The Peculiar American

Still A Fan

Watching the US lose its World Cup opener 3-0 to the Czech Republic I am reminded that it takes a very special kind of fan to back the American soccer team. Unlike most countries, where rooting for your country in the World Cup is practically a birthright and civic duty, Americans have a wide range of sports to choose from, most of which their country dominates or is a regular contender for top spot.

Why watch soccer when you can watch basketball, baseball, track & field, swimming, snowboarding, hockey, ice skating, boxing or any number of other sports where we're used to seeing the Stars & Strips fly high above the field of opponents? And then there are all the sports we invented and only Americans seem to like: football (the other kind), stock car racing and most extreme sports. Fast, hard-hitting, edgy and overflowing with gratification for its fans. Bigger! Better! Faster! More! is how we like our sports.

Being an American soccer fan, it might seem to the uninitiated, is like being a fan of the national cricket team (do we even have one?) or closely following our country's fortunes in Olympic table tennis. Why? What special form of masochism would drive someone to pick an obscure sport we never win at when there are so many others to choose from?

Soccer is boring, too slow, too low-scoring, are the reasons Americans usually give for not liking the sport the rest of the world loves. But I don't think that's the real reason. Americans don't like soccer because Americans love to win and the US soccer team commits the cardinal sin of losing. If the US team were in the World Cup final overnight there would be 50 million newly-minted soccer fans. Look at the men's curling team and how quickly people were talking about brooms, hammers and hacks around the water cooler. Curling! Talk about an obscure sport. But they won the bronze medal. There's nothing like winning to win Americans over, is there? Does anybody remember the runner-ups to American Idol or The Apprentice two years ago? Who was Michael Dukakis anyway? The name sounds vaguely familiar...I think he might have played midfield with Bob Dole and Walter Mondale for D.C. United in the 1980s.

I like to watch the US soccer team because, besides the fact that I love the sport, it illuminates corners of the American character that are overshadowed by our love of winners and super stars. The US soccer team is the antithesis of the 1992 Men's Olympic Basketball Team, a.k.a. the Dream Team. The iconic image of the Dream Team for many people around the world was Charles Barkley shoving the hapless Lithuanian defender. It wasn't enough that we were the best in the world at basketball, we had to be arrogant about it too. This is the United States as superpower, a role that is wearing thin around the world.

By contrast, the US soccer team is...humble. Not a word you usually associate with American athletes. There are no Michael Jordans or Magic Johnsons or Larry Birds on this team. Or, to put it another way, the US soccer team does not have a Ronaldinho or a David Beckham or Francesco Totti. And not one of the players is a millionaire, or even anywhere close to being a millionaire. You won't be seeing any of these guys endorsing a major soft drink or automobile or sports sneaker any time soon.

I went to watch the US play El Salvador in a World Cup qualifier in San Salvador back in 1997. I was with a handful of other Americans and our enthusiastic cheering was barely audible over the shouts and cheers of the home squad. Still, after the game a group of players approached our section in the stands and waved their thanks John Harkes even threw us his Captain band at the request of my friend. From what I've heard, my experience was typical. These are players who stay close to their fans and are grateful for the attention.

These are guys that play because they love the game. They know, as Coach Bruce Arenas tirelessly repeats, that they will only win if they work as team. The Americans train hard: if they can't have the super stars they can at least have superior physical fitness. They believe that eleven men on a field that work as one can overcome a rival with super stars as they almost did in the heartbreaking 1-0 quarterfinal loss to soccer power Germany in the 2002 World Cup.

Hard working. Modest. Generous. Team-focused. That's the other America, the one so many people around the world respect. Most of the time when an American team or athlete competes internationally they are better paid, have better training equipment, better sponsorship, better technology. Soccer is one of the few endeavors left where America plays the role of the underdog. We have been Goliath so long it's nice to be reminded that we were once the little guy.

I have been a fan of US soccer since the 1990 World Cup in Italy when a band of outclassed college players took the field against bigger rivals, played their hearts out, and lost. The evolution from that team to the one that almost beat the Germans in 2002 has been a story of grit, determination, perseverance and optimism when there was no reason to be optimistic. A very American story. This is the America of The Alamo and the Doolittle Raid and the Apollo XIII mission, refusing to give up faced with impossible odds.

When the US soccer federation set out to rebuild the team for the 1994 it took the core group of players from the 1990 team and also began recruiting foreign players that had an American parent or some connection to the United States, and could be naturalized. These were players that didn't have a chance to make their national team and so donned the American jersey. These are the poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to play free to paraphrase Emma Lazarus.

Other countries import and naturalize players of course. Germany's biggest star, Miroslav Klose is Polish, or was anyway. And Team Italy for years has been known to recruit Argentine and Uruguayan players of Italian origin. And that's just it, most other countries import players of the same ethnic extraction or players from former colonies. The US is truly a team of immigrants, both recent immigrants and the children of immigrants. What stands out when the US plays in the World Cup is how homogenous the other teams are. We've got our Lewises and Johnsons and Popes playing for us, but we also have our Reynas and Bocanegras, our McBrides and O'Briens, our Mastroenis and Cherundolos, our Berhalters and Hahnemanns, our Chings and our Onyewus. The American soccer team reminds me of Herman Melville;s quote, "You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world."

Which is why eventually the US will accede to the ranks of soccer superpowers alongside Brazil, Argentina, Germany and Italy and even win the world cup. Soccer fans are by definition patient. You have to be to enjoy matches where a single goals marks the difference between joy and despair. And the future looks good for the patient fan, recent setbacks aside.

The best and the brightest have long come to our shores in search of opportunity. As America shades darker in the years to come and continuous to let in a stream of immigrants there will be young opportunistic athletes that decide to focus on soccer, the world's sport, and there will be a growing cadre fans, immigrant and native, to cheer them along. Already there is much excited talk about what Freddy Adu, the 17 year-old wunderkind immigrated from Ghana, might do for the Stars & Stripes at the next World Cup.

US soccer is where America was at in 1906, a land of immigrants awakening to its vast potential. And that's a good reason to cheer for the US team now, before the bandwagon really gets going. You can say, I was there when we were David facing Goliath. I believed even when it looked like there was no reason to believe.

The Place That Was Then

Someone once said there is no greater love affair than that of a man and the metropolis of his youth. I don't remember who said it, but it doesn't matter. Baudelaire could have said it of Paris; Joyce of Dublin; Hammill of New York; Fuentes of Mexico City; Garica Marquez of Cartagena; Vargas Llosa of Lima; Borges of Buenos Aires; Mahfouz of Cairo; Rushdie of Bombay. The love of a woman comes and goes, the memory diminished by the next one. But not the love of a city: the sight of its palaces and edifices; the smell of its markets and sewers; the sound of its streets and plazas; the press of humanity in its alleyways and subways: a man spends a lifetime evoking these, breathing new life into the memory with each conjuring. To remember is to love.

I think of Mexico City, the place that was then, and how much it has changed. The city was dirty and crowded and dysfunctional. And I loved it. Never do I feel more alive and happy than when I am in Mexico City.

The city was hopelessly corrupt and authoritarian. It was a supremely unjust place: a bribe was needed to get anything done or even just to be left alone. The poverty and inequality was overwhelming, colonies of squatters live on garbage dumpsters that ringed the city, literally living on and off the trash, building homes, eating meals and making a living from the waste of the prosperous in the center. The police harassed anyone they could harass, the army disappeared anyone who asked too many questions. The city plazas regularly filled with bands of peasants and farmers and oil workers and indians who marched into the city with their grievances blocking the arteries of La Capital forcing us to watch and witness their oppression and staged hunger strikes and protests until a second-rate bureaucrat allowed them into the halls of power long enough to buy them off with promises and carbon copies.

There was the ex-cop that tied himself to a cross every day to protest corruption; the man who painted the fence every morning demanding justice for the murder of his wife during the student massacre of '68 only to have his slogans painted over at night, a fresh canvas for the next day; the fired teachers growing feeble in hot tents connected to IV tubes, their hunger strike overshadowed by the newest protesters that setup camp across the plaza, an unintended and tragic one-upmanship that continually raised the minimum cost of entry for this political theater of suffering.

Mexico City was a supremely unjust place and that is the first reason I loved it: the city did not let you off the hook. Whenever you were enjoying yourself you were always reminded that you were one of the few lucky ones, for every prince there are a thousand paupers. You could not move through the urbanity without sidestepping beggars and supplicants. Every moment of pleasure came with the reminder that ultimately, at the highest level, you had a winning ticket in the cosmic lottery. And there were thousands that didn't. It a was more honest city that way.

