Lesley Tellez

Election day in Mexico: The PRI returns

July 6, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

I don’t know much about Mexican politics, but I’m puzzled by the PRI’s big win in yesterday’s elections. They won five of the six governorships up for grabs (the state of Sonora is still in dispute), and they now control the Chamber of Deputies, which is the lower house of Mexican Congress.

Does anyone else think this is weird?

The PRI ruled Mexico with an iron grip for 70 years. To keep themselves in power, they did some pretty atrocious things: stuff ballot boxes, create fake voter lists, ignore complaints from opposition parties… not to mention they were the party in power during the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco, in which armed soldiers killed hundreds of innocent people. Well, actually, no one knows the real number of people who were killed, because the PRI government at the time refused to release any numbers. And PRI-controlled newspapers refused to report the true story.

This is the party that, in 1988, pretty much stole the presidential election from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and unplugged computers from the wall to prevent opposition parties from seeing the true election results, before the PRI had fiddled with them. How do I know all this? I’m reading Opening Mexico, a fascinating/depressing look at 20th century Mexican politics. It’s written by two Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporters who were former correspondents in Mexico City.

Really: How can this party have any type of majority power again? The NYT and BBC say the Mexican people were fed up with the drug war and shrinking economy and wanted a change. Maybe voters really believed the PRI’s new slogan — “The PRI of Today: Proven Experience. New attitude.”

On a sad note — sad in my opinion — nearly six percent of voters across the country cast a “null” vote, meaning they didn’t vote for anyone at all, in protest of Mexico’s political machine. In Mexico City, this figure was as high was 11 percent. This strikes me as crazy. In a country where the first true democratic election happened in 2000, people are now refusing to exercise their democratic right and choose a leader?

No entiendo.

Land lines and wrong numbers

July 3, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

For some reason, having a home phone line is considered super important in Mexico. When we signed up for cell phone accounts, we had to provide two references, and both people had to have home phones. When I went to the doctor’s office last month, they would not accept my cell phone number on the paperwork. “Don’t you have a home number you can put instead?” the receptionist asked me. I had to look it up on my cell phone because I can never remember it.

The crazy thing is, 99 percent of the time when my home phone line rings, it’s not for me. But I never know immediately, because no one ever identifies themselves, and you have to do this whole polite “buenos días” dance at the beginning.

This is what happened when my phone rang five minutes ago. It’s muy típico.

Me: Bueno.
Woman’s voice: Buenos días.
Me: Buenos días.
Woman: Hi, yes, can you please connect me to Mr. Edgar Rodriguez?
Me: You have the wrong number.
Woman: I’m sorry, to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?
Me: I’m sorry, but whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?
Woman: This is Banamex. Do you currently have a bank account with Banamex, or another bank?
Me: I have a bank account already.
Woman: Bueno, hasta–
Me: [click]

All these wrong-number callers are actually starting to make me a little loopy. When one lady called a few weeks ago and asked for Juan Valdarrama or something like that, I said: “Valdarrama?” And she said, “Sí.” Sounding all hopeful. I said: “Oh no, you’ve got the wrong number.” And then I laughed to myself. She kind of sputtered — “I have… I have..?” Then she hung up.

Maybe this means I need a hobby.

Channeling my inner Zumba hip-hop dancer

June 30, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

If I could be anything in the whole wide world, skills be damned, I’d write books and work from home. But after that, I’d be a dancer. On tour with some famous singer. With outfits that twirled when I spun around.

Seriously: I love dancing. Love, love it.

This is a recent thing for me. I never took dance classes as a kid — I was more into soccer and track and cross country — but last year in Dallas, I took a burlesque dancing class and had a fantastic time. A few months later I took an aerobics class that mixed elements of hip-hop and adored that, too. My dance-love really cemented a few weeks ago, though, when I started going to hip-hop and Zumba classes at the gym a few doors down.

