Michael James : 'El Lechero' in San Miguel de Allende, 1962

'El lechero' in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, August 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
'El lechero' in San Miguel, 1962

We arrive early and watch people setting up and selling their produce and wares. There are a few vaqueros stumbling up a cobblestone street... I shoot an image of a lechero making his delivery rounds, a container of milk on his back.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 21, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

I’m riding in the back seat of a 1957 Plymouth, heading to Acapulco on a weekend adventure. Cliffs on the mountainside act as pages in the "People’s Book," catching my attention. Giant messages say: “¡Capitalismo No! ¡Comunismo Si! ¡Viva Castro!” I heard in one of my anthropology classes about leftist guerillas controlling portions of Guerrero, the state we’re riding in.

The car belongs to the Delamarter twins out of Michigan, Larry and Lou. Also on the ride are Bob Marks and a guy named Zeke from Long Island. I credit these four with introducing me to the wilder side of new things I experienced in Mexico.

In Acapulco there’s drinking at a back-street cantina where a little pimp, speaking a few words in five languages, introduces a parade of women. There is a party on a docked sailboat, where the Jamaican captain is very rude to the women he’s invited.

On a more wholesome adventure, we head south of Acapulco to a non-tourist beach, for a great swim in the Pacific. Older women sit on an old boat. A campesino couple is walking the beach. An old man is asleep in a hammacca.

I see Afro-Mexican kids, reflecting the slave economy of earlier times. Years later I will learn the extent to which African slaves were brought to Mexico and Central and South America. And later I will also learn that Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, long before it was abolished in the USA.

Early Sunday morning in Acapulco, at dawn, I’m awakened from a short night’s sleep by the barking of dogs, followed by the earth rumbling and the building shaking. Whoa! It’s short and then it’s over: my first earthquake.

On yet another occasion with the same four fellows, plus another gringo and three Mexican theater types, I take a Saturday trip to San Miguel de Allende. An artists’ colony with a long-running expatriate presence, San Miguel is about 175 northwest of Mexico City. Once a battleground between the Dominican and Franciscan religious orders, there are churches everywhere.

We arrive early and watch people setting up and selling their produce and wares. There are a few vaqueros stumbling up a cobblestone street after an apparent night out. Lots of burros, little beasts of burden, are loaded with bundles on their backs. An old man pulls a small cart, watched by a group of laughing Mexican teenagers modernos. What a contrast. I shoot an image of a lechero making his delivery rounds, a container of milk on his back.

Other new friends I meet at the Mex-Ci-Co apartamentos include Jack and Donna Traylor, and Jim Darby, who years later would become a Chicago public school teacher. Jim, an ex-sailor, had ridden the smallest model Honda motorcycle all the way from Chicago. Part of the trip his brother was riding on back, getting out of town after being shot in the leg.

I would see Jim just once back in Chicago, but after then was never able to find him -- that is, until I saw him in 2013 while watching public TV. Jim and his boyfriend were the focus of a story about how they are suing my pal David Orr, the Cook County Clerk, over the right to marry in Illinois. Wow. I ended up contacting him and having him on our Live from the Heartland radio show.

Jack Traylor was an Okie, his family part of the Grapes of Wrath migration that moved from Oklahoma to California in the late 1930’s. He and Donna were schoolteachers and graduate students. And Jack sang beautiful versions of Woody Guthrie songs. He has my favorite voice ever.

In the early 1960’s in San Jose, California, Jack taught Paul Kantner guitar riffs. Later in the 60’s he played with the Gateway Singers and toured the nation’s folk clubs. In the 70’s, his own group, Steele Wind, put out an album on Grunt. The Jefferson Airplane “stole” guitarist Craig Chaquico from Steel Wind. Jack wrote some tunes for Jefferson Airplane, and was the link that brought the Airplane to the Heartland Café 40-odd years later.

Jack and Donna have a VW camper. I ride around with them, and they are the closest thing to parental figures I have in Mexico. They look out for me. Once Jack throws me into the van and speeds off. We’d been drinking at the Tipico Mexico in Garibaldi Square, a place full of bars, mariachi bands, and putas.

A well-dressed young Mexican with a smile asks me -- an inebriated, not-very-bilingual gringo — ¿Como se gusta tipico Mexico? How do I like typical Mexico? Thinking he means the bar we’ve been in, where solicitation for sex is constant, I say No me gusta, demasiado putas, “I don’t like, too many whores” -- whereupon Jack immediately shoves me into the van; an embarrassing episode to this day.

Mexico City. Wow! What a place. Years later I would become friends with the late, great leftist writer John Ross, who was a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and whose El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City covers the city’s dynamic history from early on.

My activities in La Ciudad that summer of ’62 include eating out, drinking, lifting weights at a Mexican version of a Vic Tanny gym, going to museums, taking classes, reading, writing letters, shopping, and getting the Triumph repaired. And I discover Sanborns.

Sanborns was a lunch counter/soda fountain operation similar to Howard Johnsons in the States. I meet a waitress there, a pretty counter girl in a tan uniform, little hat, and white apron. Getting my courage up, I make a return visit and ask if she would like to go on a date, go see a movie. And she accepts.

So, wearing a sport jacket and driving the Delamarter boys' 1957 Plymouth wagon, I venture into a maze of unpaved back streets, getting lost in el barrio. Eventually I find her family’s small adobe home, indistinct from hundreds of others. I go to the door and she greets me -- with the information that her father won’t permit her to go on the date. She says she is sorry. So am I.

At a party one night at the apartment complex, I am sharing a joint: la mota, la marijauna. I remember seeing this far-out, amazing golden waterfall as I take a piss. In the morning I wake up sick. Really sick. Very sick.

Yellow jaundus, hepititis. I’ve got it. It’s got me. Over the course of the next few days, through one of my dad’s connections (who he had repeatedly asked me to contact) --  I end up in the American British Cowdray Hospital. I stay there for 19 days. A benefit is eating big, part of the comeback.

While I am recovering I read a book filled with oddities about Mexico, called A Mexican Medley for the Curious. I read Kerouac’s On the Road. In posession of a portable Olivetti typewriter and probably influenced by Jack’s adventures, I write of my little Mexican adventures. I reference politics, drinking, women, and drugs.

A Panamanian nurse who speaks English and has been very friendly asks if she can read it; I say sure. When she returns a few days later, she hands back my would-be manuscript and leaves without a word, never to return. What? First glimmer of lessons I continue to learn.

For the short remainder of the summer I live with the Delamarter brothers who have moved to a modern apartment off the Carretera Mexico Toluca north of Mexico City College. A general lives next door. We never see him, but we do see his wife -- glamorous and modern, a bourgiois woman. Her two small boys come to play; other kids from the neighborhood come around too, checking out the gringos. The sexy neighbor wife has some Afghan hounds and, grinning, looks at us young fellows and asks, “You like my dogs?” Ay-yi-yi.

And then it’s time. Trecking north and back to school, I’m on the Triumph, following the gang of four in the Plymouth. We ride through San Luis Potosi, then the desert and Sautillo, and stop for the night in Monterrey. The next day we ride into dusk, heading to Nuevo Laredo during the night. Suddenly around a curve there are lights: a carnival, people enjoying a festive event. I shoot the picture. We move on, cross the border, and sleep in Laredo on the state side of the Rio Bravo, the Rio Grande.

In the morning we find a bike shop and I arrange to leave the Triumph to be shipped. Post-hepititis, I had been told not to ride the bike. But because Mexican law does not permit me to sell it; if I want to keep it I have to drive it out of the country, doctor's advice or not.

Then we cross back into Mexico, into Neuevo Laredo for a last-time look around. We walk through the red-light disctrict at noon, observing an abundance of women on the stoops of small shacks, their hair up in curlers.

The gang of four leaves me off at my college girlfriend Lucia’s new family home in Morton, outside Chicago. Her dad and I compete to see who can eat the most jalapeño peppers. A day later I’m hitchiking to Connecticut, somehow via the New York Thruway. A band of Gypsies picks me up in a beater Cadillac convertible. They ask if I have money. “No... I wouldn’t be hitchiking if I had money.”

Late that night I am pretty miserable, sleep-deprived, sort of hallucinating while waiting for a ride near Batavia, New York. I make it home to Connecticut sometime the next day and sleep till the day after that.

