This Monday finds me in deep noodling, mainly on my Far West Texas book but also, Schritt für Schritt, my translation of Countess Paula Kollonitz’s memoir of her visit to Mexico in 1864.
Relatedly, herewith, from the archives (specifically, ye olde research blog Maximilian & Carlota ), are Henry R. Magruder’s woodcuts from his memoir of his visit some two years later: Sketches of the Last Year of the Mexican Empire. Magruder’s was one of the many memoirs that I read as part of my research into my novel based on the true story, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. Just as Kollonitz’s memoir has been bringing it all to mind so vividly, Magruder’s woodcuts provide a glimpse of the garden paradise that was once Mexico City— and so much more.
The illustrations are the author’s own woodcuts of five landscapes (Veracruz; Acasingo; Chapultepec; Tacubaya; Valley of Mexico;) and five portraits (Aguadors; Coal Bearers; Mexican; Ranchero; Tortilla Makers).
“In the course of the morning we entered the port of Vera Cruz, which town with its glittering Church-domes, dazzlingly white spires and many coloured houses, preseted from the distance the appearance of an eastern city. On nearer approach one is grievously disappointed. The scavaenger birds are protected and encouraged to frequent the place as they maintain the sanitary condition of the streets, they give a wierd appearance to the town and look like birds of ill omen, they fly all over Vera Cruz unmolested.”
“At eight in the evening we stopped at a village called “Acasingo” and heard that a diligence [stagecoach] had been plundered that morning, and if we persisted in continuing our journey that night, should certainly be attacked; what the crowd of Mexican standing around, and all talking at once, and not one of us understanding what was said, we foolishly allowed ourselves to be pursuaded by the rest of the travellers, to remain the night in the place, we alighted and before we had time to reconnoitre, the stage had driven off and we were forced to remain whether we would or not. On searching for an inn we were suprised to find that as Acasingo was not a regular halting place, such an establishment as an hotel did not exist; fortunately we found some people who offered us one large bedless room for our party; the apartment we had obtained must in former years have been very fine, the walls being still covered with traces of old frescoe paintings, it possessed a very fine balcony overlooking the “Plaza” or Square, which, although it may not even possess enough houses to surround it, every Mexican town contains. We found there were shutters, but no glass to the window, and were obliged to make up beds for the ladies on the chairs, the geltemen of the party sleeping on the floors…”
“From the entrance of the Church [Villa de Guadalupe] I had a view of the surrounding scenery which will never be obliterated from my mind, in one word it was gorgeous and magnificent. In the distance the fair Capital, its many spires and dome glittering in the midday sun, surrounded by the blue lakes, and the plains overgrown with the wierd looking Maguey plants; far away in the distance the beautiful snowy mountains, of which one never wearies, bounded one side of the valley, whilst on the other the park and grounds of the Emperor’s summer residence the famous Chapultepec stood in bold relief against the distant blue mountains…”
“The Paseo is about two miles in length— only the upper division of which is used by carriages the lower one being almost exclusively occupied by those on horseback. After leaving the crowded drive the road becomes pretty and is shady all the way, and the surrounding scenery most lovely, arriving at the end of the Paseo the rider finds a most romantic convent: “La Piedad,” the road here divides into two, branching off into different directions, one of which leads to Tacubaya and the other to San Angel a small village in the mountains.”
“The climate of the valley of Mexico may be likened to a perpetual spring, little rain falls except in the months of July, August and September, and then usually in the afternoon between two and five o’clock, exercise can always be taken in the mornings. Sometimes the showers or “Aguaseras” [sic] as they are called are so heavy, that in a few moments the streets are flooded and impassable unless on horseback or on the shoulders of the Indians who during the season make a business of vcarrying people.”
“The City of Mexico is supplied with water from the mountains by means of two grand aqueducts, which terminate in the town in large and very handsome fountains, whence the “Aguadors” [sic] fetch the water in their earthen vessels. These aqueducts are almost in ruins and greatly need repair for at intervals the water may be seen trickling through crevices.”
“These wretched indians are generally not overly clean, and if one comes into close contact with them, it is advisable on returning home to shake one’s coat.”
“The nearer we approached Puebla the more crowded grew the road, and I then for the first time observed the picturesque dress of the Mexican “Rauchiero” [sic] which is composed of yellow leather, elaborately embroidered with silver and gold; the seams of the trousers are decorated with a row of gold or silver buttons, the sleevs of the short and jaunty jacket being trimmed in the same style, over the shoulder hangs gracefully a “serape,” a kind of large scarf fenerally of white and red tho’ all colors may be seen, on the head an enormous “Sombrero” or hat with a large brim also enriched with silver and gold is worn; the Mexican men generally ride on horseback and have the most magnificent saddles, the pommels of which besides being high are of solid silver, exquisitely chased and engraved.”
“In the place of bread a cake called “Tortilla” is generally eaten, in reality it is the bread of the country, it is made of corn-meal mixed with water until it has the consistency of paste, which is pressed between the cook’s hands to flatten it and afterwards baked; it has little taste and is generally heavy.”
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. > For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here. P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.
The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, a newsletter.
OUR LOST BORDER Edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso Arte Público Press, Houston, Texas Trade paperback $19.95, March 30, 2013 ISBN: 978-1-55885-752-0
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal, 2013
Lurid television, newspaper stories, and cliché-ridden movies about Mexico abound in English; rare is any writing that plumbs to meaningful depths or attempts to explore its complexities. And so, out of a concatenation of ignorance, presumption and prejudice, those North Americans who read only English have been deprived of the stories that would help them see the Spanish-speaking peoples and cultures right next door, and even within the United States itself, and the tragedies daily unfolding because of or, at the very least kindled by, the voracious North American appetite for drugs. For this reason, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, a treasure trove of one dozen personal essays, deserves to be celebrated, read, and discussed in every community in North America.
Not a book about Mexico or narcotrafficking per se, Our Lost Border is meant, in the words of its editors, Chicano writers Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, “to bear witness,” to share what it has been like to live and travel in this region of Mexico’s many regions, and what has been lost.
Snaking from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the 2,000 mile-long U.S,-Mexico border is more than a fence or river or line on a map of arid wastelands; it is the home of a third culture or, rather, conglomeration of unique and hybrid cultures that are, in the words of the editors, “a living experience, at once both vital and energizing, sometimes full of thorny contradictions, sometimes replete with grace-filled opportunities.”
In “A World Between Two Worlds,” Troncoso asks, “what if in your lifetime you witness a culture and a way of life that has been lost?” And with finesse of the accomplished novelist that he is, Troncoso shows us how it was in his childhood, crossing easily from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez: family suppers at Ciros Taquería near the cathedral; visits to his godmother, Doña Romita, who had a stall in the mercado and who gave him an onyx chess set; getting his hair cut by “Nati” at Los Hermanos Mesa… Then, suddenly, came the carjackings, kidnappings, shootings, extorsions. For Troncoso, as for so many others fronterizos, the loss can be measured not only in numbers— homicides, restaurants closed, houses abandoned— but also in the painful pinching off of opportunities to segue from one culture and language with such ease, as when he was a child, for that had opened up his sense of possibility, creativity, and clear-sightedness, allowed him develop a practical fluidity, what he calls a “border mentality”— not to judge people, not to accept the presumptions of the hinterlands, whether of the U.S. or Mexico, but “to find out for yourself what would work and what would not.”
For many years along the border, and in some parts of the interior, drug violence was a long-festering problem. It began to veer out of control in the mid-1990s; by the mid-2000s it had become acute, metastasising beyond the drug trade itself into kidnapping, extorsion and other crimes. Short on money and training— in part a result of a series of fiscal crises beginning in the early 1970s— the Mexican police had proven ineffective, easily outgunned or bribed. Shortly after he took office in late 2006, President Felipe Calderón unleashed the armed forces in an all-out war against the cartels and that was when the violence along the border erupted as the narco gangs fought pitched battles not only against the army, marines, and federal and local police, but also and especially, and in grotesquely gory incidents, each other. Some of the worst fighting concentrated in the border state of Tamaulipas in its major city, Tampico, which is a several hours’ drive south of the border with Texas, but a major port for cocaine transhipments.
In the opening essay, “The Widest of Borders,” Mexican writer Liliana V. Blum provides a Who’s Who of the narco-gangs, from the Gulf Cartel, which got its start with liquor smuggling during Prohibition, to its off-shoot, the Zetas, which formed around a nucleus of Mexican Army special forces deserters in 1999, then joined the Beltrán Leyva Brothers, blood enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel. Fine a writer as she is, Blum’s experiences, which included having to drive her car through the sticky blood of a mass murder scene on the way home from her daughter’s school, make discouraging reading.
In “Selling Tita’s House,” Texas writer Mari Cristina Cigarroa recounts her family’s visits and Christmases to her grandparents’ elegant and beloved mansion in Nuevo Laredo. But then, with soldiers in fatigues patrolling the streets, Nuevo Laredo seemed “more like an occupied city during a war.” Chillingly, she writes, “I awoke to the reality that cartels controlled Nuevo Laredo the day I could no longer visit the family’s ranch on the outskirts of the city.”
