One thousand beer glasses have been painted and/or engraved by Mexican artists thanks to an initiative of pilsner brand Stella Artois.
The brand, brewed in Mexico by Grupo Modelo, collaborated with artists from various parts of Mexico on “The Art of Chalice” project.
Stella Artois chalices are sold around the world and considered the best glasses from which to drink the pale lager that was first brewed in Belgium almost 100 years ago.
Collaborating on a project to create a collection of hand-painted chalices was an opportunity for Stella Artois to “merge its historic respect for artisanal process around the world with the ancient artistic traditions of Mexico,” said brand manager Sofía Hourcade.
“… Stella Artois and several of … [Mexico’s] best artists have created works of absolute beauty that are a window to the world [to show] how beautiful Mexico and its culture are,” she said.
Two of the many artisans who participated in the project.
The chalices, which feature a range of distinctly Mexican images, have been on sale since late last year with all proceeds going to the artists who painted them.
One artist who participated in “The Art of Chalice” project was Waldo Hernández Melchor of San Martín Tilcajete, a town about 30 kilometers south of Oaxaca city. The maker of alebrijes (wooden carvings of fantastical creatures) told the newspaper Milenio that he was thankful for the opportunity to paint a number of Stella Artois chalices.
“That brands such as Stella Artois do these kinds of collaborations is a great opportunity of growth for us, and not just us, but artisans from all over the country,” Hernández said.
“We should all have the opportunity to show how much we love our country through the arts and crafts we make,” he said. “… For us it’s a way of showing off our work, our skills…”
Hernández collaborated with a range of other artists during his participation in the initiative including Amador Montes, who features in an official “The Art of Chalice” video.
“… It was a great experience because we exchanged knowledge, sensibilities and techniques,” he said.
Artist Amador Montes speaks (in Spanish) about the Art of Chalice project.
Hernández said that initiatives such as that backed by Stella Artois also help to create jobs and spur artists to grow and develop their skills. “We are very grateful,” he added.
Chris Wood, director of the National Laboratory of Advanced Microscopy in Cuernavaca, Morelos. Julia Wood Martínez
Microscopy has been utterly fundamental to our understanding of the life sciences for half a millennium. It is a sad reality, however, that in Mexico, as well as the rest of Latin America, there are disparities in scientific development and infrastructure compared to the rest of the globe.
This means that young Mexican scientists, who simply cannot access the most advanced equipment and techniques, are looking to other parts of the world for a gateway to resources and funding.
In other words, argues Chris Wood, director of the National Laboratory of Advanced Microscopy (LNMA) in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico needs to fight harder to retain scientific talent and create space for innovation. To achieve this, he argues, there is a pressing need for more egalitarian access to core facilities.
At the LNMA, Wood, alongside a team of scientists and specialist technicians, is shifting the narrative on precisely this issue, building connections among laboratories around the country to encourage knowledge exchange and emphasizing the importance of cooperation at every level.
With the support of Conacyt’s National Laboratory Program and the National Autonomous University (UNAM) — the lab complex is located on UNAM’s Morelos campus — the LNMA opened its doors in 2013, part of a national program of national laboratories formed by Conacyt in 2006. Renting its state-of-the-art microscopy equipment to everyone, regardless of their scientific background, the LNMA creates a space for fruitful knowledge exchange and collaborative research for the whole community.
There is not a clinical laboratory in the world that does not contain a microscope of some form since microscopy is essential to our knowledge of anything that exists beyond what we can see with the naked eye. However, many microscopes with the most cutting-edge capabilities cost millions of dollars and are therefore not feasible to purchase for the majority of laboratories. This means that a great deal of exciting new research is stymied by the misfortune of financial circumstances.
An autofluorescence image of an Arabidopsis seed embryo. Chris Wood
Moreover, funding here has historically been granted hierarchically; in Mexico, Conacyt previously granted subsidies to individual scientists who oversee groups of researchers and graduate students. This stratification of access to resources created a gap between the proprietors of expert knowledge, whose research is hugely influential in public policymaking, and the on-the-ground interests of the people served by those policies — as well as new scientific talent whose access to facilities might be restricted.
The LNMA’s founding grew from the need to create a positive tonal shift in scientific infrastructure. In 2011, Conacyt made the groundbreaking commitment to fund this centralized facility, accessible to people of every circumstance, in order to ease the way for burgeoning new domains of scientific discovery, as well as to encourage new progress in more established fields.
Changing an entrenched system, however, has been no easy task: Wood explains that one of the biggest battles fought at the genesis of the laboratory was explaining the concept to the scientific community and overcoming the skepticism surrounding the notion of a widely accessible core facility.
