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True Tales From Another Mexico
Chapter 1
The Ballad of Chalino Sanchez: Chalino Sanchez came to Los Angeles in 1977, an immigrant on the run, after killing the man who had raped his sister. Fifteen years later, he was murdered. In between, Chalino Sanchez changed Mexican music. As an immigrant, Chalino supported himself writing corridos, or ballads, on commission for friends and acquaintances he met in cantinas. They were unknown immigrants in L.A., drug smugglers often, who ran in his semi-underworld circles, and just wanted their stories told. He tapped a huge, underground Mexican music industry in L.A. that sells cassettes at swap meets and car washes, and depends on the car stereo as an informal radio. In Chalino's hands, Mexican folk music had become dangerous urban dance music. When he achieved that, he brought thousands of Mexican-American kids back to their parents' country music. This is the story of the late, great Chalino Sanchez.
Chapter 2
The Two Salesman who were lynched in HuejutlaLynching in Huejutla: Two traveling salesmen make an inappropriate remark to some school girls in a working-class neighborhood of a sweltering small town. Twenty-four hours later, they are hacked, beaten and hung from the town bandstand by an enraged mob that accused them of being foot soldiers in a Texas-based ring of child kidnapers who not only trafficked in organs, but had a liver or two in the cab of their truck The story of a lynching.
Chapter 3
Telenovela: No Mexican product has captivated the world in this decade like the telenovela, or soap opera. Telenovelas have paralyzed life in Russia. Philippine women have named babies after Mexican novela stars. In Croatia and Serbia, warring soldiers have called truces so they could all watch the latest episodes. Mexican novelas have been sold in 125 countries outside Latin America. Other eras had Grimm's fairy tales or the feuilletons of Dickens and Balzac. The Mexican telenovela is the fable for the high-tech global village. It offers a romance that in 160 to 240 half-hour episodes begins, falters, blooms, falters again and finally succeeds - a simple formula that has captivated the world in the 1990s. Telenovela diva Veronica Castro was probably the first star of the global economy. The story of how television genre became a propaganda vehicle for the Mexican one-party state, and recently has become an indicator of the country's political and social evolution.
Chapter 4
One of the Jotos de la FogataThe Jotos of La Fogata: The story of a group of young transvestite prostitutes - known as jotos -- in Mazatlan, as they prepare for the oldest drag-queen beauty contest in Mexico. Jotos are found in conspicuous numbers in every city, town, and a good many villages. They are a national caste of court jesters. They can be publicly goosed, rebuked, insulted, tortured and laughed at with impunity. In turn, they are caretakers of the country's darkest secrets. One secret is this: in manly Mexico, drag-queen prostitutes are so in demand they can often charge more and usually do better business than female prostitutes.
Chapter 5
A field worker near San Quintin San Quintin: The story of a once-abandoned patch of coastal desert in Baja California that has become an important stop on the agricultural global economy. The Valley of San Quintin is an amalgam of fetid labor camps, misused pesticides, callous police, child labor and abusive foremen. But it is also the story of how a desert valley has become permanent home to more than 50,000 Oaxacan Indians. They have brought Mexico to the border, with Day of the Dead and Las Posadas celebrations, in a region that once only feted Halloween and Santa Claus. Indian languages now echo through the valley. Meanwhile, full-time work has been an invigorating elixir for these Indians. Many have eagerly doffed traditional customs that kept them poor and benighted back home. They have joined Protestant denominations. Indian children dress in tennis shoes and t-shirts and are enthralled by television and videogames. "We've never thought of Indians as people whose identity is in the future, but rather in the past," says one anthropologist. "San Quintin is one of these places where you can see Indians looking to the future for an identity."
Chapter 6
The Raza Unida TeamZeus and the Oaxaca Hoops: Zeus Garcia was one of the greatest Indian basketball players to come out of Oaxaca. Today he is a bus boy in Santa Monica and coach of the best Oaxacan basketball team in the Los Angeles area. His cause is to protect the purity of basketball in the land of hoop infidel, the NBA. This is the story of one man's obsession with a sport. It is also the story of how basketball -- the most hip- hop 21st Century of sports -- came to be part of the traditional culture of Oaxaca's mountain indians, and how it sustains them and their culture in the United States.
