I flew to Austin, Texas this year for the 20th annual SXSW Film Festival to party hardy and watch short movies. I'm pretty excited now that the jury winners have have been announced. Unfortunately, most of the winners movies aren’t online yet, since they’re still making the festival rounds. So most of the films I’ve culled below are past winners from the Lonestar State’s biggest Festival. The selection here is unabashedly weird—pushing both visual and intellectual boundaries—but those are the kinds of films SXSW champions and they're really all that should matter, anyway.

Eager by Allison Schulnik: 2014 Animation Special Jury Award Winner

Allison’s forth animated short film finds her playing with ideas of transformation, creepiness, and twisted beauty. It may very well be her best film to date. Bleeding flowers, disfigured horses, and parasitic creatures consume and expel each other in a weird and dark dance. Poetic and haunting, this film will fuck you up if you down some drugs beforehand.

The Apocalypse by Andrew Zuchero: 2013 Midnight Short Film Award Winner

When you’re sitting around with your buddies trying to come up with an idea for something to do, watch this film and don’t do what they do because it has some dire consequences. This killer black comedy premiered at Sundance and went on slaying at SXSW. 

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling: 2012 Midnight Short Film Award Winner

At this point, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared has cemented itself as the anti-Muppets/Sesame Street puppet educational songsters in the most bizarre and endearing way. No idea, animation style, or boundary is sacred in the path to explore creativity. Becky and Joe premiered their second installment of the series, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared: Time, at this year’s SXSW and it may just be better than the first.

(Notes on) Biology by Ornana Films: 2012 Animated Short Film Award Winner

A pretty simple premise of a boy strolling into biology class late, taking a seat, starting notes, and getting distracted by doodles. Shot entirely in stop-motion with students fussing about and an animated science notebook full of gun-slinging robot elephants, the energy and playfulness are what this short’s about.

The Wonder Hospital by Beomsik Shimbe Shim: 2011 Animated Short Film Award Winner

Ideal beauty is a pretty difficult task to confront and traverse in 12 short minutes, but this fantastically warped exploration of a person’s path to discover their “after” image gets at something deep. At times it's nearly impenetrable with its highly stylized animation and confusing narrative progression. But the film finds its footing when it lands in a fever dream atmosphere of fear and desire. 

The Eagleman Stag by Mikey Please: 2011 Wholphin Award Winner

This is hands down one of 2011s best short films. In The Eagleman Stag, filmmaker Mikey Please combined stunning black and white stop-motion animation with high-minded ideas to tell the story of the quickening death of a man. It’s cerebral. It’s surreal. It’s scary. It’s truth. Pretty heady stuff and he’s back this year at SXSW with his new short animation, Marilyn Myller.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Ernesto, 16, works 65 hours a week harvesting crops. Here, he performs “cleanup” work at an almond grove in Madera, California. All photos by Matt Black. Reporting for this story was generously supported by the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the age when most American teenagers are trying to decide whom to ask to prom, Ernesto Valenzuela was instead weighing whether it was worse to die of thirst in the desert or have his throat slit by gangsters.

That’s the choice the 16-year-old faced in his hometown of Mapulaca, Honduras, a drowsy village where MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangsters are known for recruiting youth—sometimes as young as kindergartners—into their cartels. If the kids refuse, they are often killed. Now Ernesto was being recruited, and he didn’t want to end up one of the 6,000 people murdered each year in Honduras. With a total population just shy of 8 million, that means nearly one of every 1,000 Hondurans is a victim of homicide, making it the most dangerous place—after the war zones of Iraq, Somalia, and Syria—in the world.¹

After mulling it over for months—and trying to dodge the tattooed gang members who wanted to sign him up—Ernesto decided his potential fate at home presented far more danger than what he might face at any distant desert crossing. So, early one morning in June 2013, after his mother sobbed and begged him to stay safe, he set out for a place he’d only seen in movies, a place where he’d heard a kid like himself—with just a fifth-grade education—could earn $60 a day working in the fields: America.

To make the journey, Ernesto borrowed money from older cousins who’d migrated to California several years prior. They lent him $7,000, the amount he’d need to cover bus fare from Honduras to Guatemala and up through Mexico, where he would then need to hire a coyote—a smuggler of human beings—to sneak him over the border and into Texas. The way Ernesto saw things, the mere fact that his cousins were able to loan him so much cash at once was evidence of the riches to be found on arrival at his final destination.

At first Ernesto wasn’t fazed by his lonesome journey on an endless succession of buses. It didn’t bother him that between rides he sometimes had to sleep in the streets, or, if he was lucky, a fleabag frontier hotel. He even brushed off his fellow passengers’ cautionary tales of narco violence and the countless murdered migrants who wound up in the cross fire of the cartels. But on the fifth day of his trip, he got nervous. He had arrived in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, with 14 other travelers. Only a black ribbon of water—the Rio Grande—separated Ernesto from McAllen, Texas, and a new life. But first the group had to avoid drowning to get across.

Led by their smuggler, Ernesto’s group boated across the river in a leaky sloop. They made it without capsizing, but shortly after climbing to shore, leaving a trail of soggy footprints behind them, they were spotted by US Border Patrol agents just as they were about to load into another coyote’s waiting pickup truck. The group scattered, and Ernesto sprinted into some scrub brush. He managed to evade the authorities, but in the process he’d gotten himself completely lost. For three days he and four others—three adults and another parentless boy, all from El Salvador—wandered the desert without food or water, scorched from the inside out. Lost and dying in the 90-degree heat, he no longer found the gangsters in Mapulaca so scary.

After circling through the ceaseless South Texas nowhere, all of them on the brink of collapse, the group eventually stumbled on a midsize cattle ranch. On the outskirts of the building, they found a cache of water jugs, presumably left out in the sand for hopeless migrants just like them. They guzzled all the water they could drink, left the bottles behind, and took a road leading north.

As they followed the path, Border Patrol once again spotted the bedraggled crew. This time, they were too exhausted to run. Ernesto was arrested and taken to a detention center 50-odd miles away in Harlingen, Texas, a sort of high-security youth shelter—replete with locked doors and guards—for “unaccompanied alien children” (undocumented kids who are found in the US without their parents or papers). He was placed in one of several dorm rooms alongside 200 boys who had stories much like his.

This year, because of rising crime and economic depression in Central America, the Department of Homeland Security is expecting approximately 60,000 unaccompanied minors to be captured while attempting to illegally enter the US, according to a report issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which tracks human-rights issues. That’s more than double the number that were apprehended in 2013, and more than four times the number that entered the year before. Conversely, for the past nine years, the number of adults captured while illegally entering the US from Mexico has steadily decreased—from 1.1 million in 2005 to 367,000 in 2013.² Apparently, increased risks and ramped-up security on the US-Mexico border have deterred adults but not children. According to Jennifer Podkul of the Women’s Refugee Commission, an NGO that works with displaced women and children, a spike in violence throughout impoverished Central America is the primary force behind the rise in youth migration. As a result, the average age of the illegal migrant labor force in America is declining each year. Parentless, penniless, and homeless—what will happen to them? And what effect will they have on the US economy?

Amilcar and Junior outside their home, in Mendota

This September, three months after Ernesto was apprehended, I met him in the dusty California town of Mendota. “I’m not supposed to work,” he said. We were at a bustling swap meet where gloves, boots, and bold-colored bandannas are sold to the laborers who live in this town of 11,000 people, 97 percent of whom are Latino. But Ernesto—who has almond eyes and the thin shadow of an adolescent mustache—admitted that, even though it was illegal, he had been picking melons to survive. He was already sending money to his mother back home, and he still owed the coyotes $3,500 (because he was caught, he was able to negotiate his debt). “The judge told me I couldn’t work,” he said. “But I need to work.”

After spending more than two months incarcerated in Texas, Ernesto was released to await an official removal hearing, expected to be set in March or April of 2014. Youth detention centers along the US-­Mexico border were filling up and needed, more than ever, to cycle him out (as is customary in these shelters) and into the care of a trusted adult. While he awaited trial, he would be free, as long as he met two conditions: First, he was to be placed in the care of an older uncle and California resident named Orlando; second, he had to attend school in the interim. If he fulfilled these requirements, and could sufficiently convince a judge at his removal hearing that he’d left Honduras under the threat of violence, he might be granted Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and eventually become a resident. This would be a huge victory in that it would allow him to legally stay and work in America, and ultimately offer him a path to citizenship.

For this to happen, however, he faced enormous challenges, not least of which was that the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a lawyer, only applies to criminal cases, and immigration cases are classified as civil. So Ernesto—all of 16 years old, with little command of the English language beyond hello and thank you—would very likely have to argue his own case before an American judge. And if he failed to be sufficiently persuasive, Ernesto would be immediately deported back to Honduras.

For now, neither condition of his release was being met. The uncle who was supposed to take care of him had vanished shortly after his nephew’s arrival in Mendota, so Ernesto was living with four of his young cousins, who’d illegally sneaked into the US without being caught. They were living in a house nearby, surviving on sheer wit, hard labor, and little else.

Ernesto also wasn’t attending school. That’s why he’d come to the swap meet, where a group called the Fresno County Migrant Education program had set up a dusty stall between a taco truck and a work-boot stand, signing up youth for English classes.

“We can only help people who are working in the fields,” an ebullient woman named Rosa Hernandez told Ernesto when he approached her table. The Migrant Education Program is funded by the US Department of Education, which aims to provide additional support to children of migrant farmworkers—or, in Ernesto’s case, child farmworkers themselves. If Ernesto refrained from working in the fields, as his judge had mandated, he would be ineligible for the temporary health services, English classes, and dental care offered by the program. Such is the contradictory and confusing existence of the young illegal migrant in the US.

Ernesto shifted back and forth as Rosa took down his information on a clipboard, nervous that immigration court would learn he’d been working and not going to school—or that he was not, in fact, living with his uncle, who’d all but abandoned him (which violated the agreement he signed with the federal government).

After we left the stall and chatted by the refrescos stand, Ernesto told me that because he’d dropped out of school in Honduras when he was 12 to help support his family, he was actually excited about the prospect of learning English. Now was his chance to “get ahead,” he said. It might also help him argue his case successfully.

Ernesto’s route from Mapulaca, Honduras, to Mendota, California

Later, I visited Ernesto’s home in Mendota, where he lived with four young cousins. It was something like a Peter Pan’s fort for disenchanted migrant youth. None of the young men living with Ernesto had papers, and all of them crossed the border to work the California fields well before their 18th birthdays.

Their house, near downtown, was a small, sweet little ranch, plunked between a larger home on one side and an empty dust-filled lot on the other. Its wrought-iron fence, painted black and white, was slightly askew at the hinge, and on the concrete front porch stood five pairs of sturdy, dirt-caked work boots lined up neatly beside the door.

When I arrived, Ernesto led me to a tattered couch where we sat and he told me about the work he’d been doing. His shoulder muscles swelled, belying his age. Hanging on the living room wall behind him was a collection of frames, variously sized, displaying a depiction of the Virgin Mary and colorful family portraits, several of which appeared to be of the same older woman. I asked about her, assuming she was a relative.

“Oh, those aren’t ours,” Ernesto said. The photos belonged to the owner of the house—a Mexican woman who lived nearby and rented it to them. Those were her family members, he said, and the boys just kept them up for decoration. He seemed somewhat comforted by them, in any case, much more than he would have been by a blank wall.

Since his release from the Texas detention center, Ernesto and his cousins had been working the melon harvest, but now that the summer had passed and winter was approaching, they’d moved on to trimming almond trees. It paid minimum wage—not piecework, meaning that he earned $8 per hour and was not paid by the bushel (as is the case with crops like grapes and strawberries).

Ernesto worked 65 hours per week, he said, which earned him about $1,400 a month. He paid around $100 for rent, plus utilities. Even after paying an installment of his coyote debt, settling his phone and electric bills, buying food, and helping his family as much as he could—plus putting money away in savings for the winter months, when there would be less work—the take-home pay wasn’t so bad for a 16-year-old.

Local produce companies—like Stamoules and Westside Produce, whose fruits and vegetables reach nearly every major grocery chain in the US—rely on cheap migrant labor to reap enormous profits. In 2012, California farm barons collectively grossed $311.2 million on melons alone. The state’s almond industry, for which Ernesto was working (albeit illegally), grossed $4.35 billion that year. Approximately 75 percent of the manual labor required to put cans of almonds on supermarket shelves is performed by immigrants, according to Philip Martin, a professor of agriculture and resource economics at UC Davis. Logic dictates that this is the reason politicians from across the spectrum, from Nancy Pelosi to George W. Bush, have always tacitly supported lax migrant labor laws, even while occasionally spewing anti-immigrant rhetoric from the podium; California, along with many other western states, relies on this work force.

According to a 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, at least 50 percent of US farm laborers are working in the US illegally; estimates in California are closer to 60 percent. Increasingly, undocumented children and teenagers are an accepted part of this labor pool. There are currently more than 3,500 unaccompanied minors working in Monterey County, according to Ernesto Vela of the Monterey County Office of Migrant Education. Statewide, that figure is likely well over 10,000.

In the US, individuals under 14 years of age are prohibited from legal employment, and individuals under 16 can work only on nights and weekends and school vacations, unless they have a special permit from their school district stating that they’ve completed the necessary education or that they have explicit permission to work instead of attending school. Yet Ernesto told me he’s never needed any age documents or work permits—none of the foremen for the labor-contracting companies that employed him for have even attempted to determine whether he is legally permitted to work. He didn’t buy a counterfeit Social Security card, either—which most kids purchase from an underground network in the neighboring town of Huron—because he was worried that obtaining one illegally might mess up his court case. Instead, he rented one “from someone who’s not working right now and doesn’t need it.”

I asked Ernesto whether his job was difficult. Not really, he said. In the fields in Honduras, where he began working at age 12, he made only 100 lempiras—or $5—a day. The labor there was just as hard, if not harder, and it wasn’t nearly as consistent. That kind of life wasn’t good for him, he said. He could never help his family on such insecure pay, either.

“So that’s why you left?” I asked.

“A person wants to make a better life for himself,” he said a little abstractly, universalizing his experience, making it seem not so unique, not so bad. “A person always wants something more.”

Just then, the door to Ernesto’s house opened. In walked three boys carrying groceries. Ernesto’s cousin, Amilcar, whom I had met briefly at the swap meet, looked like a gangly ninth grader, only with larger biceps and a more hardened gaze. He was 16 and came from the same region in Honduras as Ernesto—they’d gone to grade school together and dropped out around the same time to work in the fields. Amilcar had been in the US for just three months, crossing the border without hassle. He was carrying two 30-packs of Pepsi, while the others were lugging grocery bags full of the week’s other provisions: I counted at least five cartons of eggs and three tall stacks of tortillas, as well as several gallons of juice and freezer-wrapped bags of chicken. It took each of them three trips to get all the food through the door. When work started tomorrow, they said, there wouldn’t be time to shop again until next Sunday.

There were five of them living here, jammed into three small bedrooms. There were Ernesto and Amilcar, both 16; Juan Pablo, 22; Juan Pablo’s younger brother, José, 19; and Junior, short, muscly, and with his hair slicked back with thick gel, also 19. Juan Pablo and Junior had been living in the Mendota area for more than three years and had successfully paid off their coyote debts, making them the de facto patriarchs. There was a strong sense of family among the group; they told me that they all looked out for one another, the older boys offering advice and guidance to the younger ones as needed. “You know,” Ernesto said, “telling us what’s good, what’s bad, and what we should do.”

