Tag Archives: Mexico

September 19, 2013 · 8:40 am

Where have you seen the 7-4-0?

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I said I’d never been there before I went to Portsmouth, Ohio.

Later, when I thought about it, and saw the video by RWR (Raw Word Revival), I realized I had been to the 7-4-0 many times.

Seems like the 7-4-0 is in the 6-2-0 (southwest Kansas), where the farming towns are empty, streets are vacant, and storefronts are boarded up. I was there several years ago.

One reader said this:

7-4-0 reminds me of my hometown, Elkhart, Indiana (574). Elkhart was built on the pharmaceutical, band instrument, and musical instrument manufacturing industries. Because of the mobile home industry, it tags along with the fortunes of Detroit. Don’t know about heroin, but backpack meth and home meth labs (one blew up across the street from the high school) are everywhere.

I was in YIMG_4006oungstown — which looked a lot like the 7-4-0, now that I think about it.

I was in the 7-4-0 in Pecos, Texas, where there aren’t enough food stores of any kind but the fast food variety.

In Huntington, WV (3-0-4), I did a story about the spread of black-tar heroin that had reached the city from one very similar small town in Mexico. More pizza joints in Huntington than there are gyms in all of WV, I’m told.

And having lived in Mexico, I can say that a thousand villages down there are in the 7-4-0, which is why those folks have left en masse, just like so many have left Portsmouth.IMG_4034

I was in the 7-4-0 in Marion, Ohio, where a guy got so upset at the lack of attention to the heroin problem that he put up signs saying, “Heroin is Marion’s Economy.”

And it seems like I’m in the 7-4-0 when I walk the aisles of any Walmart. I always imagine them haunted by ghosts of the storeowners who once sustained small-town America: one aisle by the departed local grocer; down another the former hardware store owner, and next to that, the long-gone woman’s clothier or that pharmacist.

Where have you seen the 7-4-0?

Tell me the story. Leave it in Comments.

And follow me: On Twitter.  On Facebook.

My website: www.samquinones.com

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More posts from True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog:

T-shirts: What the hell you know about the 740?

Here’s what I know about the 7-4-0

What the hell you know about the 740?

Wanna Burrito? A prison tale

 

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September 9, 2013 · 6:05 pm

Here in Youngstown…

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I’m here in Youngstown, Ohio. A tough-looking town that appears to have been through a lot.

Apparently the town once had miles and miles of steel mills. That’s gone.

Just interviewed a Mexican trafficker who told me that the guys from his town back home sent hundreds of guys to the US to retail heroin like pizza.

In time, they’d saturate a market and so the heroin pioneers in that market would move on to other places and thus, over the years, they expanded. They’re now in 20 states and cresting on the new markets for their dope created by the waves of addiction to Oxycontin, which contains a drug molecularly almost identical to heroin.

It’s all part of the next book I’m trying to get done.

The opiate of the masses … are opiates.

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September 5, 2013 · 7:39 pm

The Virgin of the Carpet Store

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One more of the Virgin in Los Angeles, again in the southern part of the city, though I can’t remember where.

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August 21, 2013 · 1:34 am

PHOTOGRAPHY: Boy running, Oaxaca, Mexico

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I’m trying to be a better street photographer these days, and the results are only occasionally satisfying.

But I liked this shot last year in Santa Ana del Valle, Oaxaca.

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August 13, 2013 · 10:15 am

THE HEROIN HEARTLAND: Dino’s story — an addict comes clean

I first talked to Dean Williams when he was in prison for his part in a network of heroin traffickers out of Nayarit, Mexico who work many cities, including Indianapolis, where he met them.

This was in 2009 or so. He was cleaned up by then.

Dean had been using since the late 1960s, when some older guys from his neighborhood returned hooked from the Vietnam War.

I finally met him earlier this year, and then again just a few days ago. A sweet guy with a good story.IMG_9264

I made this video (7 minutes) — among my very first and the first to go up on my Youtube channel — which is, you guessed it, TrueTalesVideo.

So let me know where it can be improved.

For my book, I’m hoping to make more of these to include on my website. I’ve got four already, which I’ll put up in due time.

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July 21, 2013 · 10:36 pm

PHOTOGRAPHY: Another Tuba Photo

Paramount, CA

Alfredo Herrejon, tuba player for Banda El Recodo.

Alfredo changed Mexican tuba with his playing on “Mi Gusto Es” by Banda Tierra Blanca in 1997 — a reworking of the tuba part in that classic ranchero song that ignited the imagination of dozens of younger players.

Mexican tuba playing hasn’t been the same since.

This was taken outside the shop where he has his tuba mouthpieces made — Garibaldi Musical Instruments in Paramount, CA.

