Carlos Menchaca for City Council!

Down in deepest Sunset Park the other day, I pulled the car over to send a text (don't text and drive, kids!) and found myself parked right in front of a Mexican specialty store. From the contents of the front windows, it looked like its taste in Mexican specialties ran pretty deep. I'm a sucker for that stuff, so I ponied up for 15 minutes worth of parking credits and went in to check it out. With an unpronounceable name like "Plaza Xochimilco,"* it's a fair bet the place was not designed or stocked with gringos in mind. I was not disappointed. The shelves held dozens of varieties of dried chiles, obscure brands of Mexican soda pop, nixtamalized corn,** molcajetes and nuestras señoras de Guadalupe up the ying-yang. 

In the front was a fridge case with plastic bags full of fresh epazote and papalo**, this year's most fashionable Mejican ingredient out on the west coast, but one still near-unobtainable around this way. I had some in a sandwich at the Red Hook ball fields a few weeks ago, and have been on the lookout for it ever since. In the front window was a poster for Carlos Menchaca. His is a smiling face I got to know well, almost a year ago, after Red Hook was walloped by hurricane Sandy. Menchaca was the guy who marshalled the large quantities of volunteers who came down from dryer neighborhoods to help clean up the hood. Tireless and invariably pleasant and friendly while surrounded by mountains of soggy rubble and dozens of eager-but-anxious volunteers, all raring to go, with nobody quite sure yet what they could do, Carlos brightened the mood when a lot of us residents were wandering around wondering if we would ever again live in our houses, drink in our bars or eat in our restaurants.

I don't frankly know if he had already considered running for office, or if this experience of organizing and helping people pushed him in the direction of city government, but he's getting my vote. It won't be easy. City Councilperson isn't exactly mayor or president, and most people, I fear, will vote for the incumbent simply because they may have heard of her.**** 

Carlos lives in Red Hook now, having fallen in love with the neighborhood in those trying post-Sandy weeks. I'm not surprised to see his posters in most every neighborhood window here, but I was surprised and pleased to see his face behind glass in the demographically very, very different depths of Sunset Park. I think he's going to get elected. He helped us. You should help him.

*I'm going to go with zhou-chee-mil-co. For all you would-be papalo-purchasing punters, it's on 5th Avenue between 62nd and 63rd. (Brooklyn, obv).

**I've only just noticed that "tamal" is embedded within this word.

***Known to some as "summer cilantro", this may be a bit of an acquired taste. This weekend, my sister told me "your corn salad tastes like soap." Well, maybe, but if so that would be a cilantro-grapefruit artisanal body bar.

****S_____ "no hace nada" G________z, who won't be getting a name-recognition-boosting mention from the likes of me.

Corn Salad Recipe:

12 ears Jersey sweet corn
1 red bell pepper
1 medium red onion
1 pint sweetest cherry tomatoes
12-15 fresh papalo leaves
1 lime
1/4 cup fine olive oil
salt and pepper to taste


Cut the kernels from the cobs of corn. Chop red bell pepper and red onion very fine. Chop papalo into fine shavings. Halve the cherry tomatoes. Mix well in a bowl. Juice the lime and mix with the olive oil, salt, and pepper to make a dressing.

Revolutionary Cuernavaca

I'm in Cuernavaca, Morelos, for "Cinema Planeta," an environmental film festival founded last year. The visit is also an Antarctic get-together; both Sylvestre Guidi, the cinematographer on Ice People, and I, the sound recordist, are joining director Anne Aghion as she presents the film here. It's our first in-depth reunion since we parted ways three years ago in New Zealand after spending months together on the ice. The weather here makes a nice contrast with minus 40 and gusting polar winds. They call Cuernavaca the land of eternal spring, and each and every day here has been dominated by an immaculate blue sky and unwavering temperatures in that range of eternal pleasantness, the mid 70s. I didn't realize until I got here how long it has been since I was last in Mexico, and, not coincidentally, the extent to which I had let myself be subtly influenced by the tidal wave of negative media presented in the great north in the intervening years. Now, a week after arrival, sitting at the wrought-iron tile-topped tables of the Los Arcos café in the zocalo in view of Hernan Cortes' palace, with the brilliant tropical sunshine filtering down through a stately row of shade trees, my certainty that I would be kidnapped or caught in the crossfire of some drug-gang turf-war seems hilariously silly. 

It's true that Arturo Beltran Leyva, capo di capi of the Sinaloa cartel, was taken out in an eight-hour long hail of bullets right here in Cuernavaca just three months ago, in a tactical assault mounted by Mexico's answer to the Navy Seals. Although Morelos is landlocked, they were chosen for the mission because every other branch of the armed or police forces was considered leaky; it was assumed that if anyone else was involved Beltran Leyva would be tipped off. The taxistas gossip holds that the government is floating on a tsunami of cocaine bribes and I've been told that the Beltran Leyva takeout only happened as part of the government's collusion with "El Chapo," his rival. But while sipping a michelada in the park this narco intrigue all seems extraordinarily distant, and even improbable. Perhaps I'm the victim of a different kind of seduction, that of the bourgeois pleasures of the tourist life on the zocalo.

I had forgotten, as well, that despite NAFTA, globalization and government corruption, Mexico is eternally undaunted in its revolutionary fervor. The struggle for an endlessly unsatisfied and postponed justice, for human rights and the equitable distribution of land and resources, stretching from Emiliano Zapata to Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN, continues.

International revolutionary superhero turned brand: "El Che" as the letter "o" in a roadside mural advertising the Condor sound system.

Hernan Cortes' palace has been converted into a museum celebrating the accomplishments of the indigenous peoples he decimated. "The age of iron, the wheel and cattle arrived wrapped in blood, pillage and fire."

Zapata is the ideal revolutionary icon, since no bad word can be said against him. Like Jose Martí in Cuba, he is invoked by both ends of the political spectrum. Here in the zocalo his flag flies as part of a tent city expressing the demands of the SME, the Mexican electrician's union. But since Subcomandante Marcos and his Chiapan Zapatista army, this iconography has taken on a new resonance. Does this banner suggest solidarity with the outlaw Marcos, or the revolutionary hero, or both?

"Cursed be those who with their words cheat and convince the people while betraying them with their actions."

"In favor of an alternative national project, we reject structural reform and privatization of the electrical sector... and changes to the pension and retirement system."

Mexico has a spectacular tradition of machine-age art-deco graphic design, and the SME union logo is a great example, combining the fascist impact of red and black with the electrified fist of the socialist worker.

Emiliano emblazoned on a pullman coach.

In addition to Ice People, I recommend the films Below Sea Level, L'Homme aux Serpents, No Impact Man, and A Blooming Business.