Gods, Gachupines and Gringos: A People's History of Mexico by Richard Grabman
Writing about writers: Puerto Vallarta and Jenny McGill
Jenny is a modest artist. She paints word pictures without fully realizing it.
Drama & Diplomacy in Sultry Puerto Vallarta is an insider view of a hot beach town in a less complicated time. Both are long lost, the simple village and the relative serenity.
The Jenny McGill story is even better than the book. She tells it like it is. If you ask enticing questions, you get exciting answers, about her 35 years in Mexico, about beauty and bandits, about Fourth of July parties and the fake gardener who fleeced her out of $35.
Even better is the tale of...
read moreSix degrees of separation: how a Mexican star became a Cajun legend
Even if you have never wondered what ties Mexico to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I'm going to tell you anyway. It begins with a poem.
Longfellow's epic 1847 poem, "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie," is the story of an Acadian girl, Evangeline Bellefontaine ("Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers"), her betrothed, Gabriel Lajeunesse ("a valiant youth, and his face, like the face of the morning"), and their agonizing separation when, in 1755, the British deported Acadians (Cajuns) from Nova Scotia in The Great Expulsion. ("… all your lands, and dwellings, and cattle of all kinds, forfeited be to the crown; and that you yourselves from this province be transported to other lands.") Gabriel was torn from Evangeline's side and crammed onto a ship bound for America, leaving her ashore, silently weeping. But not for long.
read moreA Michoacan tradition: the needlework artistry of Hermelinda Reyes
The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire by C. M. Mayo
Huichol art, a matter of survival: Part Four
US postage stamps and Tijuana, Mexico's Seabiscuit connection
© United States Postal Service, 2009