Continuing my massive photograph bonanza in the wake of my 11 weeks of travelling, today I bring you a set of photos from San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico. I spent about 16 days in this city and took a lot of interesting photos. A good portion of them were of the great grafitti and stencils which are pretty prevalent and often political there. enjoy!

You may have seen a few of them before, but I have posted today the best of the rest of my photos from Guatemala. It's way too many, about 200, I am the first to admit, but it was hard to pare it down even that far. I had more than 300 to start with. What do you do when everything is beautiful and strange for 6 weeks and you want everyone you know to see just how beautiful and strange it was? Aren't I good to you?
Si, soy muy chido, si? ja ja ja...

Podscope is a search engine for searching the content of podcasts . When you get the results you can actually listen to the few seconds where your search word was said, right there on the results page. It apparently uses voice recognition, and it sort of works, though one of my test words was "Chiapas" (still thinking about the Zapatistas) and amongst the results was an item about podcasting wherein the person speaking said "chopping the sound off the end," and that evidently got heard by the computer as "Chiapas." But anyway, a very cool web tool.

Interesting. The constant march of progress. hah.

In solidarity with the EZLN who yesterday went on red alert, I just posted a collection of photos I took a bit less than a month ago while studying spanish in Oventic, one of the Zapatista Caracoles. I have over 800 photos I took in Guatemala and Mexico over the last 11 weeks that I just started going over today, but I decided to upload these first. Vive Zapatismo!

Enjoy and be inspired...

Holy shit! On the very day that I returned from Mexico (well, from that weird hybrid of Mexico and the U.S. called The Border), yesterday, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has called a red alert! Amazing. Less than a month after I was in Zapatista territory, they are encouraging internationals to leave, writing: "national and international civil societies who are working in peace camps and in community projects are being urged to leave rebel territory. Or, if they decide freely of their own volition, they remain on their own and at their own risk, gathered in the caracoles. "

What's going on? The communique doesn't explain WHY they're doing this. Wow. Is this the start of some big new rebel armed operation? Or a new defensive posture based on recent violence perpetrated by the Mexican Army and the Chiapaneco paramilitary groups? Is it related to threats last month against peace volunteers, as I wrote about in this blog?

Pues si, anyway, I am safely back in Iowa, about as far from Chiapas as one could be, though the 2 places are simliar in at least one way: they are both definitely lands of corn.

So today is my last full day en la frontera, and a few minutes ago i was
heading toward el mercado en Juarez when I met this Mexican guy who told me a sad story. At first I thought it was the typical, 'hey i'm stranded, give me some money', story you hear on the streets of everywhere, in whatever language. But it was far too detailed and convincing this time for me to think it was fake.

The guy, Angel, said he'd been living in San Jose for 5 years, and elsewhere in California before that, but he got his driver's license suspended because his friend had an open container in his car. So then Immigration got hold of him, and flew him to San Diego for a hearing. The judge suspended his green card, and said you can either stay in jail and fight this in court and it would cost lots of money, or you can voluntarily be deported and have a better chance of reapplying for your green card successfully later.. So he chose the latter, but then they didn't just take him over to Tijuana, where he has family. They flew him all the way to El Paso and deported him to Juarez, where he's never been before.

Now he has to get a job, and meanwhile try to survive in Juarez, so he can get a bus to Tijuana, which is like 100 dollars or more. I gave him some money in exchange for letting me interview him, and he told his story on camera.

Okay, maybe the driving thing is a white lie. Maybe he was DUI. But even so, that's not a reason to deport someone who's been living peacefully and lawfully, with girlfriend and kids, for over 5 years in the U.S. And then to fly him halfway across the continent is ridiculous - he said they do that a lot because they think people will just try to cross again if they deport them straight south, where they might have family, friends, etc. So they take them far away, so its harder for them to sneak in again. This is cruel and unusual punishment, especially since this guy was legal. Absolute bullshit.

In other news, yesterday I did 3 interviews with members of Nuestras Hijas Regresso A Casa (May Our Daughters May Return Home), a group of mothers of murdered women in Juarez. I first met with Marisela, who is the co-founder and a leader of the group, and I think a lawyer too(?). She was extremely helpful: she called up 2 mothers and then drove me to their houses. The first was the home of Ramona, who is the mother I was with on the Caravan last fall. Her house is also where the office for the group is. It was great to see her again, and she seemed happy to see me. She asked about the other people who were on the Caravan with us and I interviewed her with a few update questions and things we hadn't talked about before. During the interview I kept thinking of how much better my spanish was than back then, when I really couldn't have an actual conversation with her.

After that she and Marisela showed me a little pirate radio station that they had built in back of the office. It was incredible. A little table with microphones, a mixing board and other gear, and the whole room covered with egg cartons for sound dampening. We went back in the office and I got some footage of the 2 of them pointing out where bodies of murder victims have been found, on the big map of Juarez that I had brought with me. They explained where the famous places were like Lote Bravo, Algodonero, Lomo Prieto, etc. Then after interviewing Marisela she drove me over to the house of Josefina, another mother. She was a little sick so we made her interview short, and then she explained how to get a bus back into the center of town, because Marisela had to bring her husband's car back.

