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October 31, 2006
La época de oro
I've not written much lately because I've been very busy, planning our first party here in Mexico.
Our friend Charles is having to move out of his house, the one he grew up in. It's a great big house (okay, at least it's huge to us, since we live in an apartment) in Colonia Chapalita. We live in Chapalita Sur, so it's very nearby.
Shawn wanted to throw a party, and we can't really do it properly here in our place. It's is too small and Mexican parties tend to run late, like until 5 or 6 am. Since our building is mostly families and there are several young children and older people, we were considering doing what a lot of people do here: renting a terraza for an evening. That costs money though, especially if you want to have the party on a night when all Shawn's coworkers can come: a Friday or Saturday.
We were talking about this with Charles and he offered his house as a place for the party. Because he's moving out, it's more or less vacant of furniture, so we can set up our own stuff and have lots of space. We're hiring a company to provide other details: a bartender, furniture, waiters, and a taquiza, which is a taco buffet with servers. At the moment, I'm working on getting a couple of go-go dancers. The party planning place doesn't offer those.
We're calling the party La época de oro because it's the end of an era for Charles and still the start of a new one for us. Also, Charles' place has chandeliers, a garden in the back and it's got kind of a plush feeling to it, like those old classic films of Mexico from the 50s. That's the era in Mexican cinema known as la época de oro, with classy stars like María Félix and Pedro Infante.
So please bear with me while I get our little borrachera together. It goes down this coming Saturday night and Sunday morning, and I'll post pictures afterwards. It may well end up being a couple of days afterwards, since I anticipate having a considerable hangover.
[view a reduced-size pdf version of the invitation]
Posted by crispy at 12:18 AM | Comments (4)
October 23, 2006
You Say Tomato and I Say Náhuatl
Once in a while, the United States as a whole, or maybe just one of her constituent states, erupts in meaningless controversy trying to enshrine English as the official language.
Nothing has stressed to me the importance of knowing the actual language of a place over the official language more than living in Mexico, in the state of Jalisco. We have an unusual collection of lexical oddities, regional foods and musical styles that are unique to this place only, the State of Jalisco. People here are really proud of their regional quirks and specialties.
Accordingly, the politics of the Republic are being updated to promote regional and cultural diversity of the assembled states. The Mexican Congress passed a law In 2003 called the 'General Law of linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples' which states that Spanish and the indigenous languages are "national languages" due to their historical background and "have the same validity in their territory, location and context." This in no way changes the fact that Spanish is the dominant language of Mexico, but it does allow native peoples certain rights previously denied by law, such as being able to translate the national anthem into something more meaningful for them.
It also recognizes that in modern-day Mexico, the Indigenous language of Náhuatl is important. One sees it all over the place, in place names (like Mazatlan, Oaxaca and even Mexico) as well as the names of many common, everyday things. And as much as English-only advocates in the United States might cringe to think about it, they also use some Náhuatl on a regular basis too, like when they talk about that confusing fruit/vegetable, the tomato.
At a social gathering a while ago, someone asked what it was about a tomato that actually made it a fruit and not a vegetable. I responded that it was something about the seeds being on the inside. That lead to the comment that the seeds are on the insides of of a zucchini too, but we don't call it a fruit. That is true, I thought, and I put it in the back of my mind to look up later: why is it then that a tomato is actually a fruit and not a vegetable?
Last night, while fixing Shawn's lunch for today (which interestingly enough did not involve a single tomato), I remembered this debate and decided to look it up in the Wikipedia, where these things were clarified. In short, the tomato is a fruit because the part we eat is the ovary, containing the seeds within it. It is true that a zucchini also has this going on, but technically, it's a fruit too. A lot of things are fruits that we think of as vegetables: eggplants, pumpkins, chiles, etc. As an interesting side note to this, because in 1887, a tariff was put on vegetables and not fruits, the U.S. Supreme Court decided (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304) that for legal purposes, foods would be classified by their use not by their scientific classifications, and since a tomato was eaten with dinner and not with dessert, it was a vegetable and not a fruit, and therefore (surprise!) was subject to the payment of duties.
