Mexican women left behind by husbands who migrate to the United States in search of work were one of the focuses of the documentary "Los Que Se Quedan," or "Those Who Remain," by Carlos Hagerman and Juan Carlos Rulfo, which we've mentioned a number of times here on La Plaza.
In response to those posts, Jared Wilkerson, one of the authors of a recent study on that subject, got in touch with us about the findings he recently made with his colleagues at Brigham Young University.
The study, called "Effects of Husbands’ Migration on Mental Health and Gender Role Ideology of Rural Mexican Women," found that those women generally have a poorer state of mental health than a comparison group. The study attributes this condition largely to the nontraditional gender roles that are forced upon the women because of their husbands' absence.
Read more Wives left behind in Mexico by migrants suffer 'poorer mental health' »
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Cuba's underground reggaeton artists are causing a stir on the Caribbean island, according to this report from Reuters.
Rising star Michael "El Micha" Sierra, 27, records his songs into his neighbour's old computer, and then burns them onto CDs or USB Flash drives and spreads them around town. "With little official support or air time on state-controlled radio, the songs Cuban reggaeton artists record in makeshift studios lined with egg cartons for sound insulation are mostly transmitted though homemade CDs and on computer flash memory sticks.
"That is how the tropical fever of reggaeton is sweeping communist-ruled Cuba, captivating its youth and enraging a cultural establishment alarmed by the vulgarity of some of its lyrics, which include phrases like 'Coge mi tubo' ('Grab my pipe') and 'Metela' ('Stick it in')."
You can watch El Micha letting loose with another reggaeton artist, Pipey, in a video here on YouTube.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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"One of the gentle souls in the movie business is Guillermo del Toro, and I always look forward to my interviews with him," writes Geoff Boucher on our Hero Complex blog.
Boucher wrote about Mexican fiction mastermind Del Toro in today's Calendar section, and an extended version of the article runs on the blog.
Fantasy and horror fans, prepare yourself for the Decade of Del Toro.
On the far side of the globe, in New Zealand, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is now in his seventh month of labor on “The Hobbit,” a $300-million epic that will be told over two films in 2011 and 2012. But you can also find the Guadalajara native on the shelf of your local bookstore with his just-released debut novel, “The Strain,” the opening installment of a vampire trilogy he already has mapped out.
That’s only the beginning. The 44-year-old Del Toro, who was nominated for an Oscar for the dark fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth” and showed his crowd-pleasing sensibilities with the “Hellboy” films, also has plans to reanimate some musty and monstrous literary classics. He plans to make a “Frankenstein” film as well as an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s epic “At the Mountains of Madness,” a project he breathlessly refers to as "my obsession."
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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 We need Luis Peñate, a thinker and a fighter, and others going away to college to come back to L.A. to help solve our many problems, writes Hector Tobar.
"We need Luis and all the other college-bound members of the class of 2009 to come back to Los Angeles one day. We need their brain power to sort out the messes we older generations are leaving them.
"Luis is one of those young people who was gifted to us by El Salvador, a little Central American republic that has lost too many of its brightest and most ambitious people to the United States.
"His mother, a legal U.S. resident, had spent much of her life traveling back and forth between the two countries. When she brought Luis to the United States, at age 11, he was already a precocious reader. He had just read 'The Lord of the Rings' in Spanish."
Read Hector Tobar's complete column.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City Photo: Luis Peñate, second from right, with sister Brenda, left, mother Sonia and father Rogelio. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times
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Remittances from Mexicans living and working in the United States are continuing to fall.
"Money sent home by Mexicans working abroad fell by 19.9 percent in May, the biggest monthly decline on record as the U.S. recession slashed jobs," reports the Associated Press in Business Week.
"Remittances dropped to $1.9 billion from $2.4 billion in May 2008, the central bank said on Wednesday. The amount of money sent home in the first five months of 2009 fell 11.3 percent to $9.2 billion compared with the same period last year.
"Remittances are the second-biggest source of foreign currency after oil exports in Mexico, and their decline has contributed to the country's own economic downturn."
Read the full Business Week report
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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L.A. Now reports:
Angelenos with family in Cuba will have another option for travel today, when a Long Beach-based company kicks off nonstop flights from LAX to Havana.
The five-hour flight, which will run every Tuesday and can accommodate 150 people, takes off from L.A. at 11 a.m. and is the only Cuban flight for Cuba Travel since July 2004, when the Bush administration tightened rules governing travel to Cuba, according to the company.
Since 1962, travel from the U.S. to Cuba has been banned, but Cuban Americans have been allowed to visit family under various policies. Obama repealed the 2004 travel restrictions in April. According to Cuba Travel, 1.5 million Cubans live in the United States. About 55,000 reside in Los Angeles County.
For details, see The Times' Daily Travel & Deal Blog.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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 Five photo negatives of the Cuban revolutionary figure Ernesto "Che" Guevara that went on sale at the Mexican auction house Louis C. Morton over the weekend were withdrawn from the auction after failing to attract a buyer, Milenio newspaper reports.
Mexican students might love the Argentine now credited as one of the most important figures in the Cuban Revolution, alongside Fidel Castro, but it doesn't appear that art and antique buyers feel the same way.
