Tag: mexico

Tulum, Mexico — This is a friend of mine.  Young Mexican beach dog.  Apparently, she has an owner who appreciates her and feeds her.  Not as much as gringo dogs, but enough.  She’s been hanging around for about a week, just visiting.  

Carlos Fuentes, Mexican writer and laureate, says in his novel The Years With Laura Diaz, that Mexican dogs look like this because of the Mexican Revolution.  Landowners with pure bred dogs, dogs with pedigrees, had to let their dogs go, had to unchain them, when they fled the revolution, or got thrown off their haciendas, or lost all of their possessions.  The dogs had their own caste system, obviously, but it wasn’t the same one as people in Mexico had at that time.  Dogs accept and live with their own system and its hierarchy.  After the Revolution, the dogs created this new, revolutionary species.  Mexican beach dog.  My friend above is a wonderful example.

This is just one of the many reasons why I believe in dog.  History might be written by the winners.  Yes.  But in the end, dog survives.

I love my Mexico and the culture which is hard to understand at best.  I live in a small village about two kilometers from the beach, and when I say small, trust me.  I moved from the local tourist beach town in June and I have to admit that I love it here.  It is very quiet and I am the only gringa here.  I didn’t move to Mexico to join the Rotary and hang with the other gringos.  It seems like they are doing a fraud job on people and really not helping except to make us another US or Canada.

I have lived in this wonderful place for seven years now, and will never return to the US.

Today I read that many poor people from Honduras have been fleeing the country, passing through Guatemala, and are landing in shelters in Oaxaca, Mexico:

The military coup in Honduras is providing an unexpected test of Mexico’s immigration and refugee policies. On Friday, July 3, dozens of Honduran nationals arrived at a church-run migrant shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca seeking refugee status because of the political situation in their country.

Alejandro Solaline Guerra, spokesman for the Mexican Episcopal Conference, said a group of Hondurans sought assistance at the House of Mercy in Ciudad Ixtepec on the Tehuantepec Peninsula. The migrant advocate said the bishops’ organization will contact the National Migration Institute to request refugee status for the Hondurans under international law.

“Migrants from a country in a state of war should not be denied refugee status,” Solaline declared.

The Honduran political crisis could aggravate an already conflictive situation in Mexico’s southern border region. Despite the international economic crisis, thousands of Central Americans and other Latin migrants continue to cross the country’s southern border en route to the United States. Along the way, migrants remain a favorite target of corrupt Mexican officials and bands of organized criminals.

source.

I think that as the golpe de estado continues in Honduras and as the instability and repression grow, and the economy continues to be disrupted, more and more poor Hondurans will have to pick up and leave, fleeing across Guatemala and into Mexico.

I suspect that those who are running shelters all along the well traveled route from Honduras and across southern Mexico could help these refugees if they had money to do so.

That’s where I need help.  El Hogar de Misericordia en Ixtapa does not have a web site.  La Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano has a site, but no way to donate.  I don’t find on line anywhere to donate to support these refugees on their journey away from Honduras and into Mexico, though I am well aware that there are shelters along the route.

Long story short: I need your help to find a way to get funds to those who are helping the refugees from Honduras who arrive in Mexico.

This seems particularly important to me. Those fleeing Honduras are preyed on by gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha and their rivals, by coyotes, by the police.  Their journey is precarious even when it is motivated purely by economics.  And now, I fear the golpe de estado and the lockdown in Honduras and Honduras’s economic isolation will drive even more poor people from their homes into the snares set by waiting gangs and police.  The shelters are essential to protect these refugees, to feed them, to give them an opportunity to stop in a safe place.

It would be a service to provide financial help to the shelters.  The question, dear Dharmanics, is how we can do that.  I ask your assistance in finding a way.

h/t to Mariachi Mama for the Mexidata article

An off hand comment, intended as infantile bathroom humor by a male coworker:

“Ah, man. My coat’s going to smell like a sewer. Luis is in the bathroom taking a dump, and he always stinks it up.”

I cringed a little, grossed out, but keeping my work game face on said, “Luis partied last night, maybe too much tipping..” making the universal glass tipping motion toward him.

“No,” he said straight faced. “Too much beans and salsa, you know all that Mexican food.”



I gave him that sidelong look, you know the one I mean, that long suffering look of Mothers everywhere for when their kids say really stupid shit. Not irritated so much as tired.

“Luis isn’t Mexican. He is Venezuelan.”

He grinned his goofy apologetic grin, shrugged and smiled at his own stupidity, “Venezuela, Mexico, like I would know the difference, they’re all the same to me. They all speak Spanish.”

He walked away too quickly in his lolling gate, almost bouncing like a cartoon character, for me to point out the very obvious. More on that later.

Jesus, it almost tied together my two separate essays I have on hold.

The lack of cultural and geographic understanding and why tribal pure states will no longer work. Sounds strange but the source is the same. Intentional ignorance.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

The Coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico, between Bahia Soliman and Tankah

In 1958, Michel Peissel, who at age 21 was about to enter Harvard Business School, made a solo journey on foot from what would eventually become Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico, down the Caribbean Coast to Belize, which he described in his book, The Lost World Of Quintana Roo.

Join me in this Lost World.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

This is absolutely infuriating.  The New York Times reports on the struggle of former Mexican farm workers, some in the 80’s and 90’s, to obtain refunds from the Mexican Government of 10% of their wages that were withheld when they worked in the US under the bracero program:

FRESNO, Calif. – Here comes Abraham Franco now, 86 years old, skin leathery and bronzed from decades of work in the fields, slowly bending his small but sturdy frame into a metal chair at a faux wood office table at the Mexican Consulate here.

He still could not quite believe the news: Decades after working as a bracero, as thousands of Mexican guest farm workers were called in a program from 1942 to 1964, the Mexican government had recently agreed to a one-time payment, $3,500, of long overdue withheld wages.

The braceros are fading fast, some pushing or over 90, and are ever reliant on family and friends to get by.

Join me in the lettuce fields with Sr. Franco.  

This essay is cross-posted from dKos and The Dream Antilles

The Beach in Bahia Soliman

Maybe this is the beginning of another love story.  People come from all over the world to the Mayan Riviera in Mexico as tourists, fall in love with it, and return over and over and over again.  The Mayan Riviera is the area south of Cancun, Mexico, and north of Tulum, on the Caribbean.  You get there by flying to Cancun.  After that, you travel south on Route 307, to Playa del Carmen, and then Akumal, and Puerto Aventuras, past Xel-Ha and on to Tulum.  You can make the trip by rental car, bus, taxi, or collectivo.  

Join me on the beach.  

A story that has been bubbling up in Mexico finally has made its way back to the surface in the U.S. news. The New York Times reports State oil industry’s future sets off tussle in Mexico.

A bitter debate over what to do about Mexico’s ailing state oil monopoly has dominated national politics here in recent weeks, tapping strong emotions on both sides and resurrecting the political fortunes of the leftist leader who narrowly lost the 2006 presidential election.

The corporate framing is immediate in the opening graph of the story, but that’s not unsurprising from the NY Times. What is surprising is that normally stories from Mexico do not often make the news in the United States. This story is different, because: “At stake in the debate is not only the future of the Mexican economy but also the supply of oil to the United States.” Even news from Mexico is framed by the interests of the United States. As of 2007, Mexico still had an estimated 12.4 billion barrels of untapped oil reserves, or 10 percent of the world’s crude, according to the U.S. Energy Department.