a few shots of culture

Café Tacuba's "Unplugged" playing on this warm Oaxaca morning in the Sierra Juárez. Mexico has a tremendous cultural heritage, music and performance and literature and painting all parts of people's everyday lives. One of the jewels of the nation is the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM), located in Mexico City (in fact it is its own "ciudad universitaria"). An ongoing project UNAM is developing is Descarga Cultura (http://www.descargacultura.unam.mx/), a website that offers access to lectures, conferences, music, theater performances, etc., from classic to contemporary works. Especially interesting are authors reading from their own works, like Elena Poniatowska, Monica Lavin, Eduardo Lago, among many others. The site has links to radio stations and programs, the arts and culture magazine Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, as well as a variety of physical and social sciences pages. Check out Descarga Cultura and you'll understand how UNAM was awarded this year the prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize in Communications and Humanities.

Book lovers in Oaxaca, please visit Amate Books, a wonderful independent bookstore downtown on Alcalá. It has a great selection of Latin American literature in English, lots of books on regional and national art, architecture, and cuisine, and many unique titles. Owner Henry Wangeman frequently hosts readings and discussions and was kind enough to let me talk about literary translation a couple weeks ago to a full house (though I imagine most people came for the free mezcal). Amate also has some very cool folk art and handicrafts for sale. There are some kites designed, and signed!, by Francisco Toledo hanging from the walls that are themselves worth the visit.

Recommended reading:
Ficciones de la revolución mexicana, by Ignacio Solares (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2009).
What would have happened to the nation if some of the great events in Mexico's revolution had turned out differently? Ignacio Solares, author of La invasion (Yankee Invasion, Scarletta Press and Aliform Publishing, 2009), puts figures like Madero, Carranza, Zapata and Huerta in stories that depart startlingly from the official versions. These kinds of parallel universes (Pancho Villa conquers a town in the US, for example) put the heroes and villians of the Mexican Revolution into some new and unexpected lights.

This Sunday, 15 de noviembre, in Oaxaca at the Auditorio Guelagetza, Los Discipulos are going to open for Café Tacuba. Sorry, my beautiful niece Blanqui, who keeps me apprised of culture going around about town, doesn't know what time.

Event with Ignacio Solares

This past week I spent a few days in the great city of Chicago and participated in an event at Loyola University co-sponsored by its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Consul General of Mexico, that presented Aliform Publishing's newest title, co-published with Scarletta Press, Yankee Invasion. This novel by Mexican author Ignacio Solares recounts the US invasion of Mexico and Mexico City in 1847--highly recommended for those interested in understanding how past history has led to contemporary US/Mexican relations. The next time anyone complains about illegal immigrants from Mexico, remember they didn't cross the border--the border crossed them.

See more about Yankee Invasion at
http://www.aliformgroup.com/
http://www.scarlettapress.com/