I asked whether it was hard to be so far away from their families.

“Of course I miss them,” Ernesto said.

Amilcar, the quiet tough guy of the pair, just shrugged—no big deal.

“But it makes you feel good to talk with them on the phone every now and again,” continued Ernesto. “That makes a person feel better.”

“They’re becoming good workers,” Junior said of the two boys. “They’re learning.”

Mendota is home to 11,000 people, nearly all of whom hail from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. Most work as laborers in the surrounding fields of Fresno and Monterey counties.

A few weeks later, I accompanied Amilcar and Ernesto to their first English class, in Mendota. They have a vague, inherited sense that knowing English might open up doors for their futures, and after I’d visited their house, Amilcar had called me and asked for help finding English classes in town. After reminding him that I’m a journalist and not his social worker, I agreed to help. I explained where the classes were: not far from his home and where, I knew, he went to the swap meet each week. “I don’t know where that is,” he told me on the phone. This is a child who, like Ernesto, had made it from rural Honduras through Mexico and across the US border all alone—but he was too intimidated to seek out the English classes ten blocks from his house.

When I drove to their house to pick them up, they’d just returned from work. Ernesto was in the shower, getting ready to go. But Amilcar, who had been more eager than anyone, seemed hesitant.

“I don’t think I can go tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” he explained, “I have to cook my lunch for tomorrow.” In a pan, four knuckly chicken breasts were faintly sizzling. He poured in more oil out of a yellow gallon jug, poked at the pieces of meat, and turned up the heat. “I just got back from work,” he said. “I would have to shower.”

Ernesto emerged from the hallway smelling of cologne, having spiked his hair and put on a plaid, collared shirt. “I’m going to bring this notebook and pen,” he said, with a flourish. “What do you think?”

Amilcar was shifty as he cooked. He was still undecided about tonight’s class. And who wouldn’t think twice about attending a three-hour class after a 12-hour day spent trimming almond trees in the sun? His older cousins, seated at the kitchen table, urged him to go.

“It’s important for them to learn,” said Junior—his spiky hair gelled, as always—as he sipped a full cup of juice.

“OK,” Amilcar finally said. “I’ll go,” and he left the kitchen to take a quick shower.

While I waited, I asked Junior whether he was interested in the English class. “Oh, that’s good for the young ones,” he said, “but not for me. They need it—but, you know, I’m older.” He was all of 19. I asked how much schooling he’d had in Honduras. He’d completed most of the third grade, he said, and could read and write only a little in Spanish. He’d given up on his ability to learn anything other than fieldwork, but he was hopeful for his younger cousins.

When we arrived at the school, a group of elementary and middle school students—a mix of immigrants and California-born—was playing basketball in the gym. Amilcar and Ernesto adjusted their shirts nervously, clutched their notebooks, and walked toward the library, where the English class was being held—but the room was dark and locked. It had been canceled today. Amilcar and Ernesto were clearly disappointed, but also a little relieved.

As much as they knew education is important for their distant futures, life—without school—was pretty good right now. But did they want to do farmwork forever?

“Oh, no,” Ernesto said.

Amilcar shook his head.

It struck me that a factor of their youth was their expansive sense of possibility: In their minds, they wouldn’t be stuck in the fields forever, despite the fact that, statistically speaking, they probably would be. According to Human Rights Watch, a third of youth farmworkers in the US have dropped out of high school, which leaves them “with few options besides a lifetime of farmwork and the poverty that accompanies it.” And Ernesto dropped out of the sixth grade in Honduras—he didn’t even make it to high school.

“Working in a restaurant someday,” Ernesto said, from my backseat as we drove home, when I asked him what he dreamed of doing with his life. He looked out the window at the deadening Mendota night. “That would be really good.”

After a long day at work, Amilcar is greeted by one of the random portraits that decorate the boys’ living room.

For all its bounty, there’s something about the landscape of California’s Central Valley that feels diseased. Just a few miles from Ernesto’s house in Mendota, the air is a heavy brown-gray, polluted by the trucks that pass through on Highway 99, carrying produce to be packed and shipped and stocked onto shelves at Safeways and Hannafords across the country. The pollution clouds the rays of light that shine on the fields, smudging the horizon lines and the silhouettes of crops. The fields, too, in towns like Mendota and Huron and Raisin City, feel exquisitely toxic. As productive as they are, and as heavy with bloom and fruit, the plants are subtly listless in their rows and rows, lacking vibrancy. It’s a battered landscape, excavated and plucked and pumped for every last bit it can give.

Early one winter morning, six months after Ernesto and I had first met, I struck out into this landscape—now dried and brown—to try to find him hard at work. I wanted to see firsthand what the conditions were like, especially given that laboring in these fields is illegal but also arguably essential to the average American’s way of life. I was curious how he fared each day, and how the companies—their foremen, their coworkers—justified employing kids like Ernesto who were posing as adults eligible to work. But, indicative of the various contradictions of the issue at hand, the last thing I wanted was to get Ernesto fired, so he and I came up with a plan to prevent this: Once he arrived at the fields, he’d tell me where he was working (he was assigned a different location each day), and I’d show up and ask his crew general questions about the harvest. I would identify myself as a journalist, but not as an acquaintance of Ernesto’s.

Just in case that plan didn’t work out, I staged a meek stakeout of his house, where I watched, in the still-black, 32-degree chill of the morning, as a white-paneled van pulled up and honked. Ernesto ran out, lunch bag in tow, like a high schooler late for his bus. I trailed the vehicle but lost sight of it after a few U-turns. There were dozens of white vans roving the 6 AM Mendota streets.

Still, I made my way to Madera, the town where Ernesto had told me he’d be working the almond trees that day, and waited for the text that he had said he would send if we were separated. An hour later my phone buzzed: “12th Street where there are some oranges on the north side.”

I was way off base, soon realizing that Madera is both a county and a town. The town alone—consisting of some 16 square miles of farmland—is home to an Avenue 12, a Road 12, and a 12th Street. I quickly ruled out 12th Street, which runs for only a few short blocks in Madera’s small downtown. “Road or Avenue?” I texted. “Road” was his response. So I drove the ten-odd miles to the start of Madera County’s Road 12 and scoured it for any sign of oranges, my silver Volkswagen a pitiful chariot lurching over roads maimed with potholes, roads slick with frost, roads of dust that dipped into culverts and out again and then dead-ended altogether (despite my iPhone’s insistence that I was going the right way), roads rimmed with tree after tree after tree but no oranges, my car seeming punier and my quest more and more futile with each mile I bumped away.

Having covered every inch of Road 12 to no avail, I headed for Avenue 12, a wide, infinite east-west strip on which trucks roared past vast fields of brown: empty dirt furrows, the leafless silhouettes of fruitless trees. Unlike the summer, when vans and buses full of workers pack the fields and roadways, there was not a work crew in sight.

Just as I was about to give up and turn around, however, I spotted a stripe of orange along the road ahead—a patch of tangerine trees, or mandarinas, the landmark I’d been searching for.

As I inched along Avenue 12 with the bright thicket of mandarina trees on one side, hoping to come upon Ernesto’s almond grove on the other, I thought of a 17-year-old boy profiled in a Human Rights Watch report I’d been reading who, on his first day on the job in a Florida orange grove, was crushed to death by a truck. But devoid of humans and human folly, these groves were magnificent (save for the carpet of rotting fruit beneath the trees), the vivid colors a welcome break from the tawny winterscape I’d been traversing. Then, sure enough, across from the mandarinas, just as I’d been hoping and as Ernesto had said, I came to an almond grove where a crew of men spread throughout the rows and shook sticks into the highest branches. Though I couldn’t see their faces from the road, I knew Ernesto was among them.

So I pulled over and waited. A Migrant Education worker I had previously interviewed had explained to me the dynamics of ownership and cash flow in the groves to me. There’s typically a rancher who owns the land and leases it to a separate company—in this case, Cottonwood Creek Farms, according to the Madera County Department of Agriculture—that owns the trees and, therefore, the almond yield. A separate company, the labor contractor, hires the people. With all of these layers of ownership—land, plants, people—it’s easy to see how the agricultural industry can throw up its hands when it comes to labor-law violations, like hiring undocumented workers and teens, not to mention the moral violations of paying so little for a product from which so much profit is made. Nearly every work crew throughout the valley includes paperless workers, according to the Migrant Education staff, and of the 15 or so fields I visited over the course of the five months I reported this story, I met underage workers at nearly every single one. The multiple companies act as a compartmentalized buffer, defraying responsibility for these violations, legal and moral.

Whether intentionally or not, the agriculture companies profit from the vulnerability and fear of illegal workers. For undocumented laborers, especially children, reporting abuses like lack of water, lack of shade or bathrooms, abuse by their foremen, wage theft, or low pay—all of which are rampant in the Central Valley, according to California Rural Legal Assistance, which litigates many of these issues—could cost them their jobs.

Meanwhile, small legal outfits like the Migrant Education program or California Rural Legal Assistance lack the ability and resources to enforce existing labor laws, except to litigate on a case-by-case basis. But such cases ending up in court are rare and mere thorns in the sides of the mega-companies reaping large profits. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, between 2005 and 2008, 43 children died while working in US fields or packinghouses—a number that doesn’t include young workers masquerading as adults, a metric that is almost impossible to quantify.

While these young workers provide cheap labor and big profits to agribusiness, the skyrocketing number of unaccompanied minors puts a strain on the federal government: The Office of Refugee Resettlement is obliged to house unaccompanied minors who are apprehended, feed them, keep them safe, and ensure that they are transferred to the custody of responsible adults—all of which takes a lot of manpower and money. Before the spike in arrivals in 2012, the budget for unaccompanied alien children had been hovering around $150 million; in 2014, the federal government upped that to nearly $495 million. When you factor in those who are caught, the young, cheap labor force that agriculture companies profit from turns out not to be nearly as cheap as the fresh produce readily available in supermarkets across the country.

A bus in Huron waits to take workers to the nearby melon and almond fields.

Ernesto had told me his crew would break for lunch at noon, so at midday I left my car on the side of the road and tiptoed through the grove, ducking under rows of trees. I finally came upon a white van. Workers rested, stretched out in the dappled shade of the vehicle, with others leaning against nearby trees, silently sipping sodas. I introduced myself, asking where I could find the foreman. Among the crew of reclining men I spotted Junior first—the 19-year-old who had told me he was too old to learn anything but farmwork—his hair perfectly coiffed, his chin leaning on his knee. He was surprised to see me and quickly averted his gaze.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ernesto. Wearing a tattered baseball cap and a clean, white Henley, he reclined easily against an almond trunk, his work boots and the cuffs of his jeans covered in dust, his feet ringed by overturned mango skins stripped clean.

I exchanged pleasantries with the foreman, a friendly man in his 50s from El Salvador, of whom Ernesto had already told me, “He’s a really good boss. He never mistreats us.” As the foreman and I spoke, Ernesto fidgeted a bit, then stood up and walked farther into the grove and out of sight. I didn’t ask the foreman about Ernesto, or whether he knew that Ernesto was underage. But he must have been able to see that this member of his crew was just a kid, and he also must have known that it was illegal for Ernesto to be here, because it was the middle of the afternoon on a school day.

I didn’t ask, in part, because I didn’t want to get Ernesto in trouble, but also because it didn’t seem like the right place to get lost in the moral thickets of the question. After all, Ernesto wanted this work and needed it to survive. The foreman, himself a promoted farmworker, and his adult crew had their own things to worry about—their own lack of papers, their own need for a paycheck, their own debts, their own families here and back home. So they, just like the industry at large, turn their heads. This is the willful ignorance on which the whole system of planting, picking, and packing our food—and by extension, eating it—seems to rely.

Instead, I asked the foreman about the specifics of the work he and his crew were doing. During peak harvest, he explained, machines drove through these wide rows of trees and shook the almonds loose. But the machines didn’t get everything. Ernesto and his companions were the cleanup crew.

“Look,” he said, pointing at the ground. It was blanketed with almond pods, which resembled bulbous, mossed-over acorns. He grabbed one off the ground and cracked it open to reveal, much to my surprise, a perfect, golden-brown almond.

“But so many almonds are wasted!” I said.

“That’s how it is,” he shrugged. “In every harvest, you lose something.”

Amilcar in his backyard

After my time in the almond fields, I didn’t see Ernesto or Amilcar for a few months. I was busy at my day job—I teach immigrant children in Oakland, California, more and more of whom are unaccompanied minors. For their part, Ernesto and Amilcar continued to trim almond trees while Ernesto awaited his day in court.

Their work dwindled during the December holidays, the cold spells, the rain. Days off were boring, Amilcar said. Ernesto found them nerve-racking—he was worried about the possibility of being deported, and in the meantime no work meant no money. Other boys they knew moved on throughout California or out of state, as far as Washington or Texas or Arizona, in pursuit of the winter crop. But Ernesto and Amilcar were scared to move with the harvest because they lacked papers. Mendota was a place they knew, where they had work connections and felt safe enough from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On top of all this uncertainty, the State of California declared a drought. As a result, some farmers weren’t even prepping their fields for planting in the summer, because the state was raising water prices and climatologists predicted there wouldn’t be rain. So Ernesto and Amilcar waited, at the mercy of the weather.

In early January, Ernesto walked out to the front yard of his house to get the mail. Inside he found a letter from the immigration office in San Francisco, which had taken over his case:

Please take notice that [your] case has been scheduled for a master hearing before the Immigration Court in July 2015… Failure to appear at your hearing… may result in… [your being] taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security.

It took him a moment to understand the letter, but when he did, he was shocked: His court date—the one that would determine his fate—had been pushed back to July 2015. The ICE court was overloaded. Instead of knowing if he would be deported in March or April 2014, as expected, he would have to wait another year and a half. He wouldn’t stand in court until more than two years after he crossed over the Rio Grande in that leaky boat.

In a way, it was a fitting turn to his story. Like so many lost kids before him, Ernesto would remain in limbo, at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the courts, the gangsters, the markets, the crops, the California rain and sun. He would likely spend the rest of his teenage years laboring under that uncertainty.

When I met Ernesto one last time, at his home in Mendota, he told me—with an optimism that was both impressive and a little inscrutable—that he saw waiting for court as a good thing. He would be in the US, working, and not in Honduras, and for now that was good enough for him. “It’ll find me time to get a lawyer,” he said. His uncle, who was now “somewhere up north,” promised to help him with this—although when I pressed him it was unclear how, and when, and with what money.

Even with a decent lawyer, Ernesto’s odds of actually winning an asylum claim, and thus a visa, would be something like winning the lottery. Being the victim of gang violence is not a sure bet, and he didn’t have concrete evidence that he was specifically targeted. According to the Women’s Refugee Commission, very few asylum cases are awarded based on claims of gang persecution—because it’s very difficult to argue, in a case like Ernesto’s, that the gang activity he experienced was personal, or anything more than generalized violence in a certain region. In other words, Ernesto might not have had it bad enough to win.

I asked him what he will say to the judge when he finally gets his day in court.

“Well, my lawyer will help me with that,” he said. “When I find one.”

And if he doesn’t find one?

“I guess I’ll ask the judge if I can stay.”

I asked him how he felt about the very real possibility of deportation, of being sent back to all his former problems.

“If they send me home, I won’t go back to my town. It’s too dangerous there.” He said the gang members who first threatened him would recognize him. “So I guess I’d just go somewhere else.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Well… One never knows.”

¹ Because of sensitive legal situations, the names of some people in this story have been changed at their request.

