Tag: mexico

Air pollution is taking a deadly toll on the U.S.-Mexico border

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this Desert Sun article:

A suffocating brown haze hangs over Mexicali.

Clouds of smoke billow out of the city’s factories and float through neighborhoods where children run and play in the dusty streets. Soot rising from smokestacks mixes with exhaust from traffic-clogged avenues and columns of smoke swirling from blazing heaps of trash.

When acrid fumes and particles fill the air, the pollution stings the nasal passages, grates in the throat and leaves people coughing and wheezing.

The air along this stretch of the border is so polluted it’s killing people. The tiny airborne particles ravage human lungs, triggering asthma and other chronic diseases. Children as young as 6 have been among the victims. The air leaves countless other people coping with illnesses throughout their lives.

The poisoned air drifts across the border into the United States and California’s Imperial Valley, entering the smaller city of Calexico. The pollution here regularly violates U.S. air-quality standards, and children in Imperial County are taken to emergency rooms for asthma at one of the highest rates in the state.

The air pollution that plagues the Mexicali area isn’t just some of the worst in Mexico. It’s also some of the worst particulate pollution measured anywhere in the Americas.

The toll in lives lost is ghastly. Mexican health records show at least 78 people died of asthma and 903 people died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the Mexicali area between 2010 and 2016. Officials in the state of Baja California have estimated that pollution causes about 300 premature deaths annually in Mexicali.

Air pollution is taking a deadly toll on the U.S.-Mexico border

Small Farmers in Mexico Keep Corn’s Genetic Diversity Alive

typhlonectes:

This evolutionary experiment has been going on for thousands of years.
And the efforts of small-scale farmers, a recent study suggests,
generate the bulk of corn’s genetic diversity in North America. In the
face of more aggressive weather threats researchers say the finding
comes at a critical time. “This takes things a step further,” says
Daniel Piñero, a plant population geneticist at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico. “Family farmers are not only preserving the
[genetic] diversity of maize,” or corn, Piñero says—they are
contributing more of it. 

In the study Mauricio Bellon, a social scientist who works for Mexico’s
National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity, and his
colleagues used government numbers from the 2010 rainy season—the last
year a national census was done. The team narrowed in on the
municipalities with maize yields of up to three metric tons per
hectare—in other words, where people still grow their own food and
cultivate native varieties. The researchers then estimated the area
where corn hybrids are produced at a commercial scale…

Small Farmers in Mexico Keep Corn’s Genetic Diversity Alive

typhlonectes:

23 Nuns Fight For the Survival of an Endangered Mexican Salamander

This is the Lake Pátzcuaro salamander. It is a critically endangered
species. Overhunting, habitat destruction, and invasive exotic fish have
brought the salamander to the brink of extinction. Recent studies
revealed that fewer than 100 are left in the wild.

But a group of 23
nuns in Mexico teamed up with other International experts to try and
save the species. The nuns live in a convent nearby and have used the
salamanders to make cough syrup for more than 150 years. Now they’re
breeding them not only to keep their tradition alive, but also to save
the amphibians from extinction.

Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico is the only
place in the world these salamanders can be found. Experts say the nuns
will play a pivotal role in the survival of the species.

Read more in “Nuns Resurrect Endangered Salamanders in First-of-its-Kind
Conservation Effort“ 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

everentropy:

izanzanwin:

https://twitter.com/nativehebe/status/1017270880093655040

So I looked this up and it’s going to cross the Yaqui river, which is a water source for the Yaquí people. It looks like the ones resisting are specifically the Loma de Bacúm Yaquí, other groups were given compensation though I doubt it will make up for the potential environmental harm.A judge in September of last year ruled in their favor that the energy company did not have the right to enter their lands to repair the pipeline.

According to this article: https://intercontinentalcry.org/a-pipeline-runs-through-it/ There should be further action soon but I wasn’t able to find anything recent.

Source: izanzanwin

myceliorum:

“καὶ τί δὲν κάνατε γιὰ νὰ μὲ θάψετε
ὅμως ξεχάσατε πὼς ἤμουν σπόρος You did anything to bury me
But you forgot I was a seed Nos enterraron sin saber que tambien somos semillas. They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

— Dinos Christianopoulos (Greek poet), with English translation, became a Mexican political proverb, also with English translation

In This Ancient City, Even Commoners Lived in Palaces

tlatollotl:

View from the Moon Pyramid to the Road of the Dead in the ancient Teotihuacán Pyramids in Mexico.Tais Policanti

This story was originally published in Spanish by HuffPost Mexico. A version of it has been adapted and republished here in English with permission from HuffPost Mexico.

Millions of tourists visit the ruins of Teotihuacán every year. They climb the pyramids, walk the Avenue of the Dead, and learn about the spectacular artifacts recovered from the ancient Mesoamerican city. Looking across the vast and remarkably well-preserved stone complex, built by hand by a pre-Aztec civilization, many likely assume that only a powerful despotic king—directing hordes of slave or serf laborers—could have orchestrated the construction of such a carefully planned city. Indeed, this is what archaeologists once believed. If tourists make the effort to visit some of the excavated residential compounds outside the main archaeological zone, however, they may start to understand why such assumptions about Teotihuacán society are changing. For these structures lie at the heart of our shifting perspective of the ancient city: namely, that it was far more egalitarian than we had previously imagined possible.

