Falcon Lake in Manitoba: relaxing family vacation

The family of Bridget´s partner, Phillip Ens, invited us again this year to their lodge on Falcon Lake, Manitoba, about an hour east of Winnipeg.

Lovely place. We had lots of sun, warm temperatures, perfect for swimming and biking.

Christine, Bridget, Emily (Patrick´s partner), Patrick, their dog Sheva, Phillip (standing, Bridget´s partner), Alex (Phillip´s brother-in-law) and Johanna (Phillip´s sister).

The blue marker is Falcon Lake.




One day we took the boat and two kayaks to an island in the lake for a picnic, egg salad sandwiches and a couple of beers. That´s me, Phillip, Bridget and Patrick.

Bridget and Phillip went fishing one day and caught a couple dozen walleye and pike, which we feasted on over several days. Sweet corn was fantastic, as were the bison burgers, country sausage and saskatoon berry pie. Cindy and I each gained five pounds in 10 days.

Schlitz Gold beer, very tasty, had something to do with it.

We all used the kayaks at one point or another. It´s very peaceful to paddle along in the early morning, stop and listen. The loons sometimes paddled close before diving for fish. They can stay down for about a minute. Bald eagles like to occupy the highest spot on the highest trees on some of the islands in the lake.

Christine and Em

Patrick and Em bundled up on one of the few cool days. Mostly it´s warm in Manitoba in August, but you´re 400 miles north of Minneapolis. Six years ago during our visit the temperatures were in the 30s and 40s and we saw the Northern Lights.

A deer offers Phillip a carrot.

Em, Bridget and Patrick play a board game. Dominos were also a nightime diversion.

A swing through Toltec ruins and provincial towns

We had a couple of days free and decided to swing down toward Mexico City. We made a big detour around the state of Michoacán, which has been a hotbed of drug violence, and stayed in Querétaro, which is famous for, among other things, its 275-year-old aqueduct.

On Sunday it provided the venue for sculptures of fanciful creatures.




The town of Bernal is noted for its crafts market. We went on a recent Sunday and bought our quota of lovely things.

Mexico has hundreds of charming towns, 35 of which are given the official designation of Pueblos Mágicos, and Bernal is one. We´ve been to about a fourth of these towns and all merit the designation.


While we were there, we saw a group of men marching down the street. The men were singing praise to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is perhaps a more important figure than Jesus in Mexican religion. The priests might contest that but the people have their own way of worshiping, especially in the countryside.

In the background you can see the huge monolith known as the Peña de Bernal, which rises more than 1,000 feet above the town.


Exorbitant tolls

Incidentally, traveling by toll roads is safer but costly. For a 500-mile round trip mostly on toll roads, we paid about $75 in tolls, which works out to about $15 per 100 miles.

Americans would rebel against tolls that high. Rates on the Ohio Turnpike, for example, are about one-third as expensive.


The four imposing Toltec warriors are among the attractions at the archeological site of Tula, about 60 miles northwest of Mexico City. We hadn´t seen any statues like these before.

This site sprang up in the 8th century after the collapse of Teotihuacán, the massive cultural center to the east. It´s notable that these statues are of warriors. Historians say the warrior class replaced the priestly class as the dominant one in many Mesoamerican societies around this time. Prayer was less important than making war.

The Tula site is like a park, with lots of cactus plantings leading from the parking area up to the pyramids and ball court.


Marching like young warriors, a Scout troop takes in the sights. We saw an awards ceremony for a troop the next day on top of a pyramid.


Cindy is my tour guide. She figures out itineraries, reads the history to me in the car and takes a lot of the pictures.

Getting to these sites is complicated by the fact that signage is spotty and inconsistent. You´ll see 10 signs that say, "Don´t leave rocks on the roadway", for every one that gives you a hint about where a major historical site might be.

Back to Teotihuacán and the huge pyramids

We had visited the city of Teotihuacán almost two years ago but both wanted to go back. The massiveness of the pyramids and the sacred plazas takes your breath away. This one is the Pyramid of the Sun. The specks on top are people. We climbed to the top. That also takes your breath away. The stairs are very steep.

In their original state, the stone surfaces of the pyramids were covered with a thick plaster that was painted white and red.

Not much is known about the people who built this place. It thrived from around 2,000 years ago to its collapse in the 7th or 8th century. Historians think it might have been a combination of drought and then an uprising against the ruling priestly class that led to the city´s demise.


