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Olga Garcia Echeverria

In August, cumulous clouds and a poem by tatiana de la tierra greet me, “Prisionera de tu perro.” My heart warms and I laugh aloud, remembering this querida amiga, bloguera, escritora. It’s a true story, the poem. tatiana once got dumped for a dog. She was indignant when it happened. “Can you fucking believe it? A dog! A cat maybe, pero un perro comemerida?” Her revenge was to write a poem-song (with a loud barking chorus) to the ex-lover. “You don’t seem too heartbroken,” I said to her once while she was practicing the poem with a yowling gusto. She barked, and then kept on singing.

Gracias Ina and Rotmi. Your international parcel is greatly appreciated. Las mujeres en este calendario están VIVAS.


Calendario de mujeres opportunity: I have two extra VIVAS calendars to share. It's bilingual queer word and mujer visual art to hang on a wall porque every day is a good day to celebrate International Women's Day. If you'd like a calendar, email me at [email protected] and I'll send the first two people who respond a cool parcel in the mail.

 

Rotmi Enciso & Ina Riaskov: Artistas, Activistas, Femenistas,  Revolucionistas, Lesbianistas, Internacionalistas.

 
To learn more about VIVAS contact Rotmi and Ina via Producciones Y Milagros Agrupacion Femenista, A.C. [email protected] or on twitter: @prodymil

If you haven’t already noticed, we now have a TWEET button. Look down. To the left. See it? Yeah. It’s awesome. Use it well.

Here are some other items I obsessed over this week.

Tweet

In Mexico City, that plastic bag could get you a $90,000 fine, jail time. [BBC]

They call it the Snazzy Napper, but it’s more like the Snazzy You’re-about-to-have-your-purse-stolen-while-looking-ridiculous-er. [Urlesque]

Feel estranged from your friends who use Twitter? [GeekandPoke]

See kids? Sophomore Chemistry wasn’t a total waste of time. [FailBlog]

This song would be OK, but it features Rivers Cuomo, so that makes it awesome. [YouTube]

It’s almost time for school, so let’s make sure we all know how to write absurd, incoherent academic sentences. [UChicago]

This is a photo of our President being silly. [DailyWhat]

Could you live in these teeny tiny homes? [MNN]

They made an ice cream-serving robot. So, that’s that. [Eater]

20-Somethings. Sigh. [NYTimes]

People have been reporting humanoids that fly since at least 1880.  Most have bat-like wings.  The most recent flurry of sightings have occurred in Mexico.

Paranormal researcher Stephen Wagner reports some of the historic sightings of flying humanoids.  In 1880, several people saw a man with bat-like wings flying at about 1,000 feet over Coney Island, Brooklyn.  In Chehalis, Washington, many witnesses reported seeing a flying man in 1948.  Hovering 20 feet above a barn, the man was in an upright position.

In Brazil in the early 1950s, a couple saw what they first thought was a couple of birds.  However, they turned out to be two man-like beings about six feet tall.  In 1952, another man thought he was seeing birds while on guard duty at Camp Okubu near Kyoto, Japan.  But once again, it was a strange flying creature.  Three people saw a winged being land in a nearby tree.  It looked like a man with bat-like wings. 

There are three types of flying creatures being seen: (l) Humanoids with bat-like wings; (2) humanoids without wings that fly unassisted; and (3) non-human beings that look like monsters or robots.  Even the cases in which the humanoids appear to be flying by some artificial means were using technology that had not been invented yet.

Mexico has been the scene of the latest wave of flying humanoids.  The date: January 17, 2004.  The place: Guadalupe, Mexico.  The time:  3:15 a.m.  A police officer saw a black mass touch the ground.  It turned into a black-haired woman wearing a black dress.  The woman started walking towards him when the police officer put his car in reverse.

Her eyes were completely black, including the parts that are normally white.  She flew through the air and smashed against the windshield of the car.

Salvador Guerrero is one of the most respected sky watcher in Mexico with hours of video tapes of unidentified flying objects.  But even he was amazed by a sighting he made in March, 2000.  Guerrero taped a solid, dark flying object with a human form with legs and arms visible.  This was the beginning of a wave of sightings of flying humanoids in Mexico. 

A sky watcher named Amado Marquez videotaped a “little man” flying horizontally in a standing position.  According to the newspaper La Prensa , an airline pilot sighted a little flying man during their descent into the Mexico City airport.  The copilot also witnessed the sighting.  On February 14, 2004, Ana Luisa Cid videotaped a large dark object.  It had a black body below and a structure above.

The flying humanoid sightings continue to be reported in Mexico.

