Category Archives: Mexico

February 13, 2012 · 2:18 pm

STREETS: Latinas and transgender style

Luisa Rivera

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been doing a story on the murder of a transgender black woman named Nathan Vickers, who also went by the names Chassidy, Chase and Cassidy.

I believe homicide gives reporters an opportunity to write about how a person lived, and less about how she died. As part of that, I’m trying to write about the transgender prostitute subculture in Hollywood.

One person I talked to was Luisa Rivera, a transsexual who has lived here for many years and who comes from Guadalajara. Latina transgenders changed a lot about the culture, which was really about drag queens until they arrived. They began coming in large numbers in the 1980s, mostly from Mexico, she said. As it happened, this coincided with the emergence of plastic surgery, which kept dropping in price as the years passed.

Far more so than other groups, Latina transgenders went for plastic surgery in a big way, she said. Enormous breasts, cheek and buttock implants, lots of silicon and hair weaves. Rivera said. In Hollywood they had surgeons here and in Tijuana to choose from. (They also had a vast, monied john clientele here, who insisted that they remain “fully functional” men, as the back-of-the-book ads in Hollywood sex throw-aways relentlessly put it.)

As we spoke, it occurred to me that Mexican transgenders were very much like other Mexican immigrants, but with a twist.

Mexican immigrants, generally, have spent the first dollars they’ve earned here in establishing themselves back home, mainly by building large houses. So it’s not only a house; it’s a way of showing everyone else how the person has done, that he is no longer the humble, shoeless kid who left the village at 15, who was humiliated for simply being poor. His transformation is complete.

Mexican transgender women also come here for a transformation — wanting to live as women after years of beat-downs and humiliations. They, too, want to show success publicly and quickly. Instead of houses, they spend on their bodies, to show the world, and maybe themselves, that they are not who they were when they were run out of their hometowns and country. Their breasts especially are monuments (pardon the pun, if that’s what it is) to the person they have become and always wanted to be back in Mexico.

Very much enjoying this story. More interviews to come.

 

 

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February 12, 2012 · 9:37 pm

CULTURE (kind of): SNL spoofs tuba thefts

This is getting weird. SNL’s Weekend Update riffed off the stolen tuba story last night. Here’s the full show, check it out at minute 35 or so.

As it happens, I missed it. By weird coincidence, I was out last night at a rehearsal of a banda of guys calling themselves Los BuKnas de Culiacan (that would be a bastardization of Buchanan, the rum), in a garage in Downey (see photos above). Buchanan Rum is a prized drink in the Mexican narco world — a sign of class and having arrived.

One of the songs was “Si No Vienes Conmigo” — which involves a man threatening his girlfriend that if she doesn’t come with him, he’s going to kidnap her and not charge a ransom. Where’s the romance gone?

Actually the band is a mixture of banda and norteno — with tuba, baritone horn, plus accordion — and looks to me a lot like the beginnings of punk rock. Went to the club where they were playing after the rehearsal and they wouldn’t let me and two BBC colleagues in. Reporters strictly prohibited at El Potrero Club in Cudahy.

 

 

 

 

 

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February 7, 2012 · 1:45 am

MIGRANTS: Tuba thefts

Santiago "Shagi" Mata, tuba player, Maywood, CA

The LA band craze continues to claim high school tubas right and left.

Here’s a link to a story about the latest: Bell High School had two stolen over the weekend, valued at $6,000 apiece. Several other schools have had tubas stolen in recent months.

It’s all about the emergence of the tuba as the emblematic instrument for Southern California in this era, just as the electric guitar was for the 1970s.

With the arrival of Mexican immigrants, and their tradition of house parties, the tuba has become all the rage in SoCal. Great tubists in banda music, like Santiago Mata (pictured here), are paid more than other musicians.

Also, the Sierreno trio — tuba, guitar and accordion — has grown in popularity at these parties.

Hence, tubas, the most expensive of marching band instruments, are in high demand. Most of the thefts have taken place in predominantly Mexican immigrant areas — southeast of LA especially — where banda is hugely popular.

I’ve written a story about this phenomenon and one about the thefts of tubas that many instructors believe is the result.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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February 2, 2012 · 7:20 am

DRUGS: Mennonites and Time’s `Flower Girls’

Mennonite one-room school house near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua

Time Magazine has published a set of photos of an Old Colony Mennonite community in Durango, Mexico, titling it The Flower Girls. Check them out. Tell me what you think. I find the photos are sweet, delicate, beautiful, and only hint at the disaster that has befallen most of these Mennonite communities, which have tried mightily to separate themselves from the world.

The Mennonite communities in Chihuahua are replete with severe problems of inbreeding, domestic violence, benighted education, alcoholism, and, in the last 20 years, drug trafficking, particularly in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua, four hours south of Ciudad Juarez.

