Día De los Muertos Border Display at Mexicali Border Wall 2012

Mexico's Narco Polo Shirt Fashion Craze

AP/MSNBC
By MARK STEVENSON
updated 54 minutes ago

MEXICO CITY — "Narco Polo" is the new fashion trend sweeping lower-class neighborhoods in Mexico, inspired by seven high-ranking drug traffickers who were arrested over a three-month stretch wearing open-neck, short-sleeved jerseys with the familiar horseman-with-a-stick emblem.

The polo shirts are becoming ubiquitous in street vendors' stalls from the drug-war-ravaged state of Tamaulipas to the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, Sinaloa.

Demand is so high that a Mexico City street vendor named Felipe stocks several colors, and names them after the drug lord who was wearing that color at the time of his arrest.

"This is the 'J.J'," he says, pointing to a blue one, "and this is 'La Barbie,'" indicating a green number. That was a reference to Jose Jorge ("J.J.") Balderas, who allegedly dealt drugs and shot soccer star Salvador Cabanas in the head, and to U.S.-born Edgar Valdez Villarreal, "La Barbie."

Despite their Ralph Lauren labels, the shirts on sale on Mexico City streets for 160 pesos ($13.50) are clearly pirated goods, sold by unlicensed vendors like Felipe who don't want their full names used for fear of attracting police attention.

read the full post HERE.

Mexican ruling party proposes prison time for drug ballad singers

Canadian Press

Mexican ruling party proposes prison time for drug ballad singers

By Catherine E. Shoichet (CP) – 4 days ago

MEXICO CITY — A new proposal from Mexico's ruling party could send musicians to prison for performing songs that glorify drug trafficking.

The law would bring prison sentences of up to three years for people who perform or produce songs or movies glamorizing criminals. "Society sees drug ballads as nice, pleasant, inconsequential and harmless, but they are the opposite," National Action Party lawmaker Oscar Martin Arce told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The ballads, known as "narcocorridos," often describe drug trafficking and violence, and are popular among some norteno bands. After some killings, gangs pipe narcocorridos into police radio scanners, along with threatening messages.

Martin said his party's proposal, presented before Congress on Wednesday, also takes aim at low-budget movies praising drug lords. It was unclear when lawmakers would vote on it.

"We cannot accept it as normal. We cannot exalt these people because they themselves are distributing these materials among youths to lead them into a lifestyle where the bad guy wins," he said.

Martin said the proposal's intention is not to limit free expression, but to stop such performances from inciting crimes.

But Elijah Wald, author of the book, "Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas," said politicians are attempting to censor artists rather than attacking Mexico's real problems.

On his Web site, Wald has posted descriptions of dozens of past efforts to stop the songs, including radio broadcast bans and politicians' proposals.

"It is very hard to stop the drug trafficking," he said. "It is very easy to get your name in the papers by attacking famous musicians."

The norteno band Los Tigres del Norte cancelled their planned appearance at an awards ceremony at a government-owned auditorium in October after organizers allegedly asked the group not to perform their latest drug ballad.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a nationwide crackdown on drug cartels in late 2006, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police across Mexico.

Even performers who don't sing drug ballads have been caught up in recent raids.

In December Mexican authorities arrested Latin Grammy winner Ramon Ayala at a drug cartel's party in a gated community of mansions outside the central mountain town of Tepoztlan.

Ayala's attorney has said the accordionist and his band, Los Bravos del Norte, did not know their clients were suspected members of the Beltran Leyva cartel.

.....

Read the full article HERE.

Associated Press Writer Carlos Rodriguez contributed to this report.

Muslim-Hindu punk rock bands in America

AP/Yahoo

Muslim-Hindu punk rock bands part of new movement
By RUSSELL CONTRERAS, Associated Press Writer Russell Contreras, Associated Press Writer 1 min ago

WAYLAND, Mass. – Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement — cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings — 25-year-old Arjun Ray is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani-American bandmates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, The Kominas, is trying to record a punk rock version of the classic Bollywood song, "Choli Ke Peeche" (Behind the Blouse).

"Yeah," said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band's guitarists, "there are a lot of contradictions going on here."

Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, The Kominas have helped launched a small, but growing, South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants and drawing scorn from some traditional Muslims who say their political, hard-edged music is "haraam," or forbidden.

The movement, an anti-establishment subculture borne of religiously conservative communities, is the subject of two new films and a hot topic on social-networking sites.

The artists say they are just trying to reconcile issues such as life in America, women's rights and homosexuality with Islam and old East vs. West cultural clashes.

"This is one way to deal with my identity as an Arab-American," said Marwan Kamel, the 24-year-old lead guitarist in Chicago-based Al-Thawra. "With this music, I can express this confusion."

The movement's birth is often credited to the novel "The Taqwacore," by Michael Muhammad Knight, a Rochester, N.Y.-raised writer who converted to Islam.

Knight coined the book's title from the Arabic word "Taqwa," which means piety or God-fearing, and the word hardcore. The 2003 book portrayed an imagined world of living-on-the-edge Muslim punk rockers and influenced real-life South Asians to form their own bands.

South Asian and Middle Eastern punk bands soon were popping up across America and communicating with each other via MySpace.

At the time of book's release, Basim Usmani and Khan already were experimenting with punk and building the foundation for The Kominas, which loosely means "scoundrels" in various South Asian languages. When Usmani, now 26, came across the book, he was writing songs and sporting a mohawk — just like the punk rocker on the novel's cover.

Usmani contacted Knight, who agreed to buy a bus on eBay for $2,000 to help launch the nation's first "Muslim punk rock tour" in 2007. Kamel, the son of a Syrian father and Polish mother, bought a one-way ticket to Boston to join the tour, and Canadian drag-queen singer Sena Hussain met up with them along the way.

The musicians performed at various venues but were notably kicked off stage during an open mic performance at the Islamic Society of North America convention in Chicago. Traditional Muslims at the convention decried the electric guitar-based music as un-Islamic while others were upset a woman dared sing on stage. The episode was documented by Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed in his new documentary "Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam."

"These guys are not prophetizing or preaching anything specific about Islam," said Majeed, whose film is set for release in the United States in 2010. "They just happen to be young and Muslim, and they write songs and do art that expresses that idea."

Imam Talal Eid, executive director of the Islamic Institute of Boston, said some traditional Muslims may object to such music because they focus on its sexual attraction rather than its use for spiritual enjoyment. "But I think we can come up with a moderate opinion that distinguished what is forbidden from what is not," said Eid. "It's a new issue among Muslims."

The musical style of each group varies. Some songs on The Kominas' album "Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay" lean toward the humorous and ironic, including "Suicide Bomb the Gap." In their song "Sharia Law in the USA," the lyrics mock the portrayal of Islamists: "I am an Islamist/I am the anti-Christ/most squares can't make a most-wanted list/but my-my how I stay in style." Their sound mixes hard-edged punk, ska and funk.

Meanwhile, Al-Thawra sings about political events in the Middle East with songs like "Gaza: Choking on the Smoke of Dreams." Their music is closer to heavy metal.

Other bands include the Washington, D.C.-based Sarmust and the Texas group Vote Hezbollah.

Like most punk groups, bands produce their own albums and sell them at shows and online.

.....

The groups have toured since that first Taqwacore trip, playing in small clubs, in basements at parties and in Hispanic cultural centers. Typically, The Kominas and Al-Thawra say they play in front of 50 to 80 people.

The bands have noticed Latino punks getting into their music. Al-Thawra recently picked up a guitarist from Mexico City named Mario Salazar. The cover of Al-Thawra's next album will feature the image of the U.S.-Mexico border fused with the Palestinian-Israeli wall.

Alan Waters, an anthropology professor at University of Massachusetts-Boston, said it should come as no surprise that young Muslim and Hindu immigrants are expressing themselves through rock or that their music would strike a chord with other "disenfranchised" populations in the U.S., such as Latinos and other children of recent immigrants.

"If they're touching or singing about identity, it's going to make a connection," said Waters. "Punk rock is very American, and this is assimilation through a back door."

He called the bands "a good opportunity for stereotype-smashing."

The Kominas, who sing mostly in English, now are trying to break the image they are just a "Muslim punk band," especially since one of their founders, Ray, is Hindu. On their next album, Ray said the band will have songs in Hindi.

.....

Usmani said he grew up as a "nonreligious" Muslim-American so his journey into punk caused few problems, although he admits his family doesn't like the drinking and smoking that pervade the music scene. Khan and Kominas drummer Imran Malik, 25, also said they aren't as observant as their families might like.

"I mean, if you put a sword to us," said Usmani, "one of us might pray."

.....

Read the full story and related links HERE.

Border Patrol requests Mexican music encore (Migra Corridos)

SD UT/WaPo

Border Patrol requests Mexican music encore

By Ashley Surdin

THE WASHINGTON POST

2:00 a.m. March 17, 2009
SAMPLE SONG LYRICS

“Before you cross the border, remember that you can be just as much a man by chickening out and staying.

“Because it's better to keep your life than ending up dead.”

– “Veinte Años” (“20 Years”)

WASHINGTON – To its arsenal of agents, fences and stealthy sensors skirting the nation's southern border, the U.S. Border Patrol may soon add another weapon in the fight against illegal immigration: a follow-up album.