It’s good to be home. I talk with my dad. He tells me of his job in a fish cannery in Alaska back in the 1920’s, and lets me know that he had smoked marijauna then. He does encourage me not to smoke it every day.

Against my wishes, Dad had been editing and compiling my letters into what he called "The Mexican Oddyessy of Senior Miguel Gaylord James," then sending mimeographed copies to family and friends. Years later I am grateful to have that tamed-down version of my summer in Mexico.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Chellis Glendinning : Confessions of an Obituary 'Aficionada'

Fred Astaire: Bidding adieu.

Witness to notable crossings:
Confessions of an obituary aficionada

Brimming with Mississippi gentility and rousing political arguments, he drew me into the swirl of mad farmers, musicians, historians, sheep herders, and political philosophers who were demanding that the state of Vermont secede from the United States of America.

By Chellis Glendinning / Wild Culture / March 27, 2013

Bolivia-based psychotherapist and author Chellis Glendinning on the fine art of biography-after-the-fact.

I’m a daily reader of the New York Times obituaries. There, I said it. And yes, this little habit of mine has been going on for decades. Needless to say, in that time I’ve witnessed a surfeit of notable crossings into the unknown. Simone de Beauvoir. Picasso. Katherine Hepburn. Anwar Sadat. Indira Gandhi. Mercedes Sosa. And, in the process, I’ve gained an education in the fine art of biography-after-the-fact.

For example, I’m an admirer of Fred Astaire -- and of Fred Astaire’s NYT obit. Placing him in the era of America’s immigration rush, vaudeville, and the rise of Hollywood talkies, it covers his working-class upbringing, attendance at dance school, how he stayed so lithe, film successes, marriages, praise from colleagues, and why he put away his tap shoes. The essay is capped off with his philosophy of hoofing: “The search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn’t want to be tracked.” The obit itself is as elegant as Fred Astaire in a tuxedo skipping across the linoleum.

Which brings us to the obituary as literary form. While the death notice began as a titillating little gossip crumb in early-1700s England, Melanie Johnson’s The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries informs us that we have arrived at the Golden Age of the Obituary. In addition, says Johnson, while the earliest obit writers perceived the job as the lowest-entry-rung of a hopefully rising journalistic career, today’s writers accomplish the mythic feat of blending “empathy and detachment; sensitivity and bluntness.”

But, we might ask, from where springs this mad dash toward minimalism? True, invention of the six-word narrative, short-short fiction, and “smoke long” (a tale whose enjoyment lasts the length of a cigarette) parallels the fascination. The cell phone, whose text-messaging lines allow but 40 characters, could be a culprit.

In this era of flash-technologies, life has become too hurried and fragmented for lolling about for days on end with Sense and Sensibility. Whatever the sociology of this literary development, in a mere 100-500 words, the obituary may have replaced the biography, using the most telling incidents of a lifetime to reveal the blistering whole of a person’s story; perhaps, we might consider, its practitioners have become today’s bards.

Nonetheless, in not-so-Golden-Age circles, to be an aficionada, as I am, is still not an accepted social status. If ever my little secret happens to come up in conversation, the incredulous demand to know why, and I’m never able to formulate an explanation that saves me from assignment to the “Goth” category. That is... until my own friends’ life stories began to appear like confetti in a ticker tape parade in those same revered pages -- and in the San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Fe New Mexican, Washington Post, Anderson Valley Advertiser, By What Authority, Orion, La Jornada, CounterPunch...

Feminists, writers, filmmakers, anti-nuclear activists, farmers, historians, ecologists, bioregional activists, folk singers, yoga teachers, technology critics, philosophers, they -- and I could see that death was no longer going to be something that happened occasionally and to someone else. It was the flame-eyed, snake-coifed Gorgon in the room -- right here and right now.

The passing that threw me over was that of John Ross. The news came via an email announcement from his colleagues in San Francisco, reporting that the doctors had done all they could to prolong his time and, by choice, he had left his room in a Mexico City hotel for Lake Patzcuaro where he had lived on and off for 50 years. It wasn’t that we hadn’t had sufficient notice of the possibility, yet I sat in my chair for some time, as stunned as a bird slamming into a glass window.

I could not imagine a world
without John Ross.

Red-diaper baby, the first journalist to venture into the Chiapas selva to report on the Zapatistas, Human Shield against the war in Iraq, author of books documenting left-wing history in the U.S., jazz poet: Ross was a bona fide character. Toothless and almost blind from conflict generated during his various political exploits, he could guzzle cheap wine like nobody’s business and recite poetry into the wee hours. He was obnoxious as all get-out, and he had liver cancer.

Ross took the rail-runner from Albuquerque to Santa Fe to visit me while on a book tour for his monstrous tribute to Mexico City, El Monstruo. His mission was to swig espresso, buy a really cool cane to bolster his failing leg, and (needless to say) talk politics. I was on the verge of moving to Bolivia, and he reached into the suitcases of memory to regale me with his encounters with now-President Evo Morales. Although neither of us said a word, when he mounted the aluminum steps for the return journey, we knew it would be the last time we would be together. I clung to the vision of this brave warrior as he hobbled to grab the overhead bar and plop his wiry body into a seat.

The news of his passing in January 2011 struck me in a way that even my own mother’s death did not. I could not imagine – or accept – a world without John Ross.

Maybe I was still reeling from Ross’ passing when Richard Grossman’s metastatic melanoma flared up. Grossman was what one might call a “sweetheart with an edge.” Caring in friendship, he also boasted something of an uncouth penchant for sticking his face into stretch limousines and loudly decreeing the shame of the owners in a world of gross inequity. He was best known for his contribution to progressive thought for the “legal” mechanism corporations rely on to perpetrate injustice and exploitation: they enjoy the same rights as individual people do.

He had also fought for workers’ rights in the context of the environmental movement, jumpstarted organizations to push citizen rights, designed a school for teaching democracy, and spearheaded court cases to challenge the “rights” of corporations. Grossman and I had had a habit of talking on the phone for hours each week -- Río Grande Valley to the Catskills -- about history and politics. He had a fondness for growing opium poppies, and since cultivating such a crop was illegal in the U.S. (and, incidentally, since I had written a book about the global heroin trade), he reveled in referring to his delicate blossoms with code words and a tone of devilish irony.

Two weeks before he died, in November of 2011, Grossman was talking up a storm about his new lawsuit in Pennsylvania; he had just done an interview for Corporate Crime Reporter proposing a law to strip away 500 years of Constitutional protections for corporations -- and out of the blue he offered financial help to salve my housing problems in Bolivia. His last email to me capped off with: “Be Good, Be Bad, Be Historical.” And then the calls and letters stopped...

Rebekah Azen’s suicide hit like the clang of an alarm clock: “SAD NEWS FROM SANTA FE” announced the note from a friend-in-common. Upon arriving in New Mexico from Wisconsin, Azen had sought roots with a Native clan at San Felipe Pueblo that she called her “family,” and by the time I met her in the 1990s, she was hot on the trail of the visionary philosophies of what she called the two Henrys: Thoreau and George. Her particular outrage had to do with theft of land and home, drawing parallels between the colonization of indigenous peoples and the housing hardships of the working class – and she wrote abundantly on the topic in Green Fire Times.

Of late, she had been suffering from an ill-explained illness, although her diligent work in the anti-electromagnetic radiation movement, and her constant complaints about her librarian job at the Santa Fe New Mexican where she was daily barraged by Wi-Fi, gave the sense that she had electro-hypersensitivity, otherwise known as microwave sickness. One afternoon in October of 2011, probably very slowly as Azen always moved at the pace of a snail in a Buddhist retreat, she walked into her beloved, juniper-spotted Tesuque desert and blasted her skull to bits with a bullet.

I couldn’t get over the courage that such an act took. Maybe it was desperation: she hadn’t been able to sleep for months. But being that she was an ally with whom I had navigated the labyrinthine passageways of philosophy and literature, not to mention Cochiti Pueblo’s wind-sculpted Tent Rocks -- and who had come to me in my moment of need -- I knew her spirit: that exit was the handy work of one intrepid voyager.

Then Thomas Naylor surprised us with a stroke, and on December 12, 2012, the family chose to remove the life-support technologies. That decision would have pleased Thomas: he was a raving critic of mass technologies and of the authoritarian institutions they reflected, facilitated, and propagated. After a successful career as an economics/computer science professor at Duke University, he moved to Vermont and authored a series of books on decentralism, including Downsizing the USA.