Mennonites came to Mexico from Canada in the 1920s, invited by the government that wanted to colonize the north to avoid further US depredations. Those who came to escape the world were masterful farmers and cheesemakers. But in time they suffered from the same problems as other Mexican farmers: drought, lack of credit, etc. Many in the Chihuahua colonies turned to drug smuggling — some full time and some to pay an urgent debt. I ran into these folks in 2003 and included a chapter on the harrowing result — the scariest moment of my reporting life — in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.

I like the Time photos immensely, but from them you’d not guess much of the reality of Old Colony Mennonite life in Mexico.

For many of these world-rejecting Mennonites, it always seemed to me that their very attempt to isolate themselves made them  vulnerable to the worst the modern world has to offer. Many I spoke with described their people as lambs, unprepared for what they would encounter outside their community. Some likened it to Indians’ lack of exposure to small pox before the Europeans came.

I’ve included a photo above of a one-room schoolhouse, taught by a man with barely a bad sixth-grade education, which is how Mennonite kids are still schooled in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua. Would  love your comments on the Time photos.

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January 29, 2012 · 10:29 pm

MIGRANTS: Zeus Garcia, the Michael Jordan of Oaxacan Indian basketball

I had lunch the other day with an old friend, Zeus Garcia.

In his day, Zeus was like the Michael Jordan of Oaxacan Indian basketball – this in the mid-1970s. He and his brothers and cousins formed a basketball team from their village outside the City of Oaxaca and won tournaments for miles around for years. In the 1980s, they all migrated to LA., part of a large Zapotec Indian migration to the area that really heated up during those years. Almost all of them moved to either Pico-Union or Mar Vista or Venice.  (More on why not East LA in a later post.)

Zeus, when I first met him in the late 1990s, was a bus boy and intent on bringing a purer form of basketball to the United States, which he felt had corrupted the sport he loved. He coached a team of Oaxacan all stars, which he called Raza Unida.

Oaxacan Indians are basketball-obsessed folks and the sport plays an enormous role in their lives here in Southern California. Tournaments take place almost every weekend somewhere in the LA area. Zeus was kind of the guru of Oaxacan Indian basketball here. I wrote about him in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico. I later went to the Copa Benito Juarez in Guelatao, Oaxaca, and watched 7000 people take in the tournament at a small outdoor court in the birthplace of the legendary Mexican president, who was Zapotec.

Zeus is now a truck driver delivering for a fruit and vegetable wholesaler near downtown L.A. He told me his brother, Isaias, himself a great basketball player in his day, last year returned to their village to take on a servicio – a public job that is unpaid and that each member of an Indian village must do if he wants to remain in good standing. Some who’ve refused have had their lands taken. Zeus was full of stories of how folks back home seemed from another world to Isaias, mired in gossip and unwilling to try new things or work hard.

This is the story of many Mexican villages, seems to me. The ones with the drive and gumption leave. Those left behind depend on the dollars sent down from El Norte, and the result is a kind of welfare dependency that drives a lot of returning immigrants nuts.

I may do that story. Keep you apprised as it goes along.

Photos:  Zeus Garcia then and in 1999, and two shots of village teams from the Copa Benito Juarez.

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January 27, 2012 · 2:10 am

Pay Phone Virgin – Broadway & 42nd

Xochilt Market at Broadwway & 42nd Street

Another in my campaign to shoot every Virgin of Guadalupe in LA. This one protects the last pay phone in town.

 

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January 21, 2012 · 2:15 pm

Jaripo, Michoacan

Speaking with people from Jaripo, Michoacan comes news that the small town now has a cell of the La Familia camped out and controlling access.

They apparently drive around armed and with walkie-talkies, questioning any who enter the town.

This is sad.

Jaripo is a small, sweet town in northern Michoacan, largely deserted. Most natives have moved to the United States — Chicago, Dallas, Stockton, Santa Ana and other places. It’s inhabited mostly by empty houses, built by migrants through the 1980s-90s, when they returned every year for Christmas.

I wrote about the town in Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream — a place of clean air and quiet, except at fiesta time, when it filled with folks from the US and their trucks and mariachi bands brought in from Guadalajara.

Few return any more. Its only new residents, I’m told, are folks deported: for DUI or felony reentry into the US; a few for more serious stuff. Some of the latter have formed an alliance with this La Familia cell, I’m told.

But Jaripo lies on a paved road between Apatzingan in Michoacan’s Tierra Caliente (Hot Land), which is home to a robust drug trafficking culture that spawned La Familia, and Guadalajara. So this isolated place has become a strategic point in Mexico’s inter-cartel drug wars.

(Btw, a lot has been written about La Familia Michoacana — a pseudo-Catholic narco clan, who present themselves as defenders of Mexico against drug traffickers and smuggle large quantities of meth into the US. They have allied with the Sinaloa Cartel lately in a battle with the Zetas. They appeared to be on the decline since the arrest and death of several of its leaders in the last year or so. )

 

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