This is a great article I received from an old UCLA flatmate...
Funny how this author and I have much in common...i.e. boarding school, UC Santa Barbara...and California.
SUMMERIZED
California dreamin'... of England
Escaping the seduction of endless summer.
By Pico Iyer, PICO IYER is the author, most recently, of "Abandon" and "Sun After Dark."
August 3, 2006
GROWING UP, I used to flee my 15th century English boarding school every summer and come to California. California was where my parents lived, but, no less important, it was where freedom lived and long horizons had their home address. It was the source of everything we craved — and didn't have — in our tiny, medieval, all-male cells: movement and opportunity, beaches and bikinis. Mustangs with their tops down along PCH and cheerleader camps spreading like blond explosions across the campus at UC Santa Barbara. California was the place where we could put history and hierarchy behind us. It was — as those blond cheers and cries of optimism reminded us — the future stretched out ad infinitum.
This has always been the California that the Old World cherishes, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the longing reached its peak. I would get on the Pan Am plane in London every July — bound for LAX — and see my classmates turn away with envy. I was going to the center of a revolution — to the very place where youth was remaking the world in its own image — while they had to remain among the fixed.
Every autumn, when I returned to the low, gray skies of Berkshire, I told my friends how I had seen the Dead live in a nearby campground and heard "White Rabbit" sailing across the lagoon at UCSB. I had seen the world made new on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue and found ancient caves in the hills that made Xenophon and the Punic Wars look nouveau.
There were long, sunlit afternoons listening to Vin Scully call another golden twilight over the palm trees at Dodger Stadium. Country-rock harmonies ringing out underneath the stars in the Santa Barbara Bowl, as the lights came on around the ocean far below.
When lucky friends from England visited, we made the obligatory trip to where the soul itself was being reborn, at the Esalen Institute — often welcomed, thanks to our British accents — or savored the inadvertent ironies of Solvang, or the Madonna Inn up the coast. California was where we went when we wanted to leave real life far behind.
It was only much, much later, then, after I'd come to see that daydreams pack less danger than fantasies, that I began to realize, to my surprise, that summer, like anything, is best appreciated in its absence. Endlessness itself can be imprisonment.
And it was only when I looked back on both cultures from a new home in Japan that I noticed that summer light was actually sharper, more clarifying in England than in Santa Barbara. The sun didn't set till long after 9 p.m. on summer evenings there, and the afternoons drifted on, over acres and acres of rich green fields and lazy rivers, till they dissolved into a drowsy Keatsian twitter sometime before midnight. The sound of a cricket bat in the distance. Shouts from a far-off tennis game on grass courts. And after the languid falling of the dark, Handel concerts above the rolling lawns, and spirits hiding in the trees in college productions of Shakespeare's "Dream."
I had made it my identity, my policy to style myself as an exile, a fugitive from England's narrow spaces, given new life, like Isherwood or Hockney, in the subtropical light of California. But summer in California, I came to see slowly, is bleary skies and sticky afternoons, traffic jams among all those trying to flee the city. Winter is the time to enjoy the light here, when early evenings and crystalline skies put a frame around the sunshine.
California, I suppose I realized, had given me possibility; but only England could show me what to do with it — in part by giving me 10 months a year of chill, gray finitudes.
jueves, agosto 03, 2006
miércoles, julio 26, 2006
The Countess of Mexico City - DF
Life is good in LA...I am so glad to be back, but every now and then, an article about Mexico City comes along that makes me very nostalgic about that Gran Tenochtitlan south of the Border!
Hope everyone is having a great sizzling summer!
Check out this LA Times article on Condesa, the bohemian countess of Mexico City.
Ecléctico in the city
It's a bohemian oasis in the middle of stressed-out Mexico City: Condesa is home to artists, musicians, novelists and filmmakers who give Mexico its global identity.
By Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2006
IN Tony Scott's action thriller "Man On Fire," there's a scene where a bodyguard played by Denzel Washington realizes that his young client (Dakota Fanning) is about to be kidnapped. Time slows to a crawl, the camera does a loopy 360-degree pan, and the audience sees the world through the bodyguard's eyes — edgy, alluring and wildly unpredictable.
The neighborhood where this memorable sequence occurs is Condesa, a leafy, Art Deco-studded oasis in the heart of this stressed-out metropolis of about 22 million. Over the last several years, Condesa (pronounced con-DAY-sah) has acquired a reputation as one of this unruly city's most compelling, and occasionally jarring, places to live. It boasts some of the region's trendiest bars and restaurants, splashiest avant-garde architecture and, arguably, its most intriguing mix of residents and residential options — from classic 1930s Deco private homes to chic new loft apartments.
Condesa also offers plenty of evidence as to why Los Angeles and the Mexican capital are sister cities. Occupying a roughly pentagon-shaped area southwest of the city's historic center, Condesa is Mexico City's Silver Lake and Los Feliz rolled into one, with traces of West Hollywood, Boyle Heights and several other Spanish-speaking urban barrios. "It has an air of Buenos Aires or Barcelona," says Federico Campbell, a novelist and essayist who has lived in the community since 1997.
Like L.A., Condesa has long been a source of fascination for the film business and the image-manufacturing industry. Movie directors, novelists, soap opera writers, musicians, painters, architects and academics, among others, all make their homes here alongside the quaint flower stalls, mom-and-pop taco stands and curbside shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe that give the district a touch of old-fashioned charm.
Condesa also is one of the city's most photogenic and visually iconoclastic locales. The neighborhood attained its first architectural golden age in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, when the Mexican screen diva María Félix was shooting movies in the 12-story, Bauhaus-influenced Edificio Basurto and the buildings were as glamorous as the human stars. And like L.A., Condesa appears to have woken up just in time to start restoring and preserving its crumbling Art Deco gems for future generations.
Small wonder the neighborhood has kept its cachet with film location scouts. Besides "Man On Fire" (2004), numerous commercials, telenovelas and a section of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Amores Perros" (2000) have been filmed here in recent years.
These contemporary portraits have given much-maligned Mexico City a global identity as a complex, multi-strata urban-scape where ancient and modern, elegance and squalor, coexist. Condesa too is a neighborhood that has spent decades getting ready for its close-up. Shattered by the monster earthquake that struck Mexico City 21 years ago, the area for a time was all but abandoned, its once-fashionable buildings dirty and decaying, its parks and plazas dimly lighted and dangerous.
TODAY, Condesa is easily the city's most de moda district. Classic Deco apartment houses that once were rotting are being rehabilitated. Sleek new residential glass-and-steel towers, some equipped with shared interior courtyards, rooftop swimming pools, hanging gardens and other high-end accessories, are sprouting like summer lilies. Both locals and tourists, with New York, French or lisping Madrid accents, loll in sidewalk cafes and chat away evenings in smoky tapas bars. The abundant parks offer a respite for rendezvousing lovers and parents with rambunctious children.
But Condesa isn't some gated enclave, removed from the city's bustle and grit. The neighborhood and those adjoining it, though gentrifying, still contain a social and economic cross-section of the capital.
"For me, the most important thing about Condesa is the lifestyle. It's more urban, it's more diverse," says Victor Sánchez, 42, a Stanford-educated software specialist who recently bought an apartment in Condesa with his wife, Cecilia López, 33, a college architecture instructor.
Though the couple had to spend "about a year" searching for a home in the tight housing market, they say it was worth the wait. Besides its other attractions, they were drawn to the neighborhood's relatively central location in a sprawling mega-city where enduring a long rush-hour commute can take years off your life. While a number of their friends have moved to more sanitized, suburbanized locations, the childless couple prefer Condesa's eclectic vibe. "Many of our friends who don't live here want to live here," says López.
