The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Lesley Tellez

Finally back from India!

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Got home Wednesday at 1 a.m., after a supremely long journey that included a 15-hour flight, a four-hour cab ride through windy mountain roads, snow delays, engine failure, and me walking around New York City with a scarf wrapped around my head, because I had no warm clothes. Strangely, I was intensely calm about the whole thing, the entire time. (Maybe I was just zonked out of my mind?)

Scratch that. I was not entirely calm when our American Airlines pilot announced we’d have to make an emergency landing in Little Rock because one of the engines had failed. But once the wheels hit the ground, I knew I’d make it home at some point, either by car, bus, or plane. This is what staying at the ashram helped me realize: a little faith can go a long way toward keeping my mind at peace.

I’ll get more into that later. For now, I just wanted to say hi, and let you know that I have lots more good India stuff coming. (Camel safaris! Savory breakfasts! Indo-Mex fusion! And some spiritual-mind stuff too.)

Thank you for being so sweet to Crayton. He did a kick-ass job blogging, and I am eagerly awaiting Mescalapalooza 2010.

More soon!

Miércoles de carnitas

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Lesley’s husband Crayton is guest-posting while she makes her way back from a trip to India.

So, after all those nice comments I got yesterday, I had to come back for an encore!

Just kidding. Lesley’s had some snags in her travel plans and is getting back to Mexico a little later than planned, so you’re stuck with me again today. But she’s doing just fine! Don’t worry.

This does give me the opportunity to tell you about my favorite Mexico City food: carnitas.

At the place where I work, eating these chopped pork tacos is a ritual so important that it has a name: Carnitas Wednesday, or Miércoles de Carnitas. Yesterday, just like every week, one of my co-workers took orders from the rest of the office and ambled out to the street to our favorite puesto. (Lesley has discussed the place before here (in her section on carnitas, where she notes it’s next to the pirated DVD stand on Rio Sena, just off Reforma in the Colonia Cuauhtémoc).)

We pay 10 pesos ($0.78) per taco, which includes the tip for the three people who work at the stand: the guy who chops up the meat with an enormous hatchet of a knife on a giant cutting board that looks like a slice of tree trunk; the lady who sits by his side, wraps up the to-go orders in foil and plastic baggies and handles the money; and the utility guy, whose main responsibility, I think, is to make sure the condiments (green and red salsas, limes, cilantro and onion) are all readily available. They run a pretty efficient operation.

My friend Carlos gave me lessons long ago on how to order carnitas: “de maciza, bien blanquita.” That means you want your meat really white and lean, without fatty chunks. A lot of Mexicans I know love the fatty chunks, but many Americans I know, including myself. find them icky. The risk you run with carnitas de maciza is that the pork is too dry, but our puesto does a pretty good job of keeping the meat moist. We’ve often found we get better meat if we show up before 2 p.m., when things get really busy.

The portions are generous, with tacos roughly the width of a can of cola on its side. Most of the time I can only eat two, though there are three-carnita days on occasion.

Our puesto just uses store-bought tortillas. If we feel like going all out, we buy some fresh-made tortillas and just order a bunch of meat from the carnitas stand.

Our puesto’s green salsa is fantastic, with an almost creamy consistency, not drippy. The mix of the spicy peppers with the sweet warmth of the meat… Wow. It’s gotten to the point where I wake up on Wednesday mornings already excited about lunch.

Yesterday's lunch

Hasta luego

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

So! Lesley is making her way back to Mexico City. I want to thank all of the visitors and commenters for keeping me company in her absence. Mescalapalooza is still in the works, so you’ll get the full report on the Mija Chronicles as soon as we get scheduling arranged.

Meantime, I wanted to dedicate this last post to some friends who have become very dear to us during our time here. We finished up a year here in January (you can see Lesley’s first posts here), and I really don’t know how we would have managed as well as we have without the help and advice of Joy and her husband Brendan. Not only did they guide us through some of the basic, learning-curve kind of stuff when we first arrived, but they welcomed us into their circle of friends so warmly that we really didn’t ever get lonely. In short, they are two fantastic people.