One of the negatives up for auction was an image of Guevara addressing the First Latin American Congress of Youth in 1960.
The bidding for the negatives started at 80,000 pesos (around $6,075) but were withdrawn due to the lack of interest, reports the newspaper.
As we reported in January, when the first part of Steven Soderbergh's film "Che, the Argentine" premiered here, Guevara is popular among the sprawling student population in Mexico City, where he and Castro, then an exiled lawyer, planned the Cuban Revolution over dinner and cigars on July 3, 1955.
The myth and heroic image of Che have replaced a real understanding of the complex man that he was. His face is often seen emblazoned on flags and T-shirts at student protests and commonly evoked as a universal symbol of social struggle.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: Alberto Korda's 1960 photograph of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, not one of the negatives up for auction, has been painted, printed, silk-screened and sketched on nearly every surface imaginable. Credit: Alberto Korda.
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 The time has come to fight hate speech against Latinos as we have against blacks, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Hector Tobar.
I struck a nerve two weeks ago when I suggested that all Americans,
Latinos especially, owe a collective thank you to black people for
their struggles for equality. Recognizing this truth, and
teaching our children that black people fighting for their own freedom
helped free all of us, I argued, can help combat intolerance in
communities where blacks and Latinos live side by side. I got
more than 300 messages [you can see some of the comments on that column here], mostly positive. Dozens of black people thanked
me for "saying what someone ... in the Latino community needed to
say." But others launched into a refrain I hear whenever I write the word "Latino." Read the rest of Tobar's column here. -- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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Though half a world away from Argentina, the shy Finns have a passion for the melancholy music and dance, writes the Christian Science Monitor's Stacy Teicher Khadaroo.
"Finland. A nation of reindeer, saunas, Nokia cellphones, and its own special version of ... tango?
"Yes. It seems the melancholic music is a perfect match for the typical Finnish soul. 'It's a little bit sad, and it's beautiful,' a woman tells me at a dimly lit Helsinki restaurant that regularly hosts dances. Paradoxically, when she moves to these sad melodies, she feels happy. (She didn't want to be named, her reason being another national trait: shyness.)
"When Finns first laid their eyes on performances of the Argentine tango nearly 100 years ago, they latched on and soon made it their own. By the 1930s, songwriters were penning original Finnish lyrics, setting the stories in their own snowy landscape."
Read more about the Finnish passion for Tango here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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"Los Que Se Quedan" (Those Who Remain), a film made by Mexican directors Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman, gets another look, this time from Patrick J. McDonnell, due to its presence at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
"Few topics inflame political passions like immigration, but don't expect polemics from 'Los Que Se Quedan' (Those Who Remain), a Mexican documentary screening Saturday evening at the Los Angeles Film Festival in Westwood, writes McDonnell here. "The film examines the phenomenon of those left behind in the home countries, in this case the countless families enduring the emptiness and melancholy that inevitably follows the departure of loved ones for el norte." You may remember our video and report about the film from earlier this year, when it was showing at the Guadalajara Film Festival in Mexico and scooped the prize for best Mexican documentary. You can watch an interview with the two directors in the video above.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Video by Deborah Bonello
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The dangers for journalists in Latin America continue, and the latest report is about Guatemala.
Reporters, media directors and human rights defenders say the greatest risk for journalists is exposure to violence combined with a lack of protection and a lack of commitment to investigate crimes against them, Inter Press Service and Cerigua report.
"It is definitely dangerous to work as a journalist in Guatemala," radio reporter María Teresa López tells Inter Press Service. Journalists outside the capital are especially vulnerable, she says, because "everyone knows us and knows what we’re doing."
The blog of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reports that "the prosecutor's office for crimes against journalists took legal action on only one of the 36 complaints it received in 2008. But Walter Juárez of the Guatemalan Journalists Assn. says media owners share the responsibility. They "make the reporters stick their necks out by forcing them to sign their stories, while failing to do anything" to protect them, he says.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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The reunion of Aleida Gallangos with her long-lost brother Lucio is a long and painful story. The two siblings were separated in Mexico after their parents and uncle were "disappeared" during the country's dirty war in the 1970s.
The Times' Richard Boudreaux reported in January 2005: "In a rare story of closure to the conflict, Gallangos traced her brother to Washington, D.C., found him living under the name Juan Carlos Hernandez, and convinced him of his identity, making the immigrant construction worker the first of Mexico's more than 500 desaparecidos, the disappeared ones, to be found alive since the "dirty war."
Aleida's search for and reunion with her brother was documented by the filmmaker Christiane Burkhard over a series of years. The result of that project -- the documentary "Tracing Aleida" -- is showing in theaters across Mexico and is out on DVD in the United States.
We visited the German director in her Mexico City home to talk about the process of making the film.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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The San Francisco Chronicle has some advice for honeymooners planning a trip to Mexico, and has listed what it thinks are the top 10 places for the recently wed to hang out and celebrate.
Quintana Roo state's Riviera Maya and the Yucatan, both on the Caribbean coast, have the most places on the list, but Nayarit, Jalisco and Michoacan states also get a mention.
