True tales from another Mexico : the Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx / Sam Quinones

The Ballad of Chalino Sanchez -- Lynching in Huejutla -- Telenovela --The Jotos of La Fogata--San Quintin--Zeus and the Oaxaca Hoops--The Dead Women of Juarez--West Side Kansas Street -- The Bronx--Leaving Nueva Jerusalen--Jesus Malverde--Tepito--The Last Valiente--The Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo--Nuevo Chupicuaro

Quinones merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in his search for an authentic modern Mexico. He finds it in part in emigrants, people who use wits and imagination to strike out on their own. In poignant stories from north of the border -- about Oaxacan basketball leagues in southern California and the late singing legend Chalino Sánchez whose songs of drug smugglers spurred the popularity of the narcocorrido -- Quinones shows how another Mexico is reinventing itself in America today. But most of his stories are from deep inside Mexico itself. There a dynamic sector exists. It is made up of those who instinctively shunned the enfeebling embrace of the PRI's paternalism, including scrappy entrepreneurs such as the Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo and Indian migrant farmworkers who found a future in the desert of Baja California. Here, too, are true tales from ignored margins of society, including accounts of drag queens and lynchings. From the fringes of the country, Quinones suggests, emerge some of the most telling and central truths about modern Mexico and how it is changing.

English