Chapter 7
The Dead Women of Juarez: Since the 1970s, Ciudad Juarez has bet its development on maquiladoras, the assembly plants where thousands of young people, primarily women from rural villages, put together stereos, toys, clothes, blenders and a good many car parts for export across the border. On display in Juarez is the quick and brutal mashing of a rural people into an industrial work force. Thousands of women come to Juarez hoping to be part of it. The maquiladora yanked women from the farm with the offer of their first paycheck; they became Mexico's "Rosie the Riveter." In a matter of a few years, the maquiladora turned time-honored sex roles upside down: women became the family providers, men the caretakers. Women who arrived in Juarez to work in the plants came to see the world, and their place in it, differently. But this same process did not create a new man. Does the killing of dozens of these young women in Juarez have to do with serial murder, or with what the town has become?
Chapter 8
A wall in Zamora, Michoacan. West Side Kansas Street: The story of a hundred yards of Juarez Avenue in the city of Zamora, Michoacan. Two teenagers left this street in 1989, went to L.A., joined the West Side Kansas Street gang. They returned home two years later with nothing but their gang affiliation to show for it. Now West Side Kansas Street territory stretches out of Los Angeles to include those 100 yards in Zamora. Los Angeles is Mexico's culture factory, a force that defines modern life with its image and its product. Mexican Indians centuries ago adopted and transformed part of an incoming foreign culture as a matter of co-existence. In a similar way, Mexican youths today are performing their own syncretism, this time with L.A.'s gang culture. A gangland minor leagues has emerged across Mexico, a pre-NAFTA export mimicking L.A.'s big show. The trappings are the same: baggy pants, tattoos, hand signs, graffiti. "Homeboy" and "cruising" have become English additions to Spanish. What cholos here can't match, they work around: low-rider bicycles of spit-polished chrome instead of low-rider cars. "If you think that there are 2,000 miles between Zamora and Los Angeles, all this is strange to see," says an immigration professor. "But when you think of the fact that there's no cultural distance, then it's not strange at all. The United States, speaking of its culture in the broadest terms, is here in Zamora." This is the story of how West Side Kansas Street came to Zamora, Michoacan.
Chapter 9
The Bronx: The group of Congressmen known as the Bronx, the best representatives of the Mexican one-party state. "The Bronx" are members of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who spend their time not legislating or debating, but heckling and insulting speakers from other parties. Imagine a Greek tragedy with a chorus of pro wrestlers and fraternity brothers and you have a good idea of the Mexican Congress with the Bronx in the house. On most of the gripping questions facing the nation, the Bronx can be counted on to point out, for instance, that a speaker is a "Clown!" or a "Fatso!," a "Baldy!," an "Ox!" To the overweight opposition congresswoman who threatens a hunger strike, "Don't let us stop you." The Bronx are shock troops the ruling party leaders use against opponents and critics. This is the story of how and why the Bronx came into existence.
Chapter 10
Voting in Nueva JerusalenLeaving Nueva Jerusalen: Now 20 years old, Nueva Jerusalen is a theocratic village with its own street gang, governed by an ex-communicated Catholic priest who believes that Pope Paul VI is alive and being held hostage in the basement of the Vatican. But more than that, Nueva Jerusalen is also a theocratic community that always votes for the PRI. Its leaders are told by the Virgin, and Mexico's most beloved president, the late General Lazaro Cardenas, that to vote for any other party is a sin. This is why government authorities allow it to be an island where the Mexican Constitution doesn't apply: where teenagers are jailed for talking to the opposite sex; where the community's seer can live free despite accusations of rape and child molestation. The story of how Nueva Jerusalen played its political cards right and grew to become a state within a state. It is also the story of the Villasenor family, the cult's political protectors. The Villasenores were the peasant kings of Turicato, who were once peons on a sugar-cane hacienda. Using iron will, impetuous violence, the pilgrims of Nueva Jerusalen, and the political system, the Villasenores rose from the dirt to own that hacienda. Then their empire collapsed in a hail of political murder that echoed across the Turicato valley and left a legacy that, years later, was still being felt.