Yes, as in CD. With singers, guitars, accordions.

In what may be among the lesser-known deterrents exercised by the nation's security forces, the Border Patrol is deploying up-tempo Mexican folk songs about tragic border crossings to dissuade would-be illegal immigrants. The agency has paid – how much, it won't say – a Washington-based advertising company to write, record and distribute an album, “Migra Corridos,” to radio stations in Mexico. Its title is intended to mean “songs of the immigrant,” but migras is commonly understood as a code word for Border Patrol in much of Mexico.

The first CD of five songs was recorded in 2006 and distributed over the past two years. Another CD is scheduled to be ready by May. There are also plans for a collection of similarly themed songs with musical styles geared toward would-be illegal immigrants from Central America.

Many stations in Mexico that play the songs and the listeners who request them are seemingly oblivious to who is behind the bouncy ballads of death, dashed dreams and futile attempts at manhood.

“It's pretty slick,” said Jason Ciliberti, a spokesman with the Border Patrol in Washington.

The music is part of the Border Safety Initiative, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's push to squash smuggling. The Border Patrol launched “No Más Cruces en la Frontera,” a campaign aimed at educating communities with potential illegal immigrants about the dangers of crossing.

Illegal immigrants can encounter severe hazards on their journey: professional smugglers and bandits who beat, rob, rape and abandon them; bitingly cold or scorching temperatures; snakes, scorpions; drowning; and death by dehydration or exhaustion.

The slogan, which means both “no more crossings on the border” and “no more crosses on the border,” has relied on newspaper, TV and billboard ads.

The most recent twist on the media blitz is “Migra Corridos,” a brainchild of Elevación, an advertising firm that specializes in targeting the Latino market. Elevación, which had been working on the border campaign, sold the Border Patrol on the idea of songs-as-deterrents.

The five-song album draws on corridos, popular Mexican narrative ballads with roots in Spain's Middle Ages. Re-energized in recent decades by such popular Mexican groups as Los Tigres del Norte, the genre reverberates deeply with Mexican and Mexican-American communities, said Martha Chew Sanchez, the author of “Corridos in Migrant Memory” and professor at St. Lawrence University in New York.

The songs, Sanchez said, humanize the experiences of those communities with tales of love, death, migration, globalization and social and political events. More recently, there has been an explosion in the popularity of narcocorridos – ballads that recount the drug traders, their violent exploits and, often, their deaths.

Among the perils mentioned on “Migra Corridos”: a cousin who dies of dehydration, a mother who is raped and beaten by a child-killing smuggler, one man's suffocation in an airtight tractor-trailer.

“He put me in a trailer

“There I shared my sorrows

“With 40 illegals

“They never told me

“That this was a trip to hell.

– “El Respeto” (“Respect”)

Whatever the subject, the songs can connect with listeners, as long as they tell a compelling narrative, Sanchez said.

“Migra Corridos” lives up to its dance-inducing predecessors, despite its somber stories. The music is peppy, even cheerful.

The songs were distributed to six Mexican states, where, according to Elevación's research, many migrants left for the border: Zacatecas, Michoacan, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco and Chiapas. Elevación contacted stations and asked them to play the songs as part of the border initiative.

“When we approached the Mexican media, we approach it as a humanitarian campaign,” said Pablo Izquierdo, vice president of Elevación. “We didn't tell them who was behind it because consumer research indicated that it wasn't going to be as well-received.”

But, Izquierdo said, there's nothing fake about the songs. “It's all heartfelt, and it's all from the point of view of the people.”

Izquierdo said feedback from the stations was positive and that even though the CDs were not for sale, listeners started requesting the songs.

It is difficult to measure how effective the corridos have been in aiding the government's effort, but the Border Patrol's Ciliberti cited a steady decline in deaths and rescues along the southern border, attributing it to the agency's broader approach to illegal immigration. According to Ciliberti, 492 people died along the southern border in 2005. Last year, 390 deaths were recorded. In 2005, the Border Patrol assisted 2,550 people in distress in that same area. Last year, 1,263 were rescued.

“There's no mention of being punitive in any of these corridos. These are simply about the dangers,” he said.

Olmec giant heads in Mexico damaged by ritual

AP

Olmec giant heads in Mexico damaged by ritual
By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer Mark Stevenson, Associated Press Writer Tue Jan 13, 12:07 am ET

MEXICO CITY – A group performing a ritual poured grape juice, oil and other liquids over four Olmec "colossal head" stone sculptures, badly damaging some of Mexico's most prized archaeological relics, authorities said Monday.

Experts will try to remove the stains from the porous stone using special solvents but warn the treatments could be time-consuming and costly, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement.

Two people were detained for damaging the pre-Hispanic sculptures, which are displayed in the La Venta park in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco, the institute said. It did not give details on the group or what ritual they were trying to perform.

Four of the thick-lipped, glowering carved heads and 19 other Olmec carvings were heavily stained by the suspects on Sunday.

"This act was carried out by persons performing an apparent ritual," the institute said. "As part of the 'ceremony," they poured oil, grape juice, salt water and other substances" over the heads, a tomb, altars and other structures.

The artifacts are displayed in an open-air setting meant to replicate the jungle region in which the Olmec culture flourished starting about 3,200 years ago.

The Olmecs are often referred to as the "mother culture" of the region that later saw the rise of the Mayas and Aztecs, and the colossal stone heads are often considered the most emblematic pieces of their art.

The government news agency Notimex quoted Tabasco Gov. Andres Granier as saying the park would have to be temporarily closed until the statues are restored.

The Aztecs and Mayas daubed ceremonial structures with the blood of human sacrifice victims. But pouring substances like grape juice and oil over statues does not figure in most historical accounts of pre-Hispanic religions.

The institute said the treatments might have to be applied repeatedly and could cost about 300,000 pesos ($21,750).

In a statement, it said that the grape juice "stains any surface almost permanently."

The heads appear to wear helmets and a total of 17 have been unearthed to date in Tabasco and Veracruz state. No two are alike. They range in size from 1.5 to 3.4 meters (5 to 11 feet) and the largest heads have been estimated to weigh between 25 and 55 tons.

The institute said it had filed a criminal complaint with federal prosecutors.

The incident comes amid a growing debate about how to protect Mexico's archaeological artifacts from human intervention. A project to install illumination equipment for a nighttime light show at the famed Teotihuacan pyramids outside of Mexico City has drawn criticism from preservationist groups, who argue the pyramids are being damaged by holes drilled into the stone to anchor the gear.

Tijuana's Caesar's Restaurant: Home of the Caesar Salad

NYT
October 22, 2008
Tijuana Journal
Wary Tourists Toss Aside a Chance to Taste History
By MARC LACEY

TIJUANA, Mexico — Eating salad in Mexico is discouraged by most guide books, citing the potential threat to the digestive tract.

It is true that the water can be problematic south of the border, if it is consumed directly from the tap or used to wash one’s salad fixings. At the same time, fine dining abounds throughout Mexico, white tablecloth affairs with celebrity chefs, mouthwatering menus and fancy water that comes from elegantly shaped bottles.

Although not in that lofty league, there is one eatery with a particularly distinguished history that is relevant to the question of whether one should consume salads in Mexico. Called Caesar’s Restaurant, it sits in the seediest of spots, along Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución, and specializes in salad — Caesar salad, to be exact, which it says was invented in its kitchen in 1924.

Jorge Chávez is the manager of Caesar’s and the keeper of the historical flame. After a waiter whipped up a salad tableside the other day in an elaborate ceremony, Mr. Chávez plunked down to defend his lettuce.

A table full of customers had recently left the premises after taking advantage of Caesar’s two-for-one beer special but not daring to eat the food. One of them had scoffed when a waiter offered her a salad. She made a crack about that being a sure-fire vacation spoiler.

“She has bad information,” Mr. Chávez said when the group was gone. “We’re not using dirty water on our salad. I’d put our salad up against anyone, anywhere.”

He then veered into a bit of history. One day back in 1924, Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who ran a restaurant in what was then an upscale tourist zone in Tijuana, found himself low on provisions but with some hungry friends to feed. As the story goes, he threw what he had — some lettuce, garlic and pieces of bread, among other ingredients — into a bowl and came up with a creation that has lived on ever since.

There are some disagreements over the details of the story. Was it a cook who really came up with it? Did Caesar’s brother, Alex, first throw anchovies into the mix? But there appears to be some support that the Caesar salad was born in Tijuana, or at the very least earned its worldwide reputation here.

None other than Julia Child wrote in one of her cookbooks, “One of my early remembrances of restaurant life was going to Tijuana in 1925 or 1926 with my parents, who were wildly excited that they should finally lunch at Caesar’s Restaurant.”

She recalled Mr. Cardini himself rolling a big cart to her family’s table and throwing some raw eggs into the mix.

Raw egg yolks are still part of the recipe here. Also tossed into the large wooden bowl, which is big enough to bathe a newborn child, are olive oil, ground anchovies, garlic, a dash of mustard and Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan cheese, pepper and white wine mixed with vinegar.

Large romaine lettuce leaves are dunked in the mixture and then laid out on a plate.

