Kurtz and the Heart of Darkness have nothing on Quibdo, Colombia. In the afternoon, before the daily rains turn the mud streets into rivers, the city festers in metallic rivulets into the warm waters of the Atrato River. An emaciated elderly black woman scrubs herself with a rag below the river wall. Her deflated breasts shrivel beneath the shaking strokes of her hands in a futile attempt to clean. The boatmen maneuver their long dug-out canoes, engines choking out black smoke, toward a group of men waiting on the riverside; they shout out prices for transportation upriver, a bidding war ensues, bits of garbage float downriver. Through an iron portal that reads “Quibdo, Brown Pearl Between Two Seas,” you enter the municipal park. It is overgrown with high grass and swarms with fruit and meat vendors; it is the pride of this city of 75,000 inhabitants.

Above the municipal park and sea wall the metallic green cathedral sits awkwardly among the few wooden buildings leftover from the 1966 fire that destroyed most of the town. As the afternoon wears on, the humid heat remains, the pews are filled with shade seekers and creyentes. Quibdo, a city that is ninety-eight percent Afro-Colombian, is proud of its first black Bishop. I can’t stop sweating.

This is one of the first opportunities I have had to walk around the city. We’ve been here for three days—Pablo, Jane, Dave and I—but we’ve been working on a non-stop schedule holding workshops and practice sessions to teach students from the Technological University of Chocó (Quibdo is the capital of Choco Department). We have brought cameras and tripods and are training them to digitize endangered documents that hold the surviving history of slaves and Afro-descendants that remain in the few archives and churches of Quibdo. We are aware of the irony of this project.

Notarial Records, Quibdo.

I have not walked very far in the park along the river before the young student, named Uriel, I met earlier taps me on the shoulder. This morning he ran up to me on the street in front of the University, dodging the scooters and taxis, to speak to me in excited, breathless English. He had seen this foreigner walking around looking confused (I was looking for a place to buy gum) and had jumped at the chance to practice his English. When he first approached and spoke I was on guard, not wanting to take a chance with the camera in my backpack. His smile quickly disarmed me.

Uriel
He wants to help. He is learning English and wants to “show me find” whatever I need. He gives me a stick of gum. “You are the first American I know, American, American, American!” He smiles a guileless, glowing grin. Before five minutes have passed I am invited to his family home for dinner, a guided tour of the city, and the mines on the outside of town. I am sweating.
Now on the river bank he pats me on the back. “This is the Atrato.” Uriel’s English is incredibly smooth for never having been out of Quibdo. He is rightfully proud of it. “I speak in French too!” I make my respect for his abilities obvious. A gaggle of drunk men sitting in the shade above us ask me to take their picture, a teenage girl asks if I will marry her and giggles to her friends. I walk with the student to meet Jane, Pablo and Dave for a walk around the city. In route the student confides to me his plans.
“I will finish University and go to Medellin…maybe even the United States or Europe. I will get my Master’s in English.” I sweat as we walk up the stairs from the river to the Cathedral and the park where everyone in waiting. I stray from the group with my camera with the character of Quibdo, Yuber, as my informant on the spots where “huge breasted women” (tetonas), hang-out. My protestations that I have a fiancé back home are met with good natured chiding.
Yuber teaches English at the Universidad Technologica de Chocó, is a former professional soccer player, calls women on balconies “Juliets,” and takes female rejection with a grain of pepper: “That woman is just afraid of my darkness.” We drank Aguardiente in his friend’s bar the other night amid the brain numbing thumps of Raggaeton; he laughed when told that I was “cobado.” He has a quick, ironic sense of humor, a curious yet irascible intellect and has an innate ability to gauge people and make conversation accordingly. He tells me about a boxing match that he was once in and pausing to laugh he explains that after the first blow he received he took off the gloves and tackled the guy. The whole table laughs. Pablo and I agree that if he were in the United States he would be a politician, he would make that insane tit Willie Harrington into minced meat.

Yuber

More to come.

On the Road Again: Colombia

I haven't written on this blog for six months. I'll blame it on the mind numbing process of dissertation writing and the tepid niche I got into while in Coyoacan; I'm not the best at routines (I'll also blame my high octane caffeine addiction on Jarocho's coffee, Coyoacan). I can't complain however; though I can't afford any technology younger than ten year vintage (no car, still), I have the luxury of time to read, write, photograph and travel. I've been back in Nashville for a while now; this is my first summer here since I left for the Mixteca Alta in Oaxaca when I graduated high school.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, I leave for Quibdo, Choco Department in western Colombia. Thanks to my friend (colleague too, I'll concede) Pablo Gomez, I've been included on a project to teach digitization of colonial documents pertinent to the Afro-Colombian and Zambo (black and Indian mix) populations of the Western Colombian jungle coast. This is the rainiest place on earth and as you guessed it, the entire forecast for our trip is for heavy thunderstorms.
My part on this trip is too teach a seminar on digitization and image manipulation to set up an information pipeline between Quibdo, Vanderbilt, and the British Library. The wider goals of the trip are to preserve endangered documents for future historians to write the history of this remote and largely forgotten region. It is the poorest area of Colombia and almost no outsiders come here; it's hard to find much information, even on the largest town. There are no paved roads into the department capital and it is easiest reached by boat or plane.
We fly into Medellin Wednesday night and arrive in Quibdo Friday morning to begin all day, intensive seminars.
I have been to Colombia once before, but my trip was limited to the Northern coast; mainly Cartagena, Santa Marta and Barranquilla. Quibdo should seem light years from there. Pablo is a native of Medellin, where we will spend two days before boarding the pond-hopper to Quibdo, so I should have some pictures and impressions of that city up in the next few days.

Friday Rant

I woke this morning to the dual pleasure of the bums beneath my window urinating over the low fence and to five teenagers asleep in uncomfortable positions in my den. Three of them were huddled together on the love seat to keep warm. I had gone to bed early not realizing that they were staying over and didn’t offer them my heater. I felt a bit selfish in my toasty room with these college kids asleep sitting up on the love seat surrounded by empty forties. It was a crisp Friday morning and I decided to take time off from research to walk around Coyoacan.
The bums are always very political. We have shared several “pomos” of Mezcal and the vagabundo en jefe, Javier, wears a Subcomandante Marcos t-shirt that was given to him “by a Belgian radical who came to live with us for awhile.” The teenagers are friends of my roommate from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. They are about like you would expect kids that age to be: curious, broke, shy, quick to laugh, and fascinated by new ideas. They stayed over for two reasons, they are too broke to pay for a cab and it is not safe to be out a night, even in Coyoacan. As Javier told me a few weeks ago “the violence here is reaching apocalyptic levels.” Even Mexican bums are scared.
At El Fronton, the bar I wrote about in a previous blog, I talk with Augustin. Augustin is 42, works for the phone company selling calling cards in Mexican prisons and he has offered to take me to see the annual prison boxing tournament. “All the violence comes from the narco-traffickers. If its not them directly, its people associated with them. Take that with the piss poor educational system and the hopelessness of most kids your age and its ripe for explosion. I don’t want to be rude, (I don’t mind, I say) but if you Americans didn’t love your drugs so much things would be much different.” I tell him I agree.
Augustin, slightly swaying at this point and always a close talker, continues. He tells me that somewhere in the north of Mexico the police recently found around a dozen bodies, some decapitated. The story followed, and I have more reasons to believe it than doubt it, that the men were bricklayers. They had been hired by members of one of the drug cartels to build some sort of underground storage vault for drugs or money. They were then killed to keep them from talking about what they had built. These were poor people, laborers, who were probably just happy to have the work. Then they were beheaded. The unnecessary brutality (why not just give them two to the head?) is now commonplace from Yucatan to Tijuana.
The demand for cocaine in the United States, despite the billions spent on the “War on Drugs,” has only increased since the well intentioned but ultimately naïve and destructive policies initiated by the Reagan administration. Our refusal to deal with the demand side of the equation underscores our national inability to self-criticize and our intransience in the presence of simple solutions that tend to ruffle the feathers of self congratulatory “moralists.”
Cocaine is only rare, exotic, and expensive because it is illegal. It has been pointed out before, and this is not my idea but one that I agree with, that the bi-products of the illegality of cocaine (and marijuana for that matter) are mirror images of that silly and intellectually bankrupt fiasco of the twenties and early thirties, Prohibition. Violent turf wars, loss of potential tax revenue, the creation of myth and social stigma and the romanticization of drug use, a swamped prison system and the exportation of our faults to supplying countries are only the most irrefutable casualties of our outdated prohibitions.
“If those backward Colombians could just control those commie-rebel-drug pushers in the south then there wouldn’t be a problem with drugs in the U.S.” Let’s throw more money at the problem, kill and displace more people, crawl deeper into the covers with that pimp Uribe and continue to blame other people for the effects of our juvenile laws. If we can just stomp out the suppliers then people won’t do drugs anymore. Yes, and if you teach abstinence teens won’t have sex.
It’s not safe to walk the streets at night in Mexico, beheadings are no longer surprising, and now the common advice is to avoid the entire because of the violence that our demand has created. Rubbish. The high price of cocaine is a product of its illegality. The money that Americans spend on the exotic high has created a paramilitary force, the cartels, that by many accounts is now more powerful than the Mexican government.
We finally have a president that has the intellectual ability to grasp cause and effect and has the moral fortitude to admit that our policies have been destructive, destabilizing, and inhumane. Our stereotypes are so often self-fulfilling prophecies. Mexico has enough problems as it is, they don’t need ours as well. ‘Way to kick a man when he is down.

