For years, he was Mexico’s most-wanted fugitive, a ghost who controlled half the country’s drug trade from the shadows, shielded by a platoonof well-armed bodyguards. 

On the 18th anniversary of the death of Miguel Ángel López Rocha, the seven-year-old boy who died after falling into the polluted Río Santiago in El Salto, a small white coffin sat at the center of a press conference in the elegant Hotel La Rotonda in Guadalajara Centro. Representatives from citizen groups throughout the region had come to present a “citizen balance” or evaluation of the first year of the federal government’s Lerma–Santiago river basin restoration program.

Amid our tranquil expatriate enclave, the Lake Chapala Jewish Congregation (LCJC) finds itself grappling with a dilemma echoing through diaspora communities worldwide: in an era of rising global antisemitism, is it safer to stand visible or retreat from view?

“Un lugar sano para conversaciones productivas” is emblazoned across the menu of El Sentido, a “bar” situated steps from Guadalajara’s Templo Expiatorio. The motto seems to well express the outlook of Kurt Robinson, the 40-ish Australian who started the business just 1 1/2 years ago in a quirky upstairs venue that used to house an Oaxacan restaurant.

Many historical accounts neatly bookend the Mexican Revolution between November 20, 1910, the start of the uprising against Porfirio Díaz, and February 5, 1917, the promulgation of the Constitution. 

When Mayan poet Pedro Uc Be stepped onto the stage at the Feria Internacional del Libro last month to receive a recognition for his trajectory as a Mayan poet, the moment carried far more weight than a literary honor. It was a recognition not only of a body of poetry written in the Maya language, but of a life’s work rooted in territorial defense, environmental justice, and the survival of Indigenous ways of being.