Yet another interesting side note is that tomatoes originated on the west coast of South America. It is part of the Nightshade family, and while eventually cultivated by the Spanish after their arrival in the New World, the tomato has now and again been regarded as being poisonous. American Indians did not cultivate it as a food before the arrival of the Spanish, but the Spanish brought it back to Europe. Before Italy fell in love with it, they avoided it as poisonous and used it only as a decorative plant. They loosened up a bit when they saw that the Spaniards were not dying from eating tomatoes, and look what they've done with it since. There's even a rumor that a British secret agent tried to kill George Washington by feeding him a dish laced with tomatoes. [source]
So the indigenous peoples of the Americas aren't why we eat the tomato; that distinction belongs to the Spanish. But they are the reason we call it what we call it, becuase the Náhuatl word for tomato is tomatl. Today in modern-day Mexico, they call it a jitomate. Oddly enough, they refer to a green tomato as a tomate; in other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, like Colombia, the red kind is a tomate.
The truth of the matter is, it should not come as a surprise that Náhuatl words are used in the United States as well as Mexico. There are many foods that are indigenous to this hemisphere, and obviously their first names came from indigenous people. Perhaps the best known (and loved) of these is chocolate, but there are several others. As these foods gained popularity throughout the world, their Náhuatl names were carried with them, even if slightly altered from the original form.
Furthermore, Náhuatl, the second most-used language in Mexico, is part of the Uto-Aztecan group, a Native American linguistic family which is in turn one of the largest in the Americas. It's range goes from Oregon south through Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan languages are believed to have originated in what is now the American Southwest: Arizona or New Mexico. (Interestingly, Navajo is not one of the Uto-Aztecan languages; it belongs to the Na-Dené family.) There are 1.5 speakers of one Náhuatl dialect or another. Although no dialect matches Classical Náhuatl, it is believed that the Náhuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico is the most similar to it.
To me, this Náhuatl influence on the Spanish of Mexico is tricky. There are names for places and things here that seem like long clusters of consonates with an occasional vowel thrown in, and they pop up like speed bumps in newspaper articles, news broadcasts and historical accounts. Teocuitlatlan , Acaxochitlan, Mihuiittilmoyoccuitlantonpicixochitl - try saying those ten times fast.
Náhuatl is part of the language of Mexico. There are at least 60 others, all of them recognized by the government as equally valid. This doesn't threaten Spanish speakers; they've been dominating the indigenous cultures here for nearly 500 years and that's not going to change any time soon. By allowing these minority languages and cultures legal recognition, the dominant culture is not diminuished. It simply recognizes the historical and present-day reality that it is one of many diverse cultures in Mexico, and instead of trying to fight it and force everybody into one heterogenous mass, they respect and groove on it.
Posted by crispy at 12:47 AM | Comments (2)
October 19, 2006
If Moses supposes potatoes son rosas, then Moses supposes erroneously.
This is the funniest thing I've learned yet about Mexico.
You know what red potatoes are, right? (If not, click on the previous link and look at the picture. Sheesh.)
In Mexico, the red potatoes that you buy in the supermarket are not really red-skinned potatoes. They're just boiling potatoes painted with red food coloring to make them look like their skin is red.
I learned this from someone that used to work as a potato painter. No joke.
Posted by crispy at 07:23 PM | Comments (2)
October 18, 2006
Advanced Ironing
After a recent visit to the United States, where the hotels had ironing boards and irons, I decided this was a modern convenience of which I could no longer deprive myself. However, unlike the ironing boards I've had in the past, this time I wanted one that was tall enough that it didn't give me a back ache bending over to use it. Little did I know what a luxury that would be.
I went to Ekar de Gas, the place where I've bought every other appliance I have, save the oven, and looked at both irons and ironing boards. I got a nifty T-FAL iron for $800 MXN. This was more than I expected an iron to be, and sure enough, they did have some cheaper ones. However, the one I got is pretty nifty - lots of steam holes, enameled soleplate, vertical steaming - so I am not too upset with that.
Yet the ironing boards, ranging from $180 MXN to $220 MXN, were all kind of rickety and all seemed to be made for someone 5 feet tall or shorter. To get a taller one, they suggested that I try Fábricas de Francia, which is kind of an overpriced department store. It's like Sanborns without the chic (or the restaurant, for that matter).
They had a beautiful Spanish number there, with single-leg feet that curved out of the way of the user and a silicone support for resting the iron. Best of all, it nearly came up high enough that I could actually bend my elbow to use it. The problem was that it was something like $2200 MXN (which is over $200 USD)!