And they’re going to be outta here soon, which is something we’re learning to accept about life abroad. I’m an Army brat, and I moved around enough to get accustomed to the coming and going of people, how moving is part of life and how, in the end, when you know enough people who have left for somewhere else, it allows you to end up with really great friends all over the world. (Which is good when you go to New York or Paris or Bombay or Bangkok and you want to crash at somebody’s pad.)

When we arrived in Mexico, it seemed like every other week we were going to somebody’s despedida, or goodbye party. Joy and Brendan won’t be the only close friends we’ve made that will leave Mexico this year. People come to live here for an experience or for a job, an escape or a self-discovery, and at some point that ends for a lot of people, and they go back to their home turf. (The alternative is to “go native,” and that happens too, but it’s rarer.) I get really sad when we think about friends leaving, but I try to remind myself that it’s part of what I signed up for by choosing to live in another country.

The way to ameliorate some of that sadness is, of course, to also make friends with people who aren’t as likely to leave, such as, y’know, Mexicans. I was really worried when I first arrived here that I would gravitate to my own kind and not make a lot of Mexican friends. And truth be told, there are times when I’ve done that. But slowly, as my Spanish gets better and I feel more comfortable, I’m spending more and more time with Mexicans, who I’ve decided like having me around as a sort of Balki Bartokomous immigrant character who gets stuff wrong but has a good heart.

Still, there’s always going to be a bit of gravitation toward fellow expats, because we have so much in common and we help each other, and because we’re all a little strange. With every despedida will come another bienvenido. Somebody will arrive from abroad, and we’ll get to be their Joy and Brendan, helping them navigate the banks and the utilities and telling them not to freak out when the camote whistle sounds for the first time.

Thanks, guys.

Represent your hood

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHip6auoiew&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I’m a firm believer in hometown pride, in recognizing how much where you live forms part of who you are. And there’s nothing like a good local anthem, a song that brings you home again even when you’re far away.

I grew up mostly in Alabama, and I get misty when I hear this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5LFYjtMnu4&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Or this (caution, bad language):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DALzCMW5hdg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

And when I want to look back at my years in Dallas, this one gets me nice and nostalgic (also has naughty words, careful):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR9ZeNkFu3o&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

So that’s why I was so excited to discover “Sabado Distrito Federal” a few months ago. It’s basically about the people of Mexico City out on the town during the weekend, spending what little money they have. The song was written by Chavo Flores, the “Urban Folklorist of Mexico,” a Mexico City native who was famous for his colorful descriptions of the lives of common people, according to this excellent Spanish-language bio.

Spanish lyrics and my rough attempt to translate are below. (Native speakers and Mexico experts, feel free to correct me.) Any other Mexico DF jams I should hear? Let me know.

Sábado Distrito Federal,
Sábado Distrito Federal,
Sábado Distrito Federal,
¡Ay, ay, ay!

Federal District Saturday,
Federal District Saturday,
Federal District Saturday,
Ay, ay, ay!

Desde las diez ya no hay donde parar el coche,
ni un ruletero que lo quiera a uno llevar,
llegar al centro en el Metro es un desmoche,
un hormiguero no tiene tanto animal.

Since 10 there hasn’t been a parking spot,
nor a taxi driver that wants to pick anyone up
to get downtown on the Metro is a pain
even an anthill isn’t this inhumane

Los almacenes y las tiendas son alarde
de multitudes que allí llegan a comprar,
al puro fiado porque está la cosa que arde,
al banco llegan nada más para sacar.

The warehouses and stores are a sight
of crowds that show up to shop
on nothing but credit because they burn for just this thing
they show up at the bank just to withdraw

El que nada hizo en la semana está sin lana,
va a empeñar hasta su hermana en el Monte de Piedad
hay unas colas de tres cuadras las ingratas,
y no faltan papanatas que le ganen el lugar.

