Hernandez Mexico Quotes

[Dona Queta] says that her motherly advice is always the same: 'Only whores, thieves, and cops go out at night. Which one are you, asshole?' p. 157

[...] the "explosion" of Mexicans crossing the border without permission was entirely predictable. It was the inevitable consequence of of policies that slashed opportunities to migrate legally without addressing the forces pushing and pulling people across the line. People who had lived their lives across two countries legally and peacefully for decades were suddenly redefined as invaders and threats. The "Illegal immigrant" was thus invented in Washington, D.C., conjured out of contradiction.

One night, walking on the street in the Colonia Portales, I become startled by my own train of thought. I am desperately poor right now, surviving on coffee, orange juice, and beer ('grain juice'), and tacos. Gigs for writers don't come easy. I am angry and depressed and feverish. I had moved to Mexico City on a whim and I knew it would be hard. What I fail to expect is that the delinquency mind-set would take over my brain. Who would stop me, I think, who would catch me, if I hop into that cab coming my way and start barking directions? Who would know or care if I held a knife to the driver's throat, demanded all his money, and threatened to kill him if he made any further moves? How would I feel when I got home at night, finally able to eat properly? p 123-4

It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes." "That's how I feel about eating," Sirine interjects, and some of them laugh. Aziz lifts his chin and lowers his eyes silkily. "Please tell us more." "Well, I mean..." She fumbles for words and tears apart a slice of bread, trying to think what she means. "Something like... tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes." "Fabulous metaphor," Aziz says. Nathan lifts his head. "That's giving other people power over you." "No more than usual," Aziz says. "Somebody's always going to have the power, and somebody's always got to bake the bread." He turns and smiles suavely at Sirine. "You've got the soul of a poet! Cooking and tasting is a metaphor for seeing. Your cooking reveals America to us non-Americans. And vice versa." "Chef isn't an American cook," Victor Hernandez says. "Not like the way Americans do food- just dumping salt into the pot. All the flavors go in the same direction. Chef cooks like we do. In Mexico, we put cinnamon in with the chocolate and pepper in the sweetcakes, so things pull apart, you know, make it bigger?

A Conspiracy Theory that took hold was introduced by Anthony “Tony” Summers, the respected author of The Kennedy Conspiracy, published in 1980 and again in 1998 as “Not in Your Lifetime.” He believes that anti-Castro activists, funded by Mafia mobsters who had been ousted from Cuba, killed Kennedy. Summers believes that members of the CIA took part in this conspiracy and named the people he suspected. Summers also stated in an article published in the National Enquirer magazine, on October 25, 2013, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. The National Enquirer stated that Herminio Diaz, born in Cuba in 1923, had, in 1948, shot Pipi Hernandez, who was a Dominican exile employed at the naval base at Guantanamo. This killing took place at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico. In 1957, he was involved with an assassination attempt against President José Figueres of Costa Rica, who incidentally was a trained Army Ranger and a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. According to JFKFacts published on May 27, 2014, General Fabián Escalante, the historian of Cuban State Security and Castro’s former bodyguard, said that the assassin Herminio Diaz, along with Eladio del Valle and three American mobsters: Richard Gaines, Lenny Patrick, and Dave Yara, were the shooters at Dealey Plaza.

Everything is thrilling in Mexico City because everything is out of whack. There

Mexico is a society where a lot is denied in the official discourse,” Yoshua

Whatever! IT’S MEXICO!

What about those who are not rich and famous, those who do not have a platform on which to transmit their case?

In Tepito everything is for sale but dignity,” the maxim goes.

Vicente Fox, who succeeded Mr. Zedillo and was president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, institutionalized the policy of ensuring that Mexican-Americans remained Mexican. In 2002, his government established the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior (Institute for Mexicans Abroad) to promote “a more comprehensive approach” to promoting Mexican loyalty. One method was to invite Mexican-American elected officials to Mexico, to deepen their Mexican identity. In October 2003, for example, the Instituto invited 30 American state legislators and mayors for two days in Mexico City, where they met lawmakers, ministry officials, scholars, and advocates for immigrants. The Instituto had plans to bring 400 Mexican-American officials on similar trips every year. The Instituto also sends representatives to the United States. Jacob Prado, counselor for Latino affairs at the Mexican Embassy, explained to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials that it was in “Latino officials like yourselves that thousands of immigrants from Mexico find a political voice.” He went on to explain: “Mexico will be better able to achieve its full potential by calling on all members of the Mexican Nation, including those who live abroad, to contribute with their talents, skills and resources.” American citizens who hold elective office in the United States are still expected to be “members of the Mexican Nation.” One Instituto official is Juan Hernandez. Born in the United States, and therefore a US citizen, Mr. Hernandez was at one time a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, but made no secret of his real loyalties. In 2002 he wrote that he had “been commissioned to bring a strong and clear message from the president to Mexicans abroad: Mexico is one nation of 123 million citizens—100 million who live in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States.” On ABC’s Nightline on June 7, 2001, he explained, “I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico first.’ ” Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, who later became national security advisor to Vicente Fox, wrote in the Mexican newspaper El Siglo de Torreon that the Mexican government should work with the “20 million Mexicans” in the United States to advance Mexican “national interests.” Vicente Fox’s interior secretary Santiago Creel once complained, “It’s absurd that (the United States) is spending as much as it’s spending to stop immigration flows that can’t be stopped . . . .” When he took over in 2004 as the man in charge of border relations with the United States, Arturo Gonzalez Cruz explained that his ultimate goal was to see the border disappear entirely. Mr. Fox himself insisted that any measure the United States took to arrest or deport illegal immigrants was a violation of human rights.

It is tempting to draw a connection between Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez and the tools he held in his hands—the Ansco 8x10 camera, the Taylor Hobson Cooke convertible lens. Yes, they made the image possible, but does the camera truly matter? Could it not have been a Deardorff or a Kodak Master View? What I’m trying to say, perhaps imperfectly, is this: It is never the machine that creates the image, but the soul behind it. The lens does not see; the photographer does. The camera is a vessel. The vision—the light, the shadow, the breath of the land—that belongs to the one who dares to witness.