The Lake Chapala Society, with monthly and yearly membership fees and, "the largest English language library in Latin America" according to a docent. The monthly fee is on par with a latte and scone at your favorite cafe in the States, or perhaps a burrito from Gordo. Well worth it. I checked out four book from the library: The Crystal Frontier, by Carlos Fuentes, a Biography of Stephen Crane, written by John Berryman (of all people: look him up if you do not know the name), a Robert Harris historical thriller and a book by Don DeLillo. The librarian had taught in the UCSD Extension Writing Program so we had a thing or two in common. There are a few people here this day, and at least two of them are older women speaking passionately at lawyers about how to access money from a will or annuity, or something. Sad but also funny. The allure of life in the area is so great that I understand the desperation. The attachment. Life here is normal: it moves at a natural pace. Plus there are box stores and golf courses!

These guys played Beatles songs. Really mellow and a good rapport. 

(Note: I wrote this in the Fall of 2017)

“A society is only as free as its most inconvenient dissident.” – Caitlin Johnstone

M

M was in his late twenties; he was dumpy and bearded. He wore hiking boots, tan survival pants (the kind with many pockets up and down the leg and fabric that is made to dry quickly) and a blue parka. His backpack was enormous. He found me online, through a site set up to connect tutors and college students. It would be the only time I used the website. When I arrived to work with him—sight unseen—he sat in the side café—a Starbucks inside the larger chain bookstore, Barnes and Noble. M had a Norton Anthology of Medieval Literature and it was opened at “Lanval,” a long poem by Marie de France, a writer about whom I knew nothing. 

He looked perplexed—bewildered actually—and he would not make eye contact with me. In fact, his ball cap covered his eyes. He spoke as if he were from an imagined genteel class of conservatives from the New England area of another century. His speech was tonally flat: “I will need your help with my writing…it would be quite helpful if you could possibly meet this Saturday, if that is at all not too much to ask…I am sorry if you were angry at me today; I sometimes hold unconventional views in areas such as politics.” 

He certainly needed help. A victim of the Special Education program at a local high school, I would come to find he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (a label no longer used by professionals) and held strange resentments. He hated the Boy Scouts, “for what they did to me.” He loathed the academic salary class (i.e. his professors) who he considered lightweight goons carrying the pitchforks for multiculturalism, anti-hate and anti-racism. These ‘agendas’ he found stifling, shallow and vane. To him his teachers and fellow students were “Social Justice Warrior assholes.” His mom and dad he loathed because “they never asked me to do anything. They coddled me. To this day, I do not know how to do anything.” He was more than a little angry.  

M called them "Social Justice Warrior assholes."

Initially he needed help studying for a course titled "The Literature of Passion," something I was on short supply of lately, seeing as I had lost my little sister (a social justice teacher herself) months previous, was drinking too much, and I worried about my now motherless six-year old niece. I lacked clarity about what I needed and wanted for my own life. In short—and I know this is getting lengthy—I was adrift in a kind of hopelessness and despair unimaginable to me before I myself returned to school to attain my M.A.

I always used Barnes and Noble, when I was an undergraduate, to read my assigned books for free, in a setting that allowed me to sit in a comfortable chair without too much distraction (perhaps some muzak) and drink coffee, one of the few things I spent money on back then. 

M had no real investment in reading. He sat slouched over the table. He was so nervous he could barely look up from the table. At the outset of that first meeting I thought certainly there would be no way we could meet again. We had barely made eye contact. We were in completely separate realities, and I had no idea what his had anything to do with. The only connection I felt was the visceral shame, the embarrassment at mere being; the inability to look at the world eye to eye because he felt he did not belong. I could relate to those things.  

I looked over the writing prompts he had for “Lanval,” a verse translation of a morality laity (whatever that was) written in the twelfth-century by a noblewoman writing under a pseudonym, translating Latin to English, but actually French because this was during the centuries France controlled England, so the dialect she wrote in is called Anglo-Norman (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, in which Shakespeare and Milton wrote). 

