¡Ya llegó!

July 3rd, 2008

When I came to Mexico City in 1990, with limited knowledge of Spanish, I knew that I wanted to learn to the language well, and to be able to read anything from Don Quijote to One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original. But I never dreamed I would one day write in Spanish, let alone that a prestigious publishing house like Sexto Piso would consider my work worthy of a book. But here it is. Las llaves de la ciudad is a collection of pieces I wrote about Mexico City in the last few years, published in various magazines and newspapers here. The great majority of them are portraits of people: the proprietor of the first and only boutique in the world that sells nothing but bulletproof clothing; Alín, a deaf-mute transvestite who has invented her own sign language and sells her company in a beer joint; Viviana Corcuera, who was Miss Argentina in 1964, and for close to 40 years has been Mexico City’s most notorious socialite. Each of these people is a stone in what, in the book’s totality, becomes a mosaic of Mexico City.

For the moment it is only available in Mexico, at most major bookstores or if you click here. It will shortly be obtainable on Amazon; please watch the books page for its progress.

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Sweets for the sweet

July 1st, 2008

 

There are about 400,000 Mexicans of Lebanese descent, and most of them are in Mexico City. My favorite is Achmed, pictured above, the manager of the Al-Andalus restaurant on calle Nueva York in the Colonia Nápoles, in walking distance from my apartment. The original, and more splendid, branch of the restaurant is in the centro histórico. They have everything there, except Achmed.

No matter how infrequently I go to Al-Andalus, Achmed always greets me as if I ate there every day, indeed as if I were part of the family.

When Jabbar Yassin Husin, an Iraqi writer who lives in France, visited Mexico, we made a date to have coffee together at the apartment where he was staying. He asked me to bring him some kind of cake or cookie, so I went to Al-Andalus and got an assortment of Lebanese pastries. When I told Achmed that I was bringing them to an Iraqi, he had me take him a particular cookie. He professed that at Al-Andalus the cooks prepared more delectably than they do in Baghdad.

The last thing Jabbar expected was traditional Middle-Eastern pastry in Mexico City. He fell into a Proustian swoon and insisted we go to visit Achmed. The two of them, and a couple of other men, sat for hours speaking Arabic, as if they were all old friends, shooting the breeze around the corner from the souk.

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Trilingualism in Los Angeles

June 28th, 2008

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El Barrio

June 24th, 2008

Briefly away from Mexico City, let’s continue with our tour of uptown New York. Harlem has, of course, a fabled history as the most important black neighborhood in the United States, although these days Manhattan real-estate prices are so high that some blacks are being edged out by whites. But that is in the central and west sides of town. The east side of Harlem became known as El Barrio, or Spanish Harlem, in the 1960s due to a huge influx of Puerto Rican residents. These days, the area is pan-Hispanic.

I happened to take a walk there the day before an unofficial New York holiday called Puerto Rican Day. Up and down Third Avenue, as a sort of warm-up to the big day, they held a street festival celebrating Puerto Rico. The characters pictured above are a tropical equivalent of the Three Stooges.

La dieta puertorriqueña, aka a heart attack waiting to happen.

The above is an outtake from the film Babe: A Pig in the City.

Fifteen or twenty years ago there were hardly any Mexicans in New York, but now it’s become más mexicana que nunca.

This is where you can get your fix of Jarritos, jabón Ariel or cacahuates japoneses. The furtive body language of the man pictured above indicates some ambiguity as to whether he is a shopper or a shoplifter.

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Quote for the day

June 20th, 2008

  

There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican.

               — Raymond Chandler

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