Mexico City

Show time

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From the 1940s through the 1960s, it was considered the classiest night club in Mexico City. Chilangos of a certain age still have pictures of their parents taken at El Patio, snapped by a strolling photographer, amid the white tablecloths, waiters in tuxedos and bottles of sparkling wine chilling in ice buckets. Not only did Mexico's most famous performers play here, but when the peso was relatively strong, so did international performers like Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker and Charles Aznavour. It has been closed for the last twenty years or so, perhaps waiting for some enterpreneur to come along to tear it down and build a condominium. As it is around the corner from the Ministry of the Interior, some might think of it as a nicer place to visit than to live.

Spoiled brats

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No doubt that if any animal rights people read this they will want to shoot me. But does anyone else find it distasteful that, in a country where so many people can barely feed themselves, and so many others have malnutrition problems, there is a stand in the Parque México in Colonia Condesa where you can "spoil your pet" with gourmet treats? They cost 20 pesos per morsel -- some Mexican families' entire food budget for a day. All are made with rice, and are filled with chicken, beef, or veggies, and sprayed with an orange sauce.

From the other side of the ocean

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The presenters of Top Gear, a lauded and well-received BBC TV show about cars, recently weighed in on Mexico. According to the program's three caustic commentators, you wouldn't want to buy a Mexican sports car because it would be "lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle as a coat."  Here's the BBC itself reporting on the incident, about which the Mexican ambassador to England demanded an apology.

For those of you who read Spanish, here's a slightly more detailed version from Yahoo.


Some of my Mexican readers seem to think that remarks like these are all in good fun -- when the joke's on someone else. When I posted about the Mexican use of the word "negrito," for example, quite a few Mexicans commented. They tended to think I was a clueless gringo affected by the U.S. disease of political correction, unable to appreciate the cultural nuances. What do you think about the remarks of our hermanos from England? As the queen might be saying in this picture, "Cheers my dears, and down the hatch."


Quezada at the Museo de la Ciudad de México

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To call Abel Quezada Mexico's greatest cartoonist somehow undermines his importance. His medium may have been the newspaper caricature, but you could call him the Mexican Voltaire: a satirist and social commentator, possessed of a merciless rapier wit and profound wisdom about his country and his countrymen. He made fun of the powerful and the wealthy (among his favored personalities were Gastón Billetes, who wore a diamond ring on his nose, and the Dama Caritativa de Las Lomas, as well as any number of politicians) as well as starving-to-death journalists (so thin as to be barely visible except in profile), vendors of tacos de carnitas (replete with buzzing flies around their stands), bureaucrats, cops, mariachis, cowboys and supposed machos. He was also an accomplished painter and watercolorist. An exemplary retrospective of his work is on display at the Museo de la Ciudad de México (Pino Suárez 30, Centro Histórico) until April 3rd. Don't miss it.