These were basic moral stories, or fables, and in the specific case of Marie, they made love the focus for analysis of the individual’s relation to the whole. This, at least, was what the forward told me.  Here is a quote from “Lanval”: 

He to whom God has given knowledge 

And the gift of speaking eloquently,

Must not keep silent nor conceal the gift 

But he must willingly display it.

Within that kernel could bloom and blossom, if I were to put it on display, the entirety of my relationship with M, or lack thereof, which lasted two years. Therein exist ideas of charisma, courage, knowledge, ‘gifts,’ and obligation and responsibility, none of which would ever actually become the true fulcrum of our tutoring sessions, and this was because, as I noted above, M refused to read. 

In comparison, when I was an undergraduate English major in my year-long introduction to literature course, when it came time for my test on Chaucer, a random line by line translation, I joked with a friend that instead of studying the great poet I had been carousing the night before drinking Old English (a malt liquor). Fortunately for me, I think my Teaching Assistant liked me. In the middle of the test she slipped out of the room, seemingly to allow degenerates like myself to pull out translation guides and to not so subtly cheat. 

Up to that point it seemed I might fail the course. After that passing grade things got better. My T.A. liked the work I produced on “Henry the Fourth, Part 1,” Shakespeare’s play. I had fallen in love with the character of Falstaff and would write about his down-to-earth and worldly character traits in juxtaposition to the coddled and Machiavellian Prince Hal, who looked to the former as a father figure. I ended the year with a steady stream of B minuses. I learned to take notes. I learned to focus and my confidence grew. 

Falstaff

Things got easier in upper division courses and I grew to understand that what I was doing in college was learning to learn, for me an intuitive and performative task. I became enamored of Faulkner, not because I understood what his writing meant, but because it was so difficult to read, so carefully written; I thought reading him would somehow cast me into the echelon of people who understood big and important things. I read the other American modernists. I studied more Shakespeare. 

Faulkner

With M, these aspirations mattered not a whit. He wanted to be a writer but would not write on his computer because he was convinced that the Word program that he would be writing on had a ‘backdoor’ and therefore would be impossible to secure. He actually said that someone could crack into the computer, steal his writing, and publish it as his or her own. “Wouldn’t there be any satisfaction in the fact that your writing got published, even if by somebody else?” I asked. “I won’t be anybody’s cuck,” was what he would respond.

I was dumbfounded. What on earth did this guy see in the world as true? Why was I working with him?? 

After our first meeting—a meeting I was sure would be our last—I got up to dismiss myself, appalled at the guy’s inability to comprehend and contextualize literature, and as I was turning to head out of the bookstore, M said, his eyes turned to the ground, “so hopefully we can meet again at the beginning of next week?” This was a relief, as I was beginning to hate the kids I worked with in my ‘other job.’ 

M (actually, M’s parents) would pay my rent, I decided.

I did not think about M much after our first meeting. I figured working with him would be easy money. I thought that because he never did any preparation, I would never do any either. This approach worked. He wanted someone to hang out with. I met with him two, three, even four times some weeks for two-hour meetings at the Barnes and Noble café. Eventually we moved to a donut shop because he felt more comfortable there. The Barnes and Noble café was often crowded with shared seating. 

It was at about the end of our first semester working together that M told me about his Asperger’s diagnosis. It was also at this time that I started to become aware of the online world he inhabited. I learned about Pepe the Frog, the ‘Trump alt-right’ meme; I learned about PewDiePie, the online celebrity gamer best known for his provocative pushback against European speech laws; I realized that M was infatuated by Sargon of Akad, a Youtuber who hosted a regular podcast who considered himself, like many of these ‘new’ conservatives, a Classical Liberal. He told me about Tommy Robinson, a British Brexiter who had been taken to jail for teaching his bulldog the Nazi salute and posting a video of it doing so online.

