"Cadillac Rosa" or "I Hope We'll Never Be Alone Again"

I am a reverse snob about most things, and music is no exception. Anything overproduced is anathema, and things that smack of consumerism, like covers of popular songs, are only acceptable if they’re done ironically-like Cap’n Jazz’s cover of ‘Take on Me’—not only is it ironic, but it ends in a series of animal-like screams that express the futility of trying to avoid pop culture and material society.


When I travel, I recognize that this snobbery is part of my cultural makeup—or subcultural makeup, as the case may be, and I try to be as open as possible. Still, imagine my horror when I realized, about a month into my stay in Mexico City, that I had been lured into a bar with a COVER BAND. Being a southern girl, I was far too polite to let the kind young man that did the luring know how absolutely taken aback I was. Much like the times I have been served nearly rotten meat in houses without refrigeration, my motto in these situations is “grin and bear it, and deal with the giardia tomorrow.” Knowing that a couple hours at the Liverpool Pub was unlikely to cause giardia, I decided to treat the situation as an ethnographic experience. I sat back (ok, not really, because I was on a stool), relaxed, drank a couple micheladas, ate an unprecedented number of olives, and listened to Spanish language versions of songs I hadn’t ever liked the originals of—like ‘I think we’re alone now’—not ironic at all, since my companion and I made up the bulk of the audience that night.

Thanks to youtube, you too can experience Cadillac Rosa at the Liverpool Pub on Insurgentes Sur…


I find that Mexico is full of bizarre renditions of familiar music. On the subway, for the equivalent of 80 cents, you can buy CDs of “jazz”—including jazzy versions of Madonna’s “Material Girl”, and “rock from the golden years”—with Spanish language versions of songs like “Long Tall Sally”.

I often find these bizarre renditions where I least expect them. The other day, I walked into the infirmary at my university. I didn’t find the Gregorian chants the nurse had playing surprising at all—I go to a Catholic university started by Opus Dei, so Gregorian chants, rosaries, shrines, and Latin masses are part of every day life. But after sticking a thermometer in my armpit, the nurse cranked up the volume, and exclaimed, “Listen! Listen! Don’t you love it?” as if something really special was happening. I must have looked extraordinarily dense, because she lowered the volume again, and told me, “It’s the Bee-tlays—but done in Gregorian chant style.” Usually I have no trouble deciphering English words pronounced with a Spanish accent, but that day I was feeling confused and congested, and I still didn’t understand. Luckily, the university administrator who had dragged me to the infirmary in the first place came to my rescue. “Ooooh, I love the Beatles. Where do you find these things, Lupita?” It turns out Gregorian chant versions of the most popular Beatles songs are sold by a vendor outside the VIPS (a chain restaurant, kind of like a Mexican Denny’s) at Insurgentes and the Eje 7. I politely commented on the originality of the concept, and the nurse told me I wasn’t dying of swine flu. An all around fulfilling interaction.



I don't think these guys are real monks.

Water + Electricity = Electrocution

Ever since humans invented electricity, this mantra has been an important one to live by. I have always been especially paranoid about electrocution--beyond my regular paranoias about plane crashes and car wrecks. So paranoid, in fact, that I told my best friend in 4th grade that if she EVER, at any time in the future, heard that I had died of electrocution, she MUST investigate, because I am so careful about electricity that it wouldn't be an accident, it would be MURDER.

Latin America is one of the worst places to live if you are paranoid about electrocution. Once, I lived in a village where almost every house was provided electricity by a series of very long extension cords. Not realizing that my entire house's supply of electricity was through one small cord that was draped at about eye level through the central courtyard, I assumed that the cord was a clothesline. I hung a bunch of drenched huipils to dry on it, the cord broke, the huipils fell into the dirt, and we spent quite a bit of time without power. Finally, when my friend's father got home from work, he helped us reconnect, and we all stood around in the midst of a torrential downpour with different bits of electrical cords in our hands. Here is the village of loopty-loop extension cords where I lived:



When choosing my apartment in Mexico City, I nearly turned down a good view and a good location, not because it is a sixth floor walk up, not because it's basically a double wide trailer placed haphazardly on the top of a building--I nearly turned down my apartment because of the shower.



Showers like this work on the presumption that Water + Electricity = Hot Water, not Electrocution. I used to find them rather disturbing, but harmless. Then I lived in a house in Guatemala where something had gone terribly wrong. Every time we touched the faucet to turn the water on, we got a shock. Literally. Everyone had their own special way of dealing with the situation--some people used a towel to turn the shower on, others took cold showers, I used a piece of rubber to touch the faucet, wore rubber flip flops and only put parts of my body into the stream of water. Since then, I have feared these showers. Here is a close up--yes, electricity comes through the cords in the wall, and water comes up from the metal pipe below--and it all gets mixed together in the shower head.


I mentioned my predicament to a couple friends at school, hoping to be reassured that I am not going to be electrocuted during my morning shower. Sadly, it turns out that this fine invention is strictly for the commoners. None of the sheltered rich kids at my university had any idea what I was talking about when I described a Lorenzetti shower head. Here is the view of snow capped mountains from my desk--for this view I risk electrocution on a daily basis.