“Given that it takes a significant amount of time for scientific systems to accommodate a system which does not fit the typical model of research,” he says, “it is a risk to switch to running core facilities. But stepping outside of the traditional evaluation systems is worth it to make sure the science we do in Mexico is comparable to science performed anywhere in the world.”
Bioimaging labs in Latin America and across the globe are largely removed from the academic rigmarole of publication. Instead, laboratories like the LNMA exist at the vanguard of knowledge exchange and support for people through human resources and high-quality training.
“We run courses which anyone can attend, and anyone with 200 pesos in their pocket can spend an hour on a microscope,” Wood explains. “The result is that we work with a hugely diverse range of people and that we are able to democratize access and make it a bit more horizontal. We work with photographers, advertising agencies and cinematographers — we never have a dull day!”
Image of an Arabidopsis root with starch granules taken with an LNMA microscope. Arturo Guevara, Chris Wood
Needless to say, it is not merely about the equipment: a collection of machines can do little without a highly specialized team of technicians and researchers who can guide users into getting the best results.
Beyond this, LNMA has invited microscopy labs across the country to join a growing network of cooperating bioimaging laboratories. Wood and his colleagues are embarking on a three-year project which epitomizes their philosophy and aims to connect the Mexican bioimaging community.
Funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which encourages collaboration among scientists from around the globe, the LNMA and associate microscopy labs — including the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada (CICESE) and the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) — will hold workshops in various institutions across the country on all aspects of microscopy — another way to get scientists across Mexico talking to each other.
“By fomenting relationships through networks like this one, we have the freedom to be multidisciplinary,” says Wood. “We are able to escape academic labels that pigeonhole us into specific fields, and we can instead problem-solve using a diverse team to take a multi-angle approach.”
What this does is create an ecosystem whereby the team at LNMA, working in dynamic exchange with labs across the nation, can take multipronged approaches to the scientific problems brought to them, facilitating a more collaborative understanding of our environment.
“Presenting a united front, it really does change the culture of how you do science,” Wood concludes, striking at the heart of what he and his colleagues do best in Cuernavaca: taking radical steps forward in the advancement of knowledge exchange in bioimaging and microscopy across Latin America by blending the most innovative scientific techniques with a philosophy focused on sharing and collaboration.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
Average temperature during the month was 18.7 C. deposit photos
The final 31 days of 2021 marked the warmest December in 68 years, the National Meteorological Service (SMN) said.
The average temperature during the month was 18.7 C, surpassing December 2016 to become the hottest final month of the year since record keeping began in 1953.
The historic December average for Mexico, which takes 1981-2010 data from the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as a reference, is 16.9. December was 1.8 degrees above that average.
The average nationwide temperature for 2021 was 22.2, making it the fourth warmest year since 1953, only eclipsed by the hotter years of 2017, 2019 and 2020.
However, the head of the SMN, Miguel Ángel Gallegos, warned against over generalizations on the national scale, explaining that extreme heat in some states had raised the nationwide average. “The increase in temperature does not occur in a generalized way throughout the country. On the Pacific coast, from Sinaloa to Chiapas there have been temperatures in the past year of 40 and 41. For the months of March, April and May, in the northern part of the country, we had temperatures of almost 50,” he said.
Meanwhile, the SMN also noted that rainfall was below average in recent months. The agency said that from October 1 through January 9 there was 8% less rain than the historic average for the same period.
And it has been an extremely dry 2021 so far: for the first nine days of the year, the country saw 39.4% less precipitation than the historic average for the same period.
The agency added that only 21 of the 56 cold fronts forecast for the winter season have come to fruition, making it milder than usual.
Foreign capital outflows of Mexican debt hit a record high of more than US $12.6 billion last year, central bank data shows.
The Bank of México published data Tuesday that showed there were debt instrument capital outflows of 257.6 billion pesos (US $12.64 billion) in 2021.
The outflows, slightly higher than those in 2020, were the highest since such data was first recorded in 1992.
The value of government securities in foreign hands declined 13.6% last year, 1.7% higher than in 2020. That was the biggest annual decline since 2000, according to data compiled by Banco Base.
Balance of payments data to be published later this year will give a broader picture of foreign capital movements in 2021.
The record outflows of Mexican debt came as the economy recovered from the sharp downturn of 2020, but not as strongly as expected.
GDP contracted in the third quarter of last year compared to the previous quarter (although it increased on an annual basis), and the Bank of México cut its 2021 growth forecast to 5.4% from 6.2%. Data on fourth quarter growth has not yet been published, meaning that the overall performance of the economy last year is not known.
