Watching Pablo Sleep
It's midmorning in Santa Lucía and Claire lies on Pablo's right side watching him sleep. He can't go to sleep unless she watches. This is his belief, and his beliefs infect her, fester like splinters ...
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Bound for Mexico, a short story
From the beginning it had all seemed too perfect, too unreal.
At first Vanessa thought it would be the perfect vacation: a full week on Mexico's Mayan Riviera, as the travel agent had called the...
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Three Tamales for the Señor Part Two
Michael Beauregard has retired from Denver to the Mexican village of Refugio de María, where he rents two upstairs rooms from the Widow García and her daughter, María Elena. With a busy career and even Internet technology behind him, Michael experiences a renewed energy as he becomes acquainted with his neighbors and reconnects with life's simpler pleasures.
read moreWhere Toucan Fly - A Short Story
The marimba band filled the breezy space with a rippling rhythm, a tropical river of notes and glissandos, bird-light tunes. Sancho responded to the music from home with a roll of the hips and shy smil...
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The Virgin dialogue - an excerpt from the book: Agave Marias
The objects in my house have become a form of dialogue between my housekeeper Yolanda and me. I put things in places where they are artistically pleasing to me. That is why the Virgin of Guadalupe has resided for a year in my bathroom, along with other sculptures and paintings of female forms.
But when I arrived home after a month in the States, I found my large terra-cotta Virgin moved to the small table below my entryway nicho. Around her were placed a few cacti in small pots that I'd had up in the nicho next to a grouping of stones, greenery and pre-Columbian replicas. Now the Virgin stood solidly in front of them, the nubs of white candles rising from attached candelabra on each side of her.
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The wedding - an excerpt from the book: Agave Marias
Some of us wondered how that wedding could be blessed by God. Was it really His will? The village padre said it was. No one dared ask why. That would just give him a chance to preach to us about the power of faith. And, after all, our good standing in the church means a lot to us. The church provides the major distraction in our tedious lives, giving us religious fiestas and processions, baptisms, weddings, first communions and funerals.
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Maid in Mexico - an excerpt from the book: Agave Marias
When I refer to "my Mexican maid," my Canadian friends cringe. I suspect they picture a stooped crone in a shawl, scrubbing my floors on her hands and arthritic knees. Lupita is young, a handsome woman with strong features, too strong to be described as pretty. She arrives for work wearing tight jeans and a sweatshirt, dons my Harrod's apron and sets to work. She has her own methodical approach - bleach in the toilet bowls, shower curtains tossed over the rods, laundry in the washing machine, efficient methods I never interfere with.
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Three señoras named Lola - an excerpt from the book Agave Marias
Two things the three señoras had in common were poverty and pain. Even their names, Dolores, meaning pains, seemed to cast a grim prognostication on their lives. Their informal names of Lola did nothing to lighten their load.
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The delivery - an excerpt from the book: Agave Marias
Giving birth is difficult enough with one woman involved; imagine when it takes ten. We conceived of this anthology in October of 2004. We had no instruction manual to follow, no physician to monitor our pregnancy, check our blood pressure, give us internal examinations or prepare us for delivery. How hard could it be?
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The Dark Side of the Dream by Alejandro Grattan-Dominguez
The story begins in 1941, at the time America went to war with Japan and Germany. It concerns the Salazar family, poor farmers in Chihuahua. The grandfather, Sebastian, knows he is dying and he advises the family to move to the United States. He reasons that because of the war the Americans will want lots of people to work in their country as their men go off to fight. Their farm is a ruin. Only expensive fertilizer could bring it back to life. And they don't have any money.
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Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico by David Lida
Lida's writing and his choice of material cast a powerful spell.
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Only Once In A Lifetime - A Novel by Alejandro Grattan
During the late 1970s, the first major Hispanic motion picture, Only Once in a Lifetime, premiered in Texas at the San Antonio Film Festival. The reaction was, according to the city s largest newspaper...