Thomas Naylor: Brimming with
Mississippi gentility.

I met him in 2008. I had written an essay for CounterPunch entitled “Techno-Fascism,” and it turned out that Naylor had been using that same term. He sent me a packet containing a four-page hand-scrawled letter, a pile of articles, and a book he had written called Secession. And so it came to be that Naylor, brimming with Mississippi gentility and rousing political arguments, drew me into the swirl of mad farmers, musicians, historians, sheep herders, and political philosophers who were demanding that the state of Vermont secede from the United States of America.

His activism was inflamed by old-fashioned ethical outrage, and he waxed emotional when it came to the immorality of remaining within a U.S. that was ruining the planet with its technologies and killing people with its imperialist wars. Right before his death, he was organizing an assembly of the small nations of the world to discuss their role in addressing the injustices caused by imperial nations and gain worldwide backing for secession movements, to be held in Liechtenstein in 2013. But then, unexpectedly, he was gone.

One angle on this incessant bombardment of obituaries is that today’s culprits to the final demise tend not so much toward what in my grandmother’s day was called “natural causes” as they do toward the impacts of the dirty chemicals and abrasive technologies overrunning planet Earth. Pesticides. Nuclear power plant leakages. Preservatives. Dioxin-infused tampons. Cell-tower and satellite emissions of electromagnetic radiation. Carbon monoxide. Asbestos. Chemical hormones. Heavy metals. I do not feel just the wells of grief at these deaths; I feel unnerved and discombobulated by the untimely and unnecessary theft of lives -- and wisdom -- from our midst.

And there is something else. Now, after reading so many of my own friends’ life endeavors in encapsulated form, I finally understand why I have relished the NYT obituaries all these years. As we know, the end of an individual’s life bold-facedly reveals that person’s participation in an era. Yet too, and perhaps more notably for the longings of the human psyche, it offers up the wide view we all seek so that we can make meaning of life. And more importantly still, it proposes a frame.

When the dreaded skeleton-laden-with-roses-and-gauze snatches away a comrade, we are able to see with utter clarity what that person did with this life, what her challenges and burdens were, how he mounted them, what she did with ease, what he attempted against all odds. No matter how illuminated or bewildered, how fulfilled or unfinished, how healed or how wounded, the frame reveals that each person is in reality a hero.

The irritations and disappointments we may have felt at personality quirks fall away; whether the most introverted of poets, the most inspiring of orators, or the crankiest of curmudgeons, the final marking unveils each of us as a wondrous creature in the eyes of Creation.

This article was first published at The Journal of Wild Culture.

[Chellis Glendinning lives in Bolivia. She is a psychotherapist specializing in treatment of traumatic stress and the author of six books. Her Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy won the U.S. National Press Women book award in 2000, and she just finished a novel about the energies emanating from artifacts used in revolutions and social movements. In Bolivia she writes for Los Tiempos. She may be contacted via www.chellisglendinning.org.  Read more of Chellis Glendinning's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Thorne Dreyer : Journalist, Author, and 'Investigative Poet' John Ross (1938-2011)

The late great John Ross.
Farewell to our great friend John Ross

See "Los Muertos," a poem by John Ross, Below.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2011

Yesterday I received an email with the following message: “John Ross passed peacefully in the arms of his good friends Arminda and Kevin in Tzipijo, near Lake Patzcuaro, Michoacan, after a two-year lucha against liver cancer.” The message was sent from John's email address and included the above photo.

John Ross, who styled himself an "investigative poet," was a long-time contributor to and friend of The Rag Blog. He was a singular talent whose work was always enlightening and entertaining, every post a revelation. No one ever wrote about Mexico like John Ross did... or ever will again.

Ross, whose roots were in the old left politics of New York City and the beat poetry scene of San Francisco, visited Austin last March promoting his latest book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, and reading his poetry at MonkeyWrench and Resistencia bookstores.

Our mutual friend Mike Davis, himself a noted author and educator, wrote about John and El Monstruo: “From a window of the aging Hotel Isabel, where he has lived for almost a quarter of a century, John Ross sings a lusty corrido about a great, betrayed city and its extraordinary procession of rulers, lovers and magicians.”

Indeed, everything John Ross ever wrote was a "lusty corrido," a vivid grito of protest and celebration.

The Rag Blog last heard from John late last year when he informed us he would be suspending his writing indefinitely due to the rigors of the latest round of chemotherapy to treat his advancing cancer of the liver, which had been in remission but had returned with a vengeance.

In my copy of El Monstruo, John Ross wrote, “To Thorne: Desde el corazon del Monstruo sigues en la lucha!”

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering '60s underground journalist, is a director of the New Journalism Project, Inc., editor of The Rag Blog, and host of Rag Radio.]

• Please read Frank Barnacke's lovely tribute to John Ross. Also read John's unforgettable dispatches from the heart of El Monstruo on The Rag Blog, and read John Ross in Obamalandia : Death Waltz Across Texas.

John Ross dies:
Opposing every war was his obsession

The American rebel journalist, poet, novelist and human shield, John Ross (New York, 1938), deacon of Mexico correspondents, died yesterday at 8:58 a.m. in Santiago Tzipijo, Michoacan, after battling for two years against liver cancer.

A wake is being held on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. He will be cremated in Urapan and his ashes scattered in Mexico and in several cities in the U.S., according to his wishes.

Ross, whose last book is entitled El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, arrived at Casa Santiago, on the shores of the lake, on Dec. 31 in a taxi, reports Kevin Quigley, who with his wife is owner of the guest house. Both were compadres of the New Yorker.

Two days earlier, friends of the journalist had retrieved his archives from the room he occupied in the hotel Isabel in Mexico City, where he had lived since the week following the earthquake of 1985. His files are to be temporarily stored at the Cemanahuac Educational Community in Cuernavaca.

John Ross was a man of the Left and one of his great obsessions was the struggle against wars of every type. His great labor as an independent journalist and correspondent was to participate in and cover the political and social events that happened here, to make them known in the United States. “He never quit telling the gringos what was happening in Mexico” ...

-- La Jornada / Mexico City / January 18, 2011
(Translated by Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog)

John Ross. Photo from Con Carlitos.


LOS MUERTOS

After they had waited on line

for nearly eight straight hours

to vote for the candidate of their choice,

The Dead were finally informed

that they were no longer inscribed

upon the precinct lists of the Republic.

But we have only come to exercise

our rights as responsible citizens

The Dead complained bitterly

for it seemed to them that the President

in the spirit of national unity

had called upon all the people

to cast their ballots

as is the democratic norm.

The official registrar

who was still quite alive

could only explain

the exclusion of the calacas

with platitudes about Morality.

Oh said The Dead and voted anyway.

But your votes are clearly illegal

winced the official Official,

they can't be counted in this election.

You have a point The Dead replied,

maybe they won't be counted now

but surely you will count them later.

© John Ross
When John Ross was 18, he was a young member of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles Mingus. -- Beatitude Poetry

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Frank Bardacke : John Ross Had All the Right Enemies

John Ross, 1938-2011. Photo by Marcia Perskie, courtesy of Michael James, Heartland Cafe, Chicago.

All the right enemies:
Farewell to the utterly unique John Ross

By Frank Bardacke / CounterPunch / January 18, 2011

John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.

The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was 16 years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of 20, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.

Back on the streets of San Francisco 18 months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.

When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of PL (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist.

“Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.

In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabel in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.

During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.

He died Monday morning, January 17, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.

That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.

He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.

John Ross at Day of the Dead celebration. Photo from CounterPunch.
He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity, and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist -- that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him.

It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column.

He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.

He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount New York Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.

The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission -- a “cancer resister,” he called himself -- and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels.

[Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com. This article was written for and distributed by CounterPunch.]

Please see:

• "Journalist, author and poet John Ross (1938-2011)" by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2011 (includes poem "Los Muertos" by John Ross)
• "John Ross in Obamalandia : Death Waltz Across Texas" / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2010
• More articles by John Ross on The Rag Blog
• "BOOKS / 'El Monstruo : Dread and Redemption in Mexico City'" by Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2010

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SPORT / John Ross : Torture and the National Pastime

New national pastime:
Torture and the San Francisco Giants

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO -- The return of liver cancer has afforded me an unexpected opportunity to contemplate the National Pastime.

