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(04/19/07 4:00am)
MEXICO CITY – Miss Mexico is toning down her Miss Universe pageant dress – not because it’s too slinky or low-cut, but because its bullet-studded belt and images of hangings from a 1920s uprising have outraged Mexicans.\nThe floor-length dress is accented with crosses, scapulars and a sketch of a man facing a firing squad. Designers who helped select the dress from among 30 entries argued it represented the nation’s culture and history, especially since Mexico City is hosting the pageant in May.\nCut from a traditional natural cotton called manta, the dress depicts scenes from the 1926-1929 Cristero war, an uprising by Roman Catholic rebels against Mexico’s secular government, which was imposing fiercely anti-clerical laws. Tens of thousands of people died.\n“We wanted a dress that made you think of Mexico,” Hector Terrones, who served on the selection committee, told La Jornada newspaper. “The design should grab people’s attention and have impact without giving too much information.”\nBut many Mexicans weren’t happy about the history the dress evoked, especially at a moment of debate about the Catholic Church’s role in politics and its lobbying against a Mexico City proposal to legalize abortion. Others said it glorified violence in a country where a battle between drug gangs has brought a wave of killings and beheadings.\nMiss Mexico, Rosa Maria Ojeda, presented the dress March 29, showing off the billowing, hoop skirt adorned with sketches of Catholic rebels hanging from posts. Rosaries and scapulars hung from the bullet-studded, bandolier belt; a large crucifix necklace, black halter top and wide-brimmed sombrero completed the outfit.\n“It’s inappropriate to use images of this Cristero war that cost so many lives and was so pointless,” said Guadalupe Loaeza, a contemporary Mexican writer.\nThe gown’s designer, Maria del Rayo Macias, told La Jornada that “we are descendants of Cristeros. Whether we like it or not, it’s a part of who we are.” Macias is from Guadalajara, a city in what was the Cristero heartland.\nLa Jornada columnist Jorge Camil said a dress was not the place to recount the event.\n“It would be like Miss USA wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the deep South, with their hoods, their burning crosses and beer cans,” he wrote. “A beauty contest is very far from being the right place to vent political and religious ideologies.”\nOjeda’s representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment, but said in a statement the dress would be “modified” due to “the concerns that have surfaced regarding the design.” Pageant spokeswoman Esther Swan said the skirt would have ribbons and ruffles and no pattern, while the top would remain the same.\nMexican church officials also argued that using the war as a fashion statement was disrespectful to the thousands who died, some of whom were later named saints.\nThe conflict was the culmination of a century of bloody struggles over liberal attempts to slash the power of the church, which had been an arm of the Spanish colonial government for three centuries, owning vast tracts of land and savagely persecuting rival religions. The church later supported a foreign invasion of the country.\nThe secular government that emerged from Mexico’s revolution of 1910 through 1917 toughened anti-clerical laws imposed earlier, setting off a conflict in which churches and convents were shuttered, foreign priests were expelled and mobs sacked sanctuaries. Religious raiders responded by blowing up passenger trains and attacking government forces.\nBy the time the U.S. Embassy helped mediate an end to the violence in 1929, only a few hundred priests remained in Mexico.\n“It’s not right for Mexico, in an important international event like Miss Universe, to remember this sad and unfortunate fact of our history,” Monsignor Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel told La Jornada. “This traditional outfit alludes to events that opened deep wounds.”