My taxi driver suggested that I hold off on buying it there, because he suspected that he could find one cheaper. Taxi drivers here can nearly always hook you up with anything you need, and sure enough, later that night he called me, from inside Sears, to report on his find of a decent substitute that was wide and tall for only $750 MXN (and that's just below $75 USD). We went back the next day and bought it.
While I am still shocked that the ironing board cost nearly $75 USD, it is a very nice one.
When we first moved here, our friend Joseph told us that ironing boards were expensive. In fact, I seem to recall his saying that if I wanted one, it would set me back about $70 USD. I am not surprised that he hit it more or less on the head with that one, as he is invariably right about such things.
I'm not sure what the conclusion is about ironing board costs in Mexico. It seems that in the US, you'd never pay $70 for an ironing board, but then again, all the ones I've seen in the US are neither as wide nor as tall as the one that cost me that much here. One could buy an ironing board for less than $20 USD here, so there are cheaper options.
Since I saw the same iron that I bought selling for $1260 MXN at Fábricas de Francia, I guess the one thing I can say is that if you can buy something at Ekar de Gas instead, do it. If not, check Sears.
Posted by crispy at 12:43 AM | Comments (4)
October 15, 2006
Zacatecas, Zacatecas
Zacatecas, Panorama From Hotel Argento Inn Balcony [larger image]
No, it's not the new Mexican musical staring Bette Midler. It's the city (and state) that we went to this past weekend because Shawn had three days of vacation and we thought we should take that opportunity to explore our new country a bit.
Street Scene, Zacatecas
We traveled by bus (ETN, "la línea más cómoda") between Guadalajara and Zacatecas, going through Aguascalientes (again, both the city and the state. We like ETN because they have only 24 seats on the bus, which translates to more room per seat. This is generally referred to in Mexico as 'executive class.' They also give you a bag with a ham and cheese sandwich and the soda of your choice (as long as it's made by Coca-Cola®) as you board the bus. Luckily it's not so hard to peel the ham off the sandwich, because they don't offer vegetarian or kosher alternatives. Like most first class (and the higher, executive class) bus lines, they showed movies during the trip. All but one was dubbed into Spanish, and it was subtitled.
We only stopped in Aguascalientes for about 20 minutes, so information on that capital will have to come from another trip. It's interesting to note that it is known for wine and brandy production, although it's not like there's a lot produced there nowadays. It seemed to have a much bigger bus station than Zacatecas, though.
We arrived at the central camionera at sunset, and hopped in a cab to wind our way through the pink and gold maze of city streets to get to the Hotel Argento Inn where we were staying (pictured on the right in the photo above). We had a friend call to make reservations for us, because it was a complicated call. All the rooms in hotels around the city seemed to be booked up for some reason we couldn't figure out, and whether or not we would take a room in a hotel depended on the combined answers to a series of questions: Did they have rooms available? Did they have rooms with windows facing outside (compared to having windows that only face an inside courtyard, which usually results in the room being very dark and gloomy),? Were they located in or near the historic center? Did they cost less than $1500 MXN per night? Did they have one bed? Double beds? Private bathrooms? An iron an ironing board? The task of calling around to several hotels and struggling to get answers to these questions (and understanding those answers) was daunting to me, so I asked for help. I'm not proud of that, but I did. Unexpected surprises with hotels in Mexico can be quite disturbing, and I didn't feel like suffering (and making Shawn suffer) them gladly just to guard my pride.
Street Scene, Zacatecas
Zacatecas is known for having a lot of its colonial architecture still intact. It is, along with places like Cuernavaca, Puebla and San Miguel de Allende, one of the "colonial jewels" of Mexico. Like most of Mexico, you will find some crumbling about the edges in Zacatecas, but there was less than I expected. It isn't that all the old colonial stuff has been restored to its original beauty, but it seems to have been kept clean and the ravages one notices are of time, not the hand of man.
Guadalajara is considered one of the "jewels" as well, and it certainly does have lots of colonial gems that are still in good shape and worth visiting. However, Guadalajara, being a bigger city and having developed to serve the business economy, doesn't rely on the colonial and historic elements about town as much as Zacatecas does. In fact, much of the old colonial stuff here was torn down long ago to make way for more modern facilities. In turn, many of those have been torn down even more recently to make way for even more modern facilities.
