Reyna Grande

This woman made me cry several times yesterday. I read her book The Distance Between Us.

She is from Iguala, the closest city, next to my mother's hometown of Huitzuco. Most of all, I was crying because I also left my precious little ones, and my wife to pursue an impossible dream in Mexico. A scientific career in a country run by drug dealers, supported by Enrique Peña Nieto, and Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

I also cried because I taught in Iguala, in the same neighborhood where Reyna lived, with her maternal grandmother. It is really poor there, as she describes in the book, and my students, who I love, are still living there, in that squalor.

When you see people living in garbage, and nobody is fixing it, you kind of block it. I met the Mayor, Raúl Tovar Tavera, a man with such a little awareness of reality, that couldn't care less, how my students live.

I come from the ruling classes, and I feel a civil war in the making there. I am happy, I have my children here, just like in the Memoir, written by Reyna.

It has been hard for us also, to emigrate from Mexico, and to immigrate to the US.

Thank you Ms. Grande!

Today (9/21/2012) I read there is no water in 60% of the city, and the Mayor couldn't care  less:

"He added that on Wednesday of last week, when the deadline passed to pay, during a meeting with executives of the CFE was granted an extension that perished on Wednesday and the mayor, Raul Tovar Tavera had pledged to cover the debt that exceeds 900,000 pesos through a loan that would make Capami, but no credit was authorized by the financial insolvency of City Hall."

Taken From La Jornada Guerrero