Arguing that it is meeting students’ constitutional right to education, a large private school association has called upon private schools to reopen in-person classes starting March 1, despite edicts by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education (SEP) for schools to remain closed.
“We have the right to provide education according to the third article of the constitution, and no one will restrict those rights,” said Alfredo Villar, president of the National Association of Private Schools.
Opening is optional for each school, Villar said. The association expects about 65% of students to return to in-person classes.
According to SEP figures from last year, 5.3 million K-12 students in Mexico were enrolled in private schools.
The association says it is making the call to reopen because many private schools are at the point of collapse due to the distance learning scheme instituted by SEP. Many schools are completely closed and may never reopen, it said on its website.
Soon after the SEP announced last August that distance learning would continue for the 2020-2021 school year, the association estimated that about 18,600 private schools in Mexico would likely end up closing permanently as a result.
The association accuses the Mexican government of “indolence” in finding a solution for schools to return to in-person classes, a situation which has created chaos in the country’s private schools, it said.
“Currently, many of these schools find themselves completely closed or at the point of bankruptcy, which will leave millions of users of the national education system defenseless,” the association said.
When the SEP announced in August that classes for public students would be broadcast on television, many parents with children in private schools began deregistering them, Villar told the news outlet Infobae.
“Many parents didn’t think it was necessary to pay tuition,” he said.
According to the SEP, over 465,000 teachers at 46,675 private schools are currently being paid a fraction of their salaries because many parents have not paid full tuition since the pandemic began.
Many private schools in Mexico charge tuition by the month, and some parents at these schools are paying only the minimum to maintain access the schools’ online teaching platforms.
Carla Maseli is one such parent. She told the newspaper El País that she continues to pay for her 10-year-old son’s access to online classes at a private school, but she sometimes doesn’t see the point, she said.
“At the end of the day, I see that my son hasn’t understood anything since he’s distracted a lot because the space that he uses to play at home now is his place to study,” she said. “A 45-minute class ends up being less than 10 due to connection problems, and they end up watching a video on YouTube.”
A cascade of private schools permanently closing would negatively affect Mexico’s public school system, the association asserts. It said that public schools would suddenly see their student populations greatly increase due to an influx of former private school students.
The Federal Auditor’s Office (ASF) has admitted that there were errors in its calculation of the cost to cancel the previous government’s Mexico City airport project.
The ASF said Saturday that canceling the partially built project at Texcoco, México state, would cost almost 332 billion pesos (US $16.1 billion), an estimate more than three times higher than that of the federal government.
President López Obrador, who took the decision to cancel the project after a legally questionable public consultation in 2018, rejected the ASF’s estimate on Monday, saying that the figure was “wrong” and “exaggerated” and that he had “other information.”
He also called on the auditor’s office to explain how it reached its figure.
In a statement issued later on Monday, the ASF said there were “inconsistencies” in its calculation and that its content is undergoing “exhaustive revision.”
“Up until now it has been detected that said amount [the estimated cancellation cost] is less than initially estimated due to a methodological deficiency,” it said.
The calculation currently under revision “considers past and future flows [of money] to carry out the cancellation of the contracted obligations,” the ASF said. That movement of money “doesn’t represent a cost but it does represent an outflow,” it said.
The ASF also said there were miscalculations with regard to costs associated with liquidating airport bonds. It said that the final result of the revision will be announced when it has been completed.
The Ministry of Communications and Transportation estimated in a 2019 document that the canceation of the US $15-billion airport would cost 100 billion pesos (US $4.8 billion).
López Obrador has said that scrapping the project in favor of converting the Santa Lucía Air Force base into a commercial airport will save the government about 130 billion pesos.
According to the government, the total cost of the new airport– whose first stage, a new military base, was inaugurated earlier this month – is projected to be 75 billion pesos (US $3.7 billion), or 230 billion pesos less than what the former administration’s airport would have cost.
The estimated 130-billion-peso saving includes a cost of 100 billion pesos to cancel the Texcoco project.
“It was a great decision we took, a wise decision,” López Obrador said at the military base inauguration, referring to scrapping the project, which was about one-third complete when it was abandoned.
The president long argued that the previous government’s flagship infrastructure project was corrupt, too expensive and geologically unsound. His alternative, the Santa Lucía airport, is slated to open in March 2022.
There were 52% more deaths last year than in previous years.
Deaths in Mexico last year were 52% higher than in previous years, putting the rate of excess deaths during the coronavirus pandemic well above that in some countries seen as suffering the worst outbreaks in the world, including the U.S., U.K. and Brazil.
New official data showed Mexico has registered 977,081 deaths since March 2020, compared with an expected 641,556 for the same period based on the 2015-2019 death tolls. Since the start of the epidemic, Mexico has officially confirmed more than 2 million cases and 181,000 deaths from Covid-19.
Total so-called excess deaths per million in Mexico last year were 2,602 — 52% higher than 1,713 in the U.S. and nearly twice as high as Brazil’s 1,047, according to Eugenio Sánchez, a Mexican statistician who has examined world mortality data compiled by Israeli economist Ariel Karlinsky and Russian researcher Dmitry Kobak. Compared with the U.K., Mexico’s toll is 75% higher.
Peru was the world’s worst-hit nation, according to that data, and Ecuador and Bolivia have also been hard hit in terms of excess deaths during the pandemic, underscoring the virus’s heavy human toll on Latin America.
The tally of excess deaths in Mexico has called into question whether its largely hands-off approach was the right one. But Hugo López-Gatell, Mexico’s coronavirus czar, told the Financial Times in an interview that his “conscience is very clear.”
“We all agree that excess mortality in 2020 compared with previous years is explained by Covid, directly or indirectly,” López-Gatell said.
He blamed political opponents for trying to twist facts. “It’s a pandemic. It would be senseless to think life would be normal. It’s a human drama. What is happening is very sad,” he said.
“But the public narrative tends to be that there’s something strange and hidden going on that’s different to what the government says. We have nothing to hide . . . It sometimes appears that we’ve been found out and we are irremediably trying to cover things up. That is not the case. Our conscience is very clear.”
Mexico imposed a nationwide lockdown from March to June 2020 but has not enforced confinement measures, enacted travel bans or made mask-wearing mandatory, arguing that draconian measures could not work in a country with millions in informal jobs needing to work in order to eat.
But officials have sometimes ignored their own data — for instance, imposing tougher restrictions in Mexico City last December two weeks after its own indicators on hospitalizations, cases and deaths indicated it should. It recently bowed to pressure from businesses to allow shops and restaurants to reopen even as hospital occupancy was trending upwards.
Analysts said that was a tacit acknowledgment that the cost in lives lost was regrettable but inevitable, given the low level of government support despite the deepest economic recession since 1932.
Coronavirus point man López-Gatell: Was the hands-off approach the right one?
“These are the consequences of a strategy based on trying to do nothing to reduce the damage instead of trying to prevent the consequences,” said Máximo Jaramillo-Molina, a fellow at the London School of Economics who researches inequality. He found that the death toll in Mexico City had disproportionately hit poorest neighbourhoods.
Independent researchers Laurianne Despeghel and Mario Romero reckon that Mexico City has the highest level of excess deaths of any city in the world, at 8,411 deaths per million inhabitants.
Their research found Mexico City’s excess deaths tally per million was 46% higher than the next worst city, Lima; 157% above New York; 190% above Madrid; and some 349% higher than London, according to Mexican data and the Financial Times’ coronavirus tracker.
Despeghel said the nationwide excess mortality data could yet be revised higher since reporting from some states experiences delays.
“The reason there are lots of deaths is that there have been lots of infections,” she said. “Mexico didn’t close its borders or do mass testing and isolation.”
But López-Gatell said the decision not to conduct mass testing was “absolutely” validated. At the start of the epidemic “an idea, that has no scientific basis, was positioned in the public narrative that the more you test, the better you control the epidemic,” he told the Times.
He said opposition politicians and columnists “sowed these ideas systematically” and were seeking to “discredit the government … in political terms that have nothing to do with science.”
On Saturday, López-Gatell disclosed on Twitter that he had caught Covid-19, writing that his symptoms were “mild” and he would continue to work from home.
Mexico says hospital occupancy has now been trending down for three weeks. President López Obrador, who said last April that Mexico had tamed the virus, has said the country will bounce back quickly.
“If you’re serious and rigorous, there are always lessons to be learned in managing the epidemic,” López-Gatell said. “The danger is to enumerate those lessons … because they get simplified and taken as if they were mistakes.”
