total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

So much going on, so little of it anything I got around to talking about here. And right now I am in Mexico City, where I haven't spent significant time in years, and there's so much to talk about with that, and I have all these new projects and all these students whose work is so interesting and and and.

But that's not what finally got me to post. What I wanted to say was that, you know, finally and at last today the Obama administration announced that it will stop defending the constitutionality of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act.

When I put my absentee ballot in the mail, back in September 2008, I said a prayer. I'm not usually a praying person, but I asked for three things from an Obama government, in case he got elected:

- an end to torture and the indefinite detainment of non-combatants and complete respect for the Geneva Convention on the part of the US and all our allies,

- universal access to complete, excellent health care, and

- full human and civil rights for everyone in the US, regardless of ability, race, class, sexuality, gender, or citizenship status. Starting with repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.

What can I say, I don't pray much but when I do there are a lot of details to cover. Anyway, as you all know so well, we're not getting anywhere on the first, we're making slow progress (but progress! but slow progress!) on the second, but on the third - well, we just took a big step forward. I just wanted to stop for a second and mark that moment.

You know, historians mostly suck at predicting the future. Predicting the past is hard enough. So when I say that I thought this day would never come, that is the literal truth. Anyway whether or not it was predictable that this would happen, it is a surprise to me, and I am full of gratitude.

Okay, I spent way too much time today tracking down Spanish-language music videos about Obama. I have a vague idea about an article but basically I am just too tired to do my actual work.

So anyway. I found this. It will only make sense to those of us who know the oeuvre of Pedro Infante and can appreciate the sheer utter brilliance of pasting in George Bush where Jorge Negrete ought to be inDos Tipos de Cuidado. Which I guess is likely to be just me, twotoedsloth, and maybe logovo. But believe me when I tell you, this is fabulous.


...

We didn't know about the big government raid last May on Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants in Postville, Iowa, when we drove through there last month. (A useful followup story is here, highlighting the critical, honorable role played by the local Catholic Church. See also this story on an intervention by a heroic legal translator.) It didn't make the news in Canada. All we knew was that we stopped on our way from Minneapolis to Dubuque in this tiny town that had a Productos Latinos store on the theory that it would be selling tacos - which was true, and they were excellent - and nobody wanted to answer my eager, ignorant questions about why all those immigrants were there, along with a large number of black-hat Orthodox Jews out enjoying the warm Sabbath evening. The people eating in the taqueria had jobs in a meat-packing plant, someone eventually explained, and they were from Texas. But not originally from Texas, surely, I asked. Texas, the nice guy behind the counter said firmly. Texas.

You could see that families had rooted themselves there - the store windows were full of christening gowns, quincenera outfits, and toys with Spanish-language packaging - and that without them this would just be one more dying corn belt community. You could tell by the stink, even a block away, that those jobs in the meat-packing plant had to be pretty unpleasant, nothing you'd want to do yourself. You couldn't see, unless you already knew, that 400 people had just been taken away by la migra.

There's nothing more to say about this that you don't already know.

...

I have nothing useful to say about current events, just the powerful urge to clutch my head and moan. So let's just turn our eyes to Mexico, all right?

About a decade after the worst of the fighting of the Mexican Revolution ended, a religious war broke out. The Catholic Church went on strike -- that is, the Church refused to offer any sacraments at all for about 30 months -- in response to the anticlerical policies of the new, Revolutionary government (which were frequently rapacious and sometimes vulgar and cruel); some of the Catholic hierarchy in Mexico also organized violent resistance to the government's new cultural initiatives (which in practice meant raping and murdering schoolteachers.) It was an ugly little struggle, lasting almost three years and leaving perhaps twenty thousand dead.

Making peace between church and state, and keeping it for the subsequent eighty years, required that both sides give up their most extreme positions. But it also meant that the topic of the Cristero War became pretty much unmentionable in public. Historians know about it, of course; and I think it comes up in very briefly in high-school level history classes too. It's been almost a secreto a voces, an open secret, one of those things in Mexican public life that everyone knows but that everyone claims nobody knows.

Well, until this year's Miss Universe contest anyway.

Check this out. Or here's a similar story but without pictures and in English.

Yes, this year's Mexican contestant for the Miss Universe crown planned to attend the contest in a gown covered in the bloodiest images from the Cristero conflict. And sequins. She managed to offend nearly everyone in Mexico, secular and religious, leftwing and right, which is unusual in a beauty queen, and almost even admirable. So now she's editing the gown, apparently.

But the whole story is just so ... so Mexican, you know? Because, you know, some nations deal with the historical memory of civil war and religious conflict by having even bloodier wars later. Some nations practice ethnic cleansing. Some nations obsessively police their borders to prevent contamination by the ever-lurking threat of [insert menance here]. But not Mexico. In Mexico, they just take that unbearable memory and turn it into telenovelas and historietas and the tackiest possible outfits.

Seriously, I admire Mexican culture so much for doing precisely this, and doing it so well.