The teacher, an Afro-Latina woman with braids, is ripped. She hops in the air like she has springs in her shoes. (It’s probably her abs of steel.) She yells out the counts in this high-pitched, militarist voice: “Unooooo! Doooooos! Treeeeees!” And we all flop around and try to follow her.

I discovered that I’m not that bad. My arms and hips can actually move in the way I want them to. Moreover, it’s actually fun to kick my feet out in a pseudo-attempt at a quebradita dance, and to pitch my hips left and right in a merengue. (I think this is my inner Jennifer Grey coming out.) Plus it’s an amazing workout. By the end of the class, I’m ready to collapse onto my sofa with a big glass of water. But proudly.

Last week’s hip-hop class was the most fun yet. We learned a real routine — which called for flinging ourselves delicately on the floor! — and we performed it to some late-nineties pop song. (Teach needs help selecting the hip-hop tunes.) She’d scrutinize each of us as the music played, making sure we hit the steps correctly. This sounds cheesy, but I felt like I was rehearsing for a show or something, and that maybe in some alternate universe I was a real dancer. I’d be the girl who got started late in life, who always showed up to class in the same ratty tennis shoes; she’d be the critical teacher who expected the best from her students, and pounded a cane on the floor.

Of course none of that will ever happen, first of all because she doesn’t have a cane. And my tennis shoes aren’t that bad. Still, it’s nice to dream while I’m huffing and puffing.

The next class is tomorrow. I think I will get some new shoes, because my old ones haven’t been so easy on my knees. The last thing I want to do is start talking glucosamine-chondroitin just because I wanna dance.

The complicated world of Mexican banking

June 30, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

One of the strange things about banking in Mexico is the popularity of bank transfers. Meaning, instead of writing a check, you go to the bank and deposit the money directly into someone else’s account. This is how I paid the carpenter, when we got shelves installed in the kitchen. It’s also how we pay our rent and our bills.

Usually I don’t mind the “transferencias bancarias,” as they’re called, but sometimes it can get annoying. Last month, when I wanted to attend a Mexican wine dinner at a cooking school south of town, they would only confirm my reservation if I deposited the fee in their bank account first. (It’s like, Dude umm… what if I had to cancel at the last minute?) I wrote down the account number wrong and then I was so frustrated I didn’t want to go anymore. Then I got a stomach bacteria, so I couldn’t have gone anyway.

Had to stop by Banamex this morning to deposit money into the American Benevolent Society’s account. They’re throwing a Fourth of July party this weekend with beer and hot dogs and potato salad, so of course you know we’re going. Unfortunately, Banamex kind of stresses me out. The lines are always long, and they’ve got tons of windows, and I never know which section I’m supposed to go to.

Today I walked up to a little machine and pressed a button, which spit out a number. But the number-display screen wasn’t working, so they had a man in a Banamex uniform calling them out. (I thought: In Mexico, you really get paid to be the number-shouter-outer?) He was on 135 when I walked in; I had 166. Tried to pull out my newspaper and read, but the guy called them out rapid-fire, so you really had to pay attention.

“155!” he’d bark.

And then someone would jump up and rush to the window. I wondered how invalids were supposed to make bank transfers here. It’d be impossible.

After about 10 minutes it was finally my turn, and I deposited the money fine. (Deep, heaving sigh of relief.) The teller printed me a receipt and stamped the back. I have to fax that to the ABS, so they know I’ve paid.

On a related banking note, I will soon have my own Mexican ATM card. Not at Banamex — at Ixe, where the lines are much shorter. We had to make a special request since I’m not the principal name on the account. (I am the co-principal, which is much, much different.) Crayton had to sign the form authorizing me to receive my own card. Luckily he left the “monthly allowance” part blank.

Thanks, honey.

Moody, magical Patzcuaro Michoacan

June 29, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

This sounds kinda dorky, but one of my secret pleasures in life is contemplating the clouds. (I’m actually a wee bit of a closet hippie.) When I lived in Boston, I couldn’t get over how fast the clouds moved. They were like trains, pushed this way and that by the wind.