Mr. Chávez took pains to point out that each leaf is carefully cut into a diamond shape and then purified with a chemical additive to kill any microbes. The resulting salad, he contends, is not only safe to eat and delicious to eat but, in his view, quintessentially Mexican.

“Some of the ingredients are foreign but the hands that make it are Mexican,” he said. Another key addition are Mexican limes, which are squeezed into the salad dressing to neutralize the strong flavors of the anchovies, garlic and egg yolks. “No flavor dominates,” he said.

The biggest problem these days is that not enough people are digging in. Tourism is in the doldrums in Tijuana, a result of a variety of factors, including too much crime, police harassment and the economic woes up north.

The restaurant has struggled through hard times before. It closed for more than five years in the 1990s, and after it reopened, it installed a topless dance club in the back, which operates in the evening and supplements the paltry restaurant income.

There were only six people eating salads on a recent afternoon. Four of them were local university students who were on a research trip and were eating on the house. The other two were reporting on and photographing the salads for this article.

“You hear so much that’s bad about Tijuana,” Mr. Chávez said. “I want people to know that we have something to be proud of.”

And how is the salad? Well, the guy taking pictures let out a long “mmmmm” as he sampled the sauce. The guy with the pen thought the croutons, which soak up the zesty dressing, were among the best he had sampled anywhere.

Both of them lingered at the table, their stomachs feeling fine.

Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren

One can only imagine the longterm effects.


NYT
[see original post for images and audio supplement]

October 20, 2008
Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren
By MARC LACEY

TIJUANA, Mexico — The little boy, his school uniform neatly pressed and his friends gathered around, held up 10 little fingers, each one representing a dead body he said he saw outside his school one recent morning. He was not finished, though. He put down the 10 fingers and then put up 2 more. Twelve bodies in all.

“They chopped out the tongues,” the boy said, seemingly fascinated by what he saw at the mass-killing scene outside Valentín Gómez Farías Primary School three weeks ago.

“I saw the blood,” offered a classmate, enthusiastically.

“They were tied,” piped in another.

Mexico’s explosion of drug-related violence has caught the attention of the country’s children. Experts say the atrocities that young people are hearing about, and all too frequently witnessing, are hardening them, traumatizing them, filling their heads with images that are hard to shake.

“Unfortunately, with this wave of drug violence, there’s been collateral damage among children,” said Jorge Álvarez Martínez, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who specializes in post-traumatic stress. Such exposure to violence can hinder learning, interrupt sleep and linger for years, he said.

Nowhere is the trauma greater than along the border with the United States, where drug cartels are battling one another for a growing domestic market and the lucrative transit routes north. In Tijuana alone, a wave of gangland killings has left at least 99 people dead since Sept. 26, a death toll that rivals, if not exceeds, that in Baghdad, a war-torn city that is four times as large, over the same period.

Across Mexico, the carnage is impossible to hide, with severed heads and decapitated bodies turning up, sometimes nearly a dozen at a time. There have been more than 3,700 killings related to drugs and organized crime this year, up from about 2,700 last year, the Mexican attorney general’s office said early last week, with Chihuahua the most violent state and the killings continuing in the days since.

Exchanging gruesome stories is nothing new for schoolchildren, who have a way of overstating their brushes with danger. But the 12 tortured, tongueless bodies that were the talk of the playground recently were no exaggeration. In the early hours of Sept. 29, the bodies of 11 men and one woman, bound and partly dressed, were found in an abandoned lot opposite the school.

The headmaster, Miguel Ángel González Tovar, canceled classes soon after the bodies were discovered, but that did not stop some students from getting a glimpse of them and many others from hearing about them.

“There’s no doubt these images affect the children,” said Mr. González, who recently met with government psychologists to plan counseling sessions with the students. “Some of them are very quiet now. Some are asking us, ‘Why did they die?’ ”

And the bodies dumped outside the school are only one of several macabre displays, forcing teachers to compete with the killers for the attention of Mexico’s youth.

Indeed, it is hard to find a student here who does not know some of the gruesome details of recent killings, like the several vats of acid that were found outside a seafood restaurant, containing what the authorities said they believed were human remains. Or the two bodies wrapped in what resembled cellophane that were found near a road sign that said, “Thank you for visiting Tijuana.”

Bodies have been hung from bridges, sliced into pieces, decapitated, burned.

Mr. González’s biggest fear is that the awful scenes playing out across much of Mexico are so common that they will eventually lose their shock value among the young, making killing an expected, even acceptable, part of life.

“They may grow up with this sort of thing being normal,” he said. “They can say, ‘I saw 12! How many did you see?’ You could never have imagined this years ago.”

Youngsters today already know the names of the drug traffickers, not just from the nightly news but also from popular songs that extol them as heroes and from the Internet, where the grisly homicide scenes can often be watched on YouTube.

In Tijuana, the leader of the Arellano Félix drug cartel is Fernando Sánchez Arellano, a nephew of the group’s founders who goes by the nickname the Engineer. The authorities say they believe the outburst of killings here is the work of rival traffickers trying to seize control of his turf.

That explains the note found propped up on the dozen bodies outside the school: “This is what happens to anyone associated with the loudmouth Engineer.”

Mexico’s government has sent soldiers to trouble spots throughout the country to reinforce embattled local law enforcement agencies and in some cases root out corruption in their midst. But the drug traffickers have proved better armed in many cases and hard to contain. They are not just violent but also sadistic in their killing methods, and they seem intent on showing off their latest killings, to young and old alike.

“They are sending some kind of perverse message,” Mr. González speculated on why the 12 bodies were dumped near the front gate of his school. “They want attention, and they know leaving bodies in front of a school has impact. Now we’re worried that at any school at any time a body could turn up.”

This month, just before a high school was letting out, the police were on the scene of another killing, this time a barrel containing the body of a man whose arms and legs had been severed. The body, which had been left near the first-base line of a popular amateur baseball league field not far from the school, was whisked away by the authorities to the overflowing morgue before any students came upon it.

But it is not always possible to keep the drug violence hidden from young people.

In January, for instance, the police and soldiers engaged in a three-hour gun battle with narcotics traffickers from the Arellano Félix cartel in a residential neighborhood of Tijuana, requiring several schools to evacuate their students. Heavily armed police officers carried crying children to safety as other law enforcement officers crept along the sidewalk with guns drawn.

By the time the shooting quieted, six presumed traffickers had been killed.

“It was awful,” said Gloria I. Rico, director of the Garden of Happy Children, a preschool that was forced to evacuate. “Even when it was over and we tried to return to normal, any little sound would make the children jump.”

When a prison riot broke out here in September, and there was another eruption of gunfire, teachers at the preschool tried to distract the youngsters. “We told them they were fireworks,” Ms. Rico said, since independence celebrations had just taken place. “We said, ‘Don’t worry,’ but they were still anxious.”

On Wednesday afternoon, another shootout forced yet another Tijuana school to evacuate. This time it was Secondary School 25 that called off classes midway through the day and quickly emptied its classrooms in a panic. “It’s terrible what’s happening in Tijuana,” said Antonio Ochoa Pastrán, the headmaster. “It’s sad that now even in school children aren’t safe.”

Many children, Ms. Rico said, now associate anyone in uniform with violence, which is not an absurd proposition, not only because they may be fighting the traffickers, but also because many law enforcement officers around the country are on the traffickers’ payroll. “The children see the police and they are scared,” Ms. Rico said. “They fear that there is going to be more shooting.”

And there probably will be, which prompts parents to watch their children more closely than ever.

“You don’t know if he goes out if he’s going to come back,” said Patricia Beltrán, who looked on as her 8-year-old son, Marco Antonio, played near the spot where a killing had taken place, the blood still visible in the dirt.

Such fear is not misplaced, because innocent youngsters have been caught in the cross-fire. In addition, most of the victims are under 30 because the cartels use young gunmen to protect their merchandise and enforce discipline, the authorities say.

And given the extensive and often graphic media coverage of the killings, parents say it is impossible to shield their children psychologically.

“My kids are dreaming about this,” said Laura Leticia Quezada, who has three children at the primary school near where the bodies were dumped. “They watch it on the news, and they know every last detail.”

Jorge Fregoso, a television reporter, spends his days hustling from one homicide scene to another and then rushing back to the studio to put it all on the air. The father of two children, he says he understands the concern of many parents and tries to avoid extremely graphic images.

But at the same time, he said, reporting the awful events presses the authorities to take action and to make the streets safer.

“It’s hard for children not to know what’s going on,” he said. “You can turn off the TV all the time and hide the radio and newspaper. They’re still going to hear the bullets. And they might see a shooting themselves.”

Tavira, Mexican one-handed violinist, dies at 84

AP

Tavira, one-handed violinist, dies at 84

By ALEXANDRA OLSON, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 44 minutes ago

Angel Tavira, a one-handed violinist who dedicated his life to Mexican folk music and won a Cannes Film Festival award for his first movie at age 82, has died. He was 84.

Tavira died of kidney problems Monday in a Mexico City hospital, said Eugenia Montiel, a spokeswoman for Camara Carnal Films, the company that co-produced Tavira's 2005 film "The Violin."

