America's 4th-Largest City

Tombstone Blues

Another reason sane people may want to avoid the Failed State of Arizona:

A new Arizona law goes into effect Wednesday that will allow guns into Arizona bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

Under the law, backed by the National Rifle Association, the 138,350 people with concealed-weapons permits in Arizona will be allowed to bring their guns into bars and restaurants that haven't posted signs banning them.

...J.P. Nelson, director of the NRA's western region, said people with concealed-weapons permits have the right to protect themselves by bringing guns into bars and restaurants.

"Bad things happen in bars and restaurants," Nelson said. "People want to carry a gun and if the facility owner doesn't have a problem with it, there shouldn't be a problem. If a person starts drinking and gets in a shootout and kills someone, of course they're subject to criminal prosecution."

Because what could possibly go wrong?

A Cabinet That Looks Like Latin America

Governor-elect Pepe Calzada, who takes the reigns of state from Paco Garrido tomorrow, rolled out the first team photo of his soon-to-be-enmeshed-in-scandal cabinet today.



A bit heavy on the Y-chromosomes, but at least he's not afraid to hire Latinos.

Beast of Eden

It's not clear to us why so many convicted pedophiles think fleeing to Mexico is a good idea - Mexico has extradition treaties with a lot of countries, you know - but the UK's Andrew Eden, recently returned home to prison after a three-year vacation in Guadalajara, offers a pretty convincing explanation: he had "always wanted to go to Mexico or Thailand," you see, but then, having been sentenced to jail in the UK, he "had gone earlier than planned because he feared for his safety."

We gotta admit, we're totally buying that one. Unless you really like beaches, we'll take central Mexico over South East Asian weather any day. But then Eden follows up with what might be the least-sympathetic argument ever for fighting extradition:

Eden was arrested in September 2008 but fought extradition. The Manchester Evening News understands he preferred conditions in Mexico where prisoners are said to enjoy conjugal visits.

We're disturbed by the argument of course, but even more so by the fact that, well, he may have a point.

Got Cute If You Want It

The perro makes his triumphant return to the Brooklyn Inn. Conveniently framed for laptop wallpaper.

Dispatch from the Hot Zone

Swine flu deaths in Querétaro (pop. 1.5 million) have now doubled in the past month, to...four. Because victim #4 was a 13-year-old kid, though, we'll save the snark for another day.

Monday Update: Whoops...make it five.

The Other 95%, We Can Take or Leave

Swine flu may hog all the headlines, but it turns out that one in three Mexicans suffers from obesity, and one in seven in an alcoholic. Statistically, this would mean that about 5% of the Mexican population are fat, jolly, adorable drunkards. And we're totally fine with that.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With It. No, Wait...

Wow...

MADRID - A little-known Spanish matador is breaking with a sacred tradition, agreeing to advertise on his cape while slaying bulls and endorse a soft drink that caters to gays.

Matador Joselito Ortega will be plugging a club-scene energy beverage called Gay Up and have those words embroidered into his cape in large red letters.

The "endorsing a soft drink that caters to gays" part is funny, but not all that disturbing - anyone who would get in the ring with a half-ton of angry, lethal beef doesn't have to work very hard to prove his machismo to us. We wouldn't dare laugh at his traditional pink socks, for example. (We admit that the words "GAY UP" in big letters might force a chuckle or two out of us; we're not made of stone.)

But advertising on the cape...is nothing sacred anymore? Once you crack that door open, where does it end? Because from an advertiser's point of view, the cape - which gets put away after the first part of the bullfight - is hardly the most attractive location for an ad.

This Just In

BREAKING: Mexico sets world record for largest chile en nogada. Presidente Calderón declares Wednesday "national day of prayer and thanksgiving." Obama, Benedict XVI, send congratulatory telegrams.

The Carnage Continues

Querétaro, population 1.5 million, suffers its third swine flu death in six months. We don't mean to panic anyone, but its definitely time to panic. Querétaro Airport probably looks like the fall of Saigon right about now.

Rocky Mountain Way

Buena Vista, Colorado, 8:45pm.

Give Us Your Poor, Your Tired, Your Smarter-Than-Average

The anti-immigrant crowd lives in perpetual fear that some how, somewhere, some illegal immigrant is going to get something beneficial, which is why school districts around the country are redoubling their efforts to keep non-citizens out of their schools.