Tuesdays with El Fronton

I was walking down Aguayo Street toward the place where I usually eat dinner when a small man in a white shirt and green jeans came flying backwards out my local bar. He fell into me hard and I went down on the pavement with him on top of me. Sergio, the permanently scowling but friendly-when-you-know-him bar back came through the swinging doors to help me up. He was all apologies. He pushed the guy off of me with more than necessary force. “Get the fuck out of here you drunken disgrace,” he said to the now cowering man in green pants. He beat a confused, crab-like retreat towards Malintzin Street.
Sergio brushed me off and invited me for a drink on the house. “Would you believe it,” he asked with his usual scowl, “that fucker just took a shit on the floor, in the middle of the bar!..Pinche Oaxaco!” Tuesdays are meat days in the Bar El Fronton. It is a diminutive place with just a few tables and bar stools in the front room and a bit more space on the side. One gets the feeling that there must be more bar somewhere behind a hidden door.
As a bar it has a long history. It was founded about 1905 by the great grandfather of the current owner, Miguel, a cherubic man with several scars that look like cut marks on his face. It was originally a pulqueria, a bar of ill-repute where milky fermented cactus juice was served. In the 50s by order of the Coyoacan government it was changed to a cerveceria, or beer joint in order to rid the neighborhood of such a disgraceful establishment.
Meat Tuesdays are always worth it. The regular bar patrons take turns bringing in huge plates of asado, lamb, grasshoppers or whatever else they can get their hands on. Woman are welcome in the side room but rarely approach the bar where the food is laid out and greasy fingers pick through the feast. Tara knocked them all senseless when she sat with me near the bar.
The bar patrons are middle-aged men hiding from their wives. Most of them drink vodka or whiskey and by 6 pm on Tuesday the voices are loud and the stories flow freely. The usual self-proclaimed buffoon of the bar Manuel aka “el conejo” (the rabbit) is absent and the playful “you are such a queer “ lambasts have shifted to the buffoon’s assistant, a dark skinned music teacher named David. He already has the glassy-eyed smile of the content drunk and he immediately springs up to give me a hug. “Tocayo!!!,” he screams and once again explains to me that tocayo means someone who shares a name with you. This is about the tenth time he has told me. The bartender, Juan Carlos, rolls his eyes and gives me a knowing glance. Sergio is spraying down a spot on the floor in the doorway between the two rooms with Windex.
David launches into his story about how an American came down and learned how to play Huastecan music from him. The American, from Boston, didn’t deign to cite him in an essay he published. I agree, yet again, that the guy must be a son of a bitch. I turn to El Doctor, trying not to be rude to David but not in the mood to hear the usual battery of how people have mistreated him.
El Doctor is an oncologist and his quiet opinions are sacrosanct in El Fronton. Like most of the men there, he is a heavy drinker with the big gut,-skinny legs combo that seem to be a requirement in most bars like this one. At the table next to the bar, full of smiles and listening to Sergio curse his job of excrement removal, Guzman aka El Tigre de Coyoacan, sucks down a vodka tonic. He and I have made our peace.
A month ago he picked a fight with me. He claimed, very drunk, that I had lost a bet to him and owed 400 pesos. I promptly answered that he was full of shit, thinking he was joking. He stewed in his corner for a few minutes and then started cursing me to Juan Carlos, the bartender. I took about five minutes of this and then told him to shut the hell up or do something. He reconvened his stewing and drinking. A few minutes later his balding, dapper friend Leon arrived and shook my hand, oblivious to Guzman’s invented rage. Guzman promptly sprang up and asked me to step outside, knowing that his friend would make peace and not allow him to do so. A few weeks ago Guzman and I shook hands and pretended nothing happened. Tonight he apologized and gave me a drunken hug and called me hermano. By gones are by gones.