Of course, there's a downside to its surging popularity. Some poorer residents have been driven out by rising rents. Weekday parking is a nightmare. In recent months, construction cranes seemed to cast a shadow over practically every block.
Like Washington's on-screen character, longtime denizens might have the sensation that the neighborhood is spinning around them. Some wonder if Condesa is being victimized by its own success.
But it's hard to find anyone who plans on leaving. "I wouldn't know where else to live," says architect Derek Dellekamp, 35, who shares an apartment with his wife, photographer Lara Becerra, in the striking, stacked-aluminum apartment building he designed. "I started doing it for a client and I ended up marrying her," Dellekamp explains with a laugh.
His building, which is constructed around a shared interior courtyard and a communal garden, was one of several in the neighborhood included in last year's exhibition, "Mexico City Dialogues: New Architectural Practices" at the Center for Architecture in New York.
The same exhibition featured the work of Higuera + Sánchez, another ambitious young Mexico City firm that was one of the first to build loft-style apartments here. It has been putting its stamp on Condesa's new experimental architecture with a number of airy, angular, steel, concrete and glass apartment buildings (full disclosure: this writer lives in one), as well as the chic, opaque-glass qi gym, where guitarist José Alfredo Rangel Arroyo, a.k.a. Joselo, of the popular Mexican alt-rock band Café Tacuba often can be spotted sweating away on the treadmill.
Yet another young architect, Alberto Kalach, who designed the just-opened Biblioteca Vasconcelos national library in downtown Mexico City, is represented in Condesa by an apartment building that playfully balances a heavy concrete superstructure with a futuristic, see-through glass interior that makes the building's units seem to float above the surrounding streets.
Alas, an increasing number of modern Condesa apartments are drab, hulking copycats of earlier, better buildings. In Mexico City, lax building codes and even more lax code enforcement have created a wide-open architectural environment where, for better and worse, experimentation is encouraged and relatively young twenty- and thirtysomething designers can get work. Condesa has been one of the trend's chief beneficiaries, as well as its sometime dupe.
"Mexico City is like a laboratory," says Dellekamp. "It's because it's growing so fast. It's because the social differences are so extreme and it has a great history."
In Condesa's case, that history dates to the beginnings of the last century, when the city government launched the new residential district in 1902. Named for an old house on the premises owned by a colonial-era Spanish countess (" condesa" is Spanish for countess), the neighborhood incorporates two oval-shaped streets, the inner Avenida México and the outer Avenida Amsterdam, that are the remains of a former horse racing track (" hipódromo" in Spanish).
A few years after development began, the Mexican Revolution broke out and further construction halted until peace returned in the 1920s. Over the next 20 to 30 years, the neighborhood became a haven for immigrants (particularly Jews), foreign expats and bohemians, as well as a magnet for modern architectural styles that expressed the dynamic post-revolutionary nation.
Technically, the area consists of three neighborhoods: Condesa, Hipódromo and Hipódromo-Condesa. Two older, artier, less-gentrified neighborhoods to the east, Roma Norte and Roma Sur, though separated from Condesa by the roaring traffic and neon glare of Avenida Insurgentes, are culturally and commercially linked to Condesa. Residents and weekend day-trippers in search of diversion constantly wander back and forth among the five neighborhoods.
"There are people who never leave Condesa," says Mario Torres Peña, 50, a painter who lives in Roma but regularly crosses over Insurgentes Avenue. "There's everything. There are restaurants, there are bars, there are places to dance."
LIKE many urban renaissances, Condesa's revival grew out of disaster. On the morning of Sept. 19, 1985, a temblor measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale devastated the capital, killing at least 10,000 people, leaving thousands more homeless and destroying hundreds of structures.
Condesa and the Roma district were among the hardest-hit areas because they were built over part of the ancient lakebed that once surrounded the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City). When the Spanish conquistadors occupied the city, they began filling in the lake, but the soft subsoil that remains tends to magnify the deadly shaking effects of the area's frequent tremors.
In the quake's aftermath, Condesa has become a pioneer in showcasing experimental new forms of residential dwellings. But it also has fought to preserve its rich architectural past. Mexico City reputedly has the hemisphere's highest concentration of Art Deco anywhere south of Miami, and over the last half-dozen or so years Condesa has become ground zero of the capital's Deco revival. Dozens of Deco apartment buildings and private homes dot the neighborhood, many now upgraded or fully restored, a few still deserted and teetering on the brink of extinction — but unlikely to stay that way for long.
Patricia Arriaga Jordán, 53, a well-known film and television writer, director and producer, says that as a child she used to visit her grandmother's home on Amsterdam Avenue. But many members of her own middle-class generation gave up on the old inner-city neighborhood and fled to developing, Americanized suburbs such as Satélite and Santa Fe. "I think it was a mistake," she says. Mexico City "should have been like Barcelona," she believes, where city officials carefully limited new residential construction, encouraging the middle class to remain in the city.
A year ago, Arriaga Jordán and her husband John Page, 76, a professor of Chinese literature at the Colegio de México, decided that with their children grown it was time to sell their family home in the southern San Ángel district. They moved into the 2,475 square-foot penthouse of a meticulously restored Art Deco apartment house built in 1931 on a tranquil Condesa plaza.
Known as the Edificio Lux, the building was constructed by prominent architect Ernesto Buenrostro, who also designed the nearby Edificio San Martín on the Parque México. Because of the structure's architectural merit, its renovation was supervised by the National Institute of Fine Arts. Fortunately, Arriaga Jordán says, the building had not undergone much alteration of its original floor plan or ornamentation over the years.
A granite-covered staircase leads to the couple's penthouse unit, with an enclosed terrace that faces a tree-encircled public fountain on the streets below. Their living room, just off the terrace, artfully contrasts modular modern furniture with Indian sculptures dating stylistically from pre-Columbian times, and a ponderous bookshelf that bisects the room horizontally. Page's study overlooks the terrace, while Arriaga Jordán rents an office just down the street.
Though Page was skeptical of the move at first, the empty-nester couple now appreciate living in a neighborhood with four bookstores, dozens of restaurants, plenty of shared public space and an enveloping sense of community. "The one thing I really like is the mix of people," Arriaga Jordán says. By contrast, she says, in San Ángel, a colonial-era district where the rich live barricaded behind high stone walls, "it's all upper-middle class. We all look the same, we dress the same."
The area's Deco pièce de résistance is the Edificio Basurto, which rises across Sonora Avenue near the northeast end of Parque Mexico. Built between 1941 and 1944, it's the masterwork of celebrated architect Francisco Serrano. This soaring, geometric edifice, with its garden balconies and spiraling interior reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, incarnates the futurismo optimism of Condesa's mid-century developers.
Hit hard by the '85 quake, the 42-unit building (including two penthouses) has been substantially reinforced and converted to condominiums. It also enjoys protection by the nation's cultural commission, which must approve all changes or renovations, right down to the color of the exterior paint. "It's the most precious, beautiful building," says Adriana Talazuelos, the property's manager. "It's a jewel."
Among the notable names attached in the past to the Basurto are Paul Westheim, a German-Jewish art critic who came to Mexico fleeing the Nazis and became an influential authority on Mexican art; and the Chilean writer-director Tito Davison, who filmed several movies in the building, including "La Diosa Arrodillada" ("The Kneeling Goddess"), a 1947 mystery-melodrama starring screen star Félix.
Other former Condesa and Roma residents linked to famous neighborhood sites include Tina Modotti, the Italian-born actress, ardent communist, photographer and lover-muse of fellow camera bug Edward Weston (she's the subject of one of his most sensual nudes). For a time after moving to Mexico City, Modotti lived in a triangle-shaped building on Veracruz Street, which today bears her name. And Beat writer William S. Burroughs fatally shot his wife Joan while aiming at a cocktail glass on her head while living in Roma. (Their old home has since been torn down.)