The wife of convicted drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was arrested in the United States on Monday on charges related to international drug trafficking and conspiring to aid her husband’s 2015 jailbreak.
The United States Department of Justice said that Emma Coronel Aispuro, mother of twin daughters to the former Sinaloa Cartel leader, was arrested at the Dulles International Airport in Virginia and that she will appear in federal court on Tuesday via video conference.
Coronel, a 31-year-old dual U.S.-Mexican citizen, is charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for importation into the United States, according to court documents.
She is also alleged to have helped plan Guzmán’s escape from the Altiplano maximum security prison in México state in 2015. In addition, Coronel is accused of planning another prison escape after Guzmán was captured in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, in early 2016.
According to an affidavit written by United States Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Eric S. McGuire, Coronel was immersed in the drug trafficking world from a young age.
Her father and brother, both of whom are in prison for marijuana trafficking, were members of the Sinaloa Cartel.
“Coronel grew up with knowledge of the narcotics trafficking industry, and married Guzmán when she was a teenager. Based upon my investigation, I know Coronel understood the scope of the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug trafficking. Coronel knows and understands the Sinaloa Cartel is the most prolific cartel in Mexico,” the affidavit said.
McGuire, who has extensively investigated the cartel, said “Coronel was aware of multi-ton cocaine shipments, multi-kilo heroin production, multi-ton marijuana shipments, and ton quantity methamphetamine shipments,” adding that she “understood the drug proceeds she controlled during her marriage to Guzmán were derived from these shipments.”
The affidavit also said that from 2012 to 2014 “Coronel relayed messages on behalf of Guzmán in furtherance of drug trafficking activities while Guzmán attempted to avoid capture by Mexican authorities,” adding that “once Guzmán was arrested in February 2014, Coronel continued to deliver messages she received from Guzmán during her prison visits.”
Mcguire said he had reviewed a letter from Guzmán to Coronel, which allegedly serves as evidence of the latter’s involvement in drug trafficking.
“Regarding Cleto, increase the production so that it yields. Say hi to Cleto. Tell him to please give me a hand, so that the first sale will be my part … because I have a lot of expenses here,” read a pertinent part of the letter, according to the affidavit.
Coronel during Guzmán’s trial in New York and the drug lord after his arrest in 2011.
Guzmán likely wrote the letter, which McGuire said had been authenticated by multiple witnesses, while in the Altiplano prison between 2014 and 2015. The expenses to which he referred were bribes he paid to prison staff and support for his family, the affidavit said.
Cleto is a drug trafficker in Durango who produces heroin, McGuire said, explaining that he had established that fact via his investigation.
“I know from cooperating witness 1 as well as other sources that Cleto produced heroin for Guzmán. …. I know from my investigation that Cleto and cooperating witness 1 provided Coronel drug proceeds from more than 5 kilograms of heroin,” the affidavit said.
Cooperating witness 1 was not identified but it is possible that the person is Dámaso López, a former Sinaloa Cartel boss who testified against Guzmán at his 2018-2019 trial and said that Coronel knew of El Chapo’s plan to escape from the Altiplano prison.
According to the affidavit, Coronel visited Guzmán at the prison on multiple occasions after his arrest in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, in February 2014.
“According to cooperating witness 1, he/she received communications from Coronel on behalf of Guzmán while Guzmán was detained in Altiplano prison in 2014 and 2015. Furthermore, cooperating witness 1 told me Coronel agreed to help facilitate Guzmán to escape from Altiplano via an underground tunnel,” the affidavit said.
Four of Guzmán’s son’s along with Coronel and witness 1 “agreed to organize the construction of an underground tunnel linked to Altiplano in order to facilitate Guzmán’s escape from prison,” it said.
El Chapo escaped from the jail in July 2015 via a tunnel with an entry beneath the shower in his cell. He remained at large until his capture in Los Mochis six months later.
“I … know that while he was a fugitive, he continued to lead the Sinaloa Cartel with [Ismael “El Mayo”] Zambada,” McGuire said.
The special agent said that according to witness 1, he/she met with Coronel approximately one month after Guzmán’s January 2016 arrest.
“Coronel told cooperating witness 1 that Guzmán again wanted to escape and wanted to know whether [the witness] again would assist in the escape. Cooperating witness 1 agreed,” the affidavit said.
Coronel allegedly gave the witness approximately US $1 million to aid the escape plan, including money to purchase property in the vicinity of the Altiplano prison.
