free the USA, repeal the HSA
A video for Instagram: The New Republic has a fine recap. File under: “Little Green Men“
Category: latin america
cuba, mexico
latines
Latines is a gender neutral term that is pronounced as it’s written, in both English and Spanish. The “e” can also be used to make other nouns gender neut...
that migrant life
When you’re a migrant, be it a refugee or an immigrant, you’re forever an outsider. You’re no longer fully of the culture you left and yo...
the normal
I just scanned the most recent issue of “14 y medio”, a banned / clandestine news digest from Cuba. You won’t be surprised that the stories are about struggle. ...
Spanishes
Free advice, actually worth a lot. I’ve been married to a Mexican for almost 20 years and I’ve slowly learned that Mexicans communicate in a way tha...
Pleasure and power
Casamigos, Doritos marketing collateral, 2018 A consistent theme in the marketing of Mexico’s grastronomic culture is the erasure of Mexicans. When Mexica...
a gxg rule, unintended consequences
gender fluidity is top of mind. it’s been neglected. it’s revolutionary. so every discussion of people from latin america must recognize gender flui...
Legal or illegal, capital or labor
“You’ll get beautiful coverage, believe me, and the Mexicans will pay for it.” – Jeet Heer This tweet is comedy because “and the Mexicans will...
Characters Matter
If you’re a young Hispanic interested in a career in acting, seeing a Hispanic actor on the screen could validate your professional interest. If you’...
Equeibol
You know it’s 2016 when these are just a few of your options to represent… from L to R: Santa Cruz, Powell-Peralta, Chocolate in the long tradition of Elg...
“Se Vale Soñar” by Juan Cierro
My own hasty translation of the lyrics: I wish that when it rained instead of water, cocaine fell that beer would run along with tequila through the rivers and ...
Boba is Yuca
Before I could talk, I was eating yuca. In the way that Americans upgrade a fast food meal by adding fries, Cubans add yuca. It’s cheap, filling and thus ...
La cultura circula
Karan Mahajan: Shakespeare remixed Boccaccio. Dostoevsky loved Dickens. Marquez said, “Graham Greene taught me how to decipher the tropics.” Mohandas Gandhi, a ...
A movie about the “war on drugs”
At the end of the excellent movie Sicario, Benicio del Toro puts a gun to Emily Blunt’s face and tells her that she should move to a small town where the ...
more on Mexican restaurants; planting a cactus in too small a pot
A few weeks ago I asked why Mexican restaurants are so often decorated like 19th century ranch homes when Mexico is a living, modern culture. Such decor perpetu...
should Mexican restaurants always be decorated like 19th century ranch homes?
Near our home is a newish Mexican restaurant that bills itself as a “modern Mexican delicatessen.” Like many Mexican restaurants, it is decorated as...
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About a year of tweets, archived here for posterity.
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure...
A limited caribbean confederation flag
An obvious start. The flags of Cuba and Puerto Rico combined. previously: The British Isles became the United Kingdom. What might the Caribbean islands have bee...
The British Isles became the United Kingdom. What might the Caribbean islands have been?
Yesterday it occurred to me: what if Puerto Rico and Cuba had federated long ago? This morning, while measuring the nautical distance between their nearest port...
Imagining the German thriller The Tunnel as if it were set in Baja California.
It’s hard to believe that I was born at a time when the city of Berlin was divided in the middle by a militarized border wall. The movie The Tunnel goes a...