Gilding Condesa's cultural lily, last spring President Vicente Fox helped christen the new Centro Cultural Bella Época, a cultural center built around an Art Deco cinema designed by U.S. architect S. Charles Lee. The 32,000 square-foot center, whose restoration and expansion was done by Mexican architect Teodoro González de León, includes an art-house movie theater, an art gallery, a cafe and what is billed as Latin America's largest bookstore.
As Condesa's boom continues, no doubt the whispers will keep getting louder that the area has peaked and is on the downslide. Too trendy. Too expensive. Too many valets cramming more and more SUV's onto the already crowded weekend sidewalks.
"There are extremely interesting things going on in Condesa, as well as people coming from [the suburbs] just to get drunk," says architect Dellekamp. "What the lifespan of Condesa being interesting would be, I couldn't say."
Alvaro Mejer, a real estate agent who has lived in the neighborhood for years and watched it revive and thrive, worries that it may turn into the next Zona Rosa, the formerly fashionable district to the north now overrun with clubs and dissolute tourists. He's now a mainstay of a neighbors' group that's working to prevent the same thing from happening in Condesa, Hipódromo and Roma.
In the meantime, Mejer will keep strolling Condesa's cool, green boulevards with his dogs, Azúl, Chata and Tohui, and living in an apartment behind the offices where he works and shares space with Arriaga Jordán, two filmmakers and the managers of the pop rock singer Julieta Venegas.
"Here, it's easy to make friends," Mejer says. "It's a community with much conviviality."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reed Johnson can be reached at reed.johnson@latimes.com.
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Calm and collected
Like L.A., Mexico City is a sea of concrete and blacktop with little public green space, given its enormous size. Condesa is one of the relatively few neighborhoods where two parks play a civilizing role in the frantic pace of urban life. Incorporated into the city's plan in the 1920s, the parks are as conspicuous and cherished by local residents today as ever and help us understand, even at a distance, how critical these spaces are for cities.
Parque México: Avenida México, lined with apartment buildings and a few single-family houses, defines the elliptical periphery of the park, which was constructed around a previously existing horse racetrack. Filled with dozens of varieties of trees and shrubs, fountains, sculptures, a duck pond, an open-air Art Deco-style theater named for Charles Lindbergh and ornamental walkways and shelters, the 22-acre park (also known as the Parque José de San Martín, named for the Argentine revolutionary hero) is one of the city's most distinctive public spaces. Besides shady venues in which to stroll, kick a soccer ball or watch your child race around in a miniature tram car, the park has spawned an abundant cafe culture along its margins. "I think it's probably the highlight of Condesa," architect Derek Dellekamp says of the Parque México. "And if you go on a Sunday, the people you're going to see are all locals."
Parque España: This smaller oasis is filled with a wealth of tropical plants, trees and fountains crisscrossed by ornamental bridges. Like Parque México, it helps buffer Condesa from the noise and congestion. Add the tree-lined, oval-shaped Avenida Amsterdam and several small landscaped plazas, and Condesa has more green space, proportionally, than practically any other part of the city.
— Reed Johnson
Hope everyone is having a great sizzling summer!
Check out this LA Times article on Condesa, the bohemian countess of Mexico City.
Ecléctico in the city
It's a bohemian oasis in the middle of stressed-out Mexico City: Condesa is home to artists, musicians, novelists and filmmakers who give Mexico its global identity.
By Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2006
IN Tony Scott's action thriller "Man On Fire," there's a scene where a bodyguard played by Denzel Washington realizes that his young client (Dakota Fanning) is about to be kidnapped. Time slows to a crawl, the camera does a loopy 360-degree pan, and the audience sees the world through the bodyguard's eyes — edgy, alluring and wildly unpredictable.
The neighborhood where this memorable sequence occurs is Condesa, a leafy, Art Deco-studded oasis in the heart of this stressed-out metropolis of about 22 million. Over the last several years, Condesa (pronounced con-DAY-sah) has acquired a reputation as one of this unruly city's most compelling, and occasionally jarring, places to live. It boasts some of the region's trendiest bars and restaurants, splashiest avant-garde architecture and, arguably, its most intriguing mix of residents and residential options — from classic 1930s Deco private homes to chic new loft apartments.
Condesa also offers plenty of evidence as to why Los Angeles and the Mexican capital are sister cities. Occupying a roughly pentagon-shaped area southwest of the city's historic center, Condesa is Mexico City's Silver Lake and Los Feliz rolled into one, with traces of West Hollywood, Boyle Heights and several other Spanish-speaking urban barrios. "It has an air of Buenos Aires or Barcelona," says Federico Campbell, a novelist and essayist who has lived in the community since 1997.
Like L.A., Condesa has long been a source of fascination for the film business and the image-manufacturing industry. Movie directors, novelists, soap opera writers, musicians, painters, architects and academics, among others, all make their homes here alongside the quaint flower stalls, mom-and-pop taco stands and curbside shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe that give the district a touch of old-fashioned charm.
Condesa also is one of the city's most photogenic and visually iconoclastic locales. The neighborhood attained its first architectural golden age in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, when the Mexican screen diva María Félix was shooting movies in the 12-story, Bauhaus-influenced Edificio Basurto and the buildings were as glamorous as the human stars. And like L.A., Condesa appears to have woken up just in time to start restoring and preserving its crumbling Art Deco gems for future generations.
Small wonder the neighborhood has kept its cachet with film location scouts. Besides "Man On Fire" (2004), numerous commercials, telenovelas and a section of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Amores Perros" (2000) have been filmed here in recent years.
These contemporary portraits have given much-maligned Mexico City a global identity as a complex, multi-strata urban-scape where ancient and modern, elegance and squalor, coexist. Condesa too is a neighborhood that has spent decades getting ready for its close-up. Shattered by the monster earthquake that struck Mexico City 21 years ago, the area for a time was all but abandoned, its once-fashionable buildings dirty and decaying, its parks and plazas dimly lighted and dangerous.
TODAY, Condesa is easily the city's most de moda district. Classic Deco apartment houses that once were rotting are being rehabilitated. Sleek new residential glass-and-steel towers, some equipped with shared interior courtyards, rooftop swimming pools, hanging gardens and other high-end accessories, are sprouting like summer lilies. Both locals and tourists, with New York, French or lisping Madrid accents, loll in sidewalk cafes and chat away evenings in smoky tapas bars. The abundant parks offer a respite for rendezvousing lovers and parents with rambunctious children.
But Condesa isn't some gated enclave, removed from the city's bustle and grit. The neighborhood and those adjoining it, though gentrifying, still contain a social and economic cross-section of the capital.
"For me, the most important thing about Condesa is the lifestyle. It's more urban, it's more diverse," says Victor Sánchez, 42, a Stanford-educated software specialist who recently bought an apartment in Condesa with his wife, Cecilia López, 33, a college architecture instructor.
Though the couple had to spend "about a year" searching for a home in the tight housing market, they say it was worth the wait. Besides its other attractions, they were drawn to the neighborhood's relatively central location in a sprawling mega-city where enduring a long rush-hour commute can take years off your life. While a number of their friends have moved to more sanitized, suburbanized locations, the childless couple prefer Condesa's eclectic vibe. "Many of our friends who don't live here want to live here," says López.
Of course, there's a downside to its surging popularity. Some poorer residents have been driven out by rising rents. Weekday parking is a nightmare. In recent months, construction cranes seemed to cast a shadow over practically every block.
