Real big heads: Museo de Antropologia de Xalapa

It had been a long day. We were tired. I thought I knew about big heads. I was wrong. Though we had only 45 minutes in the Museo de Antropologia de Xalapa, it would have been a great loss to miss this place. (Do click on the link; the website is exceptionally good.)

It seems that from roughly 1200 to 900 BCE, a people called the Olmec lived and thrived in what are now the Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. And they thought big.






This picture gives a sense of scale. It is also the only one of six of these at this museum that some scholars think may have represented a woman. Our group of four uppity women came to that conclusion without prompting from the label.




Some Afro-centrist historians have pointed out that the features on these Gulf of Mexico colossi suggest an African origin; other anthropologists wonder if there was a Chinese influence. Quien sabe?




He's certainly fierce looking. When I get a chance, I'll have to read some of the literature about the lost civilization that produced these enormous figures. A long Wikipedia entry on the Olmec might provide a starting place.

Mercado Coyoacan

The neighborhood of Coyoacan is a bit hip and trendy, a meeting of classic older Mexico City residences with the nearby Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) whose 300,000 tuition-free (!) scholars support a multitude of bookstores and cafes. Because the University is not in session now, the streets are not so full of students -- the break is why we're here, enjoying the vacation of our friend, a University instructor. But Coyoacan's market is simply a market -- a feast of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, taco stands, and sundries for daily life.


Need a pineapple?


Or a few chiles?


Or perhaps some cheese from Oaxaca?


There's no doubt about the freshness of these fellows...


...waiting for purchase under a proper shrine.


Hungry? Take your choice of fillings at the taco stand.


Are the cares of life getting you down? Stop by the apothecary for an aerosol blessing!

Two Mexican museums

Mexico City is a city of museums. I've only been to two so far and they were both wonderful, as well as places where photography is somewhat restricted. Seeing here demands a cultural leap for me -- I'm happy to attempt the acrobatics. Here are few images


The art of Frida Kahlo is well known in the United States, thanks in part to the work of Galleria de La Raza. Her house is a museum cum shrine to the crippled painter. Here in Mexico, she's the subject of what our friends call "Frida-mania."


Crowds lined up to see newly opened papers and drawings by Frida and her partner, the great muralist Diego Rivera.


The show banner is a self-portrait revealing the artist in the frightening harness she wore to enable her to straighten a broken back.


The Museo del Estanquillo in the historic area of the city showcases an eclectic mix of art, photographs and cartoons out of Mexico's past and present. Carlos Monsivais, one of Mexico's most creative leftist intellectuals, has put his political and esthetic sensibilities up for public viewing. He's clearly been a wonderful patron and friend to some of Mexico's most unruly artists. The museum is a gem.


This Rius cartoon says something easy for a U.S. audience to understand in the age of Fox News: "He's an intellectual."

Mexico City scenes

(I am once again in an old, sophisticated culture where I know next to nothing. What follows are some superficial tourist scenes from Mexico City. Perhaps in the future I will write more complex things about this country and the looming shadow of my own, but for now, here are pictures from two days sightseeing with our Mexican friends.)


The "Angel of Independence," Mexico's national monument, coexists with the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank Corporation, as we all do.


Mexico City is unimaginably populous (23 million people) and traffic impacted, but not humanly dense, not crushed by the sense that people are crammed in every cranny, the way I have felt in Manhattan -- or Lima. We dealt with the traffic by riding the tourist bus.


Locals deal with us by gawking at the tourists. Mexico City has an historic center whose buildings date from the 17th and 18th century colonial era, a lay out and many grand monuments from its 19th century hey-day, and every artifact of modernity side by side. The city I know of which it reminds me the most is Washington, DC -- but older and more subtle.


This is a city proudly filled with public art. Murals by Diego Rivera line the halls of the Palacio Nacional. Whether contemporary scenes or historical, Rivera's murals always show the human labor of that creates our world. Here, women workers in pre-conquest times.


Many less edifying 19th and 20th century monumental sculptures line the streets. Tastes change. Here, Benito Juarez.


You have to love a city that boasts a fountain and statuary in honor of the nationalization of the oil industry.


You have to love a city where tourist police look like this.


