“¿Qué estás quemando?” (What are you burning?) I asked the curandero. The folk healer looked at me the way you’d look at someone asking a ridiculously obvious question. “Es copal,” he smiled in amused disbelief. My first week in Mexico City, wandering through Chapultepec Park, I stumbled on the Concheros dancers mid-performance—elaborate headdresses, ankle shells, […]
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On my first evening in San Miguel de Allende, my friends and I walked up Callejón Blanco, the street where they were renting a house for the winter, turning right on to Quebrada and then, crossing a bridge overlooking Templo de las Monjas, we turned again onto Umarán, heading towards the city’s main plaza It […]
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I am not an addict or so my dealer says. Because I can stop whenever I want. I probably won’t, but that’s a different story. Today, for example, is Friday. It would be ridiculous to quit right before the weekend, wouldn’t it? I blame Guadalupe or Lupe, as she prefers. The thirty-seven-year-old supplier has spent […]
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Almost a quarter of your skeleton lives in your feet. Fifty-two bones. Dozens of joints. They will carry you 75,000 miles over a lifetime, enough to circle the Earth three times and usually without complaint… usually. Yet we spend most of that time ignoring them. Not to mention what lies beneath them. The trouble is, […]
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Pan American Highway near Oaxaca © Tony Burton, 1981. The Pan American Highway is a dark asphalt ribbon. To the east and west, low brown hills rise in the distance. To the south, Oaxaca. To the north, Mexico City, many miles away. It’s quiet, deserted, nothing in sight but the jeep heading across open […]
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MexConnect’s founder, David McLaughlin (1946-2019), would have celebrated his 80th birthday on the 17th of this month. As we strive to live up the incredibly high standards he set for this website, we remember all the good times we shared in the old days—from hand coding thousands of articles and images to animated discussions about […]
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As I mounted my red, Honda SL 175 combination bike a cool drizzle sprinkled Mexico City. The city only had seven million inhabitants then, but still presented a puzzling maze my three week visit hadn’t deciphered. Today’s tourists complain about the lack of highway signs but there were even fewer in 1971. Two possible potholed […]
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Men are strange creatures. On the hazy fumes of a drunken evening, they will compete over anything: V8 vs. V6 engines, grill surface area, lawn stripes and, after sufficient cerveza, even personal appendage metrics. But in a brightly lit taquería, when the conversation behind me turned to hammocks, I couldn’t help overhearing. For research purposes, […]
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Airport Lounge (Villahermosa). Image (cropped): Vmzp85, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The First Class lounge floats like Olympus on the second floor at Benito Juárez Airport, a discrete distance above the multitude herding like hungry cattle on the concourse below. Inside, soft leather couches surround TV monitors offering fútbol and the latest […]
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When you say the word Mexico, something odd happens to the anglophone ear. The M leans in. The E lingers. Pressure builds. Anticipation hums, then release. To most, it’s just a word. To a neurodivergent nervous system, it’s the waiting before the jump. Arriving in Mexico can feel like a sensory freefall. It is a […]
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