em·brace əmˈbrās/
From this weekend while roaming downtown, Mexico City. A cliché moment, perhaps, but nonetheless meaningful to human experience. Margaret Meade once stated that "one of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night." It's so true, so descriptive --in part-- of the human condition.
"One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night." -- Margaret Meade
Sombras
Chasing light and shadows in Mexico City's historic downtown area. A lot has changed since I first came to know this area. I worked here for five years. Though I don't commute into the area everyday as I did then, much of my photography is executed in this very exciting niche of this vast urban space.
Morning Push
Sanitation worker chugs along Cafetales Ave. in the Coyoacan municipality of Mexico City.
Morning push for a sanitation worker in the southern end of Mexico City.
Seeing...
This image was made in 2011 when I was exploring what seeing from difference perspectives does to a composition. In the process I was attempting to break a rut in creativity by shooting outside my comfort zone. This one involved protestors marching towards me while I set the DSLR on the floor.
Seeing is all about perspective and relative to where you stand. Two people can't see the same object from where they stand if one of them has his eyes closed or something obstructing their vision from a given angle.
T.V. Dinner
A not too unusual seen one evening in Iztapalapa, Mexico City.
Iztapalapa, Mexico City
All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Go
All dressed up and nowhere to go. This describes pretty much how I see Mexico's economy these days after all the energy the Mexican government put into reforms that nonetheless represented little in eventual benefit to the people of Mexico. Worse still, Mexico has been feverishly fighting a stronger US Dollar that has been battering the Mexican Peso left and right as global investors hedge against loss in gold and stronger currencies like the aforementioned greenback. Government revenue is also down as the price of oil --representing over 35% of government income-- stays low, part of the reason why President Enrique Peña Nieto stated early this month Mexico would have to tighten its belt into 2016.
Calling It In
Improvised hazard warning.
After residing here in Mexico for several years I can boastfully claim that I shed my tourist identity a long time ago. Each return visit to my native United States becomes an out of body experience as I progressively feel more like an outsider; though I haven't fully assimilated the culture of the place that has become my new home since the year 2000, I don't feel as "American" as I once had. Not that I am anti-American. What I mean is that I simply don't see the world like I used to; I no longer take many things for granted as I once did. Some of my compatriots back home, if not many, behave as if they have a right to security, peace, and prosperity having no idea that in some ways that life is the exception when compared to what other folks --as human as themselves-- face in other parts of the world. My Mexico experience hasn't been an easy road: I've had to battle my inner streaks of ethnocentrism, adapt to a different way of seeing the world, to a whole new set of realities. All this has served to help shape who I am today, even towards personal growth.
Something I've had to get used to are the lumpy, pot-holed streets of Mexico City's roads which can make you quite deft at defensive driving as you are forced to add this to the list of potentially hazardous phenomena to watch out for when traversing this urban chaos. The above image illustrates an act of solidarity where folks will warn others of a danger ahead. Sadly, a lack of proper street lighting at night may foster the very accident the protrusion was signaling you to avoid.
An Oligarchal Tyranny?
Street labor in Mexico City.
Street labor in Mexico City. A literal illustration of what some are forced to make a living in Mexico.
I've been re-reading Robert D. Kaplan's Empire Wilderness in which the author describes what he believes the United States is transforming into: an interconnected globalised network of city states united and governed by concerns of economy and growth in which the poor are left behind while the better able move to suburban gaited communities isolating themselves from the "threatening and unsightly poor" while at the same time avoiding the moral obligation to be their brother's keeper. A picture that better outlines the socioeconomic divide in places like Brazil, Teheran, or even Mexico which the author describes as an oligarchal tyranny --a depiction I find hard to disagree with after having lived here for near 20 years. Be it the U.S.A., Brazil, or Mexico, what can be said of democracies that not only fail to provide for their most deprived citizens but simply don't care to?