Like Washington's on-screen character, longtime denizens might have the sensation that the neighborhood is spinning around them. Some wonder if Condesa is being victimized by its own success.
But it's hard to find anyone who plans on leaving. "I wouldn't know where else to live," says architect Derek Dellekamp, 35, who shares an apartment with his wife, photographer Lara Becerra, in the striking, stacked-aluminum apartment building he designed. "I started doing it for a client and I ended up marrying her," Dellekamp explains with a laugh.
His building, which is constructed around a shared interior courtyard and a communal garden, was one of several in the neighborhood included in last year's exhibition, "Mexico City Dialogues: New Architectural Practices" at the Center for Architecture in New York.
The same exhibition featured the work of Higuera + Sánchez, another ambitious young Mexico City firm that was one of the first to build loft-style apartments here. It has been putting its stamp on Condesa's new experimental architecture with a number of airy, angular, steel, concrete and glass apartment buildings (full disclosure: this writer lives in one), as well as the chic, opaque-glass qi gym, where guitarist José Alfredo Rangel Arroyo, a.k.a. Joselo, of the popular Mexican alt-rock band Café Tacuba often can be spotted sweating away on the treadmill.
Yet another young architect, Alberto Kalach, who designed the just-opened Biblioteca Vasconcelos national library in downtown Mexico City, is represented in Condesa by an apartment building that playfully balances a heavy concrete superstructure with a futuristic, see-through glass interior that makes the building's units seem to float above the surrounding streets.
Alas, an increasing number of modern Condesa apartments are drab, hulking copycats of earlier, better buildings. In Mexico City, lax building codes and even more lax code enforcement have created a wide-open architectural environment where, for better and worse, experimentation is encouraged and relatively young twenty- and thirtysomething designers can get work. Condesa has been one of the trend's chief beneficiaries, as well as its sometime dupe.
"Mexico City is like a laboratory," says Dellekamp. "It's because it's growing so fast. It's because the social differences are so extreme and it has a great history."
In Condesa's case, that history dates to the beginnings of the last century, when the city government launched the new residential district in 1902. Named for an old house on the premises owned by a colonial-era Spanish countess (" condesa" is Spanish for countess), the neighborhood incorporates two oval-shaped streets, the inner Avenida México and the outer Avenida Amsterdam, that are the remains of a former horse racing track (" hipódromo" in Spanish).
A few years after development began, the Mexican Revolution broke out and further construction halted until peace returned in the 1920s. Over the next 20 to 30 years, the neighborhood became a haven for immigrants (particularly Jews), foreign expats and bohemians, as well as a magnet for modern architectural styles that expressed the dynamic post-revolutionary nation.
Technically, the area consists of three neighborhoods: Condesa, Hipódromo and Hipódromo-Condesa. Two older, artier, less-gentrified neighborhoods to the east, Roma Norte and Roma Sur, though separated from Condesa by the roaring traffic and neon glare of Avenida Insurgentes, are culturally and commercially linked to Condesa. Residents and weekend day-trippers in search of diversion constantly wander back and forth among the five neighborhoods.
"There are people who never leave Condesa," says Mario Torres Peña, 50, a painter who lives in Roma but regularly crosses over Insurgentes Avenue. "There's everything. There are restaurants, there are bars, there are places to dance."
LIKE many urban renaissances, Condesa's revival grew out of disaster. On the morning of Sept. 19, 1985, a temblor measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale devastated the capital, killing at least 10,000 people, leaving thousands more homeless and destroying hundreds of structures.
Condesa and the Roma district were among the hardest-hit areas because they were built over part of the ancient lakebed that once surrounded the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City). When the Spanish conquistadors occupied the city, they began filling in the lake, but the soft subsoil that remains tends to magnify the deadly shaking effects of the area's frequent tremors.
In the quake's aftermath, Condesa has become a pioneer in showcasing experimental new forms of residential dwellings. But it also has fought to preserve its rich architectural past. Mexico City reputedly has the hemisphere's highest concentration of Art Deco anywhere south of Miami, and over the last half-dozen or so years Condesa has become ground zero of the capital's Deco revival. Dozens of Deco apartment buildings and private homes dot the neighborhood, many now upgraded or fully restored, a few still deserted and teetering on the brink of extinction — but unlikely to stay that way for long.
Patricia Arriaga Jordán, 53, a well-known film and television writer, director and producer, says that as a child she used to visit her grandmother's home on Amsterdam Avenue. But many members of her own middle-class generation gave up on the old inner-city neighborhood and fled to developing, Americanized suburbs such as Satélite and Santa Fe. "I think it was a mistake," she says. Mexico City "should have been like Barcelona," she believes, where city officials carefully limited new residential construction, encouraging the middle class to remain in the city.
A year ago, Arriaga Jordán and her husband John Page, 76, a professor of Chinese literature at the Colegio de México, decided that with their children grown it was time to sell their family home in the southern San Ángel district. They moved into the 2,475 square-foot penthouse of a meticulously restored Art Deco apartment house built in 1931 on a tranquil Condesa plaza.
Known as the Edificio Lux, the building was constructed by prominent architect Ernesto Buenrostro, who also designed the nearby Edificio San Martín on the Parque México. Because of the structure's architectural merit, its renovation was supervised by the National Institute of Fine Arts. Fortunately, Arriaga Jordán says, the building had not undergone much alteration of its original floor plan or ornamentation over the years.
A granite-covered staircase leads to the couple's penthouse unit, with an enclosed terrace that faces a tree-encircled public fountain on the streets below. Their living room, just off the terrace, artfully contrasts modular modern furniture with Indian sculptures dating stylistically from pre-Columbian times, and a ponderous bookshelf that bisects the room horizontally. Page's study overlooks the terrace, while Arriaga Jordán rents an office just down the street.
Though Page was skeptical of the move at first, the empty-nester couple now appreciate living in a neighborhood with four bookstores, dozens of restaurants, plenty of shared public space and an enveloping sense of community. "The one thing I really like is the mix of people," Arriaga Jordán says. By contrast, she says, in San Ángel, a colonial-era district where the rich live barricaded behind high stone walls, "it's all upper-middle class. We all look the same, we dress the same."
The area's Deco pièce de résistance is the Edificio Basurto, which rises across Sonora Avenue near the northeast end of Parque Mexico. Built between 1941 and 1944, it's the masterwork of celebrated architect Francisco Serrano. This soaring, geometric edifice, with its garden balconies and spiraling interior reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, incarnates the futurismo optimism of Condesa's mid-century developers.
Hit hard by the '85 quake, the 42-unit building (including two penthouses) has been substantially reinforced and converted to condominiums. It also enjoys protection by the nation's cultural commission, which must approve all changes or renovations, right down to the color of the exterior paint. "It's the most precious, beautiful building," says Adriana Talazuelos, the property's manager. "It's a jewel."
Among the notable names attached in the past to the Basurto are Paul Westheim, a German-Jewish art critic who came to Mexico fleeing the Nazis and became an influential authority on Mexican art; and the Chilean writer-director Tito Davison, who filmed several movies in the building, including "La Diosa Arrodillada" ("The Kneeling Goddess"), a 1947 mystery-melodrama starring screen star Félix.
Other former Condesa and Roma residents linked to famous neighborhood sites include Tina Modotti, the Italian-born actress, ardent communist, photographer and lover-muse of fellow camera bug Edward Weston (she's the subject of one of his most sensual nudes). For a time after moving to Mexico City, Modotti lived in a triangle-shaped building on Veracruz Street, which today bears her name. And Beat writer William S. Burroughs fatally shot his wife Joan while aiming at a cocktail glass on her head while living in Roma. (Their old home has since been torn down.)
