A Man and His Tuba
A Man and His Tuba
By José Luis Bobadilla, Mixcoac, 2012
Picture a man walking with a tuba. He moves along with other men, also carrying instruments. The men have been paid handsomely. They walk behind a hearse and a group of dignified individuals that, unlike other such processions, is composed of women and children who, rather than black, are wearing their usual street clothes. Let's try to listen to the music. The traditional tambora from Sinaloa, a sound of fluctuating volumes, not entirely related to conventional Western tuning. That is one moment when one can hear the music. But there is another. That same music no longer accompanies mourning or crying. Now the sound blasts from a small radio. Someone is listening. He is amused, he can kill some time, he's happy and entertained. If there was a woman, they would dance. The music would bring them together, it would please them. The two moments make us wonder why that music can happen in two very different circumstances: leisure and death.
...Maybe for us Mexicans the brass band music heard [in Sinaloa]... seems more or less familiar. But let's think of what this music may... mean to others less familiar with the sounds of our country. Without the resounding blast of firecrackers, local festivities would not create the same disorienting lack of inhibition that they produce, along with food, alcohol, music and dance. However, to other cultures the sound of exploding gunpowder is not directly associated with celebration, but often with situations linked with the desire to instill, for example, fear.
Paul Westheim, the German art historian that lived for several years in Mexico, recognized with great clarity in his extraordinary essay "La calavera" that, while the fear of death produced an irrepressible anguish in Europeans, for Mexicans, for pre-Hispanic cultures, it was life and its uncertainty that seemed unsettling: "Old Mexico was not stirred by Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death; it shuddered before the uncertainty that is man's life. They called her Tezcatlipoca." These matters, among others, explain our country's familial relationship with death. It is a relationship that seems incomprehensible to other cultures... Europeans seem convinced that death will snatch life away from us, and therefore is to be feared. Something quite different from the pre-Hispanic idea that the life-force is indestructible and carries on after death.
But, going back to Bourdieu, music -- in this case band music, the music that one listens to at the party and at the burial ground, the music that one dances to and that accompanies mourning... that thundering music that acts as counterpoint before the silent images of death, embodies a view in which life and death, as in the pre-Hispanic world, are more or less the same. The jocular and the melancholic coexist delicately within the architecture of that music, allowing the deceased to cross from one shore to the other, that is, from life to death or vice-versa, with the utmost indifference. The flamboyant mausoleums in Jardines del Humaya play more or less the same role. They are the houses where the meeting of the living and the dead is made possible.
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day
By Elmer Mendoza
Mar/Garita. Marga/Rita. Mar/garrr/Ita.
That guy used to play with my name, you're crazy, I said, but he didn't care, and soon after I heard a name that wasn't mine, but had the same letters, why do you ask me so much about him? Knowing things about him is knowing things about you...
When he was home he was always happy, playing around with my name. Mar/gatita, amar/guita, like that. You introduced us, remember? But you didn't ask who killed him. Cuz, don't push it, some things are better left alone. What difference does it make? It ain't gonna bring him back, the man lived his life, lived through and through, and that's it, the kids are growing, they go to school, and I, well, I'm what you see, I indulge myself and I've got the cantina, that's enough for me. My man knew this would happen after he died, he said you had the devil inside. Oh really, what did he want? He wanted me to mourn him for the rest of my life? I'm not buying that; I already told you, cuz, I'm pissed at him, I think it sucks he got himself killed, and I still don't get why you ask me so many f***ing questions, I'm telling you, I've let him rest. The day he got killed he called me on his cell. And? He said if they killed him to go find you. You're good at taking orders, stupid, its been five years. I was in Albuquerque, and right after he called me I got caught, I just got out last week. Congratulations, man.
The tomb was impeccable, surrounded by similar monuments, she gave the watchman a tip so he would sweep and cut the weeds. She opened the door, went in, and told him why she wanted to finally break up with him; you're an a**hole, you knocked me up at 18 and left me at 20 to be with other women. It hurt, but you know it wasn't me who killed you, I was going to, but they got to you before. I heard it from the door, I wasn't surprised. She didn't ask for forgiveness, and she told him twice that she was angry at him, There was a long silence. The Sig Sauer on my waist had mixed feelings about it. Then my cousin lit the candles that were before my bro's photo. He was smiling. I remembered when he told me with a broken voice. Man, you introduced me to her, and he cried. I got closer, my cousin didn't turn around. I saw her name next to his photo Mar/Garita, and then knew God had decided. Valentine's Day.
Poetry
Poetry
By Dolores Dorantes
Translated by Jen Hofer
This is an image of love though it might seem to be the image of a dead person. We drive with dirt on top of the glass, with the sun cutting across the dirt we drive. We arrive when everyone disappears. We defend nothing. We defend it from no one... They have hired us to remain standing in this silence. Someone is building a city. A beautiful city that is going up in the country. Living cupolas inside its body. We keep watch. We protect it from no one. Someone gives us money to keep our eyes open in the middle of this night. Something keeps us awake when the wind strolls the sound of a band. A box of music and of mourning. Of fiesta and of silence.
This city is decorated with living memories. With the photographs of heads when they were still whole. With weapons in the hands of the owners of this city. This city is more alive than the body where it's going up. Hot. Lulled by sun. This safe city.
Our eyes are open for whom? We protect for whom? Who keeps everything calm?
