Sitting by the river in Paramaribo, Suriname

He was quiet, alone, and–seemingly, at least–contemplative, sitting by the river in Paramaribo, Suriname. I stood at a distance so as not to intrude on his thoughts, and depressed the button to take a picture. Though I didn’t know what he was thinking, of course, I identified with the need to just sit down and be quiet and still and stare out at the river’s swift current for a little bit.

Last Tuesday was my final day at Matador, where I’d worked for about five and a half years. It’s a transition that’s been on my mind for a while, and one that, finally, I decided to make, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what was next for me, apart from continued freelance work. I debated with myself for a couple months- Should I? Shouldn’t I? I have a child; jumping out of a job without a Plan B seemed far more irresponsible and impulsive than it was eight or nine years ago when I did it the first time.

Eventually, though, I ran out of excuses. I sent in my resignation, took a deep breath, and stepped out into nothing. And the net appeared- immediately.

There are lots of projects and possibilities I’ve been offered, some of which take me in completely unexpected and exciting directions that will provide new, interesting challenges. And they’re coming together faster than I could have hoped, proof–once again–that when we trust ourselves to know that it’s time to take a risk and welcome the unknown, everything we need appears. As I consider my options and wait for some details to get sorted, I’ve been enjoying spending some much-needed and long-overdue quality time with my family.

I hope you’ll keep following along and stay in touch to keep me up to date about your own projects.
**

See more Suriname photos here.

Cueva San Gabriel, Samana, Dominican Republic

San Gabriel is one of several caves accessible to the public in the Los Haitises National Park in Samana, Dominican Republic.

Llego Papa.

The taxi driver wanted to talk about New York, the weather here and there, and whether it was my first time visiting the Dominican Republic.

He did not want to talk about politics.

“Si, es mi primera vez,” I said, adding that I didn’t know why it had taken me so long to visit the Dominican Republic, when I’ve been kicking around the Spanish-speaking Caribbean’s other islands, Puerto Rico and Cuba, since 2003. “Yes, it’s cold in New York, and yes, I’m happy it’s warm here.”

Now can we talk politics?

The campaign posters on the side of the road intrigued me, while exposing my ignorance. A close watcher of Latin American politics, I had been paying attention to the countries where I’d lived and traveled. The Dominican Republic’s presidential campaign wasn’t on my radar. I knew the current president’s name, but nothing else.

I barraged the driver for the basics: How many viable political parties do you have? When is the election? What are the term limit laws?

His answers were of the “just the facts ma’am” variety, and he tried to change the subject as I pressed on. Now that I’d gotten the basics nailed down, I wanted him to tell me about the current cast of characters, two in particular: Margarita and “El Papa.”

I could see his eyes looking at mine through his mirrored sunglasses; that’s how thin the silver film was, cheap knock-offs of a more expensive brand. Was he just not interested in politics, or was he wary of answering questions from an American woman who seemed far too excited and interested in his country’s politics… and oddly disinterested in hearing about the Brugal rum factory we had just passed? Uncharacteristically, I didn’t care if he wasn’t interested in politics, and no, I didn’t want to know about Brugal. I was so intrigued by the campaign ads staple-gunned to every power pole and tree we passed that I wanted someone to decode their significance for me.

Finally, he gave in.

Margarita, he explained, is the current president’s wife, and she was going to run for president but the party didn’t think she should head up the ticket, so she’s the ruling party’s VP pick. “Interesting,” I thought, making a mental note to read about her later.

But “Papa” was the one who really interested me. “So who is this guy?” I asked, clearly oblivious to the fact that he is a former president, having occupied office before the current president, Leonel Fernandez, who is finishing up his second term. His ads blew me away with their dual references to a paternal figure (“Papa”) and a religious figure, the latter a not so subtle nod to “El Papa,” the Pope, which is only reinforced by the golden light that seems to illuminate his head like a halo in every poster. As if the symbolism wasn’t hit-you-over-the-head obvious enough, Papa is gazing upward in the ads, as if gaining inspiration from and– more importantly–being blessed by God Himself. The text on many posters was the kicker: “Llego Papa”… “Papa has arrived” (or “returned”, depending on your particular translation, and either one really fits the bill here).

