Tag: mexico

A Tale of Two Appliances

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

Our air fryer adorned with lyrics by Garrett Hedlund
Our air fryer adorned with lyrics by Garrett Hedlund

Part One

This story begins, as no great story ever has, with a dustbuster.

That’s right: A cordless, rechargeable handheld vacuum cleaner. If you don’t know, consider yourself lucky. It means you have had so much household help, that you never needed to recognize that dustbusters exist. Align yourself with George H.W. Bush, amazed, as he was, by a supermarket scanner.

A dustbuster once infiltrated my life and as much as I would like to make it the culprit of part one of this story, I blame two other operatives. For a dustbuster to be an actual culprit it would have to star in an anime film—or take on the alternative meanings assigned to it by the Urban Dictionary. (Don’t go there for this particular word, unless  you want to read about raunch—or worse—ice hockey.)

As for the actual culprits, they are my husband Jim Mulvaney and his late mother, Eileen O’Keefe Mulvaney. My husband is an intrinsically good guy. But nobody is perfect. My mother-in-law—whom I loved deeply—had her own flaws. Super practical, but  more about other people’s needs as opposed to her own. When we cleaned out her house, we found scores of nearly identical striped, button-down oxford shirts in their original packaging. I realized it was the shirt she wore on a daily basis. She was not a serious hoarder. She just hated going to the dry cleaners. Read more »

Remembering Rey

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Rey Rodriguez, photo by Mark Harvey

A week before he died, I drove my good friend and ranch foreman, Rey Rodriguez, to Denver to catch a bus to Chihuahua, Mexico. He was taking a two-week vacation to visit his family there. On the three-hour drive to Denver, we practiced answering questions for the test given to immigrants applying for US citizenship. He had downloaded 100 potential questions onto his phone and had been studying for more than a year to take the test. I often wondered why he didn’t take the test sooner because he had the questions down. Most of the test is composed of the sort of useless memorization you’d find in an American high school in 1950.

Who was Benjamin Franklin? What do the fifty stars on the American flag represent? Where is the Statue of Liberty? Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

I have no idea how this test ensures that an immigrant will make a good citizen other than ensuring that the applicant knows far more about American history than the complacent homeowner in Pasadena, California, going all red-faced about keeping “illegals” out of ‘America—between bites of avocado that the “illegals” planted, picked, and packed.

We probably went through 60 questions and Rey didn’t miss one. My suspicion is that Rey had very mixed feelings about becoming an official gringo. Like many Mexicans, he had done the Mexico-America dance for years. Traveling great distances from Chihuahua to places like Yuma, Colorado, to work on a giant feedlot, the Central Valley of California to harvest vegetables, or western Colorado to work on our ranch.

He liked America okay and admired certain things about gringos. But his heart and soul were in Mexico. America was a way to stay afloat financially. I asked him what the average wage of a ranch worker in Mexico was and I reckon American ranch workers make in the neighborhood of 10 times as much. Read more »

The Great American Bigot

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Salinas, California – A tractor operator works the agricultural fields of the Salinas Valley of central California.

There are a number of videos circulating on the web that show angry white people screaming at Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to “Go back to where you came from!” It takes a special brand of stupid for, say, a Texan living in a town with a name like Llano located in Llano County to tell a Mexican or Mexican-American to “go back to where they came from.” For when you’re in Texas—a different spelling of the Spanish Tejas—in a county named Llano, which means plain or flat in Spanish, and in a town also named Llano for its flat ground, and you find yourself yelling at someone named Garcia or Gallegos to go home, you might be the one with the problem.

In a country with state names like Colorado, California, and New Mexico, and city names like Santa Fe, Amarillo, La Junta, and San Diego, it’s obvious that explorers, ranchers, store owners, priests, and law men had previous history in what is now Mexico. Our forebears were not just the ones who landed on the east coast after crossing the Atlantic, but also the ones who came up from south of the border, long before a border existed.

