Book of the Week

Michigan-born author Zev Chafets investigated the racial complexities of pre-riot and post-riot Detroit in his 1990 book Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit. It was one of the few books about Detroit that I found to be worth reading even if Chafets leaned a bit much upon personal anecdotes in order to make a point sometimes.

Of course, in the wake of recent events, some might argue that Chafets tried a bit too hard to end his book on a happy note. But I know many Detroiters who would beg to differ.

Then again, one of the reasons I chose to buy this book back in 1990 was because the author name-dropped the name of a Detroit journalist to whom my favorite first cousin was then married so perhaps I'm not the most objective critic this book could have.

Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

One Day at a Time: “Supermoon”

A lot of the episodes that I've seen of this series have been surprisingly meh, making me wonder what exactly TV critics saw in this show in order to make it a "critically acclaimed" series. I don't expect every TV show about Hispanics to feature characters who act like the Hispanics I know in real life -- especially since few of those Hispanics are Cuban-Americans like the ones in this show. On the other hand, I would like to see some type of recognizable emotion in the characters who do appear on the show as well as the commitment on the part of the writers to at least try to keep things interesting. But up until this episode, I've been disappointed in all that.

Then, toward the end of the episode, Lydia -- the mother of the lead character -- talked about visiting her home in Cuba and not feeling at home and then suddenly for the first time since I started watching this show, I saw something I could identify with. After all, when I last visited my hometown of Detroit back in the 1980s, I had a similar feeling. A feeling that, yes, Detroit will always be my home -- but not in the same way that Dallas was. Dallas was where I grew up. Where I first fell in love. Where I first met my best friend. For the longest time, I did not want to admit this. After all, I loved Detroit and I missed my kinfolk there. For many years, I felt closer to them than to anyone in Texas outside of my own family. And yet the last time I visited there, I found myself missing Dallas. And like Lydia, I was forced to face the fact that my former home was no longer my home.

I still don't yet know whether to regard this episode as a lucky fluke. After all, the writing is still very mediocre and while I have a strong affection for Rita Moreno and Justina Machado, I can't help but feel that both actresses have done better work on other TV shows. And yet part of me is starting to become optimistic about this show's future -- as odd as that seems in the Age of Social Distancing.

Detroit Is Other People

Where's Jean-Paul Sartre when you need him? There's something very No Exit-ish about the way people keep implying that the premise of the 2017 movie Detroit is okay with them while in the same breath arguing that it's better suited for other people. It makes me kinda surprised that the studio didn't simply rename this movie Detroit, c'est los autres (Detroit is other people) or better yet, Detroit est pour les autres (Detroit is for other people).

In an odd way, that makes me kinda proud to be a native-born Detroiter.

Of course, when you grow up hearing your Mexican-born father tell stories about having to sit in jail and listen to the sound of his friends getting beat up by various members of the Detroit police, it's hard not to consider a lot of the stuff in Detroit to be old news. Yet I would like to think I learned something from this movie anyway.

Science Fiction Quote of the Week

We still do not understand what happened to Detroit.
--Murray Leinster, "Sideways in Time"

Michigan Gothic

I kinda wish I had thought of the title used for this odd photo-essay about my hometown. Then again part of me wishes that I could not agree with it but alas...

Across the Border

(I first wrote this essay back in the late 1980s when my father was still alive and I was courting by mail a young woman who lives in my father's hometown. I have since revised it a bit and brushed up the grammar, but I have not changed any of the actual details concerning the things I had observed during my last two trips to Mexico. Nor did I make up any of the things that my Mexican friend told me in her letters -- although I would probably sleep better if I could pretend otherwise.)