² All dates refer to federal fiscal years, which run from October 1 to September 30.

As the head of the Euromaidan movement in the Crimean city of Sevastopol, Ukraine, Viktor Neganov led about 100 Ukrainians in his hometown to call for an end to corruption. At one protest, a crowd of pro-Russian “provocateurs” confronted the activists. They attacked Viktor, knocking him down and giving him a concussion.

Once the Russian troops took control of the peninsula, Viktor escaped to Kiev after his life was threatened. He snuck back to his hometown of Sevastopol this week, despite pro-Russian militias controlling the train and bus stations. I spoke with him via Skype while he was in hiding. He told me about his experience on the run and what he thinks is next for Crimea. 

VICE: Why don’t you start by telling me how you got into activism and how you ended up running the Euromaidan movement?
Viktor Neganov:I started because of the regime of [former Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych and because of the loss of the lives when Yanukovych was the president. Many people, they died to live in this political and economic system when the corruption is ahead of [everything]. I, like other activists, [was] coming out to the streets and started saying that things should be changed. 

When I met you in Sevastopol in February, even before Yanukovych absconded and Russian troops invaded Crimea, you told me that there were [Russian] FSB spies and pro-Russian provocateurs who were disrupting your Euromaidan protests in Sevastopol. What would they do?
I know that some of them they are real Russian military—moving out to our meetings like ordinary Sevastopol people. But they are not ordinary [people]. [Pretending] that they are Sevastopol people, they say that they don’t want Maidan here in Sevastopol. They push us, making noises, and after I spoke to the head officer, I was punished. I was beaten.

About the spies, these spies are and were in the Sevastopol institutions like Sevastopol administration, Sevastopol council, Sevastopol police, Sevastopol SBU(which is the equivalent of FSB in Russia)—and we have the proof. The proof is that all these institutes now say that, “We are not Ukrainian institutions. Now we are Sevastopol institutions. We [are] supporting Russian aggression.”

These institutions are working … not for Yanukovych but for Russia. We know that Yanukovych is in Russia.

Yanukovych was probably a spy also. [laughs]

You were also attacked when the Berkut [Ukraine’s elite riot police] came to Crimea from Kiev. You suffered a concussion. You got a bloody nose. Tell me about what had happened to you.
I went there to ask several questions. I [saw] the deputy of the former Sevastopol governor. … I asked him, ‘Do they plan to separate Sevastopol from Ukraine?’ When I asked him, the crowd, which was big, they saw me. They knew who I am (which is a Maidan activist). They [previously] came to our meetings and made provocations against our meetings so they know who I am.

And they started to punch me, so I tried to protect myself but there were too many people—ten or 20 from different sides, different angles—so it was hard for me to protect myself so I get several punches in the head, fell down, for a few seconds I [lost consciousness]. One policeman helped me to stand up and call to the ambulance. The ambulance took me to the hospital.

I'd never met anyone up against so much opposition. You had 100 some people in your movement who were willing to speak up publicly but this in a city of 350,000. What did you expect to actually achieve?
Yes, you could see that if we had 100 activists [out of] 350,000 people, it means that it’s dangerous to hold public meetings. But, as I said before, we have much more people supporting Maidan ideas, but they are scared. They don’t want to be in public because they have business or they work for the government. So that’s why not all of them go out on the streets.

And about 20 percent of the voters in the elections of the Ukrainian parliament in 2012, they voted for the opposition parties [in Crimea]. And these parties support Maidan. But not too much [people] move out [to protest].

What I expected to achieve: to show the world, to show Ukraine that [in] Sevastopol and also Crimea, we have people [who] support Maidan ideas, which means that this is not just Russian territory. This is Ukrainian territory. We have Ukrainian activists who support the Ukrainian ideas, the Ukrainian territory.

What effect did your movement have in Crimea?
We had several effects. We have good effects and bad effects. Bad effects that our movement mobilized the pro-Russian. If we didn’t show [up] in Sevastopol, this Russian movement wouldn’t be so big as it is now. So we mobilized it. It’s not a good achievement.

The good is that we showed our position. We showed our faces publicly. And we said that Sevastopol is a real Ukrainian city. Yes, we understand that most of people, they support Russia. But, we have the law; we have the Ukrainian territory here.

Once the Russians took control of the peninsula, you left to Kiev. You were telling me on Facebook that you couldn't get out by road and were going to try leaving by train. How'd you eventually arrive in the capital? What made you leave?
I arrived by train without any big issues. If you’re moving out of Crimea, it’s much easier to move out than to move in. So, when I moved out, it was maybe a week ago, and there [weren’t] issues for moving out by train.

I left because of the dangerous situation. I was beaten before. I got many messages by phone or by internet, social network, that my life was in danger, that some people wanted to punish me. Saying that, after I was beaten up, that “We could do much more to you.”

Did they threaten to kill you?
Personally nobody says they are going to kill me. But I saw these messages through the social networks. Some people said they would cut me by knife. But on the streets, people were negative to me. They said, “You’re not a good guy. Leave Sevastopol. You’ll get many more punches.”

How did you eventually make it back to Sevastopol?

Yes, I made it by train and when I moved to Sevastopol, now we have such [pro-Russian self-defense forces] that are controlling the train station. I asked to the people who are running the train to hide me for an hour or so. So I hid [in a train compartment] for 40 minutes and then these people from self-defense, they left and I went out. I [waited] for them.

That sounds risky.
I took some risk. And now I’m not in my flat. I’m hiding at my friend’s place with some safety, I hope. You know that I didn’t [attend] some public meetings after Crimea was occupied, so I hope these Russian guys are not thinking too much about me now.

What do you expect they would do if they found you?
First of all, they know my face. They know my name. There have been examples when activists who were caught and the Russian guys took them out of the city to the woods. Some of them were beaten, some not. They left them there. So they take some steps to make them scared.

But you don’t know what happens next time.

For now they are not killing, just kidnapping people, for several days. But, tomorrow things could be changed. They could do other things. So there’s no sense to take that risk. So I try to protect myself. 

I remember I was interviewing local people walking along the main boardwalk in Sevastopol and they all said basically the same thing: "Euromaidan activists are extremists and criminals. We feel closer to Russia. We have no interest in activism coming to Sevastopol." You weren't really surprised and said it was part of an information war. Tell me more about that.
People here in Crimea they’re basically Russian. We have also Tatars but Russians are the majority. Russians have roots in Russia Federation. Now some of them have families there so they connect with Russia. So they support Russian and Kremlin steps. 

Politicians, officials here are not working for the people here but for the corruption, how to get corrupt money. So people see that Ukrainians here are not helping them. They don’t feel the real support of Ukraine for them. That’s why people don’t love Ukraine.

But also they don’t feel the Russian support. But they see that Russia is a big country, they have roots in Russia. Also Russian soldiers here, they have big wages, they spend their money here in Sevastopol. They support Sevastopol economy. So people see that Russia is much more part [of Crimea] than Ukraine.

Many of the people they look at Russian television, the propaganda Goebbels-style. Lying, lying, lying. When people look at Russian TV saying that on Maidan we have criminals, we have Nazis, we have extremists, we have provocateurs, we have some people with psychosis, etc.

People couldn’t check it. I know some of my friends they support Russia. They weren’t at Maidan. They don’t really know what was happening there but they were watching Russian television. Russian television is saying that people there are bad people. But every time I say, you should go to Maidan to check and see what is happening there. 

Aside from Russian media like RT, there are also Western columnists, pundits and academics in New York and DC who also characterize Euromaidan as a nationalist, extremist, homophobic, anti-Semitic movement that ousted Yanukovych in what they call a coup. Your thoughts?
About RT, you know this is the propaganda tool of the Kremlin. I know that Mr. Putin, they spent money for Western journalists. They give money and [say], “You need to make some article that are [good] for us.” So it’s not strange that some Western journalists write articles for the Kremlin for money and say that Maidan is nationalistic, extremist, etc.

I want to recognize that in Maidan we have some situations with some kind of extremist topic. But it’s a minority. It’s a real minority. The majority of Maidan are good people. They love Russians, Ukrainians, love all nations.

Do you expect the referendum results to show that Crimeans want to rejoin Russia?
Yes, because all the Ukrainian channels in Crimea, they are not working. Here in Crimea, we have only Russian channels. You can’t see any Ukrainian channels, only by internet. And these Russian channels, they say about the referendum that Crimea should come to Russia.

Also we have propaganda here. We have a propaganda war in the papers. We have stickers on the streets that say vote for Russian Crimea. So we have the propaganda here and we have another mind because Russian soldiers with Russian guns, they didn’t give opportunity for us, for people [who] represent another [view] to make our propaganda to say what we want to say.

Here, for us, it’s dangerous to make public meetings. So we haven’t got any public opportunities to say what we’re thinking about.

This article was published after confirmation that Viktor had safely returned to Kiev.

Some people might say that two weeks isn't enough time to prepare for referendum to separating from the country that you've been a part of for the last 70 years. But that's not what a reported 95.5 percent of Crimeans think, according to the official vote count. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky visits the polling stations in Simferopol, including predominantly Tartar areas where the pro-Russian fervor is seemingly absent.

In February 2014, letter bombs were sent to nine British military recruitment offices over the course of three days. Londonderry postmarks, a coded message sent to a Northern Irish newspaper, and security forces at Downing Street all pointed to the New IRA as the main suspects.

Last Summer, VICE News visited Derry and heard from Gary Donnelly—the most prominent dissident republican in Londonderry, accused of leading operations for the Real IRA—that these attacks on Britain were to be expected as part of "strategic attacks on high-profile targets," as "it's England that's occupying Ireland."

In Free Derry: The IRA Drug War, VICE News investigates how, 16 years after the Good Friday peace agreement and on the eve of the first major loyalist parade through the city in four years, dissident republican activity in Derry is increasing, thanks to the merger of the Real IRA with anti-drug vigilantes.

VICE News reporter Alex Miller speaks to members of the Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD), who formed the coalition with the Real IRA, and meets supporters as young as 13 who are being armed with petrol bombs to combat criminal gangs and intervening police.

For the first time, Paul Stewart, a close friend of slain Dublin Real IRA leader Alan Ryan, speaks on camera about witnessing the murder, as well as sharing insights on Ryan's war against drug dealers.

Miller also interviews the mother of Andrew Smith, a man who she says was murdered by the Real IRA despite no affiliation with drug-related crime, before hearing from a Derry ex-drug dealer who now claims that, if the New IRA didn't fight drugs, "this town would be filled with ecstasy and rat poison, and kids would be dying."

VICE News encounters a city where kneecappings and shootings are rife, where walls are branded with anti-UK slogans, and where a policeman can scarcely walk down the street—according to Gary Donnelly—"without being killed."

Carrie and Zoong, among other protesters. All photos by the author.

Last Wednesday, a group made up almost entirely of aboriginal mothers, conducted their second railway blockade in association with Idle No More, on the CN line in Toronto. The demonstration is a part of a larger trend of protest across Canada, in direct response to the Conservative government’s refusal to launch an inquiry into over 800 missing and murdered aboriginal women. The Conservative government’s inquiry denial comes in the face of pressure from provincial governments and the UN.

Last week’s blockade in Toronto was originally organized through Facebook as an “Emergency Vigil,” but last minute organizers meandered up Spadina Avenue to Dupont, spilling onto the CN tracks, to block five trains for about four hours in a raging blizzard. The crew of around 20 sang songs, gave speeches, and attached a bouquet of flowers to a locomotive’s cowcatcher. Police eventually made their way to the scene, but they allowed protestors to leave on their own time, which proved to be a powerful contrast to the militant police response, which was marred with arrests at a rail blockade in Belleville a few days earlier.

Shawn Brant, the media spokesperson for the blockade in Belleville, was held overnight and fed potentially rancid McDonalds by the OPP—an allegation that the police force denies. Mischief charges against Shawn are still pending.

John Fox, who attended the Toronto blockade, was also arrested at the Belleville demonstration while he was ceremonially laying down tobacco for his daughter, Cheyenne, who was mysteriously found dead at the bottom of a high rise apartment building in Toronto last year after an alleged altercation. Police dismissed her death as a suicide—a charge that John and the Fox family blatantly disagree with. They suspect murder. After his arrest in Belleville, John was released once the blockaders dispersed.

In addition to these two rail blockades, a community rally was held in St Catharine’s, Ontario on Saturday the 15^th. Over 150 people came out to march on Conservative MP Rick Dykstra's office and lay purple flowers in honor of missing and murdered indigenous women. Rick Dykstra was apparently out of town when the protest went down, but he issued this statement defending the government’s reluctance to launch an inquiry:

"An inquiry will solve nothing. There have been 40 noted and completed studies, none of which have impacted the issue. What has begun to help is tougher legislation for convicted felons and specific legislation to protect aboriginal women, like having matrimonial rights on reserves, which by the way, the opposition voted against… Will a public inquiry mean more aboriginal girls will get an education? Will it stop the incidents of fetal alcohol syndrome? Not one bit. We have invested in education, we've signed more treaty deals and for the first time, women have equal rights on reserves."

Earlier this month in the nation’s capital, a group of 100 gathered on Parliament Hill to demand an inquiry, while also memorializing Lauretta Saunders, a student who was found dead in the midst of her research into Canada’s missing and murdered aboriginal women. Rallies and marches have also gone down in Victoria, Montreal, Winn ipeg, and Regina. On March 22, the Grassroots Committee-Ontario is calling for nationwide highway and rail blockades, ceremonies, and MP office sit-ins.

I spoke to Zoong Deh Kwe, one of the Anishnawbe mothers from Toronto, about what brought her out to protest the government, and blockade the train tracks: “The OPP went in there [Belleville Blockade] on International Woman’s Day and stopped the warriors from standing up for the women. I think the police and Harper made a definite statement that was anti-women, especially anti-Aboriginal women. They wanted to make sure that no one was going to stand up for our women, so that’s why as women we have to make sure that we take a stand, too."

John Fox.

Beside Zoong was Carrie Lester, a Mohawk Onondaga mother who gave me this statement while standing in front of a line up of locomotives: “We demand a public inquiry into the missing and murdered aboriginal women of Canada. 825 lives gone, that would equate to over 70,000 non-native women going missing. If 70,000 is a big number, so is 825. We need an inquiry that’s going to take us beyond that Pickton inquiry. Only 3 of the 65 recommendations that came out of that inquiry were ever looked into. We need to have faith that an inquiry will go though and find those perpetrators, no matter what office, station, or occupation they hold. They need to be held accountable.”

Carrie is referring to the failure of British Columbia’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in the aftermath of serial killer Robert Pickton’s infamous pig farm atrocity. The report did at least succeed in pointing out that The RCMP and Vancouver police had both been receiving tips that the Pickton farm was responsible for the rash of disappearances, hinting that the law enforcement bodies were reluctant to investigate because the victims were drug users and sex workers. It was announced yesterday that the Province of BC and the City of Vancouver will pay out $50,000 to each child whose mother was killed in the Pickton massacre.

The largely inadequate BC inquiry raises the question: If a national inquiry were ever launched, would it even be successful? Perhaps if the police and government spent more time investigating the deaths of aboriginal women, and less time arresting those who speak up about them, we might not be in this terrible situation in the first plac­­e.


@nicky_young3

If you’re the kind of person who keeps up with UFO spiritualists, you’ll know Raëlians as the group who believe that Earth was created by a vastly superior alien civilization. According to its French founder, a racecar driver and singer-songwriter named Raël, the aliens (called Elohim) created humans in their own image and have been guiding us throughout history with the help of messengers—humans they’ve had special contact with. If you guessed these messengers include people with names like Jesus and Buddha, you guessed right.

But while that might sound far-fetched to some, they also believe in the importance of pleasure—sexual or otherwise—in the pursuit of spiritual growth. And that sounds pretty reasonable. This stance has led them to create a nonprofit called Clitoraid, which champions reconstructive surgery for victims of female circumcision in the developing world. This month they opened their first “Pleasure Hospital” in Burkina Faso, where world-class surgeons will treat women for free, rebuilding their clitorises to give them the ability to orgasm. After speaking to Clitoraid’s smoky-voiced French communications director, Nadine Gary, it’s hard to deny that this sexy group of UFO enthusiasts are the best dudes in Africa.

VICE: Hey, Nadine. How’s the Pleasure Hospital coming along?
Nadine Gary: Oh, it’s going great. It’s the last stretch, and there's a lot going on. The equipment is set up. The patients are being taken care of for medical visits before their operation. Everything is coming together, really.

Are you open yet?
We opened on the second or third of March. Surgeons from the United States came on the first, and that’s when we started treating people. We’d never treated anybody in that hospital before.

That’s exciting. Why did you call it the Pleasure Hospital?
Because, really, that’s what it’s about. It’s about restoring pleasure—sexual pleasure. We know we’re putting our finger on a taboo. Women’s sexuality has always been something people look down upon, that women feel guilty about. With that psyche of feeling so guilty, so ashamed, they go to the extent of cutting off somebody’s clitoris. We want to restore women’s integrity and women’s beauty. Part of the woman's duty is her sexuality, which is very noble.

There is no doubt the reconstruction is vital, but is sexual pleasure a priority in the developing world when women are still dying in childbirth?
Are you saying that orgasms are not necessary for women's health?

You can see how some people might argue that.
Oh, wow. You know pleasure is an integral part of life. Everything that we do is our pleasure. You calling me right now is out of pleasure, either because you are interested in the subject or just doing this because you need to make a living. Sometimes we do things out of indirect pleasure, and sometimes we do things out of direct pleasure. When we eat, when we sleep, when we watch a sunset, and when we make love. And this is what balances our mind. It’s so important to a person’s psychology, to a person’s balance. When someone’s clitoris has been removed, some of her balancing effect, some of the pleasure—she doesn’t have that. That’s taken away a lot of her, you know, the balance in her brain.

That sounds very Raëlian. How closely are you working with that movement?
Personally, I am a woman priest in the Raëlian movement. I’m also a volunteer and the communications director for Clitoraid. And what the Raëlian movement has done for me and my involvement in Clitoraid is that their philosophy has no taboos about sexuality and it really encourages people to feel pleasure and enhance the pleasure in their lives. To me, this is really an answer for Clitoraid, to be associated with a philosophy that’s not going to make them feel guilty about anything, and certainly not their sexuality.

Of course, there are many charities around the world. The Christian religion does a wonderful thing in feeding and taking care of the poor, but one thing it cannot do because of its values is encourage people to enjoy their sexuality, or recover their sexual pleasure. That’s because of the guilt in their religion. The Raëlian philosophy is a positive thing. Whether a woman is Raëlian, Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist, she will still get the benefits of the philosophy that will support her in her sexuality.

But, you know, we’re not there to preach the philosophy. We are, however, there to give people the benefit of it.

How central is orgasm to Raëlian philosophy?
Pleasure is the most important part of the Raëlian philosophy, but the central part is simply explaining that life on planet Earth was created scientifically by people like us. Ladies like us and men who were created in their image. When you enjoy your clitoris, you can think that women creators have a clitoris just like you and have created you in their image, so you can enjoy yourself like they enjoy themselves. So is orgasm central to the Raëlian philosophy? Yes. You know we don’t masturbate every second of the day, but we don’t shy from it.

How did the Raëlians end up coming to Africa?
Oh, I have to tell you the story. Raël, the head of the Raëlian philosophy, was in Africa in 2003. He was taking a tour of West Africa and speaking about happiness and self-esteem. During several of his talks the subject of circumcision came about, and he casually asked, “Are there any circumcised women in the audience?” And, you know, some of the women stood up! He realized this was a major problem. We all know about the prevention method the United Nations is advocating, but no one is taking care of the women already circumcised who hate it.

He heard about this surgery and said, “Maybe we could build a hospital in Africa somewhere and offer the surgery to women.” It started like this, and little by little the charity was put together. Ten years later, here we are opening the hospital.

As you mentioned, there is a lot of prevention work in Africa focusing on genital mutilation. Why do you think it’s taken so long to focus on the women who have already suffered it?
Part of it was that the technology was not really there. Until 15 years ago, that surgery was nonexistent, so there was nothing to offer them. And once it became existent, there were still taboos around sexuality. You know, for example, in England the surgery is not offered, but it is in France.

What the UK government is offering women is simply to restore the ease in penetration. Many women have had the vagina sewn together, which is excruciating and makes intercourse horrifically painful. They offer to open the women's vaginas so they can have normal penetration but are not addressing their pleasure.

Do you think if you weren’t so open with your focus on pleasure and orgasm, some of those processes would be easier to get off the ground?
I think this is precisely the point. The world has a problem because there is a taboo—if you show too much sexuality, automatically you’re a bad girl.

We take it as part of our education, so Clitoraid wants to make a point: Don’t cut clitorores literally, but don’t cut the clitoris culturally, either. In America many women feel guilty about their sexuality, about being over sexual. You need the right balance so you’re taken seriously. Women struggle, but men don't.

I like what you said about it not being a solely physical thing—it’s social and emotional as well. After surgery do you have programs for women in the community to reclaim their sexuality?
Oh, yes. When we say “Pleasure Hospital,” we’re saying we’re helping women surgically, but we are also helping women with sexual therapy. Helping them and their husbands or their partners. All of this needs to be retaught. When people have not enjoyed their sexuality it’s difficult to open up, and this needs to be worked out with a professional.

And yes, in the community, we have women involved with Clitoraid in Africa who go around to villages and give sexual education the women can understand; it’s amazing. They open their eyes wide, and they ask questions. And all of this happens between women. We have to teach one another and not feel bad about it.

What are your long-term goals beyond eradicating female circumcision?
What we’re trying to teach, first of all, is for women not to be mutilated anymore. This is the most important part. Women are being tortured, and that needs to stop. Then we want to remove taboos and create a balanced society where women are respected and not thought of as sluts.

Would all of this be easier if you didn’t have the Raëlian reputation in the background?
We are not asking ourselves these kinds of question. What we see are women coming to us wanting to get their integrity back. They are not asking us, “Are you Raëlian? What are you?” They’re just saying, “What is the surgery about? I want this.” We never ask ourselves whether it would make a difference if we were a traditional or mainstream religion—it doesn’t matter. It’s humans helping other humans.

Follow Wendy Syfret on Twitter.

Temp labor is one of the fastest growing industries in the US. Increasingly, temp workers are part of a business strategy to keep costs down and profits high.

From mega-retailers to mom-and-pop shops, temps are hired to do some of the hardest and most dangerous jobs. While more and more of the American workforce is composed of temporary workers, they're largely hidden from public view. Many of these workers stay silent, often having their livelihoods threatened if they speak out.

Wanting to get a glimpse of this invisible workforce, VICE News traveled across the country, scouring warehouses, temp agencies, and temp towns in search of the people who make our world of same-day delivery possible.

Illustrations by Craig 'Questions' Scott

I recently stumbled upon a website called the Amsterdam Diaries. Initially, it just seemed to be a chronicle of one British guy's visits to the city's red-light district—another coarse vaginalogue written by a creepy, monosyllabic regular. But I soon realized there was more to the site than the many others like it. There's a noticeable political slant; there's a wealth of research into the history, laws, and culture of prostitution; and the stories, written with finesse in the first person, actually contain more than faint traces of humor and humanity.

Given that the blog's author is a rich professional who enjoys the finer things in life, it kinda reads like American Psycho if Bret Easton Ellis hadn't given Patrick Bateman axes and had toned down the psychopathy. For example: "Now I’m dressed, I feel the part. It feels good to be suited and booted. If I find pussy that fits like my boots, it will be magic. I have a fuck-fund which looks like a well that can never run dry. I’m physically very fit. If I get any fitter the government is likely to tax me on it."

The blog now attracts about 100,000 visitors a month and is, in the author’s words, “probably the most extensively documented primary research into the prostitute-client transaction and relationship."

With that in mind, I contacted the anonymous author, who—after some negotiating—agreed to meet with me as long as I revealed nothing about his identity or his location, for fear that “if any tabloids or feminist journalists tracked me down, they could and would set about making my life really fucking miserable." So, for his sake, let’s call him Lange.

The fact that he's a decent writer with a deep interest in his subject matter obviously doesn't make him a saint. But to me it makes him more interesting than your average Amsterdam-bound British tourist, those guys who end up spending all their money on weed, novelty ashtrays, and sex with as many women as their Heineken-filled, semi-conscious penises allow them to.

Here's the shortened version of our conversation.

VICE: So what can you tell me about yourself?
Lange: Working-class background. University-educated—politics. Professional occupation. Married too young. Divorced.

Why did you first begin visiting sex workers?
No rational explanation, no thinking it through, no planning, no horny appetite to satisfy. On a beach one night, I said to myself, “What the fuck are you doing out here at eight o'clock at night on Christmas Eve?” I was separated and in the middle of a divorce, and not in the mood for Christmas. It led me to the conclusion that I would appreciate the warmth of female company, and if she could be about 25, drop-dead gorgeous, and Japanese—the influence of porn, I suspect—that would be quite good too. I rationalized that it wasn't likely to happen without my paying for it.

So you went to Amsterdam.
Yeah. I had a great time, as a man who hasn't had sex for the best part of a year might, in such an environment. I went back a couple of times in the next six weeks. The short, sharp sexual experiences were very nice, but they weren't what I was looking for. I wanted a much more intimate experience than the sex-by-numbers that the windows offered. I'd decided to call it a day when I had a life-changer. I visited a Dutch girl one afternoon and had a real girlfriend experience.

What's that?
The sex is over a longish period, involves a lot of very intimate sexual acts, and, importantly for me, kissing. A real girlfriend experience with a prostitute can be considerably more sexy than with some real girlfriends. I set about replicating that experience as frequently as possible. You can't just turn up in De Wallen, enter a window, and expect to get what I have just described. But it does happen. Sometimes I have to romance a girl over a few visits before we make that connection.

So these visits aren't just physical?
Absolutely. The girls I visit regularly are girls I like. I enjoy their company. I'm interested in them as individuals. I'm not like the members of the rescue industry who dump prostitutes into a box labelled "Broken, needs mending." To them, prostitutes are statistics and people to be controlled. To me, they are real people who deserve respect. And from what I can make out, most of them are brighter than their critics.

Is it ever difficult to stop yourself getting too emotionally involved?
I did find it difficult when I first started visiting the red-light district; I made the mistake of thinking that they were thinking of me as a special client. But I grew out of it. I don't get romantically attached. Common sense says that while this can be a good environment to have a real girlfriend experience, it's not a good environment to meet a girlfriend.

Why did you start writing about your experiences?
I'd been keeping a detailed daily diary for a couple of years before arriving in Amsterdam. It was down to the divorce—I was using it to discharge the emotional slurry churning about inside my head. When I started to visit De Wallen, I simply carried on.

Is the writing on the site you or a character you've devised? It seems almost Patrick Bateman–esque in parts.
Well, it's a version of me—or an extended character. I do deliberately go for humor whenever I can. A lot of it is aimed at me, acknowledging that I really can be a twat sometimes. American Psycho is the only book that I have ever been ashamed to have read and owned. I took it down to the bottom of the garden and set fire to it.

Really? Why?
It was a while ago, so I don't remember the content too clearly—though sending the rat up the girl's vagina is a fairly vivid memory. But it came down to the fact that the violence was so gratuitous that I didn't want anyone thinking that I was entertained by it in any way; my capacity for analyzing how things might go wrong is immense. It followed that the best thing to do would be to burn it. Then there was the problem of the ashes and explaining why the lawn had these fucking great burn marks.

What do you get from these experiences that you can't get with people on dates or in relationships?
I don't have the opportunity for dates or relationships. I don't meet women I'm interested in; I have zero interest in women my own age. There's an assumption that if a couple are in a relationship, then the sex is hunky-dory. The truth is that there are all sorts of sexual problems within long-term relationships. One common factor in visiting prostitutes is that a guy can ask a prostitute for things that might put a cloud over the relationship if his partner isn't up for it. A prostitute will either say yes or no, and that will be the end of the matter.

Do you consider yourself to be a sex addict?
Of course not. It's amazing how often this question rears its head when the talk is about prostitution. If a guy has sex with his wife every other night, that will universally be regarded as both normal and healthy. Another guy has sex with his wife every night, he's considered a bit of a sex machine, but still very, very normal. Another guy visits a few prostitutes once every six weeks, and he's a sex addict.

How much do you think you’ve spent on having sex?
When I do the sums, it's painful. Over time, it adds up to quite a lot, but on a single visit it adds up to what I can easily afford—it's disposable income. There's one girl I don't hesitate to pay $550 for two hours, with maybe another two visits at $140 and $280.

You're a frequent visitor—have you had any horrible experiences in the red-light district?
No, but then I'm unlikely to witness it since it would—theoretically—be taking place behind a closed curtain. I do, from time to time, ask the girls that very question, and most girls simply say no. The girls have pretty well honed man-management skills, so I suspect that they mostly take care of incidents before they happen.

My guess is that an official working on the London Underground is more at risk of violence than an Amsterdam window girl. Have you noticed all of those signs up at airports, in banks, at job centers—"Abusive behavior and violence towards our staff will not be tolerated"? Bad things happen in prostitution just as they happen everywhere else. Unfortunately, they're always magnified and used as reasons to stop prostitution.

You seem to be a keen proponent of the rights and fair treatment of sex workers. Could you briefly sum up your philosophy and opinions on UK sex-worker laws?
Historically, the emphasis has been on prostitution as a public nuisance offence, and so it tends to be street prostitutes who receive the most attention from the police. To this end, there's a Frankenstein's mish-mash of legislation, which tends to focus on activities surrounding prostitution and effectively makes a legal activity an illegal one. The other problem is the way that prostitution—a legal activity—is conflated with illegal activities, such as illegal immigration or actual sex trafficking—a violent, coercive, exploitative practice. There is considerable inconsistency in the way that the law is applied, and the outcomes of that application frequently appear as harassment and the infringement of the human rights of prostitutes.

So how would you solve that?
I'd decriminalize prostitution. It would be OK to operate a business model where prostitutes became part of the normal economy—paying tax, etc. The age of consent would remain at 18. If a woman can vote and terminate life through an abortion, she can decide what to do with her body. I'd introduce effective, funded provision for women who wish to exit the work. Anti-prostitution lobbying would be made a hate crime. A clear distinction would be made between prostitution, economic migration, and sex trafficking, supported by thorough analysis of real sex-trafficking data and a proportionate response. Where the root cause of prostitution is drug addiction, I'd introduce funding for effective withdrawal. The mindset would have to be how to make prostitution work safely and effectively, without stigma, rather than as a barely tolerated activity that should experience punitive controls.

You say that “feminist ideology enslaves common sense and objective analysis,” yet on other parts of your site you mention your fondness for "positive feminism." Can you explain your relationship to feminism?
In terms of gender equality, I'm a fully signed-up member. Yet modern feminism is a litany of complaint, fueled by observing the world through a feminist prism—and that I struggle with. It's also dominated by middle-class elitism where a small number of women obsess over the things that really matter most to a small number of elitist women. Ideology demands that women are portrayed as victims at every opportunity. They are always forced, pressured, or coerced. Women, according to feminists, are incapable of rational thought or objective decision making. And where female victims don't exist, feminists go out and manufacture them.

I can't help comparing young women who support real causes—like Malala Yousafzai with girls' education in Pakistan, or Fahma Mohamed, with female genital mutilation—with feminists who campaign over getting a woman's face on a bank note or getting tits out of magazines. I'm quite clear about which ones are trying to make the world a better place. There's also that insane group who parade statements such as "Prostitution is violence against women," and "Prostitution is an expression of pure hatred of women." This stuff is rabid, toxic nonsense. Apart from expressing how strongly some women feel about prostitution, those statements don't make any literal sense.

What do you say to those who claim there can be no prostitution without human trafficking?
I wondered when the get-out-of-that question would appear. The issue is the way that prostitution, human smuggling, human trafficking, and sex trafficking are conflated in order to support the anti-prostitution agenda. Most recently, the EU voted to recommend that member states adopt the Swedish model, where prostitution is recognized as legal and the purchase of sex is illegal—despite the fact, incidentally, that even the Swedish government can't demonstrate that its laws actually achieve the intended outcome. 

I really should bite my tongue here, but I think I'll throw in some analogies. Bad things happen in the context of prostitution, but that doesn't make prostitution bad. Bad things happen in life. If there were no automobiles, there would be no deaths through traffic accidents. If there were no knives in the world, there would be no knife crime. Prostitution is singled out for special treatment, not because it's special but because there are people who—on a moral, personal level—have a problem with it. The issue should have an appropriate, proportionate, and focused response.

Follow Daniel Dylan Wray on Twitter.

Screengrab via BBC

Noel Edmonds appeared on Newsnight last night with a ransom note for British culture. His Shatner’s bassoon visibly pulsating on the back of his neck, Noel explained that unless we all coughed up several billion dollars in license fees, he was going to eat the BBC like he was Pac-Man and it was a series of small white dots. Nom nom nom.

Apparently Noel is the head of a consortium of "big name investors" who have been meeting in secret for 18 months. This group—who refer to themselves as "Project Reith"—now hope to buy the BBC in order to save it from its own worst excesses: to take it private, make it turn a profit, but also maintain its public service mandate. A bit like Britian's Channel 4.

Jeremy Paxman frowned. Already tired from an evening of beating up political heavyweights and chewing over the fundamental origins of the universe, despite the direct threat to his existence, he must’ve sensed this was also his chance for a smoke break, the evening’s comic interlude. He leaned back in his chair. He adopted the little smirk of condescension that differs in tone and size from the much larger condescending smirk he reserves for Eurocrats, environmentalists, and Danny Alexander. So who were these secretive investors anyway? These were, Edmonds replied, "like-minded people." But who? “With the greatest of respect,” said Paxo, disrespectfully. “Are they afternoon TV show hosts with beards?”

“We believe,” said Noel, “That the BBC is sleepwalking to disaster. We believe it will be lost to Britain. And that is not right.”

“What?” At this, Paxman sat forward in order to condescend a little harder. “And Mr. Blobby’s the man to save it?”

Practically immune to these tactics after a lifetime of jokes about his weird pink slug, Noel decided he was going to play the bigger man. “Well, Jeremy,” said the dwarfish fun-shouter, as he drew himself up to his full moral height, “I like the little extras you’re throwing into this... but the situation is...” The situation, apparently, was that the BBC has to undergo charter renewal in 2016, and that means going through a lot of bureaucratic paperwork and inter-governmental posturing to ensure it’s still worth funding. The option is and always has been there to dismantle the Beeb at these ten-year intervals but—spoiler alert—the charter has been renewed every single decade for the better part of a hundred years.

Noel’s odds of success are so small that it seems, well, a bit weird that he’d go on national TV and inform Paxo that he wanted to be his boss. I guess a couple of points stack up in Noel's plus column: the BBC has been subject to an effective 20 percent funding squeeze since 2010. And, thanks to a new law making its way through Parliament, you will now no longer have to go to jail for not paying your TV license—meaning that the Corporation stands to lose some $300 million a year in unpaid fees. In the minus column: that this whole "Project Reith" thing still doesn't make any sense.

Why exactly is the only 80s celebrity who has not been interviewed under caution lately suddenly popping up to tell us he wants to grind our national identity into a fine paste? It’s difficult to know what to make of Noel materializing in the world of real news, like a starman crash-landing from the planet Ridiculous Bullshit. You can only assume all that money the BBC paid him during his 30 years of service—enough to buy an 850-acre lodge in Devon—has driven a wedge between him and reality that is fast becoming a chasm. He is not a man widely prized for his grip on the facts. Indeed, Noel is known nowadays for being the wet-eyed Glenn Beck of British TV on programs like Noel’s HQ and Noel's Christmas Presents, in which he carries the can for sentimental patriotism and rages, quietly, against political correctness having gone mad, occupying a zone of common-sense fetish and cut-price cultural philistinism that can only be described as "ASDA-right wing." For all that he might complain about the BBC possessing some inbuilt left-wing bias, the counter-argument is still that it employed him, Cheggers, DLT, Steve Wright, Bruno Brookes, and a whole herd of smallest-c conservatives for ages.

So just who are these "like-minded" people who are backing Noel up from the shadows? He is not, on first glance, the kind of guy a serious cabal of sinister investors would employ as their only chess piece in the game. Unless, of course, they wanted to disguise their steel fist in a velvet glove of blithering idiocy.

Noel drives around in a taxi and consequently has taken to keeping a life-size mannequin in the backseat "so that people will stop trying to flag it down." A practical solution to a practical problem, perhaps. But also: stupid. By contrast, if, say, Jeremy Irons turned up on Newsnight wearing a black polo neck, laughing callously, and projecting 10,000 kilowatts of menace into the nation’s living rooms, people might this morning be more scared than bemused. Noel, on the other hand, seems a bit like a locksmith from Wallington who walked through the wrong door at Television Center in 1969 and has since been living the high life, while some chiseled and charismatic wit has had to resort to fixing locks in Wallington because he never got a callback on his interview.

Either the cabal is genuinely sinister: Rothermere, Ecclestone, Cheney, Berlusconi, Lakshmi Mittal, or it is hopeless—Brian May, Chris Akabusi, Joan Collins, and the life savings of 50 pensioners who wrote in to Noel’s HQ. Or, option three, as Paxman could barely be bothered to insinuate, it simply doesn’t exist. Noel is bluffing. And, much like on his Sky show, is trying to will social change into being simply by going on about it.

No one would be too surprised if he were exactly that brazen, given what we already know about yer man’s esoteric beliefs. Noel is a huge fan of The Secret (the famously shitty book). In fact, he gives all the credit for the rebirth of his career via Deal Or No Deal to Rhonda Byrne's endlessly parodied tome and the "cosmic ordering techniques" at the heart of it (or what we used to call "writing things down and hoping they come true"). Deal Or No Deal is a show that doesn’t even make sense on its own terms, where people are often dressed up as Red Indians, or hippy flower children for no discernible reason, yet it attracts massive audiences every week.

Given the quantity of voodoo that must’ve taken, gobbling up the BBC might seem like a cakewalk to Noel. After all, any man who can make millions off of a lucky pink blob-creature, and spawn a Number One hit single with the not terribly catchy hook: “Although he's unconventional in hue / his philosophy of life will steer him through” is operating on a different astral plane to the rest of us. Ask yourself whether you’ve ever thought of even one single pink felt creature that you could make a million quid out of. Well, Noel made many times that amount. He just thought of a pink blob, then, wham-O: Several million dollars turned up in his bank account.

That’s the Edmonds magic. Plus, as Paxman found out, at least he was always going to be practising what he preached. Despite wanting to own the BBC, it turned out that Mr Edmonds did not pay the TV license anyway. Why? Because he only watches shows online, and that isn’t covered by the license fee. As pensioners in Kirkcaldy sat on their sofas watching Edmonds last night, working out that they were effectively picking up the tab for Noel to sit at home watching iPlayer in his pants, even Rothermere and Ecclestone must’ve winced as they stroked cats in their lairs.

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A Philly cheesesteak from Geno's. All photos by the author

The downfall of the United States is not upon us just yet. Though I am convinced that the yuppification of American culture portends our end times, I’m happy to say that we still have some institutions holding fast to the true foundation of freedom: disgusting, heart-pummeling foods that may have a questionable relationship to actual ingestible materials. God bless them.  

Philadelphia’s great contribution to such freedom, alongside more paltry offerings like the Liberty Bell and the Declaration of Independence, is the majestic cheesesteak. Every food truck and corner store in the city offers up some version of this great East Coast American tradition of borderline inedible items. However, at Geno’s Steaks, a Philadelphia staple notorious for harboring a crude version of this sandwich and politics that are even cruder, pressure from the increasingly widespread popularity of the cheesesteak may be threatening this iconic item. Torn between menu adaptations geared at a wider audience and current disapproval of time-honored arts like heart-disease, Philadelphia sandwich eaters may be witnessing the refinement of the cheesesteak and, with it, the shaking foundations of that liberty for which the city is so famous. 

Subway has a cheesesteak now. 

The cheesesteak is pervasive enough by now outside of Philadelphia that any Subway sandwich chain will serve you some monstrosity of a “Philly.” I tracked down one of these sandwiches in its natural environment: a standing-room only convenience store swarmed with high school kids pounding energy drinks. Shockingly, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. The generous sandwich artist garnished it with a mountain of whacky toppings that brought it closer to a salad than a cheesesteak. No traditional Philadelphia steak shop is going to put raw green peppers, black olives, crushed Fritos, or any number of utterly fucking ridiculous absurdities on their sandwiches. That is happening here.

I got mine on a freshly-made “Italian Herbs and Cheese” roll with Chipotle Mayo because hell is real. There is no such thing as a “Philly,” but somehow this wasn’t even horrible.

Embarrassing as it may be, the attempt to brand the cheesesteak as the “Philly” for mass-market appeal has had apparent success. But in a society plagued by highly suspect food allergies and fad diets, adapting pulverized and processed foods like the cheesesteak for a mass audience tends to equate with fast-food style bastardization. As anyone with their finger on the pulse of authenticity—or anyone who has watched four hours of any random food television programming cycle—can tell you, to gauge the world’s real perception of the authentic cheesesteak experience we need to look to the heart of South Philly on the only street corner that contains the opposing factions of the Philadelphia cheese steak sandwich: Pat’s King of Steaks and Geno’s Steaks.   

I’ll spare you the mind-numbing debate that surrounds these two shops. The only voices louder than those arguing for the superiority of either side are often those who argue that the “real place” to find an authentic steak is a mythical deli in the backroom of their grandfather’s basement where you’re forced to drink homemade grappa until you go blind before you’re allowed to order. That sounds like a good time, but I’m confident both Geno’s and Pat’s meet the strenuous demand of representing a tradition that basically involves dumping Cheez Whiz on sliced beef and serving it on a long roll. 

The traditional cheesesteak from Geno’s includes a sliced rib-eye, fried onions, and a slathering of Whiz. It’s pretty delicious and almost definitely made of organic material. 

A proper cheesesteak from Geno's

In its most basic incarnation, these simple ingredients are all you need to achieve deliciousness. Onions are acceptable, but the trend towards adulterating the sandwich with bell peppers or any other foods that actually grow in soil is mostly taboo. Like the best of all American inventions—electricity, airplanes, and hard work—it almost seems designed to kill you.  

But even the traditional gatekeepers of the cheesesteak no longer seem content to wrest their sandwiches directly from death’s cold hand. Geno Vento, current owner of the shop who was, I shit you not, named after the restaurant founded by his father, is publicly discussing menu changes more shocking than a six-pound-can of processed cheese product. 

He wants to try to make the cheesesteak healthy. 

Coinciding with a recent lap-band surgery and enrollment in culinary school, Vento has been exploring low-fat and low-cholesterol options in an effort to update the currently straightforward Geno’s menu. What these changes will entail for Philadelphia’s sandwich future aren’t clear, but a “diet cheesesteak” seems custom-made for the assholes of the world. Will Geno’s steak go the way of the Subway “Philly” sandwich? Could we see a vegetarian offering alongside the ribeye? 

Maybe afterwards, we can swing by Ikea for a frozen yogurt and a Häst Slidan furniture set? 

A cheesesteak from Philly’s all-vegan Blackbird Pizzeria made with sliced seitan, daiya cheese, and plenty of green peppers. Could this be the future of Genos?  It didn’t even give me chest pains.  

A "cheesesteak" from Blackbird Pizzeria

Such efforts to make the cheesesteak palatable to a health-conscious market might go unnoticed if it weren’t for Geno’s historically unique attitude towards newfangled ideas like diversity or tolerance. Geno’s would be just one of many menus that have been sanitized to translate a local dive’s character into widespread appeal. In this particular case, there is more to the process than cutting calories; the character in question gives off the vibes of a shady racist uncle decked out in gold chains and tattoos who is complaining about the Mexicans moving in.  

Having first attracted controversy for their prominent memorial to Daniel Faulkner, the police officer allegedly killed by former Black Panther and currently incarcerated political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geno’s has made a history of establishing themselves as anything but accommodating to all elements of the Philadelphia community. The Faulkner plaque, conspicuously placed on the shop’s facade right in the center of the outdoor seating area, was the beginning of an onslaught that featured prominent signs instructing customers to order in English and a steady stream of interviews with the late Joey Vento lamenting the plight of Italian-Americans in facing the current wave of goddamned freedom-hating immigrants.  

The politically incorrect signs outside of Geno's Steaks

Geno, the son, has made it clear that he’s stepping away from the aspects of his father’s legacy that overshadowed the food, but catering to the politics and diets of the organic grocery store crowds will still be a lofty goal for the heir.

Considering this context, the changes Vento institutes could be a welcome respite from an uncomfortable history. Certainly a healthier— and less racist—Philadelphia is a good idea. But at the same time, these healthy adaptations also make clear the attempt to tame and sterilize working-class food culture. From the exterior view, replete with numerous neon signs and a giant glowing cheesesteak, Geno’s itself looks like some kind of meat amusement park from hell. I’d love to offer a romantic history of the cheesesteak along the lines of the Cubano, with local workers lining up to grab steaks on their lunch breaks, but whatever roots in feeding the common people Geno’s may have had, it is now largely given over to the spectacle of a tourist trap.  

The easiest response, of course, would be for purists to completely ignore Geno’s as it completes this transformation. But whether it be “Philly” offerings from Subway and T.G.I. Fridays or vegan steaks from the city’s local all-vegetarian shops like Blackbird Pizzeria and Govinda’s Vegetarian, the entire cheesesteak landscape is shifting dramatically. It would be comforting if the crowds of tourists drawn to Geno’s neon lights like idiotic moths to a flame walked away with at least a somewhat authentic experience of Philadelphia cuisine. Hopefully there’s a way to preserve the only slightly toxic tradition of the delicious cheesesteak while navigating the more thoroughly toxic aspects of its present predicament.  

Photo courtest of Richard Siemion

“There’s still a war going on,” Captain Richard Siemion began. “There are still people dying—not as many as before—but it’s still happening. And when it does, the Army sends somebody like me to break the news.”

Captain Siemion was recently honorably discharged but was one of several Casualty Notification Officers serving in upstate New York. Whenever a soldier’s death was reported, the CNO on duty would have four hours to track down the deceased’s family and deliver some of the worst news they would ever hear.

CNOs have been the focus of some interest over the last decade of American war. In 2006, the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News published a Pulitzer-Prize winning series about the Marines tasked with the same job as Captain Siemion, and in 2009 Woody Harrelson starred in the independent film The Messenger. He played a CNO.

I sat down with the 31-year-old Siemion to talk about his first-hand experience telling families of active-service soldiers that their loved one have died in action.

VICE: Did you volunteer for the job?
Captain Siemon: We call it being voluntold. I had just gotten back from my first tour in Afghanistan when my Battalion Commander sent me to the training course.

What did you learn there?
You learn that there’s no right way to tell someone that their loved one is not returning from war, but there are a lot of wrong ways to do it. If you look at history, the way they used to tell families about a death: you had telegrams, you had taxi drivers paid to ring doorbells, you had word of mouth. Through trial and error, the United States Army got it as close to right as they can. I was always the kind of leader who didn’t go 100 percent by the book, but in this case, I went right by the book, because there is a reason why they have it the way they do. Not much room for creativity.

What do you think they got right?
One thing is the idea that no job is more important than this job. So, if you’re in the middle of an important brief with a Colonel and you get called to give a notification, you say, “Gotta go.” Another thing is that you go in person. It shows the importance. Obviously you’re never going to see that individual again, or be their best friend, but if my brother died, I’d rather have it straight – face-to-face. 

Did they teach you how to handle your own emotions?
My bosses were really understanding that it could be rough on me. I mean, everybody handles it differently. I was told about a guy who had to give multiple notifications  and eventually took his own life on a train track. I think I handled it better than most people would given the same circumstance. I honestly really enjoyed it. There are so few things in the Army that give you instant gratification like that. It’s painful and awful, but you’re doing a service.

What’s the sequence of events for delivering a notification?
You get briefed, you get your dress blues ready, and you go over the paperwork. That’s when you realize how important paperwork is, because each soldier fills out a DD93 where they write their address. Sometimes the handwriting is real sloppy. It can be a little frustrating.

What other ways do you track people down?
Well, for example, every soldier has an ERB or ORB which is a record of their career in the army – deployments, units, awards – so that helps. The other thing I started doing was looking up a soldier’s Facebook profile. I would use that as a kind of positive identification to see what the deceased looks like, what his kids look like, what his wife looks like. You don’t want to drag it out by saying, “Hey, are you so-and-so?” because, that’s how you’re supposed to start out. But, if you have that Facebook picture, you can skip that step and just move forward to asking if you can come inside the house. You want to get inside as quickly as possible. You don’t want to do it on the porch there in front of all the neighbors.

What is the car ride there like?
Well, the protocol is that you travel with a pastor, so there’s usually conversation. We’d start talking about just any old thing. A lot of times it was like a Quentin Tarantino movie. It was really suspenseful, like the suspense that comes before the violence.

Only in this case the violence is emotional rather than physical.
That’s a good way of putting it.

What kinds of things did you talk about?
We’d make jokes and we’d laugh, you know, to break the tension. And in between breaks in the conversation, I would start rehearsing again what I was going to say. I’d recite it, and the pastor would typically critique how I sounded. You can’t over-rehearse, though, because it has to sound like it comes from the heart.

How would you actually deliver news of the death?
There’s a whole spiel. There’s a script that I memorized. It’s the same for everybody—you just replace names and locations.

How does it start?
The Secretary of the Army regrets to inform you that your son, or husband, or brother—whatever it is—was killed in action yesterday in such-and-such province or wherever it was, and then the details about their death. Typically you don’t have all the details. Sometimes you’ll know just a few things—whether it was small arms fire, or suicide, or a motorcycle crash. Whatever you say, they always ask for more details. The standard response is, “There is an ongoing investigation. Once the investigation is complete, you will have full access to the report.”

How do people react?
Devastation is the best way to put it. I have heard horror stories though, of people pulling out shotguns, or where the wife was cheating on her husband, and said, “I know what you’re here for. Cut the bullshit. How much money do I get?” I didn’t experience that at all. You see the love there. I might’ve been a little more cynical about army wives before doing this job, but I realize now how tough it can be.

Did the families often know right away why you were there?
A lot of times, the family would know as soon I got out of the car. People with family members overseas are nervous every day for their loved ones. But, sometimes denial is a very powerful thing. They hold onto that hope that it’s not as bad as they think it is. One time I started the spiel, “The Secretary of the Army regrets to inform you that your husband…” And then the dog started barking, and the wife went over to quiet the dog, and was with the dog for a couple minutes and then I had to start again.

After you told them, did you try to offer comfort?
I wasn’t there to console anybody. That’s what the chaplain’s there for. The most natural thing to do would be to hug somebody who just lost her husband or son, but you’re supposed to step back and just do the mission at hand.

What did the pastors do?
I had Mormon, Protestant, and Catholic pastors, so everybody was different. They all have their own training. A lot of the time, they’ll just go over and place a hand on the shoulder and ask what that person needs. One chaplain was more touchy-feely, another wanted to talk things through.

How did you know when to leave?
You’re not supposed to linger. I never tried to. I try to get as much information as I can out there. I try to make the Casualty Affairs Officer’s job a lot easier, because he’s the one who’s going to be coordinating with the family after I leave. I remember one time, the wife said that she was getting tired of seeing uniforms, so I asked, “Would it be easier for you if the Casualty Affairs Officer came in his regular civilian clothes rather than his dress blues?” She said, “Yes.” So, that’s what he did. A widow, you know, she’s like a bride on her wedding day –  whatever she wants, she gets. The Casually Affairs Center is very respectful of the family’s needs.

What was the hardest moment for you?
A lot of times they asked, “Did he suffer?” And I don’t lie. I said, “I don’t know.” I’m not going to say, “No, he didn’t suffer,” only to find out later that he was in agonizing pain for an hour and a half. I would say, “I’m sorry. I don’t really know the answer that question.” One person asked me, “Why? Why did this happen?” I said, “Honestly I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to answer that question. Never. I could have 1,000 years and I would never be able to answer that.”

Roc’s new book, And, was released last year. You can find more information on his website.

Photo via Flickr user Azwari Nugara

Back in January of this year, Guangzhou, a megalopolis in southern China, opened China's 20th "baby safety island," a place where people could safely deposit their offspring. It received 260 babies, or about six a day, over the course of two months. Now, the orphanage to which the baby hatch is attached is over capacity and, according to the BBC, won't be taking any more kids.

If you're American, you probably think I'm being glib when I say "baby hatch." Here, we call it a "safe surrender site," enabled by something called a Baby Moses Law, and we envision a more reassuring institution than a hatch. But European readers will be much more familiar with the term "baby hatch," a mechanism akin to a book return, only with much less security and scrutiny. 

Image via Flickr user bluemeat

The original story, as reported by the Chinese tabloid Beijing Times, did an interesting tap dance, asking readers not to be too judgmental or pessimistic, saying the program wasn't a lost cause. But the paper also said authorities "have not done enough research and are not prepared to handle the crisis.”

State-owned media stayed in characteristic lockstep with the government, saying they will "have to fight against the immoral behavior of those who maliciously abandon the infants, while on the other hand we need a more comprehensive legal system to protect their welfare, as well as [a] support system for families with seriously ill or disabled children."

The crisis, and the corresponding government reaction, are going to be pinned by the American media as more fallout from 35 years of China's one-child policy.

Discouraging population growth is all well and good. China says they've prevented the births of 400 million babies with the policy. Demographers say it's more like 200 million. If you split the difference, it's approximately one nonexistent America. This resulted in the abandonment crisis, however. Then came rumors of horrible, deadly conditions in orphanages, and outright infanticide.

As China has developed, the powers that be have arguably become more sensitive to the outrage of foreigners, but the country also has the huge ego of any major world power. So at the end of last year, the government announced that it would relax the one-child policy, along with advancing some other positions aimed at making China look like less of a terrifying place.

This came after years of slowly tightening restrictions on adoptions. The government rolled out rules that mandated no adoption by lesbians, obese people, people with facial deformities, people on Prozac, unmarried people, or people with less than $80,000 in assets. Reader, would you be able to adopt a Chinese baby?

The idea was image control. Having foreigners come in and rescue babies from your crappy country hurts. Not that America would know; it's not like richer countries come and adopt the poor children our society does nothing to look after. (That was sarcasm. Go back and click the link.) But wishing won't make people want to keep their babies, and the orphanage crisis in China just won't seem to go away. 

Thus the baby-hatch idea, something tried-and-true in Europe as early as the 1600s (although those sometimes filled up too), but the hatch was unpalatable to the Chinese. I sent messages to China experts at several universities, asking them to give me some background about why the concept is so historically unpalatable, or to correct my misapprehension, and the response to my media requests was an extraordinarily uniform silence. I never even received so much as a "no thanks."

Articles on the subject, some of which are very good, make Chinese people out to be repulsed by the nasty-sounding idea at first, and then they warmed to it. I'm guessing this is how anyone, in any culture, would react to the idea.

Image via Flickr user Salim Virij

I wanted to know a little about how the US was different, so I contacted Michael Weston, spokesperson for the California Department of Social Services, the authority that I would surrender a baby to if need be.

First, he told me that California ones aren't like the European hatches or the Chinese tollbooths. "They have to actually go in and hand the baby to someone and basically surrender the baby. They don’t have to answer any questions beyond that, but they do have to go in and physically hand the child to somebody," he said.

Then I asked him about the "return policy." Apparently you get 14 days to retrieve your surrendered infant. I asked him if anyone had done that. He didn't have the numbers, but he confirmed that, yes, at least someone has retrieved a baby after surrendering it. 

When I tried to get him to talk to me about the larger societal implications of it, Michael wasn't much help. I tried to get him to comment on the "harm-reduction" principles behind baby hatches. Another example of harm reduction would be needle exchanges for heroin addicts. I wanted a comment about the big picture, but I couldn't get one. "I think it’s just in the category of, you know, child protection. It’s to protect the health and safety of children," he said.

I get the sense that big-picture thinking is common in Chinese bureaucracy. In fact, when you think in cold, utilitarian terms, an effective, large-scale population control program in the world's most populous country almost seems worth the odd story about a clogged baby hatch. To my mind, though, no matter how many buildings you're able to build, babies are cute, and no matter what we're trying to justify, we just need to protect them, as Michael said, even when our plans suffer because of it. I seriously doubt the average Chinese person would feel any differently.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

Ad agencies will often do borderline-criminal things in their effort to sell you a product. For instance, in 1990 a now-infamous Volvo ad purported to show that even a monster truck couldn’t crush their station wagons. Unbeknownst to the consumer, the New York agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves had secretly buttressed the car’s roof so it wouldn’t get squashed under the truck. Or take the time in 1968 when Campbell’s and its agency, BBDO, got pinched for putting clear marbles in bowls to make it look like their vegetable soup had a shitload of vegetables in it.

My point is that ads are not always on the level, and there are occasionally even criminal elements at play. So why not give actual cons a shot at writing some ads? They already have a reputation for thinking outside the box.

Two young copywriters from San Francisco are doing just that through the Federal Bureau of Prisons' pen pal program. Their goal is to collaborate with inmates on creating speculative advertising in a project called “Concepting with Convicts.”

Their mission statement: “Great ideas can come from anywhere. We're using the prison pen pal system to prove it.”

In an email to me, one of the copywriters, Ben Pfutzenreuter, wrote: “One of the things we embrace is advertising. One of the things we marginalize is the humanity of criminals. Well, agencies are always saying they want to hire interesting people… If you ask us, convicts are pretty interesting people.

“For the past couple months [we] have been using the prison pen pal system to concept ads with convicted felons. It's been a pretty interesting experience in exploring, and even circumventing, the corrections system of our country.”

The copywriters, Pfutzenreuter and Pat Davis, are both interns at the San Francisco office of Digitas/LBi. Two art directors, Marcus Löf and Luis Gonzalez, are aiding them with their project.

The creatives say they want to keep the names of the prisoners—and even the prisons—anonymous for now. Davis says they started this project for an awards show brief while they were ad students, but it has grown to something much more than a portfolio piece. Pfutzenreuter says they are now looking at ways to make the project “more transparent.”

Let’s check out some of their felons’ ads.

(To be clear: These are speculative ads and are not endorsed by the companies mentioned. The brief, role, and notes are as they appear on the Concepting with Convicts website.)

Brief: Sell tattoo removal to ex-cons.
Roles: Convict served as copywriter. We provided art direction.

It’s a perfect headline targeting tatted ex-cons. The placement is flawless as well. Excellent ad. Bravo.

Brief: LoJack never lets up the search.
Roles: Convict served as art director. We provided copy.

This felon’s art direction is good—so good that the ad almost doesn’t need the headline, or it should just be the tagline. The convict told the writers LoJack, a tracking system designed to locate a car after it has been stolen, is pretty easy to circumvent, something the brass at the Canton, Massachusetts, company won’t be happy to read.

Brief: Keep kids in school.

Roles: Convict served as copywriter. We provided art direction.

Note: Inmate attained his GED while in prison.

A “stay-in-school” ad by a convict carries a bit more weight than your typical PSA. Unless, of course, you live in Australia, where dropping out of school means you will be blown up by landmines.

Brief: Show folks why they need a safe. 
Roles: Convict served as art director. We provided copy.
Note: Inmate informed us that a heavy safe was a serious deterrent to the average home invader, who looks to grab as much as he can, as fast as he can.

Whom are you going to believe when it comes to home security—this guy, or a convict?

Brief: Help Amnesty International speak truth.
Roles: Convict served as copywriter. We provided art direction.
Note: The inmate was concerned that criticizing law enforcement would garner him unwanted attention from corrections officers while serving his sentence.

This is better than many Amnesty ads I’ve seen by major agencies, especially considering the current goings-on in many of the hot spots around the world.

It will be interesting to see where the creators of this project take it. They wouldn’t comment when I asked if they plan to pitch real clients with future ads (and maybe get the felons a little scratch; that would be nice). For now, Davis says that maybe this process will show the inmates that their creative talents can translate into a real career in the outside world.

And they are right: Ad creativity can come from anyone. You don’t need to go to an overpriced ad school to put together a portfolio of good spec ads, which is all you need to get an entry-level position in an ad agency’s creative department. The good creative directors don’t give a shit where you went to school; they just want to see how you think.

The great copywriter Ed McCabe, of the aforementioned Scali, McCabe, Sloves (though he was retired when the fake Volvo spot was produced), dropped out of high school at the tender age of 15, to sell cars. Less than 20 years later, he became the youngest person ever inducted into the One Club’s Advertising Hall of Fame.

See more of the felons’ ads at Concepting With Convicts.

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Modesto Cruz Batista, a Tarahumara man who guided me to Mogotavo, points across the ridges of the Copper Canyon. Photos by Pavel Tarin and Weston Phippen

Last year, in February, about 20 Tarahumara Indians gathered inside the Best Western hotel conference room in Creel, a small town in the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico. Aside from the taxidermied wildcats and deer heads mounted to the walls, the space was unremarkable, the sort that could host a company sales retreat or a quinceañera or a gathering of stamp collectors.