A photo of Coronel posted in December to her Instagram account.
However, El Chapo was transferred to a prison in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, scuttling the escape plan. According to the affidavit, Coronel subsequently told witness 1 that approximately US $2 million had been paid to an official who oversaw the Mexican prison system to facilitate Guzmán’s transfer back to Altiplano.
Coronel, a Culiacán resident who was born in California in 1989, attended almost every day of her husband’s trial and said that the evidence presented – including tales of grisly killings, political payoffs, high living and a massive drug-smuggling operation – did nothing to change her opinion of him.
“Everything that has been said in court about Joaquín, the good and the bad, has done nothing to change how I think about him after years of knowing him,” she said in an Instagram post in January 2019.
“I don’t know my husband as the person they are trying to show him as,” Coronel told the New York Times in an interview. “But rather I admire him as the human being that I met, and the one I married.”
Doña María Antonia remembers hearing the shooting during the Revolution.
Doña María Antonia doesn’t remember all the events that she has lived through in her 120 years on Earth, but she does remember vividly the day she married her husband, the day they built the first school in her small Veracruz town, and constantly hearing shootouts between fighters during the Mexican Revolution.
Born on June 13, 1900, the grandmother of 44 and great-grandmother to 130 became a celebrity when the Ministry of Well-Being recently shared photos showing her living through another memorable life moment: receiving her Covid-19 vaccination.
“I am well. I feel good,” she said from her home in Platón Sánchez. “The only thing that bothered me a bit is when they gave me the vaccine, but … now that I’ve received the vaccine, I’m content. But then I’m always in good spirts,” she said in a Náhuatl dialect that her relatives had to translate for the Milenio newspaper reporter who interviewed her.
She understands Spanish, but does not speak it, her family said.
She also doesn’t really get all the fuss over her, she said.
The supercentenarian and a great-granddaughter.
Sitting on an easy chair, she told a reporter about growing up in a farming family and making crafts. She also talked about the hardships in her life: her parents died early during an epidemic. She also remembers vividly when she lost her 3-month-old child not long after she had lost her husband.
Asked about her memories of the Revolution, which she lived through as a young child, Maria Antonia said she mainly remembers everyone being terrified of encountering any of the soldiers they heard engaged in warfare off in the distance.
Her parents would take the entire family to hide in the hills at night.
“We heard the shootouts, and we always were worried that at any moment they would come across us,” she said. “Most everyone was afraid, and we all hurried to finish our work so that we could eat early and leave for the hills. Our parents gave my siblings and me tortillas, but they were tortillas made from tree seeds, not corn.”
However, despite some of the tough times she’s gone through, she maintains a sunny disposition, she said. On her 120th birthday, she danced with her grandchildren.
Asked about her secrets to longevity, one of her grandchildren told Milenio that Maria Antonia eats very healthily, “no junk food or soda.”
The supercentenarian herself, however, had clarifications to add:
“I like to eat everything,” she said. “And I eat a lot of enchiladas. I like them.”
Almost all yellow corn imported is genetically modified.
The federal government will go ahead with its plan to stop importing genetically modified (GM) corn and replace it with homegrown maize, according to Deputy Agriculture Minister Víctor Suárez.
The official also told the news agency Reuters that the government is sticking to its plan to ban glyphosate, a controversial herbicide.
The government announced by executive order on the final day of 2020 that it aims to replace approximately 16 million tonnes of yellow corn imports – most of which comes from the United States and almost all of which is GM corn – with new, local production by 2024, the final year of the current administration’s six-year term.
The imports account for more than a third of Mexican demand for corn, and are mostly used as livestock fodder. Replacing the imports by 2024 with homegrown corn would require an almost 60% increase over current domestic production levels.
Suárez, an agronomist, long-term ally of President López Obrador and a key architect of the executive order, told Reuters that GM corn and glyphosate, the active ingredient in the Monsanto herbicide Roundup, are too dangerous to be permitted long term in Mexico. He said that Mexican agricultural production and sustainable “agro-ecological” practices must take priority.
Suárez: Sustainable “agro-ecological” practices must take priority.
“We are moving in this direction, and this must be clear: no one should think that they can bet that this decree will not be implemented,” Suárez said.
The deputy minister cited studies that have linked glyphosate to cancer and found that it is harmful to bees and other pollinators. He also claimed that GM corn contaminates native strains of the grain that have long been cultivated in Mexico.
