¡Feliz Día del Padre!

Happy Father's Day to all my readers!

I hope you all are able to enjoy this holiday with your own fathers.

My father, unfortunately, is no longer with us but while he was alive, he inspired me in so many different ways that it seems futile for me to try and list them all.

For example, I once saw him working on a painting that looked much like the above illustration. When he asked him about it, he said that he had copied it from a picture -- and I'm guessing that the above illustration -- which comes from a famous book by Mexican architect Ignacio Marquina -- is the one he copied it from. To some people, that might not seem like much but it seemed obvious to me even when I was a child that it took a lot of effort for him to duplicate a picture like the above illustration so well that it looked like an original piece of work. And of course, my father's interest in things artistic eventually helped inspired my interest in the arts -- although, unlike him, I never seriously tried to copy an actual picture, much less create one from scratch.

Anyway, I am sorry that I never had a chance to question him more about his painting when he was alive but perhaps it is just as well. After all, some things are better left to the imagination.

Anyway, please enjoy the holiday.

(A repost in honor of my late father.)

The Mystery of Juarez

There are a lot of mysteries concerning old-time Hollywood that will probably never be solved but if I had to pick the one that most intrigued me this week, it would be the mystery surrounding the reasons why the 1939 movie Juarez received its current title. After all, the movie itself did not seem to be too interested in telling the story of the Mexican president it was named after. Indeed, despite playing the title role, actor Paul Muni spent so little time on film that it seemed a wonder that he got any dialogue at all in the movie.

Nor did it help that he was constantly upstaged by actor Brian Aherne (who played would-be Mexican Emperor Maximilian I) and actress Bette Davis (who played Maximilian's wife Carlotta). True, Muni did get to make a lot of serious speeches but in the end, it was Aherne and Davis whose characters who got the bulk of the filmmaker's sympathy if for no other reason that they were among the few historical figures in the movie who got to be portrayed as human beings.

Thus the movie Juarez presented its viewers with a paradox: a movie that was allegedly about the triumph of the first Mexican president of Indian descent that nevertheless chose to concentrate most of its story on his European opposition. Which is a nice thing if you always wanted to see a movie about people like Maximilian and Carlotta but kinda besides the point if you wanted to see a movie about people like Benito Juarez.

If that wasn't a big enough paradox, the movie also found time to portray Porfirio Diaz (the head of Juarez's military forces) in a heroic role -- a development that seemed ironic considering what would happen to Diaz in later life. But, alas, this was a movie that had little room for irony.

Trailer of the Week: Juarez

"...But when a presidente misrules, the people change him." Oh, snap! Easy enough to see why this movie isn't likely to be remade any time soon. But wait! They're talking about another country in this movie, right? Not the US...

¡Feliz Día del Padre!

Happy Father's Day to all my readers!

I hope you all are able to enjoy this holiday with your own fathers.

My father, unfortunately, is no longer with us but while he was alive, he inspired me in so many different ways that it seems futile for me to try and list them all.

For example, I once saw him working on a painting that looked much like the above illustration. When he asked him about it, he said that he had copied it from a picture -- and I'm guessing that the above illustration -- which comes from a famous book by Mexican architect Ignacio Marquina -- is the one he copied it from. To some people, that might not seem like much but it seemed obvious to me even when I was a child that it took a lot of effort for him to duplicate a picture like the above illustration so well that it looked like an original piece of work. And of course, my father's interest in things artistic eventually helped inspired my interest in the arts -- although, unlike him, I never seriously tried to copy an actual picture, much less create one from scratch.

Anyway, I am sorry that I never had a chance to question him more about his painting when he was alive but perhaps it is just as well. After all, some things are better left to the imagination.

Anyway, please enjoy the holiday.

(A repost in honor of my late father.)

Book of the Week

I have long enjoyed the writing of Stephanie Elizondo Griest but I would like to think that her latest book -- All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands -- is her best book yet -- perhaps because it was so ambitious but more likely because it was so angry. I found it hard to read the book without finding at least one item to be angry about -- and no, I'm not talking about bad grammar or misspelled words, I'm talking about the events Ms. Griest described in the book when writing during her various visits to the Mexican and Canadian border country. She wrote about a lot of things worth getting angry about -- ethnic discrimination, environmental racism, illegal drugs, unsolved murders, and so forth. As you might guess, she also wrote quite a bit about illegal immigration but even there she had a different take on the issue than most Hispanic apologists. As you might guess, she was not overly fond of our current president but she also didn't pretend that all the problems on our southern border began on January 20, 2017.