Gilding Condesa's cultural lily, last spring President Vicente Fox helped christen the new Centro Cultural Bella Época, a cultural center built around an Art Deco cinema designed by U.S. architect S. Charles Lee. The 32,000 square-foot center, whose restoration and expansion was done by Mexican architect Teodoro González de León, includes an art-house movie theater, an art gallery, a cafe and what is billed as Latin America's largest bookstore.
As Condesa's boom continues, no doubt the whispers will keep getting louder that the area has peaked and is on the downslide. Too trendy. Too expensive. Too many valets cramming more and more SUV's onto the already crowded weekend sidewalks.
"There are extremely interesting things going on in Condesa, as well as people coming from [the suburbs] just to get drunk," says architect Dellekamp. "What the lifespan of Condesa being interesting would be, I couldn't say."
Alvaro Mejer, a real estate agent who has lived in the neighborhood for years and watched it revive and thrive, worries that it may turn into the next Zona Rosa, the formerly fashionable district to the north now overrun with clubs and dissolute tourists. He's now a mainstay of a neighbors' group that's working to prevent the same thing from happening in Condesa, Hipódromo and Roma.
In the meantime, Mejer will keep strolling Condesa's cool, green boulevards with his dogs, Azúl, Chata and Tohui, and living in an apartment behind the offices where he works and shares space with Arriaga Jordán, two filmmakers and the managers of the pop rock singer Julieta Venegas.
"Here, it's easy to make friends," Mejer says. "It's a community with much conviviality."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reed Johnson can be reached at reed.johnson@latimes.com.
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Calm and collected
Like L.A., Mexico City is a sea of concrete and blacktop with little public green space, given its enormous size. Condesa is one of the relatively few neighborhoods where two parks play a civilizing role in the frantic pace of urban life. Incorporated into the city's plan in the 1920s, the parks are as conspicuous and cherished by local residents today as ever and help us understand, even at a distance, how critical these spaces are for cities.
Parque México: Avenida México, lined with apartment buildings and a few single-family houses, defines the elliptical periphery of the park, which was constructed around a previously existing horse racetrack. Filled with dozens of varieties of trees and shrubs, fountains, sculptures, a duck pond, an open-air Art Deco-style theater named for Charles Lindbergh and ornamental walkways and shelters, the 22-acre park (also known as the Parque José de San Martín, named for the Argentine revolutionary hero) is one of the city's most distinctive public spaces. Besides shady venues in which to stroll, kick a soccer ball or watch your child race around in a miniature tram car, the park has spawned an abundant cafe culture along its margins. "I think it's probably the highlight of Condesa," architect Derek Dellekamp says of the Parque México. "And if you go on a Sunday, the people you're going to see are all locals."
Parque España: This smaller oasis is filled with a wealth of tropical plants, trees and fountains crisscrossed by ornamental bridges. Like Parque México, it helps buffer Condesa from the noise and congestion. Add the tree-lined, oval-shaped Avenida Amsterdam and several small landscaped plazas, and Condesa has more green space, proportionally, than practically any other part of the city.
— Reed Johnson
sábado, junio 24, 2006
en alta mar - zihua
Doce meses despues de haber regresado de Mexico, es muy agradable revisar fotografias de mi estancia en ese inolvidable pais. Mexico es un lugar magico, porque la tierra, el sol y su gente palpitan con un coraje envidiable. Viva Mexico - ayer, hoy y para siempre. Esta fotografia fue tomada en Marzo 2005, en el mar Pacifico al sur de Zihuatanejo.
martes, mayo 23, 2006
Lopez Obrador for the Nacos?
Below is a fantastic article about what Mexico's upcoming elections mean for its future. At the core of the political debate is the realization that Mexico's infamous class lines are finally fracturing and becoming embarassingly self-evident.
Mexico's Elite Fear Leftist Candidate's Rise
By Héctor Tobar, Times Staff Writer
7:47 PM PDT, May 23, 2006
MEXICO CITY — An insidious force is threatening the collective peace of mind in Lomas de Chapultepec, the Beverly Hills of this capital city.
The 10-foot walls and the electrified fences that are de rigueur for most homes can't keep the force out, nor can the neighborhood's ubiquitous private security guards. It seeps in, like a noxious vapor: the possibility that a certain leftist politician with a tropical accent might be elected the next president of Mexico in July.
ADVERTISEMENT
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a native of the sultry state of Tabasco and onetime mayor of Mexico City, is the boogeyman of the rich here. Once the clear front-runner, he is now in a tight race with Felipe Calderon, the candidate of the center-right National Action Party. The possibility of a Lopez Obrador victory has some wealthy Mexicans preparing as if for an earthquake or a hurricane.
"If he wins, this country will be ruined. I'll be better off leaving," declared Marta Garcia at the Starbucks in Lomas de Chapultepec, where a cafe mocha and a blueberry muffin cost slightly more than the daily minimum wage of $4.50. "I'll move to Guatemala."
With its main slogan of "For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First," Lopez Obrador's campaign has exposed deep class and ethnic tensions in Mexico. Although he's made quiet overtures to the business community and financial markets, wealthy Mexicans and some in the country's business community see him as a dangerous Robin Hood figure who will take from the rich to give to the poor.
The biggest fear of many wealthy Mexicans is Lopez Obrador's vow to toughen tax enforcement to raise the revenue to pay for social programs. Mexico has a reputation in financial circles as a vast, tax-free "enterprise zone" for the rich.
"We have a saying here," Mexico City economist Mario Correa said. "If you pay taxes in Mexico, then you don't have a good accountant."
Guillermo Oropeza, a sales manager for a movie distribution company and resident of Santa Fe, another exclusive enclave here, believes that Lopez Obrador lacks a basic understanding of economics.
"He doesn't have the intellectual capacity to be president," Oropeza said. "He can't win. It would be absurd."
At a campaign stop this month in the state of Jalisco, Lopez Obrador, the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, insisted that he had nothing against the wealthy. "We are not against businesspeople," he said. "We need businesspeople, and their investments, to create jobs for our people and get our economy moving again."
As mayor of Mexico City from 2000 until last year, Lopez Obrador instituted a variety of public works programs and subsidies for the poor. Most residents saw him as a competent and compassionate administrator of an overpopulated megalopolis beset by social ills: He left office with an 84% approval rating in the city, according to one poll.
But Calderon, once significantly behind, has had considerable success playing on the fears of the wealthy — and the anxieties of many in the middle class. He has used a series of ads attacking Lopez Obrador to propel himself forward in several recent polls.
"Lopez Obrador is a danger to Mexico," intoned one of the ads, comparing him to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a self-styled populist and the bete noire of Latin American conservatives. Another ad argues, with considerable exaggeration, that Lopez Obrador bankrupted Mexico City with expensive public works projects.
It isn't hard to find executives, Lomas de Chapultepec homemakers and students at elite colleges here who repeat those arguments. A few speak of the candidate and his supporters using the colorful and insulting vocabulary with which the rich talk about the city's poor majority.
In the parlance of the city's "educated society," Lopez Obrador and his followers are nacos, a slur meaning "rube" or "uncultured."
"Only the nacos, the people who are dying of hunger, will vote for him, just so they can get everything for free, instead of working to make this country better," a man who identified himself as Andres Lavoisere wrote on a Mexican blog recently.
The slang word turns up in thousands of Web postings about Lopez Obrador, along with a slew of conspiracy theories that "prove" he is the candidate of social anarchy and collapse.
One widely circulated e-mail points out that leaders with Lopez in their names have always brought bad fortune to Mexico. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost Texas and California in the 19th century. Jose Lopez Portillo presided over a period of hyperinflation in the 1980s and nationalized the banking system.