As I emerged from a bout of chemotherapy in late September, the San Francisco Giants were locked in a neck and neck drawdown with the San Diego Padres for a post-season play-off spot and Baghdad-by-the Bay was abuzz with pennant fever.

The Padres, who had dominated the National League West since the early days of the 2010 season, had suddenly plummeted into an unprecedented funk, at one point losing 10 games in a row. Bare percentage points separated the two teams as they entered the final weekend of the pennant race with the local heroes only having to win one out of three games here at home.

They, of course, lost the first two and diehards cringed that déjà vu was about to drop all over again. I have been a Giants fan since the day when the Polo Grounds, a misshapen stadium in upper Manhattan, was their chosen field of battle, and the scenario is an achingly familiar one for me.

Suddenly, the wind had been sucked out of the Giants' pennant hopes. The orange "rally rags" which management distributes free of charge to the aficionados (its good for business) stopped twirling, altering wind currents over AT&T park. Those idiotic panda hats issued during the pre-season to hype the disappointing exploits of third baseman Pablo Sandoval AKA "Kung Fu Panda," lay dormant splayed upon the scalps of the fanaticos.

No one "Feared the Beards," the fake whiskers that transform mild-mannered fans into facsimile Mad Bombers and remind the opposition that ace reliever Brian Wilson would soon be on the mound to rescue the locals. No kind of mumbo jumbo seemed to snap the Giants out of their trance.

I saw the first hand-scrawled signs during the late innings of the Friday night series opener. As usual, the Giants had been unable to put two hits together and were deep in the hole in yet another nail-biter with the Padres. Two young people of indeterminate sex squatted down by the first base boxes to display their homemade handiwork. The wording, as best as I can remember, underscored that it was "torture" to be a Giants' fan these days.

"Did you see that?" I turned aghast to my fellow couch surfer, the notorious peoples' lawyer Dennis Cunningham. Dennis, who of late has been trying to prevent the feds from destroying fragments from the bomb that blew up a car occupied by Judi Bari and her Earth First! comrade Daryl Cheney in 1990, reasoning that that the threatened disappearance of the evidence would absolve the FBI of complicity in the matter, was similarly provoked.

Let me delineate the reasons for our dismay. Torture, in my dictionary, means the egregious and prolonged physical abuse governments inflict upon those they suspect of harboring information detrimental to their interests. When I speak of torture, I mean Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, CIO "black sites" -- not an afternoon outing at Pac Bell Park.

When I speak out against torture, I mean waterboarding, having your fingernails pulled out one by one and your scrotum sliced by a razor, electrical currents shoved up your anus, extreme sensory deprivation -- not having to endure a close shave out at the old ballgame.

When I speak out against torture, I think of the unending agony the Israelis inflict upon the Palestinian people, the castration of those who marched with Monsignor Romero, Victor Jara's skull being shattered on the soccer stadium steps in Santiago ---not Buster Posey and the "tools of ignorance."

As the weekend progressed and the Giants continued to lose impossibly low-scoring games, the "torture" syndrome gained increasing currency. Legions of Giants fans were now showing up to wave signs spotlighting the torture motif. Now the offending word was spelled out in Giants' colors and decorated with hearts and care bears. Both the Chronicle and the Examiner ("free" -- and worth every penny of it) were running the T-word in their leads.

The kicker was a phone call from an old friend who has marched through this city for years decrying torture, injustice, and imperialist occupations. "It's torture to be a Giants fan," she chirped merrily. I just about did a Mike Tyson and bit her ear off to reciprocate.

The mindless drumbeat mounted last weekend at AT&T Park trivializes torture, transforming horrendous crimes against humanity into a sports slogan to be inserted somewhere between the Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America and further converting professional sports into a willing shill for U.S. domination of the Planet Earth. First and foremost, baseball is a business and I expect torture will soon be deployed to sell everything from beer and sushi to seasons' tickets. The possibilities are depressingly endless.

"FANS JUMP ON THE TORTURE BANDWAGON," the morning Chron, about the poorest excuse for a daily newspaper in this benighted land, headlines this morning (Wednesday, Oct. 6), guaranteeing that torture will be a part of the Giants' sales pitch as they enter the second round of the play-offs. Perhaps my illness has magnified the malaise but this past weekend's low-jinks seem to underscore the premise with which I launched this screed: Torture is indeed the new national pastime.

[John Ross, author of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, will be covering the new national pastime while recuperating from chemotherapy.]

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John Ross : The Next Mexican Revolution

Liberation Army of the South, led by Emiliano Zapata, fought the government forces of Gen. Porfirio Diaz, in the state of Morelos, Mexico. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
The next Mexican Revolution:

Don't look now but the long-awaited resurgence of the Mexican Revolution has already begun.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / September 22, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- As the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution steams into sight, U.S. and Mexican security agencies are closely monitoring this distant neighbor nation for red lights that could signal renewed rebellion.

The most treacherous stretch for those keeping tabs on subversion south of the border is between September 15th, the recently celebrated bicentennial commemorating the struggle for Mexico's independence from Spain, and November 20th, the day back in 1910 that the liberal Francisco Madero called upon his compatriots to take the plazas of their cities and towns and rise up against the Diaz government.

At least 10 and as many as 44 armed groups are currently thought to be active in Mexico and the two months between the 200th anniversary of liberation from the colonial yoke and the 100th of the nation's landmark revolution, the first uprising of landless farmers in the Americas and a precursor of the Russian revolution, is a dramatic platform from which to strike at the right-wing government of President Felipe Calderon.

Among the more prominent armed formations is the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) which rose against the government in 1996 and is based in Guerrero and Oaxaca, and three distinct split-offs: the Democratic Revolutionary Tendency (TDR); the Justice Commandos - June 28th, thought to be linear descendents of the followers of guerrilla chieftain Lucio Cabanas who fought the government along the Costa Grande of Guerrero in the 1970s; and the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent Peoples (ERPI) which also espouses Cabanas's heritage and is active in the Sierra of Guerrero where Lucio once roamed.

Others on the list released two years ago by the CISEN, Mexico's lead anti-subversion intelligence-gathering apparatus, include the largely-disarmed Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), an indigenous formation that rose in Chiapas in 1994; the Jose Maria Morelos National Guerrilla Coordinating Body, thought to be based in Puebla; and the Jaramillista Justice Commandos that takes its name from Ruben Jaramillo, the last general of revolutionary martyr Emiliano Zapata's Liberating Army of the South gunned down by the government in 1964, which has taken credit for bombings in Zapata's home state of Morelos.

The TAGIN or National Triple Indigenous and Guerrilla Alliance, thought to be rooted in southeastern Mexico, boasted in a e-mail communiqué at the beginning of the year that a coalition of 70 armed groups have agreed on coordinated action in 2010.

Also in the revolutionary mix are an unknown number of anarchist cells, at least one of which takes the name of Praxides G. Guerrero, the first anarchist to fall 100 years ago in the Mexican revolution.

Primarily operating in urban settings, anarchist cells have firebombed dozens of ATM machines and banks, new car showrooms, bullrings, and slaughterhouses (many anarchists are militant vegans) in Mexico City, Mexico state, Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi, and Tijuana. The U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has just added Mexican anarchist groups to the Obama government's terrorist lists.

Thus far, no group in this revolutionary rainbow has struck in 2010, and the window is narrowing if Mexico's twin centennials are to be a stage upon which to launch new uprisings. If this is to be the year of the next Mexican revolution, the time to move is now.

Objective conditions on the ground are certainly ripe for popular uprising. At least 70% of the Mexican people live in and around the poverty line while a handful of oligarchs continue to dominate the economy -- Mexico accounts for half of the 12 million Latin Americans who have fallen into poverty during the on-going economic downturn.

Despite Calderon's much scoffed-at claims that the recession-wracked economy is in recovery, unemployment continues to run at record levels. Hunger is palpable on the farm and in the big cities. Indeed, the only ray of light is the drug trade that now employs between a half million and a million mostly young and impoverished people.

Labor troubles, always a crucible of revolutionary dynamics, are on the rise. A hundred years ago, conditions were not dissimilar. The fallout from the 1906-7 world depression that saw precious metal prices, the nation's sustenance, fall off the charts sent waves of unemployment across the land and severely impacted conditions for those still working.