I got back to el centro without difficulty, then found a place for lunch, and shot a bunch of b-roll of the streets, the long line of cars waiting to cross the border bridge, etc. Finally I walked back across that same bridge to my hotel and my foot hurt a lot, so I ended up just resting and going to sleep early. Since it was Saturday night I had had visions of going back into Juarezland (the central, party-area right across the bridge where El Paso youth go for underage drinking and other vices), and interviewing people on the street, getting some vox populi accounts. But I couldn't, I just stayed in, read and watched TV.

This morning I got up early and went to the campus of University of Texas El Paso, because I'd heard that it was right across the river from Rancho Anapra. Anapra is one of the poorest neighborhoods, on the west outskirts of Juarez. I took a bus up to UTEP and sure enough it was perched high on a hill looking over the muddy and grassy Rio Grande right into western Juarez. Kids were swimming in the river, even though it's horribly polluted. I got some good footage. Had lunch, came back to the hotel for a siesta, and then came into Juarez. Tommorrow I fly out of El Paso, so this is my last chance to do any more footage gathering that I want to do.

Nevertheless, I'm feeling pretty positive about the film now. I think I really got everything I need to make the improvements in the documentary that it needs. I was feeling rather discouraged yesterday morning after reading email from a compa

Well, I am back in the U.S.A., just barely. The border is really quite weird, in many ways. It is indeed a mixture, a culture of its own.

Yesterday I took the bus from Chihuahua City 5 hours north to Juarez. It was, in a way, the worst touchdown in a new place that I've had for my whole trip, probably, I realized, because I let my guard down. I thought to myself, subconcioiusly at least, 'oh, hey, i'm almost back to the States, it'll be easy.' So I didn't plan my arrival that well. I knew I wanted to stay on the U.S. side, because I had read hotels and food in El Paso are a better value than the ones in Juarez, but I wanted to be close to the border crossings, so i could go back and forth easily.

(I'm reminded of a story Subcommandante Marcos told, of talking to a migrant from Guatemala headed through Chiapas on his way to Gringolandia. Marcos asked, why don't you just stay here in Mexico, why go to the U.S.? The Guatemalteco said are you kidding? Mexico is the worst of both worlds: pay as bad as in Guatemala, but prices as high as in the U.S. For the North of Mexico, especially the border region, this is pretty true, I think. )

Anyway, so I didn't think too much, plus my guidebook has no map of Juarez, just a rough description of how to get into el centro from the bus terminal. So I got on the first city bus I saw headed for el centro, but where it dropped me off was not that close to the border, and i had no idea where to go exactly. I asked around, bought a map, and eventually slogged my way to the bridge - keep in mind, with my 70 pounds or so of stuff (I started with about 50 but with souvenirs and stuff my cargo has grown) on my back. I wish I had a photo of what I looked like when I finally found my way to a hotel in El Paso - dripping with sweat and disheveled as hell with my giant backpack and other bags. But before getting there I had to walk to the bridge, over the bridge (I didnt have quite enough pesos to get a taxi and I knew there was a branch of my bank in downtown El Paso. Why not just walk? hah.), several block from the bridge into downtown proper, find the bank, get some dollars, then find a hotel. There's lots of sort of rundown sad looking hotels down here, but i found one that's not too bad called Gateway Hotel. insanely expensive by the standards of what I've been paying (anywhere from 2 to 11 times more expensive) in Mexico and Guatemala, but I get a lot more. Water from the tap that I can drink! Hot showers! All day long! Toilet that can flush down toilet paper! Air conditioning!

AC? you bourgeois pig, you're thinking about me. Wait, listen - it was in the high 90s here when I walked across the border yesterday, and today, and for the next week, its supposed to hit about 104 F. That's hot. You pretty much have to have AC, or you die, here. And many do. Meanwhile I saw on TV this morning that the Pacific Northwest is in the middle of a cold wave with lots of rain and even snow in some parts. Wow. I'm sorry, my Portland friends, but that is good news for me. It makes me happy to be sweating my ass off in the nice hot dry Frontera....

So here I am, and its weird, hard to tell when to speak which language, sometimes. And this morning a funny a pleasing thing happened. I was eating a cheap breakfast in the hotel's cafe and I bought a copy of one of the Juarez newspapers, El Diario, which they sell in El Paso - in fact they have a Juarez version and an El Paso one, both in Spanish. Anyway, regular non-intellectual newspapers I can read pretty well now in Spanish. I still take forever to get through an article in La Jornada, cuz its more highbrow. But anyway I was reading El Diario and eating breakfast and the waitress said in spanish that they dont get many gringos reading the Juarez paper here, where are you from, Spain? And I said no, the U.S. and she was really surprised and said usually gringos read the El Paso Times, wow, you know spanish, and I said, well, I'm still learning.

It kind of surprises me that more gringos in a border town like this don't know more spanish. Actually, I bought that paper because I wanted to see if there was any recent news of any murdered women in Juarez. Nope, not today. There were lots of men killed in various parts of town, though, including the owner of a big bar called El Mango. Some guys just drove up and blasted him and then zoomed off, bullets ricocheting through the window toward the neighboring children's nursery.