The traveler who goes across the International Bridge at Laredo inevitably finds himself not just in another country; he finds himself in another world. There are beggars in the streets, hordes of outdated cars upon the highway, and gangs of youthful panhandlers swarming around each and every gas station. The road to San Luis Potosí will reveal in December a line of people by the roadside which initially seems to be part of some religious pilgrimage. Then a closer look reveals that the majority of these hardy travelers are women and children who are begging for food. Some may have goats, turkeys or even snakeskins for sale, offerings designed to sway the passing tourists into stopping. Once stopped, the tourists can expect to be surrounded by anxious faces, displaying a desperation more often associated with places like India or Ethiopia.

I must confess these images have a personal meaning to me. My paternal grandfather was a migrant worker from the state of Guanajuato who brought his family to the States while my father was still a young boy. When I was a child, I used to hear many stories about how rough it had been to live in Mexico back then. Life in the Detroit slums had not been easy for my family, but at least it beat starving to death back home in San Francisco del Rincón. I still remember one story my father told me about how he had awoken one morning while his father was still working in the United States and his sister Ofelia had had to tell him that there would be nothing to eat that day because there was no money for food. Stories like this add a perspective to the immigrant saga that can't be captured by a Neil Diamond song.

I used to regularly correspond with a friend who lived in my father's home town. Through her, I learned much more about Mexican society than I could from my brief trips to Mexico. For example, she once described an incident wherein the bus on which she was traveling was pulled over by custom officials. The passengers' luggage was confiscated and some of their contents were never returned. My friend was angry because she lost a valuable set of china that she had purchased on the way back from Mexicali; however, despite an emotional scene at the customs office, she was never able to recover it.

There are worse aspects than this to Mexican society. For example, I never realized how sheltered I had been back in the States until I was stopped by a small group of soldiers on the road between Leon and San Francisco del Rincón. It was Election Day, and the government was wary of any excessive activity. I was let go as soon as they noticed the “Turista” sticker on my car, but it was still an unsettling experience. Ironically, the soldiers were still there two days later during my trip to San Francisco del Rincón. They were no longer waiting by the roadside, but they were stationed in a side street by the main plaza, and indeed, the sight of five of them marching through the plaza itself seemed to attract little attention aside from a child's exclamation of “el militario.” I don't pretend to be able to draw any serious conclusions about Mexican politics from these incidents, but I can't help thinking that if American soldiers had turned up outside the local precincts of most American cities on Election Day, it would have made front-page news. However, in San Francisco del Rincón, it did not even cause any major comment.

One might be tempted to interpret these comments to mean that I am anti-Mexican. I am not. I love my father's homeland with a great deal more affection now than I did when it was just a mythical presence in my childhood. Many of its traditions -- the serenata, the nacimientos, the Día de los Tres Reyes -- cannot be improved upon by American society. So what if many of its traditions are borrowed from Spanish and Arabic forebears? Are we here in America not expert borrowers ourselves? And have we not borrowed from Mexico in such areas as ranching and architecture?

I am quite Americanized by Mexican-American standards, and yet for many years I had an idealized picture of my father's homeland that was quite different than the image of Mexico I got from American movies and TV shows. Only recently did I have an opportunity to reconcile that image with reality. I don't lack any less affection for Mexico because of this new viewpoint, any more than an Irish-American lacks affection for the land of his ancestors just because he has heard of the latest trouble in Belfast. But I understand it better. And although I will probably always experience more of a culture shock crossing the International Bridge at Laredo than I do the International Bridge at Detroit, I do remember one moment in Mexico whose counterpart I had never experienced in Canada. I was sitting with my father in a bar in Salinas de Hidalgo. It was late at night, the streets outside were filled with recorded mariachi music, and I was far from home. Yet, for some strange reason, I felt that I was home. The world around me seemed much more familiar than the world I had seen in Canada during any of the brief trips I had made to Windsor. I have never been able to explain this. Perhaps I should not even try.

Movie Quote of the Week

Do you want Detroit to... to tear itself apart, so that you can raid it like you would any other corporation? Do you know how many people are dying out there? You're murderers.
--Willard E. Pugh, RoboCop 2 (1990)

Movie Song of the Week: "Detroit Man"

From the 1976 movie Moving Violation, it is a song written and performed by the late Phil Everly. Why none of my relatives ever told me about this song, I will never know. Hopefully, they just forgot.

