I've been sick and sick-ish for several weeks -- Wilhelmina, too -- so we've stayed pretty close to home. I went through some of Sean's computer folders and found some photos to remind me that there are walls other than the ones we've been staring at.
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| Perennial leftie favorite. |
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| Lots of fighting...with paint. |
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| A lover AND a fighter. (Where have we seen this guy before?) |
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| I think I already shared this, but it's so cool it deserves another look. The jaguar eats your gun for lunch. |
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| Colobri! There's a lot of ugly, sloppy graffiti on the walls, but there's a lot of this beautiful stencil work, too. |
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| This is across the street from our house. If you have had a fever recently, you may have seen these, too. |
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| Fly on the wall. |
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| Marching stencils. |
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| ...and NO to quasiparamilitarizacion, too I bet. |
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| Fighting and speaking out. |
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| When we first arrived, we saw a lot of graffiti protesting violence against women. I heard there had been an incident somewhere in Mexico that had prompted a lot of outcry, and I supposed that these stencils were part of that. |
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| I like this one (it rhymes and I bet works great as a chant at rallies): Neither submissive nor devoted-- woman free, beautiful, and crazy! |
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| The hashtag #yosoy132 was a big deal last summer; it began as a protest against (then-candidate, now-president) Pena Nieto. Wikipedia explains. |
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| Another big source of leftie outrage: genetically modified crops. This shows corn getting an injection and rhymes, "Without corn, there's no country." |
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| I didn't really get the corn-country association until we went to a show based on on Mayan creation myths. It explained that the first humans--the first Mexicans--were born from corn. |
Here are a few other things seen about town.
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| Everyone warned us about traffickers. |
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| Do-it-yourself 30-second nose job! |
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| I suppose you can also do this yourself (give your finger a massage, I mean). It's a good thing this product is readily available in the pharmacy, right next to the sunscreen. |
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| Maybe our taxi drivers have only been pretending that they don't speak English. (Actually, we have already been to the Pleasure Palace; it's in Utah.) |
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| School newspaper, in case you missed this particular edition. |
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| Seen in one of Don Sergio's patients' homes. |
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| Look at the size of the family! I think there would be even more people, if they hadn't run out of window-room. Eso es Mexico. |
Really? No comments? I've gotta be the first?
ReplyDeleteAt least their graffiti has a message to it, instead of the "tagging" that goes on around here.
Is the volcano Popocatépetl causing any problems for you down there? I hear it's goinna blow!
There's a lot of tagging here, too -- right alongside the more (to me) interesting and beautiful graffiti.
DeleteWe keep hearing about Popo, too -- they keep raising the alert levels in the complicated scheme (last time I checked we were in yellow, phase three, which is somehow the 7th of 9 levels of panic). I don't think there will be much impact down where we are...but we do plan to drive that way in July so I hope Popo has settled down by then.
Well, the graffiti isn't Banksy, that's for sure.
DeleteI always had a hard time saying that name, Popocatépetl. Some of those indigenous words are really difficult to pronounce for me, but names like Xóchitl or Oaxaca (an "x" is an "s" sound at the beginning, but an "h" sound in the middle...) were easier, just harder to read.
Their words sometimes have a nice bounce to them, though, like Topolobampo or Cuernavaca.
"Born from Corn"--should be the debut album of an indigenous hip-hop trio, right? Amazing images. Some of the hipsters in Chicago do stencil work, too, but I don't like it as much.
ReplyDeleteWell, I was just very aware that I didn't want to say that Mexicans were 'children of the corn', you know?
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