In Patzcuaro during the rainy season — which is now — the clouds are so amazingly beautiful, they’re like people, almost. They’re grayish and menacing, and they hover over the mountains as if to say, “We all know who’s really in charge here.”

In my hierarchy of Patzcuaro beauty, the clouds come first; then the mountains, then the lakes, and then maybe the cornstalks that grow all over the side of the road. And then maybe the amazing loaves of crusty, caramel-brown bread that sit in the bakeries.

(Can you tell she’s in love?)

We jetted off to Patzcuaro just for a night this weekend. It was my second visit there, and thankfully I didn’t have a stomach bacteria this time. Joy and her husband invited us — they’d visited Patzcuaro a few weeks ago, and were going back to buy a copper vase they’d seen in Santa Clara del Cobre, which sells all sorts of great copper handicrafts.

In Patzcuaro, we stayed at the Hotel Ixhi, which was nice even if the staff was a little disorganized. The views there couldn’t be beat:

We wandered around Patzcuaro’s historic Centro for a few hours, and had wine on Ixhi’s porch as the sun went down. On Sunday morning we drove to Santa Clara del Cobre, and I fought the urge to buy a copper sink. Although I really really want one in my house someday.

Sweetbread for sale in Patzcuaro's Plaza Grande

A street in Santa Clara del Cobre

A stall from Patzcuaro's Sunday market

Crayton and I also bought a piece of art from La Mano Grafica, a cool gallery next to the Basilica. It’s a print from Artemio Rodriguez, a Michoacan native who spent some time in L.A. (His exhibition space is in Patzcuaro.) Didn’t realize this until I got home, but he’s the same artist who did the woodcuts for Dagoberto Gilb’s book Woodcuts of Women, which is one of my favorite books ever.

We drove through a horrible rainstorm on the way back, but overall, it was a perfect weekend trip.

Still thinking about those clouds…

The case of the mangled sleeve

June 26, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Since we’ve moved here, four of Crayton’s dress shirts have developed a hole in the right elbow. Not a tiny hole, either — more like messy, shredded tear, as if someone took a pair of scissors and stabbed the thing. Or, like, yanked on the fabric with his teeth. What’s weird is that even though the hole is so severe, the shirts are perfectly fine otherwise. No missing buttons or threads hanging off.

We’ve both been perplexed by this — and annoyed, because two of the shirts were Brooks Brothers. So C went to work and asked his male co-workers if they had the same problem. Turns out they did. Tear on the sleeve, in pretty much the same spot. With one guy, it happened after he took the shirt to get dry cleaned.

What is going on here? Why does Mexico eat dress shirts? And how do you say “torn dress shirt sleeve” in Spanish, so that I can freaking google this and try to find some answers?

Last night I had some folks over for dinner. With all the men there having been smote by the Shirt Sleeve God, we must have talked about this for 20 minutes. Among the theories tossed around: Maybe Mexican soap is too strong. Maybe it’s the washing machine. (This is my guess, because I washed Crayton’s shirts in Dallas and never ran into this problem.) Maybe it’s the dryer. Maybe it’s the dry cleaning solution, or whatever they use to dry clean things here.

In either case, we have to go buy Crayton some more shirts, because he doesn’t have much left to wear. Luckily there are lots of men’s dress-shirt stores in the area. An unusually high number, actually…. hmmm. Conspiracy?

Better go continue my googling in Spanish. If anyone out there has solved this problem, please enlighten me.

Lookin’ pretty in a foreign country

June 24, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Because I’m girlie and fairly princessy, and maybe just a teensy bit vain, I worried a bit before I got here about whether I’d be able to access certain quality beauty services. Specifically: a good hairstylist, an aesthetician and a fungus-free place to get pedicures.

Thankfully, I’ve found an aesthetician whom I adore. (Whew! So totally key when you’re living in a country with fabulous beaches, and you desire to visit places like Brazil.) I found a place to get pedicures, where the staff serves hot tea while they scrub your feet. And today, I think — and I hope I’m not jinxing myself — I finally found a place to get my haircut.