Chapter 11
A bust of Jesus Malverde Jesus Malverde: In the state of Sinaloa, on Mexico's Pacific Coast, legend has it that Jesus Malverde was a bandit hero at the turn of the century. He lived outside the law, but was loved by common people. They say the government hung him. Since then, thousands of poor people in Sinaloa, Northwest Mexico and now in the United States have adopted him as their saint. For them he works miracles. Sinaloa being Mexico's Medellin, in the last 20 years Malverde has become venerated by drug smugglers, most of whom come from the region's poorest families. Jesus Malverde has become the "Narcosaint." Drug smugglers pray to him and ask him for favors and protection the way other Mexicans turn to the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Chapter 12
Tepito: Mexico's Hell's Kitchen. Tepito is Mexico's central black market and Mexico City's thrift store and recycling center and sets prices nationally on a number of consumer goods. Tepito has been Mexico's crucible for the formation of a pure capitalist ethic. Tepitenos were urban artisans, who took the city's junk, repaired it and resold it. When Mexico's economy was run by the state with high tariffs on legally imported consumer goods, Tepitenos were guerrilla free-traders. They got rich selling their countrymen the illegal merchandise they craved. As tariffs have fallen and the market for black-market merchandise dwindled, Tepitenos have found that there's only one thing that will generate the kinds of profits they're now used to. So Tepito has become Mexico's cocaine mart. The story of the transformation of a neighborhood.
Chapter 13
A typical day in Tarimoro The Last Valiente: Aristeo Prado was a wild man. For years, they say, he killed and robbed and went to prison. They still talk about him in the valley of Jaripo, in northcentral Michoacan. Like a gunfighter in some western, he would bring Jaripo to a halt. Parties would stop. Shopowners would lock up. Parents would yank children indoors. He was known as a valiente - a brave and wild man. He escaped from two jails. They say he was released early from another prison for saving the life of the prison comandante by strangling a snake. When he got out, Aristeo went to the United States for a few years. He returned to his village a changed man. He was calmer, wanting to live in peace. But that was impossible. His death served as a historical marker for the people of his village, Tarimoro. Tarimoro, like Aristeo, was a lawless place. Its people began emigrating soon after his death, to work the fields near Merced, California. And as they emigrated, Tarimoro, too, changed. Violence subsided. The story of a man - a legend, the last valiente - and of his village, and how they both changed.
Chapter 14
A typical "La Michoacana" storeThe Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo: In 1946, Ignacio Alcazar, a homeless waif from the village of Tocumbo, Michoacan, established an ice cream shop in downtown Mexico City. That shop he started is the most successful small-business idea in Mexico in the last half century, known across the country as "La Michoacana." More than 10,000 Michoacana outlets exist around Mexico, most of them owned by people from his village of Tocumbo. Mexico City has more than 1,000 Michoacana outlets. No town with more than 1,000 residents is without one. Only Pemex, the state oil monopoly, has penetrated the country so completely. Tocumbo is "the wealthiest pueblo in Mexico," in the words of one historian. This is the story of how illiterate rancheros found a way to prosper without having to leave Mexico for the United States.
Chapter 15
Nuevo ChupicuaroNuevo Chupicuaro: Bonifacio Caballero left Nuevo Chupicuaro in the mid-1960s to work in the fields of California. He returned home a short while later to build the village's first two-story house. Before too long, the rest of his friends and neighbors, emigrants all, were building the same. Bonifacio Caballero, along with most of Nuevo Chupicuaro, spent a lifetime working in a foreign land, always planning one day to return home. They created the American Dream not in the U.S., but in their Mexican village. Across emigrant Mexico the story is the same. Villages have been developed with two-storey homes of marble floors, satellite dishes, and two-car garages. Yet they are occupied only in December or January. The rest of the year hundreds of thousands of these handsome houses stand vacant across Mexico, as their owners landscape yards in Orange County, run valet parking in Chicago, and pick tobacco in North Carolina. The story of how one village came to be that way.
Chapter 16
La Loba during a speech for the July 2nd electionsAfterword - July 2, Another Mexico Emerges: Vicente Fox's election as president was a victory for the future. It reaffirmed the other Mexico - the dynamic, energetic, and daring Mexico. Election night in Mexico City … a visit to the Yucatan and Governor Victor Cervera, who used to washing machines and bicycles to woo voters … Guadalupe Buendia - La Loba - who tried strippers … a trip through PRI-land and conversations with the vanquished … the cathedral plaza project in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas and what the victory of Another Mexico means for Mexico.
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