Cars inspire Mexican artist's show with a green message

Mexican visual artist Betsabee Romero used cars to create installations for “A vuelta de rueda (Driving slowly),” an outdoor exhibition in Mexico City that has a decidedly green feel to it.

Romero's installations in the Atrio de San Francisco, an open-air plaza in the heart of downtown, include an old VW combi covered in green plants and a car coated with traditional Mexican tiles.

Watch the artist explain the motives behind her work in the video above.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Video: Deborah Bonello

Review: 'Crossing Over' tackles immigration -- badly

Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan reviews a new movie, "Crossing Over," that deals with the issue of immigration.

"Crossing Over" will make you weep, but not for the reasons its makers intended. Forced, heavy-handed and overdone, it's a pretend serious film that offers crass manipulation in the place where honesty is supposed to be, writes Turan. Read the full review here.

And for more about immigration in the movies, see this report from last year by Reed Johnson.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Jose Luis Cuevas marks 75th birthday with exhibition in Monterrey

Jose Luis Cuevas, the modern Mexican painter and sculptor who celebrates his 75th birthday this week, opened a show in the city of Monterrey's Pinacoteca de Nuevo León gallery Tuesday.

The exhibition, called "Jose Luis Cuevas en Bronce / Jose Luis Cuevas in Bronze," features 24 works created between 1991 and 2008. Six were created specially for the show.

Cuevas is credited with sparking an art movement in Mexico that broke with the traditions of the past.

"Cuevas was a founding member of the so-called Generación de la Ruptura, or Rupture Generation, a group of artists including Manuel Felguérez, Juan Soriano and Rufino Tamayo who broke with the traditional muralist style of artists such as José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera in the 1950s to create a more abstract, less socially and politically oriented statement.

Largest donated artifact collection unveiled in Mexico

This week, Mexico put on display selections from the largest private collection of archaeological artifacts donated to the government, reports the Associated Press.

The pre-Hispanic relics belonged to American dentist Milton Leoff, who settled in Mexico and began collecting artifacts from the Aztec, Olmec, Maya and other cultures in the 1930s. Leoff's widow, Nadine Vinot, donated the artifacts on condition that the collection stayed together and left Mexico only for exhibition.

Photo exhibition rewards Mexican artists

Albinos in Mexico and the "human tragedy" of Mexican society were focuses of the winning entries in one the country's longest-running photography competitions, the results of which are now on display in Mexico City's impressive Centro de Imagen.

Gerardo Montiel Klint, born in Mexico City in 1968, was one of the winners of the 13th Bienal de Fotografia, which as its name suggests takes place every two years.

An image from his project "Volutas de Humo / Smoke Spirals," can be seen below.

The other winner was Andrés Carretero, 28, who was rewarded by the judges for his portraits of members of Mexico's albino community (above).

"During 2007, I took portraits of some of the most fascinating minorities in our society -- the albino community," says Carretero in text posted next to his work in the show.

"I tried to get close to those people that society itself has left to the side. I gave myself the job of documenting with my camera the sense of identity and belonging of this group of Mexicans. In an ironic manner, I chose scenes that showed this community out of context: the beach, ice factories and open spaces, where some found themselves more exposed to the environment than others. However, all of them maintained a certain air of graciousness and superiority."

Honorable mentions in the contest went to four other pieces of work.

Jose Luis Cuevas was noted for his "Hombre Promedio / Average Man" series of photographs, in which he took portraits of men on their way to the office in Mexico City.

Oswaldo Ruiz got a nod for his work "Luto Humano / Human Mourning," taken in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon.

Livia Corona impressed the judges with her selection of images depicting the surge in poorly planned housing developments for Mexicans in Ixtapaluca, on the eastern edge of Mexico City.

Finally, "Nadie recuerda todo / No one remembers everything" by Sector Reforma, a collective formed by the visual artists Javier Cárdenas Tavizon, Santino Escatel y Alejandro Fournier, in the city of Guadalajara, was given an honorable mention.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photos: Top, an image from Andrés Carretero's winning selection of photos, Fenotipos / Phenotype. Bottom, A print from Gerardo Montiel Klint's winning collection Volutas de Human / Smoke Spirals. Both images courtesy of the artists via Centro de Imagen.

Book review: 'The Accountant's Story,' a tale about narco baron Pablo Escobar, by his brother

If you speak a little Spanish and recently have spent a bit of time anywhere near the border, you've probably heard a narcocorrido, a ballad sung to danceable norteño-style music with lyrics that romanticize the drug trade, writes Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times book section.