Supporters of GM crops, including corn, argue that they have allowed farmers to boost production significantly and that studies have proven that they are not harmful to human health.
But Suárez described GM corn, and glyphosate, as “undesirable and unnecessary,” saying that they are not needed to attain the government’s goal of self-sufficiency in food production.
“We have to put the right to life, the right to health, the right to a healthy environment ahead of economic and business [interests],” he said.
Ending corn imports would be a heavy blow for United States farmers who have come to depend on shipments to Mexico for much of their livelihood. Critics say that the goal to replace imports with local production is completely unrealistic and would force prices up.
Suárez acknowledged that the production goal will be difficult to meet but said there is no current need to change the executive order. However, he did say that the government could adjust the goal at a later date.
“Let’s say we don’t reach the goal of substituting the 16 million tonnes [of imports], and we only reach the substitution of 10 million. Well, we would evaluate that along the way and we could eventually make the necessary adjustment,” Suárez said.
That remark, Reuters reported, provides a “strand of hope to those in the industry hoping moderate voices in the government will prevail.”
A torta’s main job is to keep a person full for hours.
I’m ashamed to say I’d lived in Mexico for quite some time before I had my first torta; my snobby I-don’t-eat-white-bread self wouldn’t allow me to look beyond the outer layer of what turned out to be a delicious, many-faceted meal in a bun.
Since that first time (at Sefe’s in Mazatlán, where the tortas are actually rather tame), I’ve come to love these big, fat, messy sandwiches and realized there’s admirable method to their madness.
Each aspect of a torta’s construction is carefully considered to allow the best flavor and optimal texture of every ingredient, individually and collectively, to shine. Sometimes that kind of culinary expertise comes from schooling; other times it comes from a simple love of eating and lots of experience with a range of common ingredients that, when combined together, tantalize the taste buds and satisfy the tummy.
Tortas are what fuel hard-working construction laborers, schoolkids hungry after an afternoon of classes and employees facing an often 10-hour workday. It’s a carb load and a protein boost, perfect for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
The best way to eat any kind of torta is to order it “con todo,” with everything. The basics might be the same — a fluffy white roll spread with butter, margarine, mayo and/or refried beans and then stuffed with meats and with cooked, marinated and/or raw veggies, plus an array of dressings. But wherever you go in Mexico will have its own signature torta style. (Which is a good thing!)
The torta ahogada smothers the entire sandwich in spicy sauce.
Like tacos, these should be explored and savored while traveling here. Of special note is Guadalajara’s torta ahogada (“drowned torta”), so named because it’s smothered in a spicy red sauce.
Tortas can be hot — served fresh off the griddle or grilled and then wrapped in foil, which steams them into something else altogether — or cold. The soft white bolillo (like a baguette) or telera (a flatter, wider roll) turns into a crispy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside, mouthwatering wonder once it’s pressed onto the grill.
Next come the meats and cheeses, grilled separately and then quickly added to the roll, followed by veggies, peppers and sauces.
Use the list below as a starter for what to put on your torta — or just head to your neighborhood lonchería or tiendita and buy one.
Milanesa. A pounded-thin, lightly breaded, crispy chicken cutlet
Chorizo. Mexican sausage in the casing or loose and ground
Albóndigas (meatballs)
Camarones. Grilled, sautéed or battered and fried shrimp
Eggs. Hard-boiled, fried or scrambled
Meat. Almost any kind: chicken, cochinita pibil (slow-roasted pork), pork shoulder (pierna), carne asada
Jamón. We’re talking lunch-meat ham
Tocino (bacon)
Cheese. You want a mild melting type: quesillo (Oaxaca cheese), manchego, chihuahua
Grilled: poblano peppers, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, nopales (cactus), even potatoes
Raw: lettuce, tomatoes, red onion, green onion, jalapeños, cilantro, avocado
Pickled: onions, jalapeños (or any other pepper), nopales, tomatoes
A squeeze of fresh lime on top
While tortas are usually named after their main ingredient (i.e., torta de huevo, torta de adobo, torta de jamón), they always include a mélange of other ingredients as well. Provecho!
Tortas are always made with rolls.
Basic Torta
Feel free to improvise! Cook the meat yourself or buy something already cooked from a local taco stand or tiendita. Some casual restaurants also sell kilos of grilled meat.
