Los Angeles Times Videos

Amanda takes you on a guided tour of the L.A. Times book festival, watch out Marty McFly...he's around here somewhere!

Mexico City is currently in the grip of a swine flu outbreak. Schools, museums and theaters were closed by the Government Friday. But the illness isn t just affecting people s health it s also taking its toll on local businesses.

The Mexican Institute of Sound is the official name of the one-man electronica musician Camilo Lara. We spent some time with him in his Mexico City studio as he prepares to play the Coachella festival in California.

The El Rosario butterfly sanctuary in the Mexican state of Michoacan plays host to some of the millions of monarch butterflies that migrate south from the United States and Canada to forests north-west of Mexico City every year.

Some of Mexico City s graffiti talent got together in March to enjoy a visit from graffiti documentarian Henry Chalfont, and to let loose on bare walls.This video was created for the Los Angeles Times.

In February, New York-based photographer Noah Sheldon came to Mexico to carry out a portrait-photography concept at the Yautepec Gallery in the trendy La Roma neighborhood. He invited Mexico's masses into his studio, and after two weeks, the results went on display.

Pasteleria Suiza in the trendy Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City put its own spin on the traditional Rosca de Reyes. The bakery stuffs the oval-shaped cake, eaten by Mexicans on January 6th to remember the Three Wise Men, with a delicious, sweet cream. Hundreds of Mexicans flock to the shop to buy the Roscas, which are then taken home to be shared with family and friends.

Traffic, naked protesters and street vendors are some of the biggest daily headaches for Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard.As Ken Ellingwood reported over the weekend:"Marcelo Ebrard has turned this balmy city into an ice skaters' wonderland. He's conjured sandy beaches far from the sea. He's made hordes of annoying hawkers vanish from the historic main plaza."In nearly two years as mayor of Mexico's capital, Ebrard has shown a bent for splashy initiatives to ease the strains of daily life in a huge and unruly city. But the question is whether the leftist mayor can succeed against the city's deep problems: legendary traffic, kidnappings, poverty, eye-stinging smog, water shortages, an aging subway system and crooked police. It is a tall order."If he does, the 49-year-old Ebrard could be a contender for the country's top office. A wonkish technocrat with years of working the halls of Mexico City's government, he has signaled his presidential aspirations, though the election is four years away."

Rodrigo Sonck realized that he had to do something about his coke habit when he took a beating from drug thugs. We caught up with him at an addiction recovery center in Huitzila, in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, where he had been for a month.Married with two children, Sonck and around 25 other men live together in the center and adhere to a strict routine of household chores and meetings. This video accompanies this LATimes report by Ken Ellingwood on the state of drug addiction in Mexico: "Once mainly a smuggling corridor for drugs heading to the United States, Mexico is grappling with the effects of a fast-rising addiction rate as relatively cheap versions of cocaine and methamphetamine find a market south of the border. Experts say the supply has increased as U.S. enforcement on the border has made it more difficult to move illegal drugs north. A recent government survey of drug use shows Mexicans are trying drugs, and getting hooked, earlier in life and more frequently. The number of people who said they had tried drugs rose by more than a fourth, to 4.5 million, since the last survey in 2002. More than 460,000 Mexicans are addicted to drugs, a 51% jump from six years ago, according to preliminary results of the survey released last month."

Drug violence is Mexico is soaring. Crimes against the public are at a high, with kidnappings increasing and people living in a state of insecurity. But corruption within the Mexican police is rife, and inefficiency is the rule, rather than the exception.This video was made to go with this Los Angeles Times report on police reform: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/latinamerica/la-fg-mexcops15-2008sep15,0,5768391.story

Certain images of migrants almost have become clich s in our globalized world of perpetual human movement: Mexican families sloshing across the Rio Grande in the dead of night, young African men huddled over dull campfires in Spanish detainee camps. But other, less commonplace images challenge preconceived ideas of what it means to be an "undocumented worker," "illegal alien" or simply a person with no fixed home or identity, stranded between shifting borders. As illustrated by Laberinto de Miradas (Labyrinth of Glances), a provocative photo and video exhibition that's on display here at the Cultural Center of Spain through August, immigration today wears many faces. It's a middle-class Argentine woman, driven into exile by her country's 2001 peso collapse. A Cuban man who bears the scars of jail time served for trying to flee to Miami. Hundreds of Brazilians of mixed ethnicities, body types and attitudes, mostly economic refugees from other parts of the country, all crammed into a ramshackle S o Paulo apartment building, striving to co-exist.

The focus of the latest film from LA-based Mexican director Patricia Riggen is torn from today s headlines and deals with the issue of families separated by borders.The Los Angeles Times talked with director Patricia Riggen and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, about making the film and Mexicans in LA. This film appeared with this story on LATimes.com

Yesterday hundreds of tractors and thousands of people from rural Mexico came to Mexico City to protest against the lifting of trade restrictions on agricultural commodities like corn, rice and oats. The farmers say lifting these restrictions will put them out of work, because they won t be able to compete with powerful U.S. agri-businesses, and they re pressuring Mexico s government to renegotiate portions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada. We were there, catching it on film for the Los Angeles Times.

Mexico City's Zocalo, or massive central plaza, is the capital's ground zero of civic life. It's where Mexicans come to govern, pray, protest -- and this month, would you believe it, to ice skate?