Turns out, this might wind up being in the Mexicans best interests:

75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can't Name the First President of the U.S.

...A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens.

About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.

We're pretty sure that at least one in four Mexican high school students could correctly name George Washington, which would mean that an influx of illegal schoolkids might help some of these districts raise their average test scores. Who knows, some might grow up to be rocket scientists.

Update: The problem apparently runs both ways. America's solution is to build a multi-billion-dollar wall. Mexico's?

The Mexican consulate in El Paso has a pilot program to correct an old problem on the border -- fake birth certificates.

Some Mexican parents of US-born children used fake Mexican birth certificates so their children could live and attend school in Mexico, too. The pilot program includes free legal services.

"That means the people can do it without any kind of fear, any kind of problem and they will be able to correct the situation," said Roberto Rodriguez Hernandez, Mexican consul general, El Paso.

On a Mission From God

We're in Colorado this week, working for The Man (and not even in the cool part, but rather the ugly, sprawling, Jesus-soaked part). Ordinarily, what we'd do is send a couple of the interns out ahead of us to set up a Temporary Regional Bureau but, well, with the economy and all, etc etc... Posting could be a little light over the next four or five days.


You may want to click some of those long-ignored links over on right, instead. Or just go outside. Get some air. Enjoy the waning days of Summer.

Looks Like They Picked the Wrong Day to Stop Sniffing Glue

Abusing drugs is dangerous, but maybe not quite as dangerous as seeking rehab.

Gunmen have carried out another attack on a drugs rehabilitation centre in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, killing 10 people and injuring two others.

The shooting follows the deaths of 18 people in an attack on a separate rehab centre in the same city this month.

Remember, kids: winners don't do drugs. But quitters are losers, too, just for different reasons.

When the Whip Comes Down

The army appears to be imposing martial law in Querétaro, for reasons we can't quite comprehend, though we imagine it has something to do with preventing the transfer of power from PAN to PRI.

More on this story as it develops.

¡Viva!

Happy Marie Koughan Day, from everyone at Burro Hall.

Wetting Their Beaks

Concheros, in town for the Fiesta de Santa Cruz, get their plumage soaked outside Burro Hall. We don't mean to be insensitive to local traditions, but the drumming makes the perro a little crazy, so viva la lluvia! Rain on the parade!

Eye of the Beholder

If you've been following this blog for a while (and if that's the case, it's time you took a hard look at your life), then we don't need to retell the story of how the Mexican War of Independence kicked off a little ahead of schedule thanks to the efforts of Querétaro's Doña Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez - "La Corregidora," after whom everything in the city is now named, etc, etc etc.

There aren't many portraits of Doña Josefa still around, and those that exist don't portray her as a very handsome woman. But all that's about to change with the discovery of a pencil sketch made in 1803, which has apparently been lying around unnoticed in the state archives. The sketch "could radically change the iconography on one of the most important women in Mexican history."

Typically depicted as a stern, humorless harridan, the new portrait "is thinner, and though her expression is serious, it also has a bit of sweetness and softness to it."

We have to say, we're not seeing it. Grouchy old dame is on the left; sweet, soft, skinny babe is on the right.

Huevos!

We first read this Times review of Inside of a Dog online. (If you're thinking "gift idea," don't bother; ten years is a little late for us to start trying to figure out what goes on in the perro's head.) Because we have the mentality of a 12-year-old, the illustration immediately made us snicker. Then we saw the actual printed-on-dead-trees version. Apparently we weren't the only ones who'd snickered, and some quick-thinking art director changed it from something dogs like to lick to something they like to chase.

Heroes of the Revolution

We've been trying to figure out which part of Norman Borlaug's obituary to excerpt, but you should probably just read the whole thing. Most people don't realize the "green revolution" started in Mexico. Viva!

Five Thousand

Having spent last Friday, September 11, in New York, we missed Mexico's own September 11 milestone, as the Unofficial Drug Gang Killings Body Count officially passed 5,000 for the year! These guys could phone it in for the rest of the year and still shatter 2008's record of 5,600.

And yet, somewhat counterintuitively, when you take the long view, looking back over the past 20 years or so, Mexico's actually been getting safer.

Murder rates in Mexico dropped sharply to about eight per 100,000 residents in the two decades ending in 2007, concluded Fernando Escalante, a researcher at the Colegio de Mexico, a graduate school and think tank. Mexico's murder rate last year was about 10.5 per 100,000, Medina-Mora said.

