Immokalee

Photos of Immokalee, Florida

Miami Update

Turns out the Andeans give Miami a skip. They prefer the restaurant kitchens of the New Jersey and New York areas and don't really have a foothold in the capital of Latin America. These are the time-honed patterns of immigration: pioneers taking root, bringing their friends and family. Yesterday I spent the day chasing after the Ecuadorian and Peruvian communities in Miami, and found out that they barely exist. In fact, the whole idea of a barrio or ethnic neighborhood seems to have been exploded down here. Even the Calle Ocho, supposed center of Cuban life (Cubans make up over half of the Hispanic population in Miami), seemed dispersed and more of a drive-by strip than a hot-bed. Elsewhere, I was told by one Peruvian restaurant worker to check out Kendall, the lower middle class suburb to the southwest, but even there, despite a row of Peruvian chicken joints and even a local "chifa" serving Peru's take on Chinese cuisine, the car culture had managed to dissipate any concentration of feeling.

"Do you ever see tecnocumbia?" I asked.

"We check the local papers -- there's La Cronica and El Golazo -- and see what's playing. But shows like that, they'll just stop off here for a night or two on their way to New Jersey. Up there, I can tell you, my cousins are into that. It just never took off here."

How could tecnocumbia never take off in Miami, where the melting pot muddles what it is to be a Latin American national? What -- they have too much taste in music here? That was one theory we floated. What is the critical mass required to have home-country musical phenomena come through? How many Ecuadorians is enough (because the assumption is that there will be no "crossover" appeal) to make it worthwhile for Grupo Deseo to make a stop, put on their bikinis and waggle their hips to the tune of Mi Chiquito?

No luck, meantime, tracking down whoever is responsible for the estrellasecuatorians site that got me going on this wild goose chase to begin with. Turns out the phone number on the contacts page is listed from Summerland Key. A strange location for a music promoter. Especially one who never returns calls.

In South Florida

Down in Miami poking around the capital of Latin America, catching up with a couple of local promoters of technocumbia, just possibly the world's worst music. It's a phenomenon that mixes many of the things I'm interested in right now: how immigrants bring their past and homes with them across countries, why they like to stay in touch with what they knew before, and how new technologies change the way they do that.
If you've never seen technocumbia, click below, but consider yourself warned.



Also hoping to catch up with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, 100 miles due West. Lately, they've been asking Burger King to raise the price of their products by one penny, to cover unfair wages for the migrant tomato pickers. Want to guess what BK has said?

This time, they'd gone too far

photo: BuzzSugar

Here's the throwaway line that caught my interest:

The Colombian version was canceled in October after a woman confessed on the show that she had hired someone to kill her husband.

So ends a late paragraph in Alessandra Stanley's review of "The Moment of Truth," a Fox reality-TV offering this season. The show's basic premise is to ask increasingly intimate questions and reward truthful answers with cash. Half the fun is in watching the contestant squirm, the other half is in watching his family seethe. Classy.

According to Stanley, the Fox version is expected to be "quite tame" compared to adaptations abroad. Digging a little with friends in TV down in Colombia, I found that it isn't exactly true to say the show was canceled after the hired-killer confession. Instead, the show's demise seems to be due to a crusader named Santiago Salah, a Colombian lawyer who published high-holy op-eds in the daily El Tiempo, lashing out against the gameshow as morally reprehensible. If you speak Spanish, check out this Telemundo report.

Still, there's a charm to this whole mess. Colombian morality, their twisted sense of Catholic guilt and truth, their ability to take distraction to professional heights, and then Fox television glomming on to things of a piece. It wasn't long after the October end to "Nada mas que la verdad" that Colombia turned its attentions to an equally compelling reality show, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez negotiated with Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the FARC, to have two long-held, high-profile hostages released.

So what, exactly, is going too far in Colombia? Let Fox show us.

Roth on being gone

Hermione Lee talks to Philip Roth in this week's New Yorker, and says something that, applied to the global soul, has particular resonance.

People go in search of ghosts whenever they return, after a long absence, to a place where they once lived. Who of us has returned to a childhood home or a city that may have figured prominently in his biography without knowing full well that seeing it again was bound to be an experience at once exciting and sad? "Haunted by the past" is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, "haunted," the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become. I agree with the Chekhov character who, when, in a crisis, he is reminded that "this, too, shall pass," responds, "Nothing passes."

Later in the interview, Roth reminds us that his character Zuckerman had "adventures as a writer" in Czechoslovakia, the U.K. and Israel. His imaginative landscape has that particular global reach. In the new novel, "Exit, Ghost," Zuckerman may finally be "gone for good," as the last words read, but the fact is he had been gone before, and not for bad.

Narco-gallina

Colombia's "El Tiempo" daily reports today on the capture and confinement of a drug smuggler near the Venezuelan border. Police report that the suspect, discovered hiding in a large agricultural sack on a bus, had several bags of coca paste, the basis for cocaine, tied to his legs and wings. The police further note that the suspect was a chicken. The chicken, reports Colonel Richard Portilla, director of operations for regional law enforcement, is being held at the local prosecutors office until further soup ingredients become necessary.

In the last year, several ducks and at least one turkey have also played mule.

Khmer Food

Why can't I order out for some good kuy thiew in New York City, supposed food capital of the world? My answer (and some of my nostalgia) at Salon.

From Neiva to New York

Read my piece on Colombian adoptee Jen Cerami in this month's Inthefray.org.