factory or industrial complex, with its visible water tanks, its exposed materials and raised supporting columns. The cacti fence surrounding the house, if seen in relation to it, added to the general industrial feeling. However, Harper’s chose the image that best decontextualised the cacti fence and thus presented it as a folkloric, decorative element. To the right of that central image appeared a series of photographs of barefooted Mexican peasants selling crafts and riding mules.
An accompanying piece written by Harry Block – a New York editor – describes his search for the perfect Mexican sandals: “All Mexico walks on huaraches (pronounced wahratchehs and meaning sandals) …” Juxtaposed with the portrait of Rivera and Kahlo – he, dressed like a European dandy, solid leather shoes included; she, wearing pointy black boots – Block’s ode to the huarache seems rather forced.
The Harper’s piece is a perfect example of how Mexico was perpetuated in such stories as a marginal space, with glimpses of modernity a rare exception to the rule. The magazine shows an utterly foreign Mexico, but in a way that also makes it easier to capture and explain to foreign audiences through its associated cliches. It is a form of translation that simplifies the complex operations that took place in the Rivera-Kahlo home
The Harper’s piece is a perfect example of how Mexico was perpetuated in such stories as a marginal space, with glimpses of modernity a rare exception to the rule. The magazine shows an utterly foreign Mexico, but in a way that also makes it easier to capture and explain to foreign audiences through its associated cliches. It is a form of translation that simplifies the complex operations that took place in the Rivera-Kahlo home
A functionalist Mexican house that showcased post-revolutionary art? Impossible! Let’s just use the picture with the cacti.
This instance of colonising narratives in cultural translations was not the end but the beginning. In 2002, Harvey Weinstein’s company distributed the film Frida, starring Salma Hayek, asked for a more-sexy Kahlo – more nudity, less unibrow – and got away with it. In a 2016 concert stunt in Mexico, Madonna pulled a Frida lookalike from the audience, said she was “so excited” to finally meet Frida, and then handed her a banana as a token.
Last Halloween, my 21-year-old niece was dragged by her friend to a New York college party. She wasn’t wearing a costume, was not really in the mood. At some point, a trio of Wonder Women stumbled in: red knee-high boots, star print bikini-bottoms, strapless tops, gold headbands fastened around long blond hair.
One of the three wonders took a long swig from a bottle and almost fell back, suddenly noticing my niece, standing behind her. She turned round and looked straight into her face. She studied it up close. Like many women in my maternal family, my niece inherited a dark, robust unibrow. The Wonder Woman finally said: “Oh my god, it’s Frida Kahlo!”.
• Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends is published by 4th Estate. Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up opens at the V&A, London SW7, on 16 June. vam.ac.uk.
Sunday, April 8, 2018
María Félix / Google’s latest Doodle
María Félix
Google’s latest Doodle
Google’s latest Doodle honours Maria Felix, the Mexican actor widely considered “the most beautiful face in the history of Mexican cinema”.
Felix, who died in 2002 at the age of 88, would have celebrated her 104th birthday today.
Also known as Maria Bonita, thanks to a song composed for her by her second husband, composer Agustin Lara, the star’s screen career spanned four decades and as many as 47 films.
A leading light of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema, in the 1940s and 50s, Felix was the incarnation of the strong, sexual woman who would ultimately be tamed by a man by the end of a movie.
Felix was one of 16 children, born in the town of Alamos. She went to study in Guadalajara before moving to Mexico City, where she initially worked as a model for a plastic surgeon who used her to attract clients.
She starred in her first film, El Penon De Las Animas (1942), alongside Jorge Negrete, a famous actor whom she later married.
But it was her third movie, Dona Barbera, which turned her into a national star. It told the story of a young Venezuelan woman who ran a despotic ranch while dressed in men’s clothes.
In honour of her role, she was often known as La Dona until the end of her life.
