Comments on: Where God and the Devil Wheel Like Vultures: Report from El Paso

By: Richard W

Richard W — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:51:46 +0000

Those commentors like Richard Grabman who would criticize Tom’s charicterization of the exterme level of violence in Jaurez are ignoring the facts, the statistics and the names and faces of the dead. They would claim things are not so bad but they are just being defensive with their national pride seemingly at stake to them. But shame is due and Mexico has always been corrupt and the poor stay poor. Things are no better in 2010 than when Tom wrote this – the killings are still an every day occurance. Until Mexicans choose to make huge changes like to pay salaries which are enough for police and judges not to need bribes then nothing will change. The wealthy elite have been satisfied by outlawing guns and hiring their own private (armed)security and living in compounds – but someday perhaps that will lead to another revolution.

By: Jan Kristoffer

Jan Kristoffer — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:19:28 +0000

Peckinpah’s movies weren’t about the border though, it was a nice place for him to set his brutal dramas, but his movies were never about the border. In my mind he is the greatest American director who ever lived. Ford, Hawks and Wells don’t even compare. “Touch of Evil” is a good one, I agree. Film school types won’t agree with me, but I do’t care.

Peckinpah talked about men, their relationships, death, love and redemption, and he loved Mexico as much as anybody. He lived for that stuff. I’ve never been there myself, but I know that it ment alot to old Sam. Writing his movies off as hollywood BS is unfair. His movies were indeed butchered by the studios, and he had a hard time with the god damn producers, but at least he got them made. And “The Wild Bunch” would never fly today. I’ve seen that movie so many times, to me it’s the greatest movie ever made. “We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all”. That’s poetry. I think alot of Peckinpah’s movies are masterpieces, “Pat Garrett”, “The Wild Bunch”, “Cable Houge”, “Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia” and “Junior Bonner” are all masterpieces and I’ll go to my grave saying that. I don’t know if he got the border right in all of them, but he got something right for sure.

Nice to see that you are a Hunter Thompson fan. I’ve been reading his stuff for years. He was a wild, untamed spirit. I miss him like hell.

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:33:17 +0000

Richard’s right — this stuff about constant machine-gun fire in the streets is hyperbolic bullshit. It also seems pretty strange to write a piece that talks about so many white male tourists and transplants who’ve made hay of the border — Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, the guy who wrote this — without mentioning a single non-white writer. (Not even Bolano, whose 2666, the biggest book of last year, was about the murders of women in Juarez.)

By: giotto

giotto — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:39:09 +0000

Richard Grabman: Greene was writing of a trip to Mexico in the late 1930s. You know, BEFORE ATMs…

By: Merna Summers

Merna Summers — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:06:32 +0000

As a Canadian who has passed through El Paso and Ciudad Juarez a few times — once, notably, on the day that Marty Robbins died — I had particular reason to be interested in your fine article. But what really knocked me out was your art work. It is brilliant. Thanks for sharing both.

By: Hans

Hans — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:29:36 +0000

Please send me an email somebody on vandefruits@yahoo.com with the name of this movie about Juarez that came out about three years ago about those women getting buried in the sand, I forgot its name and would love to see it again…Many thanks in advance, Hans.

By: cal

cal — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:27:30 +0000

It’s definitely a rough, wild place and has been for years. But my gringo grandmother was born south of Juarez and lived there with her gringo family until Pancho Villa’s men chased them out. You’d be surprised to know that a lot of the gringos went back. They’ve never much liked the “liberal” United States.

My great-grandfather on a different line moved with his family to Sonora to make a new settlement in the 1890’s only to see it wiped out by the Indians. His family then moved to Chihuahua where he met his future wife. His family included an “aunt” and her kids. She was really his father’s polygamous wife.

When he got married, he went to work with a crew building a railroad through Sonora and used the money to build a furniture store. The store had an adjoining wall to the Federales fort and when he went back, after he fled with his family to El Paso to escape Pancho Villa, he found that the furniture had been burned and the wall breached by the revolutionaries to attack the soldiers in the fort.

Sometime in this time period, a posse was formed to chase Pancho Villa who successfully hid out in the badlands in western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. He said it was the land of a thousand caves and Pancho Villa could have easily hid in any one of them.

He briefly had a dairy farm near El Paso on the New Mexico border. My grandfather was born on the Texas side though he would never admit it. He was always a New Mexican through and through.

Just a summary of the stories my great-grandfather used to tell me.

By: Vicki Gundrum

Vicki Gundrum — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:20:00 +0000

Thank you, Mr. Russell, that was uncanny and striking, like a tuneful howl. I loved it. I live part of each year in Mexico–but not Juarez, I’m too afraid to go there. I’m in the Bay Area now just waiting to get my swine flu shot before I go back. I fly right over the Frontera to the central Sierra Nevada states for safety. My Mexican work visa lists my occupation as “journalist,” which is like having a target drawn on your back for the drug lords, even though I won’t write about drugs down there. The kidnappings in Mexico City have extended to the middle class, people without wealth, but, hey, they’ve got family who care so maybe a little dinero too. There are so many beautiful people in Mexico praying every day for the evil to end.

Please keep writing on this subject because even the crystal meth machine could soon change, and then what will the violent ones do for money? I just read there is a new “shake and run” production method catching on in the US: fewer ingredients dumped in a liter-sized, plastic soda bottle, and then some chump runs down the street to mix it. You don’t need a big lab or organization to pull this off.

I’ll be back in Mexico in time for Dios de Los Muertos to contribute to a public altar for the women killed in Cuidad Juarez.

By: Richard Grabman

Richard Grabman — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:19:24 +0000

What bullshit! I’m all in favor of literary license, but the “shooting gallery ride” has been a staple of U.S. fiction about Mexico for as long as I can remember… most of it passed off as truth. Juarez does have a high murder rate, and there has been, for the last couple of years, shootouts now and again between gangsters and police (or, lately, military units), and– most importantly — it is a frontier town (to our way of thinking, the frontier between civilization and the wild north) — but street violence of the type described by Russell is so very rare that it is NATIONAL news. As it is, Russell uses a collection of national headlines (including one about a day care fire in Hermosillo) from a country of 120,000,000 people as if all the random violence is within his purview.

“Speechless among the money changers”. A lovely phrase, but since everyone changes their money at the ATM machines, or in a bank, or uses a casa de cambio, I assume this is a metaphor, not meant to even approximate reality.

By: ignacio fernandez

ignacio fernandez — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:43:49 +0000

insightfully cleaver about a place that can kill you for just passing through, let alone living there. One of the Golden Gates to the American Dream with a dirty door mat.
I’m in the process of doing a blog based on a 3 year journey through Latin America and to see and read your blog is an inspiration and humbling at the same time.
Muchas Gracias