Moctezuma ordered his special chair. Pedro Páramo, in Juan Rulfo’s award winning novel sat upon one. Both men enjoyed equipales, the rustic leather furniture found everywhere in Mexico. Equipales are still hand-manufactured in many parts of the country. However in Zacoalco de Torres, a small town south of Guadalajara, the tradition dates back to Pre-Hispanic times. By the […]
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When Miguel Angel Martínez attended a photography class nearly a decade ago at the Universidad de Guadalajara (Guadalajara University), he suddenly knew that he had found his calling. A student in the university’s Escuela de Artes Plásticas (School of Plastic Arts), Martínez had been immersed in a world of painting and drawing. But when he […]
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Art is a necessity and as such, it is important not just in our personal lives, but is also the reflection of a society’s reality. If you are ever wandering around the streets of Guadalajara, Mexico, you may just stumble upon a larger than life young woman smiling down at you, her naked body partially […]
Continue ReadingMany of the things we take for granted today didn’t exist in the last century. A case in point is the railroad from Manzanillo to Guadalajara. The grand celebrations for the inauguration of this line, completed in 1908, were among the finest ever seen in Colima. The Mexican President of the time, Porfirio Diaz, attended […]
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We were snapping wedding photos in the atrium of the church – that’s the big square in front of old Mexican churches where the Indians gathered to hear Mass – when the “next” bride and her wedding party arrived and politely shooed our party away. We couldn’t complain. “Our” bride had shooed off a “previous” […]
Continue ReadingI hadn’t realized how much help an escribano might be. An escribano – sometimes called evangelista – is one of those fellows who works at a typewriter under the downtown arches. And I found out some things about those arches, too. I had a form to fill out for the Mexican government. It was long, with a lot of lines. Worse, […]
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Visitors – even those who come regularly – will always find something they haven’t seen before by taking long strolls in Guadalajara’s mansion area. Hungry? That’s where the best restaurants are. Blossoming out in bright yellows, whites, greens and even a few blues, the area sparkles monthly with recent changes. Old homes suddenly become visible […]
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It was like following three battleships. The shoppers rolled away like bow waves before the three “cargadores” who churned toward them with two hundred pounds of produce on each of their hand carts. “Aguas, ahi va el golpe!” – watch out, here comes a hard knock! – the warning cry scattered people out of the exit aisle of […]
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As I walked through the gardens of La Nueva Posada, my eyes were riveted on the young indigenous girl seated on the garden wall. Her vivid yellow skirt and blue top reminded me of our magazine’s masthead. To the Huichols, an eclipse is the symbol of a new era. For the Huichol, indigenous people of […]
Continue ReadingBy mid-October, everything was done, I was packed and ready to leave. I placed the cat carrier on the front seat, hugged my friends as they warned me again that I would surely be raped and pillaged, climbed behind the wheel and began my trek to my new life in Mexico. This trip had actually […]
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