Mexican homicides declined from 14,520 in 1992 to 8,507 in 2004, Escalante writes in an article published in the magazine Nexos. He admits that the numbers include a certain amount of guesswork. But he criticizes media reports and academic studies that paint Mexico as one of the most violent countries in the hemisphere.

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil and Colombia all have murder rates as much as five times higher than Mexico's, Escalante argues. The overall U.S. murder rate is less than six per 100,000 residents, according to the FBI.

"Mexico: It Used To Be a Lot Worse!" has a nice ring to it.

Meet the Beetles

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is hosting an exhibit next week by Mexican artist Damián Ortega, including this really cool disassembled VW Beetle, which is in our opinion as Mexican as Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo.


As always, readers who have enrolled in the Burro Hall Membership Rewards Program get 15% off the admission fee during selected hours.

Great Moments in Lepidoptery

The Chicago Trib has a run of the mill monarch butterfly story this weekend, but it contains at least one fascinating tidbit. The thing about the butterfly reserve is that it manages to be both an enormously over-marketed tourist trap and one of the most magnificent nature sites in the world. So we were kind of surprised to learn that, as recently as 35 years ago, no one* knew it existed.

Though local inhabitants have always known the monarch butterflies come here to spend the winter, it wasn't until the mid '70s that the area showed up on the international radar. Lepidopterists -- those who study butterflies -- knew monarchs migrated each fall but they didn't know where they went. Spearheading the search was Fred Urquhart, an entomologist living in Toronto, who set up a network of butterfly enthusiasts that over several decades tagged the creatures and reported their findings. Urquhart noted the sightings of tagged butterflies increasingly came from the southern U.S. and northern Mexico, but he couldn't find the winter areas.

Then in 1973 an American living in Mexico City who had read of Urquhart's work wrote to the entomologist when he saw monarchs fall from the sky during a hail storm in the mountains in Michoacan state. At Urquhart's urging, the man searched the area for the wintering sites and found them in 1975. A cover story in the August 1976 issue of National Geographic featuring incredible photos of Monarchs blanketing trees created an international sensation, and it wasn't long before visitors began to show up to see the natural phenomenon.

In the world of 24-hour news, GPS, and the internet, it's amazing to think that people who studies butterflies for a living had no idea where 20 million of them went every year. We would love to have seen the look on the American's face when he came across the reserve for the first time. Even more, we'd love to have seen the blase reaction of the locals. "What...those? They come here every year. Why do you ask?"

*(And yes, we know we're implying that something is "unknown" until the white man "discovers" it. Don't act like you don't know what we mean.)

Last Exit in the New World

We admit we had a moment of confusion yesterday when we heard that David Lida, author of a terrific book about Mexico City called First Stop in the New World, would be speaking at Burro Hall tomorrow at 2PM. "Someone better clean this place up," we said. But what they actually meant is that he'll be at the Brooklyn Book Fair at Borough Hall. Even though it's visible from our window, a mere 50 yards from Burro Hall Norte, we've never been inside, so maybe we'll see you there.

In the Light

Tribute in Light (left), Burro Hall Norte (right).

S-11

In September 2001, we had not yet relocated our offices from New York City to the central highlands of Mexico, so we missed the Mexican reaction to the terrorist attacks. But it provides the opening chapter of a book by the US's Ambassador to Mexico at the time, Jeffrey Davidow: The Bear and the Porcupine (try to guess which one Mexico is).

The terror of September 11, so damaging to the American would, became a window on the Mexican psyche. It did not so much alter the US-Mexican emotional terrain as it cleared it, thinning out the brushwood and revealing the fault lines…

“The initial Mexican reaction to the terror was one of horror. President Fox’s office and other government departments faxed statements of grief. Ordinary citizens, politicians and cabinet ministers called the embassy or friends in the United States to express sympathy. Millions of Mexicans sat stunned and numbed in front of their television sets. They learned of the probable deaths of Mexicans in the World Trade Center, where many worked in the Windows on the World Restaurant. (Much later, the deaths of sixteen Mexicans were confirmed.)