Tavira was born on July 3, 1924, into a family of musicians in the southwestern town of Corralfalso, and started playing the violin at age 6. When he was 13, he lost his right hand while setting off fireworks at a fair. He pursued his music career nonetheless, playing the violin with the bow tied to his stump.

"Being a Tavira meant being a musician," said his cousin Javier Tavira. "It's the family tradition; there were instruments in his grandfather's house. His uncles and cousins helped him work out a way to keep playing."

Mexican director Fernando Vargas made a documentary about Tavira in 2002, and two years later cast him in the fictional film "The Violin." With no previous experience, Tavira won an acting award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for his role as the patriarch of a family of street musicians who support an armed rebel movement.

In the documentary, Tavira describes the frustrations of learning how to play with one arm, saying he often wanted to hurl his violin to the floor.

"Just seeing myself tied to the bow, I only wanted to cry," he said. "I started practicing again just like I was learning to play."

Tavira was committed to traditional calentana music from his native Pacific coast state of Guerrero. He taught music to school children and led the Hermanos Tavira Banda folk band.

At 60, he enrolled in the Music Conservatory of Morelia in Michoacan state, studying musical scoring in the hopes of preserving calentana for future generations.

"He is a man who fought his whole life to keep the music of his region alive, teaching new generations and doing it with only one hand," Vargas said in a statement released by the National Arts Council.

Tavila is survived by his wife and 12 children from two marriages.

___

Associated Press Writer Istra Pacheco contributed to this report.

The Whistle of Death: Researchers re-create pre-Columbian sounds

AP

Researchers re-create pre-Columbian sounds
Noisemakers made of natural materials were integral part of life
By Julie Watson
The Associated Press
updated 9:18 a.m. PT, Sun., June. 29, 2008

MEXICO CITY - Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.

But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.

If death had a sound, this was it.

Roberto Velazquez believes the Aztecs played this mournful wail from the so-called Whistles of Death before they were sacrificed to the gods.

The 66-year-old mechanical engineer has devoted his career to recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, producing hundreds of replicas of whistles, flutes and wind instruments unearthed in Mexico’s ruins.

For years, many archaeologists who uncovered ancient noisemakers dismissed them as toys. Museums relegated them to warehouses. But while most studies and exhibits of ancient cultures focus on how they looked, Velazquez said the noisemakers provide a rare glimpse into how they sounded.

“We’ve been looking at our ancient culture as if they were deaf and mute,” he said. “But I think all of this is tied closely to what they did, how they thought.”

Velazquez is part of a growing field of study that includes archaeologists, musicians and historians. Medical doctors are interested too, believing the Aztecs may have used sound to treat illnesses.

Noisemakers made of clay, turkey feathers, sugar cane, frog skins and other natural materials were an integral part of pre-Columbian life, found at nearly every Mayan site.

The Aztecs sounded the low, foghorn hum of conch shells at the start of ceremonies and possibly during wars to communicate strategies. Hunters likely used animal-shaped ocarinas to produce throaty grunts that lured deer.

The modern-day archaeologists who came up with the term Whistles of Death believe they were meant to help the deceased journey into the underworld, while tribes are said to have emitted terrifying sounds to fend off enemies, much like high-tech crowd-control devices available today.

Experts also believe pre-Columbian tribes used some of the instruments to send the human brain into a dream state and treat certain illnesses. The ancient whistles could guide research into how rhythmic sounds alter heart rates and states of consciousness.

Among Velazquez’s replicas are those that emit a strange cacophony so strong that their frequency nears the maximum range of human hearing.

Chronicles by Spanish priests from the 1500s described the Aztec and Mayan sounds as sad and doleful, although these may have been only what was played in their presence.

“My experience is that at least some pre-Hispanic sounds are more destructive than positive, others are highly trance-evocative,” said Arnd Adje Both, an expert in pre-Hispanic music archaeology who was the first to blow the Whistles of Death found in the Aztec skeleton’s hands. “Surely, sounds were used in all kind of cults, such as sacrificial ones, but also in healing ceremonies.”

Sounds still play an important role in Mexican society. A cow bell announces the arrival of the garbage truck outside Mexico City homes. A trilling, tuneless flute heralds the knife sharpener’s arrival. A whistle emitting cat meows says the lottery ticket seller is here.

But pre-Columbian instruments often end up in a warehouse, Velazquez said, “and I’m talking about museums around the world doing this, not just here.”

That’s changing, said Tomas Barrientos, director of the archaeology department at Del Valle University of Guatemala.

“Ten years ago, nothing was known about this,” he said. “But with the opening up of museum collections and people’s private collections, it’s an area of research that is growing in importance.”

Velazquez meticulously researches each noisemaker before replicating it. He travels across Mexico to examine newly unearthed wind instruments, some dating back to 400 B.C. and shaped like animals or deities. He studies reliefs and scans 500-year-old Spanish chronicles.

But making replicas is only part of the work. Then he has to figure out how to play them. He’ll blow into some holes and plug others, or press the instrument to his lips and flutter his tongue. Sometimes he puts the noisemaker inside his mouth and blows, fluctuating the air from his lungs.

He experimented with one frog-shaped whistle for a year before discovering its inner croak.

Renowned archaeologist Paul Healy, who made an important discovery of Mayan instruments in Belize in the 1980s, said many of the originals still work.

“A couple of these instruments we found were broken, which was great because we could actually see the construction of them, the actual technology of building a sound chamber out of paper-thin clay,” he said.

Still, their exact sounds will likely remain a mystery.

“When you blow into them, you still can get notes from them, so you could figure out what the range was,” Healy said. “But what we don’t have is sheet music to give us a more accurate picture of what it sounded like.”

Mobs in Mexico Attack Fans of Emo Music

NPR Music
Mobs in Mexico Attack Fans of Emo Music
The Bryant Park Project, April 1, 2008
- The word "emo" is short for emotional, and refers to a type of music and an aesthetic. Picture a teenager in skinny black jeans and eyeliner, black-dyed hair in her face, brooding in the corner. She's a member of a new Mexican social tribe, which — alongside metalheads and punks — has made its way from the U.S. to Mexico. But emo, more than the other groups, hasn't made an easy transition.

On March 7 in Queretaro, a city north of Mexico City, a mob descended upon a square where fans of emo music congregate. That night, three teenagers were severely beaten. The following week, fans marching in Mexico City to protest the violence were attacked. Ioan Grillo, a freelance journalist, who wrote about the situation for Time Magazine, says that, while Mexican authorities are working to curb the trend, a swell of anger at so-called "emo" kids is not likely to abate.

Grillo says the first attack was organized over the Internet, when users posted messages that proposed meeting at a downtown plaza favored by emo kids. "'Let's take back the square,'" Grillo says the posts read. "'These people are gay, they wear makeup. They don't have any culture, they're suicidal.'"

Video later posted to YouTube, Grillo says, showed a mob of 800 people gathering to "beat the hell out of these three people." He says disturbing videos were posted with celebratory messages. "This is great, emos are dying," he says one commenter wrote.

Homophobia seems to be one of the two main causes of the violence, Grillo says. "A lot of the messages are very focused on the homophobic element," he says. "When you saw the marches, a lot of people were shouting very clearly the Mexican words or insults people use for gay."

The second issue, he says, is class. "A lot of the emos in Mexico, as in the United States, tend to be middle-class kids," he says. "They're 15 or 16 years old, often going to private schools in Mexico, living in some of the better neighborhoods." He says the other kids — the metalheads, the punks — are coming from tough barrios. "They see these emos as being privileged, as well as being gay."

Another wild card, Grillo says, is a TV personality named Kristoff, who appears on a music channel aimed at young people. "He came on the channel and said that emo culture is worthless," Grillo says. "It's all about teenage girls that fancy the lead singers of bands. ... He was being very aggressive ... saying, 'This is rubbish, garbage, it's worthless culture.'"

Grillo says the authorities have tried to preempt further violence. In Mexico City, he says, they arranged a sit-down between emo fans and fans of other music, in advance of a planned march for tolerance. But when a crowd of 200 people started throwing bottles at the emo fans, police had to assemble in force, he says, which made it even worse

"When you see a group of these emos, marching, protected by a group of riot police, it makes the other kids even more angry," he says. Grillo says it was just a day or two before the march that Kristoff, an influential force in Mexico, first made his damning remarks about emo. "It looked like in a way he was was inciting this violence," Grillo says.

A Women’s Mariachi Band Sings Its Way Through Traditional Male Turf

New York Times
April 1, 2008
A Women’s Mariachi Band Sings Its Way Through Traditional Male Turf
By MIREYA NAVARRO

LOS ANGELES — In “Compañeras,” a documentary about the female mariachi band Reyna de Los Angeles, one of the members explains why she is loath to see mariachi music as work.

“Personally, I don’t want to say: ‘Ugh! I have to go play today,’ ” says Sylvia Hinojosa, a violinist. “I want to say: ‘Yes! I’m playing today! I want to have a break from my school. I am going to have a break from my husband. I’m going to have a break from my house chores. I’m going to get away and be with the girls and play.’ That’s where it is for us.”