It’s kind of hilarious, actually. The shop is called “Robin by Enrique Bricker” and it’s one of those super trendy places where the staff is young, pierced, tattooed, wearing MC Hammer pants with a Hello Kitty tank top, etc. They don’t take appointments. Instead you show up whenever and wait in line. On weekends, the line stretches outside the store. But during the week, if you don’t have a job and you’re really supposed to be writing freelance stories but are instead procrastinating, you can show up and there’s usually no one there.

So I went today. It was technically my second visit. On my first visit, the stylist gave me horrible spiky bangs, but I’d only paid 200 pesos and I was happy with the rest of the haircut. It was worth another roll of the dice.

This time, I gave my name to the Hammer-Panted Hello Kitty receptionist and she referred me to a woman named Aline. Aline was stick-thin, wore ankle boots, leggings and a baby-doll top. She also had very straight, thick bangs. We chit-chatted a bit about the style I wanted and she asked me where I was from. I told her I’d moved here with my husband. She said, “You’re married? You look so young.” The phrase she used was “bien chava.”

From that point on, I loved Aline.

She listened to my thoughts about my bangs, and snipped quickly, taking off entire sheaths of my hair with just a few flicks of the scissors. She didn’t exactly cut the length — more like she sucked out the volume. I loved this. (The spiky-bangs lady did it too, by the way.) My whole life, hairstylists have wailed at me, “You have so much hair!” But in Mexico, they just snip y ya. They know how to tame thick hair. Best of all, I now have hair that I can wrap four times — not two! — with a ponytail holder.

Anyway, Aline finished cutting and got out the flat iron. She pressed, and steamed. Fifteen minutes later I had a sleek cap of layered hair that I didn’t recognize. I looked…. Mexican. Like your average bien-chava girl walking down the street.

“I feel like I should be going to a club,” I told her.

She laughed. “Go! Take advantage of it!”

So here I am at home with my soft, thin hair. Not going to a club tonight, but I may go grab a drink at the Mexpat. If you don’t recognize me, I’ll understand.

One of Mexico’s “hottest girls” is only 14

June 23, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Just when I was getting semi-used to how differently women are viewed here — they’re valued more for being mothers than workers, and chastity is prized even as many professional women here walk around in miniskirts, tacones and cleavage-bearing shirts — Quien magazine, a fluffy but respected publication in town (billionaire Carlos Slim was on a recent cover) has gone and put a 14-year-old telenovela star Danna Paola on its cover, announcing her at the top of its list of “beautiful girls.”

All the other women featured in the story are in their 20s.

As you can see above, Paola is wearing a bikini and a sexy expression, which is creepy and disturbing. Even worse is the video the accompanies the story, which has leering camera angles and moaning-ecstasy sound effects.

Executives at Televisa, which sponsors Paola’s show, Atrevete a Soñar, are reportedly scandalized by the magazine cover and are thinking about canceling her contract, El Universal says. Other websites are reporting that Televisa is demanding that Quien magazine turn over the photos. Also: Where were the girl’s parents?

Quien, for its own part, is portraying the uproar as a bunch of rumors, and Televisa as an overbearing company that’s squashing the success of a up-and-coming star. Paola felt very comfortable during the shoot, a story posted today on Quien’s website says.

I don’t pretend to know how hard it is to be a parent, let alone a showbiz parent, but what ever happened to the idea of teenage girls simply being teenage girls, and not sexualized creatures? In the U.S., a lot of the hot teen starlets right now are admired for their sweetness and innocence. (Unlike the Lohan era of five years ago.) Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez, for example, have never been photographed stumbling out of a club or flashing their underwear at the paparazzi, and Selena was just on the cover of Teen Vogue. Not that I’m advocating for them to have perfect lives, but it’s refreshing to see them acting their age. Can you imagine the uproar if either one of them appeared in bathing suits and sexy expressions on the cover of a U.S. magazine?