My biggest problem with the book is that it made me want to hulk out and hit somebody -- preferably one of the many people responsible for the problems she described in her book. And as you might guess, that's not exactly a very productive strategy.

However, the book did teach me a lot I didn't know about the Mexican and Canadian borders. And the parallels Ms. Griest drew between the two borders I found most fascinating. In any event, knowing about a problem is all too often the first step in solving it.

¡Feliz Día del Padre!

Happy Father's Day to all my readers!

I hope you all are able to enjoy this holiday with your own fathers.

My father, unfortunately, is no longer with us but while he was alive, he inspired me in so many different ways that it seems futile for me to try and list them all.

For example, I once saw him working on a painting that looked much like the above illustration. When he asked him about it, he said that he had copied it from a picture -- and I'm guessing that the above illustration -- which comes from a famous book by Mexican architect Ignacio Marquina -- is the one he copied it from. To some people, that might not seem like much but it seemed obvious to me even when I was a child that it took a lot of effort for him to duplicate a picture like the above illustration so well that it looked like an original piece of work. And of course, my father's interest in things artistic eventually helped inspired my interest in the arts -- although, unlike him, I never seriously tried to copy an actual picture, much less create one from scratch.

Anyway, I am sorry that I never had a chance to question him more about his painting when he was alive but perhaps it is just as well. After all, some things are better left to the imagination.

Anyway, please enjoy the holiday.

(A repost in honor of my late father.)

¡Feliz Día del Padre!

Happy Father's Day to all my readers!

I hope you all are able to enjoy this holiday with your own fathers.

My father, unfortunately, is no longer with us but while he was alive, he inspired me in so many different ways that it seems futile for me to try and list them all.

For example, I once saw him working on a painting that looked much like the above illustration. When he asked him about it, he said that he had copied it from a picture -- and I'm guessing that the above illustration -- which comes from a famous book by Mexican architect Ignacio Marquina -- is the one he copied it from. To some people, that might not seem like much but it seemed obvious to me even when I was a child that it took a lot of effort for him to duplicate a picture like the above illustration so well that it looked like an original piece of work. And of course, my father's interest in things artistic eventually helped inspired my interest in the arts -- although, unlike him, I never seriously tried to copy an actual picture, much less create one from scratch.

Anyway, I am sorry that I never had a chance to question him more about his painting when he was alive but perhaps it is just as well. After all, some things are better left to the imagination.

Anyway, please enjoy the holiday.

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.

Random Thoughts

I have seen more people carrying umbrellas on sunny days during the last three years than I have ever seen carry umbrellas on sunny days during the ten years prior to that. In fact, it seems like I see more people carry umbrellas on sunny days nowadays than on rainy days.

The problem with speaking truth to power is that you actually have to speak the truth.

You can tell a computer is old when it shuts off every time you expect it to stay on automatically and stays on every time you expect it to shut off automatically.

I can't help but wonder how many of the people questioning Obama's citizenship would welcome a Schwarzenegger presidency.

Should I find it ironic that the most honest stuff I write is usually written under a pen name?

History's chief purpose is not to let us know what good people we have been.

It is not a kindness to encourage the poor to spend money they don't have on stuff they don't really need just because someone other than them thinks it to be fashionable.

The past ain't what it used to be and neither is the future.

I, tú, am America.

I never realized how American I was until I went to Mexico. I never realized how Mexican I was until I came back.

How realistic is it to expect an intelligent response to global warming when local politicians are still being constantly surprised by the fact that it often snows during the winter and gets hot during the summer?

People rarely pay back money with the same urgency that they borrow it. Even when the people from which they borrow it are themselves poor.

Whenever a riot occurs, people rarely go after the most deserving targets. Instead they go after the most vulnerable.

