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For at least the last three years over six people have died each day, violently, within view of the U.S. Almost 200 people a month, many of them young people. Over 2,000 each year.

Many of us here in the U.S., Chicano and otherwise, don't seem directly affected by this bloodbath. We may not live close to the border and avoid visiting Mexico because of the potential for violence. I'm one of those.

We don't have to think about it much and can set it aside and comment "Too bad" or "Pobre Mexico." We might even pride ourselves on not doing drugs and assume that what happens there is no individual fault of our own.

While I don't agree with such thinking, I sometimes wonder what I would do, or would have done when younger, if I lived as a mejicano amidst the horrendous chaos that is life in Mexico, especially the border and other areas.

I liken it to imagining how would I have handled myself as a German citizen in the 30's when the Nazis were rising to power. Would I have been a "good German" or would I have abandoned my country or would I have wound up getting gassed in an oven?

I wonder how closely today's Mexico is to that Nazi Germany. Government complicity, worldwide inaction or appeasement and institutional violence against citizenry play/played roles in both situations. Maybe there are many more parallels. Especially, I wonder, is what goes on today across the border just a modern version of a "final solution."

In any case, news pieces like we reprint below, however tragic, indicate there will always be those who don't go quietly into the night nor go along with the status quo, no matter the risks.

As you read it, put yourself in the shoes of those who experience, even daily, what you read transpires there. We owe much to those involved. Try a little introspection and let me know if you come up with something you want to share.

RudyG

Ciudad Juarez News, 11. 3. 10

For months Ciudad Juarez's Plural Citizens Front and other opponents of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's so-called drug war planned an international forum on violence and militarization in their battle-weary city.

Ironically, on the first day of the October 29-31 event, a bloody incident of the kind activists were protesting marred the meeting site at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB) of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. Eyewitnesses told Frontera NorteSur that members of Mexico's Federal Police opened fire on young people who had just participated in the 11th Walk against Death and were arriving to the campus to initiate the left-oriented forum.

The apparent targets were a small group of unarmed, masked youth affiliated with the pro-Zapatista Other Campaign which had trailed the demonstration to spray paint walls with political slogans. As the group was running from police and towards an entrance to the ICB, shots rang out. A bullet struck 19-year-old protestor and university student Jose Dario Alvarez Orrantia in the back, spilling the young man’s guts on the pavement.

"He survived by a miracle,

La Bloga's Dan Olivas has a new story in the online litmag, Pinstripe Fedora, entitled, Things We Do Not Talk About. The issue is in PDF format with a nice design. Check it out here.

Museo de las Americas presents...

From the Earth
October 14, 2010 6:00 p.m.
at the Museo, 861 Santa Fe Dr., Denver
Free admission

The Museo de las Americas presents From the Earth, an exhibit featuring the work of ten artists from the Southwest whose materials, processes and disciplines come directly from the land where they live. Every day of their respective lives, they honor ancient American connectedness to the Earth.

They carry the understanding that all the Earth is a gift, nothing is truly owned and all is to be honored. Artists include, Eppie Archuleta and her daughter, Norma Medina, Lorena Banyacya, Lorraine Herder, Sharlyn Sanchez, Gloria Lopez Cordova, Manuel Chavarria Denet, Juan Quezada, Lawrence Namoki, Vern Nieto, and Walking Thunder. Curators Rogelio Briones and Maruca Salazar.

To keep up with weekly events, join our mailing list here.

The revolution might not be televised, but it might start in . . .

Excerpted from Frontera NorteSur:

An attempted kidnapping Sept. 21 in the northern Mexican state of
Chihuahua touched off a burst of mass outrage that left two suspected young kidnappers dead and a small town in open rebellion. While details are sketchy, the events began with the abduction of a 17-year-old female worker of a

La Bloga readers have various reasons for coming here, not the least of which is news we share from the Spanish-speaking world--from Spain's Semana Negra to cultural news from all over the Southwest. Despite being primarily an arts/literary blog, real-world events necessarily affect our art and how we live in each of our niches.

The Internet, the WWW have provided us with floods of information--as countless as the over a billion Tweets or two hundred million blogs in existence (incl. Chinese). But the reliability of news and searches for "the truth" threaten to be buried by the staggering number of pieces out there. At the same time, mainstream sources of reliable journalism are declining. We the public, Chicano and otherwise, don't necessarily know as much as we once did.

For instance, how many know there have been at least ten suicides at Ft. Hood this year, an increase in domestic violence on-base and a rise in local crime? And who in the world of journalism is analyzing that for us and tying it to Obama's adding another 40,000 troops to "our" wars?

Information on Mexico and the shared border is important to us, not only because of our proximity or cultural ties, but the nature of that border is changing. Narco violence has crossed the river and no one can say how far north it will travel or how it might change our lives in Phoenix, San Antonio and even Denver.

None of this relates to you? Heading south of the border for an affordable vacation soon? Do you know which beaches are hygienically dangerous, unfit for swimming?

Are you an academic whose dissertation or published piece suffers because your pocho Spanish won't let you navigate la idioma journalistic waters?

Or are you in education and public service where you daily work with Mexican immigrants, but lack info about what it is that made them leave their mother country?

I speak only for myself when I say that my world revolves around the Southwest. I tend not to realize I need to encompass more to understand how and why things are transforming around me.

Luckily, years ago I found Frontera NorteSur. Their purpose: "FNS provides on-line news coverage of the US-Mexico border." They do this by analyzing and summarizing U.S., Me