Gabriela Siller, director of economic analysis at Banco Base, said the outflows of foreign capital in the debt market were due to “aversion to risk” in the Mexican economy.
“This is due to the low growth but also government initiatives. This year we have the debate about the electricity reform [which would favor the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission over private companies] so it’s highly probable that the aversion to risk and the capital flight will continue,” she said
A public health nurse administers a flu shot to an unhappy candidate in Jalisco.
COVID-19 isn’t the only respiratory illness gaining ground in Mexico – a massive increase in influenza cases has also been reported.
Health Ministry data shows there were 1,261 confirmed cases of influenza between October and the first week of January. In the same period of 2020-21 just seven cases were detected.
Deaths attributed to influenza rose to 22 from just one in the same period a year earlier.
Data from the Health Ministry’s epidemiology unit shows that just under one-third of influenza cases – 31% – were detected in people aged 20-29 and that 54% of cases were detected in women.
Quintana Roo has recorded the highest number of cases this flu season with 219 followed by Yucatán (192), Nuevo León (186), Tabasco (102) and Sonora (69).
In an interview with the newspaper El País, infectious disease specialist and University of Guanajuato academic Alejandro Macías said the symptoms caused by the omicron variant of the coronavirus and those caused by influenza are so similar that a diagnosis of one illness or the other is not possible without a PCR test.
He noted that there was practically no influenza a year ago – when Mexico was facing a second wave of coronavirus cases – but acknowledged that the viruses that cause the disease are currently circulating.
However, without testing “it is very difficult to know how much of what we’re seeing is influenza and how much is COVID,” Macías said.
He said that the decline of the delta-fueled third wave of coronavirus allowed influenza to gain a foothold but predicted that the incidence of the disease will fall due to the growing prevalence of the highly contagious omicron strain.
Concurrent infection with the coronavirus and influenza – so-called “flurona” – is possible, but the World Health Organization (WHO) says that co-infections are fairly rare.
“More evidence is required to better understand the interactions between the two viruses and if the severity of illness is higher when influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses co-infect, especially in the high-risk individuals and the elderly,” the WHO told the news agency Reuters.
At least three cases of “flurona” have been detected in Mexico – two in Jalisco and one in the neighboring state of Nayarit.
More than 82 million Mexicans are vaccinated against COVID-19, but the number of people who have received flu shots this flu season is much lower.
An influenza vaccination campaign began in early November with the goal of administering some 32.3 million shots over a period of five months. The shots are mainly administered in public clinics and hospitals such as those run by the Mexican Social Security Institute, or IMSS.
Potholes are a common hazard for motorists throughout Mexico.
The Mexico City government has paid vast sums to motorists due to potholes that damaged their vehicles, a freedom of information request by the newspaper El Universal revealed.
The Infrastructure Ministry paid over 6.8 million pesos (US $334,000) to drivers whose vehicles were damaged by broken paving on the city’s main streets, begging the question: wouldn’t it have been cheaper to repair the roads in the first place?
The ministry paid out on 516 of 721 claims, at an average of around 13,000 pesos per payment, from January 2019 through October 2021. The value of the payouts ranged from 1,000-55,000 pesos.
Twenty-five claims were rejected in that period and a further 180 claims are still being processed. The highest number of claims was in 2019, before declining over the subsequent two years.
A separate freedom of information request showed the Infrastructure Ministry and the 16 boroughs of Mexico City made 1,829 requests to the Finance Ministry for accidents caused by potholes in the same period.
However, that still represents a vast decrease: in 2018 alone, 2,261 pothole damage cases were registered.
Infrastructure Minister Jesús Antonio Esteva Medina said that in Mexico City the incidence of potholes on main roads has fallen by 30%. He added that by the end of this 2021 the government would surpass 15 million square meters of repaved roads.
The Mexico City government recently introduced a system for drivers to report potholes on the road.
President López Obrador announced a nationwide plan to repair potholes in August, 2021 and said they were a bigger concern for citizens than security.
Omicron is becoming the dominant strain of the coronavirus in Mexico, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell acknowledged Tuesday as the fourth wave of infections continues to grow.
Mexico recorded 11,052 new cases on Monday, plus another 33,626 new cases today, lifting the accumulated tally to over 4.17 million and breaking a record for new cases diagnosed in one day that was set only this past Saturday.
There were 162 deaths recorded today, health officials said.