Rutten writes that "The Accountant's Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel" is the literary equivalent of a narcocorrido -- "without the redeeming virtue of a catchy, polka-inflected beat."

The book's cover bears two additional subtitles: one informing us that this is "the true story of Pablo Escobar"; the other that the author, Roberto Escobar, is his brother.

But the reviewer is unimpressed with Escobar's account of his brother's cocaine empire which, according to Forbes magazine, accounted for 80% of the world's cocaine traffic:

This oddly flat and, frankly, repellent book is certainly not confessional and is, in fact, less a memoir than it is an apologia for the brother Roberto quite obviously admires still. Pablo's drift into criminality is, in his brother's mind, at least, the inevitable consequence of growing up poor and ambitious in a violent, underdeveloped society. The fact that hundreds of thousands of other young men growing up in similar circumstances didn't elect to better themselves by profiteering on misery and death is airily passed over; Pablo, after all, was 'a born leader.

Read the full review here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: A visitor tours a Colombian ranch once owned by Pablo Escobar. Credit: Luis Benavides / Associated Press

Lance Armstrong to open Mexico's mammoth bike ride

Jeremy Schwartz from Cox Newspapers notes on his Uncovering Mexico blog that "Mexico is abuzz with the news" that legendary cyclist Lance Armstrong is coming to Oaxaca for the Vuelta Mexico, a 320-kilometer ride through eight Mexican states.

"But Armstrong won’t be riding, numerous Mexican media outlets report. Rather he’ll be the race’s honorary 'godfather' and give the starting signal for the race’s first leg."

Armstrong is also tentatively scheduled to meet with President Felipe Calderon sometime before the March 1 race.

Read the rest of the post here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Mexico's media under scrutiny in documentary

Violence against journalists in Mexico is, sadly, nothing new and has been followed closely by the press and nonprofits alike for the last few years.

But "Voces Silenciadas" (Silenced Voices), a documentary film that was part of the Ambulante film festival here, broadens the debate around the persecution of journalists to encompass the bigger issues of media ownership and the relationship between the media and Mexico’s political powers.

Director Maria del Carmen De Lara doesn’t simply examine the dozens of unsolved cases of murdered and disappeared journalists in Mexico over the last couple of years –- she delves deeper, looking at media monopolies in Mexico and how those affect press freedom more broadly.

The film uses the departure of Carmen Aristegui , one of Mexico’s most prominent and respected journalists, from W Radio in January of last year as her starting point.

Aristegui’s "Hoy Por Hoy" morning news program had been on for five years and was one of the most listened to in Mexico when it was cut from the airwaves. Aristegui has since returned to radio news on a different network, but De Lara says her case shows how concentrated media ownership in Mexico has reduced the range of opinions in Mexico's media and silence unwanted ones.

Mayan new year celebrated in Guatemala

Guatemalans celebrated Mayan New Year on Sunday, which is the year 5125 in the Mayan solar calendar, according to the Prensa Latina news agency.

Fire ceremonies, dances and baseball games in different parts of the country were held in honor of the occasion.

According to the report,  celebrations of Mayan New Year in the past were held in secret. But, for the first time, different state institutions participated this year. They were led by the Culture Ministry, which organized lectures and workshops to debate about the date's significance.

AFP reports that the traditional celebration is important because it was a ritual observed by the ancestors of modern-day Mayans, a civilization that was once spread across central and south Mexico into the Yucatan and swaths of Central America.

Saturday concluded a week of transition between last year and this year --  the year of 'Iq,' or air, the breath of life.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Mexico's drug violence didn't deter tourists last year

The tumbling peso appears to have been a strong pull for tourists tempted by Mexico last year.

That's despite the bad news flowing out of the country about the violent drug war that continues to rock certain parts of the country and has killed more than 7,000 people since the beginning of 2007. As the Associated Press reports, the number of foreign tourists visiting Mexico surged to 23 million in 2008, up 5.9% from the year before, spurred by the tumbling value of the peso against the dollar.

But the U.S. State Department remains cautious, and issued a new travel advisory on Friday warning potential tourists about increased violence on the U.S.-Mexico border.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: A soldier stands guard to the side of the main plaza in Morelia, Mexico, last September, two days after two grenade explosions went off during the city's Independence Day celebrations, killing eight people and injuring more than a hundred. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.