Pop Song of the Week: "Shuttin' Detroit Down"

John Rich's 2009 song keeps becoming more and more timely.

R.I.P. Alex Karras

Former athlete and actor Alex Karras, most famous for his years as a NFL Detroit Lions defensive tackle, his role as Mongo in the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles, and his role as the father in the 1980s TV sitcom Webster, went to the showers for the last time today at age 77.

He will be missed.

Movie Quote of the Week

I'd blame Detroit a lot faster than the Devil. It seems like every month there's some kind of recall.
--Murray Hamilton, The Amityville Horror (1979)

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Supertrain

I remember hearing rumors of such a show back in the 1970s but I never realized they actually went ahead and made it. Then again, most of my train-related memories in the 1970s involved traveling via Amtrak to visit my Detroit kinfolk. So seeing a show like this right afterwards would have seemed just weird.

Please don't ask me how they got the late mystery novelist Donald E. Westlake to co-create this series. I'm guessing that wasn't one of his more satisfying achievements.

Lesson of the Day

Falling temperatures and rolling brownouts make for such a fun combination. It makes me wonder why I never bothered to move back to Detroit.

Primavera!


You can tell it's the first day of spring here in Dallas because it's so cold outside.

All week we've had temperatures in the 50s, 60s and even 70s. Then along comes the vernal equinox and suddenly we have temperatures in the early 30s and white flakes coming down from the sky that look suspiciously like snow.

It's enough to make me nostalgic for Detroit. At least up there the seasons don't act up so much.

Nieve, Nieve y Más Nieve

Apparently it's snowing again in Dallas. It started last night after midnight and it was actually still on the ground by noon. And more of it is coming down as I write this.

It's not the first time it snowed in Dallas this winter but it seems like it.

And I was just telling a Southern-born friend yesterday about how I didn't mind being out in 37 degree weather because by the standards of my hometown of Detroit, that was springtime. Of course, it helped that there wasn't much wind yesterday.

Book of the Week


It's the forty-third anniversary of the Fermi I accident and for some bizarre reason, I find myself in a mood to read this.

As if I don't already get enough bad news.

Prima Power

My paternal cousins in Detroit are on a mission to get our entire family on Facebook. And indeed, it's surprising how many of my extended family are already on that site.

Of course, considering how large most Mexican-American families were in my father's generation, I should not find this surprising. As my mother once joked, when my siblings and I were born in the early 1960s, four children was considered a small family. By the time we hit high school in the 1970s, four children was considered a large family.

When my paternal relatives had a picture taken at a female cousin's wedding, so many people were in attendance from the bride's side of the family that the photographer had to use the same two-camera system most photographers use to photograph high school graduation ceremonies. (And that was just the relatives who managed to show up.)

Anyway, I suspect my cousins are on a mission to take over Facebook.

And what will they do tomorrow night?

Why, the same thing they do every night...

So What's Up with All the Old Movies, Tonio?

And why are you always asking yourself all these questions on your blog?

Okay, seriously, I am quite aware of the irony of being a young -- okay, not-so-young -- Hispanic half and half who spends so much time writing about and praising movies that were made at least a decade or more before I was born. And yet every time I try to write about more recent films, I have difficulty finding the same enthusiasm that comes when I write about some of my favorite old movies.

Perhaps it's because I'm burnt out on recent movies and no longer find them capable of surprising me in the manner I have become accustomed to. Perhaps it's because I'm genuinely interested in old movies and welcome the chance to give some of my favorites the same publicity that the newest releases get. Perhaps it's because certain old movies remind me of the type of old movies I used to watch with my late father.

