La Cucaracha (The Cockroach), one of Mexico’s best known corridos, is a comic, satirical song, with infinite possibilities for creative verses. The typical chorus is: La cucaracha, la cucaracha Ya no puede caminar Porque no tiene, porque le falta Marihuana que fumar. Which translates into English as The cockroach, the cockroach Can not walk anymore Because […]
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Colonial Durango — Victoria de Durango, Durango — staged many of Mexico’s most important historical events. Historic figures, including Guadalupe Victoria, Francisco Gómez Palacio, José María Patoni, José Ceballos, Domingo Arrieta León, Francisco “Pancho” Villa, and Francisco Castillo Nájera carried out their duties within and among the city’s colonial buildings. Many of the city’s important […]
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Where are people and stories brought together from far-flung places around the globe? One place is MexConnect.com. Several years ago my story about a quest for art treasures in Chihuahua was published here. I traveled there from New York with my daughter Elise to find artworks that were painted by my grandfather, the artist Ettore Serbaroli (1881 […]
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You might say that it all began on an ordinary day in New York – the treasure hunt, that is. My 23 year old daughter Elise was just back from Spain where she had been teaching English to grade school students. One quiet evening, as we sat together at home, I showed her four large […]
Continue ReadingIt is an ancient principle of politics that a revolution devours its children. Danton and Robespierre began as rebel leaders against France’s ancien régime but Robespierre ended by cutting off Danton’s head — and then being separated from his own. Kerensky led the bourgeois revolution that overthrew the Tsar — only to be replaced by […]
Continue ReadingRevolution is the ultimate test for survival of the fittest. In times of stormy social change, intense competition is generated among leaders of forces seeking that change and, inevitably, one man emerges alone at the top. Sometimes this process is peaceful but that is the exception rather than the rule. By the time Napoleon assumed […]
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A great ideological struggle is never a day at the beach. Whether its matrix is race, nationality or economic inequality, the fight of the oppressed against the oppressor is always a somber affair. Nobody realized this better than José Clemente Orozco. Born at a time when Mexico was ruled by a seemingly revolution-proof dictator, Orozco […]
Continue ReadingWith the possible exception of André Malraux, no individual associated with the arts has been involved in direct political action more than David Alfaro Siqueiros. Student agitator, soldier, leader of an assassination squad — Siqueiros was all of those things. Yet he is also considered one the artistic masters of the twentieth century, a member […]
Continue ReadingFew movements have ever started out less auspiciously than Francisco Madero’s rebellion against Porfirio Diaz, the man who had held Mexico in an iron grip for 35 years. The maderista movement’s unpromising start had a great deal to do with the background and personality of its founder. Where revolutionary leaders are usually disaffected middle-class intellectuals like Lenin and Robespierre or […]
Continue ReadingWhere does one draw the line between iconoclastic satire and cynicism? It is commonly said that the purpose of satire is correction and this seems as useful an explanation as any. No matter how brutally a target is lampooned, the satirist usually has a vision of a better world created through a necessary process of […]
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