“But quickly the reaction became muddled, degenerating into an unseemly internal political debate that revealed very little trust or understanding, but much ugliness and a harsh insensitivity”

Ah, that's sound like the US_Mexico dynamic we know and love! The problem appears to have started with a statement from Vicente Fox’s straight-talking foreign secretary, Jorge Castañeda, who acknowledged the US’s right to seek revenge for the attacks, and said Mexico should stand with her. “In difficult moments for a country, like those the United States is now facing, friends should not haggle over support,” he said. Anyone who knows Mexico could see where this was heading: Critics on the left immediately screamed that he was giving Uncle Sam “a blank check.”

“[Novelist Carlos] Fuentes argued that the US had brought the attacks on itself by recklessly pushing its own power throughout the world. His laundry list of American sins managed to convey the impression that Osama bin Laden had somehow been spurred to action by Bush’s renunciation of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. He told his countrymen not to act as America’s achinchicles - a wonderful Mexican word meaning “minions and full of the onomatopoeia of clanking prisoners’ chains.”

Commander Codpiece then did his part by giving his famous “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” speech, which somehow got translated in the Mexican press as “we want Mexico to send a lot of troops to die in Afghanistan.” Castañeda, trying to calm the furor, made clear that America didn’t need, and had not asked, for Mexican military help. “And if they did ask,” he added, “we would not give it.” That got picked up in the US press as “Mexico tells US to go fuck self,” though, admittedly, the country was a little to preoccupied to express a lot of outrage.

Of course, it's not like a little token Mexican military aid is completely unprecedented - and, who knows, maybe we'd have wrapped this Afghan adventure up by now. Anyway, Mexicans would have to wait for the next war in order to fight for the red, white and blue.

La Cucaracha

As if riding the hot, crowded New York City subway to your soul-crushing office job wasn't bad enough, the MTA manages to find a way to break your spirit even further.

Life In a Northern Town II

Back in 1991, guns were used as decorative objects in Ciudad Juárez.

"Old pistols, rifles and shotguns that were seen in bygone days now decorate the walls of many Juárez houses, such as these ones belonging to Don René Mascareñas."

El Qaeda

We fuckin' warned you.

My Goodness, My Guinness!

Looks like someone spent their long weekend combing through the Burro Hall archives:

If Guinness World Records ever creates a category for the country most obsessed with being in the Guinness book of world records, Mexico will surely be in the running. ...

Mexicans take their records seriously. Days after the “Thriller” event, mariachi musicians gathered in Guadalajara, where their traditional form of music first began, to beat the record for the most mariachi musicians ever gathered in one place. In all, 549 horn blowers, bassists and violinists turned out in suits and sombreros at the International Mariachi Festival, playing the classics “Cielito Lindo” and “Guadalajara.”

Months earlier, in January, the record-breaking focus was on dessert. Chef Miguel Ángel Quezada and a team of 55 chefs in Mexico City created the world’s largest cheesecake, using almost a ton of cream cheese and yogurt, 551 pounds of sugar and 331 pounds of butter. It took 60 hours to create the two-ton monstrosity, which was chopped up into 20,000 servings.

Mexico also set a kissing record this year, as about 40,000 people locked lips on Valentine’s Day in Mexico City in the Zócalo, which happens to be among the largest city squares in the world. The smoochers beat a British record of 32,648 kissers, which had held since 2007. A few months later, the Mexican government began discouraging people from kissing for fear of spreading swine flu.

Not all of Mexico’s record-breaking attempts go as planned. In January, Mexico’s National Association of Matadors declared that Michel Lagravere, an 11-year-old known as Michelito, had set the record at his age for the most baby bulls killed in a two-hour fight. He brought down six of them.

The New York Times charges $2.00 (27 pesos) at the newsstand, which allows them to keep Floyd Abrams on retainer. But the Burro Hall Legal Dept. has, through years of trial and error, turned the nuisance lawsuit into an art form. We should be able to get through this in record time.

Life in a Northern Town

Mexico loves a good record-breaking performance, but it's hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm for the accomplishments coming out of Juárez this week. The one that got the most attention, of course, was the massacre at a drug rehab clinic which left a city-record-breaking pile of 18 corpses. And just a few days earlier, and with much less fanfare, the city was quietly proclaimed the most violent in the world.

With 130 murders for every 100,000 residents per year on average last year, the city of 1.6 million people is more violent than the Venezuelan capital Caracas, the U.S. city of New Orleans and Colombia’s Medellin. That is according to a study by the Mexican non-profit Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, which presented its report to Mexico’s security minister at a conference this week.