The strongest and most shocking essay is journalist Diego Osorno’s “The Battle for Ciudad Mier,” about a town shattered in the war between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel for Tampaulipas.
I have hope for Mexico for, as as an American citizen who has lived in Mexico’s capital and traveled and written about its astonishingly varied history, literature, and varied regions for over two decades, I know its greatness, its achievements, its resilience, and creativity. But in his foreword, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith rightly chides, “The United States needs to wake up.”
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This makes me a popcorn-poppin’ party-pooper, but I’m going to give away the ending of Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 “The Pilgrim,” about an outlaw in stolen priest’s garb— not because this is what I’m saying you’ll find in Mexico, necessarily, but to point to enduring stereotypes that might mislead you.
A still from Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 silent movie “The Pilgrim”
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Speaking of law and order, I did notice, more than a few some nooks and crannies of this world are looking more than a little bit bio-medical police-state-y. Because I have written books on Mexico, a number of readers write, urgently asking, Should I move to Mexico?
In case you were wondering about my sympathies: I stand for respecting and defending the rights enshrined in the constitution of the United States, of which I am a citizen. Rights are not “privileges,” I didn’t buy that switcheroo. I could give you my screed on civil and human rights, enriched with quotes by Thomas Jefferson and Hannah Arendt, but I’m sure you didn’t come here for that, so I’ll vacuum-pack it down to the memes:
That said, in this literary blog I do not purvey (a) individual personal advice; (b) medical advice; (c) commentary on contemporary national or international politics; nor (d) natter on about the arcana of public health policy (many other people can do that much better than I can— to take but one example, Dr. Martin Kulldorff).
This is, after all, the second Monday of the month, when I post something for my writing workshop students. Normally on a winter month’s second Monday, such as this one, I might be reporting on the San Miguel Writers Conference in San Miguel de Allende, that enchanting bougainvillea-bedecked (if increasingly traffic-clogged) colonial town some three hours north of Mexico City. Because of concerns about the-virus-that-shall-not-be-named, however, that conference has been bumped out to February 2023.
Hint: Maybe Mexico—or at least the nook or cranny of Mexico that you, as a foreigner, might happen to land in— isn’t quite the free-for-all that some of you imagine.
And there are, as there always have been, many Mexicos— to borrow the title of Lesley Byrd Simpson’s landmark history.
This is my “armchair sociologist” hat. Because I write fiction I spend a lot of time observing and noodling about human society, which is to say, being a sociologist. By “armchair” I mean, I don’t have a degree in the subject. (What’s with the “Meat Science”? I got it when attended a weekend BBQ workshop there at Texas A & M University. My inner “armchair sociologist” finds people’s reactions to this hat endlessly interesting!)
But to begin to address your concerns: Putting on my hat as an armchair sociologist— (that would be the baseball cap I also use for dog-walking that says MEAT SCIENCE)— I would point to a strong presence at the San Miguel Writers Conference of both Mexican writers and US, Canadian, and other English-speaking writers living in Mexico, but also many writers winging in from tonier parts of the US East Coast and US Southwest. Some writers dig that scene (there are agents! and editors!). The last time I attended, I chaired a panel on Global Migration: People and Their Stories (with Elizabeth Hay, Lisa See, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Juan Villoro. Best-selling author Naomi Wolf, down from New York City, was a standing room-only keynote speaker (here we are in March 2022, but oh my, how things have changed, I’d be surprised to see her on the mainstream media again anytime soon.)
My inner armchair sociologist will suffice, before dropping the curtain on all of this— and hanging my TEXAS A & M MEAT SCIENCE baseball cap back on its hook— to note that the other day I received an invitation to a reading in Mexico by a writer, one closely associated with the above-mentioned writers conference, that was for “vaccinated only.” Those among the un- who might wish to hear that speaker (a speaker outspoken on the need for more freedom, I am not making this up) are to be segregated into that pathogen-free zone known as Zoomlandia. Just an anecdote, for your sociological edification.
As I write this, in March 2022, that I know of, the Mexican government has not imposed jab mandates, nor health passports. In the future, what will Mexican policymakers do, or not do, you ask, in regards to public health policy and public policy generally?
Sorry, but in the winter of 2020 my Aztec obsidian scrying mirror crack-a-doodled.
I’m not being flippant. Seriously, honestly, I have no idea what to expect when, after the winter of 2020, all over the world, including in Mexico, so many strange things have happened that I never could have imagined. And hey, I write fiction.
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Oh, there’s Mexico! A still from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 movie “The Great Dictator.”
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Writing in Mexico— that’s something I can confidently say more about. For now, March 2022, while I don’t know of any upcoming writers conferences other than the San Miguel Writers Conference scheduled for February 2023, if you can get to Mexico, and if you have a pencil and paper, no one can stop you! Write that novel! Scribble out that memoir! You might station yourself at a table under a palapa, by the sounds of the sea… (and if you could use any writing prompts, you’ll find 365 of them here).
No worries, you do not need documents attesting to your medical history for entry into Mexico, just a valid passport.
However, as of March 2022, attending the above-mentioned literary event— or, say, certain Mexican weddings, or other social gatherings among certain groups in certain places— might be a dicey proposition if you are not prepared ***and willing*** to present at the door documents confirming that you have been injected with the number and nature of medical treatments that satisfy your hosts’ definition of “vaccinated.”
FYI, your European “recovered-from-covid” genesen certificate doesn’t count with many of these folks. (Then again, Mexico is renowned for its culture of flexibility. You might try it and see.)
As I write this in March 2022—the situation, of course, is evolving— for many Mexicans, as for many foreigners resident in Mexico, “fully-vaccinated” means that you’ve had your two, plus your booster, for a total of three injections. My inner “armchair sociologist” notes that “vaccinated” (without the “fully”) seems to be employed a little more loosely.
In Mexico, a Sputnik jab will pass muster, but puts you perilously low in the pecking order.
Ditto anything Chinese.
AstraZeneca is a notch up, then J & J.
Prime are the mRNA vaccines (the word “vaccine” having been legally redefined to encompass what was previously known in the pharmaceutical industry as “gene therapy”), made available in 2020 under the US FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization, for which, early on, many Mexicans and many foreigners resident in Mexico traveled to the US to roll up their sleeves. I refer to Moderna and Pfizer.
Moderna or Pfizer? In some places in Mexico, it’s the conversation. Be prepared.
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Dear writerly readers who have been so urgently writing to me, as you may already be aware, in its storied past, Mexico has given refuge to those fleeing slavery, pogroms in Russia, the Russian Revolution (most famously, Leon Trotsky) the tumult of the post-Weimar Republic (B. Traven), Spanish fascism under Franco, German fascism and the Holocaust under Hitler, Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s in Hollywood, Cuba of the 1960s, Argentina and Chile of the 1970s, & etc., so, yes, if you are fleeing something, it might stand to reason that Mexico might arise on your horizon as a possibility.
Moreover, true it is that many Mexicans, as well as many foreigners resident in Mexico, have wholly different ideas about the virus-that-shall-not-be-namedthan the ones retailed by the vaccinators. There are those who have a variety of religious and/or other objections to taking the jabs. Vaccinators might dismiss most of these people as, shall we say, rustic characters, but that could not be said of those who follow the likes of el gato malo, Eugyppius, Steve Kirsch, realnotrare.com reports (this one’s a doozy), and watch censored and shadow-banned videos, such as the latest in mind-furniture-rearranging from Oracle Films. (And if you were heretofore unaware, and happen to be curious, está Usted servido.)
As it could be said of opinions about and attitudes towards the topic-at-hand in many other countries, from stringent Australia to strictest Austria, in relatively laissez-faire Mexico there appears to be a profound divide between urban and rural populations, and between the higher and the lower social classes, with many exceptions sprinkled all about.
Ahoy, sociologists, and that includes you novelists!
I have many hats. This is my “armchair modern art critic” hat. I will be wearing it often in 2022-2023 as I write about Donald Judd (and maybe also about Dada).
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As for whether you should or should not go live in Mexico, I would not presume to say. Like I said, I cannot see the future, and I don’t dispense individual personal advice.
What I can tell you, after some three decades of living in Mexico City, and traveling all around Baja California, and elsewhere throughout Mexico, and writing several books about Mexico, and also translating oodles of Mexican fiction and poetry, is that I love Mexico, and I find it endlessly fascinating. Moving there in 1986, which I did for personal reasons, was one of the best decisions of my life.
However, as you might guess, my years there (interspersed with some spells abroad) have not always been a stroll with an ice-cream cone on a sunny morning in the park.
As for questions along the lines of, what’s it like to live in Mexico, is Mexico safe, what do I think of (insert name of prominent politician), in all seriousness, humbly, and in all compassion, my wish for you being that you take the best decision for yourself as possible, I toss these questions back to you—
What is it like to live in your country?
Seriously: How would you answer that? What is your full knowledge base, which are your areas of ignorance, what aspects of life there most concern you, and whom are you addressing?
Is your country safe? How quickly, and how accurately, could you answer that?
What do you think of (insert name of prominent politician in your country whom you are very upset about)? And where, exactly, do you get your information about (insert name of prominent politician in your country whom you are very upset about)? And upon reflection— reflection lasting more than 11 seconds— how genuinely objective and reliable do you think that source information might actually be?
My point: a penthouse in Manhattan is not an off-the-grid farm in Idaho is not a modernist house in the historic district of San Antonio is not a 4th floor walk-up in Milwaukee with a view of the railroad tracks and a den-o’-nefarious-activities next door. What it’s like to live in the US? That depends on where you are in the US —among many other factors, including your history, your social network, financial resources, your own attitudes, and, I would venture to suggest, most crucially, the stories you tell yourself. Which can change.
I’m telling you, while I know some things about living in Mexico that might help you if you are considering moving there—and I gladly share them with you below— I am not the oracle for all questions about Mexico.
Mexico, too, is a large and extremely heterogeneous country— ethnically, culturally, geographically. It has some 130 million people and borders all sorts of oceans and three different countries, not counting Texas.
Speaking of Texas, I hear things are a little different there, than in, oh, say, California. And in Texas, as in California, if you’re on the ground here, you’ll observe important differences from one county to the next. Santa Clara County, California, Placer County, California: different planets.
Same story in Mexico. Coahuila isn’t Oaxaca isn’t Veracruz. Torreón isn’t Tijuana isn’t Monterrey isn’t Mexico City. And it so happens, I haven’t set foot in Oaxaca, Veracruz, Tijuana, Torreón or Monterrey in many years.
This is my “armchair baseball expert” hat. It’s from El Paso, Texas.
As for how safe living in one place or another place in Mexico might or might not be, sometimes you can have a gander at some data, if you make the effort to find it; mostly you’ll have to go by feeling “the vibes” and hearsay, and the closer to your target, the better, of course. This is true in the US, and this is especially true in Mexico.
The news, and the entertainments currently showing on TV or Netflix, could at times be, but generally, probably, are not your best orienting resource about Mexico. Please read this again: The news, and the entertainments currently showing on TV or Netflix, could at times be, but generally, probably, are not your best orienting resource about Mexico.
Now, I’m going to be annoying and say it a third time:
The news, and the entertainments currently showing on TV or Netflix, could at times be, but generally, probably, are not your best orienting resource about Mexico.
Ninety-nine percent of them will give you about as much information as the still from last scene in Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 “The Pilgrim.”It’s not much, and it’s almost a hundred years old.And you’ve already seen it.
For the most part, books are a far better resource than popular visual media for learning about Mexico. Nonetheless, there too, clichés and time-wasters abound. I get to recommended books below.
But a lot of journalists have been getting killed in Mexico, you say. Yes, tragically. And there’s a lot of narcotrafficking. Yes, alas. But a question for you: In your own country, where the murder of a journalist might be only very rare an occurrence, might this rarity possibly be because certain persons’ acts of engagement in certain nefarious activities generating important cash flows are not deemed “news”? I cannot say I know the answer to this question in all its florid details. But, really, do you?
(Did the drugs arrive north of the border to be distributed by faeries waving wands? And, hmmm, might there be other nefarious activities generating important cash flows that are not deemed “news”?)
As for what I can say about safety in my own little barrio in Mexico City I would compare it to my experience living on the South Side of Chicago in the ’80s in that, you need to use your street sense, or get some, like, yesterday. Otherwise, usually, it’s a fine place to live. But Mexico City, a megalopolis of some 20 million people, has a lot of neighborhoods; some are more dangerous than mine, others safer. There’s a lot I simply don’t know.
As for (insert name of prominent politician you are very concerned about), different Mexicans have different opinions about him, ranging from his being Jesucristo reencarnado to something, um, better wear your garlic necklace! In short, the answer you get will depend on whom you put the question to, and that may well, might I shyly suggest, depend on what you might, maybe a little bit subconsciously, like to hear. Or what that person you have queried imagines you might want, or might be willing, to hear.
Who knows, they might just make sh*t up to yank your chain.
I cannot say I haven’t seen that happen.
Politics in Mexico, like politics in the US, or anywhere else, is pretty much a lucha libre. It’s a lot of show, and tougher than unshelled Brazil nuts to know what’s really going on. I can also tell you this: In years past, when I was in-the-know on a sliver of what was actually going on, and then read about it in the press, I just rolled my eyes and laughed, if I didn’t want to cry. Or just spit. I stopped reading or watching “news” a long time ago. I much prefer Willa Cather novels.
This is LUUUUUUCHA LIIIIIBRE!
But! There’s More! Six Questions for You About Moving To Mexico That Might Be Helpful For You To Noodle On Some More
#1. Can you easily and lustily cackle like a coyote?
Because seriously, if you want to live in Mexico it really, really helps to have, and to deliberately cultivate, a wacky, high-vibe sense of humor. If you can take one thing from this long post, this is it.
As you might imagine, moving to Mexico is not easy for someone, such as myself, who grew up speaking a different language and in a different culture. Ask a Hungarian how it is to live in Berlin, or a Berliner to make a new home in Toulouse, or, say, an Uruguayan in Philadelphia; they will assuredly inform you that they have faced, and not always managed to tackle, a multitude of gnarly challenges.
To start with, people talk funny. The people there don’t think your way of understanding and of doing things is the only way, and in fact they oftentimes consider what you think is normal and/or wise and/or good to be plumb crazy and/or stupid and/or stinkingly bad. Their system for recycling is…err, something else. Etiquette— there’s a bramble patch.
Plan on offending a ton of people you never intended to offend (and also the inevitable little phalanx of unhappy souls who project their own nasty whatnot upon your innocent and clueless self, and who relish being So Offended by You! You Foreigner, You!)
To make your way living in another country can take more patience and flexibility and sheer head-banging lonely frustration than you can summon.
But maybe you can. Only you can know. And you won’t know for sure until you try.
A few people might think, “but I am Mexican-American, I speak Spanish, so it would be easy for me to go live in Mexico.” Well, there, too, I wouldn’t know what’s going to work, or not, for you.
But I do know that as a native English speaker of (partially) English descent, one who adored Beatrix Potter and C.S. Lewis and tea with cucumber sandwiches, I found living in England, as I did for a season many, many years ago, more of a challenge that I ever could have anticipated. Did I mention, they talk funny. They have a most peculiar social structure wherein one is expected to address certain persons as lord and lady & such-like. They use pounds sterling, their electric outlets take a concatenation of weird prongs, they set their thermostats at freeze-your-fingers-off, they drive on the wrong side of the road. Their “hamburgers” and “catsup” are absurdly horrible!! I was young, it did not last. Oh well.
Certainly there are many foreigners who have made their way in Mexico. Here is a picture of my American amigo who had the most rockstar Olympic champion high-vibe sense of humor: the poet and writer Bruce Berger (he passed away in 2021). Having learned Spanish while playing piano in Spain, he came back over the pond to spend his winters in La Paz, on Mexico’s Sea of Cortez (the balance of the year he lived in Aspen, Colorado). For a sampling of his humor, and his enchantingly poetic tales, you might enjoy Almost an Island: Travels in Baja California. The chapter about the nuns is my fave.
A photo that brings back fond memories: Yours Truly (C.M. Mayo) with Bruce Berger (seated) and James Tolbert (standing), after a public reading in the Ida Victoria Gallery in downtown San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur, Mexico, sponsored by Tolbert’s Baja Books. I read from my memoir of Baja California, Miraculous Air, and, as I recall, Bruce Berger read from his, Almost an Island. Bruce was the author of numerous works of memoir and poetry. His last was a collection of his luminous essays, A Desert Harvest. Read my Q & A with Bruce here.
Another high-vibe American friend I very much admire, who has been living in Mexico City for many years, is historian and biographer Michael K. Schuessler. I invite you to listen in to my podcast interview with him about some wildly talented Mexican literary ladies.
#2. Do you have plenty of spare cash to pay your Mexican lawyer?
Because if you want to work in Mexico, legally, you will need to $$$hire$$$ a lawyer (and be very, very patient). Many an American, or other foreigner assumes that he can land in Mexico as a tourist and just stay indefinitely, oh, say, teaching English, or SCUBA diving. They learn differently when they get arrested by the Mexican authorities, and then deported.
Let me say that again:
Many an American, or other foreigner assumes that he can land in Mexico as a tourist and just stay indefinitely, oh, say, teaching English, or SCUBA diving. They learn differently when they get arrested by the Mexican authorities, and then deported.
And meanwhile, funny how that is, when employers realize you’re an undocumented worker, they don’t give you benefits, and they tend to pay, when they pay, very poorly.
In short, don’t be too quick to assume things about the ineptitude of the Mexican state, especially if your main source of information is popular entertainment and the mainstream media in your native country. (I hereby desist from saying again what I already said three times.)
#3. Are you OK with the fact that when you do achieve residency status, with the right to work, as a noncitizen, you will not have the right to vote or otherwise participate in the Mexican political process?
Once you have an opinion or seven, you might find this intensely frustrating! If you decide to go for Mexican citizenship, don’t ask me about it, talk to your Mexican lawyer. See again #1 and #2.
Now a brief intermission for more from the great Charlie Chaplin— in character as Adenoid Hynkel from his movie “The Great Dictator,” a classic of anti-fascism from 1940:
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#4. Got Advil? For US citizens banking in Mexico can be a bit of a headache.
I know, banking in the US isn’t always a picnic, but for a US citizen it can take longer to open a bank account in Mexico than even the niños who believe Santa Claus lives in the Polo Norte would believe, and one fine day, as has happened to some Americans I know, including myself, you might find your balance wiped out— not stolen, exactly, just, oh, err, wiped out.
(You answered “yes” to the question about high-vibe sense of humor, I trust?)
How banking in Mexico is for other nationals, I have no idea.
#5. Can you define for yourself clearly what you mean by “living in Mexico”?
“Living in Mexico” and “living in Mexico cocooned in an expat community” might be entirely different galaxies of experience— and one expat community a different galaxy of experience from another.
I have never lived in an expat community, however, I’ve visited some of them, and I know a number of delightful Americans and Canadians who thrive in them.
Alas, however, it has not escaped my notice that, for not all, certainly, but for many expats, one of the prime attractions of an expat community is that it’s just like home but a heap cheaper and with better winter weather, you can squidge by without having to learn Spanish, and you’ll easily find friends who will sit around and whine and complain about Mexico with you while (a) watching CNN, MSNBC or (those are very deliberate italics there) Fox News (b) playing games (c) gossiping (d) commiserating about other peoples’ atrocious political opinions (e) drinking alcoholic beverages (e) ingesting other things it would probably be wiser to not ingest.
Ahoy, you novelists, rich pickings here!
FYI, Democrats Abroad is very active in Mexico, last I heard. But if you’re on the lookout for Republicans, they’re not hiding under rocks down there, either.
#6. Would you like to check out some books about Mexico?
As I said, books can be a far better resource for learning about Mexico than popular visual media. I can warmly recommend some superb literary art and illuminating histories…
The last time I received a flurry of readers’ questions about Mexico was in 2016 when Donald Trump… sigh. Was that a hundred years ago? Sure feels like it. I answered those readers’ questions by way of this reading list:
“I knew that there were many people on both sides [of the US-Mexico border] who were capable of a more nuanced understanding and wanted a better relationship between our countries. Those were my ideal readers. “—Michael Hogan
Michael Hogan has been publishing some of the most fascinating and important works on US-Mexico history that we have. I don’t say that lightly; for my historical novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I spent nearly a decade, in some of the very same archives, researching this period that he writes about in Guns, Grit and Glory: the French Intervention in Mexico, which allowed for Mexico’s Second Empire under Maximilian von Habsburg. This period overlaps, and in no way coincidentally, with the period of the US Civil War. Because governments and school boards have their political agendas, and of course time for teaching history to children and teenagers is limited, “the narrative” of such episodes that they learn is, by its nature, biased and severely truncated. Sometimes it just gets skipped altogether. So it sometimes happens that some episodes and actors and factors that are hugely important come to light decades, even a century or more later. But this light shines only if and when someone has had the burning curiosity, determination, skill, and perseverance, to dig out the evidence and then recraft a new narrative.
Michael Hogan is an American author of twenty-five books including the critically acclaimed The Irish Soldiers of Mexico and Abraham Lincoln and Mexico. He holds a PhD in Latin American Studies and is Emeritus Humanities Chair at the American School Foundation of Guadalajara. He lives in Mexico.
C.M. MAYO:What inspired you to write Guns, Grit and Glory?
MICHAEL HOGAN: In 2017 I wrote Abraham Lincoln and Mexico, a book that fully revealed for the first time, Lincoln’s support of Benito Juárez when the Mexican president and his Republican forces were driven from the capital by the invading French Army. They were forced to fight an unequal war with poorly clothed, sometimes barefoot, and poorly armed retreating soldiers. I discovered that besides moral support, Lincoln also allowed Mexican agents to raise funds in the US to help feed those troops and provide medicines. But many questions remained. How did Juárez avoid capture by the combined French forces? How did he acquire uniforms and boots, grooved cannons, and other sophisticated weapons for his men? How did his soldiers develop the expertise and training to use them effectively? How did a small retreating army overcome what was the most powerful military force in the world?
Most of these questions plagued me when I finished that book, although I had some clues. One was an article written by the late historian Robert Ryal Miller about the American Legion of Honor, a group of US volunteers who joined the Mexicans in their fight. In fact, members of this group rescued Juárez when he was in mortal danger of being captured and killed.by French forces in Zacatecas. Another was the discovery that, at the end of the Civil War, African American soldiers from the US Colored Troops joined the Mexican Army after being mustered out of the Union Army at the end of the Civil War. By 1866, there were over 3,000 US volunteers helping the Juárez forces, several were former officers and non-coms, others were sharpshooters and cannoneers. All were tested combat veterans. That story had not really been told, nor the tremendous amount of funding provided by the sale of Mexican bonds (worthless if the war was lost) which Mexican Consul Matias Romero was able to sell, thereby raising in excess of 15 million dollars.
C.M. MAYO: As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader? If so, how might you describe the ideal reader for Guns, Grit and Glory?
MICHAEL HOGAN: I wrote it during the period when there was quite a bit of tension between the US and Mexico. I thought it might be a valuable contribution to show that there was a time when the US and Mexico came together to fight for a common cause. My ideal reader was someone who was open to have a new (but researched-based) understanding of US-Mexican relations. For this reason, there is also a Spanish edition. My thirty-plus years in Mexico had convinced me that there were misgivings and misunderstandings of the US-Mexican relationship on both sides of the border. Many Mexicans still resented the invasion of 1846 and loss of their northern territories. Many people on the US side were too willing to blame Mexico for the current migrant crisis on the border. Yet I knew that there were many people on both sides who were capable of a more nuanced understanding and wanted a better relationship between our countries. Those were my ideal readers.
C.M. MAYO: Researching a book like this requires extraordinary organizational skills. Can you talk a little bit about your working library and how you keep track of the books you read / consulted?And how do you keep track of articles, both on-line and on paper? And what were some of the things you did for this book that worked especially well for you?
MICHAEL HOGAN: I was lucky that I was teaching history at an institution that gave me free access to several academic subscription services which I could download and print. I am also fortunate in that my wife, Lucinda Mayo, and I have accumulated a large personal library over the years of over 5,000 titles in both English and Spanish. So, for many sources, I kept track the traditional way, with markers and notes, and separate file folders for each theme, battle, or personage. Since the COVID crisis had not yet struck I was also able to access archives in Chihuahua, where Juarez had his headquarters, and the archives of the Banco de Mexico in the capital, where Romero’s papers were stored. He had been the treasury secretary and head of the bank under Porfirio Díaz.
C.M. MAYO: What was the biggest surprise that you came across in your research?
MICHAEL HOGAN: There were several. The first was that many of the details I found were not in the Archivo de la Nación but rather in the Banco de Mexico. I think perhaps a decision was made to keep them there so that Porfirio Díaz could claim his great victories were without any significant help from the gringos.
Another surprising discovery was that trustworthy French eyewitnesses claimed they observed over 10,000 Americans at the Battle of Querétaro whereas Professor Miller only credited 300 or so in the American Legion, and Romero said there were only 3,000 Americans total, which included the African American soldiers.
However, it was unlikely that the French were wrong; besides theirs was a primary source. So, secondary sources, a Mexican consul who was not present and a US professor writing a century later, must have been mistaken. How to resolve the dilemma?
Quite by accident, I discovered purchase invoices for several thousand Union uniforms in the Mexican military archives. There was the answer. The thousands of bluecoats that the French saw on the hills of Queretaro were mostly Mexicans in surplus US Army uniforms!
C.M. MAYO: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book?
MICHAEL HOGAN: So much of what was occurring doing those years was clandestine. The US could not openly aid the Mexicans because to do so would alienate the French who might then join up with the Confederacy. Besides the French were historic allies who helped the US gain its independence. On the Mexican side, Romero representing Juárez, would have to offer foreign investors in those high-risk Mexican bonds either parcels of land, or mining concessions, or other significant incentives if the government were to default. This fact needed to be kept secret lest Juárez be accused by his own people of signing away large swaths of Mexican territory and the patrimony of the next generation. In fact, there were defaults, and by the end of the next decade over 20 percent of Mexican territory was owned by foreigners.
C.M. MAYO: What has most surprised you about its reception?
MICHAEL HOGAN: On the positive side, I was both surprised and delighted by the critical acclaim especially from academics whose work I highly regard such as William Beazley at the University of Arizona, John Mason Hart at the University of Houston, Don Doyle at the University of South Carolina, Brigadier General (Ret.) Clever Chávez Marín, editor of Estudios Militares Mexicanos, and others. Sadly, although the book received quite a bit of positive critical acclaim, the book’s release in March of 2020 at the beginning of the COVID pandemic ensured that all my in-person events were canceled. Three major events (which in the past had garnered audiences of several hundreds) in Chicago (Union League), Lake Chapala (Open Circle), and a historical society in Texas were all postponed or canceled. Two were rescheduled for the fall, and then canceled again because of COVID resurgence. I am hopeful that the first in-person event scheduled for this spring will take finally take place, and also that this interview and on-line reviews will encourage new readers.
C.M. MAYO: For readers who are just getting to know Mexico, what would be your top three book recommendations?
MICHAEL HOGAN: 1. The Course of Mexican History by Michael Meyer and William Sherman. A highly readable text which tells the history of Mexico from pre-Columbian times to the present. With a rich bibliography for those who wish to delve deeper.
2. Mexico: Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze. A compelling history about the evolution of power politics in Mexico from the origins of the nation-state after the War of Independence to the present day.
3. The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz. Insights into the Mexican character, origins of the macho culture, and the evolution of post-colonial bureaucratic elements in government. A controversial exposé by a Nobel Prize recipient of his own people and their character.
This finds me working on my Far West Texas book and, by the by, pondering multitudinous things cross-border & pharmaceutical… ergo, this week’s post is from the archives: my review, originally published in Literal Magazine, of Sam Quinones’ must-read book, Dreamland.
DREAMLAND: THE TRUE TALE OF AMERICA’S OPIATE EPIDEMIC by Sam Quinones Bloomsbury Press, 2015 / ISBN 978-1620402504
This is a grenade of a book. Based on extensive investigative reporting on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border, Sam Quinones’ Dreamland tells the deeply unsettling story of the production, smuggling, and marketing of semi-processed opium base— or “black tar heroin”— originating in and around Xalisco, a farm town in the state of Nayarit, and in tandem, the story of the aggressive marketing of pain pills in the U.S.— in particular, of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin—and the resulting conflagration of addiction and death.
Unlike previous drug epidemics—heroin in the 70s, crack in the 90s— this one involved more deaths and more users, and not so many in urban slums but “in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee’s.”
Mexican black tar heroin trafficking isn’t anything like what you’ve seen on TV or in the movies or, for that matter, most books about narcotrafficking. It’s a small-time and customer-centric business: smugglers carry small high-quality batches over the border, and then drivers, using codes received on their cell phones, deliver tiny balloons filled with heroin directly to individual customers. The smugglers and drivers, “Xalisco Boys,” for the most part— friends, neighbors, brothers, third cousins— are not ready-for-prime-time “narcos” but otherwise ordinary young men from an otherwise ordinary farm town.
Nor are these Mexicans crossing the border because they are drawn by the light of “a better life” in the U.S. Their goal is a short period of hard work—and if that work happens to be delivering balloons filled with some drug to gringo addicts, so be it—and then to return home with the cash to peel off for a house, a wedding banquet with a live band, a stack of Levi’s jeans for the clan.
The number of English language reporters who could have written such a book can be counted on one hand— if that. Quinones draws on two decades of covering remote corners of Mexico and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. His two previous books, both superb, are True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx and Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In Dreamland, Quinones writes about the “Xalisco Boys” with unusual insight and compassion; nonetheless, in their numbers and moral blindness, they have an ant-like quality. As one DEA agent told Quinones, “We arrest the drivers all the time and they send new ones up from Mexico… They never go away.”
Neither are their customers, “slaves to an unseen molecule,” what one might expect: oftentimes well-off people living in places like Salt Lake City, Charlotte, Minneapolis or say, Columbus, Ohio. Writes Quinones:
“Via pills, heroin had entered the mainstream.The new addicts were football players and cheerleaders; football was almost a gateway to opiate addiction. Wounded soldiers returned from Afghanistan hooked on pain pills and died in America. Kids got hooked in college and died there. Some of these addicts were from rough corners of rural Appalachia. But many more were from the U.S. middle class… They were the daughters of preachers, the sons of cops and doctors, the children of contractors and teachers and business owners and bankers. And almost every one was white.”
As Quinones explains, the use of opiates is ancient, going back to the Mesopotamians who harvested poppies—“joy plants”— for their pods containing opium. The Egyptians produced opium as drug. In the early 19th century, a German chemist came up with the extract known as morphine; later in that same century, another German chemist brought us heroin, and China lost its two Opium Wars to the British, arriving at the turn of the century with a prodigious number of addicts. In the U.S. in the early twentieth century, a government-led campaign to outlaw addictive drugs may have decreased the number of “dope fiends,” but it resulted in the growth of illegal drug dealing by mafias and gangs, many of them prone to extreme violence.
The game-changer has been the Xalisco Boys’ marketing and distribution model for black tar heroin—Quinones likens it to pizza delivery— coinciding with the aggressive marketing of legal opiates such as OxyContin—which are more expensive than, but in terms of effects, close substitutes for Mexican tar heroin.
As for the marketing of pharmaceuticals, Quinones devotes an illuminating chapter to marketing guru Arthur Sackler and his work for Charles Pfizer and Company back in the 1950s, when he turned Pfizer “into a household name among doctors.” Things took a bum turn in the mid-1980s when two pain specialists, Russell Porteney and Kathy Foley, published a paper in a medical journal, Pain, suggesting that opiates might not be inherently addictive. In a footnote they cited a letter to editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from Jane Porter and Hershel Jick. Soon thereafter, Portenoy assumed a prestigious position: Director of the Pain Medicine and Palliative Care department at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. Writes Quinones: “From this vantage point, and with funding from several drug companies, he pressed a campaign to destigmatize opiates.”
Enter Purdue Pharma with its new painkiller, OxyContin, an opium derivative with a molecular structure similar to heroin. Somehow in all the hoopla, Porter and Jick’s letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine— not a report, and certainly not a study, but a mere one-paragraph note that less than one percent of hospitalized patients receiving opiates for pain became addicted— “had become a foundation for a revolution in U.S. medical practice.”
It seems few troubled to read said letter; armies of sales reps marched out citing “Porter and Jick” and—magic gong— the New England Journal of Medicine. As one nurse told Quinones, “Everybody heard it everywhere. It was Porter and Jick. We all used it. We all thought it was gospel.”
Quinones is careful to note that OxyContin “has legitimate medical uses, and has assuaged the pain of many Americans, for whom life would otherwise be torture.” But in fact, like heroin, its close chemical cousin, it is highly addictive. As one addict, a prison guard who had started off with OxyContin for back pain and, in agony from withdrawal, ended up on black tar heroin, told Quinones,
“You think you’re doing stuff the way it’s supposed to be done. You’re trusting the doctor. After a while you realize this isn’t right but there really isn’t anything you can do about it. You’re stuck. You’re addicted.”
Dreamland, a football-field-sized private swimming pool in Portsmouth, Ohio is the touchstone for Quinones’ narrative. For decades after it opened in 1929, Dreamland served as a center for the community, whose prosperity was based on a steel mill and shoe factories. Anyone who has traveled through the U.S. in recent years will have seen the same decline Quinones describes here and in so many other towns: the Mom and Pop diner replaced by a Subway sandwich shop or an Applebee’s or a Jack in the Box; the family-run hardware store and grocers, overtaken by Walmart and Home Depot; ye olde bookshop shuttered and scribbled with graffiti. (There might be, but probably isn’t a Barnes & Noble.) And the big box stores are not wedged into in the now decrepit downtown but sit on the outskirts where real estate is cheap, zoning whatever, and parking an easy swing.
As jobs went abroad, Portmouth’s businesses began to close, and “pill mills,” that is, pain clinics specializing in dispensing drugs such as OxyContin, began to open. In 1993, Dreamland was razed to make a parking lot. Writes Quinones:
“After Dreamland closed, the town went indoors. Police took the place of the communal adult supervision that the pool had provided. Walmart became the place to socialize. Opiates, the most private and selfish of drugs, moved in and made easy work of a landscape stripped of any communal girding.”
It was the historian of Mexico John Tutino who said, “We need Mexico as an other. We cannot deal with it as an us.” Too many U.S. policymakers and pundits are quick-on-the-trigger to blame the drug trade on Mexican corruption. But supply responds to demand and the corruption that makes the drug trade possible thrives on both sides of the border. Yes, even in the nicely appointed offices of a major pharmaceutical company. In 2005 Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to a felony count of “misbranding” OxyContin as less addictive than other pain medications. None of its executives went to jail, but three paid a USD $34.5 million fine and the company itself paid a US $634.5 million fine.
Dreamland should be read—and more than once— by anyone who would make or attempt to influence policy on the drug trade, whether legal or illegal. Moreover, Dreamland should be read by every citizen who would visit a doctor. As Quinones wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece, apropos of Dreamland, “we need to question the drugs marketed to us, depend less on pills as solutions and stop demanding that doctors magically fix us. It will then matter less what new product a drug company—or the drug underworld—devises.”
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
“My three novels address the very different parts of my ancestry. I also hope to have this book in particular picked up by the Jewish reader interested in the Jewish diaspora from Spain, someone who realizes that an Eastern European background is not the only one.”— Kathleen Alcalá
A couple of decades ago, when I was beginning to publish my own work about Mexico, and editing Tameme, a bilingual English/Spanish journal of new writing from Canada, the US and Mexico, I had the immense fortune to meet some of the most accomplished and innovative literary writers from the US-Mexico borderlands, among them, Kathleen Alcalá. The author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, Alcalá’s work has been recognized with Western States Book Award, the Governor’s Writers Award, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award. In 2014 she was honored by the national Latino writers group, Con Tinta, and she has been designated an Island Treasure in the Arts on Bainbridge Island, where she lives in the state of Washington. When I first met Alcalá, her novel set in northern Mexico in the 1870s, Spirits of the Ordinary, based on the true history of Mexican Jews practicing their religion in secret, was then relatively recently published, and a sensation it was, for the history of the conversos of northern New Spain (Spanish Jews who had converted to Christianity at the time of the 15th century expulsion of the Jews) and the crypto-Jews (those who practiced Judaism in secret) was then little known. Spirits of the Ordinary received high praise, for example, from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it “A fecund fable about the convergence of cultures—Mexican, American and Jewish—along the Mexico/Texas border…. Alcalá’s seductive writing mixes fatalism and hope, logic and fantasy.” And no less a literary heavyweight than Larry McMurtry called it “continually arresting—a book in which passions both ordinary and extraordinary are made vivid and convincing.”
How delighted I was to learn from Kathleen that, for its 25th anniversary, Spirits of the Ordinary is back in print in a lovely new edition from Raven Chronicles Press, introduced by one of my favorite poets, Rigoberto González. Apropos of that, Alcalá agreed to answer some questions.
C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write Spirits of the Ordinary?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: My first book was a collection of short stories in the manner of the stories told by my mother’s family. When I finished the last, long story I realized that I knew much more about these characters, based on my family’s history, enough for at least one novel. It turned out to be three novels.
C.M. MAYO:As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: I don’t know if I should be embarrassed to say that I expected my readers to be much like myself, people who grew up in the United States, but with our cultural roots firmly in Mexico. This comprises some of my audience. But a bigger part of it is the American readership that has good associations with Mexico as a vacation destination and the site of some of their fantasies.
Toni Morrison described this as writing under “the white gaze.” I had no idea how important this was for BIPOC (Black or Indigenous People of Color) writers. I was not writing the “poor farmworker makes good” narrative that was expected of me in the publishing world. As a result, around 25 publishers rejected the novel before Chronicle Books took a chance on it.
C.M. MAYO:Now that some years have gone by, can you describe the ideal reader for this book as you see him or her now?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: The ideal reader is now a generation younger than I am. It is a young professional or student who wants to broaden their perspective to include fore parents who loved the land, fought for it, died for it, and were often discriminated against by their own society. My three novels address the very different parts of my ancestry. I also hope to have this book in particular picked up by the Jewish reader interested in the Jewish diaspora from Spain, someone who realizes that an Eastern European background is not the only one.
C.M. MAYO:Can you share any surprises for you about the reception of your book’s first edition? (And has it been different in different countries?) Do you expect it to be different in 2021?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ:Spirits received a number of awards right out of the chute. From manuscript rejection to publication and great reviews in a year really floored me. I was not prepared for the embrace provided by readers. I have to thank writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Larry McMurtry, as well as booksellers like Rick Simonsen at Elliott Bay Books and Paul Yamazaki at City Lights for their kind words that helped propel this book out into the world.
C.M. MAYO:What inspired you to bring Spirits of the Ordinary back into print?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: Almost twenty-five years later, crypto-Jews are no longer a secret. When I was researching and writing, no one knew what I was talking about except for a few Sephardic Jews. Now there is a substantial body of writing about the events leading to this condition, as well as critical analysis of both the events and the literature. I feel as though this topic has come full circle now that Spain has offered expedited citizenship to descendants of the Expulsion. This provides a much more complete context for my work.
C.M. MAYO:Which writers have been the most important influences for you when you were writing Spirits of the Ordinary— and subsequently?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: I have always read science fiction along with mainstream fiction. Some people look down on “genre” fiction as not true literature, but alternate worlds and points of view fit perfectly with my upbringing in the southwest, with cousins on both sides of the border. Our reality has always been alternative.
Other writers will tell you it is comics that sustained them when they were young, but that’s really the same thing, except in pictorial form: narratives willing to address the “what if.”
I studied with Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Charles Johnson. I read Elena Poniatowska and Juan Rulfo in Spanish, and later my age peers, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chávez, although they were way ahead of me in achievements.
More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and NK Jemison. There are so many more. Books are my vice.
C.M. MAYO:Which writers are you reading now?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: I’ve read a lot of Greg Bear’s books because we are friends and he is very prolific. Nisi Shawl is an up and coming writer even though she has already received a lot of accolades. I have been reading a lot of indigenous writers recently, mostly poets like Laura Da’, but also fiction and essayists like Rebecca Roanhorse and Elissa Washuta. Every time I meet a new writer whose work I like, I try to let them know how great their writing is. I probably scare people at conferences because I am not cool— I am enthusiastic, especially with writers of color or those who otherwise don’t fit into the mainstream narrative.
This is one reason that, Phoebe Bosché, Philip Red-Eagle and I started Raven Chronicles Press. We wanted to provide a showcase for these wonderful writers. Currently, you can see much of this work in an anthology called Take a Stand: Art Against Hate. I am also working with Professor Norma Elia Cantú on an anthology of stories, essays and poetry about La Llorona— again, because there is so much talent, so many ideas that need to be published and shared.
C.M. MAYO:How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: All of this is terrible. I am so easily distracted. I will start laundry, open a file, take notes by hand, and forget what I had planned to do that day. For me, the best strategy is still the writing residency, away from home, where I don’t have any excuses and fewer distractions. This is especially needed when I am trying to organize large blocks of writing, such as the chapters in a novel.
C.M. MAYO:For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: Before submitting anything, research the market. If looking to publish in a magazine, purchase half a dozen or so that seem to be likely venues for your work. Look at them carefully and see if you fit in. This is a good place to start, rather than submitting book length manuscripts to publishers, because book editors read these magazines, too. It also gives you a chance to learn how to work with an editor, to receive suggestions and shape the best possible piece for the magazine.
C.M. MAYO:What’s next for you as a writer?
KATHLEEN ALCALÁ: Surprisingly, after all these years, Spirits of the Ordinary and Treasures in Heaven (my third novel, which is about the feminist movement in Mexico) have been optioned for movie and television rights! We will see where that goes. In between distractions, I am foolishly working on two novels at the same time – one is set in 10th Century Spain, and one in a near-future west coast and Mexico. Oh yes, and I owe someone a short story!
A TRAVELER IN MEXICO: A RENDEZVOUS WITH WRITER ROSEMARY SULLIVAN C.M. MAYO Originally published in Inside Mexico, March 2009
Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood has become inextricably linked with the Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, so what better place to rendezvous with poet, writer, and biographer of Surrealists, Rosemary Sullivan? A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Sullivan had just alighted in Mexico City and would soon be on her way to meet with Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, when we met over cappuccinos at the sun-drenched Café Moheli to talk about her latest book.
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseilleis a page-turner of a deeply researched history about the rescue of artists and intellectuals trapped as the Nazis closed in. The effort, fomented by the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee and led by their agent in Marseilles, Varian Fry, managed to save André Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst, among others, and found refuge for them in the United States. But some came to Mexico. These included the Russian novelist Victor Serge, and his son Vlady; and most famously, Surrealist painters Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who (along with Frida Kahlo), are today among Mexico’s most revered artists. For this reason, Villa Air-Bel is a work important to the history of modern art in Mexico.
But the book’s connection to Mexico goes deeper.
“Villa Air-Bel started here,” Sullivan said. She explained that, back in 1995, she had come to Mexico City to write about the intense friendship of three women artists Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and the Canadian poet P.K. Page (also known as the painter Pat Irwin), which commenced in 1960 when Page, already the author of several books and a winner of Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award, arrived with her husband, Arthur Irwin, then Canada’s ambassador to Mexico.
Sullivan, then two years out of graduate school, met Page in Victoria in 1974. As Sullivan recalls in the essay “Three Travellers in Mexico,” “For me P.K. is one of the searchers, ahead of the rest of us, throwing back clues. She encouraged me to believe I might become a writer.” Varo had died of a heart attack in 1963. But thanks to an introduction from Page, Sullivan met Carrington in Mexico City.
The English-born Leonora Carrington had a harrowing but triumphant story. She was living in France when the Germans invaded. Her lover, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, was arrested, first as an enemy alien and then a second time as an enemy of the Nazis. Leonora fled to Spain, where she had a mental collapse and was put in an insane asylum, a searing experience she wrote about in The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below. Her family got her out, but thinking they wanted to put her in another asylum in South Africa, she escaped in Lisbon en route. Ernst, miraculously, reappeared in Lisbon, but the pair parted ways, Ernst going to New York with Peggy Guggenheim, and Leonora, in a marriage of convenience to her rescuer, Mexican diplomat-poet Renato Leduc, to Mexico. Here she remarried, produced two sons, and an extraordinary body of work as a painter, sculptor, poet and writer. (Still active in her 90s, last month [February 2009] Carrington attended an event in her honor at Mexico City’s Museo José Luis Cuevas.)
In 1995, Carrington showed Sullivan some of Varo’s playfully dreamlike and delicately-rendered paintings. Later, while reading Unexpected Journeys, Janet A. Kaplan’s biography of Varo, Sullivan came upon the story of Varian Fry and the Villa Bel-Air, a château outside Marseille where so many of the outstanding figures involved either lived or visited. For a time, though they were in terrible danger and lacked such basics as coal and meat, with André Breton hosting a Sunday open house and leading Surrealist games in the drawing room, Villa Air-Bel had all the joyous spirit of an artists colony.
While in Mexico City that time, Sullivan also wrote the short story that became the nucleus of Labyrinth of Desire, an exploration of the myths women live out when they fall in love, from Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara (“Don Juan / Doña Juana”), to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (“Self-Portrait with Mirrors”). In that short story, Sullivan said, “The man is named Varian, but just because I loved the name. I never imagined I’d write this book! He just sat at the bottom of my mind…”
While reading The Quiet American, Andy Marino’s biography of Varian Fry, Sullivan saw the image that made her decide to write about the refugee artists and intellectuals and their rescuers. In the photo, like a pair of children, Fry and Consuelo de Saint Exupéry perch high in the python-like branches of an plane tree.
“This was war-time France!” Sullivan exclaimed. “What were they doing in the tree?” They were hanging paintings. “That refusal to be cowed by Fascism… “
But how to tell such a huge and sprawling story? In a flash, Sullivan realized that she could organize it around a year in the life of Villa Air-Bel.
Other than Carrington, however, few of those who had been at Villa Air-Bel were still alive.
One of the most important sources had to be Vlady Serge, the painter who, as a young man had been rescued from France along with his father. From Canada, Sullivan made an appointment for an interview in Cuernavaca, where he had his house and studio. She then flew to Mexico. She settled into Las Mañanitas hotel, and when she telephoned that she was on her way, she was informed he was not there. It turned out Serge had been rushed to the hospital with a fatal stroke. Sullivan had missed him by a matter of minutes; nonetheless, he had left her detailed instructions on whom to meet and where to find archives.
Here in Coyoacan’s Café Moheli, the snortle of the cappuccino machine interlaced with birdsong, conversations, and the occasional passing car, I said, what had most struck me about Villa Air-Bel was the way she described the confusion at the time, and how, throughout the 1930s, people had a sense of normalcy, until—I quoted her—”in a moment, the world collapsed like a burnt husk.”
“I meant people to read this book in terms of now,” Sullivan said. “Because it can always happen.”
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me by simply clicking here.
This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
Just a small election of the translations of La Relación, as well as paraphrases of the Relación, commentaries, histories, and biographies of Cabeza de Vaca.
Yes, that most memorable of conquistadors’ names, Cabeza de Vaca, means Cow Head. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was, among many things, the author of the first printed book on what is now the American Southwest and the great state of Texas— back when it was terra incognita, the 1500s. I have already written about Cabeza de Vaca and his book, La Relación, in a longform essay about the Mexican literary landscape, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla.”
My longform essay about the Mexican literary landscape is now available as a Kindle.
Now that I’m writing about Far West Texas, Cabeza de Vaca pops in again, but where in Far West Texas was he, exactly? Towards answering that question, for my working library, which I have dubbed the Texas Bibliothek, I’ve accumulated a hefty stack of Cabeza de Vaca biographies, histories, and translations of his La Relación. (I do read Spanish, and in fact I’m a translator myself, however I specialize in contemporary Mexican writing, not 16th century Spanish, large chunks of which can float by me like so much Gabbahuaque.) The consternating thing is, in these various tomes the various routes mapped out for Cabeza de Vaca’s travels differ wildly.
As recounted in La Relación, Cabeza de Vaca’s travels encompass, from southern Spain, the Canary Islands, Cuba, Florida, the Galveston area, his enslavement in the general region we call South Texas and what is now northern Mexico, also his trek through Far West Texas, and thence a jog southwest to the Pacific coast, where he was rescued by Spanish slavers, and on to Mexico City-Tenochtitlan, where he was received by Hernán Cortez, conquistador of the Aztec Empire, the Marqués del Valle, himself. (Subsequently, after writing his Relación, Cabeza de Vaca was sent to Argentina, and from there, for being much too nice to the Indians, returned to Spain in chains.)
There is indeed a library’s-worth to say about the life and times of this most unusual conquistador and his fantastic travels and ghastly travails.
THE TWO EDITIONS, 1542 and 1555
A first edition of La Relación appeared in Zamora, Spain in 1542; a second, slightly different, edition in 1555. The latter is available for viewing online at the Witliff Collections— have a look here. To bamboozle matters, some English translations are of the 1542 edition; others of the 1555; some a medley of both.
Of the differences between the two editions, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Bandelier translation (discussed below), Ilan Stavans says:
“Whereas the [edition] of 1542 is an attempt to show his courage and achievements to Charles V, the 1555 edition seeks to present the author in a good light so as to cleanse his reputation from charges against him after his forays in South America. Therein lies the difference: the first is a report, the second is an engaging, persuasive act of restoration.”
In addition there was a testimony known as The Joint Report given by Cabeza de Vaca and the other two Spanish survivors of the Narváez Expediton upon their return. The original of The Joint Report has been lost, however a partial transcription was made by historian Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557), and included in his Historia general y natural de las Indias— a verily massive collection of 19 books not published in its entirety until (not a typo) 1851. There is a good website in English on Oviedo’s Historia general y natural at Vassar which you can view here. The notable biographies of and narrative histories about Cabeza de Vaca also incorporate the Joint Report from Oviedo. (I’ll be doing a post on some of those works next first Monday.)
NOTES ON SELECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATIONSOF CABEZA DE VACA’S LA RELACIÓN
SAMUEL PURCHAS, 1625
The first English translation, by Samuel Purchas, came out in 1625—nearly a century later— sandwiched into a collection of exploration narrativesentitled Purchas His Pilgrimes. You can read about that at the Witliff Collections Cabeza de Vaca website. Purchas’ source was the Italian translation of 1556, which explains his calling the author “Capo di Vaca.” Not in my working library, last I checked. If you ever happen to come upon an original edition of Purchas His Pilgrims on offer, and perchance have the clams to buy it, I would suggest that, forthwith, you donate it to a worthy institutional library.
THOMAS BUCKINGHAM SMITH, 1851and 1871
Astonishingly, no English translation was made directly from the Spanish original of Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación, until Thomas Buckingham Smith‘s in 1851, of the 1555 edition. That it would take over three centuries for a stand-alone English translation of such a major work in the history of the Americas to appear is, in itself, telling— as was the historical moment: the wake of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, which ended the US-Mexican War and considerably expanded the territory of the United States at the expense of its sister Republic.
The New York Historical Society, which has Smith’s papers, offers this brief, albeit most interesting, biographical sketch of the far-traveling translator:
“Thomas Buckingham Smith was a lawyer, diplomat, antiquarian, and author. Smith was born on October 21, 1810 on Cumberland Island, Georgia. The family moved to St. Augustine, Florida in 1820, when Smith’s father was appointed U.S. Consul to Mexico. Smith attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1836. Following graduation, Smith worked in the Maine office of Samuel Fessenden, a politician and abolitionist. He returned to St. Augustine in 1839 and served as a secretary to Robert R. Reid, governor of the Territory of Florida from 1839-1841. Smith served as a member of the Florida Territorial Legislative Council in 1841. He married Julia Gardner of Concord, New Hampshire in 1843.
“Throughout his life, Smith was a devoted student of North American history, specifically Spanish colonialism and Native American cultures and languages. In order to further his studies, Smith lobbied U.S. government officials for diplomatic appointments abroad. He was successful in obtaining positions in the U.S. embassies of Mexico (1850-1852) and Spain (1855-1858).
“While abroad, Smith actively purchased, transcribed and translated manuscripts related to the Spanish colonization of North America. Smith also supplemented his income by selling rare books and manuscripts to collectors in the U.S., including Peter Force, an editor and politician, whose collection was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1867. During the 1850-1860s, Smith translated and edited several publications, including Colección de varios documentos para la historia de la Florida y tierras adyacentes (1857), A grammatical sketch of the Heve language (1861), Narratives of the career of Hernando de Soto in the conquest of Florida (1866), and Relation of Alvar Nunez Cabeca de Vaca (1871).
Smith died in New York City in 1871 and was buried in St. Augustine.
Note that the New York Historical Society biography is mistaken: A first edition of Smith’s translation of La Relación appeared in 1851; the second edition, edited by J.G. Shea, was published posthumously in 1871. I am sorry to say that I have not yet seen a copy of this translation; I will have to remedy that. I note that inexpensive reprints are widely available.
MRS. FANNY BANDELIER, 1905
Mr and Mrs Bandelier, she the esteemed translator of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación. From the NYPL archive (which notes that this image can be freely used).
This second translation of La Relación– from the 1542 edition– was made by Mrs. Fanny Bandelier, and originally published in 1905 as The Journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Mrs. Bandelier’s translation held its ground for many decades. According to Cleve Hallenbeck, in his Journey and Route of Cabeza de Vaca, published in 1940:
“Of the two English translations I, in common with nearly all other students, prefer the Bandelier. The Smith translation was admittedly defective, and Smith was engaged in its revision at the time of his death in 1871. It was the need for a more accurate translation that prompted Mrs. Bandelier to undertake the task.” (p.24)
Cyclone Covey, on the other hand, has this to say about the Smith and the Bandelier, in his introduction to his 1961 translation (notes on that below):
“The translation that follows has been checked against both of these and is deeply indebted to the more literal Smith version.”
Go figure.
The Briscoe Center at University of Texas, Austin has a collection of documents transcribed from those in the Archivo General de las Indias in 1914-1917 by Fanny and her husband, Adolphe Francis Alphonse Bandelier. From that website, we have a biographical note for Mr. Bandelier but, alas, not Mrs:
“Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier (1840 – 1914) was an American archaeologist after whom Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico is named. Bandelier was born in Bern, Switzerland, and emigrated to the United States in his youth. After 1880 he devoted himself to archaeological and ethnological work among the Indians of the southwestern United States, Mexico and South America. Beginning his studies in Sonora (Mexico), Arizona and New Mexico, he made himself the leading authority on the history of this region, and — with F. H. Cushing and his successors — one of the leading authorities on its prehistoric civilization. In 1892 he abandoned this field for Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, where he continued ethnological, archaeological and historical investigations. In the first field he was in a part of his work connected with the Hemenway Archaeological Expedition and in the second worked for Henry Villard of New York, and for the American Museum of Natural History of the same city.”
Says Hallenbech, p. 24:
“[Mrs. Bandelier] was a recognized Spanish scholar, and Adolphe F. Bandelier, who wrote the introduction and annotated the text, certainly subjected the work to the closest scrutinity; some of his notes lead one to believe that he actively participated in the translating. His qualifications for such work are widely recognized.”
Well, ring-a-ling to Gloria Steinem!!
My much marked-up copy of the Bandelier translation is a Penguin Classics paperback edition of 2002 with an introduction by Ilan Stavans, revised and annotated by Harold Augenbraum, shown here:
An inexpensive paperback reprint of the Bandelier translation.
CYCLONE COVEY, 1961
Not until 1961, with Cyclone Covey’s, did another complete translation of La Relación appear, this one under the title Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. His translation, Covey writes in his preface, “is deeply indebted to the more literal Smith translation,” and he consulted both the 1542 and the 1555 editions. In the afterword professor William T. Pilkington calls Covey’s “the most accessible” translation for the present-day reader. It is moreover, “thoughtful and balanced, avoiding an archaic tone as well as twentieth-century colloquialisms.”
My copy of the Covey is a 1997 University of New Mexico Press reprint, shown here:
Cyclone Covey, by the way, is also the author of a book about a Roman Jewish colony in Arizona in the time of Charlemagne—you read that right. I’ve yet to read it— the title is Calalus—but it’s extremely rare, although I delightedly note that his son has just this year, 2021, made a print-on-demand facsimile edition available on amazon. Covey had few adherents to his Romans-in-Arizona hypothesis, but I give him major points for the courage to stand by his catapult, as it were, and publish Calalus. (And strange as some things may strike me, I always try to remember that the past is a strange and ever-changing country… ) In any event Covey had a long and otherwise distinguished career as an historian at Wake Forest. You can read Covey’s obituary here.
MORE TRANSLATIONS, 1993
Nearing the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, more translations appeared, including Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández’s The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación (Arte Público Press, 1993) and Frances M. López-Morillas’ Castaways (University of California Press, 1993, edited by Enrique Pupo-Walker).
ROLENA ADORNO AND PATRICK CHARLES PAUTZ, 1999
At present it would seem that most English-speaking Cabeza de Vaca scholars look to the Adorno and Pautz translation of 1999. Leading scholar of the Spanish Conquest Andrés Reséndez, in his A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books, 2007), has this to say about the Adorno and Pautz, in his notes (p.251):
“I wish to single out the landmark, three-volume set published in 1999 by Rolena Adorno and Patrick C. Pautz, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. This work constitutes yet another edition and translation of Cabeza de Vaca’s Narrative plus—literally—two and a half volumes of “notes.” These volumes have taken our understanding of this survival experience to a new level. The book contains biographical information of the protagonists, a detailed study of Cabeza de Vaca’s genaeology, relevant historical backrgound, and a textual analysis of the different accounts of ghe expedition, among other things. It constitites the single most important source for the present book project. I have also relied on their transcription of Cabeza de Vaca’s Narrative, first published in 1542, and often cite their translations.” (p.251)
The three volume boxed set published by the University of Nebraska Press, which you might be able to consult in a library, or hunt down on Abebooks.com, is an heirloom of a doorstopper, and yep, it calls for serious clams. (Ouch.) I did buy the three-volume set, very belatedly, and I only wish I had started with it because it is indeed the most authoritative translation and history and biography; moreover, Volume I contains the original text of the original 1542 La Relación side-by-side with Adorno and Pautz’s English translation, with notes on the same page.
The three volume set ALVAR NÚÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA, University of Nebraska Press. Shown here is the side-by-side 1542 original and Adorno and Pautz’s translation, with notes. Simply splendid!
In addition, I have been working from, and freely penciling in my underlines in Adorno and Pautz’s much less expensive paperback edition of their translation of La Relación, separately published by the University of Nebraska Press. Here’s a photo of my copy of that:
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Dear writerly reader, if you are looking for a rollickingly good armchair read about Cabeza de Vaca’s North American odyssey, there are two narrative histories I would especially warmly recommend: Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange, and Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey.I will be talking about these and other narrative histories and biographies in next month’s first Monday Texas Books post.
Next Monday, look for my monthly post for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
P.S. I welcome you to sign up for an automatic email alert about the next post, should you feel so moved, over on the sidebar.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me by simply clicking here.
Ignacio Solares, one of Mexico’s most outstanding literary writers, appears in English translation by Yours Truly in the fabulous new issue #72 of Gargoyle. Edited by poet Richard Peabody, Gargoyle is one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s most enduring and prestigious literary magazines. Check it out!
The cover of Gargoyle #72, which includes my translation of a short story by Ignacio Solares, features spoken word poet Salena Godden.
Solares’ short story is entitled “The Orders” (“Las instrucciones”). My thanks to Ignacio Solares for the honor, to Richard Peabody for accepting it and bringing it forth, and to Nita Congress for her eagle-eyed copyediting.
My previous translation of Solares’ work, the short story “Victoriano’s Deliriums,” appeared in The Lampeter Review #11.
Back in 2014 my book on the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, Francisco I. Madero, came out and, shortly thereafter, its Spanish translation was formally presented at the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México (CEHM) in Mexico City. I am very honored that the CEHM has asked me back to give a lecture (in Spanish) on the topic of Madero and Spiritism this March 10th at 12 PM Mexico City time(that would be the same as 12 PM USA Central Time). In these times of the pandemic it will be virtual, via the Mexican equivalent of Zoom. Of note, the CEHM has in its archives Francisco I. Madero’s personal library, which has many rare esoteric texts, some of which I will be discussing in my talk. If this piques your interest, zap me an email and I should be able to get you the link for the virtual event.
This video (below) gives a flavor of some of what I will be discussing.
My book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution is my book-length essay of creative nonfiction about my translation, plus my translation— the first—of Madero’s secret book, the 1911 Manual espírita, or Spiritist Manual. Metaphysical Odysseyinto the Mexican Revolution is also available in Spanish translation (an excellent one by a writer I much admire, Agustín Cadena) as Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana, together with a complete transcript of Madero’s 1911 Manual espírita.
This finds me still working on the podcast about Sanderson, Texas, that podcast series, “Marfa Mondays,” being apropos of my book in-progress on Far West Texas. During the Mexican Revolution some crucial battles and incidents took place on the US-Mexico border, so the ever-charismatic and unusual Don Francisco will make an appearance in this book as well.
P.S. Next Monday’s post will be the fourth-Monday-of-the-month Q & A with another writer.