I’m getting more worked up about this as I write, so maybe I should just stop here and go take some deep breaths.

Post Vallarta zen

June 22, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

We spent the weekend in Puerto Vallarta and didn’t travel much beyond our hotel complex. We had the ocean right at our front door, and an Oxxo convenience store just a few blocks away, which sold salty snacks and elusive-in-Mexico-City Coors Light. Sitting in our balcony jacuzzi and sipping a Coors… life was just about perfect at that moment.

We stayed at the Playa Hotel Conchas Chinas, an older, charming spot on the south side of PV. All the 19 rooms there have ocean views, and they’ve got two restaurants and a small beach area. On Saturday after breakfast, we plopped ourselves under a palapa, ordered a bucket of beers (it was two-for-one!) and read and listened to the waves. The only vendors were quiet men walking around with skewers of fish and shrimp, and they only stopped if you flagged them down. Of course I did — had to try the shrimp doused in lime and hot sauce.

Even though Mexico City is less than two hours away by plane, the place felt much closer to California. We heard a lot of California accents, saw lots of tanned college guys in Hollister T-shirts and flip-flops, and Audrina Patridge-y girls in huge sunglasses and smocked coverups. Flour tortillas, not corn, came with food, which I was lukewarm about. On Sunday we ate real nachos — also hard to find in Mexico City — at a bar called Andale, whose logo was a Mexican in a sombero sitting next to a donkey. The waiter kept asking random people who walked by, “Ready for lunch, amigos?”

Overall, what really struck me about Puerto Vallarta was the amount of money there — or at least in Nuevo Vallarta, the area near the airport. In the taxi heading to our hotel, American-style strip malls lined the avenue, and high-rise hotels and condo towers were grouped along the shore. One billboard advertised “the new luxury beachfront address” next to a photo of a new condo development. We also sped by the most gigantic Liverpools department store ever, at the Galerias Vallarta mall. It was practically the size of Dallas City Hall.

Of course, at my insistence, we did take advantage of the upper-class scene — all that money means PV has some fabulous restaurants. We went to a place called Trio on Saturday night for fresh Mediterranean food. Everything was delicious: homemade bread and garlic butter, sauteed calamari in a spicy tomato broth, homemade ricotta ravioli, the seafood couscous with chunks of marlin, octopus and shrimp…

I didn’t want to leave, but it was kind of nice to come back to cool, rainy weather in Mexico City. Puerto Vallarta felt like a sauna.

A few more pictures from our trip:

Under a palapa on Playa Conchas Chinas

Chilled Pacifico, anyone?

Fresh caught lobsters for sale on the beach.

The view while eating breakfast on Sunday morning. We saw sea lions.

Attack of the mosquitoes, part deux

June 19, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Last night, somewhere around 4 a.m….

Me, envying how Crayton can sleep with half his body outside the covers, while mine has been tucked inside a sweaty, hot sheet cocoon and yet still gobbled up by mosquitoes: “Why don’t the moquitoes bite you?”

Him, not opening his eyes: “Did you put on your bug spray?”

Me, pathetically: “It smells.”

This reminds me of an exchange from It Happened One Night, one of my favorite old movies. Claudette Colbert plays a rich, spoiled heiress on the lam from her father; Clark Gable is a salty newspaperman in search of a story. They end up sleeping in a barn one night while running from the cops. “I’m hungry,” she huffs. “Eat a carrot,” he offers. “Noo,” she whines. That’s me. I’m the carrot-girl.

Now that the bugs have bitten me on my lower back, ankle, earlobe, and cheekbone in one night, it is time to stop whining and do something about this.

I am breaking out the Vicks Vaporub. Lola says it works.

I’ll start the new treatment after I get back from Puerto Vallarta this weekend, though. Something tells me that crawling into bed slathered in eucalyptus-and-menthol ointment would kind of put a dent in the whole “romantic weekend alone with hubby.”

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