Quote of the Week

Twenty years later I began working as an editor for Mandalay Publications in LA at a bilingual magazine called Estylo. One day I told the staff about my trip to Ensenada and the story I had written. They thought I was joking. Ensenada is not dark. It is not even the real Mexico, they explained, only the Baja Peninsula -- a safe, benign destination for gringos. For them, the real Dark Country is the U.S., which they had found so strange and frightening when they arrived here. And of course they were right. It all depends on your point of view.
--Dennis Etchison, Introduction to his short story "The Dark Country" in the anthology Summer Chills

Book of the Week

I have always liked Debbie Nathan's articles about the Texas-Mexico border and unfortunately this is the closest thing she has to a complete collection of articles. As you might guess from the title, it's not exclusively about the Mexican border and since it was published in 1991, one might even argue that it's a bit dated.

But it's still worth reading and given the type of rhetoric that has surrounded the Mexican border as of yet, one might say that its main problem is that it's not dated enough. Someday she might come up with a complete collection of her work but in the meantime, this is a good introduction to her work.

Trailer of the Week: Viva Zapata! (1952)

It was the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution this past week -- which makes it a great shame there are not a whole lot of good American movies about that subject. This is undoubtedly the best of them which I have seen so far.

On the plus side, you have a script by John Steinbeck and direction by Elia Kazan. It won Mexican-born actor Anthony Quinn an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and gave Mexican actress Margo one of the few opportunities she had to play an actual Mexicana for a change. On the minus side, you have Brando in brownface.

Oh, well. At least they tried.

Stealing across the Borderline

There’s something sad about watching old movies about Mexico at the same time the local news is just full of stories depicting that country as being more and more overrun by drug dealers.

Perhaps it is because so many of the movies made in the 1940s and 1950s had such a sunny, optimistic view of Mexican life. Granted, it seemed a lot easier to appreciate Mexican life in the 1940s and 1950s if you were a visiting American tourist than if you were an actual Mexican citizen. Mexico was all too often depicted back then as a worry-free paradise full of colorful dancers, beggars, cab drivers and bartenders whose sole function seemed to be waiting on visiting American tourists. The idea that Mexicans could have lives that did not center around visiting foreigners was all too often a quaint notion that Hollywood had little time for.

And to be fair, the image more modern Hollywood movies often paint is not much of an improvement. In some ways, I would almost prefer a downbeat movie like Traffic or El Norte which at least tries to deal seriously with the issues which still affect modern Mexico than yet another movie like 10 or the recent Heartbreak Kid remake which depict Mexicans as little more than background characters in their own country.

In any event, I recently watched two movies about Mexico: 1950’s Borderline and 1949’s The Big Steal.

Borderline was not quite forgettable but not really worth devoting a lot of time to. The film basically involves Claire Trevor going undercover to expose a big drug ring run by Raymond Burr, only to stumble across the path of a mysterious character (played by Fred MacMurray) who may or may not be on the same side. Along the way she sings a really awful Spanish song which serves as her way of establishing her credentials as a song-and-dance girl and gets wooed by one of Burr‘s assistants. MacMurray butts in, Burr gets wise, Trevor and MacMurray are forced to flee for their lives and the chase is on.

Along the way Trevor and MacMurray get a few good lines but nothing particularly memorable. None of the Mexican characters are depicted as being as evil as the American characters -- indeed, the film‘s absence of a conventional Latin villain is perhaps the best part of this flick. Then again none of the American characters are depicted as being as backward as a local Mexican lawman who shows up halfway through the picture. The guy is depicted as a well-meaning sort who nevertheless had the potential to prove a formidable adversary had his wife not been using as a clothesline the phone line with which he communicated with other Mexican lawmen. How truthful this depiction was, I do not know, but I doubt it was much appreciated by the local Mexican Chamber of Commerce.


1949’s The Big Steal is a big improvement on Borderline. As much as I liked MacMurray and Trevor, there is no denying that the pairing of Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in this movie was truly inspired -- or at least as inspired as one can expect after seeing the same team-up in 1947’s Out of the Past. Indeed, The Big Steal seems very much a reverse version of Out of the Past.

Both viewed Mexico as a sanctuary for tourists fleeing the hecticness of American life and both films hint at disaster if certain characters were to make a premature return to the States. As most movie buffs know, Out of the Past ends on a more downbeat note than The Big Steal and is famous for being one of the more well-known examples of the film noir genre. The Big Steal is too upbeat to make for a good film noir and too full of car chases and gunshots to make for a good romantic comedy. And yet I found it just as memorable in its way as Out of the Past and even the presence of William Bendix as a very unlikely military officer did not change my mind about it.