Pepe the Frog

All of these people and names were new to me. Before meeting M I had happened upon a regular blog by an autistic writer who was also a self-labeled ‘Burkean Conservative’ (a follower of the English philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote a famous treatise critical of the French Revolution) and a Druid. This guy sometimes wrote about politics and, when he did, he had an uncanny way of clearly explaining the populism sweeping the western world. Unlike almost everyone I interacted with in my world—family, friends, colleagues—I had been exposed to, or at least I was beginning to feel drawn to a different understanding of the political landscape for the Trump era. I was fed up with holding out hope in the specific political paradigm of Corporate corruption and the all-out militarization of everything that had lead us up to the moment. I could no longer see the relevancy of liberalism. I always craved tradition, even though I was vehement in my ambivalence towards authority. I had become entrenched in my refusal to entertain political solutions that existed within the paradigm of Clinton-Bush-Obama (birthed, I suppose, by Reagan). I assumed the Occupy Movement would be coopted and destroyed from the inside, and it was. I now see the Occupy Movement as an odd normalization of the sad fact of homelessness in society. We are living in a post-political reality. 

M was turned on to politics with Occupy. He was outraged and noticed a shift in what took place amongst ordinary people because of the financial turmoil in 2008. I was astounded by that moment too. Unlike M I had already gone through the school system and because I went to school in a progressive, liberal town, the politics I learned to recite without thinking related to race and gender and class and sexuality and the importance of questioning the hierarchy. In other words, at the same time the economic reality created atomization: the internet, Neo Liberalism and then the war or terror, students were being told to think only of identity. It was bizarrely dystopian, and I saw it in the mid 1990’s. 

So just as the fellow elected to lead a progressive, social justice minded coalition took his first opportunity in office to do something about the ‘hierarchy’ and absolved the Corporate fat cats at the very tip top of the hierarchy of any wrongdoing and not only absolved them but rewarded them for their egregious behavior, he helped set things up so that they could mess everything up again. You see what I am saying about a shift. Obama was unprecedented in that what he represented as an individual—good or bad—and what he did to keep the paradigm of war and corruption and inequality afloat simply does not lead one to trust or even want to participate in the system at large.

In other words, M is not an idiot. He saw all this. What he turned to resulted in Trump. It was not Russian bots or Wiki Leaks that elected Donald Trump. It was people like M: disaffected, open to new ideas, disappointed and more than a little dissatisfied. What got Trump into the White House was the before mentioned hypocrisy in combination with a corrupt political establishment in combination with the Internet. Let me explain what I learned working with M. I learned that the more isolated we become and the more we are expected to be individuated with no concern about community in the local sense, the more we turn to these things elsewhere. The most convenient place to turn for community—a sense of belonging—happens to be the Internet. It is convenient. It is anonymous. It does not require a lot of responsibility nor does it require accountability. Thank god for Al Gore, right?

M was a gamer, another aspect of the online community that I knew nothing about. Yes, I played video games when I was a kid. Not online though. Today people play online and they also communicate via chat while they play. Furthermore, a whole breed of celebrity Youtubers has grown out of the gamer culture. These folk record themselves playing video games and their cultural commentary makes them their lifestyles. They are paid, as far as I can see, to play video games and say provocative things. The ethos that was the very fabric of America one hundred-fifty years ago when the French writer de Tocqueville traveled the country and recorded what he saw has completely disappeared. What de Tocqueville saw was that Americans operated in community. He saw that politics was diverse and that people formed coalitions in order to get things done. Americans were communitarians back then. 

Alexis de Tocqueville

M's lifestyle and opinions slipped out over time. Some things startled me about M. He had reported one of his professors to the Dean of Student Affairs on more than one occasion for what he called her oppressive politics. He secretly recorded in-class discussions he claimed were biased and anti-Trump. He claimed one of his professors said she would “kill him” on the day of the 2016 election if he argued against her pro-Social Justice Warrior stances. While I took her behavior to be familial playacting, M, because he is on the autism spectrum, could do nothing other than take her statements as a threat. 

