Much has been written about the increasing and alarming violence in Acapulco in recent years. Taxi drivers are murdered by the dozen, bodiless heads are left to be suntanned on the beach, and shootouts up in the hills can leave hundreds of bullet casings.
I confess that I subjected this huauchinango al mojo de ajo to ruthless and merciless treatment on a spring afternoon at El Amigo Miguel, a restaurant a stone's throw from Acapulco's zocalo.
Early in 1990 I decided I wanted to move to Mexico City. I took an intensive course in Spanish at Taller Latinoamericano, which at the time was in the East Village in New York. Two months, two hours a day, four days a week, and that was my entire formal education.
But I had some auxiliary teachers, including my next-door neighbor, an Argentine from Mendoza called Tito. His mother had loved Mexican music, and Tito inherited her predilection. “You like Mexico?” he asked. “Listen to this tape. Try to transcribe the lyrics on paper and then translate them.”
A woman’s voice – so deep and husky she could almost have been a man – imbued my apartment. (It wasn't difficult. At the time I lived in a one-room studio.) She sang a song traditionally sung by a man, “Ella” by Jose Alfredo Jiménez, which begins like this:
I got tired of begging
I got tired of telling her that without her I would die of grief
She didn’t want to listen to me, and if she opened her mouth
It was to tell me she didn’t love me anymore
These kinds of exaggerated emotions are typical of the lyrics of ranchera songs, indeed of much of Mexican music. Yet when Chavela Vargas, the singer on the tape that Tito lent me, sang them, they seemed completely rational and normal. In Vargas’s voice, each song did not so much recount a soap opera, but the accumulated pain of an entire life. I could not get enough of the tape, and on a trip to Mexico – I wasn’t ready to move until later in the year – I bought several more. Tito told me that about ten years earlier, Vargas, who had been a big star in Mexico, had disappeared from the face of the earth. She was rumored to have been a “difficult” artist who consumed a bottle of tequila a day. I asked around in the Mexico City record stores, and many thought she was dead.
A couple of months after I moved to the city, in October of 1990, it was announced that Vargas would be making her comeback at a nightclub in Coyoacán called El Hábito. I was among the first in line for the show. A diminutive woman wearing a huge rebozo, Vargas was in her early seventies at the time. If in her voice you could hear the ravages of time (and all that tequila), the emotions were intact. Each song was like a little play of tragedy or redemption. I knew that I was witnessing an important moment in Mexican cultural history – and I got her autograph for my neighbor Tito. (She signed it, "Para Tito -- no mames nunca," a deliciously vulgar phrase of Mexican slang that he often used.) I went to see her several more times at the same little night club.
Within a couple of years, Vargas would be discovered by Pedro Almodovar, who used her music for several of his films. Despite her increasingly fragile health, she would entertain King Juan Carlos of Spain as well as other luminaries and royalty in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe. The last time I saw her was at a free concert in Mexico City’s zócalo in October of 2010. In the last two decades of her life – she died on August 5 at the age of 93 – she regained the fame and love she so justly deserved.
If you are in Mexico City on Thursday night, August 23rd, at 7 pm, you might want to come to hear J.M. Servin, a Mexican who has written about the United States, and I converse on the theme of Mexico y Estados Unidos, un territorio literario. Servin says that his idea is that we "talk like friends who are more proud of what we have lived and what we have drank that what we have read." The event will be moderated by the estimable Philippe Ollé Laprune and will be held at Casa Refugio Citlaltétepetl, on Calle Citlaltépetl #25 in the Colonia Hipódromo Condesa -- a stone's throw from the Plaza Citlaltépetl. (I promise that is the first and last time I will ever use the word "Citlaltépetl" three times in the same sentence.) If the event is not tempting enough in itself, there will be free mezcal served after.
Anyone out there old enough to remember the cover of this album, which sold six million copies in 1965? Or the band? Herb Alpert came from fairly close to Tijuana -- Los Angeles -- but, hardly Mexican, was a young man of Jewish Rumanian descent when he recorded a song called "The Lonely Bull," which was inspired by the brass section of a mariachi band he had heard on a trip across the border. His band, the Tijuana Brass, included no Mexicans either. According to the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass web site, the model on the album cover, Dolores Erickson, was pregnant at the time of the shoot. And that is not whipped cream. It's shaving cream. Alpert and the band sold over 72 million records, mostly in the 1960s. He also has been a recording executive and a philanthropist, and today leads a band which features his wife, singer Lani Hall. You want to see the video of the album's biggest hit? It was made fifteen years before MTV.
To refer to a torta as Mexico's answer to a sandwich would be calumny. Mexico City street food por excelencia, if a torta isn't exactly a work of art it is by all means a handicraft. A roll is split in half and heated while its contents are cooked on a grill. It might be filled with ham, chicken, cheese, egg, roast pork, a breaded cutlet, shredded pork in adobo or any combination of those. A traditional torta is not piled high with meat, but stacked with additional complementary elements: refried beans, onions, sliced jalapeños or chipotle sauce, avocado, tomato. To call a torta fast food is deceptive. Torteros are often painstaking in their preparations.
Tortas are most often eaten from stalls on the street while standing.
But they are also available at cafeterias like Armando, which claims to have invented the torta in 1892.
The torta combinada, with various ingredients piled atop each other, is also very popular, and without a doubt one of the causes of the extreme obesity problem in Mexico City. Some excellent versions of these are available at the cantina El Portal, about which I have posted previously. The Tepito and the Toluqueña are killers (and I am not referring to the cardiological punch they pack).
A joint on calle Juan Escutia near the corner of Zamora serves tortas a la barda, a specialty from Tampico. They include beans, ham, sausage, head cheese, American cheese, panela cheese, avocado and salsa. I had to try it once. I was underwhelmed. I might have liked it better had the ingredients been heated through.
I draw the line at El Cuadrilatero, on calle Luis Moya near the Alameda, owned by wrestler Super Astro. If you order the torta El Gladiador and consume all of it -- that's about two and a half pounds of sandwich -- within fifteen minutes, you get it for free.