¾ lb. meat, cooked and chopped (See list above. For milanesa, leave whole.)
½ cup mayonnaise
1 onion, sliced
2-4 plum tomatoes, sliced
1 cup shredded lettuce
1 cup shredded cheese (see list above)
1-2 avocados
7 oz. can marinated jalapeños
1 Tbsp. butter, vegetable oil or manteca
Salt
2 bolillos or teleras
Optional: 1½ cups refried beans; foil, parchment or wax paper
Assemble all ingredients before starting to cook. Heat butter/oil/manteca to medium-hot. Add meat, cook and stir 5 minutes to brown. Set aside.
Slice roll in half and generously spread mayonnaise on inside of both halves. Over medium heat, toast the bread on both sides in the same pan you browned the meat in, pressing down with a spatula. Remove from heat. Now work quickly to construct the torta while the meat and bread are hot.
If using refried beans, spread on bottom half of roll. Top with meat, then cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion and jalapeños. On top half of the bread, place avocado slices, mushing them into the bread a little. Sprinkle with salt.
Carefully place the top half of the roll onto the torta, then press gently to connect. For an authentic experience, wrap in foil, parchment or wax paper and peel down as you eat.
Musician Marcos Nicolás Sosa was recognized for great talent and excellence.
A 23-year-old classical flautist from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, México state, has won a scholarship to study in London, England, for four weeks over the summer.
Marcos Nicolás Sosa was awarded the annual Anglo Arts City Music Foundation Scholarship, an initiative of the Anglo Mexican Foundation that recognizes young Mexican instrumentalists of great talent and excellence in the performance of classical music and/or jazz.
He will now have the opportunity to study at the City Music Foundation, an institution in the British capital that provides early career music professionals with expert advice, guidance and support.
“I feel very honored, it’s a large responsibility but also a great opportunity,” said Sosa, a graduate of the National Conservatory of Music who has played in several orchestras and teaches flute at his alma mater.
“I’m really eager to learn in a country such as England, one of the most established places in terms of culture, art and history.”
Sosa, who began playing the flute at 8 and taking formal classes at 11, participated in a virtual selection process before being awarded the scholarship, which will also afford him the opportunity to perform at concert venues in London and make recordings of his music.
The son of two accountants, the flautist is the first professional musician in his family. He decided that he wanted to dedicate his life to music at a young age while attending classes at the Ollin Yolitzli music and dance school in Mexico City.
“The path has obviously not been easy, especially this pandemic period,” Sosa told the newspaper Reforma, adding that his desire to excel in his chosen field has only increased as the result of having limited recent opportunities to perform in front of audiences.
He is the third winner of the Anglo Arts City Music Foundation Scholarship after Eusebio Sánchez, a xylophonist, and Abner Jairo Ortiz, a cellist.
The Teeter Totter Wall art project gave people in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, the chance to play together despite the border wall.
For 40 minutes in July 2019, three seesaws in vivid pink broke through the United States-Mexico border wall, bridging communities on either side.
The work — then and later — became a literal manifestation of what unites rather than divides us, the communities we can generate when we dispense with barriers and instead embrace interacting together.
“The Teeter-Totter Wall encouraged new ways of human connection,” said Tim Marlow, the museum’s director. “It remains an inventive and poignant reminder of how human beings can transcend the forces that seek to divide us.”
The project’s inception came a decade before its physical appearance on a tiny patch of wall between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. The architects behind the innovation, Virginia San Fratello, associate professor of design at San Jose State University, and Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, came up with the idea to use play as activism and generate the possibility of joy and togetherness at the border wall after the Secure Fence Act of 2006.
A video about the project that can be found on YouTube is playful, peppered with the laughter of adults and children alike, each taking their turn at bobbing up and down on the bright pink seesaws. It is a contrast to images commonly associated with the border wall during president Trump’s administration, the visual metaphor of a seesaw a stark reminder that the actions on either side of the border do not exist in a vacuum.
An attempted coup and two impeachments notwithstanding, the border wall — and the many other conflicts it engendered — was one of the defining issues of the Trump administration. Indeed, since 2017, the U.S. has spent US $9.7 billion on construction of the border barrier, primarily at the southwest border.
It is important to note that other administrations had a hand in border tensions and certainly set the wheels in motion, fomenting tensions and the enduring humanitarian crisis.