He who did nothing all week is without any cash
He’ll pawn off his own sister in the Monte de Piedad
the hopeless are in queues three blocks long,
and there’s no shortage of fools who cut in line

Desde las doce se llenó la pulquería,
los albañiles acabaron de rayar,
¡Que re’ picosas enchiladas hizo Otilia,
la fritangera que allí pone su comal!

Since 12 the pulqueria has been full
the bricklayers have finished scraping
How spicy are the enchiladas by Otilia,
the street-food seller with her grill over there!

Sábado Distrito Federal,
Sábado Distrito Federal,
Sábado Distrito Federal,
¡Ay, ay, ay!

La burocracia va a las dos a la cantina,
las borrecheras siempre empiezan a las dos,
los potentados al Enjoy en su limosina,
pa’ Cuernavaca, pa’ Acapulco, ¡qué sé yo!

The bureaucrats go to the cantina at 2
drunks always begin at 2
the powerful at the Enjoy with their limousine
off to Cuernavaca, to Acapulco, who knows!

Toda la tarde pa’l café se van los vagos
otros al pókar, al billar o al dominó,
ahí el desfalco va iniciando sus estragos,
¿y la familia? ¡Muy bien, gracias, no comió!

All afternoon the bums go out for coffee
others for poker, pool or dominos
the hustler starts inflicting his damage
“And your family?” “Great, thanks, they haven’t eaten!”

Los cabaretes en las noches tienen pistas
atascadas de turistas, y de la alta sociedad,
pagan sus cuentas con un cheque de rebote
o “ahí te dejo el relojote, luego lo vendré a sacar”

The cabarets at night have dancefloors
crammed with tourists and high-society types
they pay their tabs with bad checks
or “I’ll leave my watch here and sell it later to get it back”

A Garibaldi van todos a madrugada
los que por suerte se escaparon de la Vial
ahí terminan con mariachis y canciones
ricos y pobres del Distrito Federal,

Everybody goes to Garibaldi at dawn
those fortunate enough to escape the Vial
There with mariachis and songs
the poor and rich of the Federal District end up

así es un sábado Distrito Federal,
Sábado Distrito Federal,
Sábado Distrito Federal.

That’s a Federal District Saturday
Federal District Saturday
Federal District Saturday

El Hindú de la Condesa

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

I haven’t talked a lot about our trip to India because I’m sure Lesley’s going to have lots of observations she wants to share when she returns midweek next week, and I don’t want to steal her thunder. (And she will bring you THUNDER, people. She was telling me something about “savory breakfasts” the other night on Skype. She’s very excited about this concept. Just a little preview. Prepare yourselves accordingly.) But I saw something the other night that reminded me how small the world is.

I was drinking some Victorias with my buddy Roberto at El Centenario, a really enjoyable cantina in the Condesa neighborhood. Around midnight, after we had finally found a table amidst the throng of revelers and hovering musicians, I saw the man I will call the ropa-wallah.

I’d seen him once before, I think on a patio at some other nightspot in the Condesa. Around these parts you’d call him un hindú, which is the catch-all term for anyone of South Asian descent, regardless of religion or border, in the same way that un chino is any variety of East Asian. The ropa-wallah carries an enormous bag of Indian-style dress shirts (the short kurta style) with him, colorful clothes made with light fabric. I haven’t inspected them up close to vouch for their quality, but they seem pretty nice.

And so the thing is that Mexicans LOVE this guy. The ropa-wallah approaches potential customers in bars and restaurants with a disarming, eager smile, and he’s so excited about selling his shirts that it’s hard to resist. “Real Indian shirts!” he says. “They will look so nice on you! This color is the best!” I watched him unload shirt after shirt at a table near the Centenario’s entrance, and every once in a while, after the ropa-wallah had moved on, I’d see a tipsy Mexican amble back toward the bathroom, clad in a regal-looking shirt of turquoise, lime-green or orange.

