A lion cub, a topless girl and a Mexican pop star were just some of the guests at the Yautepec Gallery in Mexico City's Roma neighborhood on a night in late January. They and a healthy share of Mexico’s young hipsters were there for the opening of New York-based photographer Noah Sheldon’s portrait studio project.
The guests, who sipped mescal and cactus honey (miel de agave) cocktails, were attending something quite different from a traditional show. Rather, it was part art and part social experiment -- what Sheldon refers to as a “performance” that would last for two weeks and, eventually, lead to a photography exhibition.
Forbes magazine takes a peek at Valentine's Day around the world and includes Mexico, Brazil and Guatemala in its sweep.
Valentine's Day, or the day of "love and friendship" (amor y amistad), as it's called here in Mexico City, is a hit with many Mexicans.
"According to Jennifer Hirsch, professor of socio-medical sciences at Columbia University, the 'red rain' begins as soon as Christmas is over. It is common for Mexican men and women to exchange flowers, red balloons and anything red and heart-shaped. The gift-giving is an expression of love and prosperity, says Hirsch, especially among migrant laborers."
The Brazilians, on the other hand, celebrate Dia dos Namorados ("the day of lovers") on June 12, not Feb. 14, in honor of St. Anthony, patron saint of matchmaking and marriage.
"Single women perform rituals, like writing the names of their crushes on pieces of paper the night before, folding them up and then opening one on the big day to determine who they should marry," reports Forbes.
And in Guatemala, El Día del Cariño, "the day of affection," is much like Valentine's Day in the U.S, only broader.
Guatemalans exchange flowers, chocolates and cards, but the day is also about showing fondness for friends and colleagues.
Middle-income countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina cannot afford any longer to compete on the basis of traditional strategies and polices such as low-cost labor and foreign investment-fueled development.
A new paradigm is needed to compete with China and India and, in particular, decision makers need to undertake change strategies and transform organizations and institutions to operate on the basis of high value added, entrepreneurship-based wealth creation, and innovation-propelled economic activity, reports the education networking site QS Top MBA.
This paradigm is creating a massive demand for MBA holders across the region.
But few business schools in Latin America have developed an international reputation and the majority of employers in the region still look to hire MBAs educated at the best international business schools in North America and Europe.
"Once again, a Mexican institution tops the list, with EGADE at Tec de Monterrey just ahead of IPADE (Instituto Panamericano de Alta Direccion de Empresas) which achieved 18 employer votes just ahead of F.Getulio Vargas in Bazil and ITAM (Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico). This top cluster is also joined by Business School Sao Paulo, PUC Chile and INCAE Business School of Costa Rica (which has the highest percentage of international students -- 85% -- in the region), all with over 10 employer votes."
Readers of the U.K. travel magazine Wanderlust voted the Guatemalan city of Antigua tops for travel in the magazine's annual awards. The Central American city bested Luang Prabang in Laos, winner for the previous two years, to the title.
The decision by U.K. readers and voters was noted with pride by the Guatemala Times in this report, in which Barbara Schieber wrote that it "is a great pride for Guatemala that La Antigua has been chosen as number one city in the world to visit. Number two is Kyoto in Japan, that is a tough one to beat. Paris and New York did not make it to the top ten."
Archaeologists digging in the ruins of a pyramid in downtown Mexico City said Tuesday they had found a mass grave that may hold the skeletal remains of the Aztec holdouts who fought conquistador Hernando Cortés, reports the Associated Press.
The unusual grave holds the carefully arrayed skeletons of at least 49 adult Indians who were buried in the remains of a pyramid razed by the Spaniards during the 1521 conquest of the Aztec capital.
The pyramid complex, in the city's Tlatelolco square, was the site of the last Indian resistance to the Spaniards during the months-long battle for the city.
Read the full report here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: La Plaza de Tlatelolco, where the skeletal remains were found. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times. Follow the AP link for photos of the discover.
Juxtapoz, the San Francisco-based arts and culture magazine, is raving about a Colombian street artist called Bastardilla.
The artist, says the magazine, sent them a link to her Flickr page, which features photos of her work.
"Not only do we rarely receive mail from Colombia, but we hardly ever see such a wealth of great artistry from an artist we were not yet familiar with," says Juxtapoz on its website.
Bastardilla's work is impressive, using paint and an extraordinary array of colors to adorn Bogota's public spaces. But it appears she's not chasing fame. In an e-mail to La Plaza, she said she wanted to remain anonymous. She did reveal, however, that she's a 27-year-old woman living in Bogota.