Especially memorable in The Big Steal was Ramon Navarro’s performance as a local police Inspector General who used his poor English to disguise a cleverness that Columbo would envy. Navarro’s character might not always seem like he knew anything that was going on but he was a whole lot more smarter than any of the American characters ever realized and his commentary on the events that unfolded in this movie was often a joy to hear. If nothing else, I certainly found it refreshing to see a Mexican police officer in an American movie who never once fussed with telephone lines nor complained about not needing any stinking badges.

If only more Mexican policemen in Hollywood movies were like him. For that matter, I would not mind seeing more people like him in the real-life Mexico. But, alas, I fear that such an individual would not have a very long lifespan.

¡Qué lástima!

Book of the Week (Libro de la Semana)




I just started reading Stephanie Elizondo Griest's 2008 book Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines this week and so far it is pretty good. Of course, the plot -- a young American woman of bicultural descent decides to travel to Mexico, the land of her maternal ancestors, in order to get in touch with her roots -- seems almost tailor-made for a Hispanic half and half like me, but we'll see.

I am curious about the author's previous book, Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana. Perhaps I'll feature that in a future post.

Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Dollhouse: “Ghost”

Eliza Dushku of Buffy fame returns in a new Joss Whedon show that I'm tempted to describe as a Faith-based initiative.

Apparently, Ms. Dushku plays Echo, a member of a secret organization called the Dollhouse that may or may not be legitimate. Okay, there's no real maybe about the legitimacy part but the head people tend to profess humanitarian motives, so who knows?

First scene shows Echo negotiating with a female VIP of the Dollhouse, a negotiation which -- the show makes quite obvious -- is not being done from a position of strength.

Next scene shows Echo riding on a motorcycle with a guy she really, really likes, only to have all memories of said guy stripped away from her when she returns to the Dollhouse for her “treatment.”

The main plot involves Echo having a different personality “downloaded” into her each week, a personality that is later stripped away with supposedly no trace left behind. In this episode, the personality is that of a hostage negotiator, sent by the Dollhouse to help negotiate the release of a young Mexican girl from Mexican kidnappers. A subplot involves a rogue FBI agent named Paul Ballard who is doing his damnedest to track down the Dollhouse.

Plus the show tempts us with the possibility that Echo might not be forgetting as much of her past personalities as the Dollhouse's head honchos would prefer.

Is the show as good as past Joss Whedon shows? It's too early to tell, but the generic quality of this week's kidnapping plot doesn't bode well. Hopefully, it's just a misstep.

Movie Song of the Week: “Muchacha”

You say you want a revolution? Busby Berkeley's got your revolution right here in the middle of his 1935 movie In Caliente. Of course, it's the Mexican Revolution. Or at least what looks like Hollywood's version of the Mexican Revolution. Dolores del Río's character would have you believe they're just bandits.

Since my paternal grandmother was dispossessed by the Mexican Revolution, I can't help but wonder what she'd think of this number. For that matter, I can't help but wonder what she'd think of those lyrics. And shouldn't the title of this song be “Mujer” and not “Muchacha”? (Mujer means “woman” in Spanish and muchacha means “girl.”)

I was tempted not to post this, but hey, I did post a song last week that made fun of Dolores del Río and it only seems fair to give her a chance in the spotlight.

I hope you enjoy it.

Movie Quote of the Week

I like Mexico; it's so... Mexican.
--Eve Arden, Mildred Pierce (1945)

Quote of the Week

Mexico is the only Spanish word I know. But it’s the best word.
--Morrissey

Dates of Importance

Monday the 15th was the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month. Though I suppose one can ignore it if one considers oneself Latina/o. Being a person who has always considered the two terms to be interchangeable, I don't really care either way.

Tuesday the 16th was Mexican Independence Day.

Most important of all, Tuesday was also the birthday of my sister's oldest son. Feliz Cumpleaños to mi sobrino.

Smells Like Teen History

It seems like just yesterday when people said the Soviet Union would never fall because it was just too powerful.

It seems like just yesterday when people said South African whites would never agree to majority rule without a bloody revolution.

It seems like just yesterday when people said it was stupid to expect PAN candidates to win over the PRI in Mexico due to that country's rampant government corruption.

Of course, it has been said that the one thing we learn from history is that we never ever learn from history...