I did a quick search online to see if anybody knows anything about the ropa-wallah. Only saw a brief discussion of him here, in the comments. (“El que vende ropa Hindú es la onda.”) Next time I see him – for surely this won’t be the last – I’ll try to get more info.

The sight of the ropa-wallah reminded me of our visit to Amigos Bar, a Tex-Mex-themed spot in Jaipur, India, just a few weeks ago. When we learned of the existence of this place, Lesley and I were immediately convinced that we had to go. (Our friend Vikas was not so enthused, but he good-naturedly came along.)

Amigos is at the top of the Hotel Om Tower, an odd-looking, cylindrical building that offers some pretty cool views of Jaipur, the capital of the rugged northwest desert state of Rajasthan. The decor is some sort of Indian interpretation of cowboy chic, with lariats and cacti and rocks. I got a picture next to a cowboy-mannequin who lay in repose, apparently after a long day of cattle-driving or whatever. (The photo’s on the camera Lesley has with her, so I will stick it in here when she gets back.) We ordered beers and a chicken quesadilla, which was covered in a creamy sauce, more like an enchilada. It was decent but could have used some spice, something picante.

Still, we were thrilled with the very concept of eating a quesadilla/enchilada in Jaipur, seeing how the food we know so well could be interpreted and altered in a country so many miles away. I felt that same thrill at the Centenario, watching the ropa-wallah outfit Mexicans in shirts like those they wear on the other side of the world.

Cuenta de horrores

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

I had to go to the bank today.

Readers who have lived in Mexico just experienced an involuntary shudder of dread. It’s never fun to go to the bank, anywhere, but Mexico’s obsession with paperwork makes the experience downright hellish here.

And the thing is, my bank is actually relatively good! It’s one of the smaller ones, so there aren’t huge lines at the local branch, the people are pretty friendly, and the branch manager saw Lesley’s name on one of my forms and asked if a previous problem she had was resolved, which is like the closest I’ve ever gotten to a Jimmy Stewart, Wonderful Life-style banking experience.

(One downside of having a smaller Mexican bank: It’s harder to deliver money to anyone else. Most services in Mexico, from the electric company to a cooking class, require you to transfer money directly from your account to theirs to make a payment. This can be done through an interbank account number known as a CLABE, but for some reason, instead of just noting what their CLABE is, a lot of services will just provide a list of their account numbers at the nation’s largest banks. So for a fictional example, if I’m a client of Banco Gigante, I just look for the power company’s Banco Gigante account number on my bill and pay accordingly. It’s an intrabank transfer from one account to the other, and Banco Gigante can handle it. But if I’m a client of little Banco Chiquito, the power company probably doesn’t have a Banco Chiquito account, so I have to call the power company and ask what their Banco Gigante CLABE is before I can pay. It’s a big pain.

“Why don’t you just write a check?” you ask. HA! Checks technically exist here, but I have never seen them used. People don’t even write checks to family members. They just do bank transfers. Assuming they can figure out each other’s CLABEs. Anyway. Is this practice normal in other countries? I only know the American way, which is that we write checks, and when you get a check you assume it will clear. (Or maybe now you use Paypal, I guess.) That’s just how it’s done. But maybe the U.S. is an aberration? I do remember in India, our friend Vikas attempted to pay for a hotel with an advance bank transfer, but it didn’t go through and he ended up having to pay in cash. So there’s that.)

Even the good banks can’t get around that insatiable Mexican need, in government and in business, for clients to produce documents proving every detail of their lives. The phone bill is proof of residence, but the cable bill won’t suffice, unless you get digital phone service through your cable provider, I learned today. I also did not have an acceptable visa, not because my visa isn’t legit, but because they just don’t encounter visas like it very often. But they decided they could make an exception for me. Thanks, guys.