This is the old cathedral and the Zocalo, the grand plaza where enormous popular political rallies take place -- and where over 14,000 people recently choose to stand naked as an art event!


Since this is Mexico, there is politics: this banner condemning the corruption of the Senate was draped on the Avenue Reforma by peasants protesting theft of their land by the wealthy. This is a land where the class struggle cannot be hidden out of sight...


...and the new stock exchange building looms over the street...


... while gold covers cathedral walls.


But what's not love in a place where university students (these are studying economics) parade about in pseudo-medieval dress singing for crowds?


The economic boys were thoroughly upstaged by the boys from the town band of Tlahuaco.

On the road again...

Don't know whether I'll be able to post for the next 10 days. Will try.

Meanwhile, enjoy.



Spotted on Undercover Black Man.

Activists arrested at Kelly-Moore site

The week of actions to demand affordable family housing and space for small businesses at the corner of Cesar Chavez and Mission in San Francisco continued today with thirteen arrests of protesters who tried to set up camp inside the chain link fence surrounding the vacant property. For more on the underlying issues, read this entry.


Around 11 am, marchers trooped in from the Day Laborer Center down the street -- I was told the SFPD had roughed up a couple of guys down there. The crowd was loud and insistent.


A solitary security guard got out of his car and ambled toward the crowd -- just in time to hear the people pictured above charging in from the other end of the lot! Despite the uniform, this guy is not an SFPD officer. He's a member of the Patrol Special Police, a private force paid for by business owners.


Protesters set up tents.


And explained themselves to KTVU Channel 2.


Pretty soon a squad of police turn up to reclaim the fenced parking lot, valuable private property.


For a few minutes, everyone waits for the order to "take them away."




And then the cops move in. There goes Michelle Foy of the Center for Political Education.


And Renee Saucedo of La Raza Centro Legal.


And the Rev. Brenda Vaca, a United Methodist minister to the Latino community.


Karl Kramer stands straight for his mug shot.

By noon this action was over.

The Patrol Special officer worried that he'd lost his job -- he certainly couldn't hold the lot by himself.

Community activists insist "another project is possible" at the Kelly-Moore site and urge as many people as possible to attend the Board of Supervisors meeting on July 17 to demand affordable housing!

A migration and its consequences

Fill in the blanks -- go ahead, try it:

News of high paying jobs up in _____________ shot through every portion of _____________, carried from town to town, farm to farm, by labor recruiters, ... newspapers, word of mouth.... So they came ... The vast majority were working people, sharecroppers, lumber-camp hands, and maids. But they were looking for ... the promise of opportunity, the chance for something better. "I was reading the paper," remembered one migrant, "and it say where plumbers were making [good wages] and brick layers and plasterers too. ... Well that's more than I ever made in a regular job.... So I know I could make big money in _____________."

Most migrants didn't make those fabulous tradesmen's wages. [But] by _____________ standards, ... typical _____________ wages were nothing short of spectacular. ... No wonder _____________'s _____________ population shot up at an extraordinary rate....

Mexicans flooding across the U.S. border after NAFTA killed the farms at home, desparate to take any low wage job?

No. The first blank refers to Detroit, the home of the mushrooming auto industry in the 1920s. The migrants were African Americans from the U.S. South, flooding north for better wages.

No strangers to living in a white supremacist society, the migrants found themselves in a place where racist social structures presented new forms, dangers, and opportunities. Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age is a vivid, absorbing, horrifying and very human story of one of the clashes created by these new circumstances.

Like Boyle, I'll describe the story using the language of the period. A white man was killed by shots fired by Negroes. Detroit boiled with the passions unleashed by the case. People and socials forces mixed in unlikely combinations. Some of the characters included:

• a proud, but somewhat timid, Negro doctor who had made the hard climb out of Southern poverty to professional success;

• his Northern, middle class Negro wife who had grown up comfortably in white surroundings in a city not yet feeling overrun by Negro migrants to the factories;

• a violent white working class mob, determined not to lose the shred of privilege conferred by living in an all white neighborhood;

• Klu Klux Klan demagogues who saw the arrival of the Negro migrants as an opportunity to inflame hatreds;

• white ethnic politicians who hoped to ally with the Negro migrants to overthrow the entrenched WASP upper class;

• ambitious, entrepreneurial Negro activists who saw in the murder case a chance to raise funds to put the NAACP on a solid footing;

• and the aging celebrity lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who made of the case an occasion to star once more in his own drama of righteous combat against injustice.