To me it was all very ironic. Here was a kid who had been taught from day one in his educational experience to advocate for justice, equity and fairness; but he was being told his opinions did not count, that he did not matter if he did not hew to the particular line of argumentation going on in class. Critical Theory, to take just one example, is theory after all but is taught as scripture by some professors. More pointedly, if the right wing represents the vertical and the left represents the horizontal then the two are meant to balance each other. It sounded to me as though there was not much balance in the ideological perspective M attributed to his teachers. If a pro-Trump student can be derided as a fascist, why is it not ok to question a pro-Sanders student who claims to be a Communist? Which ideology has done more historic harm? That depends on who you ask. In all fairness, both have been egregious.  

This is not to say I support one or the other (Trump or Sanders). The latter seems far more in touch with the political realities of the past century, while the former might be more in tune with political dystopia  here today. It’s hard to say. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, compares the online video gaming community to the ‘Old Bowling League,’ or a Hollywood version of a Western Utopia that never was, whose “angry voices, properly directed, have lengthened political-power.” He claims that he knew early-on that the comment sections of the Gaming World, “could be weaponized at some point.” At least some of these are the people who voted in the populist surge that brought Donald Trump. 

I do not like the police state. I do not support politicians who take money from weapons makers. I do not support the expansion of the US military. In this respect, I do not see that there would be much difference between Trump and Sanders. Socially, they are different. As people, they are different. I would have a far easier time in relation to Sanders, I suspect. As leaders I cannot know who will get the ‘better’ results. It seems this kind of information is always controlled. History writes and rewrites itself. It is a mass of entanglement, of mis- and dis-information. What is and what has been cannot truly be untangled without the collective intent to include dissident voices.

In this sense, I knew M needed to be heard; and, over time, he became a dissident voice I listened to. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/covid-deaths-plummet-excess-mortality-falls-pre-pandemic-levels

San Antonio Tlayacapan, Bar 503

These two rolled a joint at the bar after asking if I had papers (I didn't) and disappeared into thin air. 

 

Kurt Vonnegut

The firebombing of Dresden took place between February 13th and 15th 1945. Initially the U.S. press gave the massacre no coverage. Initial German propaganda claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 deaths. The first serious history of the event claimed 135,000 innocents were killed over the two nights of sustained Allied bombing. Wikipedia places the number at 25,000, but as a poet friend of mine once told me when I expressed outrage at what I thought to be the numbers killed in the Second Iraq War, “it's relative! No one should have died in Iraq.” It is really hard to imagine anyone needing to die in Dresden either, but, for the sake of clarity, let's say between 25,000 and 100,000 did; and Kurt Vonnegut lived through the massacre, huddled with a group of prisoners of war in an old slaughterhouse beneath the city. Slaughterhouse Five reflects Vonnegut’s frustration and attempts at honestly depicting the horrors he experienced. 

Many of the victims of the bombing were refugees escaping the advance of the Soviet Army, which was moving swiftly towards Dresden from the east. At least some of the victims were displaced citizens from the agricultural regions to the east of Dresden. (Others were Allied soldiers, many were women and children). This is one reason for the discrepancy between various analyses of the event. There is simply no way to know how much of the city was populated by civilian residents and how many of the people there were refugees from places east of Dresden. The destructive nature of the event is perhaps best characterized by subsequent public ignorance. According to Vonnegut, the massacre made the Guinness Book of World Records. 

As Vonnegut tells it, after the bombing, his group was forced to go from building to building and to dig through the debris bringing out corpses, most of which were discovered in basements and cellars, to be burned in pyres. It is not a story of heroism or valor but rather one of absurdity, arbitrariness, trauma, and death. 

The story’s protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, and he is based on a real soldier Vonnegut met in  Dresden who died, literally, of shell shock. In the novel, Pilgrim is an overly passive man whose father was particularly hard on him, and who, after living through World War II and being institutionalized in a psychiatric ward where he read the books of a specific science-fiction writer, experiences—or imagines—being transported to another planet, called Tralfamadore. There, reality is understood differently. On Tralfamadore time does not exist. Everything happens at once. Free will does not exist. And, thus, it is easy to project onto Billy Pilgrim a deep trauma that he can only cope with by imagining a fantastical world and reality completely “other” than the one we understand as our own. Pilgrim re-experiences Dresden again and again, and yet again. 