And it all worked, to a large extent, because of the corruption and the oppression and the inequality. Mexico City was a supremely unjust city but it was my city. It was mine, the metropolis of my youth. I remember it and measure what I have lost.

The pollution was so bad, that very rarely could you see beyond a few hundred feet, and those days when the grey haze lifted and you could see the surrounding mountains and the two magisterial snow-capped volcanoes that overlook the city, the Popocatepetl and the Izlaccihuatl, were like magic. When it rained the city flooded, cars got stuck in freeway underpasses and you could see the poor take their shoes off and hold them over their head as they waded home. Traffic was so bad you could reasonably show up for an appointment an hour or two late and claim innocence, any plan was tentative at best.

And to counter the frustration of another day lost in traffic there was street theater everywhere. At red lights a phalanx of vendors would descend on your car offering everything from fresh oranges to giant crucifixes. The street kids would sneak up on you and squirt dirty water on your windshield and wash it before you could say no, hoping for a few pesos. Behind them a troupe of dirty clowns would juggle or lay on broken glass or breath fire hoping for those same pesos. When you pulled into a gas station a swarm of attendants with distract you with questions and trinkets while a hidden attendant began pumping hoping you wouldn't notice he hadn't cleared the last sale. Getting pulled over by a cop was a study in subtle negotiation. He would solemnly enumerate your transgressions and then suggest that a refresco or soda, for him and his partner might make everything go more smoothly. You would delicately ask just how large of a refresco he was talking about and modestly suggest that you knew places that server far cheaper refrescos.

In December, a couple of weeks before the Day of the Virgin, the faithful would pour into the city by the million from all over the country, to pay their respects to Guadalupe at the Basilica, the second most visited pilgrimage site in Christendom after St. Peter's in Rome. The most devout would do the last stretch on their knees, scraping on the asphalt, Red Cross volunteers on the side waiting to carry off those who would faint from loss of blood. On the day of the dead the cemeteries would come alive as families built altars and bought the bright orange cempasuchil, or flowers of the dead, and stayed up all night singing songs with the dead, eating with the dead and drinking with the dead. Downtown, in the ruins of the main temple complex of Tenochtitlan, as the city was known then, there are lines to see the shaman, pay them a few pesos to have them cleanse you of evil spirits, the egg they rub over your body cracked open and the black yoke spilled onto the pavement.

This is the city I love.

This city is still there, of course. It will always be there, the way the city of Moctezuma and the city of Porfirio Diaz survived, two of the many geological strata the denizens of Mexico City walk on daily.

But in other important ways this city in not there. Not anymore. As crazy and surreal was Mexico City was in the 1970s and 1980s it was not dangerous, not if you were a member of the elite, which anyone white and a little bit of money was. There was crime and random danger of course, no place in the Third World is immune. I was in an armed robbery as a kid. I was in a papeleria with my sister and my dad buying school supplies when two men with guns walked in. I spotted them first and one of the gunmen raised his pistol at me-- a revolver, I still remember seeing the bullets--and I froze up and couldn't say a word. Eventually other people noticed and we all laid down on the floor while they emptied the registers and beat up the cop. The memory stands out precisely because it is exceptional, one of the few times I really felt in danger.

What I most remember, though, is this incredible freedom and curiosity, that led me to wander the city at all times. No part of the metropolis was off limits. Some days my friends and I would board the subway and pick a stop on the other side of town we had never been to before or we would get on a random bus and ride it for a couple of hours and then figure out how to get back. A city of 20 million offered no shortage of places to form expeditions around. Many times we were out of money, walking for long stretches late at night to get home. And though we felt some danger, that was part of the thrill, at an instinctual level we knew we were safe. Some of this was the naivete of adolescence, of course, but that is only a small part of it. The city really was that safe for people like us. The times I had my pocket picked or I was robbed were nothing more than nuisances. The serious crime was kept in check by the web of corruption and repression.

All of this changed. Mexico City is engulfed in a wave of kidnappings and violent crime of an entirely different order. The changes begun while I was still living there in the 1980s, a convergence of three trends. First of all, after Reagan cracked down on the cocaine trade in the Caribbean (think Miami Vice) the main conduit shifted to Mexico. A bit player in the drug trade before, Mexican cartels rose up during this decade, at first acting as mere mules for the Colombians, eventually taking payment in cocaine not cash and reaching such power that they challenged the power of the Colombian cartels themselves, setting up production and distribution networks themselves in the jungles of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. (The first time I was ever offered drugs was at a party thrown by the son of the DEA attache in Mexico, a perfect metaphor for the illogical War on Drugs).

The second major change was the opening of the economy which culminated in the North
American Free Trade Agreement. The false prosperity of the petroboom of the 1970s
ended in hyperinflation and a massive devaluation. When I was in elementary school the exchange rate was 12 pesos 50 centavos to the dollar. I know this because my parents gave me 2 dollars for every A on my report card and 1 dollar for every B to spend during our biannual trip to the Texas border, so exchange rates became something an eight year old should keep track of to afford the latest comic book. By the time I was in high school the exchange rate had shot up to 3000 pesos to 1 dollar.

By 1982 the country was broke and in dire financial straights. Beginning with President De la Madrid, Mexico began opening its economy. My childhood was marked by long car trips from Mexico City to McAllen, Texas every six months so my parents could renew their tourist visas and we could stay in the country legally. During these trips I would always be amazed by trips to the supermarket which overflowed with prosperity. It began with sliding automatic doors and airconditioning and continued with what seemed like 500 varieties for every product whereas in Mexico there was one or two. What we did have were the tianguis sobre ruedas or open-air markets that moved around the city, encamping at different streets throughout the week. The tianguis, the word is the original nahuatl word used by the Aztecs, came on Tuesdays and I used to love wandering the maze of pink canopies past boiling pots of grease and pig heads atop carts on through the carts of vegetables and stalls of clothes and pirated videos all the while hearing the melodic cadence of vendors hawking their wares.

Slowly American products began to appear in Mexico City, at first in one or two "import stores" that were eagerly patronized by any expatriate that didn't have a connection at the embassy to get them access to the commissary. I remember standing in line 6 hours to buy a Big Mac at the first McDonald's that opened or standing line all day to attend the first rock concerts of foreign bands in Mexico since the 1968 student uprising: Bon Jovi, INXS and Sting. And so on, dutiful pilgrimages made to the first Burger King, Blockbuster, Dominos Pizza and so on. Over time the novelty rubbed off until Mexico had engorged itself on all things American and there are McDonald's and Walmarts every few blocks. And one of the things Mexico imported along with everything else was guns, lots of guns. Whereas before it was virtually impossible to buy a gun in Mexico City you can now easily buy one on the black market. And that gun most likely comes from Texas or California.

The third big change is the political opening Mexico has experienced culminating in the election of Vicente Fox in 2000 and the peaceful overthrow of 71 years of one party rule. But democracy brings its own paradoxes. As Mexico has embraced human rights and a spotlight has been cast on the police, crime has soared. The principal crime-fighting tool of police forces in Third World countries is torture. Whenever there was a robbery or other notable crime, the police would round up whoever they could and torture them and catch not one, but a dozen criminal gangs as a result. I remember back in the day the newspapers in Mexico City would publish photos of criminals with black eyes and swollen lips with the headline: "Confessed!" with no irony whatsoever. Take away torture, and police forces don't have a way to fight crime. There are no sophisticated crime labs or ballistics testing or DNA samples or any of the other high-tech tools at the disposal of First World police forces. So crime has soared.

The people are more free politically than they ever have been and less free physically. There has been an explosion of kidnappings and carjackings. At first only the rich were targeted but these days even the guy who owns the corner butcher shop gets kidnapped. If you are lucky you are only held for 24 hours, long enough to be driven around to ATMs and drain your bank account. If you are not luck you are held for ransom, your finger or ear put in the mail to remind your family of the urgency of your predicament. Because the police are unreliable, most families come up with some sort of ransom and so the kidnapping industry grows.

I remember coming home to Mexico City for Christmas in 1994. That was when things really began to change fast. There had been a massive devaluation a few months before. The peso had gone from 3 (Salinas has chopped off three zeros from the currency, part of the dream he was selling that Mexico was now a modern country, more North American than South American) to 9 in a matter of weeks. The 94 devaluation was my generation's devaluation. These macroeconomic convulsions happen every 20 years or so, the natural consequence of economies tied to global commodity prices and governments unrestrained in their spending. But we thought we were different, that the cycle had finally been broken. The older generations took the devaluation in stride, after all it was the third or fourth one they had lived through. As the peso lost value week after week we realized that time after all is cyclical and not linear in Latin America and things were not so different after all.