Simply, this is a terrific, griping story that gets to the guts of how this country, in one place and time, worked out -- but not through -- very American racial contradictions. Highly recommended.


African American migrants. Photo from an exhibit at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. The Buffalo institution shows the photo by permission of the Library of Congress.

Lest we confuse ourselves ...

U.S. soldiers resting during hunt for captured comrades in May, 2007. AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo

Amid Democratic muttering about how Congress might now be able to inhibit Bush's surge and the New York Times finally seeing the light, it would be possible to believe the U.S. is in charge of its own fate in Iraq. Silly of us.

Lots of indicators suggest that withdrawal from Iraq will happen, whether planned now or precipitous, bloody and humiliating.

• Item: the war is now costing $10 billion a month -- $2 billion more for Afghanistan. This country is a rich, but there are limits.

• Item: the Broken Army clock. That's the "service timeline for an exhausted force. ... According to the Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008."

• Item: meanwhile, U.S. forces come ever closer to being thrown out. Now they are using transport aircraft to carry water to keep the GIs supplied. That's got to amount to an admission they can't safely drive the roads. The Green Zone is often out of gas. Bridges keep getting blown up.

A recipe for a rout? I really feel for soldiers who thought they were defending their country only to be sent off to die for neocons' imperial dreams.

"Another project is possible..."

San Francisco Mission District housing activists rallied today on the windswept corner of Cesar Chavez and Mission streets in front of the fenced parking lot of the former Kelly-Moore Paint store. A for-profit developer has won approval from the city Planning Commission to build a Walgreens and market rate ($500,000 plus) condos on the site, along with a few more affordable units. They want the Board of Supervisors, meeting on July 17, to overrule that decision and allow development of affordable housing units on top of small business storefronts and a space for community services such as the Day Laborer Program.


This skirmish is one front in a multi-part battle over the future of San Francisco. A speaker from SEIU retirees nailed what's going on here:

... the urban legend is actually true: Dogs outnumber children in the City by the Bay.

There are an estimated 120,000 dogs in San Francisco, according to the city's Animal Care and Control department. There are anywhere from 108,000 to 113,000 children, according to U.S. census figures from 2000 and 2005.

Dogs dominate in part because it's becoming increasingly impossible for parents to afford to live in San Francisco. ...

SF Chronicle
June17, 2007

Housing activists speak for a picture of community that includes low-wage workers and their families, especially the traditional Latino population of the Mission. The approved plan tells the new story: the units they would build include 30 1-bedrooms, 27-two bedrooms, and 3 3-bedrooms. Nobody is envisioning families here!


Araceli Lara reminds us all that the people can win. "Si, Se Puede!"


Joseph Smooke from the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center pointed dramatically to the building kitty-corner across Cesar Chavez; the Gateway projects there are union-financed affordable housing won ten years ago by a similar community coalition. Then as now, powerful private developers thought to impose upscale values on the 'hood. Plans exist for the alternative project; perhaps political pressure can force the private developer to get on board with them.


A staffer from State Senator Carole Migden's office read a letter in support of affordable housing. The Senator is in a hot primary against Assemblyman Mark Leno. These people should have to run in contested elections often -- the competition improves their behavior. Score one for Carole.


A representative of the Day Labor Program roused the small crowd. For many years, immigrant men gathered in front of the paint store here, hoping to pick up casual work from contractors. Many years ago, the Kelly-Moore was around the corner on Valencia. When it moved to the Cesar Chavez-Mission corner, the day laborers came too. They still string out along Cesar Chavez, even though the paint store is long closed.


Nick Pagoulatos spoke for the Mission Anti-Dispacement Coalition (MAC). Ever since the encroaching dotcom boom of the 90s and the Willie Brown era of civic corruption, MAC has worked to keep the Mission community intact. How long a poor, heavily immigrant, and largely Latino community can stave off market forces remains to be seen. The city will be a boring, antiseptic place if the pursuit of gross profits is allowed to drive out the people who give it its character.