Daily case numbers declined significantly on Sunday and Monday after a new record of more than 30,000 was registered Saturday, but reported infections on those two days are invariably lower due to a drop-off in testing and/or the recording and reporting of test results on weekends.
Estimated active cases currently number 184,660. With today’s recorded deaths, the official COVID-19 death toll rose to 300,574.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Tuesday morning that due to a shortage of COVID-19 tests in Mexico, people shouldn’t get tested unless it’s essential.
Speaking at the federal government’s morning press conference on Tuesday, López-Gatell said that the highly contagious omicron variant is in the process of becoming the dominant strain in Mexico, as has occurred in other parts of the world.
The coronavirus point man, a John Hopkins University-trained epidemiologist, said that the variant is less likely to affect people’s lungs than previous strains such as delta. The symptoms omicron causes are “more similar” to those of the common cold, he said.
López-Gatell also said that vaccination against COVID-19 protects against pulmonary damage, adding that evidence suggests that illness caused by omicron is shorter than that caused by previous variants.
“The unfortunate infection” of President López Obrador, who announced Monday that he had tested positive but only has mild symptoms, “shows us what happens with the omicron variant,” the deputy minister said.
López Obrador appeared at his regular news conference via video link and declared he was feeling “quite well,” despite having a “burning” sensation in his throat and “a little bit of body pain.” He took his own temperature and measured his oxygen levels as he was beamed into the National Palace, and both were normal.
“… Let’s not be scared. Fortunately, this is a variant that doesn’t have the level of danger of the delta variant,” López Obrador said.
López-Gatell noted that COVID wards are only about one-fifth full despite the recent surge in case numbers. He also said that the Health Ministry is looking at the possibility of reducing the isolation period for affected people from two weeks to five days, as is the current advice in the United States.
As has occurred in other countries, the recent surge in case numbers has had a negative impact on various sectors of the economy as workers and their close contacts isolate. One of the affected industries is aviation, with hundreds of flights canceled in recent days.
López-Gatell said that there is a shortage of tests both in Mexico and globally and for that reason people should abstain from getting tested unless they have “essential” medical reasons to do so.
“If everyone who has a cough and a sore throat rushes out for a COVID test, what will happen is that they will become anxious because they’ll be in a line, at a public or private laboratory, waiting to have a COVID test,” he said, adding that they will make accessing a test more difficult for people who really do need to find out whether they are infected or not.
In that category are people with chronic illnesses and the elderly, the coronavirus czar said.
“If a person has a chronic disease or is very old … he or she has greater probability of [COVID] complications,” he said.
Instead of running out to get tested, most people with coronavirus-like symptoms should stay at home, isolate and monitor their oxygen levels with an oximeter, López-Gatell said.
“I had a common cold myself last week and that’s why I didn’t come [to the press conference],” he said.
Mexico City authorities have also said that getting tested is not “exceedingly necessary,” but people continue to flock to testing centers in the capital. A young man who tested positive in the borough of Benito Juárez on Monday told the newspaper Milenio that he didn’t feel very sick but nevertheless wanted to find out whether he had contracted COVID-19.
“… It’s more about preventing [the spread of the virus],” said Francisco Javier, a México state man who works at a pizza restaurant in Benito Juárez.
He said he suspected he had contracted the virus because he is around a lot of people at work and those people likely gathered with family and friends over the Christmas period.
“At first I didn’t suspect [I had COVID] because I still had my sense of smell and taste, but since my throat closed up a little and my nose started to run I had my doubts,” he said.
According to federal government figures, some 184,000 other Mexicans are also currently infected – most likely by the omicron strain – but as official numbers for cases – and deaths – are considered significant undercounts due to a low testing rate, the real number of virus-carrying citizens is undoubtedly much higher.
Figures of the fictional marionette-turned boy Pinocchio and his creator Geppetto from the new stop-motion animation film Pinocchio. CIA
A new stop-motion animated movie based on the 1883 Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio will have a famous “Made in Mexico” stamp on it.
The upcoming Netflix film Pinocchio was partially produced at the Centro Internacional de Animación (CIA), or International Animation Center, in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Founded by Pinocchio director and Guadalajara native Guillermo del Toro, the CIA is Latin America’s first stop motion production studio.
CIA director Angélica Lares told the news agency EFE that del Toro personally decided that part of his new movie would be made in Guadalajara. “He’s attentive to what we do. We’re constantly talking about what’s coming up,” she added.
Lares said that the CIA had an “unbeatable” beginning, given that it had the opportunity to work on Pinocchio shortly after it opened.
She said that the studio will seek to collaborate on more international projects, noting that it is especially well suited to the production of stop-motion films.