The other big change were the kidnappings. That's all everyone talked about. It seemed like everybody knew somebody who had been kidnapped or robbed or carjacked. When I met with friends we were much more cautious about where we met, when we met. The city began shrinking: only certain neighborhoods were safe, certain hours were safe, certai types of people were safe. Driving in Mexico City, always an adventure, took on a new lethal challenge: avoid being taken at gunpoint at a red light. Now when I drive in the city I always leave plenty of space in front of me and am careful not to have another car directly parallel to me. I give myself room to speed up or back up. Before running red lights was done for expediency or for fun, now you run red lights because you are sitting target.

The year 1994 was notable for a couple of other reasons. On January 1st the Zapatista rebellion broke out. Suddenly Mexico was feeling very South American with an indigenous rebel group up in arms. "We march on Mexico City," the charismatic Subcommandante Marcos had said in a communique days after the rebellion started. After the cease fire he was asked about this boast and he replied, "Did we not take Mexico City? Were we not on the lips and in the minds and hearts of every resident?" The economy was crumbling, the country was at war and in a final literary flourish the Popocatepetl which had been dormant for 500 years began spewing smoke and ejecting boulders the size of city buses. There was a miniscule, but still quantifiable, risk that the volcano would erupt and cover the metropolis in a blanket of hot lava. The pundits pointed out that the last time the Popocatepetl erupted Cortes was marching on Tenochtitlan. Was this an omen of changes to come? The smoke from the volcano blew into the city so that it seemed to be on fire, thick acrid smoke that stung your eyes and burned your throat. That's what I remember about Christmas 1994, dashing through red lights late at night to get home, looking through the molten miasma for phantom assailants.The city seemed to be dying, but as always the collapse was breathtaking and poetic. And that is another reason I love Mexico City: it coats tragedies great and small with beauty and humor.

We fled the city, the middle class, the ambitious, the young, the connected. Those on the cusp between moving up or moving down. And you only get one life so you move up. The very poor stay, of course, because they cannot afford to go. Migration studies show that it is the most entrepreneurial who pick up and leave, the locksmiths and butchers and barbers who can store up enough money to pay the coyotes to smuggle them across the border. And the very rich stay, living off their monopoly rents behind a wall of bodyguards and armored cars and helicopters.

I went to the best high school in Mexico City. My classmates were all the children of top politicians and industrialists, if they were Mexican, or children of diplomats and managers of multi-national corporations. We friends and classmates went to the top colleges in the States: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, MIT, Georgetown, Duke and Berkeley. Five years after we graduated from high school there were more of us living in Manhattan than in Mexico City. We did not sneak across the border, wading through the Rio Grande, enduring days in the desert without water and hiding in the back of trucks to wash dishes at an Olive Garden. No, we got H-1 visas and scholarships and moving allowances. But we are no less the refugee, forced to leave the land we call home in search of a better life.

The city is not mine to lose, I remind myself. One of my favorite books, made all the more exalted because I found it for a dollar in a used bookstore in New Jersey and have since discovered it is out of print and hard to find, is La Capital: The Autobiography of Mexico City by Jonathan Kandell. Now an editor at the Wall Street Journal, he grew up an expat in Mexico City in the 50s and 60s and remembers a very different city, the city of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, of trolley cars and afternoon siestas, and the unspoiled beauty of the Valley of Anahuac. He laments the loss of this city in the massive industrialization and centralization of the 1960s and 1970s that drowned the city in migrants and factories.

It is a reminder that the city has survived other cataclysms and will survive this one. There were the artillery duels downtown during [i[La Revolucion[/i] or the time the hydraulic system designed by the Aztec prince and poet Nezahualcoyotl finally collapsed in the 17th Century and the city was underwater for seven years, the few remaining denizens commuting by boat between belltowers and rooftops. And of course there was the greatest cataclysm of them all, La Noche Triste when the Aztecs, finally rose up against the Spanish led by Cuahtemoc, the apostate who refused to believe the fair- skinned men were the god Quetzalcoatl and his host, and in a bloody battle drove them out of Tenochtitlan. Cortes and his men were so laden with gold that the causeways connecting the city on the lake to the surrounding valley collapsed and a third of the conquistadores drowned. Cortes wept under a tree that night. He regrouped his men for another assault against what would have been astronomical odds had Cuahtemoc's men not died in droves from disease first, leaving the city undefended.

The city lived on, though not in the way its denizens might have imagined. Throughout Mexico City there are catholic churches built with the stones of Aztec temples which is why occasionally you'll find feathered serpents and human skulls carved into walls of these sanctuaries. The city always lives on. Even now there is the next Carlos Fuentes or Octavio Paz walking the streets of Mexico City constructing a new metropolis out of asphalt and aspiration, concrete and conceit, who can imagine the city no other way.

There is a short story by Borges where he is walking home one day soon after his friend has died and he spots a new billboard for a cigarette brand. He looks at the billboard in disbelief: it is the fist tangible sign that the world has changed, a physical manifestation that the world he shared with his friend is lost.

When I first moved away for college and went back to Mexico City often I would drive around the metropolis trying to catalog all of the changes I noticed: a new overpass here, a new shopping center there, a new modernist tower over there, they tore down the old baseball stadium, and so on. It still felt like I possessed the city, all I needed to do was become reacquainted with it, like noticing a new haircut and wardrobe on an old lover. But it was an illusion. The fist time I was gone for an extended stretch of two years and returned the city was a stranger to me. There were too many changes to keep track of to believe it was the same city.

Back in the States there were other ways to measure the city slipping away. In New York I would have lunch regularly with my friends from Mexico City, who now worked at the top investment banks on Wall Street or at the top management consulting firms. We would meet and talk about the desire to one day go back, but each time we did the desire was less strong and we spent more time talking about our jobs and looking ahead. I remember being impressed by the United States in general and New York in particular and its ability to attract us and draw us in. And we were but one of myriad brain trusts at work for a new land. Being an international student you usually hang out with other international students and I knew from newer friendships I'd made that there were other tables at other cities throughout the city hosting their own diasporas of Turks and Brazilians and Colombians and Lebanese and Russians and Indonesians. Add all of these tables of ten or fifteen people and multiply across generations and you begin to appreciate the power of the United States. And the conundrum these countries face: not only must they develop their economies, but they must do so with the 800-pound gorilla in the room that draws its best and brightest away.

In the early years we made excuses. "I just need a couple of years experience and I'll go back," or "I am an ambassador of my country, that's how I'm helping it." But slowly we get used to the money, the efficiency with which things get done and when we go back to visit you start to complain the first sign you've become Americanized. We go back less often. Talk about returning less. Stop making excuses. "I'd go back but it's not safe," or "I can't make a living there." After all, you have to make the best decision for yourself, not your country. We met and marry American women. We have children. "I have to do what's best for my children." And now conversation is about whether the kids will only grow up speaking English. "So hard to remember to speak Spanish to them at home. I don't want them to get confused." And perhaps when they are older we'll take them for a visit, so they know where we came from.

And so we walk the streets of new cities, seduced by the charms of these new beauties; cities that are more beautiful, more orderly, more clean, more just, more sophisticated and, of course, more forthcoming. Cities that love us back, generously returning our affection instead of hoarding it. And yet. And yet. Sometimes as we walk these new streets we dream the Dream of the Exile, longing for a place that is forever slipping away, one cigarette billboard at a time.

And Justice For All

I was in court the other day for a speeding ticket. I haven't had one in a long time after getting a bunch of them in my early 20s, most notably once in Georgia where I had to write a check out to the county judge, by name.

I usually drive home very late from the office and there is a stretch of the road that crosses the Rio Grande that is deserted at night so, even though the limit is 35 mph I, and half the state of New Mexico, zip over at a comfortable 65 mph. Natalia had even warned me, during one of her periodic visits to my office, that the APD was out in force that week enforcing speed limits. Something about meeting a quota. But it was around midnight, I had Eric Prydze blasting, and totally forgot about Speed Week until I saw the red and blue lights in my rear view window.

So it was that I found myself in a courtroom a few weeks later waiting for my turn to talk to the city prosecutor and hopefully plead my case. The courtroom was packed and I didn't immediately find a place to sit. I finally spotted an empty bench (they looked suspiciously like church pews) whose only other occupant was a disheveled woman in black pants, heels and a tank top that kept sliding down her right shoulder. She kept pulling the strap over her only to have it slide down again. As I sat down I noticed she had the word "Joe" tattooed on the back of her neck in that cheap department-of-corrections-green.