(02/15/07 4:01am)
MEXICO CITY -- A year ago, Rinko Kikuchi was appearing in mothball ads on local Japanese television. Today, she's nominated for an Academy Award as the world breaks into that most exclusive of clubs: the Oscars.\nNo matter who wins at the Feb. 25 ceremony, the global movie community is already gushing over this real-life version of a Hollywood feel-good movie.\nThis year's lineup is the most ethnically diverse ever, with five black people, two Hispanics and an Asian among the 20 acting nominees. Best-picture nominee "Letters From Iwo Jima" is almost entirely in Japanese. Hispanics alone garnered a record 19 nominations, including three Mexican directors contending for some of the biggest prizes of the night.\n"They represent us," declared a headline in the Mexico City newspaper El Universal.\nNo film better exemplifies Hollywood going global than "Babel," from Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, a saga of families on three continents linked by tragic events in the African desert. It received seven nominations, including for best picture and best director, and has dialogue that jumps among Arabic, Berber, Spanish and Japanese.\n"It's a joy. American cinema is receiving people from all over the world -- this can open the doors for everybody," said Mexico's Adriana Barraza, nominated for her supporting role in "Babel."\n"Nowadays we are a global society -- people are thinking in global terms, and I think it touched society as such," she said of "Babel," speaking in Spanish from Miami.\nIn Japan, euphoria has erupted over Kikuchi's nomination, also for a supporting role in "Babel." No one from Japan has won an Oscar since Miyoshi Umeki, for her supporting role in "Sayonara" in 1957.\nMoviegoers are flocking to theaters in Tokyo, while tourist agencies are offering cruises to the island of Iwo Jima after Clint Eastwood's film renewed interest in the World War II battleground.\nSince her acting debut eight years ago, Kikuchi, 26, had been confined to low-budget movies, television dramas and commercials.\n"We really hope she would win since it would be great for a Japanese person to be given recognition on the world stage," said Naeko Natsume, who helped produce the Japan portion of the film.\nEurope is also basking in the glory. The large number of Britons nominated even caught the attention of Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called it "a real tribute to the increasing strength of the British film industry and to the incredible talents of all who work in it."\nThe Scotsman newspaper declared, "The Brits are coming--again!" referring to director Colin Welland's famous line accepting an Oscar for "Chariots of Fire" in 1982. Judi Dench ("Notes on a Scandal"), Kate Winslet ("Little Children") and Helen Mirren ("The Queen") grabbed three of the five best-actress nominations while Stephen Frears ("The Queen") and Paul Greengrass ("United 93") are up for best director. Irish-born Peter O'Toole ("Venus") also is vying for best actor.\nIn Spain, hardly a day goes by without a photo of best--actress nominee Penelope Cruz ("Volver") in newspapers recording her every movement, from revolving-door boyfriends to California shopping escapades.\nWhile the broadening of Hollywood has touched many corners of the world, in Sierra Leone few even know what the Oscars are, even though the West African nation's bloody civil war is the focus of "Blood Diamond."\nDjimon Hounsou, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in the West African country of Benin, is up for his supporting role as a fisherman struggling to save his family in the war.\nAlthough only a few private copies are available in Sierra Leone and the film has yet to hit theaters in Hounsou's native Benin, "Blood Diamond" has brought the world's attention back to how diamonds have too often meant war and suffering in Africa.\nGaston Kabore, an awardwinning filmmaker from Burkina Faso, called Hounsou's nomination "an individual success that does not suffice to fill in the gap between the African film industry and Western, but it shows that we have talented individuals. It gives psychological and moral impact and it gives the feeling that Africa has heroes, talented actors."\nThe same goes for Latin America. Mexico's Isidra Hoil Mukul, a 7--year--old Mayan Indian who speaks only a few words in Spanish, had never even been to a movie theater before a film scout recruited her to play the one who predicts her people's tragic demise in Mel Gibson's Oscar--nominated "Apocalypto."\nInterpreter Mary Coba said the scout first had to explain to the girl what a movie is. Then they took her to see a children's film before flying her to Mexico City for an interview with Gibson.\n"I liked working on the movie 'Apocalypto' because I got to meet a lot of people," Isidra said at a news conference, speaking softly in her native Mayan dialect.\nBut she said fame has not gone to her head: "I'm still the same"
(04/28/06 3:56am)