Once my transaction was approved in principle, the mounds of paperwork began. Banks like for you to sign, not just initial, every page of a contract. Including the copies you’ll be keeping yourself. They also like for your signatures to match as closely as possible, and they will scrutinize your handwriting like fortune-tellers to divine whether you are the same person who just signed that other page five seconds ago. (Actually the worst experience I had like that was in the tax office, where the clerk kept made me re-sign my name about five times to get my signature matching perfectly with the one in my visa.)

It took three hours to get my business done. On the plus side, they gave me free coffee.

Albur, the Mexican double-entendre

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

Image from Esmas.com

Today my cab driver mentioned a concept I had heard before but hadn’t really had the Spanish expertise to pay much attention to. So now I pass it on to you!

An “albur” is a Mexican form of wordplay through the use of sexual double-entendres, often used as a putdown like the dozens in the U.S. There are some common albures that everybody knows (see a great overview here), but the quick-witted people who are really good at it get to make a career out of it.

One of these is Victor Trujillo, better known as “Brozo the Creepy Clown,” a green-haired wisecracker (pictured above) who, behind the makeup, has become one of Mexico’s sharpest political critics, to the point where the big names in government have to kowtow to him. Here’s President Felipe Calderon on Brozo’s show, back when he was running for the office. (In this sense, Brozo seems to me to be kind of like a Mexican Jon Stewart.)

My Spanish comprehension and Mexican cultural sophistication aren’t nearly good enough to get most of the jokes, but the ones I have managed to digest are pretty great. Brozo, for instance, used to have a show called “El Mañanero,” which can be translated simply as “The Morning Show,” but can also refer to a morning roll in the hay. That crazy Brozo!

(Also, according to this, Brozo did the voice of Lion-O for the Spanish-language version of Thundercats. Hooooooo!)

Prepping for a mezcal tour

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

Mezcal (also spelled mescal) is alcohol distilled from the agave plant. If it’s made from the right type of agave plant – the blue agave – it’s called tequila. Or at least that’s my understanding. Liquor snobs, feel free to correct me.

Mezcal is much smokier than your typical tequila, and Mexican distillers have a lot of fun throwing different ingredients into the process. You can find lots of citrus and herb mezcales, and a popular option is mezcal pechuga, which literally means “chicken-breast mezcal,” because the mezcal maker has actually put a raw chicken in the still, adding a really nice roasted flavor. There are obviously lots of sanitary implications in the mezcal pechuga process and I prefer not to think about that. (Good discussion of mezcal varieties here.)

Mezcal is still a pretty small-time industry compared to the tequila business in Mexico, although there are some exports being manufactured now. Most of Mexico City’s nicer restaurants now have a mezcal option or two, and some of the coolest places in town have a long list to choose from. Most places will serve it as you see above at one of Lesley’s favorite haunts, Al Andar in old downtown Mexico City, with some slices of orange sprinkled with pepper.

There are also bars that specialize in mezcal, known as mescalerias. Commenter Martin has suggested I go and try some out with him. I am going to take him up on this challenge and will have a full report. Nothing brings people together like booze and the Internet.

If you’re familiar with any Mexico City mescalerias we should try, let me know. I’ve got La Botica, Red Fly, Mestizo Lounge and of course Al Andar on the radar screen. Los Danzantes is a good spot in Coyoacan, too. Any other suggestions?

I could also use a good name for this mezcal tour. I was thinking Mezcalathon 2010 but that doesn’t seem very creative. Your ideas are welcome.

Things I don’t understand about Mexican soccer

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

I’m not one of those Americans who hate soccer or think it’s a wussy sport or whatever. I really enjoy the games, especially when I can go to the stadium, because as with American football, people-watching is half the fun.

I’ve been to two Mexican league games and one international game, the World Cup qualifier between the U.S. and Mexico last summer, pictured above. (Lesley chronicled some of those experiences here and here.)

I generally understand the game and a little bit of the strategy, though the unevenness in the enforcement of the offsides rule always confuses me. But Mexican soccer has some peculiarities that really throw me off. Maybe some of Lesley’s helpful readers can help me out here.