In the year that I've been living in New Mexico it's amazed me how common it is for people to go to prison. People here talk about going to prison the way my friends back in New York and Boston talk about going to graduate school. There are more parallels than you might first expect. There is that vague 'what am I going to do with my life?' feeling you get in your mid 20s. In the northeast this usually means you go get an MBA or go to law school, places you can hang out for a couple of years in a socially acceptable way figuring out what do to with your life [answer: pay off all the debt you've accumulated getting degrees]. In the southwest, you go to prison to hone your skills and become focused (either by deciding you will run an even more efficient dope distribution network or by deciding you will dedicate your life to reaching out to gang members like yourself and reforming them. Either answer is socially acceptable). Plus, in both cases you get to tap an extensive alumni network, you make friends for life and have very deep late night conversations about the meaning of life.

There was a group of guys I used to play poker with here every other week. I used to love those games, no nonsense Texas Hold'Em tournaments with lots of booze and cigars and no one ever asked what you did for a living, unlike Boston where within two minutes of meeting someone you knew: a) what they did for a living, b) if their extended network could help advance your career in any way, and c) whether it was worth continuing the conversation or not. It was so refreshing playing with these guys, who were firemen and construction workers and janitors and morticians. My poker group in Boston was made up of mathematicians, economists, hedge fund managers and dotcommers. The former turned out to be the lesser gamblers.

The poker group was a lot of fun. That is, until Eddie, the host, announced he was going to be going away for a few years. There was no need to ask, though I did anyway. The feds nailed him in Ohio. Trafficking. Third offense. So the regular poker game ended and Eddie is but one of a half dozen people I have gotten to know fairly well who have had to "go away for a few years." I meet these women all the time, at clubs and bars, beautiful women fanatically devoted to a boyfriend in prison yet willing and wanting a relationship while their man does his time.

"How's Joe?" I turned and asked Cascading Tank Top.
"He's my son."
"Oh? How old is he?" Experience has taught me that where there is a tattoo that says Joe or Eddie or Jaime there was usually a Senior at some point who fathered the Junior. These come in pairs.
"He's five."
"That's cool."

The judge entered the room and everybody in the room rose in respect, albeit with differing degrees of enthusiasm. A clerk began reading off names one by one as each defendant rose went up to the podium and faced the judge. It's during times like these that I realize what a small insular world New Mexico still is. You hear the same names over and over again, whether it be in traffic court, at the Chamber of Commerce or on the 10 o'clock news. Montoya, Jaramillo, Maestas, Madrid, Baca, Gallegos, Tapia, Archuleta and others all tracing back to the original eight land grants the King of Spain made to the descendants of the first conquistadores who settled this corner of the Terra Incognita.

"There is a price tag on the bottom of your shoe," she said.
I checked. "You're right."
"Are they new?"
"Not really," I said as I took the tag off. I was wearing my best dress shoes, slacks and pants. Attire usually reserved for funerals, graduations and weddings. Or court appearances where you need the whole ensemble to say, 'I am a law-abiding, tax-paying, upstanding member of the community who will vote for you the next time you're up for reelection.'
"Are you from around here?" she asked.
"No. You?"
"Yes."
"What do you do?"
"I'm a dancer."
"Where?"
"The Rhino."
"You like it?"
"Actually don't work there much these days. Mostly do private shows."
"How long have you been doing that?"
"About five years. Look me up in the Yellow Pages. It's called Private Eyes."
"How is it?"
"The money is very good."
"Mostly girl-girl stuff?"
"Mmmmh. That and then some." She looked bad, too skinny and her face seemed older than she actually was. Like she'd been used and abused. She looked so bad, that it almost became erotic.
"You don't work for Albuquerque's Finest?"
"What's that?"
"An escort service."
"No, it's called Private Eyes. I'll give you a card."
It's a big inside joke: Albuquerque's Finest is the nickname of the APD. It's also the name of the fake escort service the police department runs to nab people for soliciting prostitutes. It's surprising how many people they get each year who open the Yellow Pages and call Albuquerque's Finest looking for a hot time.

We talked some more. She asked what I did, where I was from originally, why I came to Albuquerque, and so on. She said she wanted to leave Albuquerque. I told her it was a great town. I asked her why she was in court and she said she was stopped without a license, with no plates and no insurance. And she'd missed her first court date. She pulled her tank-top strap up. Not exactly conveying upstanding member of the community, are we?

"I don't have a boyfriend," she said out of the blue.
"Why not?"
"Because I have a five year old son. And most people can't handle what I do."
"How long have you been without a boyfriend?"
"Too long. Do you have a pen?"
"No. Why?"
"So I can give you my number."
"No, I don't have one. And they wouldn't let me come into the building with my cell
phone."
"I'll give you my number outside when we're done."
"Okay."

When her turn came, she sauntered up to the podium and replied to the judge's "Good Afternoon" with a "hey". His Honor asked her why she had missed her first court date and she said she forgot. He asked her why the car had no insurance or plates and she said it was a friend's car. He asked her why she didn't have a license, and she said she forgot it. Surprisingly, all she had to do was pay a hefty fine. She winked at me on her way out.

By the time my turn came I had already met with the city prosecutor and worked out a plea bargain. If I don't have any traffic tickets in the next 90 days then the speeding charge is dropped and not reported to my insurance company. So my sartorial strategy worked.

This is a key difference between the US and Mexico. When you get pulled over by a cop in the US you want to show respect. "Yes, officer" and "No, officer." Be polite, cooperative and contrite and at least half the time you get off with just a warning. This is a land of laws: show that you respect the law and you are treated reasonably well.

In Mexico, on the other hand, if you get pulled over by a cop you want to show, in subtle ways, how little respect you have for the cop. Take a long time complying with requests, challenge the cop when he makes a statement and do it all with a slight tone of contempt. The reason is that Mexico is not a land of laws, but of raw power. You want to show the cop that you have more power than he does (why else would you be so blase in the face of authority) and therefore he shouldn't try to screw you over. You plant the seed in his head that if anything bad happens to you, you have powerful friends you can call on to make his life miserable. Otherwise, if the cop gets the feeling you are powerless, you will have to pay a huge bribe at best and could be robbed and beaten at worst.

There is a great Mexican joke that, like all great jokes, speaks volumes about the truth of a culture. A man gets pulled over by a cop who asks, "Didn't you see the red light?" "Yes, officer I did. What I didn't see was you."

It was a skill I fine-tuned. I got a car midway through my junior year in high school and got pulled over repeatedly by the police. True, I was a bad driver. But everyone in Mexico City is a bad driver: cutting people off, not using turn signals, speeding, making illegal turns, running red lights, and so on. This is normal stuff. In fact, if you don't drive aggressively you are more likely to get into an accident. And true, my car was a junky car. By the time I was done with it the door did not work (I had to enter through the passenger side), it did not go in reverse, the gas gauge was broken (I would stop at red lights and put a hose in the tank and pull it out to get an idea how much longer I could drive before I needed to fill up), the brake lights were out and the radiator overheated after about an hour of driving. But once again, most people in Mexico City drive crap cars.

No, I got pulled over because I was a 17 year-old gringo and I had "Big Bribe" written across my forehead. So I learned to play the game well. I had to. I asked semi-literate cops to show me the traffic code I had violated. They usually fumbled through the Reglamento de Transito before giving up or, most amusingly, handing me the law book and asking me to find my own infraction. I debated the nature of law with them and the morality of bribes and corruption.

Actually, I got to know the system very well as a result. Every cop has to pay for his uniform and gun and even his bullets. And he has to pay a weekly quota for the right to work a certain street corner, the more upscale neighborhoods commanding a larger fee. And if they didn't make their quota, they were punished, demoted to a worse intersection, made to clean the bosses house, even beaten. So they usually gave up, since time is money after all, and there were less pesky motorists to harass. A few times though they did take me into the police station and so I resumed my arguments with a judge. A couple of times I even spent a few hours in jail before I was let go. And eventually I always was.

At first I felt a certain moral superiority: I do not pay bribes. I am not corrupt. My friends always paid the bribe, some of them rolling down their window and sticking a bill out in an exquisite mix of contempt and expediency. But not I. I am not corrupt, I said. But this was an illusory superiority. The real reason I got off was because I had immunity: I was a fair- skinned American who was not worth the trouble. Even though my family actually didn't have any money or real power to speak of, I was a member nonetheless of the tribe that has plenty of both. If I had been a dark-skinned Mexican my moral stance would not have been worth much. And in fact, the couple of times that I did get in real trouble I did pay a bribe. Just like everyone else, I had my price. In a lawless land, before a predatory justice system, you very quickly become a realist.

