The Power and the Money

Organized crime and a research fail in Mexico City

 So I’m in Mexico City at the moment. Why am I here? I’m looking for county-level homicide data back to 1950. Thus far, I haven’t found it. INEGI, the national statistics agency, didn’t have it. The Instituto Nacional de Estudios Penales didn’t have it. The health ministry didn’t have it: that last was a surprise. Thus far, a bust, which has me annoyed because the other bit of data collection — finding the times and places of PGR and Operation Condor actions — has proved less hard.

Bah. It is enough to drive one to purchase and smoke a good Cuban cigar. For $3.87. Which would be, in 1913 prices, 17¢. A bit more than a good five cent cigar, but not too far off. It is annoying. Unless I have some data collection luck, my next big project now looks to be French nuclear power instead of a history of violence in Mexico. Not that there’s anything wrong with either one! One is a form of energy that (absent breakthroughs) needs to be developed around the world in order to avoid catastrophe; the other threatens one of the great countries of the world.

The Revista magazine recently ran an issue about organized crime in Latin America. (Warning: the link will only work until the next issue comes out.) There is a piece by yours truly on the business strategies of Mexican cartels. (I may post a condensed version on this blog.) Morris Panner, a very smart guy, wrote another good piece that illustrates how far organized crime has sunk its tentacles into Mexican life. (The title is a bit misleading, however; the article is not about crime business models.) A third piece gives a nice short view of life in Ciudad Juárez.

For some hope that might be realized in the short-term, read this piece by Gabe Aguilera and Viri Rios about the keys to reducing violence in Mexico: the tactical recommendations are well-worth following. There is also a very nice piece warning Mexico that it might want to think twice about adopting models that worked in Colombia. The reason being that they are, you know, very different countries. (My wife had some very cogent observations about law-and-order in Colombia that I will try to remember to blog about in the near future.) And everyone needs to read more about the Zetas and Guatemala, a country that will (with Honduras) start filling headlines in a newspaper near you, or whatever insane electronic thingcrappy the young people are using.

The rest of the issue is also very good! If you have any interest in the violence spreading south of the border, go read it.

While I am here, I’d like to make a plug for Grits and Tamales, a blog about life in the deep south, published by a compa from Los Angeles. (Deep South meaning the one inside the United States, not Tierra del Fuego.) I know this blog has Canadian readers. I love you all and your country, but trust me, Prince Edward Island to Brooklyn has nothing on East L.A. to Montgomery, Alabama. Recommended. Especially as someone who has spent the past week gorging on tacos al pastor, enchiladas con mole, cochinita pibil, chilaquiles (verdes and rojos!), caldo tlalpeño, cebollitas, and all the other good stuff that is pretty much impossible to get outside of southern California, a few parts of Texas (Tex-Mex is awesome, and eaten by most Mexican-Americans in the state, but it is not Mexican food), and that truly awful taquería on East 117th Street and First Avenue in the old neighborhood down the block from Patsy’s.

(Side note: the miracle of Google tells me that Eric Asimov reviewed la crapola taquería for the Times. Which has gotta say something about the pathetically small number of taquerías in NYC.)

Anyway, regardless of the review, it is a bad taquería. But is bad in the way that lousy taquerías in Mexico City are bad, and thus I highly recommend it should you find yourself in Manhattan jonesing legitimate Mexican street food. Californian and Mexican readers take note. If, however, you should find yourself with the same jones, but be looking for something more upscale, I give this place a conditional recommendation. Why conditional? Well, my dearly-departed ma knew the owners, and we used to eat there all the time, and it was excellent. But ... I have not been there since 1988. So you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Oh, and since I have friends from the Deep South who still harbor suspicions about us effete academic liberal not-quite-white folk from the coasts, lemme give you this post from Grits and Tamales. God bless you Al Pacino, another boy from the old neighborhood.

Cowboys and Italians

 I was in Oklahoma to visit the headquarters of Laredo Petroleum, one of the leaders in the development of domestic shale gas and oil. I was also here to visit some of their field operations. I’ll have more to say about that later.

 
The reason why I’m going to wait is that along the way, I discovered something I did not know: southeastern Oklahoma was once a center of Italian settlement. Now, mass immigration this was not. In 1910, the census recorded 2,564 Italians in Oklahoma, with a further 1,303 native-born Italians. That’s a tiny part of a state of 1.6 million. Even in Coal, Latimer, and Pittsburg counties, Italians made up only 3% of the population in 1910. But they left a mark.

 
Why did they come? Well, the aforementioned names of the counties where they settled gives a clue. The first coal mines in Oklahoma opened in McAlester in 1872. In 1875, the mining companies built a labor camp in nearby Krebs. The companies recruited Italian workers in a deliberate attempt to prevent unionization — American coal miners had already become radicalized. In the words of a 1956 article: “Mine operators found the English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh stock produced the best miners but also produced the chief trouble makers during periods of strikes in the 1880s and 1890s.”

It isn’t entirely clear why the mining companies had to worry. The mines were located deep in the Choctaw Nation. Before statehood, non-Choctaw residents of the area had to pay a residence fee of 25¢ per month (about $77.20 per year in today’s money). The mining companies deducted the fee directly from workers’ pay packets, and arranged with the Choctaws to make it impossible to pay any other way. Upshot: striking workers faced deportation.