That so many of Reyna’s members regard the band more as a passionate hobby than a job may help explain why professional female mariachi bands are not as numerous as their male counterparts. But as portrayed in “Compañeras” — which is to be shown as part of the PBS series “Independent Lens” on April 4 in New York (April 1 in the rest of the country; check local listings) — marriage, motherhood and meager pay also get in the way.

But the operative word here is passionate. The women bring such power and feeling to this 19th-century Mexican tradition that audiences can only assume they know what they’re singing about when they plead for the return of a lover or berate him for his drinking, betrayals and assorted misbehavior.

“I want a man, not a potbellied macho,” goes one song in Reyna’s repertory.

Mariachi bands have commonly featured women as singers, but all-female ensembles like Reyna, formed in 1994 in Los Angeles and believed to be one of the first such mariachi bands north of the border, have been rare. Some of the women in the documentary mention the excuses that have been used to keep women from tarnishing the music’s aura of machismo. A common one, says one member, is that the guitarrón, an acoustic bass, is too heavy for women.

But the music is thriving among both male and female students in high schools and colleges around the country, and “Compañeras” notes that more than 20 female professional groups have been formed in the United States since Reyna began.

The film’s producer-directors, Elizabeth Massie and Matthew Buzzell, said in an interview that they stumbled across the band in the early 2000s when they passed through Union Station, the landmark Los Angeles railway station, while the women were giving a Mother’s Day performance. The filmmakers then set out to explore the female interpretation of a male-dominated genre.

The creator of Reyna is José Hernández, founder and musical director of the Grammy-nominated all-male ensemble Mariachi Sol de México. Mr. Hernández, who composes for both his mariachi bands, also owns Cielito Lindo Restaurant in South El Monte, east of Los Angeles, where both Sol de México and Reyna de Los Angeles play regularly.

Mr. Hernandez assembled the female group after starting mariachi classes for children in Los Angeles public schools in the early 1990s. Half the students who showed up were girls.

“They didn’t really have any role models,” he says in the documentary.

Soon he was holding auditions for a women’s band, drawing mostly high school students and amateurs whose love for the music ran through generations of their families. As it turned out, the most experienced of the lot was not a Latina: she was Cindy Reifler, a classically trained violinist from Santa Cruz who had played with a male mariachi band for years and became Reyna’s first leader.

True to the music’s itinerant peasant roots, the 13 women donned cowboy “charro” skirt suits and swept up their hair in buns. Some married, some single, and ranging in age from 16 to 42, Reyna’s members bonded into a tight-knit group. As the documentary’s title suggests, they are compañeras.

“When you tell your friend secrets, and she tells you her secrets and her problems, that’s not a friend, that’s a compañera,” Laura Paloma Córdova, who plays the harp, explains in the film.

The women felt so strongly about protecting their vibe that when two candidates auditioned for an open slot, they rejected the obviously better musician in favor of a younger, less experienced one, 19-year-old Angélica Gómez, whose dream of joining a mariachi band is one of the main stories in the film.

“The girls said it was her attitude, but I think they were intimidated,” Karla Tovar, a band member who plays the guitarrón and who had favored hiring the experienced player, says in the film.

Other women counter that a group with no soloist — they take turns singing — has no room for a prima donna. And as Mariana Nañez, who plays the signature mariachi five-stringed vihuela, says on camera, “When you go out onstage and you all had a really good talk and you bonded, it comes out in the music.”

Camaraderie can get the female players only so far. While mariachi music generates more than $100 million in records sales each year, according to “Compañeras,” the genre relies heavily on live performances. Touring — in theaters and arenas, and at festivals and county fairs — along with nightly gigs at restaurants and private parties are hard to balance with child care needs and second jobs. And the low pay, about $75 a night when the film was made, seems hardly a reason to abandon school, day jobs or families for the music.

“We have a hard time selling the group,” Mr. Hernández says in the film. “We’re lucky if we get half the amount of the money we charge for Sol.”

Still, American audiences have been receptive not just to all-female mariachi bands but also to co-ed bands, multiethnic bands and those that tweak the form to sing English-language standards like “New York, New York.”

“When mariachi is offered as a class in American schools, there is no sex barrier whatsoever,” said Jeff Nevin, director of mariachi activities at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif. “Most school-based mariachis are approximately 50-50 guys-girls.”

One result, he continued, was that there are a lot of girls and boys graduating from high school with considerable mariachi experience. And many of these girls want to continue playing mariachi professionally, he added.

But among the high-profile “show” mariachis, Mr. Nevin said, the all-male groups still tend to resist admitting women instrumentalists, and the all-female bands are still catching up to the male bands in the market.

At Cielito Lindo, where Reyna performs every Tuesday night, the band draws a crowd that on a recent week consisted mostly of families with young children and birthday revelers who wanted their photographs taken with the women, who are mostly college graduates and whose day jobs include teaching and real estate. The Reynas may still be regarded more as a novelty than a bona fide group, but Ms. Massie said the compañeras have helped smash one stereotype: “They’ve proven that they are as capable of playing the music,” she said.

Travelers in Search of Mexico’s Magic Find Town of Witches and Warlocks

NYT
March 28, 2008
Travelers in Search of Mexico’s Magic Find Town of Witches and Warlocks
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

CATEMACO, Mexico — To kill a man, Alejandro Gallegos García explains, all you need is a black cloth doll, some thread, a human bone and a toad. Oh, and you must ask the devil permission, in person, at a cave in the hills where he is said to appear.

Assuming you have these things, plus the green light from the prince of darkness, you simply lash the doll to the bone, shove it down the unfortunate toad’s throat, sew up its lips and take the whole mess to a graveyard, reciting the proper words.

“The person will die within 30 days,” Mr. Gallegos said matter of factly, as if he were talking of fixing a broken carburetor. (The toad dies too, by the by.)

“There exists good and bad in the world, there exists the devil and God,” he went on, turning a serpent’s fang in his rough fingers. “I work in white magic and in black magic. But there are people who dedicate themselves only to evil.”

Mr. Gallegos, 48, is a traditional warlock, one of dozens who work in this idyllic town, nestled near the Gulf of Mexico by Lake Catemaco in the state of Veracruz. Like most witches here, he melds European and native traditions in his work, a special brew of occultism he learned from his uncle.

His cramped cement workroom holds an image of the Virgin Mary and a large crucifix with a bloodied Jesus. A six-pointed star is painted on the floor, with a horseshoe to one side and a St. Andrew’s cross on the other. Candles dedicated to various saints crowd his table, most with photographs lashed to them. Some are photos of men and women whom the client wants to ensnare in love. Others are of barren women who want children. Others are of people with maladies from asthma to cancer.

Beneath the table Mr. Gallegos keeps ragged boxes full of herbs, bark and roots that have been used in these parts for medicinal purposes since before Hernán Cortés was a gleam in his great-great-grandfather’s eye.

He has dead bats, used in certain love charms, and ground-up rattlesnake, for curing illnesses. He uses oils extracted from lizards and turtles, the dried tongues of certain fish, coyote skin, eggs, chickens, holy water from the church and less-than-holy water from the lake. He knows dozens of local plants and their attributes. And he wields the tooth of a venomous snake.

“This goes back to ancient times,” he said. “There were witches here before the Spanish. Here there is a mix of everything, even of God.”

Catemaco is known throughout Mexico as a center for witchcraft and, to the dismay of some hard-core practitioners, magic has become a big tourist draw. The town holds an International Congress of Witches on the first Friday of every March.

During the event, a black mass is held at the mouth of the cave where the devil supposedly loiters. An oversize six-pointed star — they call it a Star of David — is set alight, to the delight of photographers. Politicians show up to receive amulets for good luck at the polls. Believers flock to the town to have their auras cleansed.

Sandra Lucía Aguilar, a 25-year-old cashier, traveled 22 hours by bus from Cancún for the black mass. A few days later she found herself in the waiting room of a popular witch doctor known as “The Crow,” hoping for a little black magic to force her errant boyfriend to return.

“I lived with him for five years, and then, overnight, he ran off with another woman,” she said. “I want him back. He humiliated me a lot and I want to humiliate him.”

The Crow turns out to be a slick-looking fellow named Héctor Betaza Domínguez, who wears white guayabera shirts and sits in a candlelit room among effigies of La Santa Muerte, a Mexican icon resembling the grim reaper in drag.

Mr. Betaza says people come to see him from all over Mexico and from major cities in the United States with large Mexican communities. Many simply want “una limpia,” or cleansing, to ward off evil spirits. But a majority of the complaints are broken hearts.

Asked where he learned his craft, Mr. Betaza, who calls himself a “master of occult sciences,” becomes evasive, muttering something about his mother having practiced magic. “This you don’t learn,” he said. “It’s something that you carry in the blood.”

Not everyone is convinced. The Rev. Tomás Alonso Martínez has the unenviable job of parish priest in a town best known as a haunt of the devil and witches. “It’s farce,” he said, “a lie, a fraud.”

In his five years in Catemaco, Father Martínez says he has seen so-called witches practice all sorts of confidence schemes, extracting money from gullible and vulnerable people.

One common trick is to tell someone he is hexed and then remove the hex for a fee. Another is to tell people they are sick, then offer them a traditional cure for an outlandish sum.

“They attribute to themselves power they cannot have,” the priest said. “The fundamental problem that exists with these people is that there are people who believe them. Anyone can set themselves up as a witch.”