Back in the land of speed limits, I now have to be very careful driving for the next 90 days, which will be hard because I just discovered a new way home that takes a bit longer but follows the rim of the mesa behind the five volcanoes that overlook the city. The drive is spectacular and the road mostly deserted...except for the occasional cop hunting for a speedster.

Whenever friends or family would come visit us in Mexico City they would remark how nerve-wracking it was to drive in the city. My uncle, who used to be an amateur race car driver, said it was like car racing in slow motion. But I find it a lot more stressful to drive in the US than in Mexico. There are so many laws to be constantly looking out for. In one stretch of road the speed limit can change from 45 to 35 back to 45 and then to 25, except when school is in session it is 15, then back to 45 and so on. What a way to ruin an enjoyable ride. Personally I'd rather keep my eye out for kamikaze commuters and let the rest sort itself out.

When I lived in Boston about 10 years ago I was friends with a colleague at work, a guy from Italy who had been living in the States for about five years. We quickly had a common interest: the amount of parking tickets we were getting. Milan, like Mexico City, is a city where you can park just about anywhere and where traffic laws are no more than suggestions. Being a motorist in Boston, on the other hand, requires a PhD. There are parking signs that say, "No parking third Wed of every month April - Nov, 8 am - 12 am, except during Snow Emergency." Driving and parking are abstractions. In Mexico City any spot of asphalt is fair game though you probably end up paying a guy with a red rag a tip or extortion fee, depending how you look at it, to make sure your car is intact when you return.

"They humiliate you into submission," Alessandro said with Etruscan flair.
"Yes, I finally gave up after four or five parking tickets and do exactly as they say," I said.
"I've learned there is no such thing as the immaculate parking spot."
"It's inhuman," he continued. "We are not children. All these rules." Alessandro proceeded to tell me about all the times he'd gone to traffic court to contest the parking ticket, how despite his oratorical skills and appeals to common humanity and common sense, he was always browbeaten and fined anyway.
"It's inhuman," he said. The funny part about this story is that we were on our way to Harvard Square for a an official company dinner and running late. Harvard Square is the Mt. Everest of parking challenges. Alessandro first swore me to secrecy and then drove us down an alleyway I had never noticed before and had me jump out of the car and lift the arm of a parking gate long enough for him to drive in.
"What's this?"
"Harvard faculty housing," he smiled the smile that said the Massachusetts Bay Parking Powers had not beaten all of the humanity out of him after all. "Parking by permit only."

After I spoke to the judge I waited for my name to be called so I could get the $56 bill for court costs. I left the court room and headed downstairs where I knew Cascading Tank Top was waiting. I could see our life together unfolding: I pay her court fine, we have crazy sex, she gets evicted and moves in, we have crazy sex, she asks to borrow money, we have crazy sex, I confront her about her meth habit, we have crazy sex, Joe Jr and I play soccer in the park, we have crazy sex, Joe Sr is let out of prison and breaks my nose in the park, we have crazy sex, she asks to borrow more money, we have crazy sex, I get home one day to find all my stuff missing, and so on until we're back at this exact same courthouse where it all began.

I discreetly slip out a side exit and put a check in the mail for $56 payable to the City of Albuquerque.

Ah Chihuahua

Jay called me the other day excited about a new Mexican place he'd discovered. This is not unusual, Jay is obsessed with Mexican food. I met Jay through his wife, Regina, an Italian girl from Las Vegas who used to work for me. The first few times I ever spent time with them Jay was always talking about Mexican food.

At first I thought it was his attempt to get me to like him. I'm from Mexico, I like Mexican food, ergo let's talk about Mexican food. But as much as I like tacos and quesadillas, Jay seeemed to really like talking about tacos and quesadillas, far beyond the point it ceased to be interesting to me. There were directions to the one place in Las Vegas that serves fresh agua de horchata (my favorite), a detailed explanation of the way to properly prepare taquitos, the latest episode of Rick Bayless' show, why the place on Montgomery isn't really that good, the secret behind great guacamole, and on and on and on.

Then I thought, perhaps he's aware how strange this obsession is and he's embracing the parody, talking about Mexican food a ridiculous amount of time because it is funny. But when Jay continued to talk about Mexican food beyond even the point something is so ridiculous it becomes funny it ocurred to me: this guy really does love Mexican food. And I'm apparently the only person he believes understands this about him.

To be fair, Jay will forever be in my debt. I think he understands this, that no matter culinary gem he is able to lay at my feet, for the rest of his life he will never be able to make up for the fact that I, having only been in Albuquerque a few months, introduced him to the greatest Mexican restaurant north of the border: TQM1. At this point I must apologize, Dear Reader, for using an acronym for this restaurant, but I have had the unfortunate experience that whenever I tell someone about TQM1 they become fanatical patrons of the establishment, which makes it damn near impossible to find a seat between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Jay told his cousin, one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the state, who told half the courthouse.

And seeing how TQM1 is my favorite restaurant in town, and I enjoy sitting down when I have a coctel de camaron and pastel de tres leches, I have decided I can no longer trust people with my secret. The last person I offered to take to TQM1, a cute blonde real estate agent who seemed eager to have lunch with me, refused to park at my office, siwtch cars and wear a blindfold the rest of the way to the restaurant. So we had Asian salads instead at Flying Star. Her loss.

Albuquerque is crawling with Mexican restaurants. Half of them we can discard immediately for really being "New" Mexican restaurants. New Mexican food is good, sometimes even great, but I can never help feeling that I am at a funeral or memorial service, honoring the memory of authentic Mexican food, singing it's praise, recalling beatiful moments we shared together and really wishing the bastard were still alive.

Of the remaining half, the vast majority are Americanized versions of Mexican food. Any establishment that uses cheddar cheese or asks if you want a "hard" taco or a "soft" taco is automatically disqualified. I you think eating Belgian waffles at the International House of Pancakes is a legitimate foray into foreign cusine then you would be quite satisfied with these establishments.

TQM1 is the real deal. For starters, the place is a dump. You would never think to stop there and eat. There are only six tables, half of which are really uncomortable to eat at because any time someone opens the door the glass pan is a just a few inches from your meal. The special of the day is handwritten (always misspelled) on a piece of notebook paper and taped to the wall. The waitresses bareley speak English, the cooks none at all.

They are all cousins, of course. You can buy calling cards to Mexico at the counter. And they have real Mexican Coke, smuggled in from across the border. What's the difference? Mexican Coca-Cola is made from sugar cane, not high fructose corn syrup. And it's made with Mexican water, which has more minerals than ultra-filtered American water. And it comes in a glass bottle. I love Mexican Coke. Anyone who grew up in Mexico does.

(True story: the Wall Street Journal recently had a story on the growing trade in smuggled Coke form Mexico (not cocaine, but Coca-Cola as immigrant establishments prefer to stock it and make their clientele happy. The Coca-Cola distributors in the Southwest are up in arms because while total sales of Coca-Cola are up in the area, they are not seeing any of the upside: it's all being smuggled in from Mexican bottlers).

But back to TQM1. The food is authentic, or as authentic as you can possibly get not being in Mexico. I have more than once considered dating one of the waitresses, a particularly uncomely lot, just for the positive associations she would bring. Looking at her would remind me of the tacos de barbacoa. I've thought about trying to buy the building next door and moving, home and office, there. It's not for sale. Jay himself eats there at least 3 times a week. I would as well, but the place closes at 7 and I usually eat dinner very late.

Recently, TQM1 rolled out new menus. The old menus looked like they had been typed out on an Olivetti at the height of the Watergate scandal. The new menus were slick affairs, professional printed, with photos and legible text, and laminated.

"This is not a good sign," I said over a plate of carne asada y arroz.
"No, it isn't." Jay agreed.
"This place is really going downhill."
"A real shame."

So pressure was mounting to find an alternative eatery, in the event TQM1 continued to go mainstream. So it is that Jay called me the other day.

"I found a Mexican place."
"Yeah?"
"I'm here now."
"How is it?"
"I don't want to be hasty, but it might be--"
"Don't say it," I cut him off.
"I was just going to say that--"
"I don't want to hear it."
"Really, it could be as good as TQM1."
"That's crazy."
"Not everything. No one can beat TQM1's camaron it's true. But as far as tacos,
this--"
"I'm going to hang up now."
'No, no, no. This time I'm serious. It might be as good. And they have al pastor."
"Al pastor?" If I am ever scheduled to be executed and am offered a final meal, it will be tacos al pastor. The fist thing I do when I land in Mexico City is eat al pastor.
"Yes!"
"If this is some kind of a joke I want you to know it's not funny."
"I'm eating one right now?"
"How is---Nevermind. I don't even want to allow myself to believe there could be decent al pastor in Albuquerque." Tacos al pastor are hard to find outside of central Mexico. I once spent the better part of an afternoon driving around Cd. Juarez looking for an al pastor joint and, failing that, looking for people who might know where there was a good al pastor joint. To no avail.
"There is."
"It would hurt too much if it turns out your wrong."
"Come now. I'll order some more."
"I've been hurt before, you know."
"Trust me."

