To the charreada with stars in her eyes
"There is a sensitive filament in our beings, which responds to Mexican music…. To the sight of a horse well ridden, to the spectacle of a bull skillfully lassoed…. All of us, a...
View ArticleYour own celebration of the Day of the Dead
A few months ago I received an email request from a small town in Texas. The writer Ray and his fiance wanted my guidance in celebrating the Day of the Dead. My answer was - celebrate it in your own wa...
View ArticleA gift for giving: The mandy Man of Mata Ortiz
Juan Mata Ortíz is a small village of potters, farmers and cowboys in Northern Chihuahua. About 30 years ago, an unschooled artistic genius, Juan Quezada, taught himself how to make ollas, eart...
View ArticleLife and music in Guanajuato
The city of Guanajuato is nestled in a sort of steep basin in the Sierra Madre Mountains and spreads up around the center of the basin. Imagine a huge, terraced rice paddy such as we've seen in photos ...
View ArticleGuanajuato's sonic landscape
Sometime during my first month in Guanajuato, the idea floated into my head of writing an article about the sonic landscape of the city. This of course includes a great deal of music, since it resounds...
View ArticleThe Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato
Guanajuato is, and has been for a long time, a centre of culture and education. In one way or another, it has always been prosperous, either through the richness of its farmland or its mines. There was...
View ArticleCantinflas, the castillo and ponche in the plaza
As the evening mass ended, the huge colonial doors of Santa Maria Magdalena swung open. People swarmed down the church stairs into the plaza. I moved along with the crowd to a wrought iron bench....
View ArticleMexicans: Changing The Eastern Oregon Perspective
Large families, devout Catholics, modest clothing, very poor - these are some of the common preconceived notions about Mexicans from a rural eastern Oregon perspective. However, such a view is limiting...
View ArticleMexican Mornings: Essays South of the Border by Michael Hogan
Here's an interesting and entertaining collection of essays, mainly about Mexico, like "The Crawling Things of Paradise", a small tribute to all the crawling, flying, buzzing, poisonous, and...
View ArticleThere is no such thing as a bullfight
From the outside, this bullring resembles nothing so much as a red erector-set construction but inside, it is a concrete-stepped cone funneling down to the sand, on which are painted two white rings, o...
View ArticleTears from the Crown of Thorns: The Easter Passion Play in San Miguel de Allende
"People unfamiliar with the Latin culture are curious, confused, and sometimes repulsed by the emphasis on suffering in religious figures. During Easter in North America, the focus is on the...
View ArticleCreations In Silver - By Dona Eva Martinez
The designs of Doña Eva Martinez are mostly 18th and 19th century with some pre-hispanic symbolism, predominantly earrings. They are of pure silver and treated to give an antique finish. The designs a...
View ArticleAgave Marias: Border Crossers, Boundary Breakers by the Lake Chapala Women...
Here's an unusual volume with ten individual authors, each of whom is independent of the other nine except for the fact they all reside - either full or part-time - in the Lake Chapala area of Mexico....
View ArticleQueen of the South by Arturo Perez Reverte
The story line concerns a young Mexican girl, Teresa Mendoza, 23 years old, who is in love with a Chicano Cessna pilot who flies cocaine and hashish from Colombia to locations in Texas. It's a...
View ArticleThe Guaymas Chronicles: La Mandadera by David E. Stuart
Although it's about Mexico, this one starts off in Ecuador in the 1960s where the author was doing doctoral fieldwork for a dissertation on haciendas in that country. His work took him to a remote...
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Pilgrimage with La Virgen de Zapopan
This is an account of the annual procession of La Virgen de Zapopan from te Cathedral in Guadalajara to her home in the Basilica de Zapopan, as experienced in the early 1940s. The procession always...
View ArticleWhere Divergent Religious Customs Merge: Death Of An Infant In Oaxaca
Between the birth and the death came a crazy-quilt of only-in-Mexico experiences that resonated with my memories Daniel Pérez González was a beautiful baby. His parents Flor and Jo...
View ArticleSpeaking of Mexico
There is nothing that can compare with the sounds, tastes, and delights of Mexico. Many words have passed through many lips about Mexico, from Herb Alpert to Erik Estrada -- some humorous, some poignan...
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Washing Dishes in the Ancient Village / Lavando platos en el antiguo pueblo:...
A little over a year ago, I was searching for a title to pull these short poems together. Enedina stepped out to wash dishes in the cold water of the worn concrete tank immediately behind the house....
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US postage stamps and Tijuana, Mexico's Seabiscuit connection
In 1934 during the depths of the Great Depression, horse trainer Tom Smith was living out of a stall at Mexico's Agua Caliente racetrack in Tijuana. Flat broke, Smith shared the stall with Noble...
View ArticleSteinbeck's Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck penned his famous book, Tortilla Flat, in 1935, and apparently never considered Hollywood's casting choices when it was made into a film in 1942. If he had, he would've fallen flat himse...
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Maya Doomsday
I'm sick and tired of hearing disagreements between the U.S.A. and Mexico. First, there's the emigration thing with fences and coyotes and blustering politicians; second is the drug thing where the...
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Ask an old gringo about Mexico education, politics and miracle cures
For some strange reason, an unusual assortment of questions about Mexico education appeared in my e-mailbox. It could be the world has heard about De Panzazo, the new documentary loaded with enough...
View ArticleMexican photographer Enrique Metinides: The man who saw too much
Exploring Enrique Metinides' images is to immerse yourself in those depths of humanity awash in raw emotion, as the 79-year-old photographer has captured some of the most poignant moments to unfold on ...
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Mexican Kaleidoscope - Myths, Mysteries & Mystique. A review of Tony Burton's...
Tony Burton’s recently published Mexican Kaleidoscope is a whirlwind trip through some of the underpinnings of Mexican culture, told with humour, affection and well-documented facts. This readable...
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