At ten in the morning the day was already hot enough to dry the tears on my face as I walked into San Juan Cosala to attend little Santiago’s funeral. His teacher and his six-year-old school friends filed slowly into the churchyard, many of the girls in white dresses, and all of the children looking […]
Continue ReadingBitter are the fruits they eat in Michoacán, black oval fruits the size of an olive, borne in the summer on the capelin tree. Bitter is the story told to me in a mountain pueblo in the northeast corner of the state. Juan Manuel told his story of machismo and the fate of his horse as we […]
Continue ReadingI will always be here. I send my spirit every night to guard you. We lie in bed listening to the tympani of rain on the tile roof and burrowing into each other’s warmth. My neighbors weren’t home when Jaime came to visit, so no one saw him. Secrecy wearies me. I fancy the scandal […]
Continue ReadingThat morning when Michael left his house on Miguel Blanco to head toward the tortillería on Constitución, on impulse he looked through the window of his little curb-parked 1996 Geo, only immediately to discover that during the night he had been robbed. Maps, manuals, insurance papers, were scattered across the seats. Alas, he at last had […]
Continue ReadingHow did Robert Mulligan find himself, in August, in a Mexican jungle, running a small flat-bottomed boat up a sleepy little river into the steamy interior, pointing out tiny alligators to the wives of two retired telephone executives from Detroit, Michigan? Three years ago when he left his tenured position teaching literature at a small […]
Continue ReadingImmediately after Ethel Chestnut chucked her old human-resources administrator job in Chicago, she began to sell almost everything. A few short weeks later she jumped on a plane and headed to the tropical mountains of southern Mexico, to Chapala, near Mexico’s largest lake, el Lago de Chapala. Ethel had passed through the town two years earlier […]
Continue ReadingTo Part One The previous night Michael had started carrying María Elena’s big metal pot of atole to the plaza as she walked beside him carrying her steamer of tamales. What a rich drink, he thought, made of that same corn dough they called masa and also of those curious little cones of piloncillo, a raw sugar, and of […]
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As Michael stepped off the bus at the edge of Refugio de María, he felt clean, enthusiastic, like a boy on a new adventure. He threw the straps of the large green pack over one shoulder and began trudging the dusty stones toward town. When he finally found a couple of rooms to rent for […]
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At age seventy-five, Peter Larson gave away or threw out most of his old life, packed up what was left into a few boxes, got into his old red Pontiac and drove south, to Mexico, to begin a new life. It was in late spring, toward the end of the dry season in the tropical […]
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Vanessa thought it would be the perfect vacation: a full week on Mexico’s Mayan Riviera, as the travel agent had called the Yucatan coast. The agent had suggested the small city of Campeche, stressing that it was a place not yet discovered by hordes of Americans, a pristine paradise a few hours south of Merida. […]
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