The Associated Press reports that Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, considered the "heartbeat" of Cuba's legendary Buena Vista Social Club for his internationally acclaimed bass playing, died Monday of complications from prostate surgery, fellow musicians said. He was 76.
Lopez, a founding member of the band brought together in the 1990s by American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder, died in a Havana hospital several days after surgery, said Manuel Galban, a Cuban musician who played with Lopez for decades.
It's a cliche, but it's true: The U.S. military, by and large, is run by its senior enlisted -- those sergeants and senior chiefs who know how to carry out the officers' orders without undermining their authority.
Now the U.S military is helping the armies of Caribbean, Latin and South American countries develop noncommissioned officer corps.
In June, the U.S. Southern Command will sponsor a conference for senior enlisted leaders in Santiago, Chile. The U.S. Air Force has been working with military units from Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago and Honduras, including a training session recently in Honduras.
The Colombian military, U.S. officials said, has shown that strong noncommissioned officers and a strong officer corps can work in tandem. Colombia looked to the U.S. on how to develop the senior enlisted ranks earlier this decade.
Now the Colombians run two 11-week sessions every year. Also, the Colombians are working with U.S. Army Special Forces on a new sergeants-major course.
The movie is set in multiple locations and languages, shifting from New York to the Philippines and Thailand. Garcia Bernal stars as a computer game tycoon who is married to an overworked emergency room doctor played by Michelle Williams, and the film shows how their 8-year-old daughter grows up much closer to the Philippine nanny than to the parents.
You can watch the trailer above, and click on the Reuter's link for the full report.
Leaving the taco shop, I might have assumed that familiar weight in my gut was a sign of gastrointestinal distress to come. But it was probably guilt that I had bypassed one of the many mama-y-papa taquerias and instead chosen the first Taco Bell to open in Mexico after a 15-year absence, writes Oscar Avila for the Chicago Tribune.
Since opening in the United States in the 1960s, Taco Bell has taught Americans the Mexican art of cramming stuff in tortillas. Now they're on the menu everywhere from school cafeterias to McDonald's drive-thrus. You might not know Spanish, but you know "taco."
Carmen Aristegui, one of Mexico’s most prominent journalists, disappeared from the Mexican radio airwaves last year in a cloud of controversy.
As Reed Johnson reported in January of 2008, “Aristegui’s departure from W Radio set off a flurry of op-ed commentary in Mexico City newspapers. Several commentators have denounced the incident as an act of censorship and harassment by media and governmental interests.”
Now Aristegui is back with a new radio news show –- this time on a different network. The journalist, who continued to host a nightly television broadcast on CNN Español during her radio hiatus, returns to the Mexican airwaves from 6 to 10 a.m. every weekday on MVS Radio.
El Santo, the legendary lucha libre fighter and movie star, was remembered fondly in Mexico yesterday, 25 years after his death.
A Mass was held in his honor in the Metropolitan Cathedral Thursday afternoon, followed by the presentation of a new book about his career by his son -- El Hijo del Santo (Son of Santo), also a lucha libre fighter.
The son, Jorge Guzman, placed a wreath of flowers at a monument to El Santo in downtown Mexico City and told the crowd that El Santo was a man with a lot of magic who threatened to overshadow his own career but that "fortunately, I have won the love and respect of the public myself."
Without fanfare but with great hopes, the border state of Tamaulipas has declared itself the first bilingual state inMexico, deciding that its 320,000 public school students, from elementary to high school, will learn conversational English, reports McClatchy newspapers.
"Our efforts are aimed at preparing students for a more competitive world filled with technology and English," governor Eugenio Hernandez said at a ceremony formally inaugurating the program. "Let's face it. The world speaks English. And even if you can only speak a little, you can defend yourself and compete."
Reuters reports that the man who banned the Beatles from communist Cuba's radio and television stations has died.
According to the wire service, Cuban state television reported Tuesday that Jorge "Papito" Serguera had died at the age of 76.
Serguera, who at the time was president of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, pulled Beatles music from the airwaves in the 1970s, but he later acknowledged that he enjoyed listening to it in private.
Jonathan Mirando García, age 7. Disappeared in the Tlapan neighborhood of Mexico City on Nov. 22, 2006. Distinguishing features: a mole on his nose.
Saul Hernandez Ramírez, 10 months old and 55 centimeters in size. Disappeared in Naucalpan, Mexico City, on an unknown date.
América Martínez Enriquez, 1 month old. Disappeared from Matamoros, in the state of Tamaulipas, on June 23, 2003.