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June 3, 2013 · 1:06 pm

PHOTOGRAPHY: More photos at Kaldi in South Pas

I have some more photos on display at Kaldi, the cafe in South Pasadena.

These shots are from Jaripo, a small town in Michoacan, which taught me a lot about immigration from Mexico. It was a big part of the introduction I wrote to my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration.

Check them out next time you’re in the area.

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February 26, 2013 · 9:32 pm

MEXICO: Elba Esther Gordillo, head of teachers union, arrested, charged with misuse of funds.

imagesBig News From Mexico.

Authorities arrest Elba Esther Gordillo, hugely powerful chief of the national teachers union, and charge her with misuse of union funds, money laundering.

Here’s La Jornada’s take.

She is one of the pillars of the PRI regime, but had broken with the party in the last election, and is widely believed to be a major obstacle to education reform — probably the most powerful woman in Mexico.

This marks an interesting start to the presidency of Enrique Pena Nieto, of the PRI. Reforms that EPN had signed into law recently stripped Elba Esther, as she’s known, of her power to hire and fire teachers. Here’s the LA Times story.

Resembles the start of Carlos Salinas’s term, when he arrested the powerful head of the Oil Workers union, Joaquin Hernandez, known as La Quina, as a first step in what Salinas proposed would be a transformation of the Mexican economy.

Here’s what La Quina said about Elba Esther.

Mexico’s Attorney General, Jesus Murillo Karam, said there was no political motive behind Gordillo’s arrest.

Wow….As an ironic note, I’m watching the PBS documentary on the women’s movement as I write this.

 

 

 

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February 12, 2013 · 6:50 am

MEXICO: Can Vigilante Justice Save Mexico?

Community militias in Mexican state of Guerrero, present suspected criminals in El Mezon plaza.

My homeboys in Mexico, Dudley Althaus and photographer Keith Dannemiller, have a new story up on Global Post asking this question, and visiting places where citizens have taken up where the police have not in the face of rampant criminality.

This town, Ayutla de los Libres, in the Mixtec region of Guerrero, has had a masked militia for a month or so. (More here on the disaster that is Guerrero lately.)

It’s interesting that the militia also is part of the usos y costumbres system under which many Mexican Indian villages are governed — unpaid municipal labor by each member of the community, including policing.

Vigilante justice is nothing new in Mexico. Lynchings have been going on for decades if not centuries. I wrote about one lynching in True Tales from Another Mexico: the Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.

But I take it as sad commentary on the country that the question the story poses even has to be asked.

Photo: Civilian militia, Ayutla de los Libres; Credit: Keith Dannemiller

 

 

 

 

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February 11, 2013 · 2:22 pm

MEXICO: Is Acapulco Lost? Is Guerrero a Failed State?

These are the remarkable questions asked in its El Palenque column by Animal Politico — a Mexican online newspaper.

The questions are brought on by the rape of six Spanish tourists last week, and by a constant narcoviolence going back to imagesthe real beginnings of Mexico’s cartel war — that being roughly 2004-05, when heads were placed on stakes and that kind of thing.

The state of Guerrero has been infamous within Mexico for its wanton violence, brought on by its intense heat, poverty and caciquismo – a term referring to the political and economic control by certain families and individuals.

Here’s what Jose Carreno Figueras, from the Tec de Monterrey, had to say:

“You have to remember that Guerrero was always a problem state, and that except for a few enclaves — like Acapulco, Taxco and Zihuatanejo –where there were appearances of authority, it was never far from being ungovernable. Political bosses, criminality, banditry, injustice have always been part of the perennial panorama of Guerrero.”

You just never could see much of it from an Acapulco hotel room — until recently, that is.

For those who read Spanish, Jose Antonio Alvarez Lima had the following remembrance of Acapulco in the 1960s’s glory days, and its fall in the 1970s — calling the city “a mirror of our own failure”:

“Durante los sesentas, disfrute Acapulco y mi primera juventud. Era el paraiso. Quizá uno de los sitios más bellos del mundo, junto con Río. En los setentas, el populismo echeverrista llenó los cerros de invasores sin servicios y se inició el deterioro desastroso que hoy conocemos. Acapulco  es el espejo de nuestro fracaso. De la corrupción generalizada, la demagogia, la codicia y la indiferencia.

“El mismo futuro que espera para Cancún y las Rivieras Maya y Nayarita. Nunca tan pocos y tan rápido han hecho tanto daño a la naturaleza.”

 

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February 6, 2013 · 10:33 am

LOS ANGELES: The Tubas have left the building … again

Los Angeles Tuba

So yet another school has lost its sousaphones to thieves who apparently will spare no effort, and overlook many other valuable items, to make off only with the tubas.

San Fernando High School’s marching band had its only two tubas stolen last month. The thieves broke into one band room, stole nothing, then broke into another and stole nothing but the tubas — overlooking guitars, violins, trumpets, drums, etc.

It’s all about banda music and the tuba’s newfound popularity here in LA, where it’s really the emblematic instrument of the era, much like the guitar was in the 1970s.

 

 

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February 3, 2013 · 10:00 pm

LOS ANGELES: The Plaster Vendor, or how I spent my Sunday morning

TJ Plaster -- the Naked Woman

What’s nice about the Los Angeles of today is that you can go out a meet folks with worthwhile stories almost without trying.

I was in the area once called South Central L.A. (now South L.A.) and came upon a guy named Rogelio in a truck selling plaster statues to passers-by on Vermont Street: Snow White, bulldogs, snakes, Mickey Mouse, and this naked lady pictured here, among other things.

He buys them in Tijuana and brings them in.

I stopped to chat. He didn’t let me take his photo, but I shot other stuff.

He said sales of plaster was weak. “Enough to eat, but not well,” he said. “No meat.”

Rogelio is from Apatzingan, Michoacan. He was 16 in 1970 when he arrived in LA about 1 pm one day. He had a job by midnight.

Apatzingan is in Mexico’s Tierra Caliente, a particularly violent place, even before the latest nastiness. He went home a Plaster bulldog with furmonth ago to visit family. The police refer all problems to the local drug cartel — a pseudo-Catholic group of drug traffickers called the Knights Templar. Wonder how anyone would want to remain a cop under such conditions — or join the force at all.

At one corner, he said, there were two groups of headless bodies.

Still, he said he wants to return. This apparently has something to do with the fact that after 42 years in the country, he’s unable to find work that feeds anybody.

This, seems to me, is what LA is right now. If a Mexican immigrant has spent his time here learning new skills — English, welding, painting — he has a better chance of rolling with the economic bad times. But many people did not, assuming that the few skills they always had would be enough, as work had always been so plentiful that you could find a job in a few hours.

Those are the folks who are more likely to be leaving LA — some for other parts of the US, but mostly for Mexico, as it’s cheaper to be poor in Mexico, particularly if you have a place to live.

I told him about Craigslist as a place to put advertise his statues, and told him to give me a call if he needed help.

He said his daughter has a computer, but that maybe he’d call.

Hats

 

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December 12, 2012 · 8:48 am

LOS ANGELES: “I Who Am Your Mother” …The Virgin of Guadalupe

I’m not Catholic, or any kind of Christian, but years in Mexico formed a soft spot in my heart for the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose day is today: December 12.

She seems to embody all the best of the philosophy of Jesus Christ: tenderness, patience, love, caring for the poor and forgotten.

I also liked how, in a very Protestant way, many Mexicans shaped their own personal relationships with her, far, very often, from the church hierarchy.

These photos are from La Placita in downtown Los Angeles early this morning.

Happy Virgin of Guadalupe Day to one and all!

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November 21, 2012 · 8:36 am

LOS ANGELES: Oaxacan Indians, the bonds & binds of tradition

In the background to the lives of many Oaxacan Indian migrants is the system of usos y costumbres, a system of Indian local governance in Mexico which requires them to fulfill unpaid service jobs in their village.

This story ran in the LA Times and was fascinating to do. I went to Santa Ana del Valle, a village where migrants had been trying to change the centuries-old system. (Many thanks to the French-American Foundation for its grant funding.)

The system of unpaid municipal service jobs goes back, in some form, for centuries. But it was a system that functioned because everyone lived in town, and it helped the town remain unified, if also poor.

Now, with so many migrants in LA, the system doesn’t work as it did. It fractures towns often, rather than unifying them. It continues to create poverty by both forcing government to be done by people who don’t really know how to run a modern city government and by not paying workers, forcing those who take on these jobs to go into debt or sell land or animals.

There was a lot more to the system that wasn’t possible to include — such as its role in religious persecution. Some villages have used UyC to run out Protestants who’ve decided they don’t want to participate in the annual religious rites and festivals that are also part of the system.

Isaias Garcia (photos above, with wife Angelica Morales), by the way, was, in his day, one of the great Oaxacan Indian basketball players — basketball being a kind of second religion for Oaxacan Indians.

I wrote about his brother, Zeus, and his attempt to restore the purity of amateur basketball to the sport in America in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.

 

 

 

 

 

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October 19, 2012 · 1:23 pm

MEXICO: Homeless World Cup

Mexico City photographer Keith Dannemiller has some great shots of the Homeless World Cup soccer tournament.

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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