Papa’s given name is Hipolito Mejia; the 70 year old presidential candidate for the Dominican Revolutionary Party is a galvanizing figure in domestic politics. One friend, an American scholar in Dominican history, compared him to George W. Bush, noting the similarities between the two: overconfident but underprepared, brash talking men prone to verbal gaffes in public. She pointed me to YouTube, where more than two dozen videos are catalogued under a “Hipolito Mejia malas palabras” (“Hipolito Mejia bad words”) keyword search. If you speak Spanish, they’re worth a bit of time.

The Dominican Republic isn’t the only Latin American country in the midst of an election cycle; Mexico is also having a presidential election this year, and the race has taken a fascinating turn this week with the PAN’s nomination of Josefina Vasquez Mota as its candidate. Though domestic and foreign media are calling her election a “long shot,” she currently enjoys a favorable popularity rating in the polls and has certainly outshone rival Enrique Pena Nieto of the PRI party, who has repeatedly stuck his foot in his mouth during TV interviews and public appearances (one much-discussed incident was his inability to name three books that have influenced him; another was his inability to state the price of a tortilla).

For armchair analysts like myself (and admittedly, that may well be too generous a term), the presidential races in other parts of the Americas are even more interesting than the every-primary-more-bizarre-than-the-last here in the US. I’m staying tuned.

Are you following any elections? Have insight to share? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

**

Hotel rooms make me lonely, even the loveliest ones.

My lovely hotel room on a recent trip to Amsterdam.

I can go strong all day, but when I return to my hotel room, devoid of anything other than my bags to say “This is your place,” well, I get sad, and fast.

You may know that I have a crazy, crazy passion for love songs in Spanish. When I’m alone in a hotel room, I DJ myself through the loneliness by pulling up dramatic love songs^ on YouTube (forget Pandora, whose “Latin music” selection is pretty lame).

Seems strange to cure loneliness with plaintive songs, perhaps, but it works for me.

Here’s my soundtrack for six nights in a lonely hotel room:

-“Acompañame a Estar Solo,” Ricardo Arjona

-“La Nave del Olvido,” Cristian

-“Remolino,” Francisco Cespedes with Ana Belen

-“Yolanda”, Pablo Milanes

-“Me Dedique a Perderte,” Alejandro Fernandez

-“Yo Queria,” Cristian

-“Como Si No Nos Hubieramos Amado,” Laura Pausini

-“Lento,” Julieta Venegas

-“Lola,” Chayanne

-“Quitemonos la Ropa,” Alexandre Pires

-“Volver a Amar,” Cristian

-“Peces de Ciudad,” Ana Belen

-“Siete,” Carlos Varela

-“El Alma al Aire,” Alejandro Sanz

-“Guitarra Mia,” Polo Montanez

-“Si No Te Hubieras Ido,” Marco Antonio Solis

What’s your travel soundtrack, and when do you cue it?

–
^Not all the “love songs” are love for a person; a few are about love for a place or idea.

2010 in Mexico

Forward:   In August, Jimena Navarrete won the Miss Universe pageant, only the second win for Mexico in the contest’s 59 year history. And in September, despite cancellations of celebrations in a handful of cities, including beleaguered Ciudad Juarez, Mexico City’s grand bicentennial festivities went off without any serious or noticeable hitches (though not without considerable expense).

Backward:  Continued narcoviolence and the attendant media reports about it, coupled with growing doubts, both at home and abroad, about the wisdom and efficacy of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s aggressive strategy for managing the persistent problem.

These were the stories, good and bad, that dominated Mexican and international news reports in 2010.