The first section of the book describes Vonnegut, years after events, searching for the form within which to tell his story. He goes to the house of someone who lived through the bombing with him and there his buddy’s wife, a woman named Mary O’Hare, tells him disdainfully that she hopes he does not make the story a heroic one, with tough guys doing courageous things. After all, she says, it is a story of very young and naive people living the horrors of war. Inspired by O’Hare, and in a realistic style, Vonnegut begins his own story—his own search for answers to what the experience of surviving Dresden means to him—only to then tell the story of Billy Pilgrim, an ordinary guy raised in an ordinary town and then drafted into a war he has no ability to survive much less comprehend, who is so traumatized by life he imagines himself abducted and taken to another planet. 

Harold Bloom writes, in his analysis of the book, 

“Tralfamadore is uncovered as quite likely a fantasy creation of a shell-shocked soldier—something like a compensatory sexual fantasy—because Vonnegut has presented the story as told by a strong, credible narrator from Billy’s point of view, the Tralfamadore story is not so easy to explain away: it has taken hold of the reader’s imagination, and in a sense has become real. By leading readers to believe, even temporarily, that the imaginary can be real, Vonnegut strengthens the possibility that readers can be helped to see that the real can be the result of a particular variety of imagination, the result of the ways we think and daydream. Mary O’Hare, the moral spirit of the book, has asserted in chapter 1: “she thought that wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.” (11)

Harold Bloom 

Of course today the murder of civilians in 'acts of defense against terrorism' has become common. In Israel, just yesterday, the IDF, the most notorious and egregious actor in the ongoing flare ups in the Middle East, obliterated a fifteen story apartment building filled with families, children, grandparents etc. What happened in Dresden has become almost quotidian in places like Gaza, and I suppose Syria, over the last decade or so. What was Vonnegut’s answer to the ongoing trauma of war on the human psyche? I think Bloom sums it up well:

"By leading readers to believe, even temporarily, that the imaginary can be real, Vonnegut strengthens the possibility that readers can be helped to see that the real can be the result of a particular variety of imagination, the result of the ways we think and daydream.” 

As a final note of comparison: I think what I have witnessed this last year, with Covid, has been a massive experiment in belief, originally premised on a social contract which involved closing society for two weeks in order to save the health care system. Two weeks became permanent, at some level, and now the implicit imaginary holds us all individually responsible for the spread of respiratory viruses: the individual becomes, in our newly imagined scenario, a walking vector of danger and disease. I wonder what Vonnegut would make of my comparison.

Slaughterhouse Five, ultimately, is the story of a man, Billy Pilgrim, who takes his experience reading science fiction (we could substitute here the ways the media spreads fear of terrorism, or fear of a respiratory virus) and he makes that experience his reality. It is about the many ways, as Bloom puts it, “the imaginary can be real.”

San Antonio Tlayacapan. I am renting here for one month. The weather has finally changed. We have had rain two days running. Thunder and lightening, too.

Sunset

The VW Beetle is popular here. 

 

Upon entering Uruapan, a city of perhaps 300,000, about two hours from Morelia, my trip had taken on new dimensions. I started feeling as though I had crossed a threshold there was no need to cross. I passed through town, feeling no actual connection to anyone or anything and slight bursts of adrenaline: worried I would scratch or dent my rental car, worried I would turn the wrong way down a one way street. I wondered what had brought me to this spot. Why was I here? What was I doing?  I was in a cartel hotbed. 

Uruapan itself is rather plain: two story buildings connect wall to wall in blocks in which everything seems made of the same material. The towns is overcrowded. There is rebar everywhere, for tax purposes (the owner of a building under construction does not

pay property taxes). Uruapan is filled with plastic and dogs and not enough trees. My basic assumption is that over the last 50 years it has grown from a village into a city, with an International airport. This is because it is a magnet for villagers in the surrounding region.

