Here's how we're celebrating Mexican New Yorkers this week for Cinco de Mayo
Growing up, I saw a holiday that was supposed to celebrate Mexican-American identity as one that turned our culture into an opportunity to sell discounted margaritas. Don't get us wrong, we love a good party (and occasionally, a great drink), but Mexican-Americans have a lot more to offer. To me, the power in New York's Mexican community is that we've managed to find pride and joy in our heritage in spite of messaging about our communities being filled with drug dealers and currently, a criminal presence to be purged from our borders.
What most don't realize is that you can't get rid of us because we're everywhere, even when you don't realize it. There are more than 330,000 Mexicans in New York, and we all have a different story to tell. We've managed to break out of every box we've been placed in—Now, we're just waiting for everyone else to notice.
Last year, we highlighted prominent New York Mexicans through our Cinco to Celebrate editorial package, in which we asserted the importance of New York's Mexican community as a force that deserves to be recognized, appreciated and ultimately, platformed. This year we're doing that again, but bigger: Through more features, we want to show that there're infinite ways Mexicans show up in New York culture, sometimes in ways you don't expect. Whether they're playing hard techno behind the decks at Basement; photographing covers for your favorite magazine; or being big time influencers on TikTok, they're all shaping the future of our city.
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an hour ago
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The Daughter of Time was worth the wait
That it has taken its sweet time getting here cannot be denied, but, at last, it has happened. More than 70 years after the novel by Josephine Tey became an overnight sensation in 1951, a stage adaptation of The Daughter of Time has arrived in the West End. Voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association back in 1990, The Daughter of Time is Tey's most unusual but brilliant detective story. It's her most unusual because its sees her Inspector Alan Grant – the central character in five of her detective stories – solving a crime from his hospital bed while recovering from a broken leg. And it's arguably her most brilliant because the crime he solves is one of British history's coldest and most high-profile cases – who murdered the Princes in the Tower in 1483. Yet while it's a brilliant book, because most of the action happens either inside Grant's head or in his hospital room, it has probably been judged undramatisable – until now. Playing at the Charing Cross Theatre just off Villiers Street, American playwright M. Kilburg Reedy's stage adaption takes Tey's classic and serves it up with a leavening Shakespearian twist. And what a historical tour de force it is. If you don't know your 15th-century history or House of York genealogy, you certainly will do after an evening here (the programme helpfully includes a family tree). We begin with Grant, who believes he can discern an individual's character through their face, so when his friend – glamorous actress Marta Hallard (played to the nines by Rachel Pickup) – brings him a selection of historical pictures to peruse, he becomes obsessed by the portrait of Richard III. This man doesn't resemble the devious hunchback of history who schemed his way to the throne and then had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London. If anything he looks cautious, thinks Grant (played with great bravura by Rob Pomfret) – sober, decent, more suited to the bench than the dock. 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Of course, since it's a dramatisation there are deviations from the original. First, Reedy has taken the implied romance between Grant and Marta Hallard from the book and turned it into a full-blown subplot, one which turns – irony of ironies – on an act of deception that could have graced the pages of a Shakespeare comedy. This however fits remarkably neatly with another change introduced by Reedy, which is to use a Shakespearian actor, Simon Templeton (played brilliantly by Noah Huntley), to give voice to the Tudor 'case' against Richard III. And it works. While Tey's original dialogue is flawless – and Reedy used as much of it as she could, she says – there is so much more to the play, and many more laughs than one would have expected too (thanks not least to the nurses played by Hafsa Abbasi and Janna Fox). For fans of the book, the most significant change to the story comes in the selection of the killer of the young princes. 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'Truth is the daughter of time, not authority,' is the Francis Bacon quote that inspired the title. Time will tell if this is the play that finally gets Richard III off the historical naughty step. The Daughter of Time is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 13 September.