Why does the Mexican league have two seasons? It does! The first one is called the Apertura, or opening season. The second one is the Clausura, or closing season. (We’re currently in the middle of the Clausura.) Each season has its own champion. If a team manages to win both championships, it’s known as a bicampeonato, and it’s really rare and fantastic, they say. But unless that happens, each year does not have a single team that is declared the best in the country. I find this incredibly frustrating.

Why are teams so inconsistent? Pumas won the Clausura last year, then got off to an awful start in the Apertura. Chivas were so-so in the Apertura last year and are having a great Clausura so far. Nobody seems to be able to get any sort of dominant run going. Good teams turn bad and bad teams turn good almost instantly. Is there a lot of player turnover? Do the good teams lose their players to Europe or something? Is this common in all professional soccer? I feel like in Major League Soccer, the U.S. league I sort of paid attention to, there have been a few consistently good teams over many years.

Why is it so hard to figure out when the game is on? Seriously! I know Mexican soccer fans use sites like Medio Tiempo to keep up, but I have yet to find any central repository of information on what channel the game will be on. The newspapers never have any detail. Is the Pumas game on Televisa this week? Do Chivas play on TV Azteca? According to this, you’re just supposed to know?

How are Chivas still around? My friend Carlos, a diehard Chivas fan, says the Guadalajara team has a special mystique because its roster is, by policy, composed completely of Mexicans. No other team has that rule, he says. So if you’re puro mexicano, Chivas is your team. But this is an international game! Other teams are importing players from Argentina, Brazil, even the U.S. How can a team with this policy, which is either patriotic or xenophobic depending on your view, stay competitive? It automatically shuts out most of the world’s soccer players from its recruiting base!

Carlos is trying to convert me into a Chivas fan. I’m going to watch some games with him this pseudo-season and see if it rubs off. Who knows, maybe this’ll all become clear to me.

El Super Tazón (or The Super Bowl in Mexico)

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

Wow, that was an impressive victory by Los Santos in el Super Tazón. I don’t know how to say “onside kick” in Spanish but:

“First down” = “Primer diez”
“Second down” = “Segunda oportunidad”
“Touchdown” = “Anotación”

Interestingly, Mexico has four different ways to watch the Super Bowl. You can watch on one of the two national broadcast networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, and on two cable networks, ESPN and Fox Sports. No matter what you watched last night, El Who’s halftime performance was weird, with the vocals out of sync with the video. We chose Fox Sports for the broadcast. The announcers, who called the game from a studio with occasional “color” feeds by cellphone from a guy who was actually in Miami, just seemed a little more knowledgeable than the rest.

American football (as opposed to “football,” which is soccer, guys) is quite popular in Mexico. In my first year in el DF, the Steelers seemed to me to be the most popular team based on the jerseys I saw, so I’ll be interested to see if that changes now that we have a new champion. The Cowboys are perennially popular, along with the Pats and the Broncos. I’ve spotted a good number of jerseys of my team, the Bears. I think the north of Mexico is pretty exclusively Cowboys territory, but the capital is a little more diverse.

Someone once told me that the Steelers – the Acereros – are popular in Mexico because the NFL first started broadcasting in the country in the 1970s, when the Steelers were pretty much everything one would want in a football team.

I ‘ve posted a bit before about how to watch American football in Mexico. You can get the Sunday Ticket here if you are able to get a satellite TV receiver. There’s no (legal) way to do it over the Internet here, though you can sign up for Internet broadcasts in other countries further away from the U.S.

That’s where the NBA has the NFL beat.  I’m addicted to International League Pass, the gateway to U.S. professional basketball. I can watch my Phoenix Suns play every night, along with every other game in the league. Thanks, Internet!

OK, i just checked. “Onside kick” is “patada corta.” Now you know.

(Oh! I almost forgot! Some people like to watch the Super Bowl just for commercials! Not so much in Mexico, where there are just regular commercials for cars and such, nothing special. To watch the Real Super Bowl Commercials, expats must rely on the Internet once again. Pass the guacamole!)