It has always, again my assumption, been a hub of agriculture. It sits at 5,000 feet in a lush valley. As I closed in on the center of town and I crossed a short trestle bridge and a creek bed that runs through a neighborhood and is filled with trash and is devoid of running water at the present moment, the road doglegged and began to slowly rise, becoming one way, and the further I went the more everything felt crowded, narrow and it was as though I was in Chinatown of San Francisco, minus any high rise buildings or Chinese people.

It was 10 a.m. and I was smack dab in the middle of the warehouse section. Trucks were unloading. In and around cars men and boys passed to and fro, pushing dollies stacked with boxes that overflowed with onions, avocados, cilantro, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, zucchini,

peaches, papayas, and of course, peppers of all kinds.

Passing through Uruapan turned out easy. There is an enchanting two-square-mile park at the far end of the city and from there the road I wanted heads north. I was going to Angahuán, an indigenous town famous for the volcano, Paricutin, which sits opposite the town from the highway and erupted in 1954, filling the air with ash. The villagers sensed the danger and moved and within five months their previous homes were covered in lava, at some places forty feet deep. The church steeple and walls still exist and are a tourist attraction. My intent was to get out of my car in Angahuán and to walk towards the church and photograph it, for my blog. 

Angahuán

Cathedral covered in lava.

From a Pemex station I drove a dirt road leading into town. In a small hut, dilapidated and showing wear and labeled “tourist info” in a sloppy writing, four men played cards. I rolled slowly past and about twenty yards further noticed a man running in my rearview mirror. I stopped. He was one of the town welcomers. He said I needed a guide if I wanted to see the cathedral or hike the volcano and that I would not be able to drive past the town limits. He recommended I hire a horse as well. Eventually I was able to communicate that I only wanted to drive through town and that I had toured the cathedral and volcano by horse in the past. 

Angahuán street. 

Angahuán is run down. Its horses are scrawny. Its buildings and roads are dilapidated. Women wear bright dresses and drape large multi colored striped woolen scarves over one shoulder. Some carry children on their backs. At one point, two dogs leapt in front of my car, playfully, and I imagined one was teaching the other how to have fun jumping in front of moving vehicles. People stared at me as I drove slowly down one lane roads which are framed by one-story wood timber buildings. It looks as if tourism has collapsed and that this last year in particular has been tough. Like the protagonist of The Red Badge of Courage, I came to my destination, experienced it, and turned around.  

Charapan cathedral.

Now let me tell you why smartphones provide an illusion of control and freedom. My original plan was to take the two lane road from Angahuán to Los Reyes, then to climb into higher mountains and Mazamitla, and from Mazamitla I would coast down to lake Chapala and home. I had been to Morelia and, for two nights, Pátzcuaro. Now it was time to take a leisurely drive through a foreign land. Like a true American genius I scuttled my original plan in order to follow my I phone’s instructions. My phone had me turn right on to a road about ten miles west of Angahuán and head due north towards Zamora and the toll road that runs between Guadalajara and Mexico City. Years ago I had driven the Los Reyes road and while there are not very many people or towns, it is paved, maintained, and there is not much elevation gain or loss. It passes through farmland and small pueblos. 

The road north was the exact opposite in every possible way. In parts it was dirt and at other places covered by potholes large enough to sink the Titanic. The elevation fluctuated, as I passed over not two but three volcanoes, all of which was a bit like crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains on Highway 108, which crosses Sonora Pass: crossing it three times back and forth. 

Cocuchos

Unlike the Sierra Nevada range of Northern California, here, the villages I passed were magical, filled with women going about in traditional dress, wood houses, and ancient churches. Charapan shows up on the map, but smaller villages like Charapaco and Cocucho do not. The latter is known for its pottery. These are P'urhepecha peoples, famous for their presence, and fishing technique, in and around Patzcuaro, where Día de los Muertos is celebrated for two weeks each November.  

Cocuchos

Up and down the mountains, I refused to use the air conditioner for fear the engine was overheating. I coasted down volcanoes with wind blowing in my hair, and then I crawled back up leaning forward and holding my breath. I passed large ancient lava flows and trash heaps. Finally, I saw a great golden plain beneath me and the outskirts of Zamora, and knew I was homeward bound.

