jacobito's Journal

Zapata
Originally uploaded by jacobito.

In a week I'll be in Chiapas. I'm going to enter the Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Secondary School and study Spanish for a month. I'll have to take a couple of days off so I can check out the Primer Campamento Nacional de Jóvenes por la Autonomía in Oaxaca. When my Spanish is fluent enough, I'll return to D.F. and try to get a bunch of the people I've met here to come up to San Diego for borderHack.

I've been busy lately!
Friday, I went out to a book opening at Casa Lamm for someone named Federico Samaniego, whose book "La Semilla del Tiempo", is a political astrology of Mexico. The speakers present were very famous and well respected, but I didn't follow it. It felt strange to explain the history of country with accounts of the stars when the country was 'born.'

Afterwards, we met up with Fran's friend, Tania Molina Ramirez, a journalist with La Jornada, the best paper in Mexico. She writes as well as translates for people like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn. I got to interview her about the relationship between La Jornada and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos as well as other things. It will get played on radioActive Tuesday night at 8pm.

Later, I went to the Centro de Medios Libres and met up with some people from Aire, a media collective a friend of mine from San Diego helped out with during the Cancun protest against the WTO. After a quick interview about the Centro and Aire, we went over to a party where I met some people from Radio Ke-Huelga and Radio Zapote. The party was great; incredible amounts of espanol going in my head, along with beer. At one point, I remember talking to a street gang with a friend of mine, but not really sure. Anyways, there were people from Spain, Germany, U.S., Mexico, and Sweden there. A mini-encuentro of sorts.

In the morning, with these friends, I went to the anarchopunk & Goth & Ska & Skin autonomous street market, called El Chopo. I've never seen anything like. Tons of crusty subcultural punks and goths having their own swap meet! I saw posters for Ska shows, and lots of graffiti. Shirts, food, buttons, pins, zines, tapes; bartering, bargaining, stealing, selling. One thing I saw there, as well as other places in Mexico City, were Swastikas. Hip, trendy kids wearing swastika shirts. People selling them in the same bin as anti-nazi shirts. The people who buy them wear it as a fashion symbol; its become trendy to be sport fascism. It makes me sick.

As we were walking around El Chopo, a friend of ours came by and asked us if we wanted to be extras in a movie. Why not, we said? So we went to this bar and waited until he picked three of us to be 'punks' at a concert. One of us had to get water dumped all over him. After 20 min, we all walked around 200 pesos richer.

When I'm not adventuring around the city or making interviews, I've been reading Ya Basta! Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising from AK Press. The story I read today was the Cave of Desire. When I'm not reading that, I've been listening to Radio Insurgente, la voz de los sin voz. We just started to rebroadcast them on radioActive, and I hope to check out the station when I'm dowin in Oventic.

When I'm not doing that, sometimes I lay in this park. Other times I play with the chihuahua.

I sleep between dreams.

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