Columns

Unsurprisingly, every so often readers have an occasion to ask: Just how in the hell did stuff that occurred back in, say, 1964 get into an act-by-act, word-for-word account?  

1964.  We had recently left the busy port town of Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave, the Free and Sovereign State of Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave.  Now my wife, I and our sturdy Chevy station wagon were lost.  Our sleekly printed, carefully drawn map did not show the unpaved road we were traveling.  Ahead a thin man squatted as if waiting for a bus.  We hoped his presence meant he knew where he was going – unlike the two of us.  We hoped he knew where he was at.  

December 10, 2008, an intriguing, romantic and tragic German-American film titled “The Reader” was released.  It was produced by two great film-makers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died before it was released.  Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet starred.  It remains a movingly fateful love story with a stinging twist shaping the end in which a woman kills herself to hide her illiteracy.  Winslet  won the Academy Award for Best Actress.  

President Enrique Peña Nieto visited China, Australia and the United States after the disappearance of the 43 students in the village of Iguala, Guerrero.  As public pressure forced him to meet with the students’ families, he insisted the encounter take place not in Guerrero, but in presidential territory.   Those grieving and incensed families were not at all pleased.  

Backed by numerous international economic forecasters, the administration of Mexican President Peña Nieto predicted a buoyant year of vigorous growth, robust foreign investment, muscular job creation and, magically, lower prices for consumers.

Present scrambled circumstances are bourgeoning. They are dipping foreign visitors (long- and short-term) to Jalisco’s “Lakeside” into a changed and squeezed together “North Shore.” It’s a place that increasingly sees itself painted a shade of metropolitanism... almost.  Often, this, in turn, seems to frustrate some outsiders who are trying to join together a scrambled “almost” with the vast and handsome lacustrine expanse once ambitiously known as the “Chapala Riviera.”