Anyway. Today I have errands. Go back across border, call some potential interviewees. Go to a bank to pay my Mexican border exit fee (i think it's 13 bucks). Wander around, think about where to shoot more footage. Try to find a high building to shoot a panorama of the city from. But basically I'm not in a rush. Yestereday I realized I have a day longer than I thought. For the last week I was thinking, for some reason, that my flight out of El Paso was Sunday, but its monday. So I have 3 full days here. Hopefully that will be enough time to get all the footage I need. I think it will be.

This article from El Paso talks about the dissappearance about a month ago of a young school teacher in Juarez. Its the first thing I've read, amazingly, that suggests there are links between certain specific areas of town and certain stores, namely 2 music stores, where victims were going or coming from or in when they disappeared. Muy interesante.

Wow, if someone ever told me I'd be spending 2 nights alone in Chihuahua City, Mexico a few years ago I would have been baffled. There is a reason I am here that I will get to in a moment. But seeing it, you would understand why I wouldn't have expected to ever go here, unless you thought I was really into cowboy boots - there are about 200 boot stores here, supposedly one of the best places in Mexico to buy cowboy boots - there just is not really any tourististic reason to be here at all. Actually, it is the terminus of the Copper Canyon rail line, so people are probably passing throuh. But there's very little that caters to foreign visitors.

It's not an unpleasant town. There are several very nice plazas in el Centro, and a pedestrian walkway a few blocks long, though it has virtually no benches to sit on, and no coffee culture presence or any other sidewalk sit-and-hang-out restaurants or bars or whatever. Here in Chihuahua eople seem to like to buy ice cream and walk with it, rather than sip lattes while sitting at sidewalk tables. In fact in the whole downtown area I only found one coffee place where you can sit down and drink real coffee and relax. This is specifically Chihuahense, or maybe of el norte, because in D.F. and in San Cristobal there was definitely a coffee culture, even apart from tourism.

Anyway, the reason I AM here is to interview people regarding the femicides of Juarez and Chihuahua. About 5 hours south of Juarez, this city, capital of the state of Chihuahua, has seen similar killings of young women, and an activist group called Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters) has arisen and is based here. Late afternoon yesterday I rolled into town on a bus 17 hours or so out from Mazatlan and checked my email. Macrina from Mexico Solidarity Network had come through for me and had arranged with Alma Gomez, one of the leaders of Justicia Para, for me to do some interviews. So I called up Alma and we have made plans to meet at her house. Two mothers of victims from here, and also perhaps another woman who is a main leader of the group, Lucha Castro, will meet us there.

So I'm pretty pleased. 3, maybe 4 interviews in one day. Now I just have to find my way to Alma's house, which is outside of el centro.

There's so many other things I'd like to blog, so many thoughts and observations, but I think its best to start with just what's going on, and if I have time, after checking my email and other tasks, maybe I'll blog again with some other random themes. hasta loo...

Jacob has been trying to comment on my blog and my antispam module keeps rejecting him. I can't figure out why. So, I'm going to post what he tried to say, which he just emailed to me:

Hey, I only paid 600 pesos!
Hope you're travels are going well Steev. The night you left, we went a
cafe where Karlitos and someone else from CML were going to do a poetry
reading. Well, the smug dryness of the place mixed with the damp
inebrity of ourselves made for a quite a hilarious night. Karlitos ended
up reciting his poetry from the second floor, meanwhile some others were
throwing down biting anti-bourgeous criticisms at the other 'poets.' We
got thrown out. Just another day in the Ciudad Monstruo.

Some other things you left out (and i haven't written anything in a
while): The amazing pyramids of Teotihuacan, the phat dj-funk party in
that hotel, the wireless hacking adventures, and more. Really, I love
this city. Te amo Mexico.

Say hi to the border for me. She misses me.

Jacob also recently posted the radio show he produced last week which is centered around an interview he did with me in San Cristobal. He's been remotely doing this weekly radio show as he travels, for broadcast on Radioactive, the San Diego IMC web radio station. I'm listening right now and I sort of sound like a spaced out dork for most of the interview. I think I was distracted by the beautiful garden we were sitting in at the time. oh well.

Anyway, more about me. I made it onto a bus last night that knifed its way across Mexico and 18 hours later deposited me here in Mazatlan. All air-conditioned buses in Latin America are TOO air-conditioned, to the point that its always a good idea to bring at least an extra layer with you to your seat. This bus, though, was the worst ever in that sense. It was so cold I should have brought 3 extra layers. Or a down quilt or something. It was crazy. especially when the bus was stopped for awhile. It sucked.

But anyway, now I am in hot sunny coastal Mazatlan and it's beautiful. I've only been here a few hours so I havent been over to where the really nice beaches are, by the resorts. I'm staying downtown where its cheaper and more authentic. Tommorrow I will hit the beach, and I wish I coudl stay longer but then in the evening i plan to jump on another long distance bus and go to Chihuahua City, 16 hours away,where I will hopefully interview one of the activists involved with the fight for justice for the victims of the femicides there and in Ciudad Juarez.