In the palace of Tetitla are impressive murals of priests and gods that are about 1,500 years old.

All around the sacred city are residences that are still being excavated. Depending on who is making the estimate, the city might have been home to 80,000 to 250,000 people at its peak.

Cussing and slang in Mexico: it´s all about Mom

Mexican slang and cursing are different from every other Latin American country. The best place to find out why is in Octavio Paz´s classic essay on Mexican identity, "The Labyrinth of Solitude."

It´s all about Mother. Or the children of the Violated Mother, los hijos de la Chingada.

Mexicans use that phrase to describe themselves with a mixture of pride and bitter irony. It has to do with their history: indigenous women taken or raped by Spanish conquistadors and colonists. The Woman as Victim, a person they identify with. (Her opposite is the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Woman as Refuge and Protector.)

Paz dedicates much of a chapter to the unique Mexican use of the word chingar: in this country, it´s as vulgar as saying f---, but in other countries it means to fail or get drunk or mess up.

Daily speech in Mexico is filled with expressions about mother:

Un desmadre (trans.- dis-mother) is a mess.

Desmadrarse (trans. to dis-mother oneself) means to go wild.

Ya estoy hasta la madre (trans. - I´ve reached motherliness) means I´ve had it, I´m tired, I´m sick of it.

Te voy a romper la madre (trans. - I´m going to break/wreck your mother) means I´m going to kick your ass.

Me vale madre (trans. it´s worth mother to me) means, I don´t give a shit.

A toda madre (trans. - totally mother) means very good.

Me cae de madre (lit. - he/she strikes me as mother) means I think he/she is cool or great.

De poca madre, (trans. - not very mother) means cool, very good.

Mentada de madre (lit. - mention of mother) means to insult someone´s mother.

The legendary mentada de madre here in Jalisco came when the governor, clearly drunk at a fundraising event, presented a check of state money to the Cardinal to build a sanctuary.

The donation was highly controversial because Mexicans have a love-hate relationship with the Church. The governor had been roundly criticized. So in presenting the check to the Cardinal, the governor told his critics and all the electronic media, "If you don't like it, then chingue a su madre" (f--- your mother).

Dad, on the other hand, is not associated with victimhood but with power and control.

Yo soy tu padre (lit. I´m your daddy) means I own your ass.

Qué padre (lit. - How dadly) means cool or great. Padrísimo is even better.

I work with a guy who is a poet in the way he fills every line of speech with creative variations on four or five vulgar words, in all of their shapes and variations. Cab drivers are quite good at it as well.

The words for me do not have the weight of culture and history. I'm like a child playing with sharp knives. I don't know how to pick them up or throw them around without causing injury.

Or the words seem to be mere puffs of air without substance, until I utter one and see it jerk someone's head back.

Renewing a Mexican visa, or Catch-22

"Catch-22" is one of my favorite books because it makes hilarious comedy out of bureaucratic lunacy.

None of the bomber crew members in the story want to fly the suicidal missions over Italy. The only way they can get out of them is if they´re judged insane by the Air Corps psychiatrist.

But if they tell the psychiatrist they have horrific nightmares and they´re too terrified to fly the missions, that´s a healthy response, therefore they´re sane and have to fly the missions.

If a crewman really is crazy, then he enjoys flying the missions. So everyone has to fly the missions. That´s Catch-22. The world´s bureaucracies are full of Catches.

Mexico´s version of Catch-22

Getting a work visa renewed in Mexico is something like that. You´re wrong even when you´re right, and you will be punished. This year the government developed a new computerized streamlined system for the process. Here´s how it works:

1. It says on the helpful website that you just fill out the renewal form online. I ransack the website without finding the renewal form. There is no place on any page that has a link to it. I do a Google search for FM3 visas and find a blog dispensing immigration advice for Cubans living in Mexico. It has the link.

2. I fill out the form online. There is no English version, which is not a problem for me but must be for some of the other 1 million Americans who live in this country. At the end, the form gives me two choices: "save" (guardar) or "save and copy" (guardar y duplicar). Being a careful sort, I hit "save and copy".

Hitting "save and copy" was, I later learned, a big mistake.

3. Being a careful sort, before I fill out Cindy´s application, I take the printout of my application down to the immigration office to submit it to Answer Lady, whose job it is to help ignorant foreigners decipher the niceties of the system. She reviews my form. In the box for writing where the original visa was issued, I wrote, "Washington, D.C.", just as it said on my visa.

-- This is a mistake, said Answer Lady. Even though your visa says it was issued in Washington, it was really issued on Mexican soil because it was in the embassy there.

-- Oh, I said. So when I fill out my wife´s form online, I should write that her visa was issued in Mexico, right?
-- Right, said Answer Lady.

Believing Answer Lady was a big mistake.

4. At the immigration office the next Monday, the line is amazingly short at 9 a.m. We bring with us a fat file folder filled with documents that we had to present the previous year to renew the visas:
-- letter from me in Spanish attesting to the fact that I will support my wife during the time of my visa and not abandon her,
-- passport and two copies of each page of the passport,
-- visa and two copies of each page of the visa,
-- letters from the University and from Washington saying that I am in Mexico to do good things,
-- copies of passports of the letter writers with their signatures to prove that the letters aren´t forgeries,
-- copies of utility bills as proof of residence,
-- copies of three months of bank statements to prove income,
-- copy of my work contract with the International Center for Journalists,

-- three black-and-white photos face front, two photos in profile.....
-- and although we supposedly don´t need them this year in the streamlined system, I bring along the certified copy of our marriage license and certified copies of our birth certificates.

I also had obtained from Answer Lady the form you use to go to the bank and pay the visa fee for each of us.

To speed up the process, I paid the fees before submitting the application. Big mistake.

5. We submit our papers. Two women scrutinize various documents.

-- We have to reject your application, sir, because you made a mistake by hitting 'save and copy´. You only use that if you´re going to submit a duplicate for a child, and you don´t have a child seeking a visa. So you´ll have to go online and fill out the form again.

-- And we have to reject your wife´s application because it says she got her visa in Mexico but it was really in Washington, D.C.
-- But Answer Lady told me to put down Mexico, I protest.
-- Sorry.

6. We go to an Internet café near the immigration office and fill out the forms again, print them out, get back in line, which is longer now, and wait our turn. We submit our stuff again.
Do you have your payment forms? You bet we do.
-- I´m sorry sir, but we can´t accept your payment. It´s for the wrong amount.

Cindy´s is correct, but it turns out I had made a mistake and paid the same amount for both Cindy and me, about $100 each. I was supposed to pay $160 because I´m earning a salary down here.

7. They accept Cindy´s application but won´t accept mine until I go to a bank and execute a new payment for the correct amount. It´s not possible to just add on to the amount I´ve already paid. Cindy takes a taxi home. I take a taxi to the bank where I originally paid, pay again, this time $160, take a taxi back to the immigration office, take a ticket and get back in line. The line is longer now. I wait. I submit my application again, payment is correct, they accept the application and give me a number to check online. It will tell us when the visas are ready.

8. So what do I do about getting a refund for the erroneous $100 payment I already made?
-- You´ll have to talk to that lady over there.
She has me fill out some forms. Now what?
-- Well, the paperwork has to go through some channels and you´ll have to come back in three days.

9. I come back three days later, expecting to get a check or a voucher I can take to a bank and use to make a deposit.
-- Oh, no, you have to take this form to the office of a different agency, the SAT (tax collector) where they issue refunds.
-- Where is the SAT office?
-- There are several. You can look them up online, but you have to make an appointment.

10. I go online to try to make an appointment. The system is down and not working and continues not working the next day as well. I call the number listed on the website. A person answers and says that I made a mistake, this is the wrong agency. I check the number on the website. I had called the number listed, so evidently everyone who has this problem and calls this number will always get the wrong agency. She gives me the correct phone number.

11. I call the agency to make an appointment for getting my $100 refund. The woman asks me what SAT district I live in. I say I don´t know but I give her my address. She says she can´t tell from that what district I live in. I´ll have to go to one of the offices and ask which office is the correct one to go to for the refund.
Then I can make an appointment.

12. Meanwhile we find out that are visas are ready. On this day, the office is packed. We wait about two hours to get to the front of the line. I´m nervous as hell that I might have made some other mistake, that there is some hoop we forgot to jump through. The clerk asks us where our XXX forms are. What forms?
-- These forms. You mean no one told you to fill these out?
--No.
-- OK, we´ll just fill them out now."

Fortunately do not have to get back in line.
But this new form asks for information that we have already given them two or three times in different documents, but we have to fill it out.
We get our visas. Yay!

13. Now about my $100 refund for the erroneous payment.
There are two possible SAT offices that could be the one I´m required to go to. I pick the one by the Christopher Columbus Circle. I get in the line that says "without appointment". I give them my address. Yes, you´re at the right office. You´ll have to wait to see a counselor. I take a ticket. I wait. The counselor says that to get the refund I will need:
-- Proof of residence from a utility bill
-- a copy of my passport
-- the voucher that I already have and a copy of it
-- copy of my visa, both sides
-- the bank account details where they are to deposit the money (they don´t issue checks)
-- and I will need to make an appointment

Here comes Catch-22

-- So when would you like to make your appointment?
-- How about this week?

She looks at my newly issued visa. It´s a plastic card like a driver´s license instead of the old passport-style booklet. She checks the date. Technically, my new visa doesn´t take effect for two weeks because I renewed it two weeks before the old one expired.

-- I´m sorry sir, but we can´t make an appointment with you until this visa takes effect.
-- But I just renewed it. Look. Here´s a copy of my old visa.
-- Sorry, we´ll have to make an appointment no sooner than the effective date of this new visa.

14. Now uncertain whether my new visa is valid, I prepare to leave on a two-week trip to the U.S. I carry a 24-page full-color photocopy of my old visa, just in case. At the airport in Guadalajara, the immigration officer looks at my card-style visa as if he has never seen one before.
The new rules and new forms have been in effect for two months.
-- What´s this?
-- It´s my FM3 visa. It´s the new style. They just started issuing them.

He looks at me, looks at the picture, studies both sides of the card, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually he sees something he recognizes, writes something down and stamps some forms, giving me two copies.

15. I´m back now from the U.S. and have my appointment at the SAT office. I bring my fat file with me that has 10 times more information than is required because bureaucrats always want you to present something you don´t have.
She asks for a copy of the picture page of my passport, which by dumb luck I have. She looks at the bank account information.

-- This bank account isn´t in your name.
-- No that´s my wife. I don´t have a bank account. Here´s our marriage certificate.

After a half hour of looking at her computer screen and printing out a half-dozen documents, stamping each four or five times, she hands me a form that is a record of my application.

-- It will have to go through channels and be approved she says. You should hear within the next 40 working days.

40 working days. That´s more than eight weeks after you take holidays into account.

At this point, the authentic human response should be a shriek of frustration. But I know that within the bureaucratic system, you have to pretend to be civilized, or the system will punish you even more.

So now I´m waiting to see if the deposit will show up in Cindy´s bank account or for some notification that my application for refund was rejected.

On the other hand

The Mexican bureaucracy functions differently for special people, though. Yesterday I read in the paper that six state government officials, in illegal fashion and with approval from no one, awarded themselves bonuses last year totaling $2 million.

That averages to $333,000 apiece. I´m betting that they didn´t have to make an appointment at the local SAT office to get it.

Designing a master´s degree and becoming an academic

This month I think I have finally resigned myself to the fact that I am becoming less of a journalist and more of an academic.

For the past several months I´ve been meeting with a committee of about 10 academics within the University of Guadalajara´s Virtual University, their distance-learning unit, to design an online master´s degree in digital journalism.

This is a fairly innovative program. There are maybe a dozen digital journalism master´s programs in the U.S., and I don´t know of any of them that are completely online.

There are only one or two similar programs in the Spanish-speaking world that both teach digital journalism (how you practice journalism in the multimedia world of the Web) and do it online. So it´s a stretch for all of us.

Meetings of the minds

The University has its own processes and values that have to be understood and respected, just as a newsroom does.

To begin with, you design a degree program as a response to a series of "problematicas" in society. Basically needs, gaps, problems. Then you describe "intervenciones" which your courses are supposed to provide to satisfy those needs, fill those gaps, solve those problems. This took a couple of weeks.

These interventions, if you will, are courses. Most of the participants in the committee are experts in education, online course design and pedagogy. Two are journalism professors with some professional media experience but little experience with digital journalism.

Words matter

I spent a lot of time just describing to the committee what is happening in the world of journalism today, which is a revolution on the scale of the invention of the book.

They needed a context to understand why I wanted to have courses on multimedia storytelling, citizen journalism, ethics in the online world, new business models for journalism, writing for the web and so on.

Then the hard part. Each course has to be justified by the "competencia" (skill) that the student has to demonstrate upon completion. And each of these skills is described in terms of abstract nouns whose meanings even in English are not always clear to me and often seem to overlap.