Imagine yourself a resident of Baghdad in March 2003. It is the eve of the United States invasion. You know your own military’s weakness is the perfect foil for the invader’s fabled power. Some of your men in uniform will fight fiercely, but they will surely die. You know your nation’s political leadership engenders little loyalty from a restive citizenry, so you hold no hope for massive resistance when the invaders raise their flag from the conquered rooftops. A feeling of dread begins to seep into your every waking thought. The first bombs drop, the first tanks turn the corner, and everything you feared turns out as you foresaw, only it’s worse because all these fears are real, and they’re happening to you.

Now put yourself into the same frame of mind, except the year is 1847 and you are living in Mexico City. The Yankees have already stolen Texas, the evil clown Santa Anna having held a state funeral for his dead leg, now has gone into hiding to avoid battle. Only poorly armed rasquachi soldiers stand in the way of General Scott’s invading giants. The Yankees have bombarded Veracruz. The Yankees have overwhelmed Puebla. The Yankees are in the Zócalo about to raise the stars and stripes above the Palacio Nacional.

Such parallels are inescapably part of the ambiente of Ignacio Solares’ Yankee Invasion, a Novel of Mexico City. Such is the bad P.R. the United States has earned from its many years of military adventures in foreign lands that the novel doesn’t need to make the parallels explicitly. Solares feeds the flames an anti-Yankeeism in this historical novel, so it is not a novel for “my country right or wrong my country” tipos. Solares doesn’t waste a lot of tears for Mexicanos, either. One of the key side characters, Father Jarauta, stands for fighting against the Yankees and the Mexicans who support them. Moreover, the story comes to us ten years after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has ceded half of Mexico into US control, and 1848 was a long time ago.

Solares uses the invasion as backdrop for the story of a courageous surgeon, a troubled writer, and an indictment of an inept government, then as now. We hear about war but see precious little. Much of the battle action takes place in hearsay narrative, in rumor, in newspaper reportage. And this is a good thing because readers who are Veterans of the U.S. military do not want to read about Mexicans—or anyone—killing GIs or Marines, whether from the halls of Montezuma or the banks of the Euphrates.

The medico is Dr. Urruchúa. He’s troubled that his patients die with regularity after childbirth and other procedures. He’s frustrated that a few tragos of rum are all he can offer a patient about to feel the doctor’s saw cut into an amputation. Urruchúa suspects that washing hands and instruments might alleviate virulent infection, and ruminates that hypnotism could be useful in surgery. The doctor is a genuine hero. During the battle for Mexico City, the doctor goes from hospital to hospital without food or rest tending to wounded. A grievously wounded Yankee gets as good as the doctor can give—just as Yankee medicos tend to wounded Mexicans.

Among the doctor’s closest friends is Abelardo, the frustrated writer. Dr. Urruchúa theorizes Mesmer’s treatments could reduce Abelardo’s chronic depression, not just an amputee’s. But the best the doctor can offer his friend is some pills and a sympathetic ear.

Abelardo experiences hallucinations borne of his depression. He sees colors and auras, contemplates suicide as his one sure cure, and perhaps the best way to escape the consequences of the Yankee invasion. But unlikeable Abelardo is a man of inaction, preferring to discuss politics with his other rich friends than take up arms in defense of la patria.

Abelardo’s story is at once comic and frustrating. Comedy grows from his relationship with Magdalena, his wife, and two women whom Abelardo refers to as the true loves of his life. Magdalena hectors the frustrated writer to stitch together the drawersful of newspaper clippings and scribblings, along with Dr. Urruchúa’s notes, Abelardo has collected over the years. She’s heard bits and snippets of the history throughout their married life and Magdalena’s fed up with the story’s sketchiness. She, too, wants details on the two women, daughter and mother.

This novel, in fact, is the result of Magdalena’s goading urgency. But, in the end, Magdalena refuses to accept Abelardo’s version of events. To the reader’s frustration, Abelardo acknowledges that Magdalena is probably correct, telling her that many details are pure fiction or wishful thinking. In Abelardo’s untrustworthy mind, there’s no difference. Still, history has a concrete referent for much that transpires. The U.S. did invade. Chapultepec was taken. Mexico City was occupied. The trains ran on time, as it were, from United States administrative reforms. And maybe--given its dismal leadership and powerless easily riled plebe--Mexico got what it deserved, the invasion and loss of half its former territory.