NOGALES, Mexico -- Swaddled in dirt in the inky night, the newborn trembled as a stranger struggled to snip her umbilical cord with nail clippers. A smuggler and other migrants had bolted when the baby's 18-year-old mother screamed with labor pains.\nBut Lilia Ortiz couldn't just leave them in the harsh Arizona desert. Ortiz, 23, had walked two days straight to get this far. But she knew what it was like to struggle as a mother on her own.\nThe two women are part of a new wave of migrants. A decade ago, illegal migration was dominated by men. Now more women are making the journey, risking rape and even death to support their families.\nThe increase in women migrants comes as beefed-up border security has funneled migrants through one of the world's most forbidding deserts, and as smugglers adopt increasingly violent tactics.\nSome cross with their children. Others leave them behind with relatives. Pregnant women, like the one who gave birth this week, walk for days through the desert in the hope that their children will have a better life as U.S. citizens.\nRape has become so prevalent that many women take birth control pills or shots before setting out to ensure they won't get pregnant. Some consider rape "the price you pay for crossing the border," said Teresa Rodriguez, regional director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women.\nIf caught by the U.S. Border Patrol, women are often deported to Mexico's violent border towns in the middle of the night, despite a 1996 agreement between the two countries that promised women and children would only be returned in daylight hours, according to directors of migrant shelters along the 2,000-mile border.\nWorldwide, nearly half of the estimated 180 million migrants are women, according to a report released in February by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.\nA study released last week by U.S. and Mexican migration experts, partly funded by the Mexican government, found that nearly half of all Mexican migrants living in the United States are women.\nThe female migrants are getting younger. Of migrants under 18 deported to Mexico, females accounted for only 2 percent in 1994, when the U.S. started cracking down at the border. Since 2002, they have made up nearly a third each year, said Blanca Villasenor, who recently published a book on Mexico's female migrants.\n"It's very significant because it shows the country is losing its potential -- its youth, its reproductive force," said Villasenor, who runs a youth shelter in Mexicali on the California border.\nCentral American women face even more danger because they must first cross Mexico, where gangs and even immigration officials have attacked women, said Jesus Aguilar, a migrant rights activist in El Salvador.\n"The normal rule, according to women who migrate, is that before leaving their countries they have to take the pill for at least one to three months to ensure that they will not get pregnant after a rape," said Aguilar, of the group Carecen Internacional.\nMany Central Americans crossing Mexico hop cargo trains, where Aguilar said "there's almost a 99 percent chance that a woman will get raped."\n"The risk of rape is very high, not only by smugglers or by men in their same group, but also by criminals on public buses or on the cargo trains," he said.\nWaiting with a smuggler for darkness in the popular jumping-off point of Sasabe, across the Arizona border, Gisela Anzures fiddled with a purple scrunchie on her wrist Tuesday and said she had heard the horror stories.\n"It's very dangerous. The gangs show up and pat you down in a horrible way," said Anzures, a 28-year-old divorced accountant who left her 5-year-old son with her parents in Cuernavaca. "It's no great pleasure to do this, but I'm fed up with the long hours and low pay in Mexico."\nTwenty-five miles to the north, a U.S. Border Patrol helicopter had spotted Ortiz, her aunt, the 18-year-old new mother and her baby a day earlier. After being abandoned in the desert by their smuggler, they were glad to be rescued.\nOrtiz and her aunt were returned by the Border Patrol to Nogales, where they vowed to try again. The mother and newborn were recovering at a hospital in Tucson, Ariz., and were listed in good condition; Ortiz said she didn't know the mother's name and U.S. authorities would not release it.\nBorder Patrol agents in southern Arizona -- the busiest crossing area -- come across a birth in the desert about once a year. Last fall, a baby was born in a Border Patrol helicopter as it flew the mother to a hospital.\nCollapsed on a bunk bed at a Nogales shelter, Ortiz rubbed her legs, which were covered with cactus thorns. She said she left her abusive husband after Hurricane Stan swept away her family's home in Chiapas last fall, and decided to head north. Friends in Florida had promised to help her get work.\n"I have a 6-month-old girl, and I'm a single mother," she said. "I feel sad and desperate. I have no money and haven't been able to get work at home, and now I can't get to the other side."\nOrtiz said she would try the crossing again in hopes of a better life for her daughter -- who is now staying with another aunt.\nWith a glimmer of envy, she said the pregnant woman had been trying to do the same thing.\nIt worked. Her baby daughter is now a U.S. citizen.\nAssociated Press writer Diego Mendez contributed to this report from San Salvador.