What to say? Amazingly, Jay was right. The new place (and I will risk using its real name) Ah Chihuahua is quite good. The tacos al pastor are not as good as the ones in Mexico City (the secret is marinating the meat in the secret sauce overnight before roasting it on the spit and topping off the taco with a slice of pineapple to contrast the spicyness), but good enough to bring back pleasant memories. Hey, who said funerals couldn't be fun?

I was having trouble processing this new change to the culinary landscape. A veritable earthquake.

"I suppose this can be the after 7 place." I said, with the same melancholy tone you use when you've met someone new and realize you love the person you're with just a little bit less.
"Exactly!" Jay said excitedly, shoving the last of a taco in his mouth.
"It's not like we'll stop going to TQM1," I rationalized.
"It's like this. When I was in Vegas there was an Italian place I really liked and then I found a new one I loved. The key is that the first one was good at all the red tomato sauces and the second one was really good at the white creamy sauces."
"I see." Could I love more than one Mexican restaurant at the same time?
"Problem solved. You feel like red, you go to the first place. Feel like white, go to the second. Same deal here."
"You've given this a lot of thought."
"Of course."

Just then a fly landed on my cheek. I swatted it away.
'This place has ambiance."
"You like it?"
"Love it."
"There's seating inside. No one sits there, unless it's raining."
"It's better out here." And it was. We were standing up, on the side of the road, the dust and exhaust mixing in with the cilantro and lime and onion and salsa we put on the tacos.
"More legitimate."
Jay laughed.
I pointed to the TV sitting on a crate in the corner, an old black & white box that had duct tape where the channel know used to be. "All that's missing is the dog that licks your leg as you try to eat and old coke bottles that are salt shakers."

It's one of the cardinal rules of street food. The more run-down the establishment, the better the food. The best tacos are always had standing up. There is a taqueria near my old house in Mexico City that always has a long line of people standing on the sidewalk eating. It's some of the best tacos I've had. They had so much business they bought an old Volkswagen van and keep it permanently parked in front of the al pastor stand. If you want a more leisurely dining experience you wait for one of the patrons to finish eating and take his seat in the VW van and enjoy your meal sitting down.

I asked the cook making the tacos if the owner was present. He went and got him. Jay and I both thanked him profusely and complimented him on his restaurant. I asked him where he was from.
"Veracruz," he said.
"Veracruz? Why didn't you call the restaurant Mi Lindo Veracruz?"
"My wife is from Chihuahua."
"Ah." The three of us nodded and laughed.
"Maybe the next franchise will be called Mi Lindo Veracruz I said.

"So how did you find this place?"
"I was with Regina and we wanted to eat at TQM1 and we got there after 7."
I nodded empathetically.
"So I decided to just drive, listen to my inner Mexican." This is funny. Jay is 1/8th Mexican, somewhere in the family tree there is a Mexican, though he's not sure where. You would never know it though, Jay has one of those silly American names like Jones and doesn't like the least bit like a member of La Raza. For that matter, neither do I.
"And what did your inner Mexican say?"
"I drove and drove and drove. For about 45 minutes. And then..."
"Yes?"
Jay stepped outside. I followed. He pointed to the sign. "Ah Chihuahua."
"The inner Mexican."
"The inner Mexican." He smiled.

Under The Balcony

I went to a mariachi concert the other day. Natalia's group was playing at a nursing home for Cinco de Mayo and since she keeps inviting me and I keep saying I want to go, I finally did. It was a great way to spend an hour: the concert was outdoors, the residents of the home in a circle, the six mariachi in the center. The audience was made up of very old people as well as one or two former gangsters paralyzed from the neck down, their tattoed bodies inert on wheelchairs. These were people whose bodies had betrayed them, all that was left were their minds and moments like this, their faces momentarily aglow. There was one woman who was 93 who knew every song and was singing along in a faint voice. Natalia pulled her into the circle and sang a duet with her.

I took my shoes off, laid in the grass, the sunlight on my face and listened to the music. It got me thinking about the mariachi ethic. I have always loved mariachi music, it is a quick way to tap into those subterranean aquifers of extreme joy or sadness without irony. The lyrics are simple and beautiful and known by all, a shared narrative anyone can appropriate when it is too difficult to face your own. Mariachi music, at its best, usually involves crying. I remember every year at school there were mariachi the last day of classes for the seniors, the bell would ring and the mariachis would parade in, trumpet blaring and seniors would start singing and hugging each other and crying and the ayyy ayyyy ayyyyys would last into the late afternoon and the underclassmen would watch, somewhat perplexed, somewhat in awe, not believing that would be us until the time came and there we were crying our hearts out, singing our ayyy ayyyy ayyyyys.

Plaza Garibaldi is one of my favorite places in Mexico City. You cannot say it is the heart of the city, Mexico City is too monstrous a chimera to have a single heart, but is is definitely one of the spiritual reservoirs that keeps the city alive and defines it, much like the still lake in the middle of Hanoi feeds the ethos of that Buddhist city. Plaza Garibaldi is an open plaza in the old historic center where freelance mariachi congregate. On any given night there are probably a couple hundred hanging about, on a viernes de quincena the biweekly pay day, there are far more.

At any hour, any day, you can go to Plaza Garibaldi and hire an impromptu mariachi band. As you approach the plaza you are approached by mariachi in the black suits and silver- studded pants. You can ask the band to meet you at a certain address if you are planning on serenading your girlfriend or you can have them perform for you on the spot. Some mariachi wear white or brown charro suits with sarapes. There are also a handful of singers and musicians dressed in the norteño style who will play corridas on their accordians or others dressed in the white pants and guayaberas of Yucatan and Veracruz who will strum their harps and sing bombas.

The best is on a busy night when a singer approaches you and you request a song and he assembles a band on the spot, a trumpet player in black, a charro violinist, a guitarist in white, and so on. The singer makes quick inquiries, Cielito Lindo? Hermoso Cariño? Besame Mucho? El Rey? La Media Vuelta? and the band comes together at that moment to perform the song and, after the money is divided up, they dissolve, street theater at its best.

There are two reasons, aside from the classic reason of hiring mariachi for a serenade, to go to Garibaldi: you are feeling very happy or you are feeling very sad. If you are lucky, there are friends with you and you stand in a semi-circle, arms around each other singing along with the band. When one of you runs out of money, the other pitches in and shares your happinness or sadness until they become one and the same and you are singing and laughing and crying and enjoying that very Mexican need to take pleasure in the sadness of life.

There are roving tequila men who sell tequila by the cup, you pay a few pesos and they pour a shot in a cheap plastic cup. And there are the men with the caja de toques or shock box: you stand in a circle with your friends, two of you hold a metal rod and the man runs an electric current through the circle. You hold tight, not wanting to be the first to let go, as the man runs the dial up from 2 to 3 to 4 and 5 and your friends are all grimacing and squeezing your hand tight and you to 6 and then to 7 and you don't want to be the one to let go quien es mas macho and then to 8 until finally someone lets go and everyone is secretly relieved and takes another shot. By two or three in the morning there are there are several passed-out drunk revellers, their bodies slumped beneath one of the monuments to the great mariachi composers or, why not, beneath the statue of the Italian liberator himself.

But mariachi in its purest form is the serenata, and that is the true purpose of Plaza Garibaldi, a home for the itinerant troubadour, a place for the restless romantic to assemble an impromptu army of fellow sentimentalists and charge into battle.

By tradition a serenata takes place under a balcony or window. This is important: the man is below the woman, looking up to her and pleading his case. This is not Romeo sneaking under Juliet's balcony in the middle of the night to secretly swear by the moon his love to her. The serenata is the enemy of secrecy. The lover is at the head of a raucous and loud procession that snakes its way through the neighborhood at an impolite hour, waking the neighbors and incurring the wrath of the beloved's parents. By the time the window swing open and the woman gazes down at the assembly of provacateours the entire city block is alert and waiting.

That is the point, the stakes could not be higher. This is the moment when the man must plead his case before the court. Most likely his lover's parents despise him, for few parents like the kind of scoundrel who would wake the family in the name of love. Perhaps the beauty herself is unhappy with the unfaithful minstrel. The neighbors are the jury, skeptical but willing to be swayed. The man stands alone, the world looking down on him. His only friends are musicians he met half an hour ago and are his allies as long as the pay is forthcoming. The man will stand or fall on his own will, he stands defiant under the balcony.