I began my archaeological career in the 1970s as an undergraduate examining artifacts at Teotihuacán. That first trip to Mexico cemented my love not only for the archaeology, but also for Mexican life and culture. In the decades since, I moved on to excavating Aztec-period sites in the provinces of that civilization’s empire. In 2015, when I was appointed director of Arizona State University’s archaeological lab in San Juan Teotihuacán, I got to return to my first love among Mexican sites, armed with new ideas about ancient cities and urban life. But after just a few years of work, I began to see Teotihuacán in a very different light.

Compared with the Aztec sites I have studied, Teotihuacán seems very strange, and not just because of its huge size (100,000 people, living in an area of close to 20 square kilometers). For one, it’s the only pre-modern Mexican city completely planned with a grid layout. For another, its residents lived in a form of housing—apartmentlike multifamily compounds with white lime-plaster floors, ornamented roofs, and porches—remarkably spacious and luxurious for the ancient world. These complexes are key to the conclusion of many researchers, including myself, that the city’s residents lived far more economically equal lives than any other known Mesoamerican society.

These new insights into Teotihuacán have come thanks to extensive fieldwork on the site. This includes decades of study from archaeologists excavating the pyramids and apartment compounds, who have helped to more fully reconstruct the architecture of the long-abandoned city and unearthed artifacts that are giving us clues about the lives of the people who inhabited it. It also includes work from anthropologists like René Millon and George Cowgill, who mapped the entire city and took more than 5,000 collections of artifacts from the surface of the ground. These materials are now stored in the lab I direct, where they are being studied by archaeologists.

Keep reading

In This Ancient City, Even Commoners Lived in Palaces

tlatollotl:

Fish Hacha

Date: 6th–8th century

Geography: Mexico, Mesoamerica, Veracruz

Culture: Classic Veracruz

Mesoamerican ballplayers wore protective gear called hachas, palmas, and yokes to protect their hips and abdomens from the impact of the game’s solid rubber ball (see MMA 1978.412.15 and 1978.412.16). In painting and sculpture, the yoke is shown worn around the player’s hips, the palma or hacha attached at the front. Those used during active play were most likely made of wood or some other light material; stone versions such as this one were worn, if at all, during ballgame-related rituals, or placed on display. Given the distinctive design of each hacha, both those worn and those carved in stone may have served to identify teams or individuals.

Hachas also vary greatly in form and size, so much so that they qualify as a group only in contrast to the taller and thinner palmas. The Metropolitan’s own collection includes hachas in the form of human or animal heads, full figures, even one representing a pair of human hands. The name hacharefers to the axe-like form of many (hacha is Spanish for axe), including the example seen here. In these, the back is slightly wider than the front where the sides converge in a sharp point. Facial features and any other details are carved on low relief, each side a mirror image of the other.

In other ways this stone hacha is unusual in both its subject and composition. In order to conform to the classic hacha shape, the artist has rendered the face, body and tail fin in consecutive, ascending registers of low relief. This creative solution to the problem of representing a horizontal subject within the confines of the vertical hacha format does not preclude a closely observed, detailed rendering of the subject, however. The artist has carefully rendered each scale individually, with increased depth of relief from front to back, mimicking how fish fins overlap in nature. The rounded form of the cheeks, slightly open mouth, and flared gills suggest the respiration and movement of the fish as it passes through the water.

In jarring contrast to this naturalistic image is the fish’s unusual profile. The inclusion of what looks like a very human nose suggests a composite being of the supernatural realm. The belief in a watery underworld inhabited by deities was widespread throughout Mesoamerica. At the Classic Veracruz city of El Tajín, scenes of ballgame-related rituals both on earth and in the underworld are carved on the walls of one of its many ball courts. In one, a man wearing a fish helmet sits in a water-filled temple, surrounded by supernatural figures. The unusual blending of fish and human elements on this hacha may reflect the widespread Mesoamerican belief that the ball court was a conduit, the game and its rituals a way of connecting humans to the deities dwelling in that realm.

Patricia Joan Sarro, 2017

Published references

Art of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas from the Museum of Primitive Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969, fig. 584.

Resources and additional reading

Ceremonial Sculpture of Veracruz. New York: Long Island University, 1987.
Earley, Caitlin C. “The Mesoamerican Ballgame.” In The Hilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mball/hd_mball.htm (June 2017)

Koontz, Rex. Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpent: The Public Sculpture of El Tajín. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Leyenaar, Ted J.J. Ulama, Jeu de Balle des Olmeques aux Azteques – Ballgame, from the Olmecs to the Aztecs. Lausanne: Musée Olympique, 1997.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 12, The Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Americas

Scott, John F. “Dressed to Kill: Stone Regalia of the Mesoamerican Ballgame”. In The Sport of Life and Death, The Mesoamerican Ballgame, E. Michael Whittington, ed., pp. 50–63 New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

Shook, Edwin M. and Elayne Marquis. Secrets in Stone: Yokes, Hachas and Palmas from Southern Mesoamerica. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996.

Von Winning, Hasso and Nelly Gutiérrez Solana. La Iconographía de la Cerámica de Río Blanco, Veracruz. Mexico City: UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1996.

The Met