Columns

Rich Mexican immigrants are changing Texas, Time magazine reported Monday.  Thirty-eight killed in three days, reported the BBC Tuesday.  Sixteen of the 38 were killed in Toluca, capital of the State of Mexico, where the nation’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was born, a state his extended family and close family friends have dominated for years.  (Peña Nieta was its governor 2005-2011.)   Twenty-two bodies were found in Mexico City, where he now lives, in Los Pinos (Mexico’s White House), and rules the nation from the National Palace.  Many Mexicans – whose avid taste for speculation has been proven correct disturbingly often – suggest that the killings in Mexico City and in Toluca are a signal from drug traffickers to the president that any hope for a lessening in violence and slaughter is misinformed.

A number of professional international and political analysts have examined Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) President Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposed new policies and found some illuminating but others unpromising.  Their assessments are not couched in the sharp rhetoric that many (both Mexicans and those abroad) believe the new administration’s campaign-tainted maneuvering merits.

During the holidays, many folks looked back, examining what last year meant. Being perched on a rural foothill of a mountain facing the rain and the winds of December and early January, the new year prompted a look back on warmer times.  And to experiences further back chronologically.

“Caray, that’s a good one.”  Paco Ruiz Gonzales grinned as he squinted into the slip of early morning light.  It was a couple of days before a mountain Christmas cold enough to show your breath.  We turned to face a slice of the red disc growing above the distant southeastern horizon.  It was a chill morning, but as soon as the sun crested the far Michoacan peaks, it began to change.

“The book of books” is a newly re-discovered monicker for the Bible.  A lit instructor, in the early 1950s, a gaunt, knowing World War II vet, enthusiastically parsing John Steinbeck’s  rightfully famed “Grapes of Wrath” for a class of unread, if eager students, used the term referring to the King James Bible.

A quick flight to Houston last week was packed with complex news, most of it post-electoral, along with some hard words for the way that state and its communities have traditionally dealt with voters.  Austin (the fastest-growing city in the United States, and Texas’ most liberal), plus Dallas and Houston, traditionally rigid Republican enclaves, along with San Antonio, went for President Obama. These are the state’s largest cities. Still, Obama lost Texas, garnering just 41.38 percent to Mitt Romney’s 57.17 percent.