Readers will find Yankee Invasion, A Novel of Mexico City, a worthwhile endeavor because the twisted story of the two women is deliciously salacious without being dirty, because the patriotism of the troubled primera clase Abelardo is sincere and genuine, because the underlying satire of Solares’ costumbrismo takes big bites out of Mexican pride, because the narrative is fun as it swings like Abelardo’s moods between straightforward historical account to confessional first person elements when Abelardo steps out of the narrative to address his readers directly, because of its imaginative structure.

Imagine yourself in the assembled masses. The occupying authority summoned attendance to hear the victory proclamation. U.S. cavalry and infantry clean up their appearance as well as possible, a few hours removed from the bloody battle to occupy el Castillo de Chapultepc and fight their way to the seat of government. An officer reads an English language proclamation—pendejo, the people think, screw you and whatever you’re saying in your foreign language. One GI is honored to haul the U.S. flag up the pole. A shot sounds from a nearby rooftop. The sniper’s aim drops the Yankee in his tracks. The crowd explodes in frenzy, pulling invaders to the ground, beating them with brooms and hammers and stones, tearing their dirty uniforms from bleeding corpses. You’re running for your life away from the carnage when a dying Yankee grabs your ankles. In desperation you pull a knife and thrust it into the Yankee’s body again and again until you smell his last breath. It is your own personal moment of triumph. If it happened. Ni modo, there’s a novel in it.

That's the first Tuesday of August. August, my birthday month, my anniversary month! But it's a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga.

mvs

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Michael Sedano

Today I am sharing a series of photos shot at Mexico City's Secretaría de la Educación Publica across a span of ten years, first in 1995 and again in 2005. With some trepidation, I hope to revisit these walls in the near future to see what progress time has produced. I hesitate because once photographers were free to photograph any wall. My most recent visit to el Castillo de Chapultepec, zealous guards threatened to confiscate my camera if I so much as raised the viewfinder to my eye! Fortunately, the educators have a much friendlier actitud.

On the 1995 visit, I spent an entire morning in the Secretariat, shooting every panel possible, plus some interiors. It is a short walk from the Secretariat to el Zocalo and el Palacio Nacional, where Rivera has covered the second floor with a richness of precolumbian themed work. There, again, I took detailed images.

On my most recent visit, I reached the Secretariat late in the day and was able only to rush through a couple of interiors and cursory shots of key panels. Sadly, I didn't make the effort to track down the worst of the samples and cannot illustrate a before-and-after of the destroyed panels.






As the first pair of photos illustrates, certain of Rivera's frescoes were totally obliterated and their reappearance on the walls must be seen as instauration rather than restoration.
















I did, however, have the good fortune of shooting Rivera's 1923 work, "La Feria Del Dia de los Muertos," during its ongoing restoration. The first set of images shows an artist patiently cleaning the substrate at the bottom of the mural.





I did not find a guide to ask if the damage resulted from weatherization or terremoto.










Ni modo, the work was in dishearteningly terrible shape. At bottom center, large swaths of detail have disappeared.

Have a look at the next image, at right and below. Note the figure of a woman in yellow dress in the 1995 image. Left of her all that remains is white plaster. In the close-up you can make out the artist using a point to clean off the surface in preparation for a repaint.


Notice how in 2005 all of the bottom center has been restored. Figures emerge to the left of the yellow clad woman. Now the work bench dedicates itself to work higher up, at lintel level. When I stood next to the work however, I could not make out what aspects were under repair or restoration. Study the over-under close-up and note the excellent quality of the surface.




Below see an over-under layout of close-ups showing more or less the same region. This is a set of figures at the far left of the panel, above the lintel and just to the right of the half-round clerestory of the portal. At top, the restored sections are barely noticeable. At bottom, the damage makes your heart stop.

I am working on a series of illustrated lectures on Mexico City's mural frescoes--Rivera, Siquieros, O'Gorman--and welcome leads to books and other resources. One highly informative resource I found for the Education Secretariat and the National Palace is a long out-of-print tourist manual, by R. S. Silva E., Diego Rivera's frescoes in the National Palace of Mexico, City: a descriptive guide. Mexico City : Sinalomex Editorial, 1965. I am grateful to John McDonald, a senior librarian at the Claremont Colleges Libraries, for letting me borrow the book from the Honnold Library. The title is also available at UC Berkeley. Silva points out that the personages in the Dia de los Muertos detail include actress Celia Montalban and bullfighter Juan Silveti, with the cigar.

You can click on each of the images in today's post to view the files in much larger, better detailed size. In fact, I've laid out the Rivera over-under image as a picture postcard that you can print on heavy photo stock and mail to friends. Click here for this, and other, print 'em yourself postcards from Read! Raza.