Set afire & ravaged by drug lords Culiacán, the eden with three rivers burns through the night the Guadalupe watches from La Lomita, her sanctuary church it has the best view of the dying city The same giant white SUVs blue skies, cactus, palm trees the same brown-skinned people sinners, saints, criminals, victims Los Angeles or Culiacán what’s the difference?…
Four minutes of dazzling footage comprises the eye-popping, jaw dropping opening sequence of Spectre, the latest James Bond film. In the first scene, James Bond (played by actor Daniel Craig), is seen walking through a Día de los Muertos procession in Mexico City wearing a skull mask. He sports a Top Hat as befitting a bourgeois Mexican gentleman of the…
This article is about the barbarous assassination of a young Mexican artist, Gilberto Abundiz Sánchez. Why would unidentified armed men take an artist from his home and murder him? Considering the artist was just one of over 50 victims killed in one year in a single region, why are the authorities unable – or unwilling – to stop the killers?…
In Mexico and around the world, January 6, 2015 became an international day of solidarity with the parents of the missing students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college in Iguala, Mexico. Vigils and protests took place all across Mexico, as well as in 20 U.S. cities. On the evening of Tuesday Jan. 6, 2015, up to 70 protesters in Los…
Todo está Olvidado (All is Forgotten) is a subversive cartoon one can properly call satirical. It is currently “trending” on the Mexican twitter-sphere, though I have been unable to ascertain just who created it, aside from its being signed by someone named “Alex.” The Mexican artist alluded to the January 14, 2015 “survivors issue” of Charlie Hebdo published in the…
This post is part of my notionally annual, but in point of fact, irregular attempt at spreading Christmas cheer on my web log. This year, when I heard the old Christmas standard Silent Night, I began to think of current events in Mexico, for reasons that will be apparent if you read this yuletide message in its entirety. In 1963…
El Día de la Revolución is celebrated every year in Mexico on the 20th of November. The occasion this year marks the 104th anniversary of the 1910 revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. This year however will be different. The government has cancelled the annual military parade that ordinarily fills the capital’s streets. Instead, the Mexican people will…
To mark the 2014 observance of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), I have created a suite of twenty monoprints based upon an ancient Aztec glyph representing death. Essentially a printed painting, no two images are alike. The images were painted directly on a sheet of glass in oil paint, and burnished with a wooden spoon; each color…
