I strain to see stars through the tropical haze and the pollution of the city. Moto taxis rattle over the nearby road, and Latin pop music laced with Incan pan pipes plays tinnily from a nearby stereo—at least whenever the welding noises in the garage behind me cease. I’m lying in the back of a dump-truck sized truck, on top of a stack of thick lumber. Simon has gone ... [Continue Reading]
Apocalypse Soon
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The fog crept past the streetlight, swallowing the clouds of smoke we blew out, skinny or fat or from our noses in dragony tendrils. It was quiet there on the back porch; you really couldn’t ask for a better place to take a break – sweat stuck to your skin; hands stinking like tequila and salsa; legs twitching from the hours of running up and down the stairs –the ... [Continue Reading]
A Personal Geography of Fear
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China, 2007 The KFC outside Beijing West Train Station. People sleeping arms akimbo on tables in the crush. Migrant boys' hipster haircuts sprawled like slaughtered hedgehogs atop the white plastic. The round faces of puffy-jacketed rural girls, soft and inscrutable in dreams. Normally, the capacity of Beijingers to sleep amidst swirling masses of humanity would be ... [Continue Reading]
Who Made this Grave
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One day, in late October, my son and I left his Mexican preschool and wandered up the Calzada toward Morelia’s pink stone aqueduct. He was collecting sticks snarled with epiphytes and I was walking backwards so I could watch him—his red plaid uniform, his white-blonde hair—and yet lure him homeward. Behind him, I could see, through the ficus that lined the old ... [Continue Reading]
Touring the Revolution
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The green hills from which the Zapatistas descended to take San Cristóbal nearly twenty years earlier looked wet and blurred outside the windows in the rain. After the parched Oaxacan isthmus and clammy, tropical Tuxtla Guitierrez, San Cristóbal’s mountain air felt liberating, like emerging from a fever into quiet clarity. We rolled down the windows and watched the ... [Continue Reading]