At El Fronton its rude not to shake everyone’s hand so I get up and do so. Every new entrant does the same and pronounces a “good evening” as he walks in the saloon doors. A little boy who claims to be twelve comes in selling small, brightly colored dolls. He is in a school uniform and after I tell him no thank you he asks for pesos and then proceeds to reel off the names of about ten international currencies. The smart little guy earned my plate of chicarrones.
Even though they have been at the bar since early afternoon they listen attentively as el doctor asks me if I am happy about the outcome of the elections. “Excessively so,” I answer him. “Is is just because he is black that he was elected,” the doctor muses, a statement more than a question. I discuss with the group, the best I can, the history of anti-intellectualism in recent US politics, and how it makes me sick that our current president has an infant’s understanding of world, does not countenance nuance in anything and has the empathy of small soap dish. Most of them delight in my anger at the current state of affairs. All Mexican politicians, Juan Carlos says, “with the exception of Lazaro Cardenas” have been cheats and hijos de la gran puta. We have had this conversation many times before, enough for me to have my examples in a line. El doctor proposes a toast to Obama and to my liking Obama.
Everyone turns to their own conversations. A bearded man in his fifties approaches me from outside the swinging doors. He likes me to call him “Mr. Johnny” and I always forget to ask him what he does for a living. Mr. Johnny walks awkwardly; I think one leg is shorter than the other. He likes to talk to me about the expanding universe and about the bible at the same time. When I tell him I study history he expounds on Toynbee and Hegel. He is enormously well read. He asks if I like Cormac Mcarthy and tells me that Carlos Fuentes is a genius. His wife died a few years ago and as Juan Carlos says he’s been slowly drinking himself to death since then.
I like this bar and the men who go there because they have welcomed me among them with an ease and trust that is remarkable (aside from the Guzman incident). Though they are not poor enough for that intimate sort of acquaintance that Agee wrote about they seem to genuinely value my friendship. I have learned a lot from them. They never tire of answering my questions and ask me thoughtful questions in return. They have gone out of their way to help me find contacts for my research and have included me in meat Tuesdays (this Tuesday was the doctors turn and he brought in several gallons of pulque and a bag of grasshoppers along with milanesa) It reminds me of Zinnies in Memphis where I worked in college.
As I leave the bar to head home I shake hands with Javier who is talking on his cell phone trying to get Guzman out of trouble with his wife. Javier towers over me and weighs about four hundred pounds. He had just been in an hour long argument with Sergio about who came first: the Olmecs or the Maya. I stay out of these.
As I’m shaking hands a woman nudges by me into the bar. She is thin, wearing a shawl and has a creased and hard face. Everyone is quiet as she moves to the middle of the room, addressing Juan Carlos. That was her brother who had “dirtied” the floor. She apologizes for him, he was not drunk but has mental problems. It won’t happen again she says. She lowers her head and walks out of the bar, moving quickly down Aguayo Street toward Xicotencatl. I wondered how many times she had had to do that.