Reading Rainbow

I have lived in Spanish speaking countries over pretty long periods of times. I used to spend my days reading linguistic theory in Spanish and editing bilingual Spanish-indigenous language dictionaries in Guatemala. Now I spend my days in the D.F. reading long Mexican judicial opinions, articles, and statutes. I have no problem leading my professional and social life completely in Spanish, but the one thing I have never been able to give up is novels in English. Searching through piles of used books in a store or picking through the few books in English that some streetside vendor has gotten his hands on, you can get a pretty good idea of the kind of gringos that have lived in a place.

Panajachel, Guatemala was rife with Vietnam war vets, and most of the novels were detective or spy stories that centered around hard-drinking, hard-living, independent men who have high ideals and a difficult time relating to the rest of the world. The population in Antigua, Guatemala was a little older and more conservative--and more feminine. There was a never-ending supply of Danielle Steele, but, at least on my part, NO demand. Military novels, best sellers, and mysteries.

One summer I lived in the back of an old hotel in Antigua. To get to my room, I had to pass through the American Legion library. At nights, when the library was closed, I would make tea and wander around the musty rooms, made even mustier by the thick colonial walls that had absorbed centuries of rainy seasons. Long shelves were filled with mildewed copies of Reader's Digests from the 50s. It was always a bizarre experience, like a forgotten monument to an American generation in the middle of the Guatemalan highlands.

The eclectic mix I run across in used bookstores in Mexico City belies generalizations about the English-reading population here. I find myself vacillating between "The Canterbury Tales" one day and an installment of "The Babysitter's Club" the next.

There is one thing that many of these books have in common. Even more so than used bookstores in the States, the books are often inscribed, or have, at least, some kind of note on the inside cover. The names almost always sound midwestern and wholesome. "To Len, with love, Sandy." "To Grace, from your grandmother." "The Miller Family." The stories behind these inscriptions, and behind these books, always fascinate me. How did the books get here? Is there more of a tendency to inscribe a cheap paperback when your loved one is heading off into the great unknown? Or did these books pass through a million hands before they ever got to a used bookstore in Latin America? Where are Len and Grace now, and do they know their books are in a foreign country?

Of course, there are other kinds of notes too: "*have read"--this is a sign that the books you are reading are all far too similar. And my favorite, in an Agatha Christie I got today: "Nov. 2000. Me encantas, desde hace mucho tiempo ? P.D. No es broma." A loose translation: "Nov. 2000. I like you A LOT, and have for a very long time ? P.S. This is not a joke."

(If you're looking for used English language books in Mexico City, check out El Ático, on Alvaro Obregon, close to the corner with Orizaba. Next door is A Través del Espejo, with a smaller selection--but I did find a copy of Brideshead Revisited there last week.)

Guerrilleros

I just saw a documentary by the same name at the 4th annual Mexico City documentary film festival. The film was about URNG guerrilla fighters in the Guatemalan civil war, and their lives 10 years after the 1996 signing of the Peace Accords. Having been something of an academic and an activist with a ten year commitment to Guatemala, I tend to be critical of most things I see--it didn't show enough of the ethnic struggles that characterize the country, the poverty, the current political situation. But I found myself sitting and munching popcorn next to one of the guerrilla fighters featured in the film, glancing at his profile in the dark as I watched him speak on the screen. And I was reminded that there are some stories, some personal moments, that transcend criticism. After the film, there was a question and answer session. When most of the questions had been asked, a mother in the audience turned to her daughter, another of the guerrillas featured in the film. It was the first time she had seen footage of her daughter from that period--in camouflage, firing a gun, in the mountains far away from home. Addressing the audience, she said her daughter had always been "inquieta" when it came to social movements. For a second, I couldn't tell how she felt about her daughter's participation in the civil war. But then, her voice began to crack and she said to her daughter. "I am proud that you were so brave that you would face a world you didn't know, the uncertainty and death, to give this gift to humankind."

The Power of Advertising

This billboard sat directly above my apartment for the first month I lived there. It was so close, in fact, that when the men finally came to change it, they ate lunch on my roof (they did not eat Zwan turkey dogs). I saw this billboard countless times everyday. At night, it was lit up, and the model winked down at me on my balcony, as if she knew I hadn’t eaten dinner.

There is absolutely nothing appetizing about the turkey dogs on this billboard. Who serves a bunch of sliced up turkey dogs like this? Looking at them reminds me of the time I was forced to eat a torta (sandwich) with ham, cheese, and cold turkey dogs slathered in mayonnaise. The only thing worse than a boiled veggie and turkey dog salad with a mustard dipping sauce is a cold turkey dog slathered in mayonnaise. But everytime I saw this billboard, I started to feel inexplicably hungry. I actually began to crave . . . turkey dogs.

Beyond its strange power over me, I found the billboard perplexing for the longest time. Loosely translated, it says: “I don’t like it when you get here late, but not too early either.” For a while, I thought the lady serving the turkey dog salad was trying to trick her husband into believing that she had made the turkey dogs herself, rather than pulling them out of a package—much in the same way I used to try to convince my ex-boyfriend that the heated Spam I served him was actually homemade meatloaf.

I puzzled over this for a long time—who would expect someone to make sausages by hand? I’ve been in a lot of Mexican kitchens, and I never saw a sausage maker in one, ever. Then, one day, in a flash of brilliance I realized that the trick was that this scrumptious hot dog salad was made with turkey dogs, and not all beef hot dogs. Far more healthy. I don’t know though… If I knew that hot dog salad was being served for dinner at home—turkey or beef—the question wouldn’t be, “Shall I arrive early or late?” The question would be whether to go home at all.