We're not so sure about the methodology here, and we'd certainly rather spend the night in Juárez than, say, Mogadishu, or Kabul, or Baghdad - but, really only if it came down to such a choice. Otherwise, with 307 murders in August alone (yet another record!), we feel pretty comfortable declaring Juárez something like a genuine hell on earth.

Last month, when we were wandering the weekend flea market, we came across a book that seemed more than worth the $2.50: Juárez: The Miracle of the North. Published by the Chihuahua state government in 1991, when the future of this hard-working border city must have seemed boundless, the book is one long piece of inadvertent heartbreak, like a guidebook to Lebanon written in the 1960s, or Havana in the 50s, or a Chamber of Commerce brochure from a Rust Belt city before all the jobs went to places like, well, Juárez.

Shortly after the book was published, NAFTA turned the city into an enormous, low-wage assembly plant for American corporations, and the Colombian drug cartels, their Caribbean transhipment routes having been largely choked off, began moving their product overland through Mexico. If there was any inkling at the time that these changes were coming, the book (written, of course, by the tourist office) manages to ignore it. From time to time this week, we'll be running little excerpts from it:

The zone surrounding Campestre Juárez includes a residential subdivision of great prestige. Founded a quarter century ago, homes in this area east of Cuidad Juárez are subject to strict architectural regulations. One of the best golf courses in the Republic is found nearby. Pictured here is the home of the Zaragoza family, seen on a beautiful spring day.

Sonic Boom

Sweet Jesus with wings! Aeroméxico is about to allow cellphone use on all its flights. Two hundred Mexicans packed together inside an aluminum tube, trying to shout over the noise of the engines and the cacophony of the 199 other passengers doing the same? Did we mention they don't charge for alcohol on these flights, either?

In the US, we usually have the hijacking first, and then we let everyone talk on their cellphones. Mexico, it seems, is opting for the reverse approach.

Another Reason Why All Mexican Films Have to Star Either Gael García Bernal or Diego Luna

Tourism is down in Querétaro, thanks largely to the tanking of the worldwide economy. Fortunately, the state has a crackerjack, award-winning tourism office spending time and resources on promotional videos like this one - "Querétaro in the Voice of a Group of Foreign Friends" - a title that's only slightly less awkward-sounding in Spanish.

Querétaro being perhaps the largest small town in North America, it should be no surprise that we know just about everyone who appears in this video (in fact, full disclosure, we were asked to appear ourselves), so we'd like to make clear that the interviewees are in no way responsible for the fact that this is without a doubt the worst video we have ever seen in our entire lives.

Clocking in at just under six minutes, it manages to feel longer than Shoah and about as uplifting. We couldn't hear very much of it because they apparently opted not to use a microphone, and then put annoying music over the few words that were intelligible. (From the snippets we could hear, Querétaro is a nice place to take a walk.) Also, the traditional "try to use good sound bites" approach has been so flagrantly jettisoned that we can only assume it was a conscious decision, either to make the film feel "edgier" or the foreigners appear to be inarticulate idiots. (Which they aren't. Well, okay, two of them are. We're not saying anything else.) Because you'll never make it that far, we'll tell you [Spoiler Alert!] that the last full minute is devoted to the interviewer saying thanks and goodbye to all of the interviewees.

We did admire the final shot of the woman walking in the park. An obvious homage to the ending of The Third Man, but it comes too late to save it.

Man With a Plan

This seems pretty well-thought-out.

The Naked and the Dead

They signed the unanimously approved, farcically debated "Life Begins When the Baby Jesus Says So" revision to the state constitution into law this week, provoking a wave of angry, if belated, protests from Querétaro's feminist minority. This sort of thing seems to always feature someone getting naked in public, which every news outlet in town then carries on the front page, so we figured we'd just get in line and run the picture too.

The Diocese of Querétaro then held its own press conference to say how totally super awesome the new law is. Father Saúl Ragoitia Vega kept his clothes on the whole time and still managed to get on the front page, which probably says as much about the position of women in Querétaro as the fact that the law was passed in the first place.

Volaré

There are not a lot of places in the world from which a flight to Mexico City could be considered a relaxing getaway. Mumbai comes to mind. Tokyo. Islamabad. And, apparently, New York.



On a related note, why hasn't Benito Juarez Airport licensed Bennie and the Jets for marketing purposes? Jesus, muchachos, do we have to think of everything for you?