A new story up this week on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale, is by convicted bank robber Jeffrey Scott Hunter.
Check out Wasn’t About the Money — Jeff’s story of the time he knew his bank robbing was getting out of hand.
Happy to read any story you might want to submit.
And please share it on any social media you might use….
Many thanks,
Sam
Filed under Culture, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
Great idea — forming soccer teams made up of folks who are homeless, or socially/economically marginalized, and bringing them all together to compete in a soccer tournament, this the 10th annual.
On Facebook, Keith writes of some of the people he met:
“Like Ikram Moukhlis, a young Muslim woman who lives in a women’s shelter in Tangiers, Morocco. I know about 5 phrases in Arabic, she speaks no English or Spanish, but somehow we connected and I was proud of the photos I made of her. This trip to Mexico was the first time in her life to be on a plane. And then, Mauva Hunte-Bowlby, playing for England, who has been, until just recently, ‘sofa-surfing’ in London. Ms. Hunte-Bowlby is 52, and a grandmother twice over.”
Great story, fascinating event….check out Keith’s shots.
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Filed under Culture, Global Economy, Mexico
Fascinating piece in The Atlantic online this morning about what’s behind the class chasm in America.
The magazine holds that a major reason for the class divide in this country is the number of kids born into single-parent families. Or put another way, single-parent families and less parental time spent with kids are both cause and effect of the class divide.
More-educated people are more likely to get married later, and form lasting two-parent families, the magazine states. Educated parents are spending more time with their kids. (A frightening statistic is that 72 percent of African-American children are born into single-parent families; the number is 53 percent for Hispanics and 33 percent for whites, according to the magazine.)
A divorce divide — the growing amount of divorce among less-educated parents — is a factor in the class divide as well, the magazine states.
According to the magazine: “It’s no coincidence that rising inequality in the home has been occurring at precisely the same time as rising inequality in the workplace. These two kinds of social polarization – one cultural, the other economic – are interrelated and mutually reinforcing.”
The lesson: Those who invest in themselves and wait to get married and do not have children out of wedlock or some committed long-term relationship, do better economically. Or the flip side: more education and a better economic situation lead to wiser economic choices, such as waiting for a committed relationship to have children, and having fewer of them.
As someone who waited until 46 to get married and have a child — and then only one — I find this no surprise.
In many areas of highest crime and greatest poverty, young, single-parent families predominate — as they do among gang members I’ve interviewed.
Men, in particular, aren’t ready to get married, emotionally or economically, until their 30s at least, I’ve always felt, though I know this sounds like I’m drawing a universal case from my own life example.
Still….
An interesting story in today’s El Debate, a daily newspaper in the state of Sinaloa, asks whether buchon style is here to stay.
Buchon is a style of dress and speech — attitudes as well — that is from the bottom of the Sinaloan drug world.
It usually involves slang, very drawled speech — which is how folks from the mountains of Sinaloa speak. It also involves guns, demeaning talk about women, glorification of the bloodthirstiest narcos, money, military garb, tricked-out trucks, and, interestingly, the veneration of Buchanan whiskey — bastardized as “Buchanas.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this somewhere before.
Buchon is a big deal in the state of Sinaloa, where Mexican drug smuggling began — as the story makes clear.
It’s also a big deal here in L.A., where Sinaloan style has dominated Mexican culture for two decades — since the life and death of narco-balladeer legend Chalino Sanchez.
Los Buchones de Culiacan are a band that plays here regularly, and in Sinaloa. (Can’t play in the state of Tamaulipas as their image is so associated with the Sinaloa Cartel, which is at war with the Zetas, whose stronghold in near the Gulf of Mexico.)
People in the southeast cities of LA County sometimes try to speak like hill Sinaloans even though they’re from states with very different cultures, such as Jalisco or Zacatecas.
As Carlos Monsivais was once reputed to have said: if you provide jobs to people, you become a hero. Or you get all the girls…..
Fascinating findings by the Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life that Protestants no longer make up a majority
of the United States.
Many folks are religious but unaffiliated with any denomination.
As it turns out, I’m in the midst of a story about many Oaxacan Indians, from a Catholicism in their native towns that resembles something from 16th Century Spain, who have converted to various Protestant denominations here in the United States.
This is something I also found in the parts of Baja California where many Oaxacans also migrated. The Valley of San Quintin, where thousands of Oaxacans have come for farmwork, is studded with storefront churches: Pentecostal, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witness and others.
Always seemed to me that converting to Protestant denominations was part of the voyage out of the mountains of Oaxaca, Chiapas and other similarly distant places — a lifting of the blinders, in a sense. Not everyone goes through this, and a lot find other ways to come out of the Old World. But a good many bring clarity to their New World through a Protestant lens.