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
'I'm alone' / Migrant children explain why they risked crossing the border
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Texas’s Rio Grande Valley corridor is the busiest border crossing
into the United States.
Photograph: John Moore
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'I'm alone': Migrant children explain why they risked crossing the border
About 10,588 unaccompanied children crossed the US-Mexico border in October and November, more than double who crossed during the same period last year
Associated Press and staff
Saturday 26 December 2015 17.58 GMT
The seven children had just crossed the river, shoes still caked with mud, when US border patrol agents stopped them.
The youngest was six, Jon Smith Figueroa Acosta, he said, and he’d made the 2,000-mile journey from Honduras. He did not know to what city or state he was headed, but he had a phone number for his father in the United States.
“Estoy solo,” he said, meaning, “I’m alone.”
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Six-year-old’s brutal murder at hands of other children shocks Mexico
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| Authorities carry the body of six-year-old Christopher who was killed on the outskirts of Chihuahua. / EFE |
Six-year-old’s brutal murder at hands
of other children shocks Mexico
Torture and killing of young boy rallies Mexicans to demand end to rampant impunity
JAN MARTÍNEZ AHRENS Mexico City 20 MAY 2015 - 16:58 CEST
Mexico has been shaken by the violent death of a six-year-old boy who was reportedly tortured, stoned and stabbed to death by two cousins and three other friends, all aged between 11 and 15, in a small shantytown in the northern state of Chihuahua.
The body of Christopher Márquez Mora was found on Saturday in a shallow grave in Laderas de San Guillermo, located on the outskirts of the state capital, which is also named Chihuahua.
The five juvenile suspects reportedly took him by the hand “to play kidnappers,” according to authorities.
“This is a problem concerning a breakdown of society – not a police matter, but instead a loss of values,” said a shocked investigating prosecutor.
In a country where random murders take place each day, the case has become a wake-up call for Mexican society to reflect on how runaway violence has even affected the way children play.
“As a society, how should we respond to something like this?” asked the editor of the influential Mexican daily Excelsior in a column. “What do kids see in their surroundings that pushes them to play kidnappers?”
According to investigators, the five children had brutally killed a stray dog before they took Christopher. One of the eldest in the group, who led the children on their rampage, reportedly ordered his friends to search for another victim after they attacked the dog, authorities said.
At 10am on May 14 Christopher was playing by himself on a street near his home, as he often did. The children asked him to help them find wood to burn and Christopher followed.
He knew the kids in the group: two of them were his cousins and the others were friends from the dusty and dilapidated poor neighborhood.
When they reached a stream, the group asked Christopher if he wanted to play kidnappers. They then tied his hands and feet and choked him with a stick until he fell unconscious. The barbarities then followed.
They allegedly beat him, stoned him, and then stabbed him with a knife, say investigators.
Afterwards they dragged the boy’s body and tried to bury it in a shallow grave, covering it with loose dirt, plants and the dead dog.
The following day, as the police began searching for Christopher, one of the boys’ mothers approached them after her son told her what had happened.
The two eldest boys, both 15, could face 10-year prison sentences if they are found guilty: two girls, both aged 13, and another 11-year-old boy cannot be charged but could face other penalties, according to prosecutors.
Meanwhile, Mexico searches for answers. “This is a reflection of an entire generation that has been raised on the idea that if you kill someone you won’t face any consequences,” said journalist Sandra Rodríguez, who is the author of Fábrica del crimen (Factory of crime), an account of a 2004 murder committed by juveniles in Chihuahua.
“What can we expect if they live in a state that champions impunity and where life doesn’t matter? This is what they have learned. The only remedy to cure this madness is to hand down justice. Mexican institutions must make it clear that murder in Mexico is not going to be tolerated,” she said.
At the funeral on Sunday, the outrage poured out. “My son wasn’t a dog,” cried the grief-stricken mother.
During the past decade, 10,876 minors were murdered in Mexico. Last Thursday, Christopher became another one of them.
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