RODRIGO AND GABRIELA

Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero met as teenagers at La Casa de Cultura (House of Culture) in Mexico City. For a long time they played rough clubs at night, and worked day jobs -- Gabriela taught Metallica licks to kids, and Rodrigo worked at a TV station -- and somehow found time to rehearse five hours a day. They finally traveled to Europe and busked for change in Copenhagen, Barcelona, and sub-zero Denmark. They didn't really take off until Dublin, where the fast-picking Mexicans squeezed aside the usual pop music warhorses and topped the charts, earning a well-deserved international following. According to a friend who saw them a couple days ago, they were the best musicians at Sasquatch Music Festival on the Columbia Gorge.

This song is called "Diablo Rojo" (Red Devil).

HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!

Cinco de Mayo (5th of May) is not Mexico's Independence Day, as many in the USA believe. That would be September 16th. The celebration of Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla in 1862, when the Mexicans, led by General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin, defeated the French. It wasn't the end of the French in Mexico, however. They went on to occupy Mexico City the following year and install Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico -- but were finally ousted in 1867.


In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is mostly a regional holiday celebrated in Puebla, but in the United States it's a day of Mexican pride, and an excuse to push Margaritas and guacamole to gringos. As for Margaritas -- the original was supposedly created in Acapulco in 1948. The recipe is pretty basic, but man can people screw it up:

Margarita

1 oz fresh lime juice
1 dash of salt
1 oz Cointreau (or Triple Sec)
2 oz Tequila
ice

Forget those frothy green Slurpees in Americanized Mexican restaurants. You know the places -- where the food is a bland soupy brown for American tastes, and the walls are festooned with all the Mexican cliches, sombreros and bullfight posters, and maybe Speedy Gonzalez. A real Margarita is not blended, and certainly not made from those horrible lime mixes. Not surprisingly, the best Margaritas I've tasted were in Mexico. The worst -- by far -- were in Vancouver, British Columbia, and looked and tasted like anti-freeze. They also had the worst Nachos, which consisted of old corn chips, canned beans, a few shreds of yellow cheese, and the bad parts of a withered tomato. I should have ordered Canadian food, I guess.

In this age of xenophobia and anti-immigrant "speechifying" by politicians hungry for votes, it's good to look at Mexico as more than a theme park, a vacationland, and a source of cheap labor. Mexico is so much more, especially away from the border towns and resorts and the slab tourist hotels on the coasts. The clash of Europeans and native peoples has created a deep and varied culture. The clash between the rich and poor continues, as exemplified by the Zapatista movement.

Here is a clip from Lonely Planet, where a traveler speaks with some Zapatistas (members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or ESLN), an armed indigenous group based in Chiapas, one of the poorest states in Mexico. The traveler and the revolutionaries have an interesting meeting.


For more on the Zapatistas, click here.

INTO THE MYSTIC

Back in 1978, I hitchhiked from the Pacific Northwest down the coastline into Mexico. I was just twenty-two, ready for adventure and romance, finally free from school and family and society and my own doubting mind. That's how I felt, anyway. I stayed in Mexico several months. I learned enough language to get by, made some friends, played music, climbed pyramids, drank tequila on ancient cobblestone streets, and pondered the great questions well into the wee hours with all the vigor of a twenty-two year old. My senses were wide open. I fell in love with the place -- the mountains, the towns, the music, the people. I fell in love with a girl, too, and thought that might last a while but things change quickly at that age. One night, near the end of my stay (I must have known on some level it was time to go home) I found myself wide awake in San Miguel, tinkering with an old black radio.

The radio was a piece of crap, and I fiddled with the controls and adjusted the antenna and scanned past the usual heartbreaking Norteno laments, wedding polkas, the off-key brass of mariachis, until I finally found something familiar - faint at first, then louder, coming across the Gulf from some mega-tower in Louisiana. I can't convey the feeling, sitting there alone at the kitchen table in the middle of the night. It wasn't exactly homesickness, and it wasn't sadness, but more like a feeling of distance. Great distance, and time. The song played clearly and faded away. Van Morrison, Into the Mystic.