The list of missing children in Mexico, crushingly, goes on for a lot longer. About 45,000 children are reported missing in Mexico every year, according to Aprenem (Asociación Pro Recuperación de Niños Extraviados y Orientación de la Juventud de México), an organization dedicated to trying to find them.
Take a trip to the cinema in Mexico anytime soon and you’ll probably see an ad campaign that scolds the Mexican public for buying pirated movies.
Purchasing any of the millions of pirated DVDs and CDs available at an estimated 50,000 “puestos” or open-air street stalls doesn’t, apparently, make one a great ethical shopper. In fact, it reflects badly on your character. That’s according to the campaign by Canacine (Camara Nacional de la Industria Cinematografica), an association that protects Mexico’s film production and distribution industry.
The ad currently running across cinema screens features three young middle-class girls hanging out in one of the girl's bedrooms. Two of the girls are playing on the Internet, and the third discovers a pirated movie while browsing her friend’s bookshelves.
“Does your dad buy you these movies?” she asks her friend, a disgusted look on her face.
“Yeah, so?” says the friend.
“Que chafa!” the other girl exclaims, which roughly means, “What a cheapskate!”
The two friends then go on to taunt the other girl and accuse her of having a Papa Pirata (Pirate Papa) before the screen cuts to a line of text that says: “Buying pirated movies says a lot about who you are.”
The advertising campaign launched in December, and is an attempt to tackle the enormous problem Mexico has with pirated products. The International Intellectual Property Alliance says that around 90% of motion pictures sold in Mexico are pirated. At most street stalls, 20 pesos (around $1.38) buys you a pirated movie, and 50 pesos ($3.45) buys you three. In shops, the price of authentic movies on DVDs starts at around 100 pesos (nearly $7).
Piracy in Mexico is “entrenched” and “the sheer dimension of the piracy problem in the Mexican market remains severe and unchanged,” the IIPA says in its annual country report for Mexico (pdf file).
Copies of “Che, the Argentine” were selling at black-market street stalls before the film’s official release in Mexico. You can already buy “The Wrestler” starring Mickey Rourke, at a puesto near you, even though the film is yet to come out south of the border.
The seven or eight times I have seen the anti-piracy ad aired in the last month in Mexican theaters, it always elicited snorts of laughter from cinema-goers.
Maybe they're amused by the running of such a campaign in cinemas when clearly, the people who go out to the movies are not the worst piracy offenders.
Or perhaps it's just that piracy is such a normal part of Mexican life that the idea of getting rid of it seems ridiculous. Audaciously, many pirate-movie vendors flog their wares outside cinemas. There is always a woman selling pirated films outside the Cinepolis Diana on Avenida Reforma, and when leaving the parking lot of the Cineteca Nacional in the Coyoacan neighborhood (the city's most important venue for art and foreign cinema) you can rely on finding a young man and his pirated movie stall specializing in -- you guessed it -- art and foreign film.
As if that weren't enough, the indifference of Mexico City's street cops speaks volumes about the attitude of the government towards piracy. You can frequently spot the city's police perusing the pirated movie stalls, looking for something to take home and enjoy after a hard day on the job.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: Pirated goods are widely available on the streets of Mexico City. Taken from a video still by Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.
For the second consecutive year, the polls at the Blogs Brazil 2008 Award website were open from December through January, ending on Jan. 23 with a big party, Campus Party Brazil. Voters were split into two types, a jury and the public, with the finalist entries grouped into 30 categories, reports Global Voices Online.
"According to the panel of specialists, the best blog in 2008 was Blog do Tas, whereas according to public opinion, Brogui deserved the top prize. With over 1,000 followers and almost 4,000 updates, Brogui was a brave contender to beat Blog do Tas, written by a successful and well known Brazilian journalist, Marcelo Tas. Being quite as informative as Tas, Brogui is more light-hearted, design-conscious and also outdoes Blog do Tas in interactivity with other blogs. Brogui won 1,621 votes ahead of the 1,415 won by third-placed Blog do Tas." (Global Voices Online).
Visit this link for the list of winning blogs, and read the full report on the Global Voices Online link above.
Young animal rights activists took to the streets in central Mexico City on Sunday, chanting "Corridas de toros -- vergüenza nacional (bullfights -- a national shame).'' They were protesting the hundreds of bullfights that take place here in Mexico.
Del.icio.us:
Chris Kraul
Buenos Aires:
Patrick McDonnell
Caribbean:
Carol Williams
Mexico City:
Hector Tobar
Deborah Bonello
Marla Dickerson
Ken Ellingwood
Reed Johnson
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette