Columns

Last week’s front-page mention of the Chapala area’s popularity with foreigners prompted echoes of Mexico’s fame in the “beginning” days of the late 1950’s and 60’s and the growing popularity of bullfighting – the corrida. 

Following a quiet run of rainless days, a hammering downpour, with no warning, yanked folks out of bed to close windows and double check doors.

Chucha – Maria de Jesus – Anzalda was a wiry, middle-sized woman of about 60 when I first met her in the 1960s.  She was easy to remember because of her inventive ways of  making a living.  She seldom seemed to struggle in doing that, yet was always roughly inventive about it.  

In 1992, planning to build a new bodega, Nacho Lara invited his cousin and me to survey those villages near the Lake where adobon – home-made bricks – were created. “Adobon” was the word once used to identify large local red clay bricks. They measured 36.6 centimeters long, 16.5 centimeters wide and 7.5 centimeters high.  Made of clay and cow dung, low-fired in simple pyramid brick kilns, they cost 500,000 pesos a thousand.  In 1973. adobon cost 1,000 pesos per thousand.  That was a clear marker of Mexico’s uncontrolled inflation.  The price was called “crazy” by most Mexicans, especially when talking to foreign associates, and especially by sane local albañiles (masons).   

The “Gettysburg Address” – a mere 272 words spoken by Abraham Lincoln  on November 19, 1863 – was to become the “Gettysburg formula,” a rhetorical “sleight of hand” strengthening a document that created something no one believed could work: a democratic society born of revolution.  

Thirty years ago this month I was sitting at pueblo cantina with Nacho Mejia, who had worked at La Posada Ajijic some years before that and in the 1960s in Jocotepec’s La Quinta Inn. We were enjoying some nostalgia, including numerous tales of folks we know with a thirst not only for maguey juice and cerveza, but often for more excitement than they knew how to handle.