Santana, Willie Nelson, Taibo, and Me: They All Went To Mexico

First, the song. Willie Nelson with Santana:



Then, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who writes in Four Hands (Cuatro manos)(1990):

There is a song by G. Brown on Havana Moon, a Santana record, that repeats the phrase in a country rhythm, "And they all went to Mexico," their friends went, their pals went, even their dogs went. I suppose that is part of the conjunction of two of the healthiest North American traditions: taking to the road (thank you, Woody Guthrie, Kerouac, Wyatt Earp, Bob Dylan, John Dos Passos, Calamity Jane, Spiderman, John Garfield, Ernest Hemingway) and crossing the boarder in search of the South (thank you, John Reed, Indiana Jones, James Taylor, Clint Eastwood, John Huston, Babe Ruth, Carleton Beals, Mike Gold, Burt Lancaster).

I suppose I'd gone south one time or another over the last few years, driven by those two national motivations. But it wasn't easy to go south. Every piece of knowledge brings a dose of guilt, equal in weight and importance to whoever acquires it. To be a U.S.-citizen-born-gringo in Latin America is a pastime for the unconscious, economic gangsters, commercial missionaries, radicals on the verge of jubilation, freaks, dreamers or crusaders. They all furnish the continent south of the border with their own demons. They travel with their ghosts. Then there are the others, us dreamers, those who believe there are no borders or countries, just landscapes and songs sometimes sung in unknown languages. Of all the monsters who travel south, we are the most dangerous because we believe we don't have the original sin that has to be forgiven; because we rationally think that we are not excessively different, that we can coexist with the natives on fair terms: You give to me, I give to you, you smile at me, I smile at you, even though at night we have nightmares in which half-naked, starving children, the live Latin American ghosts, point their fingers at us.

Going south is, as Malcolm Lowry and Joseph Conrad and Ambrose Bierce knew, a descent into hell itself. Leaving the deceptive North American Paradise, the true hell, the demons attack, they attempt to escape from the skin and gush forth. One knows it when traveling south, one knows the Martians who play Ping-Pong inside our heads. And in the end, one is grateful that it is so and not any other way. Anyone who doesn't have hells will be content to die kneeling in front of a television in a place as ludicrous as Indianapolis.

And then, there's me. I went to Mexico. My book Tulum, set in Mexico, is poised on a printers launch pad as I write this. I continue to be one of those dreamers who frequently crosses the border. Maybe that's why the song and PIT II's writing speak so directly and deeply to me. I know it's an essential step for me to go to Mexico. I suspect it's essential for others as well. I only wish everyone understood it as well as Taibo and Santana. And Willie Nelson. And I wish we could all work hard on learning that there are no borders or countries, just landscapes and songs sung in other languages. And that we would all do our part to assist the merging and blending of nations, peoples, languages, songs, and dreams.

Calderon's Alternate Reality

Maybe I have finally entered an alternate reality.

As I write this, I am in lovely Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico, and it is raining. Hard. After all, it’s October and the Caribe is stirred up. The rain is exquisitely beautiful. The sea is rippling with pockmarks. And the cocos are swaying and dripping. The sky is gray and white cotton. The wind shakes the trees and agitates Bahia Soliman. Everything is wet and the air is filled with mist. It is a day made for napping and reading. And thinking.

Where I am is paradise. No doubt about it. And it is far, far away from the shooting war between the Mexican government and the drug cartels. That is happening in other areas: the border states, the west coast, the capital. Where I am is far from that immense national tragedy. Regardless, it remains a topic of enormous concern. And Javier Sicilia remains a personal hero.

So it was with great interest that this morning the New York Times reported on its Front Page an interview with Mexican President Felipe Calderon about the unsuccessful drug war he has run for five years and has left 40,000 people dead. Calderon, whose term is up next year, apparently seeks to justify and perpetuate his shooting war on the cartels:

He insists that the country will eventually become more secure, although about 40,000 people have been killed since he declared his war against organized crime. He began waging it shortly after taking office in 2006 as violence climbed, and he has continued pressing his offensive against drug organizations as they have splintered and descended into bloody infighting over territory and criminal rackets.

But in a wide-ranging interview, he could not say that his approach had made Mexico safer….

The inability to control the violence, with fresh horrors nearly every week, has rattled even some admirers in the United States Congress, who have begun to question publicly whether Mr. Calderón’s strategy — supported by the $1.4 billion in anticrime aid the United States is providing through the multiyear Merida Initiative — is making progress….

Still, coming close to self-criticism for someone who has typically blamed the United States or Mexican lawmakers for what goes wrong, Mr. Calderón said he would have shored up state and local police forces that were now overwhelmed as well as hobbled by inexperience, lack of training, incompetence and corruption.

And so it is in the fifteenth paragraph of the article that the “c” word first appears. Corruption. And even there it is the fourth reason given why police forces are “overwhelmed” and “hobbled.” Does that strike anyone except me as exceedingly odd? Am I in some alternate reality?

Maybe this omission makes sense if you are in the United States and don’t know anything about life south of the Rio Grande. Maybe it makes sense if you know no Mexican history. Maybe it makes sense if you think that everywhere in the world is exactly the same: Burger King, Wal-mart, Coca Cola, malls, neighborhood policing. Maybe it makes sense if you think that the state is always above reproach. Maybe it makes sense if you haven’t read anything about Mexico.

