Recent Stories
Recently, I had a travel piece about Mexico’s La Huasteca jungle published in The National.
I also have an essay about my experience reporting on Afro-Mexicans up on The Economist’s More Intelligent Life.
Photo by Alfred Megally
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Tags: afro-mexicans, black mexicans, la huasteca, mexico, oaxaca, travel, veracruz, writing
After Vice’s sensationalist, one-sided documentary on Liberia, I was genuinely surprised to see a new thoughtful and insightful piece on a peculiar Mexican attraction in its Vice Guide to Travel series. The short film profiles El Alberto, where a theme park that simulates the illegal border crossing experience has rejuvenated a tiny, mainly indigenous town. Many migrants have come back, awareness of the dangers of crossing has increased and the number of jobs has grown. The park has already been profiled quite a bit.
The documentary, “Illegal Border Crossing Park,” is co-produced by the electric Gabriella Gomez-Mont, the founder of Mexico City’s creative think tank Tóxico Cultura and whom I recently interviewed here.
Photo via the New York Times
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Tags: border, documentaries, illegal immigration, mexico, parque ecoalberto, united states, vice
Latin Lovers
Anita Tijoux has been on the rise for a number of years now, since her move to Chile after being raised in France. (She was born to a French mother and a Chilean father who was in political exile in France during Pinochet’s dictatorship.) Her hip hop infused with Latin sounds is startlingly catchy. Listen to “Partir de cero” (“From Scratch”) below from her just released disc 1977.
And as a bonus, a charming video from a woman with whom Tijoux collaborates often, popular Mexican singer Julieta Venegas. Below is “Limon y Sal” from an MTV Unplugged performance:
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Tags: anita tijoux, chile, france, hip-hop, julieta venegas, latin music, mexico, music, rap
Exodus’s First Year
A year ago, I wrote my first post on Exodus, about adjusting both to life as a foreigner in Mexico and to the fact that Barack Obama was elected president.
As I now prepare to leave Mexico in the coming months and explore more parts of the world, I look forward to sharing the last of my Mexico stories and to another year running Exodus. I am also working on my first book. Check out the new page “the book” for more information on that project …
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Tags: africa, barack obama, blogging, expatriates, journalism, latin america, mexico, travel
South Africa’s Street Style
There was such a stir on the web and among Exodus’s readers about the stylish gentleman of the Congo that I wanted to give a shout out to the photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko and her portraits of street style in South Africa.
Veleko reminds me of The Sartorialist in some ways, but without the superficial and recycled gloss of designer labels. This is original, creative style at it’s best, in one of the world’s most alive and hippest cities: Johannesburg. I was blown away by the outfits I saw on the streets of that town, and Veleko manages to capture the daily sidewalk fashion show in her photos.
Go here for more of her photography.
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Tags: africa, fashion, Nontsikelelo Veleko, photography, south africa, style, the sartorialist
Making Mexican History at MOMA
For the first time since the late, famed painter and muralist Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist has a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: the widely praised and enthralling Gabriel Orozco. Orozco’s mid-career retrospective examines two decades of Orozco’s work in an exhibition of some 80 pieces, revealing how the artist jumps among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting and focuses on everyday, little-noticed objects. Since the early 1990s, Orozco has become one of the leading artists of his generation because of innovative works like La D.S. and Ping Pond Table.
Despite the abundance of acclaimed contemporary Mexican art, the most popular art auction sellers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s remain Rivera, Frida Kahlo and other deceased muralists, as I say in this story for Newsweek. But Orozco’s show will be on view through March 1, 2010.
Photo via Hemispheres Magazine
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Tags: art, contemporary art, diego rivera, gabriel orozco, mexican art, mexico, mexico city, moma
The New Berlin Wall?
The wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is the new Berlin Wall. It offends both Mexicans and Americans. It comforts some Americans. And it keeps expanding. Some $2.4 billion has been spent since 2005 on a still-unfinished project to erect more than 600 miles of new fence along the US-Mexico border. Yet the new fencing has been breached more than 3,000 times, costing $1,300 for the average repair.
Now controversy is heating up over the border wall again. Besides the inflating costs, the wall is destroying countless ecosystems, as the borderlands contain federally protected areas and plants and animals found nowhere else on earth. Environmental groups and laws are holding up construction, much to conservatives’ displeasure. Fences built along the U.S.-Mexico border are threatening wildlife species and the ground pollution it is creating is catastrophic. Technologically, the construction of the fence is a structural nightmare that continues to divide human families. Will this wall ever end?
Happy holidays, folks.
*Edit: Comments have been closed, the volume was getting out of control. Thanks for reading and contributing, though.
Photo via National Geographic
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Tags: border wall, environment, immigration, mexico, technology, united states, wildlife, xenophobia
The fiestas of Mexico’s drug lords are infamously decadent and infamously clandestine. Mexico’s most wanted narcotics king, El Chapo Guzman, still parties like he didn’t hide himself in a laundry cart and break out of prison just a few years ago.
But now a potentially innocent civilian may have gotten caught in the indulgent frenzy of the drug-rich. Popular norteño accordionist and songwriter Ramon Ayala was detained by the Mexican military after being discovered as the headline performer at a party held by the Beltran Leyva cartel, whose leader Arturo Beltran Leyva was recently killed by the army. Ayala claims to not have known he was being hired by the cartel (or he may been coerced into the gig by threats of violence — who says no to the drug cartels?), and Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission is now on the case to prevent any abuses to the Grammy Award-winning musician.
Photo of Ayala’s house in Hidalgo, Texas via Jess Merrill Photography
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Tags: beltran levya, drug cartels, drug war, mexico, ramon ayala
God Bless South African Rock
To continue the series of music-related posts, feast your ears on Blk Jks, a South African rock band that hails from the chaotic metropolis that is Johannesburg. I generally love South African music across genres because it all seems to be united by intensely deep, pulsing, contagious rhythms that always make me realize when I hear it, “That’s South African music.” Music that spills from the soul. Their sound is this baffling mix of South African traditional hymns, pure indie rock and township kwaito. In other words, it can result in some musical magic. (The Rolling Stone loves them, too). See what I mean with “Molalatladi” below.
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Tags: blk jks, indie rock, kwaito, music, south africa
Hey, it’s the Plastiscines, another girl-fronted band that I’m infatuated with lately. These kids are French, punky and kind of defiant, as you can see with this song “Bitch.” Turn it up loud, friends …
Photo by Rebecca Thomas
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Tags: france, music, plastiscines, punk
Recent Entries
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- The Vice Guide to Crossing the U.S.-Mexico Border
- Latin Lovers
- Exodus’s First Year
- South Africa’s Street Style
- Making Mexican History at MOMA
- The New Berlin Wall?
- The Lives of the Rich and Infamous
- God Bless South African Rock
- Try Spelling “Plastiscines” Correctly
- Mexico, Immigrants and Refugees
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