Trump’s attitude toward the border wall, however, was not only literally manifested in its construction and the commissioning of contracts. It also perpetuated an entire separatist ideology that will continue to reverberate for a long time to come — not to mention that this very attitude was a significant part of the platform he won the presidency on in the first place, and thus a large part of the significance of the teeter-totter project for the creators.
Both the project itself, and the announcement of the award, are timely reminders of the ongoing question of the border wall and the efforts of U.S. government administrations to curtail the flow of immigrants from the south.
Tens of thousands of migrants a year attempt to make the northern passage between countries in Central and South America and the United States, fleeing poverty, persecution and crime in their home countries, as well as the sweeping negative effects of natural disasters and climate change. The journey is a treacherous one, made significantly more dangerous by the risks of being attacked or enlisted by gangs smuggling drugs and other goods across the border.
The Mexico-U.S. border itself is, like most borders, a fairly arbitrary line in the sand. Territory on either side has been transferred between nations, most frequently in favor of the United States. However, while the boundary may be symbolic, the violence and crime there are definitively not.
Recently in Guatemala, security forces broke up a caravan of about 4,000 — mostly Honduran — migrants who had been camped out near the village of Vado Hondo. The police arrived with shields and tear gas to disperse them. Then, just a week after the Teeter-Totter Wall won the Beazley award, 19 bodies were found in a burned van farther along the border in the state of Tamaulipas. The incident is reminiscent of the 2010 massacre of 72 migrants who refused to work for cartels on the border and is a stark reminder that the transient communities surrounding the border wall are spaces of conflict.
There is burgeoning hope, however, for the reparation of relations between Mexico and the United States now that President López Obrador and the newly inaugurated President Biden have agreed to work together toward ending the “draconian” policies put in place by the Trump administration.
“It’s a question of drawing a very hard line in the sand about what one thing is and what another thing is, but those lines are complete abstractions,” Rael says. “Really, people and animals and water flow across these boundaries, so we just wanted to see if we could change the way this space is occupied for a moment.”
Too often, border walls merely serve as symbols of hitherto unsolved problems rather than as solutions. It is no surprise, then, that the wall has served so often in the recent past as an opportunity for communities, artists and activists to present utopian aspirations of what might be if we recognize our neighbors’ faces in our own.
For 40 minutes on one July pre-pandemic day not that long ago, pink seesaws subverted hegemony and more traditional symbols of the border, showing us how, with a little imagination and innovation, with a sprinkle of love and daring, with a dash of chutzpah, it is possible for us to imagine new and braver worlds into existence.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think-tank. She writes from Campeche.
One of the photos that accompanied a thank-you message to CFE workers.
The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has bungled an attempt to thank its employees for restoring power after a major outage last week by publishing a Facebook post that included photos of workers who are not employed by the state-owned company.
The utility published six photos to its official Facebook page on Saturday as part of a post to acknowledge the work of the “heroes” who restored power last week amid freezing conditions in the north of the country.
One of the images used, that of a man kitted out in a frost-covered uniform, was lifted from a Facebook post made by United States electricity company Evergy.
Two photographs showing workers repairing electricity lines as heavy snow fell previously appeared on the image sharing website Pinterest, the digital news outlet López-Dóriga Digital determined, while another similar image was taken from an advertisement for heavy-duty gloves.
The CFE erased its post after it was heavily criticized on social media and acknowledged later on Saturday that there had been an “error” in its selection of photos.
Photo used by the CFE that was taken from a post by a US energy firm.
In a new Facebook post, which featured four photos including an image of a worker standing in front of icicles at a CFE plant, the utility said that while it accepted it made a mistake it wouldn’t allow the “great effort” of its employees to go unrecognized.
CFE chief Manuel Bartlett and President López Obrador have both praised workers for reestablishing electricity supply after some 4.7 million people were left in the dark last Monday when an interruption to the natural gas supply due to freezing weather in the United States caused a blackout.
Bartlett said last Thursday that workers averted a “total disaster” in quickly reestablishing electricity generation, an achievement he described as a “a great feat.”
The posting of the fake images was the second example this year of the utility’s capacity for playing fast and loose with the truth. In December, the commission forged a document it used to back up its claim that a wildfire in Tamaulipas contributed to as massive power outage.
The CFE later admitted to the forgery but Bartlett dismissed the issue as a minor one.
