Lloyd Mexico Economic Report May 2004

Good year for investment Business reputations Property as an investment Revival in maquiladora industry Power projects Walmart strides forward Low tech solution to city water woes DaimlerChrysler buses The housing boom – a special report More mortgages Low-income homes Luxury homes Single personal identity code? Tequila week Train to the airport? Mail boxes etc Popeye […]

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Tlalnepantla – the land in-between

Some time around the turn of the eleventh century indigenous tribes from the Valley of Anahuac trekked north and settled in the land that Franciscans, half a millennium later baptized, “Tlanepantla”. Today Tlanepantla thrives among Mexico’s largest populations, with nearly twelve million (12,000,000) inhabitants. Below the gray stones of Chiquihuite Hill, smelting, metalworking, machine-building, and […]

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Consumer protection in Oaxaca, Mexico: A case study

The Procuraduría Federal del Consumidor (PROFECO), Mexico’s Federal Office of Fair Trading, is the closest you can get to an American or Canadian style government administered consumer protection bureau and mediation facility. Its Oaxaca regional office is run in a relatively swift and efficient manner, meaning that it is extremely user friendly from the perspective […]

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Jacobo Angeles talks about his work, which is present in the Smithsonian Institute and Chicago's National Museum of Mexican Art. © Alvin Starkman 2008

Jacobo Angeles: A rich wood-carving tradition in Oaxaca, dating to pre-Hispanic times

Jacobo Ángeles’ work is prominently displayed in The Smithsonian, Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art, and elsewhere throughout the continent and further abroad, in museums, art colleges and galleries One would be hard-pressed to search the Americas and find creators of folk art with more form, symbolism and importance to the development and sustenance of […]

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Zumpango: the guardians of a forgotten cemetery

“Magic realism” describes a style of Latin American writing where dreams and reality meet on equal footing in worlds lying ephemerally in between, poised to subvert back to the norm the very instant a strange experience is realized. Writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez draw as much from the landscape […]

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Seen from the summit at Xochicalco, vistas of surrounding hills taper away in the shimmering heat. © Anthony Wright, 2009

Busting ghosts at Xochicalco, Morelos: A UNESCO World Heritage Site

These days, for some tourists, it seems that physical history, a sense of history, a sublimity of walking in the footsteps of the ancients by the light of nature itself, is not enough – one’s senses, incapable of an exercise of pure imagination, need to be kick-started into an appreciation of one’s surroundings. Flashing laser […]

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Bored passengers at a station stop on the Mexico City metro © Raphael Wall, 2013

Moving millions through Mexico City’s Metro

For big cities worldwide, transportation is a major issue. Regular streets, avenues and boulevards may not be sufficient for growing traffic levels, so new streets are constructed, old streets re-routed, and mass transit systems established. Since 1863, when the first subterranean railway was opened in London, many cities have opened completely new transit routes by […]

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Magueyes grow as tall as a man and are many times as wide. These grown in the state of Morelos, Mexico, outside Cuernavaca. © Julia Taylor, 2010

Tears of the maguey: Is pulque really a dying tradition?

A long time ago, before the Spaniards came and changed everything, the people of the Mexican highlands cultivated maguey plants. Like the people, the magueys are native to the cool, dry, high elevation climate. The plants grew well and were useful for many things. Today, the various varieties of these agaves are sometimes called “century […]

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Sexenios in a changing world: Mexican Presidents Lopez Mateos and Diaz Ordaz

In 1958, the year Adolfo López Mateos became president of Mexico, the world was relatively tranquil. The Korean War was over and Vietnam was in a lull between the defeat of the French in 1954 and the formation of the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) at the end of 1960. In France, Charles de Gaulle had […]

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