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. CIA
“We have … the spaces, equipment and staff [required for animation projects] and that’s a good thing because productions generally have to put together a studio from zero,” Lares said.
Rita Basulto, a renowned Mexican animator who worked on Pinocchio, told EFE that the CIA’s work on the film showed what the studio is capable of. “Making scenes for this feature film shows that work of a very high level can be done here,” she said
Featuring the voices of actors such as Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz and Cate Blanchett, Pinocchio is scheduled for release in the last quarter of 2022.
The CIA is now working on Mexican animator León Fernández’s short film Ramas Torcidas but given the large size of its facilities, it has plenty of room to take on additional projects.
“We’re interested in bringing international productions but also creating [Mexican] intellectual property” and contributing to the development of new local talent, Lares said.
A previous edition of the Intervinos wine and gourmand festival in Mexico City in 2021.
Two years ago, Intervinos, an itinerant wine and gourmand festival that has traveled all over Mexico since its inception, began to bring together food, wine, Mexican-made spirits and local crafts, visiting different states throughout the year, the most recent event taking place in Querétaro on December 10–12.
Already the event has taken place seven times in several states, spotlighting wines from every region in Mexico, as well as a few from Spain and France.
Wine lovers will soon have their chance to attend the traveling festival’s next incarnation on January 28–30, 2022, when it takes place in San Juan Teotihuacán, México state, near the famed ruins.
Other future Intervinos events are planned for Tlaxcala city on March 18–20, in Valle de Bravo on April 29–May 1, and Cuernavaca, Morelos, June 17–19, with more dates to come during the year.
At the Teotihuacán event, organizers are planning shows among the site’s archaeological ruins, an open-air cinema, kids games, photo opportunities, auctions and, of course, a selection of wines from all over Mexico. There will be five tastings a day.
Other activities scheduled include hot-air balloon rides at dawn, ATV tours, temezcales (indigenous sweat lodge experiences) and a luxurious spa on site, all while you bask in the shadow of the pyramids dedicated to the sun and moon.
Rooms will be available at the nearby Hotel Villas, and a romantic dinner package is available with a special menu.
Intervinos is a great excuse to travel throughout the country in 2022, celebrating Mexican unique wine regions and what they have to offer. For more details on its upcoming events, visit the traveling festival’s website.
The Sézane team in the market at Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxacam filming an elderly indigenous Zapotec woman. Twitter
A French fashion label attacked the dignity of indigenous communities by filming a Zapotec woman dancing in its new clothing line, the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) charged.
Sézane, a clothing line founded in Paris in 2013, dressed women in their clothes in the market at Teotitlán del Valle, in the Central Valleys region of Oaxaca, on January 8.
In a video uploaded to social media, a publicity team can be seen photographing an elderly indigenous woman against a professional backdrop. One representative encourages the woman to stand up and sway from side to side to a recording of the 1968 Mary Hopkin song, Those Were the Days playing in the background. Several spectators watch the moment, and laughter can be heard in the background of the video.
INPI said in a statement that the behavior of the Sézane representatives “undermines the dignity of [indigenous] peoples and communities and reinforces racist stereotypes about indigenous culture and traditions,” before adding that legal action was being considered. “There will be dialogue with the authorities of Teotitlán and the aggrieved people to undertake a legal action, in accordance with the law.”
The agency demanded companies “cease exploiting indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and communities as cultural capital since they are not objects of clothing but citizens under public law who possess a vast cultural heritage and traditional knowledge.”
— Lo Que Circula En Redes Sociales (@LoCircula) January 10, 2022
The video that circulated on social media of the incident.
It cited Article 2 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: “Indigenous peoples and individuals are free and equal to all other peoples and individuals and have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination, in the exercise of their rights, in particular that based on their indigenous origin or identity.”
A new piece of legislation in Mexico, Article 21 of the Federal Law on the Protection of the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican Peoples and Communities, is set to become law pending presidential approval and aims to protect the “dignity and cultural integrity of indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples.”
Sézane has stores in New York, Madrid, London and France and focuses on vintage styles.
The fashion industry has consistently come under fire in Mexico for the alleged exploitation of indigenous culture and designs. The federal Culture Ministry announced in May, 2021 that it had sent letters to Anthropologie as well as Zara and Patowl for the “improper cultural appropriation” of designs from Oaxaca.
The federal government and other authorities have previously accused several other international brands of plagiarizing indigenous Mexican designs. Among them are Zimmerman, Isabel Marant, Carolina Herrera, Mango and Pippa Holt.