"Lopez Obrador closes this circle of evil," the e-mail warns. He is "a lying oddball, corrupt and a manipulator of the ignorance and the hope of Mexico's poor."
Carlos Zavala Rocha, a 67-year-old owner of a recording company, recently received an anti-Lopez Obrador joke in his e-mail, a fictional dialogue between two children on the playground of a Mexico City prep school.
"Hey, there's good news," the first child says. "This man called Lopez Obrador is ahead in the polls."
"How is that good news?" his friend asks.
"Because my papa says that if that man wins, we're moving to Miami!"
The contention that a Lopez Obrador victory would eventually bring an exodus of the rich and their money from Mexico is an article of faith among many here.
"We've lived through out-of-control inflation and devaluation of our currency, and we don't want to go through that again," Zavala Rocha said. "People with money are going to take their money out of Mexico."
Among the very top members of Mexico's business elite, the mood isn't quite so grim.
Lorenzo Zambrano, president and chief executive of the cement company Cemex, recently told The Times that Lopez Obrador probably would take steps to increase government intervention in the economy if he became president.
"He would be a throwback to what we had ... 20 years ago," Zambrano said. "To go back 20 years is not a process I look forward to."
Still, Zambrano said he believed that big business could work with such a government. "Lopez Obrador will be a challenge if he becomes president, but it won't be a tragedy," he said.
Some executives, such as telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim, are hedging their bets. Slim, the world's third-richest man, gave the maximum campaign contributions of nearly $94,000 to Lopez Obrador and each of the leading candidates.
Many executives decline to speak about Lopez Obrador on the record. In a rare moment of candor, Claudio X. Gonzalez, chairman and CEO of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico and one of the nation's most influential businessmen, lashed out at the candidate last year. He called Lopez Obrador a "retrograde and dinosaur-like" leftist who would upend the nation's economic stability.
Some critics charge that Lopez Obrador has deliberately stoked the country's class divisions.
When the anti-crime group Mexico United organized a massive demonstration last year to protest a wave of kidnappings, then-Mayor Lopez Obrador said the group was directed by pirrurris (rough translation: filthy rich people) with a hidden agenda to destabilize his government.
"He polarizes and scares people in order to win votes," said Maria Elena Morera Galindo, the group's director. "What he says doesn't scare me, but it does sadden me, because we're all Mexicans."
Still, she hopes to work with Lopez Obrador if he's elected president: This month, he signed a pledge to work toward the group's goals.
Lopez Obrador's efforts to calm the markets and woo corporate support have taken place in private, behind-the-scenes meetings. Last year, he sent letters to several hundred of Mexico's top executives outlining his economic strategy. He assured them that if he became president, he would continue the fiscal and monetary discipline that has lowered inflation and interest rates.
On the campaign trail, Lopez Obrador repeatedly takes up the theme of economic injustice. His followers affectionately call him El Peje, a nickname derived from the name of a tropical fish.
At a recent Lopez Obrador campaign stop in the heavily indigenous state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, his supporters raised a banner that declared: "We're Indians, but we're not fools any longer." The newspaper El Universal reported that Lopez Obrador told the crowd that he was sure they would not vote for Calderon because to do so was to become a ladino, or someone who rejects his Indian roots.
Analysts here say that Lopez Obrador's support extends beyond the poor. He has the support of the intelligentsia, pollster Dan Lund said. One is writer Elena Poniatowska, who recently appeared in a televised ad in support of the candidate.
Garcia, the Lomas de Chapultepec homemaker, said she was trying to step across the class divide to persuade the people who work for her to vote for Calderon.
"I try to talk to my gardener, to the two girls who work for me, the guy who takes out the trash," she said.
Her workers love Lopez Obrador for the subsidies he gave to Mexico City seniors, she said.
"They think that the money he gave to the grandmothers came out of his own pocket. I tell them it comes from their taxes.... But they just don't understand."
Times staff writer Marla Dickerson contributed to this report.
Mexico's Elite Fear Leftist Candidate's Rise
By Héctor Tobar, Times Staff Writer
7:47 PM PDT, May 23, 2006
MEXICO CITY — An insidious force is threatening the collective peace of mind in Lomas de Chapultepec, the Beverly Hills of this capital city.
The 10-foot walls and the electrified fences that are de rigueur for most homes can't keep the force out, nor can the neighborhood's ubiquitous private security guards. It seeps in, like a noxious vapor: the possibility that a certain leftist politician with a tropical accent might be elected the next president of Mexico in July.
ADVERTISEMENT
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a native of the sultry state of Tabasco and onetime mayor of Mexico City, is the boogeyman of the rich here. Once the clear front-runner, he is now in a tight race with Felipe Calderon, the candidate of the center-right National Action Party. The possibility of a Lopez Obrador victory has some wealthy Mexicans preparing as if for an earthquake or a hurricane.
"If he wins, this country will be ruined. I'll be better off leaving," declared Marta Garcia at the Starbucks in Lomas de Chapultepec, where a cafe mocha and a blueberry muffin cost slightly more than the daily minimum wage of $4.50. "I'll move to Guatemala."
With its main slogan of "For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First," Lopez Obrador's campaign has exposed deep class and ethnic tensions in Mexico. Although he's made quiet overtures to the business community and financial markets, wealthy Mexicans and some in the country's business community see him as a dangerous Robin Hood figure who will take from the rich to give to the poor.
The biggest fear of many wealthy Mexicans is Lopez Obrador's vow to toughen tax enforcement to raise the revenue to pay for social programs. Mexico has a reputation in financial circles as a vast, tax-free "enterprise zone" for the rich.
"We have a saying here," Mexico City economist Mario Correa said. "If you pay taxes in Mexico, then you don't have a good accountant."
Guillermo Oropeza, a sales manager for a movie distribution company and resident of Santa Fe, another exclusive enclave here, believes that Lopez Obrador lacks a basic understanding of economics.
"He doesn't have the intellectual capacity to be president," Oropeza said. "He can't win. It would be absurd."
At a campaign stop this month in the state of Jalisco, Lopez Obrador, the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, insisted that he had nothing against the wealthy. "We are not against businesspeople," he said. "We need businesspeople, and their investments, to create jobs for our people and get our economy moving again."
As mayor of Mexico City from 2000 until last year, Lopez Obrador instituted a variety of public works programs and subsidies for the poor. Most residents saw him as a competent and compassionate administrator of an overpopulated megalopolis beset by social ills: He left office with an 84% approval rating in the city, according to one poll.
But Calderon, once significantly behind, has had considerable success playing on the fears of the wealthy — and the anxieties of many in the middle class. He has used a series of ads attacking Lopez Obrador to propel himself forward in several recent polls.
"Lopez Obrador is a danger to Mexico," intoned one of the ads, comparing him to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a self-styled populist and the bete noire of Latin American conservatives. Another ad argues, with considerable exaggeration, that Lopez Obrador bankrupted Mexico City with expensive public works projects.
It isn't hard to find executives, Lomas de Chapultepec homemakers and students at elite colleges here who repeat those arguments. A few speak of the candidate and his supporters using the colorful and insulting vocabulary with which the rich talk about the city's poor majority.
In the parlance of the city's "educated society," Lopez Obrador and his followers are nacos, a slur meaning "rube" or "uncultured."
"Only the nacos, the people who are dying of hunger, will vote for him, just so they can get everything for free, instead of working to make this country better," a man who identified himself as Andres Lavoisere wrote on a Mexican blog recently.
The slang word turns up in thousands of Web postings about Lopez Obrador, along with a slew of conspiracy theories that "prove" he is the candidate of social anarchy and collapse.
