city at night

city at night

Monday, March 18, 2024

Benito's Birthday

 Today is a national holiday in Mexico honoring the birthday of President Benito Juárez.


The Juárez Monument in downtown Mexico City at night


Juárez was actually born on March 21st, 1806, but his birthday is commemorated each year on the third Monday of March in order to create a three-day weekend or "puente" (bridge) as it is known in Mexico.

Benito Juárez is the most revered President in Mexico's history.  Throughout the country there are cities, schools and institutions named after him.  There is hardly a Mexican city that does not have a Juárez Avenue.

Juárez was a key figure in the passage of the liberal laws known as La Reforma which eliminated the power and privileges of the Catholic Church.  A civil war between liberals and conservatives ensued in 1858.  Juárez, who was the chief justice of the Supreme Court assumed the Presidency under constitutional rules of succession when the sitting President left the country amidst the conflict.  Although the conservatives took control of Mexico City, and Juárez fled to the port city of Veracruz, the liberals achieved victory by 1860.

Elections were held in 1861, and Juárez won easily.  However, in 1862 he faced another crisis... invasion of the country by the French forces of Napoleon III.  Again, Juárez fled Mexico City and escaped to the northern border.  He established his capital at El Paso del Norte... across the river from El Paso, Texas.  The city is now known as Ciudad Juárez.  The French set up a puppet government headed by the Austrian prince Maximilian von Hapsburg.  Guerilla activity against the invaders plagued the French army, and they were never able to effectively control the entire nation.  When the United States, emerging from its own civil war, pressured Napoleon III, the French forces were withdrawn.  Maximilian's army crumbled without French support.  The Austrian who had ruled as Emperor of Mexico for three short years was captured and executed.

In 1867 Juárez returned triumphally again to Mexico City.  Elections were held later that year, and Juárez was reelected.  In 1871 he won another term, but that election was controversial, and some claimed that it involved fraud.  He died in office the following year at the age of 66.

After his death, Juárez attained cult-like stature as the hero who saved Mexican constitutional democracy from internal and foreign enemies.  However, there are historians who have reassessed the Juárez presidency.  Although he is celebrated for being a full-blooded Zapotec Indian, Juárez rejected his indigenous roots.  He viewed the indigenous people as primitives that needed to be assimilated into society.  His reform laws confiscated the Church´s vast holdings of property.  However, native peasants were better off when they were working on Church land than when that property was bought up by wealthy and avaricious investors.  Even among his liberal colleagues he was accused of abuses, infractions of the Constitution, the excessive use of emergency powers, and relying on local allies to assure the desired results in elections.

Regardless of what the man may have been like in real life, there is no denying that he has assumed a mythic quality similar to Abraham Lincoln in the United States.    




Sunday, March 17, 2024

No, It's Not Halloween

This weekend the streets near the World Trade Center were filled with people in bizarre costumes.  For example, this fellow was having something to eat at a street food stand across the street from convention center.


No, it's not Halloween in March, but rather the weekend for an event called "La Mole" Convention.  It's something like Comic-Con in the United States, and it describes itself as Latin America's largest convention of comics, fantasy and pop culture.

Alejandro was passing by the World Trade Center yesterday morning.  There was a father and his young son (dressed in Superman pajamas) waiting in the long line to enter.  When the dad realized that he didn't have enough money for the admission, the little boy was heartbroken.  The people around them started chipping in to make up the difference.  The little boy was literally jumping up and down with joy and shaking the hand of everyone who contributed.  Very sweet story.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Still Blooming

Nearly three months have passed since Christmas, but I still have a bit of the holiday season in my apartment.  The poinsettia that I bought in December is still blooming.  It has lost very few leaves, and at this rate it will still be blooming for Easter.


It seems to be very happy in its location with bright light filtered through the sheer curtains of the living room window.