Wednesday in El Barrio Bravo de Tepito

Metro Line number three, the brown line, runs north to south for almost the entire vertical sprawl of Mexico City. I got on this morning at the Coyoacan stop in the leafy suburb of “el d.f.,” heading north to the much maligned barrio of Tepito. I’ve read about several boxing gyms there—the kind that are hard to find and suspicious of tall gringos walking in to ask questions and look around—just the kind I’m looking for.
Even though it’s past rush hour the cars on the metro are still mostly full. Men in pressed suits talk on cell phones, students heading to the university hold their T-squares between their legs, and the ever present vendors of cds, candy, and miracle cures shout over the rumble of the train: “Dies pesos le cuesta, diez pesos le vale!”
There is no graffiti but advertisements for a massive clothing sale and public service announcements cover the space above the windows. One such add features a shirtless man of indigenous descent with the heel-print of a boot on his cheek. The caption reads “If they discriminate against you, denounce them! Discrimination leaves its mark!” Another is addressed to fathers: “Respect the decisions of your wives and daughters, everyday!”
As I head north towards the transfer point for the Tepito stop a short dark skinned man gets on the train. He is carrying a red jacket wrapped around a large mass of something. He has a speech impediment as he announces that he is a magician and would like the cooperation of the people on the train. Newspapers lower as he kneels to the floor of the car. He opens the jacket and spreads it on the floor; it is filled with brown and green shards of glass. Without explaining he takes off his shirt and summersaults onto the pile of glass, landing on his back. His entire torso, both sides, is covered in scars and red streaks. When he stands up pieces of glass stick in his upper back. No one “cooperates” and he moves to the next car with his red bundle.
I’ve been told by almost everyone I’ve questioned that Tepito is not safe, not even during the day. There are gangs, drugs, crack-heads and all sorts of rough necks; there are police there, but as one cab driver told me “it would be lucky if they would even leave their trucks to help anyone.” I left my camera at home, dressed in old workout clothes and my best “I know exactly where I’m going” expression. I’m looking for Gimnasio Gloria, I tell a cab driver on the street as I exit the Tepito metro station. He is parked under the Tepito sign that has a boxing glove as its signifier. He points me up the street.
For several blocks outside the metro station there are food stands, stands selling pirated cds, shoelaces, and drawings of Homer Simpson dressed as Emiliano Zapata (a future dissertation topic?) The neighborhood is saturated by the odor of questionable meat. There are mothers with their children and well-dressed old people, I relax a little.
At the intersection of two busy streets I find Gimnasio Gloria. It is in a dingy purple building that has a two-story façade and extends a long way down the street. In the front is a box office with faded advertisements for Lucha Libre (Mexican professional wrestling) and boxing. I push open the door and the smell of meat is replaced by the smell of sweat, it brings back memories of my old gym in East Nashville.
Seated on a bench in front of the entrance is a middle-aged man named Jesus Flores and a young boxer who is unwinding his blue hand-wraps. They look surprised to see me. “Good morning, can I speak to the one in charge?” Jesus points to himself as he gets up and goes behind a small equipment counter with bars. I kneel to speak to him through the slats. I explain what it is I want—the invention that I make depending on the reception I get. Jesus is pleasant and asks twice where I come from and how did I get there. “The gym was founded in the forties right?” I ask. “I don’t know, its no chiquillo,” he responds with a knowing glance.
I don’t get much of a chance to look around, he keeps on talking. The gym has one ring in the center and skylights thirty feet above. There are several generations of punching bags, speed bags, weights and Charles Atlas era exercise bikes. There are perhaps ten young boxers at different stations and the rhythmic cracks of speed bags in the back.
Jesus seems to take to what I am doing and tells me to come back with my camera and Monday and stay as long as I like. I’ll be there next Monday at 3 I tell him and we shake hands. As I walk back to the metro station thinking that Tepito is not all that bad a military truck screeches to a halt. It empties of a dozen men with machine guns and shot guns and they run up an alley way. Curiosity killed the cat; I keep on walking.
More to come.

Afternoon in Viveros de Coyoacan

After a full day researching in newspapers and other documents in the national library I took my computer back to my apartment and decided to go for a walk in the Viveros de Coyoacan. Viveros is large nursery, arboretum, and recreational area with miles of wide dirt paths that are busy with runners in the mornings but more relaxed in the afternoon. Today and yesterday we have had rare good weather, even getting a bit hot (I usually need to wear long sleeves). Today, thee warm afternoon light was not muted by cloud cover.
The park itself was founded in 1908 by a naturalist/architect named Miguel Angel de Quevedo. He is known in Mexico as the “apostle of the tree,” and is probably Mexico’s first and best known conservationist. He had several run-ins with indigenous groups who felt that his conservation measures were too heavy handed. The guy was ahead of his time.
In the middle of the park there is an open area where in the mornings and afternoons apprentice bullfighters come to practice and receive instruction from those already established or retired. The ages run from about 5 up till the late teens. I’ve included below some pictures of this afternoon.



Practicing a Suerte with the cape.



One of the many paths.



Ninjas....of course.



One of the many black squirrels, exciting, I know....