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The Stuff Of Dreams By Alejandro Grattan
Alejandro Grattan's latest novel is a rip-roaring adventure tale which swiftly takes the reader from the bright lights of Hollywood to the mysterious jungles of the Yucatan. The book is filled with int...
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Only Once in a Lifetime by Alejandro Grattan
Here's a story that takes in a complete life, from childhood well into adulthood, and from rags to riches. It's a story that is of interest to we residents in the Lake Chapala area as it starts out in Ajijic and covers a fair number of years there - or should I say here. On page one we encounter ten-year-old Francisco Obregón, a homeless barefoot orphan outside the Old Posada on the Ajijic waterfront. It's 1940 and Francisco is hustling for odd jobs and tips. It's the only way he can manage to survive.
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Breaking Even by Alejandro Grattan-Dominguez
"What Val saw as his long period of involuntary servitude was about to come to an end. In the prison movie parlance he liked to affect, he had done his 'hard time.' He had finally reached his eighteenth birthday, and Texas law entitled him to make his own decisions now." The time is 1955. Val has just graduated from high school - although barely. He's finally free to escape the tiny Texas town of Big Bend, which he detests, and go off to California. Val's mother, Guadalupe, is Mexican and his father, who has long since flown the coop, is Anglo, which at least makes Val part Mexican.
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Brain Surgeon by William Wallace and Memoirs of the Future by Eduard Prugovecki
This month's column is a little bit different as I'm not reviewing one particular book on or about Mexico. Rather, I'd like to take the opportunity to pay tribute to some local writers here in the Guadalajara/Lake Chapala area. I recently had the experience of reading and enjoying four books, all within a very brief time span, and then realized that all four were written by local writers.
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Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr
This is a novel about Richard and Sara Everton, a couple of Americans who choose to leave San Francisco and live in a small, remote Mexican village. Their purpose is to reopen a copper mine that was abandoned by Richard's grandfather fifty years ago in the Revolution of 1910. The novel depicts their arrival and their integration into Ibarra.
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The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
This, like its predecessor, All The Pretty Horses, is another coming-of-age story involving a young American in the border country between Mexico and New Mexico in the 1930s. Billy Parham is sixteen years old when he traps a wolf in New Mexico and decides to take the injured animal back across the border to its home. It’s an interesting journey.
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In amber: a tale of Mexican discovery
It was the scorpion in the amber that fascinated Linda most, at first. A four-inch, brownish nodule of Mexican amber from the great limestone flats in Chiapas, it lay on a bed of still bright marigold ...
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The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle
This isn't a book about Mexico. Rather, it's about Mexicans in California right now.
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The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes
The book consists of nine short narratives - stories, if you like - each one occurring in the hazy borderline between Mexico and America - what Fuentes chooses to call the crystal frontier.
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All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
You would be hard pressed to find a more Mexican novel than this one. Just about all of the action takes place in the state of Coahuila. I don’t particularly enjoy reading westerns but such is the power of McCarthy’s writing that I was drawn into those small researches simply to enhance my enjoyment of his book.
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Atticus: A Novel by Ron Hansen
Atticus Cody is a 67 year old Colorado rancher. He’s a very successful straight-shooting kind of guy. He has a son, Scott, who is a painter, evidently talented. He has gone to Mexico and is out of touch with his father. Atticus cares: Scott doesn’t seem to be concerned. When the story opens, Atticus has learned about Scott’s death, by suicide, in a place called Resurrección, near Cancun. Atticus goes to Resurrección to pick up his son’s body and return it to Colorado. There he meets up with the cast of characters who knew Scott, most of whom are, at best, hippies and bohemians, at worst, drifters and fugitives.
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Mexico Way by Robert Moss
Bob Culbertson, a Border Patrol chief, is chasing Mexican border crossers somewhere in Texas when a light aircraft in obvious difficulties flies overhead and then crashes in the scrub. Culbertson and his partner go to investigate and find two dead men and 40 or 50 bags of cocaine in the aircraft. One of the men has a satchel with a pouch in it. When he examines it, he finds a collection of government documents which he believes are CIA papers.
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