Many Peruvian internet cafés are covert porn theatres, and others are de facto ones, because they are primarily used that way. You can tell some of the seriously pornographically oriented ones because they have curtains around each computer.
I avoid such places, and here in beautiful Huamachuco, where I am (I walked to Markawamachuko today!) I have found an internet café which doesn’t just say “no porn watching by minors,” it actually has pornography blocking software.
This means, of course, that I cannot see most of the blogs I would normally visit. If you are gay and out on your blog, I can’t see it, and I can’t see the Unapologetic Mexican, and there are many more, including the tourism sites about Huamachuco and its region to which I wanted to link.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
what??? really? drag! my new place? /elmachete? i was just thinking about you. well. i hope i see you soon, maestra.
Yeah, ridiculous, hunh! But now I am in one that doesn´t block porn – it has two rooms, one for men and one for women and children, so that, I guess, it is assumed that there will not be enough jacking off in the women and children´s room to freak out those who aren´t viewing porn. But the connection is slow, so graphics heavy sites like yours time out. My site doesn´t come through well – WordPress is open source and Microsoft doesn´t like that. So I guess I will see you from that metropolis of Lima!!! Nice to see you here, though.
This makes me so sad.
Now I have figured out why it doesn´t let one see the tourism sites I want – they´re hosted on terra.com, which from what I can tell also hosts girlie pictures.
Sad, yes, but you have got to realize this is Peru which is Catholic and perverse. I have not figured out which is more machista, Peru or Chile, or whether the steady alcoholism of Chile is more or less irritating than the dead drunkenness you can see on Sundays in Peru. More irritating to me than the internet porn fixation, which I wouldn´t see if we weren´t still all in Internet cafes here instead of at home on broadband, are the way the ads and magazines are all decorated with pinup girls.
Meanwhile, back at the porn blocking Internet cafe, I think they’ve read my blog, because now as soon as they see me coming they turn off the porn blocker. I am glad because this place has the fastest computers and best Internet connection, and the porn watchers really don’t come here.
Unapologetic Mexican?…don’t waste your time. For starters, the blog title conveys a totally uncritical Chamber of Commerce–“Yay Team” (read Babbitt-like) condition and mind set. My take on the “Hiss-Panic”/Latino/Mex-Am/Chicano/Cholo culturas is quite different. Nez-boy marginalised my comments on machistas into my own little personal Unapologetic Mexican gated blog, just me, with no one else there. Like, I hadn’t noticed his sanctimonious and too-clever, self-congratulatory style? –the usual lame machista Attention Getter. This Real Man can’t take it when a dyed in the wool fag, me, gets on the hyper-masculinist case. I said too many things about Miss Che. Touchy Touchy! Bi-lingual, observant and studious since childhood, as I was, the issues that I found my Chicanos dealing with in the social movement, in the late sixties, were hardly new to me. I had been aware of them and living with them, veritably, since childhood. By my freshman year at Fresno High, in a community totally in the thrall of racist, utterly fascistic and uncaring central California Agri-Biz, which, let’s face it, very much WANTED me to know “my place”–I was already seriously in the need of something closely resemblng therapy. If not for the cultural strategy that I employed as a sophomore to ease the pain, I would have soon found myself in serious trouble, little doubt. I enrolled in a French laguage class, believing it likely that I would find comfort and refuge among student s willing to learn a foreign language. My gambit paid off in spades. Soon I had great pals in that class who liked my drawings, and invited to join a car club, and I found myself overnight with some sixteen white brothers, gentlemen all, who if they had qualms about a Chicano member, never said so to me. It didn’t hurt that I had been invited to join by the club prez, and had designed the club plaque and jacket logo. Years later, invited by my younger brother to look into Chicanismo, I took to involvement and participation with my raza in taking care of busines immediately. But it wasn’t long before I started noticing some serious discrepancies in our “leaders” (and their followers) cultural and political self-characterizations and our follow through in our personal politica among ourselves. Yes, The Man had been dedicatedly screwing us over since 1849. Yes, we had been deprived of education, good jobs and housing, our Civil Rights a thing unheard of, yes we suffered in addition from the serious social pathologies which such deprivations bring into the varrios and lives of the marginalised, but more and more this queer began to see what seemed to go over a lot of my communities heads, in a variety of organizational efforts. . We were up to our eyebrows in the self-serving antics of the hypermasculinist vatos, to the point of ignoring the very real needs of women, children, elders, and for sure my QLGBT brothers and sisters. The Chicano male seemed to be enthralled with the notion of making the world safe for only himself, period. Later on I worked with Lowrider Magazine ( I designed the logo), only to find vivid and lurid corroboration for my earlier social prognosis about “maleness”. What I offer here is simply a prologue, but before I continue, and with your permission, I’d like to expand critically on the Latino mind-set. What’s your take on this so far? Un saludo.
Well, Nezua is a friend of mine and I am not stepping into whatever situation you have with him, you will have to work it out on your own (or not).
On gender and Latinness and the Chicano movement there is a whole lot to say. More than I can articulate in blog size bites right now. But I am interested what you have to say re the Latino mind-set (what do you think it is, first off?)