True Tales from Another Mexico

by Quinones, Sam

• ISBN13: 9780826322968
• ISBN10: 0826322964
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr

Summary

Quinones merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in his search for an authentic modern Mexico. He finds it in part in emigrants, people who use wits and imagination to strike out on their own. In poignant stories from north of the border -- about Oaxacan basketball leagues in southern California and the late singing legend Chalino Sánchez whose songs of drug smugglers spurred the popularity of the narcocorrido -- Quinones shows how another Mexico is reinventing itself in America today. But most of his stories are from deep inside Mexico itself. There a dynamic sector exists. It is made up of those who instinctively shunned the enfeebling embrace of the PRI's paternalism, including scrappy entrepreneurs such as the Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo and Indian migrant farmworkers who found a future in the desert of Baja California. Here, too, are true tales from ignored margins of society, including accounts of drag queens and lynchings. From the fringes of the country, Quinones suggests, emerge some of the most telling and central truths about modern Mexico and how it is changing.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(10)
The Ballad of Chalino Sanchez	11	(20)
Lynching in Huejutla	31	(22)
Telenovela	53	(26)
The Jotos of La Fogata	79	(18)
San Quintin	97	(20)
Zeus and the Oaxaca Hoops	117	(20)
The Dead Women of Juarez	137	(16)
West Side Kansas Street	153	(28)
Photo Section	173	(8)
The Bronx	181	(16)
Leaving Nueva Jerusalen	197	(28)
Jesus Malverde	225	(8)
Tepito	233	(16)
The Last Valiente	249	(18)
The Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo	267	(16)
Nuevo Chupicuaro	283	(10)
Afterword--July 2: Another Mexico Emerges	293	(33)
Appendix: Story Updates	326	(7)
Acknowledgments	333