I’m not suggesting reading non-fiction to get the feel of this, although Eduardo Galeano’s non-fiction discussions of Latin America are extremely important. The real truth (is there any other kind?), I think, is in the fiction. And for the sake of brevity, I offer for your consideration two wonderful works that I think should inform discussions of the drug war in Mexico. Evidently, neither informed the Times’s credulous discussions with Sr. Calderon.

First is Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s “No Happy Ending” (“No habra final feliz”), a 1981 detective novel. Hector Belascoaran Shayne, an independent detective in Mexico City, confronts a series of murders. There will be no spoiler here. What you have to watch for is how the suppression of demonstrations by the central government in 1971 figures in the tale. And the role of the police. Enough said. It’s a remarkable book, a critique of Mexico by someone who loves it, masquerading as a detective story.

Next is Martin Solares’s 2006 novel “The Black Minutes” (“Los minutos negros”). Someone is murdered, and the question, of course, is why. And by whom. Is this really a police procedural? Probably not, though it sure looks like one in the beginning. There will be no spoiler here. Yet again, the issue is how someone escapes the consequences of a series of serious, brutal crimes for decades and what the role of the police, of the state might be in all of that. No mas. This is a literary masterpiece dressed up as a detective story. If you don’t read anything else this year, please read this wonderful book.

Both books are remarkable works of art. And they could actually change the way people in the US perceive the war on drugs without ever mentioning it. Both are available in English. And both do not directly discuss any of the particulars of 2011. They don’t have to. They provide the tablecloth on which to spread out the present war as if it were a picnic.

And then there’s also this: la mordida (literally, “the bite”), a bribe, is a fact of life here. An ugly one, but one nonetheless. It’s not really unusual for a police officer to stop a car for speeding or running a red light and to say that the matter can be settled right there at the roadside, without a trip to court, for $US50 of $US100. No receipt will be given. And everyone knows that if you only appear to have 200 pesos (slightly less than $US20) that will probably work as well. This is a small thing. It’s no big deal. It’s customary. From the motorist’s point of view it’s better than going to Municipal Court or sending in a check. But it raises important questions.

If a speeding ticket is the common cold of crime, and it produces bribery and pervasive official misconduct, what, one wonders, does the trafficking of tons and tons and tons of cocaine produce? Does it produce so little corruption that the idea can be overlooked until the fifteenth paragraph of a story about the war on drugs? You have to be kidding to do that. Really.

In whose interest would such an oversight be? You don’t have to speculate deeply about this. You just have to acknowledge the multitude of possibilities this odd placement might indicate and what that says about the reality in which I find myself.

Newark: Too Darn Hot

”He remembered. And he thought that a man’s memory was a pointless game created by idle gods.”

Paco Ignacio Taibo, The Shadow of the Shadow (Sombra de la sombra)

Yesterday, Newark, New Jersey, the city of my birth, set an all time heat record. It was 108. That qualifies as undisputably miserable. And ridiculously hot. And crazy making uncomfortable. And, as well, absolutely a danger to your health, both physical and mental. I’m sweltering somewhere else. But upon hearing on the radio that the record was set, my memory, that pointless game created by idle gods, took me back to the early ‘50’s in Newark.

I remember that particular record setting day well. A real scorcher. I think I was told it got to 103. It was unbelievable, even to a kid who had access to a kiddie pool and a garden hose. My mother was worried that it was far too hot for the kids to play outside. As if playing was something anybody felt compelled to do. But being inside was impossible: it was like a furnace. We didn’t have air conditioning. That was a luxury only for the well healed. It was like that other icon of wealth, color television: unattainable. Don’t even think about it. I think we had some box fans we got at Two Guys From Harrison, a store that folded before it could morph into a big box. That was about it for cooling the house. I don’t remember ever opening the distant fire hydrant: too much trouble with no tools, and too far away. I remember when we first got the fans. What a relief. What did we do before then when it got really hot?

I think we did nothing. Or as close to nothing as possible. I think we sat patiently in the shade. And drank iced tea. Or Royal Crown Cola. Or were supposed to. I remember my grandmother saying that it was far too hot for the kids to run around. They’d get all sweated up. Like we wanted to run around. No, they should sit in the shade too. Fat chance. I remember the day. I was wearing a bathing suit and sneakers. I went from hose to pool to hose to shade to pool. Repeat and start over again. The adults sat in the shade and moved as little as possible. Eventually, they would say, it will begin to cool off. Eventually. That qualified as wishful thinking. They’d say it was too hot to cook. The fact is that it wouldn’t really cool off. But you could lie down with the fan blowing right on you and eventually you’d fall asleep.

And then I heard the bells. The ice cream truck. Headed down Bond Street, through the glare of the heat rising from on the black street pavement toward us. If ever there was a day when Lester’s white truck was an anticipated relief. Yes, he had chocolate pops. And orange ice pops. And cherry too. Yes, but it’s so hot, kid, that they’re all kind of melty, you know what I mean? So what. We don’t care about that. We want some. Yeah, can we have them? Yeah, it sure is hot. See you tomorrow. So we sat in the shade and gobbled them down as fast as we could. And, of course, we got sticky chocolate and sticky orange all over us. Our faces. Our hands. Our bare chests. Our bathing suits. No matter. We were cool for an instant. And happy. And the mess was just another reason to sit in the pool. And get the hose.

It was just too hot for anything else. It was too darn hot: