Mexico Notes – part 10 Narrow, serpentine streets. Old world baroque buildings. Steep hills – shoehorned with vivid-colored casas. I have dropped into a spectacular place – a cross between San Francisco and Paris. Journal, June 9 We skirt Morelia, cross the four-lane cuota to Mexico City and head north into lake-lands, Guanajuato-bound. Guanajuato comes from […]
Continue ReadingI used to believe that I was one of those people who had a knack for learning languages. I must have picked up this idea from my mother when one day during my formative years, I overheard her saying “She’s good at languages”. Being the only child that I am, I assumed that “she” meant […]
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Mary and I wanted Ann and Ron to see a little bit more of Mexico, so Mary did some research on the Internet and picked out the town of Uruapan as a road trip destination. I don’t think that Ann and Ron were used to traveling by car at ninety miles an hour, but they […]
Continue ReadingSince the signing of NAFTA, an increasing emphasis has been placed on the importance of knowing English in Mexico. And not surprisingly, English teaching has become a profitable business. Unfortunately, however, while there are many professional schools, there are also many overnight ventures offering little added value for businessmen or corporate employees. So, Business Mexico […]
Continue ReadingOn Monday morning, the 13th of November, we picked up the permit to import our household goods into Mexico from the Mexican consulate in Dallas. The drive down to Laredo was uneventful except that we noticed several pickup trucks towing a second truck behind them all headed south. One truck was even pulling two […]
Continue Reading(While traveling to the Yucatan Peninsula on vacation in 1985, the author and her husband meet an adventurous contractor who offers to sell them a beachfront lot in Playa del Carmen. After accepting his offer, a series of bizarre events-including the Mexico government’s seizure of the land by eminent domain, the contractor’s financial crisis, and […]
Continue ReadingLarge families, devout Catholics, modest clothing, very poor – these are some of the common preconceived notions about Mexicans from a rural eastern Oregon perspective. However, such a view is limiting and hides the rich variety that abounds in the Mexican culture and among Mexicans from both the United States and Mexico. People who hold […]
Continue Reading(Originally published in somewhat different form in The Mexico City News, November, 1982) Eli was sick a lot in Oaxaca. The air of the city of Oaxaca in those days was fecalized. Many people there still don’t have toilets. They use their yards or vacant lots or — in really rural locations such as Zipolete […]
Continue ReadingFirst published in The London Observer/Guardian Foreign News Service Jan. 17, 2000 Anita Brown (my beautiful bride these twenty-two years) met a lady from Littleton, Colorado, on the way to downtown Cancun this morning. “Her daughter had the face of an angel,” she told me. “You think of someone like that lying in a pool […]
Continue ReadingWhen I tell my media friends that I am writing a book called “The Real Mexico”, they invariably act a bit dumbfounded and frequently ask how I can possibly know anything about the real Mexico if I’ve lived in Cancun since 1983, as if this resort city on the Mexican Caribbean were located in Brooklyn. […]
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