Morelia

Morelia, capitol of the State of Michoacán, makes the list of the world’s fifty most dangerous cities, with 47.5 murders per 100,000 people in 2020. Things are on edge. Still, though, the historic center of Morelia is far more pleasant and peaceful than most of downtown San Francisco, the city in which I was born, where currently homeless men and women copulate in public, use the sidewalk to take a crap, shoot heroin and crack, and harass techies and tourists! This is not to mention Ice, the latest scourge to hit cities in North America, a form of methamphetamine so powerful it keeps people awake for days and even weeks at a time during which time they scavenge. It is a safe assumption that both the tent encampments and the motorhomes lined along side streets of cities like San Francisco and Oakland (which profoundly overflow with some of the ugliest crap one could imagine) are communities formed around Ice. That the drug in question is manufactured in Mexico should be no surprise and it should further be no surprise that some (more or less guilty than not) American voters want to do away altogether with immigration from Mexico and make cities like San Francisco sanctuaries for the homeless and drug addled. People just do not care. "We are too angry at insurrectionists to care!"

San Francisco, the Tenderloin 

Morelia, Historic Center

In Morelia people seem passively tied to their lives, fear very subtly present, things churning along, the economy more than a bit contracted. As I passed under the walkways which line the main square, where people sat outside at tables eating, drinking, smoking and talking, two cops eyed me suspiciously, so I quickly put on my mask and announced, “buenas tardes!” It was then I spotted a restaurant showing the Champion’s League soccer match, Paris Saint Germaine vs Manchester City, and ducked inside to watch. 

Bar/restaurant where I watched the Champion's League soccer match. Cold beers, waiters who were taking mezcal shots during their shift, and a cool respite from the heat outside. 

A drug gang, Los Viagras, has been exerting its power in and around Michoacán, and there have been many recent acts of coordinated terror, murder, and violence. As recently as January, a group of armed men in nearby Uruapan blocked several roads with stolen vehicles which they set afire in a coordinated effort to generate panic. Often times this terror occurs when police arrest or detain a gang member. In February of 2020, eleven people at an arcade were killed in Uruapan, four younger than eighteen, in response to a drug arrest. It must feel like Sicily did during the 1980’s. Google the subject “cartel crime Michoacán” and a steady stream of news stories appear. The most comprehensive English news agency covering the criminal activity in Mexico is the right wing rag, Breitbart. 

Vegetable warehouse district, stuck in traffic, Uruapan. 

Outlets aligned with The New York Times do not much cover cartel violence. In fact, most Left leaning papers in the U.S. do not cover drug violence in places like Chicago, either. Chicago had shootings in which fifteen people were shot at one time, two times this last year (shouldn't those qualify as 'mass shootings'?). As of this writing, already Chicago has seen 201murders in 2021. In 2020 Chicago averaged 18.2 murders per 100,000 people. Uruapan, which has the eighth worst murder rate in the world, averaged 72 murders per 100,000 people. It is more dangerous than any city in the United States except for St. Louis, according to metrics provided by The Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice. While my suspicion is that certain neighborhoods in Chicago are far more scary than anywhere in Uruapan, the random acts of moral turpitude meted out by the cartels has placed the citizens of Uruapan in a rather new, and I pray temporary, state of horror. 

Collage

 

San Antonio Tlayacapan, Jalisco

Yesterday, May 3rd, was a traditional Catholic holiday, which has been discontinued by the church in Rome since 1960 but continues here. Mexico was granted specific privileges by the Pope. The celebration has morphed from 'Day of the Holy Cross' to 'Celebration of the Construction Worker.' All around town were set up altars with fresh flowers and in each the cross was featured front and center. At about 1pm I started to notice construction workers heading home, some with a beer in hand. That is part of the tradition: workers get half the day off and people pray at the altars for the continued success of the construction trade. Meantime, from about 6am, rockets punctuated the air. Workers traditionally set off fireworks on May 3rd in an attempt to notify their guardian angels that they are stout workers. (Something like that).