But in a three-week period spanning the middle of November and the beginning of December, two significant good news stories went largely unnoticed, especially by international media. Mexico City’s Mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, was named the World’s Best Mayor by City Mayors Foundation, a global think tank, and UNESCO inscribed Mexico’s traditional cuisine on its List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Chef Enrique Farjeat

UNESCO, the educational, scientific, and cultural arm of the United Nations, is charged with many responsibilities, among them, declaring and inscribing physical sites and structures on its World Heritage list. Mexico is home to 27 such sites, including Chichen Itza. Among the lesser known functions of UNESCO is that of inscribing intangible elements of regional or national culture deemed so valuable that they are considered treasures of global culture at large. Forms of dance and dress, traditional musical instruments and songs, sports, rituals, and even medical procedures have been adopted by UNESCO as intangible elements of human heritage, but it wasn’t until Gironella, founder of the Conservatory of the Culture of Mexican Gastronomy, convened a group of colleagues, including Farjeat, to present a proposal that UNESCO had ever considered a country’s cuisine for inscription.

The idea was so novel, says Farjeat, that UNESCO was unable to even consider Mexico’s proposal when it first made its case for inscription five years earlier. “At the time, they didn’t have any criteria to even make a determination,” says Farjeat. “We helped them establish criteria, and they asked us to make a video, to present visual evidence to support the extensive written proposal we had submitted.”
 
Though its initial application was declined, the Mexican team was encouraged, and committed itself to fulfilling UNESCO’s request. In addition to producing the requested video, Farjeat and his colleagues had to make a challenging decision: How to narrow the proposal a bit by determining which region’s food was most representative of Mexico’s diverse culinary traditions? “Ultimately, we chose Michoacan,” Farjeat explains, adding that while UNESCO’s 2010 inscription acknowledges and honors all Mexican cuisine, it highlights the role of “the Michoacan paradigm,” characterized by the use of the clay comal for cooking tortillas.

When the video was done and the focus of their proposal more honed, Farjeat and the Mexico team submitted its revised package to UNESCO and prepared to travel to Nairobi, where proposals would be deliberated and decided upon. Farjeat’s task was to handle procurement and logistics, ensuring that the equipment, the ingredients—and even two cooks from Michoacan—made it from Mexico to Kenya intact and fresh for their performance.

And what a performance it would be.

Vegetables at a Mexican market

 
But this being Mexico, the performance seemed fated to encounter serious obstacles, challenges that might even put its inscription in jeopardy. For Farjeat, in particular, the days and hours leading up to the presentation before the panel of UNESCO judges were some of the most tense of his life. “Practically everything got held up in Customs,” he remembers, ticking off a list of ingredients that sat languishing in the corner of an airport warehouse. He imagined avocados and tomatoes softening to the point of rot, and the variety of cheeses he’d packed going rancid, the red, white, and green, Mexico’s national colors, a not-so-subtle metaphor of disaster.
 
Not only that, but the clay comales hauled across three continents broke, leaving Farjeat with a daunting dilemma: How would he replace his goods and his gear in sub-saharan Africa? “Even though Nairobi’s a capital city and it has a wonderful market, it didn’t have the ingredients we needed,” he explains, mentioning, among others, chipotles, corn husks for tamales, the corn fungus called huitlacoche, and chapulines, roasted crickets. After consulting with the host hotel’s chefs, Farjeat dispatched a team of scouts to the local market with a detailed list and the mandate to buy anything and everything they could find that would help Mexico pull its performance off.
 
“I wanted pork, chicken, shrimp,” he says, mentioning the items he thought would be easiest to replace. What the team returned with might have made a chef with less experience and less determination declare the challenge impossible and the inscription lost. Farjeat shows me a photo of an enormous fish with row upon row of teeth marching deep into its throat. “What is that?” I ask, leaning closer to the photo. “You tell me,” he replies, putting his hand over his mouth and shaking his head as if the fish had just been presented to him. He laughs. “What craziness.”
 