One widely circulated e-mail points out that leaders with Lopez in their names have always brought bad fortune to Mexico. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost Texas and California in the 19th century. Jose Lopez Portillo presided over a period of hyperinflation in the 1980s and nationalized the banking system.
"Lopez Obrador closes this circle of evil," the e-mail warns. He is "a lying oddball, corrupt and a manipulator of the ignorance and the hope of Mexico's poor."
Carlos Zavala Rocha, a 67-year-old owner of a recording company, recently received an anti-Lopez Obrador joke in his e-mail, a fictional dialogue between two children on the playground of a Mexico City prep school.
"Hey, there's good news," the first child says. "This man called Lopez Obrador is ahead in the polls."
"How is that good news?" his friend asks.
"Because my papa says that if that man wins, we're moving to Miami!"
The contention that a Lopez Obrador victory would eventually bring an exodus of the rich and their money from Mexico is an article of faith among many here.
"We've lived through out-of-control inflation and devaluation of our currency, and we don't want to go through that again," Zavala Rocha said. "People with money are going to take their money out of Mexico."
Among the very top members of Mexico's business elite, the mood isn't quite so grim.
Lorenzo Zambrano, president and chief executive of the cement company Cemex, recently told The Times that Lopez Obrador probably would take steps to increase government intervention in the economy if he became president.
"He would be a throwback to what we had ... 20 years ago," Zambrano said. "To go back 20 years is not a process I look forward to."
Still, Zambrano said he believed that big business could work with such a government. "Lopez Obrador will be a challenge if he becomes president, but it won't be a tragedy," he said.
Some executives, such as telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim, are hedging their bets. Slim, the world's third-richest man, gave the maximum campaign contributions of nearly $94,000 to Lopez Obrador and each of the leading candidates.
Many executives decline to speak about Lopez Obrador on the record. In a rare moment of candor, Claudio X. Gonzalez, chairman and CEO of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico and one of the nation's most influential businessmen, lashed out at the candidate last year. He called Lopez Obrador a "retrograde and dinosaur-like" leftist who would upend the nation's economic stability.
Some critics charge that Lopez Obrador has deliberately stoked the country's class divisions.
When the anti-crime group Mexico United organized a massive demonstration last year to protest a wave of kidnappings, then-Mayor Lopez Obrador said the group was directed by pirrurris (rough translation: filthy rich people) with a hidden agenda to destabilize his government.
"He polarizes and scares people in order to win votes," said Maria Elena Morera Galindo, the group's director. "What he says doesn't scare me, but it does sadden me, because we're all Mexicans."
Still, she hopes to work with Lopez Obrador if he's elected president: This month, he signed a pledge to work toward the group's goals.
Lopez Obrador's efforts to calm the markets and woo corporate support have taken place in private, behind-the-scenes meetings. Last year, he sent letters to several hundred of Mexico's top executives outlining his economic strategy. He assured them that if he became president, he would continue the fiscal and monetary discipline that has lowered inflation and interest rates.
On the campaign trail, Lopez Obrador repeatedly takes up the theme of economic injustice. His followers affectionately call him El Peje, a nickname derived from the name of a tropical fish.
At a recent Lopez Obrador campaign stop in the heavily indigenous state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, his supporters raised a banner that declared: "We're Indians, but we're not fools any longer." The newspaper El Universal reported that Lopez Obrador told the crowd that he was sure they would not vote for Calderon because to do so was to become a ladino, or someone who rejects his Indian roots.
Analysts here say that Lopez Obrador's support extends beyond the poor. He has the support of the intelligentsia, pollster Dan Lund said. One is writer Elena Poniatowska, who recently appeared in a televised ad in support of the candidate.
Garcia, the Lomas de Chapultepec homemaker, said she was trying to step across the class divide to persuade the people who work for her to vote for Calderon.
"I try to talk to my gardener, to the two girls who work for me, the guy who takes out the trash," she said.
Her workers love Lopez Obrador for the subsidies he gave to Mexico City seniors, she said.
"They think that the money he gave to the grandmothers came out of his own pocket. I tell them it comes from their taxes.... But they just don't understand."
Times staff writer Marla Dickerson contributed to this report.
domingo, mayo 21, 2006
Get Out, But Leave the Quesadilla? - How About Stay and Get the Whole Enchilada
I stumled upon this article while surfing through the internet on my porch. Michael Skube is one of the few journalists to figure out what is really going on here with the immigration debate.
However, I feel the opposite. The Southwest should become an American Quebec, one where Spanish and English are on parity. Everyone will have to learn Spanish properly, and start learning more about Mexican history. After all, the Southwest was once part of Spain, and then Mexico. So, let's get over this 20th century revisionist-manifest-destiny-continued-nonsense, and embrace the fact that the pendulum has finally swung all the way back. Somewhere Montezuma is smirking in his grave. Viva Southern California! Bring on the Spanish, and start rolling out the whole Enchilada.
Get out, but leave the quesadilla
Why Americans get clingy about carne asada but are ready to give Spanish-speaking immigrants the boot.
By Michael Skube, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina.
May 21, 2006
IT'S 9 O'CLOCK, the sun has set and I'm going to chill out. I take two soft tortillas, spread on each a layer of fat-free refried beans, follow that up with a generous sprinkling of jack cheese, pop 'em in the microwave for a minute and then give 'em a few squirts of Texas Pete.
I'd like to say I have a more sophisticated palate, and once in a while I do. But when I want to put the cares of the day behind me, I head south of the border. It's the meal of a Mexican peasant, and it's as American as pizza.
ADVERTISEMENT
The proliferation of Mexican restaurants in the United States began decades ago, before the proliferation of illegal Mexican workers. But the two do not intersect. We've appropriated the quesadillas and the enchiladas. We can make them well enough here. The workers — well, better that they stay home. Or go home.
Such is the ambivalence — to put it mildly — of many Americans toward Mexican immigrants, especially the illegal ones. We like what they've given us to eat, but we wouldn't much like them at the table with us. We see them at Wal-Mart, bronze as pennies and so different from us. There are so many of them, enough that we feel like a minority. Like Anglos feel when they go to Dade County, Fla., and hear nothing but Spanish. Doesn't anyone speak English here? Hey, this is America, y'know.
Miami and Dade County were Cubanized. Spanish achieved dominance. The huge influx of Mexican immigrants since 1980 — not just to Los Angeles and Southern California but also to the Southwest and the South — portends a broader erosion of English. A nation whose first language was once English could become bilingual, its identity part Latino and part Anglo.
This is the unstated reason that many people oppose President Bush's plan to legalize as many as 11 million undocumented workers. Conservative Republicans in the House, in opposing both Bush's plan and a Senate immigration bill close to the president's wishes, object to legalizing undocumented workers, calling it amnesty. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans are with them. They expect immigrants to play by the rules, as many of their forebears did.
But there is something else at work: Many Americans sense that the nation's identity, long under siege in the schools and universities by multiculturalism, is up for grabs. More than religion or race, more than ethnicity or political persuasion, language defines us as a people. Before long, many worry, an American is going to be anyone who merely lives and works here, and there's a good chance he will speak Spanish.
The cliche — colorfully emblazoned on some wall of elementary schools across the land — is that "We Are All Immigrants." True enough, wave upon wave of immigrants have come ashore, from Germany and Ireland, Italy and Poland, from Asia and Africa. None was welcomed but most, in time, assimilated, leaving one culture and one language behind and adopting a new culture and learning a new language. They became Americans. And in doing so, they enriched the nation in immeasurable ways. We all know the story, even if we forget the resentment and prejudice.
