Mexico and New Mexico have a distinct liking for naming their sons biblical names. For Show Me Your Life the prefered name is Anónimo.

The Anónimo Boys

He muerto mil veces

There is a highway overpass in Mexico City where vast hordes of them live with their paper bags and their glue.

Many Yanks shake their heads and tell me they do not believe it. It doesn’t really matter what the Yanks believe one way or the other.

I am not sure I can begrudge these boys out here living rough and doing survival sex their glue. Or their neurology like sunken ships I used to find diving and the hulk has rusted and great flakes of it simply fall off to the seafloor. The men with their cars arrive quite late, and by then the boys are wired tight inside their brains.

I am not really sure who is who in this. I only know that it unfolds. Believe what you want. They put the unconscious bodies of the boys into trunks and they drive away.

By noon, the boy finds himself in the sun at the side of the highway. The highway is roaring all around him. There is a new tube of glue in his pockets.

The life is a feral wandering.

The boys will tell you they have no awareness of what goes on before they find themselves sitting in the ditch. I do not believe this. They know.

Their lives are so desperate that the glue fumes simply blot it out. Blot what out. Blot their lives out. Hunger. Real hunger hurts.

When I lived in Mazatlan, these boys, different boys, but these boys, would come over and sit with their paper bags on top of the tin roof of my house. Staring out there at nothing in particular. Often, the mist would come in off the Pacific like Mexican whispers. You couldn’t see it. You could only know it was there. The boys would crawl down and go swimming in the dark.

I have died a thousand times

Mexico / New Mexico

WARNING: Explicit Imagery and Colloquial Language

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)

the trafficking of HIV

"And I really do not give a flying fuck about who has a problem with that"

Yesterday, I received a communication that was a threat. I have put together an art program for kids at risk. We call it Show Me Your Life. We could begin at risk for AIDS. It would only be a beginning. So far, we’re in Thailand, Japan, all over Africa, South American flavellas, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Russia, and Canada. “Do not come here, and do not do the American Southwest or Mexico,” I was told. “Or we will kill you. You won’t live a week if you come here, Tim Barrus. We will destroy you and everyone you care for.”

Show Me Your Life gives kids Kodak videocameras.

The first kid to get a camera was in a war zone. The Democratic Republic of the Congo where murder is democratic and can come to anyone.

The kid was thirteen. He was killed by soldiers with machetes. Videocameras in war zones are dangerous.

The violence in the DRC makes the violence in Juarez seem quaint.

“Tim Barrus, we are going to kill you.”

I have no idea who wrote that. Only suspicions. I am a suspicious person.

Mexico tourism looks for 2011 by Christopher Reynolds (2011, Los Angeles Times)

What can travelers expect from Mexico in 2011? That's at least a $64 million question, given the many people who visit the country every year. In Mazatlan, the beachfront, 71-room Las Villas Hotel & Spa opened in June within the Estrella del Mar resort area. Pre-tax rates begin at $120 a night for a standard room. Gloria Guevara Manzo, Mexico's tourism secretary, has set a 2011 goal of boosting total tourist numbers by 15 percent. Charles Pope, assistant director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, reflects "It's quite remarkable" to see tourism and violence tallies rising together at the national level. The Mexican government counted 12,456 drug-war deaths in the first 11 months of 2010, nearly twice as many such deaths as it counted in all of 2009. Although the violence has been spreading, about 45 percent of those deaths occurred in two states: Chihuahua (which includes Juarez, the murder capital) and Sinaloa.

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Internet access is a human right, according to a United Nations report (May 2011): "Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states," Frank La Rue, a special rapporteur to the United Nations. New technologies. Several recent campaigns have demonstrated the potential of reaching large numbers of adolescents with HIV prevention messages to increase knowledge and change behaviours (Opportunity in Crisis: Preventing HIV from early adolescence to young adulthood © United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) June 2011).