The Tarahumara men wore baseball caps snugged to their brows and jeans stained with earth from the fields. Despite the winter wind outside, the women appeared in traditional flower-patterned headscarves, blouses, and dresses that bloomed outward at the bottom to reveal their sandaled feet. On the other side of the banquet tables sat a group of state government representatives, lending the gathering the look of a familiar tableau—natives facing colonizers at the negotiating table. A screen in front of the table glowed with the latest scheme to profit from the land the Tarahumara had lived on for centuries: an adventure theme park in the space now occupied by the ancient village of Mogotavo.

The government representatives rapped for hours about water treatment and renovations to Creel’s pint-size airport. But no one mentioned the relocation plans for the villagers––even though the homes where the Tarahumara would be forced to move had already been built. A federal judge had ordered the two groups to hold this meeting in order to find common ground, but so far it felt like a lecture.

A state representative leaned into the microphone: “We are going to continue this talk, following…”

When he heard the motion to delay the meeting, an American named Randy Gingrich, who was sitting on the Tarahumara’s side, jerked up in his seat like he was going into a seizure.

“Señor, excuse me!” Randy yelled. The 56-year-old runs Tierra Nativa, a nonprofit that fights mining and deforestation in the Sierra Madre and advocates on behalf of the region’s indigenous inhabitants. All day he’d listened to representatives avoid discussing Mogotavo. He’d be damned if he let them talk in circles any longer.

“The subject of consultation is the most important matter here today!” Randy yelled. “It’s a plain violation of their fundamental rights!”

And though everyone in the room had undoubtedly heard it before, he launched into the story of Mogotavo, the impoverished village with a priceless view. About 200 Tarahumara live there, spread out across an inhospitable mesa that's nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, in isolated huts and inside caves pocking the canyon’s edge. The soil is difficult to farm, and the Tarahumara live in poverty, removed from most of Mexican society. At the edge of the village the mesa gives way to the Copper Canyon, a system of sheer valleys that’s larger, and in some places deeper, than the Grand Canyon. It’s the type of vista that makes a person realize he’s tiny compared to the magnitude of nature. But a group of developers felt something different—they thought it would be the perfect spot for a golf course.

Six years ago, ownership of the mesa landed in the hands of a development group made up mostly of former politicians who, entering into a partnership with the government, formed an organization called the Copper Canyon Trust. On the mesa where the Tarahumara struggled to raise their haggard goats and corn, the Trust envisioned an unlikely tourism hotspot complete with hotels, a casino, bungee-jump platforms, and, yes, a golf course.

At the meeting, Randy denounced the Trust, condemned the investors for buying the land beneath Mogotavo, and derided the state for rubber-stamping the deal. He yelled that all involved were “extremely corrupt and dirty!”

The Tarahumara didn’t applaud, or even register that they approved of Randy’s outburst. In their culture, squaring your shoulders during a conversation can be considered confrontational; they were unused to this level of direct aggression. The natives’ collective gaze fell to the hotel carpet. If this meeting was another marker on the long road to their tribe’s extinction, they seemed content to bear it in silence.

The villagers' homes are spread across the Mogotavo mesa, as the Tarahumara relish privacy. Some live deep in the canyon, inside caves—habitations that date back to the time of the conquistadors.

The Tarahumara are an ancient, relatively unknown people who predate the Aztecs. If you’ve heard of them at all it’s likely because of Christopher McDougall’s 2009 best seller, Born to Run, which chronicled their ability to run hundreds of miles over cragged mountains in leather sandals—an appropriate talent for a tribe that’s perpetually chosen flight over fight. For centuries, they fled from the Spanish conquistadors and mostly avoided the Jesuit missionaries who sought to convert them. In the 1870s, when the Mexican government invited companies to mine the Sierra Madre, the Tarahumara took refuge atop peaks too rugged for pack mules to climb and in valleys only birds knew.

The tribe seems predestined for persecution—in their creation myth, the Devil plays guitar and wears a beard, just like the conquistadors who chased the Tarahumara into the mountains. In that legend, God made the Tarahumara using pure clay, and the Devil made everyone else from clay and ash, meaning other peoples’ inherent greed is their unavoidable heritage and hence not really evil. Myths aside, the Mexicans have been taking land from the Tarahumara almost as long as there have been Mexicans. Even the name Tarahumara is a Spanish bastardization of the tribe’s real name, Rarámuri, which in their language means something like “the Fleet of Foot.”

About 70,000 Tarahumara live in Mexico today, alongside Mexican ranchers in mountain towns, in small villages, or deep in valleys cut off from the outside world, as Mogotavo was until recently.

The village’s present difficulties started after World War II. The US economy was booming, and Mexico was eager to export silver, gold, iron, and timber to American factories. The Mexicans extracted these resources from the Sierra Madre, and as they continued to encroach, the Tarahumara retreated. In 1961, rail workers finished laying more than 400 miles of track for a train that linked Chihuahua with Los Mochis, a coastal city to the southwest. It had taken 86 tunnels and 37 bridges, but finally the Sierras were open for business. Midway between Los Mochis and Chihuahua city, Mogotavo was now just a 30-minute walk from the train station.

If you make that walk from the station to the village today, you can look out past the rim of the mesa, which drops nearly a vertical mile. Below the mesa the Urique and Recowata rivers join together, and behind them the pine forests climb rust-colored ridges, and beyond those ridges is another valley, then another, then another—a seemingly endless series of peaks and valleys climbing and fading until they merge with the blue horizon. More than 110 years later, the view still looks as Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz described it in his 1902 book, Unknown Mexico: “From where I stood looking at it, the country seemed forgotten, lonely, untouched by human hand.”

It was this unspoiled country that attracted a man named Efraín Sandoval. As legend has it, Efraín arrived in the late 1960s with two bottles of tequila, which he’s said to have traded to a Tarahumara man for five acres on the canyon’s rim. In 1973, Efraín opened Hotel Divisadero Barrancas on that land; it had ten guest rooms, a restaurant, and a bar. His father was a civil engineer who supervised road construction in the area, and Efraín had strong ties to the government. Ten years later, his holdings grew substantially when the state of Chihuahua denied the Tarahumara’s petition to recognize Mogotavo as a communally owned plot of farming land. Instead, it granted nearly 1,500 acres to Efraín and his two daughters, according to a report by Tierra Nativa, as well as a study by Horacio Almanza Alcalde, a researcher at the National Institute for Anthropology and History. The Sandoval family soon owned more than 3,700 acres surrounding the train station, including the entire town of Mogotavo.

Locals told me Efraín kept an armed retinue to keep an eye on the villagers, as if to remind the Tarahumara they were now trespassers on private land.

“Every week came at least six soldiers to watch us,” said Luis Batista Vidal, a middle-aged Tarahumara man. “And the soldiers would stay at the hotel.”

Villagers said Efraín once showed up with a gun as they dried adobe bricks to add onto the local school. A mestiza woman (part Tarahumara, part Mexican) named Lola said he torched her family’s ranch house. Don’t get comfortable, he seemed to be saying; this land belongs to me now.

As the decades passed, sightings of Efraín grew less frequent. Eventually his daughter, Ivonne, took control of the hotel. In 2008, the Sandoval family sold the mesa where Mogotavo sits to the five-person development group, which would later form the Copper Canyon Trust. With this newest parcel, the developers had now purchased nearly all the land surrounding the canyon, having spent $2.25 million for it, according to a 2012 report from Tierra Nativa.

After the sale, men employed by the developers drove up to Mogotavo in a white truck, the villagers told me. They surveyed the land and warned the Tarahumara to pack up and get out, or else they’d be back with the military. The tribe had been hounded by Mexico’s march into modernity until they ended up on land no one else wanted—and now, hundreds of years later, it turned out that someone wanted it after all.

“Their assimilation may benefit Mexico,” Lumholtz wrote of the Tarahumara a century ago, “but one may well ask: Is it just? Must the weaker always be first crushed, before he can be assimilated by the new condition of things?”

Modesto Cruz Batista, his wife, Guadalupe, and their son. Their adobe home has only one room, heated by a wood stove.

The month of the meeting in Creel, I hitched a ride to Mogotavo with a short 41-year-old Tarahumara man named Modesto Cruz Batista. He wore jeans, the traditional leather sandals with soles cut from an old tire, and a bright green baseball cap with devil’s horns and wings sprouting from the word Chihuahua. It was a 30-minute drive from the train stop to the village, much of it over a dry creek bed of rounded stones that jostled the truck and scraped its undercarriage. “It’s just as fast to walk,” Modesto told me.

The land Mogotavo sits on is so rocky it seems like one boulder, as if the villagers live on the back of a giant turtle shell. About 90 percent of the Mogotavo is communal property—traditionally, the Tarahumara have no concept of land ownership—with small patches of arable soil where villagers raise beans, squash, and corn. The only fence in town surrounds a pasture in the center, which they had built to corral the 70 goats they once owned. In the last few years a combination of coyotes and Mexico’s worst drought in seven decades killed most of the goats, and the remainder plummeted over a canyon precipice. Such is the Tarahumara’s luck lately.

There’s no doctor in the village, and when someone needs medical care he or she has to get a ride to a nearby town in Mogotavo’s only truck. Not long ago they had two, but a few years back Modesto and his friend were fixing the battery and drinking tesgüino (a homemade corn beer) when the truck jolted forward and pinned Modesto beneath it. Believing it to be cursed, his friend sold the bedeviled machine. “Now we only drink in our homes,” Modesto told me.

Like many other villagers, Modesto has a lot of children; his newborn makes six. His home is a 15-feet-long, square, single-room hut with a cement floor. When I visited, his family had placed buckets on the beds and tables to catch the raindrops that snuck through the rusted metal roof—in Mogotavo they pray for rain, but even their blessings harass them.

Modesto’s family survives on government aid for indigenous mothers, the $5 a day he makes picking apples on commercial orchards during harvest season, and the money he earns—around $100 a month—selling trinkets at the train shop, a common occupation for the villagers. His wife, Guadalupe, makes baskets from pine needles, and from local wood Modesto carves violins that he admits probably don’t work.

“The gringos don’t know how to play violin either,” he said. “They just like them made by hand.”

It’s undeniable that the village has a scenic, remote, indigenous appeal that charms a certain type of tourist. While I was visiting Modesto, a Mexican couple who looked to be in their mid 40s roared up on a pair of four-wheelers in front of the family home. The woman wore trendy black tights, a ponytail, and a black coat with a fur trim. The man held a camcorder. They smiled at each other. Guadalupe, clutching her son in her arms, offered the woman a woven pine-needle basket.

The woman inspected the basket while the man held his camcorder a foot from Guadalupe’s face, moving the camera about as if he were recording every inch of some odd endangered species for a nature documentary. The tourists pointed at Modesto’s house and at his children with their runny noses, clearly appreciating the authenticity of the moment. Then the couple smiled at each other again and roared off toward the mesa’s edge.

Villagers still construct many homes and buildings from adobe, as they have for hundreds of years. The Tarahumara are extremely taciturn, and these men stood and sat for more than an hour with barely a word or glance between one another.

The next day, I met the villagers in front of their church. The building is made of crumbling adobe and has no cross, because villagers are still saving to buy one. I asked them whether there is there anything good that will come from the village’s development.

“Tourists will pay us to take them down the canyon,” said a woman named Marcia Lora Cruz.

“The last year it almost never rained,” said another villager, clearly thinking about a transition to a tourism-based economy, which wouldn’t be so devastated by droughts.

I asked if they knew the whereabouts of the houses that had been built for them to relocate to. One man said they were over the hill, but then, after some discussion, the villagers agreed they didn’t know.

The developers had already constructed the 12-by-15-foot concrete huts half a decade ago as they plotted to take over the land. The hovels stood about two miles away—close as the bird flies, but a world apart from the village’s priceless view, and on land less inhabitable, and even rockier, than the mesa. The huts are a part of the government’s Copper Canyon Tourism Master Plan, a ten-year project announced in 2009 that had an estimated cost of almost $370 million, according to the study by the researcher at the National Institute for Anthropology and History.

The government promised to set aside funds to make improvements to Creel’s airport, pave roads, and construct hotels—essentially transforming the mesa into prime real estate. It was a huge windfall for the shrewd, politically connected developers. The plan called for eight zip lines suspended 1,500 feet above the canyon floor, bungee jump platforms that would be the second highest in the world, hotels, restaurants, an RV park, a casino, Latin America’s longest aerial tram line, and an 18-hole golf course.

Development in the area would affect at least three other Tarahumara communities besides Mogotavo, either because their land would be taken from underneath them or their lives would be interrupted by pollution and construction. Some of these attractions have already been built, and today you can take a short walk from a hotel near the train station and pay $20 to stand in the tram’s carriage—a simple windowed box—as it crosses the three and a half miles to the other side of the canyon. This is where the original development plans called for an “ideal” Tarahumara village, a kind of living-museum display where tourists would be able to photograph the Way Things Once Were, when the land needed only to provide for the Tarahumara of Mogotavo.

(I’ve been told developers have made adjustments to the original plans because of budget shortfalls and the ideal village may have been scuttled. The lawyer for the Copper Canyon Trust declined to let me see the current plans.)

The only problem with this grand vision to attract tourists was that the very real-life Tarahumara village of Mogotavo was inconveniently placed upon the mesa’s best view—and no one had bothered to inform the residents that the changing world now required things like titles that granted land ownership. In the sale contract, the Sandovals mentioned the presence of the villagers but said they resided there under a temporary arrangement. (The villagers told me they were unaware of this state of affairs.) It was the new owners’ duty to evict the Tarahumara, according to the contract, “preferably in a voluntary way.”

In 2009, the villagers realized a change had come when workers arrived to erect a fence to keep the Tarahumara away from the overlook near Efraín Sandoval’s original hotel (which now has 52 rooms and a gift shop). The Trust also built a new train station to handle the impending tourist explosion, along with the aerial tram line, the crown jewel of the development project.

“Copper Canyon Disneyland,” Randy Gingrich calls it derisively. The American activist got involved with the Tarahumara of Mogotavo when the tribe came to him for help shortly after it realized its village was being threatened with development.

Randy studied watershed managementat the University of Arizona in the early 90s; along the way, he hung out with environmental activists of varying degrees of militancy. He met his Mexican wife, a dance instructor, while researching his master’s thesis on deforestation in the Sierra Madre, and the two have lived in the state’s capital, the city of Chihuahua, ever since. For more than 20 years, Randy has battled corporations seeking to take advantage of the Sierra Madre’s resources, in the process acquiring the nickname “Randy the Red” because of his fiery beard and quick temper. Once, he told me, he filed a lawsuit against a logging company that responded by posting an SUV outside his office at night—an omen, in Chihuahua, of a kidnapping to come. In 2007 he founded Tierra Nativa with two other activists in order to focus on fighting for the rights of the state’s indigenous people.

On the nonprofit’s website, Mogotavo’s cause is described in dramatic, strident terms: “[In 2009] 19 families were threatened with forced relocation by a group of investors in tourism development including powerful national and state politicians. Without consulting with the community, the investors were planning to forcefully relocate the community into tiny brick homes on a desolate ridge without soil or water.”

“This is a representation of how the Tarahumara have been subjugated all throughout the Sierras,” Randy told me.

The difficulty is that, the rightness of their cause aside, historically the Tarahumara haven’t fought against colonialism or development through the courts or public forums, and their inclination is to avoid conflict as much as possible. “They’re not equipped culturally to deal with outside threats,” Randy said.

But they are trying. The Tarahumara have met with Randy regularly at Mogotavo’s church to discuss solutions and how to resist the government’s tourism project. They also elected their tribal governor, Miguel Cruz Moreno, in part because he speaks and writes Spanish and they feel he can best reason with outsiders.