As copper prices bottomed, workers at the great Cananea copper pit scant miles from the Arizona border in Sonora state, went out on strike and owner Colonel William Green called in the Arizona Rangers to take the mine back. Twenty six miners were cut down and the massacre gave birth to the Mexican labor movement.

In March 2010, President Calderon dispatched hundreds of federal police and army troops to Cananea to break a protracted, nearly two-year strike at the behest of the Larrea family, the main stockholders in Grupo Mexicano Industrial which was gifted with the copper pit, the eighth largest in the world, after it was privatized by reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas in 1989. Calderon's hard-nosed labor secretary Javiar Lozano has threatened arrest of miners' union boss Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, now in self-exile in Vancouver, Canada.

Lozano is also deeply embroiled in take-no-hostages battles with the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME) over privatization of electricity generation here that has cost the union, the second oldest in the country founded during the last Mexican revolution, 44,000 jobs. A near death hunger strike by the displaced workers failed to budge the labor secretary and SME members now threaten to shut down Mexico City's International Airport.

History is often colored with irony. The first important battles in the Mexican revolution were fought around Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, a key railhead on the U.S. border and a commercial lifeline to El Norte for dictator Porfirio Diaz. In skirmish after skirmish, the irregulars of Francisco Villa and Pascual Orozco challenged and defeated the dictator's Federales and began the long push south to hook up with Emiliano Zapata's southern army in Morelos state on the doorstep of the capitol.

Ciudad Juarez was devastated by the cruel battles between the revolutionaries and the dictator's troops. Dead wagons plied the dusty streets hauling off the bodies of those who had fallen to be burnt out in the surrounding desert. Today, once again, Ciudad Juarez is the murder capitol of Mexico.

Mexican troops, mobilized to fight the narco-insurrection. Image from. Mcauley's World's Webblog.
Over 1,800 have been killed in this border city so far in 2010, a record year for homicides, as the homegrown Juarez drug cartel and its local enforcers, the "La Linea" gang, try to defend the "plaza," the most pertinent drug crossing point on the 1964 mile border, from the Sinaloa cartel under the management of "El Chapo" Guzman, and his local associates, "Gente Nueva" ("New People").

Much as today when the narco kings like "El Chapo" or his recently slain associate "Nacho" Coronel are vilified by the Mexican press and President Calderon as "traitors" and "killers" and "cowards," 100 years back revolutionaries were cast as villains and vandals hell-bent on tearing down the institutions of law and order.

Pancho Villa was universally dissed as a cattle rustler, a "bandido," "terrorista," and rapist. When Zapata, "the Attila of the South," and his peasant army came down to Mexico City in 1914 to meet with Villa, the "gente decente" (decent people) locked up their homes and their daughters to protect them from the barbarian hordes.

Similarly, in 2010, the corporate press lashes out at the cartels and their pistoleros as crazed, drug-addled mercenaries who will shoot their own mothers if enough cash and cocaine are offered. Villa's troops were no strangers to such accusations. "La Cucaracha," the Villista marching song, pleads for "marijuana para caminar" ("marijuana to march").

All this duel centennial year, ideologically driven leftists here have been waiting with baited breath for a resurgence of armed rebellion such as in 1994 when the EZLN rose up against the "mal gobierno" in Chiapas, or in 1996 when the EPR staged a series of murderous raids on military and police installations -- but the leftists may be barking up the wrong tree.

If revolution is to be defined as the overthrow of an unpopular government and the taking of state power by armed partisans, then the new Mexican revolution is already underway, at least in the north of the country where Calderon's ill-advised drug campaign against the cartels (in which according to the latest CISEN data 28,000 citizens have died) has morphed into generalized warfare.

Although the fighting has been largely confined to the north, it should be remembered that Mexico's 1910 revolution began in that geography under the command of Villa and Orozco, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregon, and Francisco Madero, and then spread south to the power center of the country.

Given the qualitative leap in violence, Edgardo Buscaglia, a keen analyst of drug policy at the prestigious Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico now describes Calderon's war as a "narco-insurgency" -- a descripton recently endorsed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Daily events reported in the nation's press lend graphic substance to the terminology.

Narco-commandos attack military and police barracks, carrying off arms and freeing prisoners from prisons in classic guerrilla fashion. As if to replay the 1910 uprising in the north, the narco gangs loot and torch the mansions of the rich in Ciudad Juarez. The narcos mount public massacres in northern cities like Juarez and Torreon that leave dozens dead and seem designed to terrorize the local populous caught up in the crossfire and impress upon the citizenry that the government can no longer protect them, a classic guerrilla warfare strategy.

One very 2010 wrinkle to the upsurge in violence: car bombs triggered by cell phones detonate in downtown Juarez, a technology that seems to have been borrowed from the U.S. invasion of Iraq (El Paso just across the river is home to several military bases where returning veterans of that crusade are housed). Plastique-like C-4 explosives used in a July 15th car bombing that killed four in downtown Juarez are readily available at Mexican mining sites.

Further into the interior, commandos thought to be operating under the sponsorship of the Zetas cartel, have repeatedly shut down key intersections in Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city and the industrial powerhouse of the nation, with stolen construction equipment and stalled buses and trailer trucks purportedly to clear surrounding highways of traffic for the movement of troops and weaponry into this strategic region.

Now the narco-insurrection has invaded the political realm as manifested by the assassination of the one-time ruling PRI party's front-running candidate for governor of Tamaulipas state in July 4th elections. But party affiliation doesn't seem to be a determining factor in this ambience of fear and loathing. The kidnapping of right-wing PAN party Padrino Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, one of the most powerful politicos in Mexico and a possible presidential candidate in 2012, must send chills up and down the spines of Calderon and his associates.

Who actually put the snatch on "El Jefe" Diego remains murky. The Attorney General's office is now pointing fingers at the Popular Revolutionary Army, which is active in the Bajio region where the PANista was taken last May 14th. In 2007, the EPR claimed credit for the bombing of PEMEX pipelines in Guanajuato and Queretero in retaliation for the disappearances of two of its historical leaders.

The Mexican military has long calculated the eventual "symbiosis of criminal cartels with armed groups that are disaffected with the government" ("Combat Against Narco-Traffic 2008" issued by the Secretary of Defense).

Fifty thousand of the Mexican Army's 140,000 troops and large detachments of Naval Marines are currently in the field against the narco-insurrectionists. With an eye to the eventual "symbiosis" of the drug gangs with armed guerrilla movements, the U.S. North Command which is responsible for keeping the North American mainland free of terrorists and regards Mexico as its southern security perimeter recently sent counterinsurgency trainers here to assess threats -- their visit was confirmed at a Washington D.C. press conference July 21st by Under-secretary of Defense William Wechsler.

Meanwhile, the military is setting up new advance bases in regions where there have been recent guerrilla sightings such as the Sierra Gorda, strategically located at the confluence of Queretero, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosi states.

Leftists who have been awaiting a more "political" uprising in 2010 are not convinced by Buscaglia's nomenclature. A real revolution must be waged along ideological and class lines which the narco-insurrection has yet to manifest. Nonetheless, given the neoliberal mindset of a globalized world in which class dynamics are reduced to market domination, the on-going narco-insurrection may well be the best new Mexican revolution this beleaguered nation is going to get.

[An abbreviated version of "The Next Mexican Revolution" appeared in the Guardian (London, U.K.) September 13, 2010. Note: John Ross's cancer has returned and he is suspending publication of his column while he undergoes chemotherapy in San Francisco. He can be reached at johnross@igc.org. Readers who crave Ross's words are advised to consult El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books 2010), available at your local independent bookstore.]

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John Ross : Mexico's Buy-Centennial 'Grito'

Mexico's Bicentennial: Miguel Hidalgo with the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe.
Can a new revolution be far behind?
The countdown to Mexico's Buy-Centennial

'Viva Mexico! Let's go kill some Gachupines!'

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / September 8, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The clocks are literally ticking as Mexico starts the final leg of the countdown to the 200th anniversary of its independence from Spain. Dozens of huge, solar-powered timepieces have been installed in this monster city's great Zocalo plaza and 31 state capitols to mark the minutes until the Bicentennial celebration kicks in this September 15th-16th.

At 2.8 million pesos each, the price of the clocks is a mere drop in the bucket compared to what President Felipe Calderon is lavishing on the actual festivities.