The net effect of this is that in Guadalajara, the colonial and historic sites seem to pop up here and there within the city (granted, the centro histórico has a large concentration of colonial stuff), and one does not get a sense of being back in colonial Mexico as much as one does in the smaller cities such as Zacatecas. No modern buildings exist beside the old posadas, government buildings and cathedrals in Zacatecas. Those are all located outside the city center (which is the centro histórico), and even then, they are not of the steel-and-glass type, but rather just one or two story cement blocks common to more rural Mexico.
Street Scene, Zacatecas
That being said, the colonial stuff in Zacatecas is fantastic. There's the cathedral:
Cathedral, Zacatecas
As you can see, it is very ornate, and the detail is breathtaking. Across the street from the cathedral is a little plaque that identifies the various saints perched about the front.
Cathedral, Zacatecas
The town is buit among a set of large hills, so if you go there, be prepared to do some incline walking.
Uphill/Downhill Stroll, Zacatecas
There is a large mountain known as La Bufa hemming the city in to one side, and at the summit, they have a few shops, telescopes, a temple where a statue of the everpresent Virgin is housed and some statues commemorating the revolutionary battles that took place in and around Zacatecas. If you are strong of nerve and stomach, you can take the teleférico to the top, a cable car that runs every 15 minutes.
Teleférico to La Bufa, Zacatecas
Some of the very old buildings in town have collapsed in spots, but they have had their usable bits turned into useful spaces. That is the case with the Museo Rafael Colonel, which houses a lot of contemporary art and an enormous collection of masks.
Grounds of the Rafael Coronel Museum, Zacatecas
The most impressive thing to me about Zacatecas is its wealth of art museums. You can read all about the silver mine and the significance of the town during the revolutionary war all over the Internet, but those things do not interest me so much. I may have mentioned on these pages that I'm less of an antiquities guy and more of a fine arts guy when it comes to museums, and that came into play during our visit to Zacatecas. We elected to go to various art museums instead of the traditional historic hotspots, and we were not disappointed.
We visited the Museo Rafael Coronel, the Museo Pedro Coronel (they are brothers) and the Museo Manuel Felguérez. All of these are modern artists from Zacatecas, and their works are included along with those of other famous modern artists in their museums.
I liked the works of Rafael Coronel at his museum. The number of Miró pieces at the Pedro Coronel museum was astounding (just one set of pieces numbered 36), and they also have a Dali and a few Picassos. The best part of the Felguérez museum was the entire collection of the 12 murals painted for the Mexico pavillion at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka.
The parks in Zacatecas are very lush and they keep them in great shape, like their old buildings.
Park, Zacatecas
Of course, those of you who know me well know that when I travel I'm most interested in funky and fine foodstuffs, restaurants and general lifestyle things that are not so much on the tourist's "Must See" list. In Zacatecas, I found plenty of things that I thought you all would find interesting, disgusting, or both.
Cow Stomach Tacos, Zacatecas
Yes, tripe tacos. Seeing this made Shawn remark about Carlos Mecía's bit about why they don't have Latinos on shows where people have to eat wacky stuff, like "Survivor": because they eat disturbing things on a daily basis. It would be no challenge whatsoever for them.
(I'd like to point out here, although I don't have a lot of photos showing it, whoever paints the signage in Zacatecas for all these businesses is a master. There are various styles of lettering all over the place and they're all machine perfect.)
Jicamoy, Zacatecas
This isn't so gross as just strange. It's a stand that sells jicama, that big root vegetable that is kind of like a bigger, sweeter water chestnut. They're popular all over Mexico, peeled, stuck on a stick, and dusted with chile. This place, Jicamoy, offers something like 15 flavor variations of the jicama-on-a-stick concept.
Jicamoy, Zacatecas
Then you have these places that have a simple menu and simple atmosphere.
Restaurant, Zacatecas [View Enlargement of Wall Photos]
Here you see the famous Mexican actor and singer, Pedro Infante pictured on one of the motorcycles. At the top in the center of this photo, you can see the hole in the wall that opens to the outside, covered with a tarp.
Restaurant, Zacatecas
My favorite spot to eat in Zacatecas turned out to be a Greek cafeteria. Here "cafeteria" is used in the Mexican sense of the word, which translates into the American lexicon as something more like a diner with a very extensive selection. It is the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, located right next to the cathedral.