The only thing that happened
The only thing that happened
By Jenni Quilter
These are commercially printed tarpaulins, canvases for industry, the kind typically used for trucks, greenhouse enclosures, gym floor coverings, ice rink liners, awnings and advertising. Here they are posters for the dead, erected above graves in Los Jardines del Humaya, a cemetery in Culiacán, in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico. On each poster there is a photograph of the deceased, their name, birth and death dates, as well as a message to or from the dead.
Here is a boy, no more than twenty, with one eyebrow carefully notched, hair closely cropped, flawless skin. His name is Javier Enrique. There are two different pictures of him on the poster, each taken from a different angle. In one, he gives a cheerful, slightly forced grin, baring his teeth, and in the other, an alert frown. He is extremely handsome. The background of this poster, though it's difficult to see at first, is a watermark image of Christ's crucifixion, his face between the two Javiers. We see Christ's thorns, his paleness, aquiline brow, the shadow of his eye socket. He looks dead, but Javier does not; he is stunningly pink.
God gave us the gift of knowing you, enjoying you and loving you.
And it was God who decided to take you.
The photos on these tarpaulins are not professional photographs; they were not taken for a wedding or graduation, to consciously mark a milestone. They were taken quickly, as afterthoughts, at parties, in driveways, at home. They were likely taken on cell phones...
These photos were never meant to be blown up, to take the weight of remembrance. They buckle under their enlargement. Quite often, the pixilation is so pronounced the colors separate; skin becomes green and red and white and blue and yellow. Details are smeared, and this blurring reveals a certain consistency. We relearn what a young man's face looks like, the rules of proportion: the mouth a blush, the nose a blur of distinction, the dark holes of eyes, the dip of hair in front of the ear. We relearn the ratio of beauty for youth. We notice, all over again, how the upper lip dips to meet the groove running from mouth to nose. We notice how the eyes cannot be understood without the eyebrows. We understand how the skin is lit by the blood beneath, how unlined it can be. In many, the cheekbones are still cloaked in puppy fat.
Most of these faces have been excerpted from larger photos, and so they give the impression of having slipped away, like balloons, from their lives. The obvious cropping makes us feel the tug of their days back on the ground. We sense those who were also sitting on the sofa when the photo was taken, their breath, the accidental press of skin, the squeak of leather when they stood up. A wife's hand has been covered by the edge of another photo. A man's arm around another's neck has been covered with digital spray paint, transformed into a scarf of black smoke.
Jesús Alberto. He tilts his chin up, smiling slightly. The Virgin is holding him to her breast, and her hand belongs to a medieval portrait -- a doll's hand, yellowed, too small for her face. She is smiling so gracefully. The awkward pictorial clarity of her world against his is like salt water meeting fresh water: a sudden blur, a new scheme. He is turning her into a photo. She is turning him into a painting.
Life goes on, we will not be far apart, you will always be in our mind and hearts.
We will always feel your warmth and love.
What is allowed to accompany these men into these photos is their work. They are placed in front of their cars, trucks and SUVs. One is holding his accordion. In these images, scale is frequently distorted; their livelihood dominates their faces. In one, a man's face is superimposed on top of a baseball that -- in proportion to his face -- looks to be the size of a washing machine. Flames dart out of the ball's sides, and all of this hovers -- ball, man, flames -- over a sea at sunset. Everything is glittering, all is illuminated. The red stitches on the ball are big enough to look painful...
It's hard to believe that the people on these posters are buried beneath, slowly disintegrating. It's hard to imagine bone and flesh and scraps of fabric. In the face of this much care, it seems possible, for brief moments, to imagine that they could still be alive, in exile somewhere, drinking beer in the late afternoon. Here is a man riding a motorcycle, wearing a white helmet, dressed in blue. "Policia" is printed on the bike's windshield. He has a large black handlebar moustache. There's a bright white light shining over his right shoulder, guiding him onwards. The Virgin of Guadalupe is floating behind, riding pillion, rippling like a flag, like exhaust. Julio César is written in cursive script, outlined, blue and yellow, the dates of his life beneath. 2 Feb 1977-18 August 2009. A man and his motorcycle. A hero. A prodigal son. It looks like a movie poster. It has all the necessary elements: a hero prominently figured, the running dates, a title and a brief précis...
He calls you because you were needed.
In most of these posters the background is blue, a particular tint and tone that we automatically associate with the sky, but this sky is always richer, deeper than the pale blue of the Culiacán sky beyond. The clouds on these posters are also thicker, whiter, fluffier. This blue tells us immediately, without us having to think too carefully about it, that these men are in heaven.
Do not be sad.
A good son, a good brother, a good friend.
Keep in mind that I will be with you forever.
Always and at every moment we will remember you
your parents, brothers and friends,
because of who you were, a good son.
May the light of God accompany you and may he walk with you always.
I want to know what these men were actually like. I want to know their petty grievances, their loves, their enthusiasms, their hatreds. I want to know whether they loved their mothers too much or too little. I want to know their fears, their habits of bravery. I am not confident, no matter how candid these photos appear to be, that what I am seeing is in any way the essence of these men. Photographs have such a hard time capturing us in the first place: We grimace, pout, stiffen, lift ourselves into a shape we'd like to present. And in that moment, when we imagine how we look through the lens of the camera, there is a reduction, a contraction, a holding in that is itself a tiny death. We are aware of ourselves being transformed into an object. Our mortality becomes apparent...
What thrives in this silence -- what grows like a vine &mdashl is death as a business. And because business is good, it is implied that everything will still be all right, even if the worst has come to pass.