Even Father Martínez acknowledges, however, that mixed in with the questionable practices are vestiges of a pre-Hispanic past. The use of Catholic saints also bespeaks a syncretism of beliefs, he notes.

In his church, an icon of the Virgin Mary sits in an alcove directly above and behind the altar. Before Mass, many go to the shrine and pass herbs over their bodies to cleanse themselves. Some leave pictures of loved ones, amulets and prayers.

That syncretism also emerged clearly when Mr. Gallegos performed a cleansing ritual on a recent afternoon. The client was a taxi driver named Santos Luna Cruz who wanted protection from envious rivals.

Stripped to the waist, Mr. Luna stood on a worn piece of velvet in the center of a chalk Star of David. Candles burned at each point of the star. A horseshoe was to one side, a St. Andrew’s cross to the other. Two glasses of water, believed to absorb evil spirits, were placed in front of him.

Mr. Gallegos sprinkled holy water, garlic and ammonia over him. Then, chanting the common Catholic prayer to “the father, the son and the Holy Ghost” and invoking a long list of saints, Mr. Gallegos held eggs to the man’s head and rubbed them over his body.

He scratched crosses with his serpent’s tooth on Mr. Luna’s face, arms, chest and abdomen. He took a live chicken and passed it over his client. He blew the holy water from his mouth in a fine spray at the man, and beat him with clusters of herbs.

When it was over, Mr. Luna, 34, grinned and ran his hand through his wet hair. “I felt very stressed out at first, but now I feel lighter, better,” he said. “I feel like he is taking away from my body the bad vibrations.”

Mr. Gallegos pointed to two eggs that broke during the ritual. “When the egg breaks, it is because it has absorbed the pain inside the young man,” he said.

The Savage Silencing of Mexico's Musicians

In the Washington Post
The Savage Silencing of Mexico's Musicians
Killings Bear Hallmarks Of Drug Cartel Hitmen

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 26, 2007; A01

MORELIA, Mexico -- Sergio Gómez roared into town in a big SUV, entourage in tow, pressed suits, fancy cowboy boots.

Everything about him said superstar. He had an international following, an impish smile that drove the women wild and a star on the walk of fame in Las Vegas. More than 20,000 fans swarmed the parking lot of this colonial city's soccer stadium to dance and hear him sing romantic "Duranguense grupero" pop songs backed by a driving drumbeat.

After the show, in the small hours of Dec. 2, Sergio Gómez was kidnapped. Police found his body the next day. He'd been strangled and beaten. His face -- a face that graced album covers and made teenage girls blush -- was disfigured by burn marks.

Sergio Gómez, 34, was the latest of a dozen pop musicians to have been killed in the past year in Mexico. Nearly every one of the slayings bore the hallmarks of the drug cartel hitmen blamed for 4,000 deaths in the country in the past two years.

But the savage murder of Sergio Gómez -- one of Mexico's hottest singers, a headliner whose band, K-Paz de la Sierra, commanded $100,000 a show, twice the rate of other top bands -- was different. It has set off an unprecedented chain reaction in which at least half a dozen bands have canceled concert tours. Popular bands, such as the Duranguense act Patrulla 81, which backed out of four major shows, are terrified of coming to Morelia and the surrounding state of Michoacan.

"All this is very dark for us," José Angel Medina, Patrulla 81's lead singer, said in an interview. "We're very worried. Very scared."

Among music industry insiders, Sergio Gómez's death and the previous killings are also forcing a quiet assessment of the influence drug trafficking kingpins wield over the business. It is common knowledge in Mexico's music industry, but not known to the general public, that drug cartels finance the careers of some budding musicians, then launder money through unregulated concert ticket sales, according to industry sources, musicians and law enforcement.

There has been no suggestion that Sergio Gómez was backed by drug money. But the obvious cartel-hitmen trademarks in his killing have been the catalyst for the music industry to question the risks of mixing socially and professionally with drug traffickers.

"The narcos are completely involved in the business," Lucio Tzin Tzun, who has been a concert promoter here for 20 years, said in an interview. "They control everything. It's like a mafia."
Dangerous Benefactors

The marriage of music and the underworld is nothing new. In the United States, Frank Sinatra was long criticized for being too cozy with the mafia and, more recently, gangsta rappers often have been accused of celebrating violence against police.

In Mexico, the musical celebration of counterculture figures is in the country's DNA. An array of homages are still sung to Pancho Villa -- a bandit turned revolutionary-era folk hero. The new bandit heroes are drug traffickers, celebrated in songs known as narcocorridos and written by artists who are "essentially court poets for the drug world," said Elijah Wald, author of the book "Narcocorrido: A Journey Into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrillas."

"It's all about being like Pancho Villa," Wald said in an interview.

The existence of the narcocorrido genre made the drug cartel-style killing of Gómez all the more puzzling. Sergio Gómez, who launched his musical career in Chicago, made his reputation with romantic ballads and kitschy covers, such as the New Orleans-inflected classic "Jambalaya." He didn't sing about drug dealers. Sergio Gómez was certainly no Valentin Elizalde, the Mexican singer murdered in November 2006 after his narcocorrido "To All My Enemies," a song that mocked drug kingpin Osiel Cardenas, became an Internet sensation.

A clear line seemed to connect Elizalde's lyrics to his demise. No such line ties Sergio Gómez's music to his death.

But Wald said the popular notion that only narcocorrido singers mix with drug lords couldn't be further from the truth. Musicians are sometimes expected to give private concerts for kingpins, and to play whatever the kingpin wants to hear for as long the kingpin and his friends feel like listening.

"The drug lord is just as likely to ask for songs by Jose Alfredo Jimenez [a popular ballad crooner] as a narcocorrido," Wald said.
Deals and Consequences

The nexus between drug traffickers and musicians often forms in poor mountain villages. Young musicians have few sources of income to launch their careers. There is scant public funding for popular music genres, which ruling elites look down upon as "lower-class junk," according to Wald.

Drug traffickers are often the only wealthy people in the mountain villages of states such as Sinaloa, a hotbed of cartel activity. In the most extreme situations, the musician can become almost a serf to his kingpin sponsors.

"There are those who dedicate themselves to singing for those people," Alfredo Ramirez Corral, lead singer of Los Creadorez del Pasito Duranguense, said in an interview. But Corral, whose group canceled a December show in Michoacan, was reluctant to criticize musicians who cater to narcotraffickers, saying that "each person has to do what they can to make a living."

Traffickers are drawn to musical acts because they provide an easy platform to launder money. There are other easy options, but none is so culturally prestigious. It is the glamour of the music scene that makes it irresistible to narcotraffickers, said Rolando Coro, a well-known disc jockey at Radio Tremendous in Morelia.

"They show up at the dances, these drug traffickers, and order the expensive whiskey, not just a glass, but the whole bottle," Coro said. "They have pretty women following them around. It's fun for them."

Bands that make deals with drug traffickers get a crucial leg up on the competition. Tzin Tzun, the promoter, can spot them with ease.

"They come into town with the most expensive equipment, stuff from Germany, stuff that costs thousands of dollars," he said. "But nobody's ever heard of these guys. They were on the rancho yesterday, today they're on billboards."

But support from a drug dealer comes with strings. Traffickers expect a hefty cut of profits -- sometimes 20 percent or more -- and react violently if they don't get what they believe they're owed, music industry insiders say. Still, bands take chances.

"Bands start to get popular and sometimes they want to keep more of the money," Tzin Tzun said.

Drug traffickers can also expect musicians to be available to them at a moment's notice. But band leaders, especially those who achieve major commercial success, sometimes grow weary of altering schedules to suit their patrons' desires.

"So a capo has supported you since you were kids," Wald said. "Now it's his daughter's birthday party and instead you take the gig in Morelia for $100,000."

The consequences of such intransigence can be fatal, industry insiders say.

Proximity with drug traffickers can also lead to other dangerous entanglements. Music industry sources have theorized that some of the singers killed in the past year may have been romantically involved with the wives and girlfriends of drug kingpins, or simply that cartel honchos may have become jealous of handsome musicians.

"Skirts," Coro said. "That's what they say a lot of this is about. Musicians chasing skirts."
A Week of Tears

The spasm of violence against musicians in the state of Michoacan began a year ago, about the same time that Mexican President Felipe Calderón, a native of Michoacan, was launching a military offensive against drug cartels here. On Dec. 14, three days after the arrival of more than 6,000 soldiers and federal police officers, Javier Morales Sergio Gómez, leader of the popular band Los Implacables del Norte, was gunned down in Michoacan. Sergio Gómez, no relation to Sergio Sergio Gómez, had sung narcocorridos with titles such as "Death Contract" and "Drug Tragedy."

Two months later, four members of Banda Fugaz were shot to death in the town of Puruaran after a concert. A fifth band member survived the shooting.

Then there seemed to be a calm. No musicians died in Michoacan in the spring, summer or fall. Sergio Sergio Gómez, who grew up in Michoacan, was set for a big show in December and tickets went fast. The decision to play Michoacan surprised some here. Coro said Sergio Gómez canceled a show the year before amid rumors that he had offended a violent drug trafficker.