Mexico has budgeted 3 billion pesos for the nation's birthday fete but costs will surely exceed that modest allocation. In a country where 70% of the population lives in and around the poverty line, 50% of Mexican families cannot afford the basic food basket, and 13 million children go to bed without supper each night, Bicentennial bread and circuses will not staunch the hunger that stalks the land

How much of this multi-billion peso boodle will be pilfered, embezzled, subcontracted out to dubious friends of the house, or otherwise flushed down the drain, remains to be calculated.

Mexico is one of eight Latin American republics that will celebrate the 200th anniversary of their separation from a debilitated Spain back in 1810 this year -- but it is the only country on the continent that will also commemorate the centennial of a landmark revolution that toppled an entrenched oligarchy.

The numerical coincidences between the catastrophic conflict that began in 1810 (500,000 were dead before the war of liberation was concluded in 1821) and the revolution of 1910 (a million killed) have given rise to the thesis that every hundred years, on the tenth year of the century, this distant neighbor nation explodes in lethal social upheaval.

In Mexico 2010, with an economy in free fall, unemployment at record levels, and 28,000 citizens slaughtered in Calderon's uncalled-for war on the drug cartels, this timetable for renewed revolution is not an unlikely projection.

But aside from revolutionary numerology, there is an historical connection that explains the reoccurrence of social rebellion here in 1810 and 1910. 1910 was an election year and the dictator Porfirio Diaz, who had governed the country with an iron fist for 34 years, stealing election after election, was determined to maintain power despite his increasing unpopularity. Clapping his chief rival, the liberal Francisco Madero, in jail weeks before the balloting, the 83 year-old Don Porfirio once again crowned himself top dog -- like Diaz, current president Felipe Calderon is often accused of having stolen the 2006 election.

Then as now in 2010, deep recession was on the land and Porfirio Diaz quashed social discontent by calling out the army to restore order (Calderon has 50,000 troops in the field.) Faced with disintegrating governability, the dictator moved to soothe the restive masses by throwing a big party to celebrate the Centennial of the nation's independence.

Monuments and statues were erected throughout the capitol, most prominently the gilded Angel of Independence that still rises above the Paseo de La Reforma, the city's most traveled thoroughfare. Indeed, the dictator invested millions in refurbishing the avenue and transforming it into a sort of Mexican Champs D'Elysie.

Borrowing a page from Don Porfi's playbook, Calderon last spring laid the cornerstone for a multi-million-peso "Bicentennial Tower of Light" at the foot of Reforma Boulevard. Cost overruns on the monument have already doubled and the Tower will not be open for business until late 2011, if ever, due to engineering snafus.

A hundred years ago, among other Centennial projects, Porfirio Diaz cut the ribbon at the site of a new headquarters for the Congress of the country but two months later, revolution washed over the land and the dome-like structure was left unfinished -- after the conclusion of hostilities, the dome was converted into the Monument of the Revolution.

Similarly, Calderon's list of Bicentennial projects includes new quarters for the Mexican Senate -- weeks before the big fiesta that building too remains unfinished.

One hundred years ago, commemorative events and glittering banquets and balls filled the dictator's days and nights. Showers of fireworks lit up the skies. New pants were distributed to the poor although they were discouraged from attending the festivities. As is standard operating procedure in this ultra-centralized nation, the fiesta was confined to the capitol and the provincials uninvited, further ratcheting up tensions between the countryside and the big city.

When word got out that the dictator had spent Mexico's entire social budget on the Centennial of Independence -- there was no money left over to even pay the wages of teachers -- all hell broke lose. On November 20th, 1910 the Mexican revolution erupted and Diaz was overthrown.

Felipe Calderon has been faithful to Don Porfi's scenario. Aside from the Bicentennial Arch and the new Senate chambers, he has inaugurated a multi-billion peso extravaganza, the "Expo Bicentenario," in Guanajuato (see sidebar below); streets and schools all over the country have been renamed for the "Heroes who gave us a Fatherland," and a Bicentennial park in the north of Mexico City, constructed on the site of an abandoned refinery that befouled the air of this megalopolis for decades, is open for business. Toxicity levels are said to be still so high that just sitting on the grass can be dangerous to one's health.

The 'Bicentennial Tower of Light" at the foot of Reforma Boulevard may never happen. Image from Noticias.arq.
Calderon's management of the Bicentennial has been haphazard. Five coordinators, starting with Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of a beloved president, have signed on and then abruptly quit in the past six years, most recently when Juan Manuel Villalpando, a right-wing historian, turned over the reigns of the operation to Secretary of Public Education Alfonso Lujambio, often cited as Calderon's successor in 2012.

With less than a month until the big birthday party, public buildings like the National Palace, the Palace of Bellas Artes, and the Supreme Court are being scrubbed down for the event. Miles of red, white, and green bunting -- the colors of the Mexican flag -- are being draped over downtown skyscrapers such as the 84-story Torre Mayor, the tallest building in the nation.

The Bicentennial cultural calendar is packed. A magnum exposition of patriotic icons, including the polished skull of Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the profligate priest who first gave voice to the struggle for independence, and the mixed bones of either 12 or 14 other martyrs (it has not yet been determined whose bones are whose) will be displayed in the National Palace which the citizenry is cordially encouraged to visit (the Palace is usually locked down and sealed by the military.)

Other commemorative offerings include the publication of a reedited official edition of The History of Mexico issued by Lujambio's Public Education Secretariat. The volume has been heavily critiqued by academics because Calderon and his PAN party have imposed a right-wing spin on the nation's biography. Much of the revised text appears to be the work of the discredited Enrique Krauze, house historian for Televisa, the senior partner in Mexico's two-headed television monopoly and a bosom buddy of Juan Manual Villalpando.

The volume tilts towards a conservative interpretation of historical events and tends to gloss over darker moments in the national narrative --there is no mention of slavery and yet a third of the population at liberation was Afro-Mexican. The sugarcoated treatment of Antonio Lopez y Santana, an arch-villain who ceded half of Mexico's national territory to Washington, is remarkable. The 1968 massacre of 300 striking students by the Mexican military is described as "a large demonstration that was repressed" with no attribution as to the repressors.

In a recent Proceso magazine interview, historian Victor Diaz Archiniaba disses the revised "History of Mexico" as a history of the country's politicos and not its people. The right-wing PAN, posits the popular Autonomous Metropolitan University professor, is uncomfortable with lionizing personages such as Hidalgo, his successor Jose Maria Morelos, and revolutionary apostles Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa who defied the Catholic Church, rose up against repressive regimes, and overthrew conservative governments.

The Calderon government's plans for the twin centennials have favored the 200th anniversary of Independence over the 100th year Centennial of the Mexican Revolution, an uprising of the poor with which the PANistas have never been sympathetic.

Capitalism has bought up the franchise for the "Buy Centennial" -- as some unpatriotic wags have dubbed the upcoming festivities. As every year during September, "the patriotic month," vendors push handcarts through the city streets laden with "tricolor" flags, plastic "coronetas"- a sort of Mexican vuvuzela whose braying bleats add to the urban din -- and tons of patriotic tchotchkes. To honor the Bicentennial, the mugs of Padre Hidalgo and his coconspirators invite consumers to buy tee shirts, kids clothes, cigarette lighters, milk cartons, and cans of beans, phone cards, and lottery tickets.

A cartoon version of the struggle for independence, True Heroes, is about to roll. Creator Carlos Kuri concedes his film is a "lite" version of Mexico's oft-violent history. Hidalgo, Morelos et al more resemble "Batman, Spiderman, and Indiana Jones" than their original role models, he says -- Morelos's voiceover was dubbed by "Brozo," the green-haired "scary clown" AKA Victor Trujillo, a Televisa warhorse. True Heroes action figures are being heavily marketed.

Other Buy Centennial specials include a Bicentennial lottery ("Bicentenario"), a Bicentennial bike race ("Bicenton"), a time capsule to be opened a hundred years hence if in fact Mexico survives until then, the issuance of various postage stamps, a youth parliament, a racquetball championship, an international regatta, and an NBA exhibition game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Los Angeles Clippers.

Although the list of international dignitaries who are invited to the Bicentennial hijinks is closely held, the buzz is that Spain's Prince Felipe and his princesa Dona Leticia will be on hand when Calderon pronounces the immortal "Grito de Independencia" from the presidential balcony overlooking the Zocalo on September 15th. Given the presence of the royals, the "Grito," as first sounded by Father Hidalgo -- "Viva Mexico! Let's Go Kill Some Gachupines" (Spaniards) -- will have to be modified for the occasion.