Eventually I will cut it back, and let it sprout new growth.  It is in a very small pot, so I will need to repot it also.  We will see if I have any luck in getting it to bloom again next Christmas.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Making Salsa

I have not been doing any cooking here in the apartment other than making salads or heating something up in the microwave.  The valve to turn on the gas for the stove is inconveniently located behind it.  When I was renting the apartment and going back and forth between Mexico City and Ohio, it became a bother to pull out the stove to turn the gas on and off every time I arrived and left.  Well, now that I am living here permanently, I decided it was time to start using my kitchen.  Last weekend Alejandro and I finally pulled out the stove, and he reached behind to turn on the gas.

The first thing I prepared, now that I am cooking with gas, was homemade "salsa de molcajete".  A "molcajete" is a Mexican mortar and pestle made from volcanic stone.  Years ago, I bought a "molcajete", and it has been sitting on the kitchen counter.  I had only used it once.


 This week I went to the market and bought the produce that I would need to make my salsa.

The stovetop, like most Mexican stoves, has a "comal" or griddle in the center for heating tortillas, or for roasting vegetables.  I covered the "comal" with aluminum foil.  I put four cloves of peeled garlic and a sliced, medium onion on the griddle and roasted them until they were well charred.


I took the roasted garlic and ground it up in the "molcajete".  Then I added the onion and ground it up with the garlic.


Next, I roasted two serrano peppers until charred.  The recipe called for three peppers, but the last time I made this salsa, it was very fiery.  


(You can see why I covered the griddle with aluminum foil.)

The peppers are then ground up with the onions and garlic.

Finally, I roasted five Roma tomatoes.



The tomatoes are then ground up with the rest of the mixture, and voila, the salsa is complete!


Even though I only used two serrano peppers, it was still quite spicy.  If you don't have a "molcajete", you could, I suppose, use a blender.  But don't over process it.  The salsa should be chunky.
  

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Politicking

In the June 2 election in Mexico, voters will not only select a new President, but also both houses of the legislature, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.  On the local level there are many races for state legislatures and eight state governorships.  Voters will also select the head of government for Mexico City.  

In 1997 Mexico City, which used to be the Districto Federal (analogous to the District of Columbia in the U.S.) was given autonomy.  It gained a status akin to a state, although technically, according to the Mexican constitution, the capital cannot be a state.  So, the head of government for Mexico City, is more like a "governor" than a mayor.  Campaign posters for the two major candidates suddenly proliferated this past week along the streets of Mexico City.

As I was walking along Patriotismo Avenue, the thoroughfare was lined with posters for Santiago Taboada.  His slogan is "El cambio viene" (The change is coming).




 

Taboada served as the chief executive of the "alcaldía" (borough) of Benito Juárez, the borough in which I live.  (Just as Mexico City is now similar to a state, the sixteen boroughs are similar to cities within the city, and the heads of the boroughs are called mayors.)  He is now running to be the head of Mexico City.  Taboada is himself a member of PAN, the conservative party, but he is the candidate for a coalition called "Fuerza y Corazón por México" (Strength and Heart for Mexico) which was formed in opposition to the ruling Morena Party.  They say that politics makes strange bedfellows, and that is certainly the case with this coalition.  It is composed of PAN (conservative party), PRI (the "revolutionary" party which had an iron grip on Mexican politics from 1929 until 2000) and PDR (a socialist party).

There is nary a poster along the avenue for the populist Morena candidate, Clara Brugada.  Although Taboada will most likely carry his home borough of Benito Juárez, Brugada is expected to easily win the election.  In Alejandro's working-class neighborhood, Clara's image is plastered all over the place.


    

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Construction

 As I have mentioned a number of times, Mexico City continues to experience a building boom.  New office towers, shopping malls, and apartment buildings are under construction all over the city, including the neighborhood where I live.

Down the street from me, an older house on a large piece of property was demolished, and a new structure, most likely an apartment building, is going up.  I was able to peek through the barricade and see the work being done.  From the depth of the excavation, I would guess that the new building will be several stories high.



Across the street a new apartment complex is nearing completion.  It consists of three buildings with a total of 48 apartments.  The project is called "Blendhaus".  (I have no idea where they come up with the names for some of these buildings.)