As Sergio Gómez was preparing for his appearance, the music industry was jolted by news from the far north of Mexico. The worst six days in the recent history of Mexican music were about to begin.

On Friday, Nov. 30, Zayda Peña, the 28-year-old singer of Zayda y Los Culpables, was shot in the neck in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Tex. She was rushed to the hospital. But a gunman came into her room Dec. 1 and blasted a bullet into her heart. She died instantly.

That evening, Sergio Gómez stepped to the microphone in Morelia, nearly 500 miles to the south. Hours after his show, around 3 a.m. on Dec. 2, he was kidnapped. His body was found the next day.

There did not appear to be a connection between the killings of Sergio Gómez and Peña. Still the violence wasn't over. A few days later, the body of José Luis Aquino, a trumpeter with the band Los Conde, was found in the southern state of Oaxaca. His hands and feet had been bound and his head was covered with a plastic bag.

It should have been a joyous week for Mexico's sizzling music scene, instead of a week of tears and funeral Masses. Grammy nominations were due on Thursday, Dec. 6, and Mexican bands were expected to fare well.

The nominations went off as planned. When the Banda album category was announced, the list was stocked with Mexican musical royalty. But it was also a reminder of the violence that racks this country.

One of the five nominees, the singer Lupillo Rivera, had survived when his SUV was hit by seven bullets in December 2006 in Guadalajara. Two other nominees, Elizalde and Sergio Gómez -- who was nominated with his band -- were dead.

Mexico's Death Saint gets makeover

Mexico's Death Saint gets makeover

By JULIE WATSON, Associated Press WriterSun Aug 12, 6:44 PM ET

Death just isn't what it used to be.

A small religious group that worships the grim reaper and is fighting for government recognition unveiled a softer image of their so-called Death Saint on Sunday: a woman with a porcelain face, brown, shoulder-length hair and long thin fingers.

Hundreds of worshippers filed into the Santa Muerte sanctuary in downtown Mexico City to see the statue in a flowing golden dress and veil, clutching a rose. She offers another option to followers who have traditionally prayed to figures of a skeleton dressed in a black cloak and carrying a scythe, or in a long flowing white gown.

David Romo, the Traditional Mex-USA Church's archbishop, said the new incarnation of the saint appeared to a woman in a dream in December and told her to ask Romo to commission a statue so devotees could see her new look.

He denied the change is a publicity stunt to win government recognition and shed the group's image as a cult dabbling in black magic.

"This image is one of justice, of freedom, but above all one that reveals the face of God," Romo said. Believers say the Death Saint kills only on God's orders.

The church, an unofficial offshoot of Roman Catholicism, was registered as a religious group in 2003, allowing it to legally raise money and own property. But in 2005, the government withdrew its permit after an excommunicated member accused it of forcing followers to worship death and failing to stick to its bylaws. The church started filing papers again last month to gain official status.

The Catholic Church speaks out against worshipping Santa Muerte, linking it to black magic, Satanism and cults.

Romo said Catholic authorities are trying to scare people away from the group, which he said is growing in popularity mostly among Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

Santa Muerte, which some believe to be rooted in pre-Colombian beliefs, is one of several unofficial folk saints worshipped in Mexico. Death is commonly honored as a part of life in Mexican culture — such as during November's Day of the Dead celebrations — and does not have the same morbid stigma as in other societies.

Yareli Ceron said worshippers will continue praying to the grim reaper, but now also to the new image which will help the group gain respectability.

"Everyone still loves the skeleton, but now there will be no reason to criticize" the Death Saint, said Ceron, who was among the hordes filing past the new statue.

Standing nearby, Mabel Gonzalez, agreed.

"It's a lot better," she said. "She's not as scary now."

Sculpture: A Mexican Town's Clay 'Residents'

A Mexican Town's Clay 'Residents'

Washington Post
By Jose Maria Alvarez
Associated Press
Monday, August 6, 2007; C03

TEOCOCUILCO, Mexico -- For decades, Alejandro Santiago's picturesque home town in southern Mexico has said goodbye to its youth as they left to seek work in the United States. Now the Oaxacan artist is trying to repopulate his town, at least metaphorically.

With a $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Santiago has undertaken an ambitious plan to create an army of life-size clay figures.

So far, he has created some 1,500 statues, each about 4 feet 4 inches and 150 pounds, to represent the youth who have abandoned this hamlet in impoverished Oaxaca state. No two sculptures are alike, he said, and many of the faces have been sculpted to reflect the hardship of migrants' lives in both Mexico and the United States.

Santiago said the inspiration for the project came six years ago, when he returned home after a three-year stay in Paris and was struck by Teococuilco's empty streets.

Low wages and an inadequate number of jobs drive thousands of Mexicans to migrate every year to the United States, turning rural communities like Teococuilco into near ghost towns.

"Where are my friends, my relatives?" he asked the town's remaining residents, mostly young children and the elderly. "They are all in the United States? I kept asking and asking. Night fell and not one soul came to visit me.

"I didn't know how many to make at first, but I knew I had to repopulate the town," he said.

In 2003, Santiago decided to experience for himself what it's like to cross the U.S. border illegally. He bought a bus ticket to Tijuana, met a smuggler who set him up with fake papers and tried to cross.

In Tijuana, Santiago passed by thousands of crosses on the corrugated wall marking the border, placed there by activists to represent those who have died trying to cross. He was quickly caught by U.S. immigration authorities and returned to Mexico, but that image burned into his brain.

He estimated those crosses numbered about 2,500 and settled on that number, plus one, for his project. He says the extra figure symbolizes that there is always one more person who is leaving, risking his or her life to reach the United States.

The Rockefeller Foundation grant is helping him complete all 2,501 statues and pay his crew of 35 workers. He expects to finish the collection by the end of this month.

The sculptures will then make a journey of their own, traveling to the northern city of Monterrey for their first exhibition in September. Santiago hopes to show them later in the United States and then bring them home to be installed on Teococuilco's empty streets.

When that happens, the artist said, he'll have a party.

"We will be celebrating the migrants' return," Santiago said.

Corridos and the Immigration Debate

NYT
July 6, 2007
Mexicans Sing Age-Old Ballads of a New Life
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

NAMPA, Idaho — Watching television coverage of immigration marches, Jose F. Garcia got mad. He got frustrated. He got his button accordion.

In short order, Mr. Garcia squeezed out the beginnings of a corrido, a kind of Mexican folk ballad that tells a story, often with a moral, and sang out the lyrics that came to him.

Now they are putting up barriers in front of us so we don’t return;

but that is not going to block us from crossing into the United States,

We leap them like deer, we go under them like moles.

Mr. Garcia, accompanied by his young son Benjamin on a snare drum, recently belted out the song, “Latinos Unidos,” in an onion field for the benefit of researchers from the Western Folklife Center, a nonprofit cultural organization in Elko, Nev., that has begun a project to document Mexican influences and folklore in the ranching West.

Corridos have long telegraphed the melancholy of Mexico’s northern frontier. Heroes die. Lovers are crossed. And, in the controversial narco-corrido form, drug dealers are celebrated.

But as migrants moved north, modern corridos have also been inspired by everyday occurrences and current events, with some written about the Kennedys, crops, floods and truck stops.

Mr. Garcia has recorded a corrido about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, “Tragedia en Nueva York,” complete with a jet sound whining through the guitars, horns and accordion.

It was Sept. 11 when the world woke up

in the year 2001 when it was reported

that in the twin towers two airplanes crashed

(In Spanish, the lyrics rhyme.)

The Western Folklife Center intends to build an archive of such material, recording for posterity the Mexican presence far from the border and turning some of it into segments for public television and radio.

Although the project was conceived before the immigration debate intensified, Hal Cannon, the founding director of the center and its popular offshoot, the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, said it could serve as a reminder that, come what may, the Latino influence has already taken root.

“I think that’s an important song,” Mr. Cannon told his colleagues after listening to a few verses of Mr. Garcia’s corrido, which Mr. Garcia plans to perform with his band and may play as part of a corrido competition the folklife center is organizing here on July 15 month.

Through the project, Mr. Cannon said later, “Relationships will be built, understanding will be built and we will be documenting something that is quite ephemeral.”

Musicians and scholars debate what qualifies as a corrido. To purists, Mr. Garcia’s immigration song, though sung in the style of a corrido and with instruments common to the form, does not make the cut.

“I believe somebody has to die,” said Juan Dies, an ethnomusicologist who is based in Chicago and is working with the center on the project. “But some people don’t feel that way.”

“The community defines what a corrido is, not a scholar from Chicago,” added Mr. Dies, who specializes in Mexican music. “It is, basically, a musical news story.”

Mr. Garcia’s repertory, apart from immigration and terrorism, includes songs of desperate lovers and other more traditional corrido themes, which he and other musicians have found the crowds here, ever nostalgic, tend to favor.

“To me, a corrido is a song with a message,” said Mr. Garcia, who recently opened a dance club but is hoping for a big break some day for his band. “I don’t like the ones about drug traffickers that are popular on the radio and that the young kids these days like. But as long as it is telling a story with a message to me it is a corrido.”