After all, they come from villages where the priest would visit and everyone would have to take off their hats and cast their eyes to the ground. Where people were prohibited from reading the Bible, but virtually required to participate in mass and annual religious festivals, which often involved heavy drinking.
This morning’s news that Heriberto Lazcano (pictured here), leader of the bloodthirsty Zeta drug cartel in Mexico, may have been killed by the Mexican military reminded me of a song by Los Cenzontles, the Mexican roots-music band from the Bay Area. (Update below: Lazcano’s corpse stolen.)
The Silence was recorded in February in a session in Echo Park with David Hidalgo, from Los Lobos, who has the vocals on the track, and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who sings backup.
A great, elegant tune about Mexico’s drug violence — one of the few songs whose achingly beautiful feel does some kind of justice to the tragedy.
The song is from the band’s great new CD, Regeneration — for which (full disclosure) I wrote the liner notes. The album mixes norteno, a little sixties rock, some blues and funk — all in a really strong, bold sound.
The band started as part of a grant to get kids involved in music in the East Bay. Years later, it’s an accomplished crew, having recorded several albums and artists such as Hidalgo, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal.
On a lower note, the Zetas started out as Mexican military special operations commandos and were paid to desert by Osiel Cardenas Guillen, then the leader of the Gulf Cartel, which ran the territory on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande Valley.
Cardenas, now doing 25 years in a US prison, hired them — 31 of them — as bodyguards. It took only a few years for them to realize that they could be a cartel as well. They branched off, recruited heavily among poor youth and returning deportees from the U.S. They formed new cells like amoeba, and became a fearsome force across Mexico and down into Guatemala.
See a Mexican military-issued photo of the corpse of Heriberto Lazcano.
UPDATE: Now there are reports that an armed squad of Zetas broke into the place where Lazcano’s corpse was held and made off with it.
The drama of our times — not good for much, except art sometimes.
David Hidalgo and Jackson Browne
Salon has an article on novelists using software programs to deny themselves access to the Internet.
This is what I need. I wrote my second book — Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream — in a cafe mercifully before the era of Wi-Fi hookups.
My focus was deep, as I listened to music via headphones and wrote for 5-6 hours at a time for weeks. I remember reaching profound levels of concentration doing that.
Now, Wi-Fi allows us to cut away at any moment when the writing gets tough. Very frustrating and counterproductive.
I was covering the dramatic bank robbery at the BofA in East L.A. this morning. Appears a couple guys kidnapped the manager last night, apparently as she was on her way home, then brought her to the bank this morning with a bomb strapped to her body.
She went in and told employees that she had the device on her and the kidnappers were telling her to take money out, which she did, then put the cash in a bag and threw it out to them, waiting in a car. They made their getaway.
She was unhurt, though shaken, and a Sheriff’s bomb squad disarmed the device.
Stories like this can involve a lot of waiting around, talking with bystanders who might have seen something. One of them was Octavio Medrano, a salesman at a used car lot, who’s been in the area “like all my life,” he says, selling used SUVs and Nissans and the like. He’s from Chihuahua.
He arrived at work too late for the commotion. But as we talked he began telling me about his other line of work.
In his part time, he writes about eternity. Just finished his second book, as it turns out — Viajero Eterno (Eternal Traveler). His card urges people to read the books if they are want to learn”the secrets of the seven doors of knowledge” or “the secret of reincarnation” or “the road to internal peace” or “our relation with the moon and planets,” and more.
All in all, that’s a lot more than I’ expect to learn at any used car lot.
Btw, you can pick up Mr. Medrano’s book at Amazon.com or www.palibrio.com.
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Storytelling
The Wire, the HBO show about the Baltimore heroin trade, was one of the best pieces of film-making I’ve ever seen.
At the link above, they ask, which character would you like to be?
I’d choose the captain who chose to legalize drugs in a chunk of ghetto Baltimore. Great character, inventive idea, fantastic actor, whose name I don’t know.
Either him, or Omar…..quite a dude.
Filed under Culture, Drugs, Storytelling
At long last, a story I worked on months ago, has run.
It’s about Wan Joon Kim, a vendor at an indoor swap meet in Compton, who became an impresario of gangsta rap, a music he didn’t particularly care for nor understand, as it was emerging from the garages of that city.
I got into it while looking for a way to write about indoor swap meets in Los Angeles, which have always intrigued me. I shop at them often and find them fascinating business models for micro-entrepreneurs.
Most, if not all, are owned by Koreans, for whom the indoor swap meet was an important route into the middle class in America.