Calderon's September 15th "Grito" will be preceded and followed by multiple military parades -- foreign contingents, including one from the United States whose troops have invaded Mexico five times, will pad out the processions. Nearly half the Mexican army is currently in the field waging the President's bloody drug war.

To top off the fiesta, the heavens over Mexico City will be illuminated by world-class pyrotechnics organized by Australian Ric Burch whose SpecTak Productions staged the opening pageant at the Beijing Olympics. Burch, who will be paid a million Yanqui dollars for the fireworks display, has promised to learn Spanish for the Bicentennial.

September 15th, traditionally "La Noche Mexicana" when the natives don floppy sombreros, tank up on rotgut tequila, yowl nostalgic mariachi tunes, and shoot off their pistolas like "real Mexicanos," is always a blast but this year should be a lollapalooza. In 2008, purported narcos tossed a bomb into a crowd celebrating "La Noche Mexicana" in Morelia, Michoacan, killing eight party-goers and tens of thousands of Mexico City and federal police will be assigned to the Zocalo to keep the crowds from killing each other.

After an all-night fandango, Calderon will be helicoptered to Dolores Guanajuato where Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a survivor of a failed conspiracy to overthrow the Spanish rulers, uttered the original "Grito," the one about killing the Gachupines.

As legend has it, once the good padre had bellowed his murderous oath, he strode across the town plaza and threw open the doors of the local jailhouse. Hundreds of Indians and Afro-Mexicans who had been forced to slave in the silver mines (Mexico produced a third of the world's currency in 1810) surged out, picked up machetes and torches, and marched on the nearby silver capitol of Guanajuato City where they rounded up the white elites in the grain house or Alhondiga and set it ablaze.

The fire is said to have been ignited by a disaffected miner whose nickname "El Pipila" now graces taco stands and other purveyors of roasting meats throughout Mexico.

On the morning of September 16th to conclude Bicentennial activities in Guanajuato, Felipe Calderon will host a gala breakfast for local elites at the Alhondiga, a structure from which the captured Padre Hidalgo's head once swung.

Given the repression, economic devastation, hunger, corruption, and violence that blankets the land in this centennial year, many Mexicans are wondering if, much as in Porfirio Diaz's day, a new revolution can be far behind?

[John Ross, author of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, is currently in San Francisco for medical treatment.]

Guanajuato:
The rotting cradle of Mexican independence

Largely because of Hidalgo's revolutionary caper, the state of Guanajuato has been designated "the Cradle of Independence" and to celebrate the Bicentennial, this past July 17th President Calderon cut the ribbon at a hundred acre theme park, "Expo Bicentenario" near the agricultural nexus of Silao and facing Cubilete (Cupcake) Hill to whose "Christ the King!" shrine, the state's Catholic zealots make an annual pilgrimage.

The Bicentennial Expo includes a pavilion dedicated to the heroic Mexican military, an institution that is currently under international fire for human rights violations, and a Hall of History featuring a life-sized caveman and cave woman, and even a baby mammoth specially flown in from Russia.

A virtual Hidalgo will declaim a virtual "Grito" and a virtual Pancho Villa will sit in a real train car and tell the story of the Mexican revolution. A monumental Guinness Book of Records Mexican flag flies over the pavilions and a 40 million-peso figure of "Winged Victory," Calderon's version of Porfirio Diaz's "Angel of Independence," stands guard over the theme park.

Also on the bill: a light show, carnival rides, and kiddie cars. Pop music stars like Cheyenne, Yuri, and the hoary Ballet Folklorico de Mexico have been booked in for nightly shows.

The Expo Bicentenario is the largest public works project ever built in the state of Guanajuato. Although Coca Cola will pick up part of the tab, the state government has kicked in 800,000,000 pesos which, much as in Don Porfirio's day, will certainly diminish social budgets.

Guanajuato, which has been under the PAN's thumb for a generation, is one of the most privatized states in the Mexican union -- even the Mummies of Guanajuato, the mummified bodies of miners and their families and a venerable tourist attraction, are now owned by the private sector. The mummies are being transported to Mexico City as part of Calderon's September fandango.

Guanajuato is an unlikely venue to celebrate this country's struggle for liberty. Police repression in the state is horrific -- nine prisoners have died in police custody in the last 14 months, including a farmer whose beating death was recorded by video cameras. A private U.S. security firm was hired last year to teach the industrial city of Leon's security forces torture techniques.

Hunger is endemic in Guanajuato, particularly among the state's 40,000 indigenous residents, as graphically demonstrated by the looting of grain boxcars in the city of Celaya earlier this year. The state has one of the highest out-migration exoduses to the United States in Mexico.

The PAN's ferocious clampdown on public morals is often humiliatingly painful. Kissing in public is a punishable offense in Guanajuato city, which was once renowned for its famed "Callejon del Beso" or Kissing Alley. Last year, a civic group in Leon burnt public school sex education text books on a pyre in the city square because they contained anatomical diagrams of reproductive organs, and Luz Maria Ramirez Villalpando, director of the Guanajuato Women's Institute, does power point presentations stigmatizing as deviants women with tattoos and piercings because they "cheapen moral values."

Abortion, even for rape and incest victims, has long been outlawed in Guanajuato with women receiving up to 35-year sentences for simply soliciting an interruption to unwanted pregnancies. Six women are currently imprisoned in state penitentiaries for purportedly murdering their children in the womb -- Governor Juan Manuel Oliva who labels pro-choice groups as "terrorists," insists that he has proof that all of the women gave birth and then killed their offspring, a fact vehemently rejected by local feminists.

"What are we supposed to celebrate when Guanajuato, the cradle of national emancipation, forces girls that have been raped to be mothers, access to therapeutic abortions is denied, and women are jailed for seeking to end unwanted pregnancies?" feminist Georgina Altuna recently wrote in the left daily La Jornada.

Such is the state of constitutional liberties in the place that gave birth to Mexico's Independence as the Buy Centennial gets underway.

-- J.R.

The Rag Blog

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John Ross : 'Los Barrenderos' are Mexico City's 'Working Class Heroes'

Barrendero. Photo by jmolagar / flickriver.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Working class heroes:
Mexico city's army of barrenderos

'We don't sweep the streets just for ourselves... Our ancestors, the Great Aztecs, come from this place and now it belongs to all of humanity.'

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / August 26, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- A small army of men and women in florescent orange and green uniforms pushing bright yellow carts hovers on the edge of the overflow crowd in the great Zocalo plaza of this city, ready to pounce. Whether it’s the 62 matches of the World Cup "FIFA Fan Fest" shown on giant screens for the diversion of the masses or a rally of tens of thousands of disgruntled citizens who have gathered to protest the policies of their government, the "barrenderos" are prepared to move in and haul away the mess the "fanaticos" have left behind.

"These Mexicanos are real 'cochinos' (pigs)," kvetched my young pal Alejandro Daniel, a member of the corps of "barrenderos" or street sweepers who are charged with the hopeless mission of keeping Mexico City's Centro Historico, the old quarter of this ancient capitol, free of debris, as he scooped up plastic cups, half-melted paletas (popsicles), the gnawed butts of tacos and "perros calientes" (hot dogs), several flattened plastic horns, and a sea of greasy waste paper, and artfully stuffed them into his cart.

Alejandro, 22, a second generation barrendero whose mom worked in the city's street cleaning department before him, is one of 8,500 street sweepers on the Cuauhtemoc borough's pay roll, 400 of them assigned to patrol the old quarter, a neighborhood which is roughly the configuration of Tenochtitlan, the island kingdom that was the crown jewel of the Aztec empire and is now listed on the UNESCO roster of world heritage sites.

The barrenderos work three shifts around the clock, but keeping the Centro Historico spic and span is an impossible job. By day, the neighborhood is a chaotic confluence of 2 million automobiles, trucks, buses, bicycles, and rickshaws and untold millions of pedestrians -- government workers, ambulantes (freelance venders), tourists, demonstrators, and residents -- who dump vast cordilleras of "basura" (garbage) onto the city streets.