Routine

I haven’t written in a few weeks and though I could make any of several excuses it is primarily because I have fallen into a routine that hasn’t involved much writing (aside from taking notes). I haven’t been to the hemeroteca nacional (historical newspaper repository) as much as I would like, but when there have found plenty of source material to keep me busy for several days at a time here at home, my project is coming together nicely and I am finding interesting and telling contrasts with what I uncovered in Havana—the tricky part is knowing when to stop researching and start writing! Tara came down for an all too brief visit; we stayed in a very nice hotel in the Zona Rosa (thanks Fulbright discount) and then came to my shoebox apartment. I think she was pleasantly surprised by Coyoacan. It’s far from the Mexico City of Amores Perros.
I was getting headaches every afternoon for a while—not sure whether this was the altitude or the pollution (probably the latter, I lived in Cuzco, much higher up, and never had this problem) so I took a trip last weekend to Merida and stayed for a few nights in a Mayan fishing village called Telchac Puerto (some pictures below). It was amazing how quickly I felt better being in the fresh air (I know this sounds a bit Thomas Hardy but I swear its true). My last night in Merida, my host, a sociology professor at Bucknell, turned in early so I ventured down the street to a bar called the Black Panther. I seemed to be inordinately popular with the women there, till I realized they were all prostitutes and raced to finish my drink before they rubbed all the skin off my arm (there seems to be no polite way to brush off a Yucatecan prostitute). As I was about to leave one of the guys who I had talked to at the bar (he had worked in a meat factory in Georgia) pulled up in a late eighties Continental with leather interior and we prowled the streets of Merida till late that night.
I’m back in Coyoacan now and the pictures that Tara brought down and put on the walls of my room make it feel a bit more like home. I’ll try to travel somewhere new every weekend from here on out so I will have more of interest to write and better pictures to post (partly why I haven’t posted lately is because I have fallen into that routine of reading, researching and taking notes that would bore most sane people to tears).
As any of you who know will me undoubtedly suspect, one of my first orders of business when I touch down in a new place is to find a local bar. If I find the right pub, or in this case cerveceria, I almost always manage to meet interesting people in an atmosphere where you can sit down and have a real conversation. On the same block where I live is the bar El Frontón. It has saloon doors and speaking to the fourth generation owner I learned that it was initially opened as a pulqueria in 1904 (a bar, usually of ill-repute and only for men, that serves pulque, a distilled corn beer) but that in the fifties the Coyoacan government passed a law that prohibited pulquerias within town limits so the bar had to be converted into a cerveceria, or beer-joint). A hand tinted large format photograph of his great grandfather presides over the bar (“some rich gringo offered me 5,000 USD for it, but I said no”). I met Virgilio at El Frontón, and now every morning he waits for me down the street from my apartment and we make the rounds: coffee at Jarocho’s, (he doesn’t drink coffee because its “bad for his knees”), fruit juice at the first open stand in the market, then we poke our head in the local boxing gym before he drops me off back at my place to start work. On our morning walks I have met pretty much everyone within a several block radius from the franeleros (guys who help you park and watch your car for a few pesos), to the store owners, to the police (who have arrested the same woman each of every day for the past week for public drunkenness—reminds me of that character on the Andy Griffith show who locks himself up after a boozer). Virgilio initiated me into the weekly Tuesday night meat fest, when one of the regulars brings in massive quantities of grilled meat to share. My Tuesday night carnivorous debut is coming up in a week. I’ve found that when I bring up boxing in most any bar in Mexico I’ve supplied my conversation starter for endless debates about who was best in which era. When they are not talking about sports or women (when a woman actually comes into the bar all the men are extremely polite and bend over backwards to make her feel welcome) they bemoan the violence that seems to be daily increasing in Mexico. This being Coyoacan, almost everyone claims to be related to Frida or Diego.
I just got back from my daily constitutional with Virgilio (we go slow, he is about 75 or so) and he will be calling for me shortly to introduce me to an old trainer who apparently knows everyone in Tepito and can arrange for me to have a guide to that neighborhood where it would not be advisable for tall gringo to walk around with anything that he wants to keep). Tepito is famous for its boxers and old boxing gyms and I really want to do a photographic project on both. More to come.


Evening in Telchac Puerto, Yucatan


Fisherman


Baby Jesus watches over the Taco stand.



Sisters and Cousins dressed up for the Independence day celebration in Coyoacan. When I brought a disk back with these pictures to give to their mother, who was running a food stand, she refused to accept it without making some kind of trade. She fed my full to the gills with flautas and quesadillas.