They provided another view of black-Korean relations than that of the Korean-owned liquor store.
Mr. Kim is pictured here with his wife, Boo Ja, and his son, Kirk, who now runs the stall at Compton Fashion Center.
Hope you like the piece.
Filed under California, Culture, Gangs, Los Angeles, Southern California, Streets
One of the great arts events in all Mexico takes place this Saturday in Tijuana.
It is the Tijuana Opera Street Festival (Festival Opera en la Calle), now in its ninth year.
I wrote about the robust opera scene in Tijuana in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.
The street festival grew from that scene — which itself began germinating years ago when a guy imported an entire Russian orchestra (true story) from the crumbling Soviet empire straight to Tijuana. The musicians stayed, played, taught, shaped the first classical music conservatory in Baja California. A host of local underground opera aficionados were also pushing the whole gig along — among them Enrique Fuentes, who opened a Vienna-style opera cafe in the Colonia Libertad. (photo right)
The opera scene is the fruit of their DIY labor, though it remains a little like underground music (reminds me of punk rock, in spirit anyway) in TJ, which is a city not about harmony and discipline, but where the reigning ethic is about babble, chaos and commerce.
I loved telling this story because it was about Tijuana and its great complexity, yet had nothing about narcos, murder, maquiladoras or strip clubs. Also, it was all about people working toward something without much government help and for the pure love of it.
When my wife started crying after reading the story of Mercedes Quinonez (pictured above) and her lifelong attempt to be an opera singer while working at a hardware store, I figured I’d done well.
The festival takes place on 5th Street and Aquiles Serdan in Colonia Libertad (easy walking distance from the border crossing), a setting that cannot be matched for pure surrealness (surreality?). The neighborhood — the first to be built outside downtown Tijuana — is a crumpled wedding cake of a place, home to the city’s first boxers, gang members and mayors, as well as its plaster-statue industry. Two hundred yards away is the brown wall separating the city from the USA.
Just an amazing place to see people singing Verdi, Puccini, Wagner and the rest. Best time is later in the afternoon. Expect 7,000+ people. On this year’s bill are Carmina Burana, arias from Carmen, Cosi Fan Tutte, Turandot and Don Carlo.
Enjoy a bit of surreal border stuff — a very original creation by some very creative people.
I’ll be there. Can’t wait.
David Hidalgo and Jackson Browne
Los Cenzontles, the cool Mexican roots band from the Bay Area, is trying to put out a new disc. They’re looking for funding for the disc, Regeneration, which you can give by clicking on this link.
Several months ago, I wrote about a session I attended with the band and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Jackson Browne. Very cool time.
I recently heard the rough cuts of the session and they’re great. I wrote the liner notes to the album, too.
So help out a band that’s worth your time and money, Los Cenzontles.
David Hidalgo and the Roland button accordion
Filed under California, Culture, Migrants
The Huffington Post crime page has posted another story that first appeared on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale.
The story is by Richard Gatica, a longtime Mexican Mafia tax collector, and drug runner inside various prisons.
Now 43 and a prison-gang dropout, he is writing his memoirs, and was just convicted of strangling his cellmate to death. His memoirs make for powerful reading as he’s a great storyteller.
Richard sent me the story of how he killed his crack dealer, included in those memoirs, more than a year ago. It was posted on TYTT last year.
Anyway, read “Killing Donald Evans” on the Huffington Post.
Please “like” it, share it on FB, tweet about it, and tell your friends.
Earlier this month, HP also posted a story by federal prison inmate Jeffrey Scott Hunter: My First Bank Robbery.
Also I hope you’ll all consider submitting your own stories to Tell Your True Tale. We’ve got about 40 or so up so far.
If you haven’t looked into TYTT, or it’s been a while, feel free to check it out. The stories are great (and deal with all kinds of topics; only a few are about crime). Don’t pay, but I do edit.
Filed under Culture, Gangs, Los Angeles, Prison, Tell Your True Tale
Once again, tuba thieves have struck. This time: Whittier High School. Four sousaphones.
Last time, Saturday Night Live did a Weekend Update bit on the phenomenon.
Lightheartedness aside, I find the topic interesting because tubas are the emblematic popular instrument of our time in Southern California — just like the electric guitar was in the 1970s.
A reporter could probably have fashioned a whole beat writing about the culture surrounding electric guitar during those years. (In Claremont, where I grew up, there were easily 20 guys in my high school class who played guitar, and, if memory serves, six guitar stores within a few-mile radius.)
I think the same is true today of tubas. Their popularity says a lot about the region and the time.
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California
