Recuerdos

Black market

Black market

Had to post before I forget/lose the easy access. Okay, so I was robbed. No cell phone. Checked everywhere. Interrogated hotel clerk, but decided it had to be the supermarket paqueteria.

Yes it could have been much worse - boots, camera, computer. But I just bought the phone, the second one I had to buy, and I had work to do. I said a prayer to St. Jude, patron of hopeless causes, and figured I would have to rely on noisy Ladatel stands for the next few weeks, inevitably located near screeching buses, garbage trucks or children.

Then I thought of Hal Jones ?99. He insisted on filing a police report about a recent run-in with Mexico City thugs. Way to change the system, he said. Principled. I returned to the supermarket and explained that I wanted to file a police report, al instante, and since I did not have a phone they needed to call.

Enter: Black market justice.

It was not my idea. But when the manager suggested he help me out, I did not say no. In fact, I promised not to call the cops or a lawyer. Yes, when he tried to welch on the deal this morning, I played the good little Catholic girl plagued by thieves. But I am. Sort of.

Y despues... He bought me a new phone!

So much for changing the system. Now lets see if the phone works: 811-183-9486. Time to say another prayer...

Watching my back

I was robbed!

No, not in some dark back alley, abandonned country road or Monterrey nightclub - at the supermarket. As usual, they took the one thing that would cause muchas problemas replacing: the cell phone. Make that the second Mexican cell phone I have bought.

Despaired. Did not call the police. Have a plan. Dispatch soon to come.

Long term recuerdos

I fixate on details. When I cannot remember the name of a particular tree (palo verde) or former dictator (Fujimori) it drives me crazy. Last week, it was a painter. I spotted his trademark rays radiating from the bodies of subjects in paintings at the MARCO in Monterrey. NYC artist; AIDS activist; bald. But the name...

Just when I was despairing, the Internet gulag/cafe came to my aid. It almpot made the heat bearable (there is a fan, which ghnags, tantalizingly unued, above us as we slave away at our terminals). The artist: Keith Haring. As Martha would say in trademark Spanglish, Thanks God.

BTW, does anyone know of a good Spanglish dictionary? Forget Esperanto, Elizabeth. This is the language of the future you should be teaching those Wakefield kids.

Lights over Guadalajara

Just back from a three-day road trip to Mexican tobacco country. Story forthcoming. I was apparently a good luck charm, because we were not stopped once by soldiers at multiple checkpoints on the libre roads. So much for my Centurion check point safety training...

Best: Banda and steak in Guadalajara. No, but I really was a vegetarian before I got here...

Worst: Being subjected to replays of ?Shes Having My Baby? on the truck stereo while touring the fields with a local recruiting agent. There is a definite down side to globalization.

Thanks to Simri and Sarah, my translators in Santiago who endured the humidity and heat of northern Nayarit to help me cover a worker meeting. The heat was no worse than N.C. in June, but it was enough to make one woman standing in front of me in the crowd of about 400 faint. Sarah offered her one of our water bottles as the men carried her away.

One of those I am writing about, a Monterrey native, kept pointing out roadside scenery and saying ?That is Mexico.? Houses of weathered sticks, shoeless Huichol indians huddled at a streetcorner; the town of Tequila with its roadside stands of free samples; a drunk collapsed, hands outstretched only inches from the local bar; a young man debating whether to cross the street and continue the party at 4 a.m. on Thursday morning in downtown Monterrey.

We drove all night and into this morning, through Saltillo and Aguascalientes and Zacatecas. On the way out I saw more vistas, mountains of gray-black stone that shadow Monterrey, fields of agave, clusters of yucca and organ pipe cacti. It was pretty dark coming back. At one point the guys wanted me to get out and admire the stars, bright as streetlights. But it was 3 a.m., by the side of a libre road replete with spiney barrel cacti and tractor trailers swaying in the breeze. I stayed inside. Thank you, Centurion.

Visuals

Day 17

Think visually. They say that at newspapers. They mean think like a photographer. But I have a confession to make. I prefer painters. Especially those in the Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art.

At the entry, we find Tolstoy proclaiming:
?El arte es un medio de union entre los hombres que les permite identificarse o traves de las misdmas emociones y sentimientos lo que lo hace indispensable para la vida, el progreso y el bien estar de los individuos y de la humanidad.?

Art unites us. More than that, it forces us to reexamine our world. My job.

I want to show you Mexico as Sergio Hernandez does, ?Carried away more by sensations than by anything else. In other words, there is little or nothing in his work that deliberately interferes with reflection.? Olivier Debroise calls it ?Mexicanidad, mexicanismo.?

I agree with Roberto Cortazar when he says, ?I am interested in the powerful relationships between people and in the history they acquire.? Like Alejandro Aramgo, ?I like telling stories, starting from an image a story starts developing and I unconsciously pick up on a moment I want to tell on the canvas.?

We are objective. I believe that. But there is, of course, interpretation. Truth is filtered. Take ?Ways of Seeing? or Susan Sontag?s fabulous meditation ?On Photography.?

Sometimes I read a story and see the bloody text streaming across Janet Logan?s canvas: ?As if you?re describing a myth but you?re only at the edge of the myth. You don?t yet know what the myth is.?

Why not search as Georgina Quintana does to ?Reconstruct her mythical city,? to build a story that is brighter, closer to the truth. ?She discovers a world that lights its own myths? Supported by an intuition that takes her to the place of mystery and revelation.?

We can tell stories that touch upon the metaphysical.

As Maria Novaro asked when confronted with the work of Dulce Maria Nunez:

?What is broken inside of us, Dulce Maria? What is tattooed in our memory? Why does our heart beat so fast??What rips us apart and makes us scream??

In Mexico I have felt what Filenon Santiago, an indigenous painter from Oaxaca, presents in muted portraits: ?Silent anger, melancholy and desperation.?

Beside his work, curators placed this disclaimer:

?Filenon Santiago has never been a painter of happiness and it is improbable that he ever will be.?

Upstairs, Augustin Castro Lopez presented the conflict stretched across 20 feet of canvas. I had been waiting for the painting that would catch and suck me in. I was transfixed. A couple in shadow, faces obscured in each others? shoulders, drew me into their desperate embrace. Could they be half-submerged in a pond of wide-eyed fish, flowers and green stems, or safe on land? With time, I saw the water was rising. Should they reach shore, shades of red and orange destruction threatened to destroy them.

Ser, he calls it. Our state of being, in flux.

Day 19

Road to Guadalajara:
Land of the giant yucca gives way to barrel cactus, creosote, then blue green fields of agave, raw tequila ripened just in time for spring breakers.

Tomorrow: Tobacco.