There should be no doubt about the danger. The neighbors could throw things at him out the window, a rival lover may emerge or, worst of all, the light in the señoritas window may never turn on, the window never open, the face never peer over the balcony. One of the better pieces of family lore has my maternal grandmother being serenated by her boyfriend when my grandfather, half drunk and in a mood to fight, summons a group of friends who beat up the mariachi band and my would-be progenitor, picks up the guitar and finishes the song.

At this moment of maximum danger, the height of macho arrogance, the man invokes its counterpart: the humbling beauty of love. Everything rests on this. The parents and lover and neighbors and onlookers and street drunks all know the lyrics of the songs. There is nothing new he can say, that hasn't been sung before. The question is, will the man sing so beatifully that they are moved? Will his passion channel the purity of love and awaken the idealist in them? Or will his lack of conviction show, the windows closing one by one, the lights turning off, the trumpets falling silent?

The same man that a minute before stood in the penumbra of the street light daring the world to challenge his right to be there steps forward into the light and sings, The day you were born, all of the flowers on earth were born. It is trial by combat, he will only win her favor if in fact he does have the gods and the muse on his side. This is the mariachi ethic. The man must show he is afraid of nothing and no one and then, once he's done so, has permission to show he is vulnerable and emotional. Why do matadors wear pink stocking and their sparkling "suits of light"? Because they can. Facing the possiblity of death before the bull, the matador has earned the right to wear something beautiful and superfluous. For the man under the balcony or before the bull, masculinity has come full circle and and encounters femininity: danger is beauty, strength is nakedness.

The Weight of the Dead

China
I met a guy in Beijing a few years ago whose best friend had gone to Japan to make money. Migrants the world over do the job no one else wants to do. He said that in Japan there are a lot of high-rise appartment buildings. And a lot of old people. It follows that there are a lot of old people dying in high-rise buildings, not all of them with elevators.

Somebody has to carry the bodies down. No one wants that job, so migrants do it. This guy said his friend lived in Japan for a year and, by Chinese standards, made a ton of money. When he returned to Beijing he threw a big party, lots of booze and food, all to show his friends how successful he'd become. At the end of the night, most partygoers gone and the host drunk, he confides that sometimes he still feels the dead people on his shoulder and sometimes he wakes up at night imagining there is a dead person on top of him.

It's hard to know with the language barrier if the guy who told me this story understood it to be a meaningufl story or not, but it struck me as the perfect metaphor for where China is right now: booming with new wealth but the weight of the past still very much a burden on its shoulders.

I asked this guy if he was planning on getting married. He said no, not until he made lots of money first. The people I met in China were obsessed with making money. He told me that, growing up very poor, his mother promised him as a child she would give him a hard boiled egg for breakfast for his first day in high school. He remembered this promise years later when he woke up for his first day in high school. There was no hard boiled egg. He doesn't know if his mother forgot or if they were still too poor to afford the egg. But he has been craving that hardboiled egg ever since. Of course now he has enough money to buy as many eggs as he wants. "I will never make a promise like that to my children I cannot keep," he said. "I would rather not have children."

And so he works and saves, dreaming of a hard boiled egg while his friend works and drinks to forget for a moment the weight of the dead.

Vietnam
Driving across the Vietnamese countryside one of the first things I noticed, aside from the Fedex and Oracle billboards coming out of Hanoi's airport, were the tombstones that appeared every so often in rice fields and backyards of homes. Often it was a solitary stone slab, other times a cluster of two or three. I saw too many of these gravemarkers for it to be a coincidence so I asked my driver who spoke some english about it.

He explained that Vietnamese tradition is for a person to die at home, with family. It is considered a good omen for the family to be looking into the eyes of the person as they die. And it is also tradition to bury the deceased at home, on the family's land. He explained that the first three years after a person die are critical in making sure their spirit is happy in the afterlife. An elabaroate set of rituals ensure with special ceremonies ocurring periodically during this time, especially on the 49th and 100th day after the death, and culminating on the three year anniversary when the body is dug up, washed and prepared anew for its final resting.

If the family is diligent in observing these rituals then at the end of the three years the spirit is not only happy and peaceful but will also bless the living family members and offer good advice when consulted. If the rituals are not observed, or it the person dies violently away from family and the body is not properly treated, then the spirit is said to be a wandering spirit, ever restless and haunting the living family members. It is so important to take proper care of a departing spirit that traditional vietnamese families will borrow heavily to pay for the proper rituals. In many rural cemeteries in Vietnam there is a special temple set aside for wandering spirits who have no family to care for.

During my brief passage through Vietnam I raised the issue with several people, as I found it fascinating. These familial burial plots are becoming a real problem as the country modernizes. Any time a family has to sell their land and move they must dig up their dead and take them to their new home for reburial. The ultimate land title are the remains of your ancestors on your land. That, more than any legal document, is proof that the land is yours. So it is that the gravestones are also cadastral markers for the living. As Vietnamese cities grow and expand into rural areas, generations of peaceful souls suddenly become restless again as their remains are disinterred.

The government of Vietnam has passed a law making it illegal to bury someone anywhere outside of municipal cemeteries. For the residents of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and other cities the decree makes sense and is hardly an inconvenience. But the legions of rice farmers must decide who they fear more: the bureaucrat in Hanoi or the spirits of their fathers.

Korea
Ancestor worship runs deep in Korea. One of my best friends in high school was Korean. He was valedictorian of our class, went on to Brown and then Yale for a master's degree. His father was chairman of Daewoo in Mexico, one of the top chaebols or industrial conglomerates in Korea. The family had been posted to Miami before moving to Mexico City. My friend and his younger sister were trilingual. In other words, as modern a Korean family as you can get.

And yet during our junior year in high school my friend's grandfather made the 14 hour by air journey from Seoul to Mexico City to deliver an important message. He was soon to die, he could feel it, and he was very worried that my friend would not properly worship him as he had worshipped his father and grandfather. He feared a lonely eternity, without the living to keep him company.

I remembered the incident years later when I was in Korea and visited the DMZ or demilitarized zone that separates South Korea from North Korea. The most interesting stop on the tour is a shrine located at exactly the northernmost point in South Korea where people who were separated from their families during the war can go pray for their ancestors, stuck on the other side of the DMZ. It is one of the most poignant monuments to longing I have ever seen. The famiily members go to the shrine in grief and hope their prayers can reach across the border and find the wandering spirit of their forefathers.

Cambodia
Like Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set out to erase the past. In China I came across temples and palaces where paintings and murals depicting what were considered scenes of feudalism and capitalism had been painted over with plain white. The past literally painted over.

The Khmer Rouge took this one step further. Cambodia is a society that tore itself apart and consumed itself. Doctors, lawyers, professionals, anyone who wore glasses, anyone who spoke another language--all suspected members of the intelligentsia-- were killed. Between 1.5 and 2 million people were murdered out of a population of approximately 7 million, proportionally the worst of the 20th Century's many holocausts.

This wasn't the case of one group turning on another, Cambodian society is pretty homogenous. There is a pyramid of human skulls at the entrance of the killing fields and a sign next to it that reads, "Who were these people who had the face of the Khmer (Cambodian) but the heart of devils?"

In order to create a future, the communists believed you first had to destroy the past and to do that they recruited the people with the least loyatly to the past: children and teenageers. What makes the Cambodian tragedy so horrific is that many times it was the young killing their own family members at the behest of their revolutionary masters. And the preferred method of killing was no accident. In Asian cultures the head is sacred, the temple of the body. In places like Thailand you could be beaten or killed for accidentally touching someone's head. So the Khmer Rouge's preferred method of killing was to bash someone's head against a tree or to decapitation. These were mass executions in faraway fileds in order to ensure maximum anonymity.

In other words, every taboo surrounding death that had built up over centuries was consciously violated. Not only was a whole generation of Cambodians killed, they were killed in such a way that guarantees their spirits would never be at rest. Spend five minutes talking to anyone in Cambodia and you will soon hear their particular version of the Cambodian tragedy, of their own family members who died. Even if now, years later they want to pay proper respect to their ancestors and give the spirits some rest, they cannot. There is no way to know which of the myriad skulls was once their fathers.

Rather than kill the past, as they'd hoped, the Khmer Rough guaranteed that it is more alive than ever, wandering the countryside looking for peace.


Macau
I found home where I least expected, in the Old Protestant Cemetary in Macau. I spent a month travelling around Asia a few years ago and Macau was one of my final stops.