I don't kid myself that the filmmakers of yesteryear were more politically correct than today's filmmakers. After all, it was a time when Jim Crow was the law in many states and even a liberal northern city like Detroit was not above passing a law in my paternal grandmother's youth restricting Mexicans from sitting outside the balcony at a local theatre. However, I'm not convinced that today's filmmakers are all that liberal, either -- especially when it comes to people like me -- and I weary of the endless combinations of bad storytelling and stereotypes that pass for filmmaking today.

Perhaps the last straw came a few years ago when I had bought a ticket to see a much-praised movie called Sideways, only to realize that the movie wasn't all that entertaining and, in fact, quite dull. Halfway through the movie, a female character starts giving a speech about her wine and how it makes her think of where it came from and all the people who worked on it. It's a very inspirational speech -- but unfortunately, it's also an unwelcome reminder that movies like that were never going to concentrate on the type of people the woman was talking about, especially the migrant workers.

And when -- like me -- you're the grandson of a migrant worker and you're watching a highly praised movie that seems to have no problem dismissing migrant workers except when they're needed to provide material for the so-called "important" people -- who, surprise, surprise, are never Hispanic -- and no critic who reviews it seems to have a problem with that, you start to realize how unlikely it is that so-called "liberal" Hollywood is ever going to make movies about people like your grandfather -- well, there was La Bamba but nobody seems in a hurry to imitate that flick -- and it's hard to avoid losing all faith in the modern movie business.

Not going to bother with people like me? Then fine. Perhaps I'll find more entertainment among movies that don't even pretend to depict the modern world. Most of the modern movies I see get life all wrong anyway.

And yes, I realize movies are fiction and they're not supposed to be 100% percent accurate at depicting reality. But it would be nice if so many of them didn't automatically exclude people like me and my late grandfather. And even nicer if so many people didn't act as if they had no problem with such exclusion.

I don't expect all movies to be about people like me but it would be nice if movies that were weren't as rare as unicorns.

I Looked at Ice from Both Sides Now...

We actually had a minor ice storm here in Dallas last night. A storm so bad I could not even open my car door this morning without first pouring water on it -- and even then I could only open the car door that was on the side facing the rising sun.

Okay, it could be worse. I could have had snow to contend with as well. And now that the sun is out, I suspect most of the worst ice patches will be gone by noon.

The ex-Detroiter in me should be glad about this weather. And if I were still a young kid who lived for snow days and snowball fights, I probably would be disappointed that the winter weather wasn't more wintry. But now that I'm an adult, ice and snow don't seem like that much fun. Especially if you have to drive somewhere and contend with all the drivers who seem to forget everything they ever learned about driving on snow and ice every winter. Or if you have to walk outside for a long while and have little more than a thin coat to protect you from the wind.

I thank God I have a good supply of thick gloves and winter caps. Then again I really need to break down and buy a good scarf. The habits that I acquired up North always seem to be useless in the South but then a day happens like today and suddenly I'm glad I learned them.

The only problem is that over the years, I've become addicted to the South's warmer temperatures. If I ever had to move back to Michigan where days like this are more frequent, I don't know what I would do.

Cuento de Mi Id

“Suburbia”

Life in the suburbs! It was hell, I say. Sheer hell.

Ah, for the good old days of the Detroit slums where all one had to worry about street gangs and race riots. I much rather be stared at by the same Detroit cop who beat the hell out of my less law-abiding buddies than have to go through the sheer soul-crushing horror you have to go through in suburbia.

I much rather work for hours in a noisy, dirty assembly line than to actually have to work with my mind for some ad agency. At least, on the line, you're spared the chore of having to think all the time. In fact, the job goes a lot better if you don't.

And the conformity. Egad! Much better to live in the type of bad neighborhood where you get shot for wearing the wrong color jacket than to have to work in one of those offices where they have a dang dress code. Don't they realize how torturous it is to have to wear a neck tie?

But what do today's kids know? They have no idea what hell we had to go through in the days of endless prosperity. And thanks to the current administration, they never will.