But what was there to do except pull it all together into something presentable? The Mexican team was fortunate to have Farjeat at its logistical helm; he excels in moments of tension. He called the cooks together and made the challenge plain. He explained the ingredients as best he could; then, they rolled up their sleeves, and got cooking.
 

 
The fish was stuffed with achiote and doused with orange juice and put on a charcoal grill. “People came by to take photos of the fish; ‘Look at the Mexican fish!’ they said,” Enrique recalls. The two cooks from Michoacan made tortillas on their new metal griddles. “They loved them so much they insisted on taking them home even though we had to pay airfare for them,” Enrique says.  
   
Somehow, in spite of all the challenges–the unfamiliar ingredients, the broken equipment, the small workspace, the sudden uptick in the number of plates they were told to prepare at the last minute–Farjeat and the Mexican team pulled it all off. When I ask him about the moment of the announcement of Mexico’s inscription on the intangibles list, he pauses for a long time and clears his throat. When he finally speaks, he is visibly emotional. His smile is big and genuine, his eyes are a bit wet, and his mind, well, it seems far away.

He remembers that the room erupted in applause. Proceedings had to stop while other delegates surrounded the Mexican team to offer their congratulations and take photos. And later that evening, Farjeat could finally sit down, put his feet up, and drink a celebratory tequila.
 
*
When the Mexican delegation returned to Mexico, it was not, as they might have expected, to national acclaim and congratulations. Several days after their return from Nairobi, a press conference was held in the Sor Juana Cloister, the hub of Mexico City’s efforts to document its gastronomic history. Eighty members of the press were there, according to Farjeat, but overall, he felt that the event was post-climactic. “The impact hasn’t been as great as we’d hoped,” he says. The story made the newspapers, of course, but the press then moved on.
 

Churros at St. Regis, Mexico City

Guadalajara inaugurates the 2011 Pan American Games

“Que tal Guadalajara?” I ask the taxi driver as we leave the airport en route to Del Carmen Concept Hotel, where I’ll be staying for the next three nights. I was last here in 2008, updating a guide to Guadalajara for Gayot, and I’m wondering how the city has changed since then.

“Uuf,” he replies. I wait for elaboration, but it’s slow in coming and vague when it finally arrives. “It’s changed bastante,” he says. I want him to say more, to say how it has changed and to analyze those changes from his place behind the wheel, but he refrains, which may be smart. When your city is hosting an international sporting event in a time when your country is under intense scrutiny, perhaps you can’t afford to be overly free with your opinions. Either that, or he just prefers the quiet.

The taxi driver won’t have much of that this week; today is the opening of the Pan American Games and everything is motion and buzz. Runners are sporting the flame in the traditional relay; as I approach the city, the flame is approaching it, too. The country’s biggest names in music– Vicente Fernandez and Alejandro Fernandez– are surely warming up their vocal cords in preparation for their performances tonight.

My press credential for the Pan Am Games

And I’m among them.

For the next three days, I’ll be covering the Pan Am Games for this site, as well as for Matador.

I hope you’ll follow along. I’ll also be on twitter, checking in on foursquare and Gowalla, and posting photos on instagram and flickr.

Have questions about the Games? Please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Everything I’ve read to date about the Museo Soumaya has left me dissatisfied… not the facts, which are what they are (a museum housing 66,000 or so pieces of art acquired by Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man), but the assessment of the collection (“tragic”); Slim’s style of collecting (“more of a bargain hunter than an aesthete”); the building in which the museum is housed (“like an oversize mushroom thought up by Magritte”); and even the neighborhood itself (“the slick establishments paving the way are just enough to make you forget you’re in Mexico”– as if Mexico can only be slick or poverty-ridden).

Everyone’s entitled to his/her own opinion, of course, and here’s mine: the collection may seem random (Dali, Rodin, Mexican masters), but I prefer to think of it as the reflection of diverse interests. Who but an absolute art snob cares, anyway? There are some incredible pieces in the collection and you don’t have to look hard to find them; check out this intricate piece, made entirely of rice paper (except the frame, obviously) in 1883:

There are pieces in this collection I haven’t seen the likes of anywhere else, and that’s particularly true of the religious art.