Anyway, Italians they recruited, and Italians they came. The first “Columbus Society” in Oklahoma started in 1881.* Unlike most Italian immigrants to the United States, the Oklahoman Italians came from the north: three-quarters of them arrived from Piedmont, with the remainder from Abruzzo and Molise.** The coal mines, then as now, provided grueling employment for $545 per year ... a less-than-royal $12,700 in inflation-adjusted dollars.***  (Then again, the median household income in the tri-county area is only $17,500 today.) Mining conditions, of course, were much worse than the salaries would indicate. Things improved a little with statehood in 1907, when the new constitution provided for workers’ compensation, an eight-hour day, free public schools, and a ban on child labor in the mines.

Nowadays Krebs is dotted with Italian restaurants. But they don’t really serve Italian food, and I’m speaking as somebody who grew up in the land of the calzone and baked ziti. Consider the founding of the oldest of Krebs’ eateries: the famous Pete’s. Pete Pritchard — so named because none of the local kids could pronounce “Piegare” — who moved to the U.S. at the age of 8, in 1903. He attended school only sporadically, since his father had him work in the mines when they needed money, in contravention of the new state constitution. Pritchard broke his leg in 1923, while working in the mines. His wife and he had a small flock of chickens. They couldn’t sell them for any reasonable amount, and they couldn’t keep ‘em, so they served ‘em up to their friends ... and Pete’s was born.

The place became famous during Prohibition for serving home-brewed Choc beer; Pete himself got busted. Choc beer got its start with the European influx, which cheerily ignored the dry laws passed by the Choctaw Nation. An 1894 report written by an irritated Bureau of Indian Affairs official noted: “The sale of Choctaw beer, a drink compounded of barley, hops,tobacco, fishberries, and a small amount of alcohol, is manufactured without stint in many portions of this agency, especially in the mining communities. Many miners insist it is essential to their health, owing to the bad water usually found in mining camps, and they aver they use it rather as a tonic or medicine than as a beverage, and this idea, that it is a proper tonic, is fostered and encouraged by some physicians. But it is somewhat remarkable as a fact in the scientific world that the water is always bad in the immediate mining centers, but good in the adjacent neighborhoods.”

Eventually, coal mining declined. Many of the Italians left. The rest didn’t fully assimilate until World War 2: when the U.S. went to war, the first reaction of the local police was to raid Italian families and seize their weapons. Some people remained working in a giant socialist enterprise. By 2000, the population was down by a third from 1920. (A new hydrocarbon boom has begun, but more on that later.)

We didn’t eat at Pete’s. We ate at Isle of Capri. The restaurants are all basically converted houses, with big and scattered dining rooms bolted on as the customer base grew. It feels a bit like you’re snacking in somebody’s living room. So does the resolute unprofessionalism of the waiters, who were clearly family members, and strange way you pay, by wandering up to the front and asking for the bill, instead of having it brought to your table. (Sure, you pay on the way out at lots of places around the United States, like that diner out in Maspeth. I just don’t remember having to go to the counter to get your bill.) You can get lamb fries (don’t ask, you don’t want to know), ravioli, spaghetti, something called manicotti (I’m still not sure what it was) and sausage sandwiches the size of your head. Given how the restaurants in the area started (Pete was not unrepresentative) it shouldn’t be that surprising that the food bears little resemblance to the American cuisine you’ll find in other heavily-Italian parts of North America, let alone a real genuine Italian restaurant.

 

I ate a lot. Compare the fellow above with same fellow a few hours earlier, as pictured at the beginning of this post. As Italian food, it was awful. As food, it was awesome. If you’re in the area, I highly recommend it.

Chillin’ like it was 1999

  More like 1989, actually.  Or even 1984.  I’m putting the final touches on two cases (one on Pemex, one on the Iraqi oil industry) with a little blue pen on paper printouts, drinking Busch Light from a can, and switching between MTV Hits (you know, which still plays videos) and the Pittsburgh-Chicago game.  Break was eating my wife’s wonderful noodles.  After a week where sleep really has been optional, this is the way to work. 

One way in which digital technology is inferior to the old is in channel switching.  Analog cable televisions would go bam! instantaneously from one channel to another, especially if you had one of those multiswitch remotes that plugged into the set.  These new ones take a few annoying seconds to make the change.  Strangely, I find myself disappointed to know that said new inconvenience will not be a permanent part of the future’s video experience. 

Anyway, I had to turn on the internet and ruin it all.  Thus, this post.  More on the Canadian oil industry forthwith, but I need to finish these two cases.  Sometimes deadlines are hard, even in academia. 

Whatcha y’all doin’ on this not-so-lazy Sunday, gentle readers?

Comiendo los alimentos en la madre patria

Somebody ... probably my mother ... once described Spanish food as “letting the ingredients speak for themselves.”

“Hearty peasant food,” Amma says.  “Solid presentations of uncommon meats.  Satisfying to the stomach, but not so much to the tongue.” 

I wouldn’t call it bland, exactly.  But comida andaluza does, I think, explain the Philippines.  The Philippines got the full force of a cuisine that liked to “let the ingredients speak for themselves,” only without the ingredients.  Philippine food is, perhaps, Andalucian food before the conquest of Mexico brought the ingredients to the peninsula.   

Or not.  It’s a hypothesis, anyway. 

Anyway, Spanish cuisine is just plain food — alimentos — more than a “cuisine.”  Maybe I’m just too used to it, having grown up on a faintly Americanized version of the stuff.  Meat-heavy fried food with very light seasoning. 

Overcooked venison is actually pretty good once you get used to it, and I’ve already mentioned croquetas.   

Plus, tapas are fun, although much better in America (or Catalunya, for that matter) where the substance comes from Mexico and Southeast Asia but the style is español.