Some of the older corridos here speak of the beauty of the valley — one, a romantic ballad called “Nampa,” extols the virtues of its women and “silvery moon nights” — or bar fights long forgotten. But the longing for home, and the difficulty of going back, are more popular themes among the current crop of local musicians.

“If I write one about my friend over there the people would say, hey, who wants to hear about him?” said Gerardo Barca, a musician known by his nickname, Lalo. “People want to be transported home, to time and events there.”

So Mr. Barca wrote the bittersweet “Lindos Recuerdos,” or “Beautiful Memories,” about the loss of his family’s ranch in Michoacan to development after he left 15 years ago and his inability to ever return.

“These are just beautiful memories of times that won’t come back;

Since the times have changed,

and where there was that little ranch now there is a city.”

“Everybody here can relate to that, to that idea of wanting to go home but never really making it,” he said.

Latino immigrants, primarily from Mexico and Texas, came to the Treasure Valley here in three waves. The first arrived in the 1800s to work in mines and build railroads, another came to work in agriculture in the postwar boom of the 1940s and 1950s and a third in the past couple of decades as Boise and its suburbs have swollen over farmland.

From 1990 to 2000, the Hispanic population of Idaho grew 92 percent, to 101,690, with most of that growth in the Treasure Valley.

Alfredo Paz, a local musician, laments that the younger generation prefers narco-corridos, a rough equivalent to gangsta rap and something he and his band members refuse to perform.

“We don’t want to sing about drugs or rape or anything like that,” said Mr. Paz, who does perform corridos about double-crossed lovers and his signature, “Le Quedan Plumas Al Gallo,” or “The Rooster Still Has His Feathers.” The song is about a man defeated in love but still the cock of the walk.

Mr. Garcia, who has been in the United States for more than 20 years, said he was carrying on a musical tradition handed down from his father and practiced in the small village where he grew up.

“I always wanted to be somebody so I composed music,” he said.

While watching the immigration marches that day, Mr. Garcia said he felt compelled to put “our story” to music, scratching out the words over several weeks, right up to the day the folklife center researchers came calling.

“I feel we need to write out stories and this was a big part of our story here,” he said. “Corridos used to be like newspapers. Well, maybe, they still should be.”

Indigenous Mexican Seri versus National Tourism

Ancient Tribe at a Crossroads
Mexico's Reclusive Seri Confront the Inevitable March of Development

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 28, 2007; A18

PUNTA CHUECA, Mexico -- Gloria Sesma clamps tough stems of desert limberbush between her front teeth, shredding the plant into the floppy strands she needs to weave graceful baskets.

Sesma's lifelong work has worn her top teeth down to tiny stubs, much like the teeth of other women in this remote Gulf of California village, home to Mexico's most reclusive indigenous people, the Seri Indians. She and her daughters adhere to traditional techniques, so it can take 10 months of shredding and weaving to make a single basket.

But Sesma's family also reflects new realities for the Seri, a tribe at a crossroads. While eight of her children married within the tribe, a ninth -- her son, Ezekiel -- piqued the family by breaking with tradition and moving away last year to marry a non-Seri woman.

Now, the Seri desire for insularity is being tested on a larger scale. The inevitable march of development is forcing the Seri to confront fundamental questions about their future, questions that will help determine whether one of the last truly autonomous tribes in Mexico melds into the greater society or stays walled off from the world.

"The community is really at this huge crux point," said Jay Roberts, a professor at Earlham College in Indiana who studies the Seri. "They're a case study for what's happening to indigenous people around the world."

The tribe's two villages -- Punta Chueca and Desemboque -- lie directly in the path of the largest Mexican tourist development in a quarter-century. Under a still-evolving plan, hotels and condominiums will sprout along the coastline in much the same way that another generation of Mexicans transformed Cancun and Acapulco from sleepy outposts to resort havens. Change seems inevitable here, whether the development pierces the Seri's land or merely spreads up to its borders.

The Seri hold dominion over more than 450 square miles of heavenly coastline, where for centuries they have scooped crabs, prowled the desert for medicinal plants and fought to keep away outsiders. They once lived nomadically, moving between fishing encampments on the mainland and their main settlement on Isla Tiburon, Mexico's largest island, which is separated from Punta Chueca by a narrow but treacherous waterway known as Little Hell Channel.

In the 1960s, the Mexican government declared Isla Tiburon a nature preserve and forced the Seri off the island, resettling the tribe in squat cinder-block homes in Punta Chueca and Desemboque. The tribe, which now numbers less than 1,000, lives in harsh desert conditions -- fresh water has to be trucked in, and there is very little modern plumbing.

The Seri make money off the scallops and crabs they take from Little Hell Channel, as well as their baskets and ironwood carvings. Under an agreement with the government, the tribe also receives income from the sale of permits to U.S. hunters, who pay $50,000 or more annually for the right to kill bighorn sheep on Isla Tiburon. The money doesn't go far, though, leaving the Seri in garbage-strewn villages.

Punta Chueca, a four-hour drive from Tucson, is a place of unexplained contradictions. Shiny new cars -- some allegedly stolen -- sit in front of ramshackle homes where the occupants sleep on dirt floors. Stray dogs roam about, while children with dirt-smudged faces go days without soap or water for bathing. Some youngsters return to homes outfitted with satellite television dishes and watch Mexican soap operas.

Though their territory is in Mexico, the Seri don't consider themselves Mexicans -- Mexicans, they say, are people who live outside Seri lands. There have been occasional gunfights between the tribe and authorities from the state of Sonora entering Seri territory to investigate crimes. Sonora's governor, Eduardo Bours Castelo, has complained about "the backwardness of the Seris."

"We're hardheaded," Sesma's husband, Ernesto Molina, 58, said one recent afternoon. "We don't even want visitors. We don't have much contact with the people of Mexico. Mexicans are not welcome here."

Molina, who ekes out a living from fishing and guiding the few tourists who can find his village, shuffles between Spanish, which he learned from Mexican fishermen, and the obscure Seri dialect, which Roberts estimates is understood by as few as five non-Seris. The dialect is said to be at its most lyrical when a leatherback turtle beaches and the Seri sing ancient melodies to coax it back to the sea.

Molina considers such traditions sacrosanct and is bothered by the intrusions of outsiders and their ideas. That's why it was so hard for him to swallow what happened a few years ago during another Seri rite, the New Year's celebration on June 30, the end of the tribe's calendar year. A young Mexican visitor caught the eye of his son, Ezekiel, during the festivities.

A romance flowered, and not long afterward, Ezekiel announced he wanted to wed. A few other Seri had married outside the tribe, but Molina never thought it would happen in his own family.

"I was sad," he said.

Ezekiel, though, could not be dissuaded.

"For me, she was a person, even if she wasn't Seri," Ezekiel Molina, now 33, recalled recently. "I don't think that way -- I'm not racist. I reject discrimination."

He left Punta Chueca, crossing the 20 miles of rutted desert path that connects the village to the small beach town of Bahia de Kino. But life outside the village has unfolded badly. He can't adapt to regular work schedules and struggles to raise his daughter with the few pesos he earns from occasional work as a tattoo artist. He says he feels uncomfortable in a society where drug use is common, though in the years since he left his home village, illegal drug use has become a major problem among the Seri.

He has thought about moving back, but he isn't sure. Outside the village, he and his family use modern medicine when they get sick. When he returns to the village, he sees his father at the medicine woman's hut, picking up remedies derived from desert plants. His daughter doesn't understand his brothers and sisters -- she speaks only Spanish.

Ezekiel's departure from this village is part of a trickle of Seri, most of whom migrate between Punta Chueca and Bahia de Kino so that their children can attend better schools. Pedro Torres, 41, the only Seri to earn a doctorate, relocates his family at the beginning of each school year to Bahia de Kino. There, his children discovered Power Rangers cartoons and have become fluent in Spanish.

His wife, Blanca Lidia Monroy -- Seri women do not take their husband's last name -- sat in a side yard of her home one recent afternoon weaving baskets while one of her sons flipped through a recently published Seri-Spanish dictionary, the first of its kind. Monroy smiled, flashing the dentures she got to cover the damage done to her teeth by stripping limberbush stems.

At the end of each school year, when she returns to Punta Chueca, her neighbors give her funny looks, she said. Some shun her.

"Things never change there," she said. "They don't understand why I would leave Punta Chueca for my children's education. They don't understand that I want something more for my children."

Torres, who works an hour's drive away in the city of Hermosillo as a state indigenous education specialist, calls the retirement developments sprouting north of Seri territory a "red alarm" for his people. He shivers when he hears the village elders urging his people to insulate themselves further.

"We have to face reality," Torres said. "Sooner or later, we're going to have this conflict with all this development. They're going to come down here and want to build hotels and we're not going to be prepared to stop them."

The only way to save Seri culture, Torres said, is for young people to leave the villages, get an education, then return empowered by new ideas. Other indigenous peoples in Mexico have done the same, he said, salting local governments and businesses with young professionals while retaining their sense of tribal identity.

But the Seri, he said, are mostly content to wall themselves off. Even the road into their village seems unwelcoming, he said. One recent afternoon, an SUV full of non-Seris rolled toward Punta Chueca. Three young boys waited at the entrance. When they saw the vehicle, they launched a hail of rocks.