Now comes another wave, except these immigrants are mostly coming not from across an ocean but from next door. And they are coming by the millions, some legally, others slipping across the border, unseen. Because they are coming from a contiguous country, many see them as threatening the nation's ability to control who does and who does not enter — and, by extension, its sovereignty.
Here are some figures. In 1960, the census showed that immigrants to the U.S. came principally from five countries — Italy, Germany, Canada, Britain and Poland. They numbered 4.7 million in total, with Italy's 1.25 million leading all others.
According to the 2000 census, the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S. was 7.8 million — and that counts only those who came here legally. No other country was even close; China, with 1.4 million immigrants in the U.S., was second.
"Contemporary Mexican immigration is unprecedented in American history," Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his 2004 book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity." The United States, he argued, might be a nation of immigrants, but it was also one whose institutions and political culture were Anglo-Protestant. What's more, that foundation was laid not by immigrants who came later but by English settlers. Huntington's book provoked a firestorm of dissent. But it also touched a nerve because of his unapologetic reverence for an Anglo heritage and his analysis of recent Mexican immigration.
No one questioned Huntington's numbers, only his interpretation of what they mean. Unabated immigration from Mexico, he argued, can only alter the nation's character and identity. "No other First World country," he wrote, "has a land frontier with a Third World country, much less one of 2,000 miles. Japan, Australia, New Zealand are islands; Canada is bordered only by the United States; the closest [that] Western European countries come to Third World countries are the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco and the Straits of Otranto between Italy and Albania."
Not only do the United States and Mexico share a long border, but one is rich and the other poor. Huntington quotes Stanford historian David Kennedy: "The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world."
The Southwest, by this reasoning, could become an American Quebec — or one gigantic Dade County. Only a Canadian could fathom the former. But you don't have to live in Dade County — as I did in the '70s — to know that the latter would not be a happy prospect.
To say as much is not to diminish its vitality. To the contrary, Cubans have rebuilt Miami. But they have rebuilt it as a Spanish-speaking territory within the U.S. It is a city Americans no longer recognize as fully American. A parallel transformation in Southern California and elsewhere would begin with language that heretofore has been a foreign language, like German and French, Russian and Italian, but now asks for parity with English.
It is asking more than what many are willing to give.
However, I feel the opposite. The Southwest should become an American Quebec, one where Spanish and English are on parity. Everyone will have to learn Spanish properly, and start learning more about Mexican history. After all, the Southwest was once part of Spain, and then Mexico. So, let's get over this 20th century revisionist-manifest-destiny-continued-nonsense, and embrace the fact that the pendulum has finally swung all the way back. Somewhere Montezuma is smirking in his grave. Viva Southern California! Bring on the Spanish, and start rolling out the whole Enchilada.
Get out, but leave the quesadilla
Why Americans get clingy about carne asada but are ready to give Spanish-speaking immigrants the boot.
By Michael Skube, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina.
May 21, 2006
IT'S 9 O'CLOCK, the sun has set and I'm going to chill out. I take two soft tortillas, spread on each a layer of fat-free refried beans, follow that up with a generous sprinkling of jack cheese, pop 'em in the microwave for a minute and then give 'em a few squirts of Texas Pete.
I'd like to say I have a more sophisticated palate, and once in a while I do. But when I want to put the cares of the day behind me, I head south of the border. It's the meal of a Mexican peasant, and it's as American as pizza.
ADVERTISEMENT
The proliferation of Mexican restaurants in the United States began decades ago, before the proliferation of illegal Mexican workers. But the two do not intersect. We've appropriated the quesadillas and the enchiladas. We can make them well enough here. The workers — well, better that they stay home. Or go home.
Such is the ambivalence — to put it mildly — of many Americans toward Mexican immigrants, especially the illegal ones. We like what they've given us to eat, but we wouldn't much like them at the table with us. We see them at Wal-Mart, bronze as pennies and so different from us. There are so many of them, enough that we feel like a minority. Like Anglos feel when they go to Dade County, Fla., and hear nothing but Spanish. Doesn't anyone speak English here? Hey, this is America, y'know.
Miami and Dade County were Cubanized. Spanish achieved dominance. The huge influx of Mexican immigrants since 1980 — not just to Los Angeles and Southern California but also to the Southwest and the South — portends a broader erosion of English. A nation whose first language was once English could become bilingual, its identity part Latino and part Anglo.
This is the unstated reason that many people oppose President Bush's plan to legalize as many as 11 million undocumented workers. Conservative Republicans in the House, in opposing both Bush's plan and a Senate immigration bill close to the president's wishes, object to legalizing undocumented workers, calling it amnesty. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans are with them. They expect immigrants to play by the rules, as many of their forebears did.
But there is something else at work: Many Americans sense that the nation's identity, long under siege in the schools and universities by multiculturalism, is up for grabs. More than religion or race, more than ethnicity or political persuasion, language defines us as a people. Before long, many worry, an American is going to be anyone who merely lives and works here, and there's a good chance he will speak Spanish.
The cliche — colorfully emblazoned on some wall of elementary schools across the land — is that "We Are All Immigrants." True enough, wave upon wave of immigrants have come ashore, from Germany and Ireland, Italy and Poland, from Asia and Africa. None was welcomed but most, in time, assimilated, leaving one culture and one language behind and adopting a new culture and learning a new language. They became Americans. And in doing so, they enriched the nation in immeasurable ways. We all know the story, even if we forget the resentment and prejudice.
Now comes another wave, except these immigrants are mostly coming not from across an ocean but from next door. And they are coming by the millions, some legally, others slipping across the border, unseen. Because they are coming from a contiguous country, many see them as threatening the nation's ability to control who does and who does not enter — and, by extension, its sovereignty.
Here are some figures. In 1960, the census showed that immigrants to the U.S. came principally from five countries — Italy, Germany, Canada, Britain and Poland. They numbered 4.7 million in total, with Italy's 1.25 million leading all others.
According to the 2000 census, the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S. was 7.8 million — and that counts only those who came here legally. No other country was even close; China, with 1.4 million immigrants in the U.S., was second.
"Contemporary Mexican immigration is unprecedented in American history," Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his 2004 book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity." The United States, he argued, might be a nation of immigrants, but it was also one whose institutions and political culture were Anglo-Protestant. What's more, that foundation was laid not by immigrants who came later but by English settlers. Huntington's book provoked a firestorm of dissent. But it also touched a nerve because of his unapologetic reverence for an Anglo heritage and his analysis of recent Mexican immigration.
No one questioned Huntington's numbers, only his interpretation of what they mean. Unabated immigration from Mexico, he argued, can only alter the nation's character and identity. "No other First World country," he wrote, "has a land frontier with a Third World country, much less one of 2,000 miles. Japan, Australia, New Zealand are islands; Canada is bordered only by the United States; the closest [that] Western European countries come to Third World countries are the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco and the Straits of Otranto between Italy and Albania."
Not only do the United States and Mexico share a long border, but one is rich and the other poor. Huntington quotes Stanford historian David Kennedy: "The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world."
The Southwest, by this reasoning, could become an American Quebec — or one gigantic Dade County. Only a Canadian could fathom the former. But you don't have to live in Dade County — as I did in the '70s — to know that the latter would not be a happy prospect.
To say as much is not to diminish its vitality. To the contrary, Cubans have rebuilt Miami. But they have rebuilt it as a Spanish-speaking territory within the U.S. It is a city Americans no longer recognize as fully American. A parallel transformation in Southern California and elsewhere would begin with language that heretofore has been a foreign language, like German and French, Russian and Italian, but now asks for parity with English.
It is asking more than what many are willing to give.
domingo, mayo 07, 2006
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