I mean, take a look at this version of Eve, literally coming out of Adam’s rib:

The curation is excellent, particularly in the gallery exhibiting 20th century Mexican painting, where thematic preoccupations are grouped together in a way that’s logical and obvious without being redundant and boring.

Bottom line: Who cares about Slim? It’s about the art.

For more photos from the Soumaya, check out this gallery.

Acapulco as seen from above

At the end of March, I went to Acapulco for the first time in my life; I was a guest of a PR firm, invited to the city for the annual Tianguis, a travel and trade show.

I’d heard about Tianguis from some other travel writers, who painted it as a long weekend bacchanal (and for some people, the description is not inaccurate). I was there to meet local tourism board officials, PR firms, and outfitters to scope out potential collaborations.

Though it’s not a city I’d hurry back to (to me, it’s got a worn, cheap, and slightly sad feel, similar to Myrtle Beach, but with a much more complicated backstory), there were some moments outside of Tianguis when I experienced genuine pleasure, and when I found a story interesting enough to make me wish I’d had just a bit more time there.

One of those stories was the cliff divers of Acapulco. When told we’d be going to see the cliff divers, I quickly developed a mental image of what the scene might look like.

But because I also fully expected a cheesy, overly touristy scenario, I didn’t do any advance research and didn’t give the excursion much thought until we were actually there, in the dark, watching the water below us froth and churn wildly.

I wasn’t prepared to take quality photos, I wasn’t prepared to ask for an interview afterward, or even to take the names of the cliff divers as they posed for photos and asked for tips after their jumps from the cliff face, and I went away disappointed in myself, but not in the show. If you ever find yourself in Acapulco, I definitely recommend that you make time one evening for the cliff diving show.

**
The question that stayed with me for several weeks after watching “La Teta Asustada” (released with the English title “The Milk of Sorrow,” but literally “The Frightened Breast”) was this: Are there films whose topics are so specific, so insular in some way, that their audience just won’t “get” them?

The answer is “Yes, of course,” which then leads to another question: What does the person who comes across this type of film do after having had the experience of seeing it?

*
“La Teta Asustada” was a disturbing, disorienting film that explores an aspect of Peruvian history few Americans are likely to know in any great detail. During the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso group clashed with paramilitary and state military troops; among the many casualties of the ongoing conflict were women raped by “security” forces.

The name given to the psychological trauma ensuing from mass rape was “la teta asustada,” and the underlying presumption was that women who had been victimized had passed along the emotional sequelae of their own trauma to their children through breast milk.

*
Fausta, the protagonist, is a second generation victim of rape via “la teta asustada.” In addition to the emotional burdens she carries, she is coping with her mother’s death, entrenched poverty, and a particularly troublesome response to victimization: in an attempt to protect herself from rape, she has put a potato in her vagina; the potato has sprouted, causing her to seek medical attention. (This, no doubt, is why at least one non-Peruvian critic has said the film has elements of “magical realism”, though I’d argue that there’s nothing “magical” about it; the potato is both real and symbolic, as is the trauma.)

“La Teta Asustada” is desperately bleak: the Peru of the film is grayscale. For the have-nots, daily life is an interminable, grinding series of little trials that pile up one on top of the other, rarely with satisfactory resolutions. The possibility of “superando,” overcoming, perhaps escaping, is visible for a moment–perhaps Fausta will fall in love with the gentle gardener and he will “rescue” her; perhaps the “patrona” for whom she works–a wealthy concert pianist with her own psychological trauma–will give Fausta an out.

Of course, it’s not to be. The film is frustratingly true to so many women’s real lives.
*
And that is what I took away from the film, but only a few weeks after seeing it. “La Teta Asustada” stayed with me in a deep, uncomfortable way, rising up in dreams and insisting that I learn more about a history that wasn’t my own.

*
Here’s the trailer for the film. It will be released on DVD in early December.