For each course we have to describe what conocimientos (knowledge), habilidades (abilities), actitudes (attitudes) and valores (values) are necessary to achieve the competencia (skill).

Into the home stretch

So after a series of six or seven three-hour meetings over the past months, we had the basic map of a master´s program, with individual courses, hours and credits described.

For the last two days, my team and I have been writing up detailed course descriptions with all of the habilidades, actitudes, valores etc. spelled out along with a description of course units and a bibliography. I did most of the 16 course descriptions that you´ll find listed on the left side of this wiki of the master´s program http://maestriadigital.wikispaces.com/.

Then we need to write up a formal document that describes the program in academic terms and get it approved by various committees of the Virtual University.

Tuesday we have a teleconference with a University in Santiago, Chile, to discuss offering our program jointly with them. They have a master´s in digital journalism, but it´s not online. (In the photo above, Arturo Catalán, who directs the program in Chile, visits one of our meetings.)

The goal is to get all of this done before my fellowship ends in December.

Impunity in Mexico: 49 toddlers die in fire, officials absolved

That´s how it works here.

You can imagine how the justice system would have reacted in the U.S. if 49 children had been killed in a fire at a day-care center.

Mexico´s Supreme Court recently voted to absolve high-level officials of responsibility. A New York Times story quoted the reaction of legal affairs columnist Miguel Carbonell, who wrote in El Universal newspaper:

The surest thing is that the case ends as almost everything ends in Mexico: in oblivion and the most absolute impunity.

The Times story added:

In all, 23 people have been charged in the case and all of them are out on bail, said Lorenzo Ramos Félix, a lawyer for the victims’ families.

Except for the center’s four owners, all of the accused are low-level municipal, state and federal employees. “Neither the government nor the court wants to take a high-ranking official to trial,” Mr. Ramos said.

Families of the victims posted the Times story on their website, which is part of their campaign to seek justice.

Among the owners of the day-care center are a cousin of Mexico´s first lady as well as party and state officials and their spouses. It is no accident that those with political connections get contracts for these centers: they receive government payments for each child cared for. It´s guaranteed income.

Impunity for crimes against reporters

A similar impunity exists in crimes against journalists, which have been on the rise in Mexico.

We offer a course for Mexican journalists in how to protect themselves while covering drug trafficking and corruption. The journalists tell us that the institutions that are supposed to protect them, such as the courts, police and regulators, are sometimes in league with the criminals who threaten them.

This week there a ceremony in Tijuana honored journalist Francisco Ortiz Franco, who was murdered six years ago. According to a statement released by the Inter American Press Association:

Ortiz Franco was killed in front of two of his children as he was about to get into his car. A masked man, believed to be from the Arellano Félix cartel, shot him four times at point-blank range. Since then, despite the initial mobilization of justice authorities and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the case has suffered numerous irregularities and today remains completely unpunished.

The complete statement is here.

This article describes Mexico as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

In the past 18 months, the facilities of five media outlets have been attacked with gunfire or grenades, according to the Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social. So far this year at least 13 journalists have been attacked or killed.

Baseball at Nationals Park in Washington, sacred sites in Mexico

I was two days too late to see the Nationals´ new phenom, Steven Strasburg, in his major league debut, in which he struck out 14 batters and created national buzz.

Thursday night was just another bad night for Pittsburgh, as the Nationals
beat the Pirates 4-2, and completed a three-game sweep.

What I like about baseball in person is the space reserved for the game. A ball park and the diamond it contains have a kind of perfect beauty and orderliness that the messy reality of daily life does not. The simple rules of the game -- and this is true for any game, including soccer -- create a ritualized form of reality, a more ordered version of it, in which what men and women do can affect the way the world turns.

Today´s athletes are heroes in that they act out our myths and beliefs about life, and because they have replaced the gods. Mexican wrestling matches have this kind of mythic battle of good vs. evil, gringos vs. Mexicans, etc. (See the next entry on this blog.)

When you explore archeological sites in Mexico, most of them have a ball court where a game resembling soccer was played. The game had a sacred significance, but it is also true that people played the game for fun.

The ball court at Montealban in Oaxaca, which we visited in December.

Supposedly Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor defeated by Cortez, would strap on his belt and play with his nephews for fun.

At some sites, evidence suggests that the losers of a ball game were ritually sacrificed.

No one was sacrificed after the Nationals-Pirates game, but they were subjected to press interviews. Basically the same thing.



I´m in DC and Boston for a few days, training Knight Journalism fellows and getting some training myself.