Alejandro's "tramo" or route extends down Isabel la Catolica, a narrow street where this writer has lived for the past quarter of a century, eight blocks north to the national pawn shop ("Monte de Piedad" or "Mountain of Piety.") Along the way, the young barrendero sweeps up the gutters (the sidewalks are cleaned by residents and store owners), and dumps plastic public trash baskets lined up six to a block into his cart.

He also picks up garbage bags from private customers -- this take-out service ("la finca") is strictly prohibited by his bosses in the borough government but Alejandro's salary is only 1,300 pesos every 15 days ("La Quincena"), approximately $100 Americano, and he desperately needs his finca to make ends meet.

The barrenderos are also charged with following demonstrations through the Centro (there are an average 3.2 a day), sweeping up after the "cochino" marchers, painting out "pintas" or spray-painted slogans scrawled on the walls of the ancient neighborhood, and ripping down leaflets posted by militants. "We leave the ones against (President) Calderon," confides Alejandro, a partisan of former left mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The worst day of the year for the street sweeper is October 2nd, the annual anniversary of the 1968 student massacre (300 killed) in the Tlatelolco housing complex just north of the Centro Historico. For generations, students have marched to commemorate those who fell in the government-ordered slaughter, spray painting every surface in the neighborhood, battling riot police, and looting convenience stores. When the barrenderos try to wipe out the wall scrawls, they are attacked. "Once they sprayed me from top to bottom and then dumped my cart on top of me," rues Alejandro.

Mexico City, the largest urban stain in the Americas with 23 million sentient human beings packed into its metropolitan zone, generates a bit under 20,000 tons of garbage daily, about 1.45 kilos of basura per chilango (Mexico City resident). The capitol, which holds a fifth of the population, accounts for a third of the country's garbage.

"El barrendero hace cosquillas a la calle." ("The sweeper tickles the street.") Cartoon by Aitorelo.
Much of the effluvia is recycled by the workers themselves to augment their meager salaries and the leftovers buried in two pestilent landfills -- the "Bordo Poniente" out on the dried bed of Lake Texcoco behind the airport in the east of the city and now dramatically running out of room, is thought to be the largest garbage dump on the continent.

Recycling is mostly the domain of the collectors -- the barrenderos and the basureros or garbage men. At the dumps, "pepinadores," garbage pickers, sift through the waste for recyclables that the crews have missed.

From the crack of dawn through high noon, elephantine green trucks swamp the inner city, picking up the residue from shops and restaurants, private businesses and working class colonias, their arrivals still heralded by the ringing of a brass bell.

The garbage men (there are no women although half the street sweepers are female) toss overflowing waste barrels into grinders mounted on the back of the trucks, dump buckets of industrial grease and organic slop, often spewing debris into the gutters for the sweepers to clean up.

Although the barrenderos and the basureros are fierce competitors for the city's garbage, they have had to forge strategic alliances to get the job done. "We consider the garbage crews to be our companeros," Alejandro affirms.

I follow Alejandro and his flailing broom through traffic as he darts down Isabel La Catolica, often squeezing between parked cars to retrieve a banana peel or a discarded newspaper. The barrendero wrestles the contents of the street trash baskets into his cart but hesitates outside the dozens of fast food franchises here in the Centro so that the hungry and the homeless can fish for discarded food first.

These days, he is often challenged by can collectors -- with unemployment at a record high and old people scraping by on meager pensions, recycled cans bring in a few coins for the underclass. Alejandro is also wary of "pirates" who steal unguarded carts and brooms and swipe the barrenderos' fincas.

The street sweepers' brooms are emblematic of their "oficio" (profession) but lately they have become the source of labor tensions. Their bosses, bureaucrats in a city government that has been administrated by the left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) for the past 13 years, insist upon buying commercial brooms rather than the picturesque bundled tree branches with which the barrenderos have historically swept the city's streets. If the street sweepers want an old-fashioned broom, they have to buy or fashion it themselves.

Alejandro's gaze is fixed on the gutter. Sometimes he finds coins or lost cell phones, but mostly these days the streets are littered with cigarette butts. Ever since this left-run city barred smoking in office buildings, restaurants, and bars, the streets have been converted into public ashtrays.

Between Uruguay and Carranza streets, the street sweeper bends to retrieve a plastic bag that has escaped from a nearby Sanborn's department store and wrapped itself around a scraggly tree planted in a tiny square of dirt, one of the few green spaces in the congested heart of the Monster. Although a city ordinance now obligates dog owners to pick up after their curs, street dogs are attracted to these dirt patches and Alejandro has to step smartly to avoid the dogshit.

Just then a driver pulls up to curbside and throws open the car door without looking, a classic "portazo" that knocks the barrandero flat. I offer him a hand.

"Even though we wear these bright orange uniforms so we don't get run down in traffic, people never see us," he complains, "we are brooms to them -- not people. Its like we are invisible."

"Los Invisibles" is, in fact, the name of a troupe of barrenderos who do street performances around the Centro Historico.

"We see that we are underappreciated. Sometimes people are personally offensive to us. They call us 'mugreros' (dirty ones) and much worse so we are trying to educate the public to respect us more," explains Pia V., a founder of The Invisibles. "Our shows also give us an opportunity to make the neighbors more aware of their environment and encourage them to do recycling and help us keep the streets clean."

Pia and Alejandro invite me to a rehearsal of Los Invisibles on Regina Street, a block devastated by the great 8.1 1985 earthquake here that the city has transformed into a pedestrian cultural passageway. A stage has been cobbled together by the community.

Poster for El Barrendero, starring Cantinflas.
Moni, the diminutive mother of two girls (the kids have come out to see her perform) opens the show with a bouncy number, "Caminando Por El Centro":

Walking through the Centro/I encountered a broom/that didn't have an owner/so I started to sweep up Allende Street.

"When I start to sweep/I think about my family/of which I am the strong arm/that maintains them..."

The two girls jump up on the stage and embrace their mom.

Dani follows with a rant about "El Pinche Viejo" ("The Fucking Old Man"), a supervisor who is taking his time about assigning her a street to clean. She frets that she will miss her finca:

Tell me pinche viejo/how long do I have to wait/for you to make up your mind?

The barrenderos raise their brooms in a martial salute. Alejandro launches into a rap about "Derechos de Senoridad" ("Seniority Rights"):

There are people with too much money/while others don't have enough to eat/the rich are the ones who make all the frauds/our job is to sweep up this black history...

Pia takes on the tourists who flock to the Centro and do not use the public trash baskets:

I ask you please/Not to dirty the streets/In whatever city you come from/And that someday you will remember us/Sweeping up our country.

Neighbors gather in front of the "vecindades," the spruced up old slum buildings that line Regina Street and laugh and applaud. The barrenderos are popular figures in the inner city barrios of Mexico's meotroplises, often seen pushing their carts and cans in the company of a string of mangy garbage dogs who live in the "depositos" or collection centers.

Street sweepers are intensely focused on the neighborhoods they clean and often the source of fresh "chisme" (gossip), the secret fuel that powers Mexican society. Back in the 1960s, barrenderos were often the source of popular troubadour Chava Flores' urban ballads and the immortal Cantinflas's final Mexican movie El Barrendero (1982) is about a heroic street sweeper who rescues a stolen painting he finds in the garbage from a gang of thieves.

But too often the city's barrenderos are seen as little more than street furniture, part of the mob of shoeshine men, newspaper venders, organ grinders, buskers, beggars, "toreros" (freelance ambulantes), and "rateros" (street thugs) who fill up the streets of the Centro. Working class heroes are hard to find and the barrenderos certainly qualify.

The street sweeper brigades were an early feature of the city's left governments. They came into their own after the two-year long renovation of the Centro Historico under Mayor Lopez Obrador that was financed by the world's richest tycoon, Carlos Slim, who indeed grew up on these mean streets and is now the virtual owner of the old neighborhood with a reported portfolio of 160 buildings.

"We don't sweep the streets just for ourselves," Alejandro explains, "our ancestors, the Great Aztecs, come from this place and now it belongs to all of humanity."

"When I was a kid I would go to the Alameda Park and the Zocalo with my family and I would wonder who sweeps up these places?" Pia remembers. "Now it is me. It is my responsibility. Although the people are rude to us and pretend not to see us, our city couldn't breathe without our brooms. Everyone would be buried under the basura."

[John Ross, the author of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, will be walking the garbage-strewn streets of San Francisco for the next weeks.]

The Rag Blog

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