Check the list here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Ruins in Tulum, in Quintana Roo state, overlook incandescent blue seas. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.
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An anti-gang activist known nationally in the United States was arrested Wednesday on federal racketeering and conspiracy charges stemming from his alleged involvement in one of the most violent street gangs in the U.S., Scott Glover and Richard Winton report.
Alex Sanchez, executive director of Homies Unidos, a gang-intervention nonprofit with offices in Los Angeles and El Salvador, was among two dozen alleged members or associates of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, also known as MS-13, charged in a 66-page indictment that was unsealed Wednesday.
The defendants, with monikers such as Creeper, Grinch, Pain and Tears, were involved in a variety of crimes, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion and drug trafficking, over a 15-year period, the indictment alleges. Among the alleged crimes was a plot to kill a Los Angeles Police Department detective who specialized in investigating the gang, authorities said. Gang members had gone as far as choosing a handgun with which to kill Det. Frank Flores, authorities allege, but police thwarted the plot.
Read more of the report here.
Click here to see more recent posts on the Mara Salvatrucha gang.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Alex Sanchez is executive director of Homies Unidos, a gang-intervention nonprofit group. Credit: Los Angeles Times.
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Coverage of the challenges for journalists working in Latin America continues today on La Plaza. Mike O'Connor, representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists here in Mexico, filed the following report about journalists working in the northern border town of Ciudad Juarez (see a December dispatch from Mexico correspondent Ken Ellingwood on the violence gripping the city): For the press, Ciudad Juarez is among the most dangerous cities in one of the deadliest countries in the world. CPJ research shows that 27 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, at least 10 in direct reprisal for their work, and that seven more have disappeared. In November, veteran police reporter Armando Rodriguez was shot dead in front of his home in Ciudad Juarez. State investigators told CPJ they have identified drug cartel members as suspects in the killing, but federal authorities in charge of the case have not acted on the information. The federal attorney general’s office declined comment on the status of its probe.
For more recent posts on the dangers journalists face in Mexico, go here, here and here.
Photo: Schoolboys, in foreground, look at the body of a shooting victim in a playground in Satelite, a working-class section of east Ciudad Juarez. The area is notorious for drug dealing. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times. See more photos here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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 Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed a marginal event -- Henry Ford's failed attempt to establish a gigantic agricultural-industrial complex in the heart of Brazil's Amazon Basin -- and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry's contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism.
For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of a blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told.
"Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City" is precisely that -- a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist's sense of pace and an eye for character. It's a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.
Read the rest of Tim Rutten's review of Greg Grandin's book Fordlandia.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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Journalism students, professionals and union members protested Monday in several parts of Brazil against the Supreme Court's ruling to eliminate the degree requirement for journalists, reports the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas blog.
Demonstrations occurred in the cities of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Aracaju, Caxias do Sul, Brasília and Teresina, among others, according to the report. (See a map of the protest sites.)
In Rio, the demonstrators, dressed in black and wearing clown noses, marched to the headquarters of the Brazilian Press Association, O Globo reported. -- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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A photo gallery on the Los Angeles Times website follows Gustavo Dudamel, the 28-year-old Venezuelan incoming music director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ending his second season as the Gothenburg Symphony's music director last month.
Dudamel will take up his new role in Los Angeles in October.
The Venezuelan conductor is the most illustrious graduate of El Sistema, or the System, Venezuela's 34-year-old music tuition program that many regard as a model not only for music instruction but for helping children develop into productive, responsible citizens.
You can watch below a video shot by Reed Johnson last year of El Sistema in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.
Read more Photo gallery: Gustavo Dudamel's learning curve »
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 Practical dreamers are creating a diverse community -- nurturing gardens, opening a business, extending goodwill and respect, writes columnist Hector Tobar.
Jose Luna doesn't see the blight around him in his neighborhood in Historic South-Central. That old apartment building with the shuttered windows? Not a problem. The graffiti on the sidewalk? He's too busy building the home of his dreams to notice.
He's not one to brag, so I'll do it for him. Luna, a garment worker, has created a gorgeous front garden, by far the best-looking one on his block of Woodlawn Avenue.
The gnarled columns of an old cactus are the centerpiece. Rose bushes and begonias provide a flash of color. And in one corner there's a bird of paradise that has a sentimental little story attached to it.
For Luna, a 42-year-old native of Mexico, owning a home is the proudest accomplishment of three decades in the United States. I look at his home and garden and see something more.
Read on here.
Image: Garment worker Jose Luna has been in the U.S. for 30 years. He has transformed the home and property he bought in South-Central not long after the 1992 riots. Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times.
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The 31st annual gay pride march took place in Mexico City on Saturday afternoon, starting at the Angel of Independence on Paseo de la Reforma and ending in the Zocalo, or grand central plaza.
Around 350,000 people attended, according to La Jornada newspaper, many urging tolerance and an end to discrimination against homosexuals, lesbians, transvestites, bisexuals and transsexuals.
You can see images from the march above, in a video made by the Reforma newspaper.
Click here for a recent article by McClatchy newspapers on being gay in Mexico City.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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