More than 200 years before the United States was even a gleam in the eye of one of our revolutionaries, Spaniards traveling up from what is now Mexico were exploring the southwest. In 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado set off on a two-year exploration in search of the mythological seven cities of Cibola with hopes of bringing home gold and silver. Leaving the territory of present day Mexico, he traveled through what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and possibly Kansas. On his trip he encountered the Grand Canyon but never found the promised gold and his trip was considered a failure. Read more »

2666 And All That

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Carolina and Roberto Bolaño in 2002. Photo: El Pais
Carolina and Roberto Bolaño in 2002. Photo: El Pais

1066 And All That, a sly rewrite of the history of England, was published in 1930 and became a perennial bestseller. Its subtitle was A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates. Written by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, the book, in the words of one critic, “punctured the more bombastic claims of drum-and-trumpet narratives … both the Tory view of ‘great man’ history and the pieties of Liberal history.” There is no connection, literary or otherwise, between this satirical non-fiction and 2666, the weighty novel by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, published after his death from liver failure in 2003 at the age of 50. However, that phrase “all the parts you can remember” triggered an association when I found a battered copy of Bolaño’s novel among some old books discarded on a park bench. But it was a half copy — the covers and last 100 pages of the 900-page tome were missing. “The parts you can remember” reminded me of my spotty knowledge of Latin American writing picked up in those faddy years following the so-called Boom in the region’s literature from the 1950s to the 1970s. In the English-reading world, any serious book-lover felt obliged to mention, at the drop of a dinner-party conversation, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Octavio Paz, or Carlos Fuentes. The ultimate one-upmanship would have been to claim reading one of the authors in Spanish, but in my years in England, I never heard anyone do so. “You don’t read Borges,” one friend mocked. “You read his translator. That’s like washing your feet with your socks on.” Read more »

Why You’re Going to Vote for Trump and How You Can Win a Free Ticket to Mexico

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt
2+2=5
Hello. My name is Akim Reinhardt, I was very, very wrong, and now it's time for me to pay for my mistakes.

The good news is, when I pay, you just might be the one to collect. My loss can be your windfall.

The catch? You'll have to publicly debase yourself almost as much I am about to do right now.

Sigh.

How did it come to this? You and I publicly shaming ourselves on the internet, each of us desperately hoping to salvage a little bit of joy as the world burns around us?

It's all because of that goddamned Donald Trump.

Trump is about to claim the Republican presidential nomination, and a whole lotta pundits got that one wrong. Legions of professional gabbers, from every corner of the political spectrum, badly missed the mark, assuring you that he'd never be the GOP candidate.

Despite their wishful thinking dressed up in high falutin' gibberish, it's happening anyway; Trump is poised to become leader of the pachyderm pack. And so a lot of the yakkers had to make amends.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post literally ate his words. Pass the salt and pepper.

Nate Cohn of the New York Times and David Byler of Real Clear Politics each created a laundry list of everything they got wrong, which like most analysts, was quite a lot.

Perhaps the oddest mea culpa came from polling wunderkind Nate Silver, who explained away his spectacular failure by saying that he had acted like a barbaric “pundit” instead of staying true to the “scientific method.” Rather than relying on statistical modeling to figure out if Trump would win, Silver says he just made “educated guesses.”

Since Silver never really explains why he traded in true reason for such wild tomfoolery, I'm just gonna assume he went on a months-long bender.

Normally, it would be very easy for me to look down my nose at these losers. After all, I'm not a statistician or a professional talking head. I'm a historian. And if there's one thing studying history has taught me, it's that trying to predict the future is pure folly.

What were these dullards thinking? Guess the future? Good luck with those crystal ball shennanigans. Studying history has shown me, time and time again, that the future is unknowable. The past is a mystery and the future is an illusion. So allow me to haughtily point a sanctimonious finger at these morons.

Except for one thing. It turns out that I'm one of those morons. I, too, am a loser.

I spouted off like all the others, publicly assuring people that Trump would not win the nomination, offering up historically informed ramblings as evidence. And just like the rest of them, I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

It was a fool's errand, of course. So why did I do it?

Read more »