(03/21/06 5:07am)
CANCUN, Mexico -- Though sugar-white sand beaches are back after being swept away by Hurricane Wilma five months ago, no stages await wet T-shirt contests and MTV won't be hosting its spring break beach party.\nInstead, the first wave of winter-weary college students who converged on Cancun found that construction workers nearly outnumbered revelers this week in Mexico's spring break capital of beer and bikinis.\nWith nearly half its hotels still closed, Cancun has plunged down the list of destinations for spring breakers from the United States. The Caribbean resort fell from No. 2 last year to No. 8 this year for travelers booking trips through CheapTickets.com. Miami was the top destination.\nTourism officials say they expect about 25,000 visitors in Cancun this season, compared to 40,000 last year. Many spring breakers have moved farther south to the Maya Riviera or to Acapulco, the Pacific playground of the 1950s that has been steadily rising in popularity because of its all-night discos.\n"Obviously it's not going to be the same this year," said Cancun Tourism Director Jesus Rossano.\nMany of those who did make the trip found themselves sitting against a backdrop of lumber piles and cement blocks or next to pools lined with brown palms that appeared to have just gotten a buzz cut. Instead of blasting music, the sound of hammers pierced the air.\n"It's not near as nice as I expected," said MacKenzie Horras, 22, an elementary education student at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa. "Some of the pools are dirty or don't have water."\nWhile some of the hotels were clearly out of business for some time to come, others were fully functioning beyond their damaged facades. The Oasis hotel, popular with spring breakers, showed few signs of being hit by a major hurricane.\nAll, however, agreed Mexico's party resort has slowed down a bit.\nStephanie Streit, who was sunbathing with Horras on the beach, said her friends who'd come the year before described a much wilder place.\n"Out of control was the term I heard most used," said Streit, 22, a psychology major at the University of Northern Iowa. "But it's pretty tame."\n"I heard boobs and beads," said her friend, Crystal Whitney, 21, referring to the wet T-shirt contests and beaded necklaces worn by revelers who flock to the all-you-can-drink discos. "But I haven't seen much of that."\nThe Mexican government hoped to use spring break as a way to show the world how the country's prime resort had bounced back.\nPresident Vicente Fox's government poured $19 million into rebuilding the beaches, hiring a Belgian company that dredged sand from the ocean floor and dumped tons of it over rocks and concrete the hurricane exposed.\nWith winds reaching 150 mph, Wilma roared ashore Oct. 21, 2005, then stalled over Cancun for nearly 40 hours. It toppled trees, demolished homes and left much of the city of 700,000 under brown, foul-smelling flood waters.\nRebuilding began almost immediately and continues around the clock, especially in the hotel zone, a 15-mile spit of coast where glamorous resorts line the Caribbean on one side and posh shops and smaller lodges face a lagoon on the other.\nSome of the most popular discotheques, like Dady'O and Coco Bongo, packed people in as in years past. But many bars which once drew thousands with big-name rock bands and over-the-top contests aimed at giving people reasons to get naked in public were closed.\nCheryl Scott, 45, said when she realized she was taking her 11-year-old son to Cancun during spring break, she feared it would be a disaster.\n"You hear the 'woo-hoo' and the 'yee-haw,' and you know where they're coming from," said Scott, who lives outside Fort Worth, Texas. "But it's not been an issue at all. It's safe, normal and he hasn't seen anything I wouldn't want him to see."\n"I'm not an old fuddy duddy," she added. "But this is my speed: My son is making sand castles and I'm drinking strawberry daiquiris."\nMany students also said Wilma did not ruin their vacations.\n"Looking at the ocean all day is a lot better than staring at a cornfield," said 22-year-old University of Nebraska at Lincoln student Ben Hansen.
(10/29/02 5:37am)
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- The signs of crisis are everywhere. Homeless people sleep in abandoned factories where workers once assembled irons, toasters, shirts and other goods. Border migrant groups air radio announcements in the countryside, telling job seekers to stay away. \nMexico's northern border industry, hit hard by a year-long downturn, is finally starting to recover, but with some of its biggest factories shuttered, no one expects the region to return to the thriving export economy it enjoyed for a decade. \nToy maker Hasbro Inc. has moved its Tijuana plant to China. Canon Inc. moved its Tijuana inkjet printer plant to Vietnam. Philips Electronics shifted one of its Ciudad Juarez computer monitor plants to China. \nIt is a dramatic change from the influx of manufacturing that began in the 1960s when mostly U.S.-owned assembly plants came to the 2,000-mile frontier in the 1960s to take advantage of Mexico's proximity and low labor costs. \nMexico recently complained to the World Trade Organization about China's luring away its factories, but Asia is not the border's only competition. Some companies have opted for Central America and Mexico's impoverished southern states, where labor is cheaper than along the border. \n"It's going to be very difficult for the border to bounce back to the way it was with labor-intensive plants," said Rolando Gonzalez, president of Mexico's Association of Maquiladoras, as the plants are known in Spanish. "Labor is too expensive. The border can't compete paying $2.50 to $4.50 an hour when China pays less than 50 cents an hour.'' \nFor decades before the crisis, busloads of Mexico's unemployed arrived daily and found work amid the boom of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Plants offered gymnasiums, daycare and other perks to compete for laborers. More than 3,500 plants employed 1.2 million people. \nBut the maquiladora industry has since lost 250,000 jobs, most along the border. Some jobs have been created recently, but most are in the interior -- not the border, Gonzalez said.