One of the three buildings is actually on the next street over.  It appears that it will soon be ready for occupancy.  I could see workers inside painting the walls.



Almost next door is another brand-new apartment building called "Viewpoint".  Apartments are now ready for occupancy.



The two-bedroom apartments (which are smaller than the one I have) START at 5.3 million pesos (over 315,000 U.S. dollars).  



Although the cost of living is generally lower in Mexico City than in Ohio, real estate is expensive.  I suppose that if you compare the prices with someplace like Manhattan, they are affordable, but for someone coming from Cleveland they seem high.  I am in an older building that doesn't have amenities such as a roof garden or gymnasium, but I think I got my place for a very good price.

The construction boom concerns me.  I can't figure out who is buying all these expensive apartments or how they are finding tenants for the office buildings. I keep wondering when the bubble is going to burst.  Of course, I have been saying that for a number of years, and yet the boom continues.  More concerning is the strain that the continuing growth is putting on the city's finite resources.  You may have read that Mexico City is facing a water shortage, yet the growth continues unabated. 

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

At the Movies

Since I moved to Mexico last October, Alejandro and I have been to the movie theater a number of times.  In fact, I think that this year we saw more of the Oscar nominated films than ever before.

Not long after my arrival, we saw "Oppenheimer".  It was an excellent movie.  It was quite long, and sometimes I had a hard time keeping track of all the characters, but I was pleased to see it walk away with the most Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

Next, we saw "Killers of the Flower Moon" (titled "Asesinos de la Luna" in Spanish).  It also was an excellent movie which portrayed the systematic murders of members of the Osage tribe in the 1920s in order to steal the oil discovered on their reservation.  However, at well over two and a half hours in running time, it was too long.

We saw "Poor Things", which I thought began promisingly as an eccentric variation on the theme of "Dr. Frankenstein".  However, after a while I felt as if I were watching some sort of bizarre porno film.  I don't consider myself a prude, but, really, how many times do we need to see a naked Emma Stone bouncing up and down while she has sex?  It hit a low point when Stone's character, who is working as a prostitute, has a client who brings his underage sons to watch and take notes.  Disgusting!

We also watched a couple of Oscar-nominated films on Netflix.  I was looking forward to watching "Maestro", the biopic about the conductor Leonard Bernstein.  After about a half hour, I said "Turn it off."  I thought it was a totally pretentious piece of crap.

We watched "Society of the Snow", a film from Spain which was nominated as best foreign film.  It was a gripping movie which dealt with the 1972 crash in the Andes Mountains of a flight carrying a Uruguayan rugby team.  It won 12 prizes at the Goya Awards, Spain's equivalent of the Academy Awards.  I wish that it had won the Oscar.

Last weekend, we went to the movie theater twice, to see two more nominated films just before Oscar night.

On Saturday we saw "The Zone of Interest", a British-Polish German language production, that was nominated for Best Picture and for Best Foreign Film


Even though it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, i
t was without a doubt the most boring film that I have ever seen.  It deals with the mundane middle-class life of the Commander of Auschwitz and his family in their pleasant home located next door to the horrors of the concentration camp.  I understand that the theme is the "banality of evil", but after a half hour of watching the family going through their daily routine, yeah, "We get it.  When is something dramatic going to happen?" I thought that the performances of the actors were wooden.  The running time was less than two hours, but it felt interminably longer.  As one sarcastic reviewer wrote, the title should have been "The Zone of Disinterest" or "The ZZZZZZone of Interest".

On Sunday we saw "May December" (in Spanish it was titled "Secretos de un Escándalo").  It was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.


In this movie, Natalie Portman plays an actress who is researching a role that she is going to play... a married woman who was imprisoned for her affair with an adolescent.  Julianne Moore plays the notorious sex-offender who, after serving her term in prison, marries and has a family with her young lover.  Many said that Moore should have received an Oscar nomination, and I agree.  We never really figure out the enigma of Moore's character, but it is an engrossing film.