Shawn at the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas
Don't let the name and the ownership fool you. This place is 100% Mexican, and pretty old school Mexican at that. They have all kinds of platos you can enjoy alongside shakes, raspados (kind of like a real fruit slushy at the Acrópolis - like a snow cone in some other places) and ice cream floats. It's the first time I've seen an ice cream float on a menu in Mexico, and the first time I've seen something I've heard about elsewhere: the excessive torta barrio.
We enjoyed ours in the ahogada ('drowned') style, so the whole thing consisted of a chile relleno made the right way with chile poblano, diced tomato, onion and crema, all on a bolillo (and not the birote common to Jalisco), then smothered in a spicy tomato sauce. DELICIOUS!
Also cool about the place is the fact that they display artwork drawn by famous local artist/customers on their walls, and they have a display of plates embellished with artwork made out of leftover Turkish coffee grounds.
The Café y Nevería Acrópolis also sells their coffee by the kilo, as well as some other, um, things.
Muchas Nalgas at Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas
Some other visual things caught our eye in Zacatecas, like these school girls on their way to an event being held in front of the Palacio del Gobierno.
School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas
Run little girl, RUN!
School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas
This house was built with unusual bricks. I bet when they built it, the neighbors were shocked and appalled.
Bricks, Zacatecas
In Mexico, people still send telegrams, although with the growing popularity of email, business is falling off.
Telegrams, Zacatecas
'Street of the Sad Indian.' Given what white folks did to the natives in the Americas, there are a lot more than one, I'm sure. Which one qualifies as 'THE' sad one, I don't know. Iron Eyes Cody perhaps?
Esquina Indio Triste y Hidalgo, Zacatecas
One parting glance of Zacatecas that Shawn took from the bus station before we left, thus ending our Zacatecan odyssey.
View of Zacatecas from the Central Camionera, Zacatecas
Posted by crispy at 06:18 PM | Comments (5)
October 04, 2006
Cheaters
My friend Jonathan has a blog. He openly declares without any evidence of shame his love for Cheaters there. You will also find among his entries, odes to Joey Greco.
Until my trip to the United States, I couldn't see Cheaters. Now I have seen Cheaters and I get a very surreal feeling from it. Greco comforts the 'victims' with his soothing voice while he tells them all the nasty things their partners have done with other people, but the building intensity of the revelations also prompts them to break down and lose it. The ultimate confrontation is captured on film.
And I thought Mexican TV was wacky.
I also have been watching some CNN, which is absolutely horrible. The effect it has seems to be like some anxiety inducing drug. It makes me angry, hateful and disgusted, mostly at the American idiots they keep showing on it. There is considerable evidence that the justification for the war in Iraq was fabricated, then used by both parties to freak Americans out, perhaps to lull them into apathy about being spied on by the government. Nobody nobody seems to care about that. Yet a congressman hits on a former page and everyone freaks out.
Not that such behavior isn't inappropriate, but it's depressing to me to see what the American media has become, and how it's used primarily as a platform for politicians to control the public, attack each other and re-write history. In defending the Republican cover-up of Mark Foley's inappropriate conduct with pages on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Newt Gigngrich said, "I think, had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would have also been accused of gay bashing." On The Situation Room on CNN, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said, "it shouldn't be totally surprising when we hold up tolerance and diversity as the guidepost for public life. This is what you end up getting: a congressman chasing 16-year-old boys down the halls of Congress." Please.
To set the record straight, I've accused Republicans of being homophobic on numerous occasions, like when they repeatedly espouse that denying the same rights to gay couples to which heterosexual couples have access will somehow protect the 'institution of marriage' and that gays cannot openly serve in the armed forces because it makes heterosexuals uncomfortable. Also for the record, I've accused many, many Democrats of the same thing. Yet had the Republicans come out early to deal with the Foley scandal, I think everyone, gay and straight, would have felt it was appropriate to deal with it as the possible exploitation of minors by an adult. Many politicians are homophobes, but nobody calls them that for investigating allegations of pedophilia. Still, those folks are being allowed to say such things on television without their even being questioned.
Indeed, television has been a strange experience for me on my return to the United States. I get a little homesick when I see the Mexican government advertising here. The Secretaría de Turismo or SECTUR is running ads here for various Mexican cities: Guanajuato, Acapulco , Oaxaca, Queretaro, etc.
It's strange that between Cheaters and CNN, the ads on American television are much more enjoyable. Maybe that was the plan all along.
Posted by crispy at 03:28 AM | Comments (4)