Tierra Nativa helped bring the villagers’ cause to the courts, and in April 2011 they won a victory when an agrarian tribunal ordered construction to be halted temporarily until the dispute could be sorted out. The ruling specified that the Tarahumara would have to be consulted on any relocation plans.

Horacio Lagunas Cerda, the lawyer who helped file a lawsuit on behalf of Mogotavo, told me that, despite this victory, the villagers have no power to control the conversation about what happens to their land and no leverage with the government or the developers. Worse, the hold on construction was only temporary, and it expired in February 2012. As long as the Trust continued to host meetings between the two sides like the one at the Creel Best Western, they could build as they pleased. So the meetings where nothing was accomplished continued, and so did construction.

“A bunch of political bullshit” is what Randy called the meetings.

Complicating matters is that the Tarahumara don’t simply want to stop all development on Mogotavo. None of the villagers wants to be forced out of his or her home, but most would welcome more sources of income, and it’s been suggested that some tourist attractions would be fine as long as the Trust gave the village a percentage of the profits. Other villagers want nothing to do with such a scheme. Randy has culled the disparate ideas into a plan that allows some development projects to be built a respectful distance away from the village. His idea is to swap the garish golf courses and bungee jumps for groomed hiking paths and small sustainable cabins. If he had his way, Mogotavo would be designated as the villagers’ private property, to be used or preserved as the Tarahumara see fit.

For its part, the Trust has repeatedly denied that development would affect the Tarahumara and claimed that the villagers will benefit from increased tourism because they’ll sell more of their trinkets. But after the new train station was built, the Tarahumara were barred from setting up booths or selling inside. The state Ministry of Economy’s head of legal services told me that the Trust would not comment, “as we have in the past accommodated interviews from foreign media, only to find the actual report to be a biased account of Mr. Gingrich’s allegations.”

Then, using opaque wording, the head of legal services suggested I trade him information about Tierra Nativa in exchange for answers to my questions. I respectfully declined.

The Tarahumara are known for their great long-distance running ability, and they’ve run from nearly every threat to their land. So when they protested against the real estate developers in Chihuahua city it didn't come naturally to them.

Inside the Government Palace of Chihuahua is a mural of Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico’s answer to George Washington, who helped start the war for independence against the Spanish. Hidalgo fomented the mostly peasant-based rebellion largely because of the Spanish rulers’ neglect and mistreatment of the poor. For his efforts, Hidalgo was killed by a firing squad in the city of Chihuahua, so the palace now hosts his shrine.

Last winter, about a hundred farmers and ranchers rode horses for days to the palace to demonstrate against crooked government dealings over their water rights. Others came to call attention to the drug-war deaths sweeping the state (Chihuahua is home to Ciudad Juárez) and the shoddy and corrupt police work that’s led to fewer than 5 percent of the homicides being solved.

Protesters brought a brass band, and around 500 people in total shouted along to the music beneath the governor’s balcony at the palace. When this failed to attract enough attention, some passionate demonstrators stormed the building on horseback. Their animals pissed in the atrium, leaving golden pools beneath the mural of Hidalgo.

On the perimeter, maintaining a leery distance, huddled the Tarahumara of Mogotavo. Randy had helped organize the demonstration partly to draw attention to their cause, and 50 of them had dutifully shown up. Amid the dusty tans and denims worn by the protesting farmers, the Tarahumara women looked like flower-patterned peacocks. A few villagers clutched a cloth banner on which they’d painted a paragraph explaining their plight; it was nearly impossible to read as it folded upon itself in the wind. Randy dashed back and forth from the Tierra Nativa office, carrying flyers and posters and shouting for the Tarahumara to raise them high.

For the Tarahumara, the protest was a completely new concept, and they weren’t particularly good at drawing attention to themselves. But after centuries of running from encroaching greed, they were finally sticking up for themselves—Miguel Cruz Moreno, Mogotavo’s tribal governor, even delivered a speech on stage in front of the entire protest.

Miguel seemed uncomfortable, though, when a woman handed him the microphone. He slid his hand in his jeans pocket. His face disappeared in shadow under his baseball cap. As he scanned the crowd, he seemed to shrink.

“They continue to take advantage of the land,” he said in a weary voice. “We have to be in the fight.”

The view from Mogotavo.

In the months after I left, Randy said the state police banged on Tierra Nativa’s door and demanded to look through his files.

“I conceded when they pointed automatic weapons at my head,” Randy wrote to me, adding that the state returned the files and nothing more came of it.

Randy said the Trust appealed the judge’s order to consult with the Tarahumara about their relocation. If it’s overturned, the villagers, too, will appeal. Meanwhile, the Trust has built a metal stage on the mesa, presumably to entertain future tourists.

When I last spoke to him, Randy believed that the Tarahumara would win the right to stay in Mogotavo now that more local organizations and the Mexican media have raised awareness about their plight.

But what will Mogotavo look like if the Copper Canyon theme park sprouts around it? And even if the Tarahumara win some concessions from the developers in this battle, have they already lost the war?

A century ago, Karl Lumholtz visited a very different land. The views were as majestic then as they are now, and the Tarahumara lived in comparable conditions, but when I read Unknown Mexico, one line in particular jumped out at me: “In the country of the [Tarahumara],” Lumholtz wrote of the terroritory where he stood, “that is to say, the State of Chihuahua…”

Weston Phippen is a journalist currently writing for the Tampa Bay Times. Follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Penelope Gazin

Everyone knows the moment or month or era when life happened, all at once, and established some set point of desire or values or best-ever happiness. Flash-flooded with detail, and then flash-frozen in time, it’s usually a quick, early thing: an especially rad summer, maybe, or a singular, sparkler-in-the-dark love. For me, it was my first three months of work. (I’m the worst?) Everything that comes before doesn’t matter; everything that comes after is not so much compared with it (because nothing can compare) as informed by it, forever and always.

There are biological and age-related reasons for these fast-and-hot epochs, and that they usually happen so early, before anything else gets figured out, feels like a gnarly trick. A particularly cruel and punishing strand of nostalgia is assigned and attached to these mega-specific moments, which means that other eras, even the amazingly idyllic ones, never feel as… much. If you were deep into Facebook or some other searchable record at the time of your personal flash flood, then it’s probably extra brutal for you, and guh, I’m sorry. The inevitability of remembering parts of youth as flares in a cold, black sky really means that, by the time participatory and for-real life starts, there has already been some profound but invisible loss.

I rewatch The Hills to work through, and maybe get over somehow, the effects of this kind of loss. For me, it’s a perfect, if elevated, proxy of my own era of sunlit rosebud gathering. I barely ever watched the show during its original run because, at that time, a posse of kids who took clubbing really seriously wasn’t interesting to me (which is cute, because during this time of my life I took going to shows in garbagey bars really seriously; if you were 23 then, all it really came down to was whether your sequins were ironic or not).

The Hills was a hothouse of future nostalgia for its total nonspecificity: Aside from the LA-ness of it all (luxury SUVs direct from the car wash, etc.), the show was so broadly about everyday origin stories of friendship and love and jobs that its themes drew a wide circle around MTV’s entire demographic. The Hills revolves around its women, who move between shabby-chic shared apartments, barely-there jobs and formal-shorts internships, dates with their trainers, and clubs, with Cabo and Costa Rica interspersed. The show became especially mythical (and, yeah, this statement will probably be controversial for LC-heads) when the dark-blond, tall-poppy centerpiece of the show, Lauren Conrad, left. Remaining were girls who were exclusively and explicitly about “the best time of their lives,” with sunset-BBQ cheering, deeply fraught breakups, and friendship fights.

What other show, or what other entity, has been so available for the projection of anyone’s pre-adult nostalgia? The Hills did not make its drama out of plot twists or calculated misunderstandings, the stuff of most TV programming that is about the same parts of life. Instead it distilled—and then amplified—the existing, ready-made drama of being alive and 20-ish or whatever, hanging out with your friends every single day and night, as if they’re oxygen, until, slowly or suddenly but always agonizingly, you just don’t anymore. I don’t know whether The Hills was hyperrealism as TV, but it wasn’t “reality television” as we knew or now know it.

Watching the show is like a salve, a Crayola-bright and comfy therapy that makes me feel closer to, and less reliant on, my own individual but hardly unique halcyonathon of riding bikes and driving cars and playing games and talking eeeeendlessly with and at my friends. I know that all of it is totally unremarkable, elevated only because it’s mine, just as The Hills feels unremarkable and elevated only because it’s theirs (and also because of its soundtrack, which offers a second, separate punch of nostalgia). Watching identical emotions played out by blonder, glossier similars recasts the experience itself—and the subsequent loss of it—as something else, as something so common and, yeah, mythical, that the attendant alone-feelings just wear themselves out. They seem, I don’t know, cute now, and not so tragic, because I’ve seen them through a prism of high ponytails and beach houses and sidewalk confrontations. That loss—still sticky and gnawing on a bad day—is most often just information on what I loved, what I once had, and what it is I should find and make for myself again, in a real and adult way.

More of Kate’s Li’l Thinks can be found on Twitter.

Archaeologists have long known you can learn heaps about a culture from its trash, and the Los Angeles street couch is no exception. These artifacts say more about us than just laziness. They tell stories of butts and passion and bad television, maybe even birth and death.

Pay enough attention, and you’ll start to realize these couches fit into certain categories, even though they won’t fit into your compact car. Pay enough attention, and a taxonomy appears.

The Cushion-Less Couch

This is the most common species of Los Angeles street couch, and all sofas without attached cushions meet this fate within a few hours. Those cushions might as well be currency for the homeless, and once they’re stripped, the couch is guaranteed a long life on the curb without any takers.

The Whole Living Room on the Curb

Nothing quite says “forceful eviction” like an entire living room chucked onto the sidewalk. Unlike your regular street couch sightings that tend to happen towards the end of the month, the whole-living-room-on-the-crub can be seen almost any time. 

The Toilet

Sometimes people take shits on couches. These people are not nice people.

The See-Through Sofa

Western philosophy has the watchmaker analogy, which can be briefly summarized as: “If you find something that looks intentional, someone probably did it on purpose.” Charles Darwin blew that theory out of the Pacific, but some street couches seem arranged just so. This particular example was found on Beverly, nowhere near an actual residence.

The Modernist Sculpture

A close cousin of the See-Through Sofa, the Modernist Sculpture is a particular breed of street couch where someone took an extra second to arrange the parts in an aesthetically pleasing way. Who are these anonymous artists? And why are they blocking the fire lane?

The Flipped Couch

Just like abstract expressionism is known for its emotive gestures, flipped couches bear the mark of aggressive discard. You can feel the frustration of the two people who lugged this couch out to the street. The pillows would’ve toppled off immediately.

The Lone Cushion

This anomaly cannot be explained by traditional archeological analysis. Couches without cushions are everywhere, but cushions without couches are a much rarer sight. What happened here? As with the collapse of the Maya, we may never know the complete answer.

The Graffiti Canvas

Street art can last much longer on a curbside sofa than it would’ve on a wall. No one buffs a couch. The city’s mural laws do not apply.

The Season Greeting

Classic broken windows theory: Rubbish begets rubbish, and street couches are magnets for other lazy dumpers. You’ll find Christmas trees next to couches well into March, proving once again that Los Angeles really doesn’t understand seasons.

The Keeper

Welcome to El Dorado. Mint condition couches are almost exclusively pleather with attached cushions. There’s no other way they could withstand the elements and still look this good. You’ll want to spray them down with all-purpose cleaner before bringing them inside, because you never know. You really never know.

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The Cinnamon Club's "Bombay Burner"

Food snobs always moan about English curry. "Tikka masala doesn’t even exist in India!" they cry. And so what? Neither do social equality or traffic laws. For better or for worse, the English "curry night" has now become an institution in its own right—a beery show of bravado that's a bit like the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter but with more football songs and embarrassed women.

However, Britain's bastardization of Indian cuisine recently came back to bite me. I'd got in touch with the Cinnamon Club in central London because I wanted to try the "Bombay Burner"—their own creation and apparently the hottest curry in the world.

With the dish sitting in front of me, my eyes were streaming before I'd even picked up a fork.

Vivek Singh

I say it's "apparently" the hottest curry because it's almost impossible to measure the overall heat of a composite cooked dish, as Vivek Singh, creator of the Bombay Burner, explained to me.

The curry consists of minced lamb stuffed into 24 halves of the hottest scotch bonnets you can find outside of the Caribbean, and blended with a combination of other chilis, including habanero, jalapeño, bird’s eye, Thai green and the Dorset Naga, a sub-strain of the Bhut Jolokai and up there with the hottest in the world.

I could try to work out the overall level on the Scoville scale, but the bottom line is that this was a plate of fucking hot chilis, stuffed with even hotter chilis and slathered in chili sauce. You'd be hard pressed to find something spicier outside of a can of pepper spray.

The chefs coughed and spluttered after checking the smallest bite of the curry for seasoning, which wasn't a particularly promising sign for the wellbeing of my digestive tract.

I had to sign a disclaimer stating that I understood the risks associated with eating the Bombay Burner and was doing so at my own volition. I'm not sure how well it'd stand up in a court of law if I was killed but it certainly added to the sense of ceremony.

I didn't really have a game plan, so opted to handle the challenge with a short burst of speed eating, figuring I could knock back all of the stuffed chilis before the spice caught up with me.

I was wrong; turns out trying to solve this with tactics was like trying to tactically approach a swimming pool full of burning oil. After just two half chilis, I was already struggling; the heat was so intense that I could feel it in my hands and face as much as my mouth.

The chemical that gives chilis such a fierce heat is capsaicin, a substance so potent that – when used to make pepper spray—causes temporary blindness in protesters who've become a little too human rights-y for the police to handle with batons and shields alone.

Just as I was beginning to face up to the physical strain of my dinner, the more transcendental effects of the capsaicin began to take hold. Self-styled "chili-heads" often describe a mildly euphoric endorphin rush brought on by substantial chili ingestion. There was nothing euphoric about my experience; it felt more like I was K-holing in a house fire.

But, unwilling to throw in the towel, I picked up my fork and stab-chew-swallowed until the plate was clear.

Molten tears and glowing lips aside, it was a delicious curry. The general rule behind a dish this intense is to create something that still hits all the flavor marks you'd expect, otherwise why not just serve up a plate of Nagas and be done with it?

Unfortunately, the chefs weren't satisfied with my completion of the dish, so brought me out a plate of Nagas, which were stuffed with the same vicious blend of chillies that make up the Bombay Burner.

This second serving didn't bother with the courtesy of trying to provide any flavor marks—it just destroyed my taste buds and set fire to my tongue.

After two mouthfuls I threw in the towel, drained a couple of lassis and tried to focus on blander, happier times. Still, Vivek said that 400 people have tried the Bombay Burner and of those, I was now one of only five who'd been able to finish it. I didn't think I'd done too badly.

A few hours later, that warm glow of pride gave way to something else entirely. What started as a slight rumble grew steadily more violent, and by the time I got home my stomach sounded and felt like a washing machine full of spanners.

I turned to an age-old remedy for extinguishing spice, which—on reflection—may not have been the best decision. I don't know if you've ever drunk four pints of milk in one hour, but it doesn't exactly make for a settled stomach.

As is often the case with curry, the heat unfortunately remained intact throughout the entire digestion process. Later that evening, I relived all the fun of the afternoon, only this time (luckily) without any of the waiting staff there to witness my pain.

I really don't recommend you try the Bombay Burner. But you should definitely order it, then duck out and let your friends have a go.

Follow Mitch Syrett on Twitter.