October 2004

This is Gicela’s delicious pan de muerto (‘bread of the dead’), almost ready in our home oven this afternoon. Reyna will be doing the same back in Toliman.

I prepared the hot chocolate.

Rugby in Oaxaca? Planeta.com and the Zinacantli Rugby Club host the fourth annual Muertos Rugby 7s Tournament on 30 October.

After championing casinos, Secretary of Tourism Rodolfo Elizondo Torres now seems intent on bringing Formula One racing back to Mexico.

We’ll call this niche tourism.

Elizondo has met with F1-supremo Bernie Ecclestone and Joe Abed, who was Mexican Grand Prix race promoter in the 80s, to discuss the options. The resort of Cancún is the favoured location for a purpose built facility. BBC News Online reported on the deal, which is still tentative, on Thursday.

The Mexican government has given its support to the bid. “Cancún could be a new venue for the F1 championship,” Elizondo told journalists in Paris last week. “If the Mexican authorities can reach an agreement with the F1 authorities. There are real possibilities. It is still necessary to look at all the details of the project but the amount of investment needed is about $100m [US dollars], mainly for the construction of the circuit, which could be built on a site close to Cancún airport, at the southern end of the Cancún hotel strip.”

The prospect of resurrecting the Mexican Grand Prix has been mooted since 2003, with Monterrey once considered as a possible alternative to Cancún.

The 73-year-old Ecclestone is seeking to broaden the sport’s appeal outside Europe, but if these new plans become a reality, it is likely to be at the expense of Brazil, which currently hosts a GP in São Paulo. But the lack of a Mexican driver in the series may yet scupper the deal (Brazil is well represented).

It was the arrival of a topline driver in F1 which motivated the Mexico City authorities to invest in the construction of a racing circuit back in the 60s. The Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City was named after racing-driver brothers Ricardo & Pedro Rodriguez. Tragically, before the circuit opened, Ricardo – aged just 20 – crashed heavily on the Peraltada corner and suffered fatal injuries. It was Ricardo’s elder brother Pedro who featured in the first Mexico GP on 27 October 1963. Pedro also died behind the wheel nine years later.

F1 returned to Mexico for the last time in 1992. Briton Nigel Mansell won that race on a hot and sunny March afternoon. He went on to win the World Championship. The bumps around the infamous Peraltada – now a 180-degree banked sweeper taken in fifth gear – were becoming dangerous. Mexico City was also becoming more polluted and there was peristent crowd trouble. It had lost any glamour it might have had in the 60s and became a chore for the teams.

F1 had turned its back on Mexico. The track hosted rock concerts, including David Bowie, and Pope John Paul II gave a mass there in January 1999. It was not until two years ago that international racing returned after the track was rebuilt for Champ car races, drawing huge crowds in 2002 and 2003. It has been included on the NASCAR calendar for 2005.

Quintana Roo governor, Joaquin Hendricks, whose term ends next year, has prepared a presentation for the FIA. He is betting that as many as 60,000 tourists would come to watch the race in Cancún.

The identities of the local tycoons funding the 100,000-seater stadium will apparently be revealed at a news conference in Mexico City on Monday.

Belatedly, just spotted Elizabeth Mistry’s column published in Scotland’s Sunday Herald last month. “The franaleros are liable to smear the windscreen with something less pleasant than detergent if their services are turned down…”

Italian Serie A giants Inter Milan have donated €5,000 ($6,250) to a stronghold of the Zapatistas in a gesture of solidarity for the indigenous people of Chiapas, The Guardian reports.

Inter’s Argentine captain Javier Zanetti persuaded his club to donate the money to Zapatista communities in Zinacantan, Chiapas, which were reportedly attacked by paramilitaries in April.

Zanetti, 31, who has been with the neriazzurri for a decade, is well-known for his good deeds. He is nicknamed ‘Pupi’ after the charity he set up with wife Paula to help disadvantaged kids back home in Argentina.

In a letter published in the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport last week, subcomandante Marcos – in his own inimitable way – professed to being an Inter fan, and appeared – balaclaved – flashing Zanetti’s No.4 black and blue team jersey

Mexican writers and artists have joined a campaign to stop the US retailer, Wal-Mart, from opening a store near the famous ruins of Teotihuacan, reports BBC News Online.

Painter Francisco Toledo has likened the construction of the Bodega Aurrerá hypermarket to the proposals to open a McDonalds restaurant in Oaxaca’s centro histórico a couple of years ago. I wrote about this very theme last month. Unlike Oaxaca however, this time the protests seem doomed to failure.

Results of a poll by the Mexico City daily Reforma suggest Mexicans want to see Kerry defeat Bush. They are not alone.

Twenty dollars for culture. According to the exhibition organisers, it’s an “extraordinarily expensive show” to stage. Admission has been jacked up to $18 from $15 ($23 with audio tour). There’s an opening day review in The New York Times.

Reyna preparing bread

With Day of the Dead drawing near, my thoughts once again drift back to Toliman. This time, I think of Reyna, the bread maker in the community. She is renowned for her ‘pan de muerto’ (‘bread of the dead’).

Her brieze block house lies just off the main highway into town, set on a rise overlooking the barrio’s dusty dirt soccer pitch. Wary of the dogs, customers make a point of stooping to pick up a loose stone or branch before making the approach up the steep rutted bank to the front door.

Inside, the bread room has one bare bulb and a concrete floor. Her dark and sooty adobe-and-brick bread oven is capable of baking 300 bolillo loaves and sweet pastries each day. She uses the dregs of the pulque pot as leavening for the bread and the results are redolent with pulque’s subtle aroma.

The oven is lit with firewood in the morning and has heated the oven by late afternoon. By 7:00pm, another room will be stacked with warm baked bread fresh from the oven. We would often arrive early and eager. Still unbaked loaves rest on a second rack. We make our selections using the ubiquitous metal tongs, hand over our pesos and head back to the house. Setting some aside for breakfast the next day, we’d sit around the kitchen table and bolt down the rest, occasionally pausing to dunk a piece in our hot chocolate or atole.

The enormously successful ‘Aztecs’ exhibition which wowed hundreds of thousands in London and Berlin has crossed the Atlantic. It’s now the turn of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City to host this extraordinary examination of the Aztec civilization. The Aztec Empire is the first major exhibition devoted to the subject in the US in more than two decades. More than 400 works drawn from public and private collections will be on view from 15 October to 13 February 2005.

Elsewhere in the US, lots happening at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, including the Treasures from Ancient Veracruz exhibition that opened last week. It features a colossal three thousand year old Olmec head among the exhibits. The Center is also hosting the Sor Juana performing arts festival.