True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx [Hardcover]

Sam Quinones (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826322956 | ISBN-13: 978-0826322951 | Publication Date: January 1, 2001 | Edition: 1st

Chalino Sanchez was a migrant worker who became a underground singer of narcocorridos -- ballads about drug smugglers - until his murder, which remains unsolved. Then he became a legend.

Two traveling salesmen plied their wares in a sweltering small town. The next day they were hanging from the town's bandstand lynched by a mob, a thousand strong.

Hailed as a cult classic, True Tales From Another Mexico  takes us to a colony of drag queens -- jotos -- preparing for Mexico's oldest gay beauty contest.

We see how a bunch of humble rancheros invented the Michoacana popsicle, and a business model that poor people used to grow rich.

We follow a Oaxacan Indian basketball team in Los Angeles as its coach fights to restore the purity of his sport, besmirched in America.

Aristeo Prado was a gunfighter and robber -- a valiente trying to escape his past -- when he was ambushed on a noontime street and died going for his gun.

Telenovelas, once a propaganda vehicle of Mexico's one-party state, flourished with political change and touched topics -- corruption, drug trafficking and poverty -- that once were prohibited.

In Nueva Jerusalen, a theocratic village run by an excommunicated Catholic priest, residents receive voting instructions from the Virgin of Guadalupe.

We enter the Bronx - the rude boys in the PRI wing of Mexico's Congress -- as they struggle with the meaning of rebellion.

Some of these stories are strange and exotic. More often, though, they are from mainstream though ignored parts of Mexican life. 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.

True Tales from Another Mexico are the stories of people whose stories never get told.

“This is a scrappy, lively, solid work of reportage about the real modern Mexico. It's insightful, crammed with information, and a terrific read.” —Alma Guillermoprieto, author, The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now, and Latin American writer for The New Yorker

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

What Hernando de Soto did for the economy and politics of Lima, Peru in The Other Path (1989. o.p.), journalist Quinones (the Los Angeles Times) does here for Mexico. While de Soto followed a very systematic path, illustrated with charts, to show the tenacity and enterprising spirit of lime$os, Quinones, an accomplished storyteller, uses a narrative style to grand effect. Sometimes, the narrative takes unbelievable turns, yet the author has met each of his subjects, and, while his text is by necessity anecdotal, his is a refreshing treatment of a country in which everything has been penetrated by the ruling party. He recounts stories of men who dress as women, of the narcotraficantes, and of the chamber of deputies' section called The Bronx, where misbehaving is both common and a specialty. This is an excellent view of the informal economy and various means that are used to get around Mexico's reliclike system of social, economic, and political organization. Highly recommended for academic libraries and for special collections. Rene Perez-Lopez, Jordan-Newby Branch Lib., Norfolk, VA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The most original writer on Mexico and the border out there." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826322956
• ISBN-13: 978-0826322951
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,074,326 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sam Quinones is a journalist, author and storyteller whose two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration made him, according to the SF Chronicle Book Review, "the most original writer on Mexico and the border."

A reporter for 24 years, from 1994 to 2004 he lived and worked as a freelance writer in Mexico. He visited all the major immigrant-sending states, spent time with gang members and governors, taco vendors and Los Tigres del Norte. He wrote about soap operas, and he lived briefly in a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Zamora, while hanging out with a street gang. He did the same with a colony of transvestites in Mazatlan, with the merchants in the Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito, and with the relegated PRI congressmen known as the Bronx. He hung out with the promoters of Tijuana's opera scene and with the makers of plaster statues of Mickey Mouse and Spiderman in that city's Colonia Libertad.

In 1998, he received a Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2008, for a career of excellence in reporting about Latin America.

His first book -- True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2001) -- is a collection of nonfiction stories about contemporary Mexico.

His second -- Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration (UNM Press, 2007) -- was called "genuinely original work, what great fiction and nonfiction aspire to be, these are the stories that stop time and remind us how great reading is." (S.F. Chronicle).

Since returning to the United States, he has worked for the LA Times, writing stories about immigrants, street gangs, drug trafficking, and marijuana growers in Northern California.

Contact him at www.samquinones.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A riveting social history, April 14, 2001

By 

jennifer j. rose (Morelia, Michoacan MEXICO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx (Hardcover)

Quinones has an eye for Mexico that's not shared by most gringo writers. And he's got the ability to insinuate himself into situations that none of us have the flair, diplomacy -- or even the cojones -- to penetrate. Like hanging with the Kansas City gang out in Zamora. Or explaining those fancy but unoccupied houses out in the hinterland.

He's got the ability to transcend just world of Mexico -- he even knows that Dickies manufactures for LL Bean.

Frequently when I relate something I've read about Mexico to Mexicans, asking for their verification, I'm laughed out of the room. I queried our in-house panel of experts - Ramiro, my gardener who owns two Paleterias Michoacanas right in the 'hood, and Maria, the woman who works for me and hails from a burg in the Tierra Caliente -- and they agreed with Quinones' assessments.

Now, we all know what rancho and corrido mean. Or so we think. But Quinones takes those concepts just a step farther, explaining the social importance of concepts like these, threading the sense of community throughout each story in this book.

And did you notice that the publisher bound this book just a notch above the usual bindings? It's a library binding, and that says something. This book demands it, because it's one to be read over and over again.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read., February 6, 2002

By 

Alvie "alvie_singer" (Napa, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx (Hardcover)

This book is fantastic. I don't often actually buy non-fiction because I usually don't plan to re-read it. This is a rare exception. Quinones is 1st & foremost a great storyteller. You'd hardly notice that it's all true if it weren't for the fact that these tales are simply too good to be fiction. Quinones has a knack for noticing the seemingly invisible. The best example being the tale of Chalino Sanchez (who graces the cover). How could someone who completely misses the U.S. radar of popular culture become a folk hero and single-handedly create a musical genre selling millions of copies of albums in the process & then having at least 1,500 songs written about him? Quinones manages to make it sound perfectly believable. If you're anything like me you'll be mesmerized by these essays.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Give us more!, August 31, 2004

By 

Brian Maitland (Vancouver, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: True Tales from Another Mexico (Paperback)

This book will blow your mind. Quinones is able to totally take you into worlds rarely heard about before. Who knew there was a thriving basketball hotbed in Oaxaca that has been transported to LA? The whole genre of narcocorridos (basically, traditional Mexican "country" [ranchero] music with a gangsta slant) started in LA, too.

The topics of lynchings in rural Mexico, the popularity of telenovelas at home and in Eastern Europe(?) and the religious cult at Neuva Jerusalen are all so fascinating and far beyond anything anyone has probably imagined Mexico to be.

He has an inate ability to dig up and find the most fascinating stories in the most out-of-the-way places yet also show how they often are a microcosmic reflection of how Mexican society operates in general.

The question is: When is Sam Quinones going to compile a Tales 2?