Though I wasn't homesick, I did have a sense of alienation after days and weeks in a land where, not only did I not speak the language, I couldn't even make sense of road signs and shop windows. Its a sense of otherness that accumulates so gradually you don't even realize it until you come into contact with something prosaic, when the common is now exotic.

So it was that as I walked through the gates of the Old Protestant Cemetary in Macau I was jolted by a sudden familiarity, a sense of belonging. Which is odd, because on the face of it I had nothing in common with the men who were buried there. The cemetery was founded by the British East India Company in 1814 as a place to bury protestants who died in the Portuguese Catholic colony of Macau. Before that, any British, American, German, Dutch or Scandinavian who died in this oriental outpost was burried between the walls that separated the catholic colony from the confucian mainland, as neither society would acommodate the bones of apostates.

The sense I got in the cemetery was a sense of freedom, which is an odd thing to feel in place of the dead. But here was a place where death was final, it did not exact a toll on the living as they travelled down their own road to the thereafter. Tombstone after tombstone proclaimed that the dead were no longer with us. A typical marking on tombs of a missionary or preacher might read "here lie the mortal remains" of the person and that the deceased were no "in the company of the Lord". For those who believe in heaven, death is a sweet release and the writings in granite reflect that relief and joy.

But it wasn't only men of faith buried there but soldiers and mercenaries and opium traders too. There were several tombstones to fallen sailors (the US navy had a hospital in Macau for much of th 19th Century) "erected by his shipments out of respect" as if the mates had taken up a collection, bought a marble marker got very drunk and were now back at sea awaiting the next adventure. Solemn, yes; sad, no. There was none of the anxiety over the dead I had seen in so many other places.

Along with the sense of freedom and liberation from death's grasp was a profound sense of optimism that permeated the cemeteray. A very illustrious selection of men are buried there: the first person to introduce the telescope to Japan, the first person to write an English-Chinese dictionary and toto translate the Bible into Chinese, the naval officer who negotiated the US-China trade treaty and countless other notables who fought battles, made first voyages and introduced western technology to the East. These tombs celebrate the life of the dead, they do not mourn their passing; they are resumes etched in granite, not lamentations. And they pose a silent challenge to the visitor: this is what we did with our lives, what are you doing with yours? The focus somehow returns to the present.

Leaving the cemetary I had the feeling that every grave, every memorial and masoleum on that plot of land that felt so much like home was echoing the words of John Donne: "Death be not proud."

The Captain

A less charitable writer might say he was always wearing a hat, one of those white sea captain hats with a black bill and those gold doodads swirling on the brim. But The Captain was pathetic enough without the embellishment; there is no need for such a coup de grace.

I met The Captain in Puerto Plata when I was trying to charter a boat to go scuba diving. The Captain advertised his servcies; there was just one problem: he did not have a boat. At least not one he could access in the next couple of days. His boat was still stuck at the port tied up in a web of customs forms, import duties and opportunistic bureaucrats.

"If you can find a boat, you got yourself a helluva captain," he said without irony. Nevermind that it is usually easier to find a boat and a captain in the same place, much like one does not first find a mattress and then a hotel room to check-in to. He may be missing a boat, but our Ahab was not lacking in self-importance.

I passed on his offer but did venture to voyage with him as far as the English pub in Sosua where I was regaled with the tale as to how our navigator came to land without a vessel.

His undoing was a woman, a variation of the theme begun in Eden so long ago. He was down from Florida on vacation and met a beautiful Dominican woman. Not hard in this tropical paradise, the island is crawling with cafe-con-leche beauties...and lecherous old European and American men. The smart ones get laid, spend some pesos, drink rum, get laid some more, and go home. The dumb ones fall in love and get ensnared.

If you guess that The Captain fell in the second category, you are correct. He married his Dominican beauty and carried her back to the good ole US of A where she played the complaint beautiful wife to perfection for three years, just the sentence proscribed by the INS.

"The bitch left me a week after she got her citizenship!" The Captain is standing too close; I can see the reds of his alcoholic eyes and I am trying to steer clear of his spittle. Our fearless seafarer believed the long chain of Carribbean beauties he encountered were actually falling in love with him and not Mr. Green Card. It's the classic expat mistake: The Captain mistook the good fortune of having been born in a prosperous country for personal virtue.

"Fucking bitch!" The Captain continues. "If it wasn't for me she wouldn't even be an American." And a rather savvy American at that, since our Dominican princess turned out to be more than just a pretty body. Along with her newfound citizenship came a sudden and ruthless understanding of jurisprudence, her God-given rights, and a divorce settlement that cost The Captain half his wealth.

The next mistake is more interesting. Having sold his house and closed his carpet cleaning business in Ft Lauderdale, The Captain decided he would move to the Dominican Republic. Perhaps our skipper believed that unable to go back in time, he could at least go back in place to where is misfortune began. But geography is not chronology and only a fool would conflate the two dimensions.

The Captain proved as adept at equatorial affairs the second time around as he did the first. Figuring he could recreate his life in a new environment, our commodore sold everything he had left save his boat and carpet cleaning machines. These of course were promptly ensnared in the afformentioned adminstrative web of corruption. When Christopher Columbus sailed for Hispaniola a second time, an opportunistic exchequer saved the crown a bit of gold by stocking the outbound ships with sickly cattle. And thus did the second settlement in the Americas come to a disease-ridden end, the first of course having been massacred by the native Tainos after the fair-skinned gods couldn't seem to keep their hands off their women.

If even the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had a snafu with Spanish bureaucrats then perhaps our own captain can be forgiven for underestimating the diffculty of settling the New World. His two assetts locked up at port, The Captain spent the next few months harboring in the bars, brothels and bodegas of Puerto Plata and Santo Domingo spending his dwindling supply of greenbacks and offering one half of a seafaring expedition to anyone interested in finding the other half.

And this time around the natives saw the white bearded man for what he is: not a god from over the horizon but a bitter drunk looking to despoil the virgin landscape. Which is about when I met The Captain: out of money, but not out of ideas. He had a business proposal: if I could help him get his carpet-cleaning machines out of Customs then I could be his partner. And the best part? He already has his first customer lined up: The Doll House, Santo Domingo's most prestigous cathouse and fortunate depository of much of The Captain's life savings.

"They said they would pay me to vacuum and scrub their carpets."

I'm sure they did. Now did they say this before or after you pulled your pants down?

"You speak Spanish, right?"

I speak more than Spanish. I speak the language of Third World bureaucrats. Our hapless American navigator lives in a world of abstraction, actually believes that when the governemnt official tells him they are still processing his paperwork that there is in fact a tireless functionary reviewing codiciles and filing-in forms in triplicate. Of cours, if such a civil servant does in fact exist, he is in an unventillated office somewhere reading the sports page waiting for a nice gringo to invite him to lunch and offer him a bit of money for his troubles in resolving the unfortunate impasse.

"I'll give you half of the business," he stammers, sensing my waning enthusiasm. I've met countless expats like him: at some point they got off the fake train ride in Disneyland that is living in the United States and they never quite figure out how to get back on.

Somewhere in Florida there is a Dominican woman pulling her new car into a suburban driveway, living the American dream just as The Captain dreams of untieing the gordian knot at Customs so that he may spend the rest of his days scrubbing the carpets of whorehouses.

The Captain likes to believe that being an American is something you earn, something the virtuous deserve, and in this case he is right.

An Important Victory in the War of Ideas
Saudi Arabia is slowly enacting democratic reform:

"Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, announced Monday it would hold its first elections to vote for municipal councils, seen as the first concrete political reform in the Gulf Arab state...In taking this action, Saudi Arabia has joined a growing trend toward experiments in democracy in other Gulf Arab countries. The decision also coincided with the opening of the first human rights conference in Riyadh."

France is reforming its bankruptcy laws to bring them more in line with American laws.

The Power of Openness II
From a story in the NYT on the decline of Christianity in Europe:

"The Rev. Enzo Bianchi, a Catholic theologian in Italy, said that in today's heterogeneous and often hedonistic European capitals, 'there are more and more morals and ethics on the market.'
'There's Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age spiritualism, consumerism,' Father Bianchi said. 'With all these competitors, it's harder for the church to sell.'
But in the United States, to name one country, many of the same dynamics have not prompted a similarly pronounced estrangement. Some experts say that in Europe, suspicion of major denominations may run higher because religious leaders directly wielded political power in the past. Others say the unchallenged supremacy of state-blessed faiths in Europe — like the Lutherans in Scandinavia and Anglicans in Britain — perhaps turned out to be a curse.
'Monopolies damage religion,' said Massimo Introvigne, the director of the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin and a proponent of the relatively new theory of religious economy. 'In a free market, people get more interested in the product. It is true for religion just as it is true for cars.'"