The American Consulate celebrated its parent country’s independence from the U.K. inside the massive convention hall of a technical school on the northwestern outskirts of Guadalajara, Friday, June 30.   

Although Guadalajara is a tourist town with some 3.6 million foreign visitors passing through it each year, English is not widely spoken in the downtown area or at the airport.

With Guadalajara officials keen to take the horse out of the calandria (tourist buggy) trade, one Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UAG) professor proposes electric motors.

While expatriate North Americans may have a lonely time celebrating their patriotic holidays in some far flung corners of the world, those living in Mexico know how to throw a good party.

Consulate staffer Rebecca Marquez did justice to the “Star Spangled Banner” at the U.S. Consulate General in Guadalajara’s July 4th celebration

Although Guadalajara has a large number of parks big and small, one of the complaints of many expats who’ve moved here is the lack of green spaces.

This is a tale of three such green areas, one that is abandoned and two others coming to fruition in the near future.

Planetario Servero Diaz

The Guadalajara Planetarium, abandoned by successive municipal administrations over the last ten years, was a place were two generations of tapatios went to gaze at the stars, wonder at the cosmos in the round theater, introduce their children to astronomy and physics and enjoy its tree filled gardens and collection of antique cars. The grounds, at the corner of the Periferico Norte and the Calzada Independencia, just a stone’s throw from the city’s impressive zoo, were sold off last year to pay off a city pension debt. In its place, an 800-million-peso, 20,000-seat arena will be built by a private consortium, with a 30-year lease, that will be the eventual anchor piece for the new Fiestas de Octubre fairgrounds.

Former Student Union

The state of Jalisco is pumping eight million pesos into a new park on the grounds where the former Student Federation of Guadalajara (FEG) building was located, in the Colinas del Normal neighborhood. The FEG, once a legitimate Universidad de Guadalajara student body organization, transformed over the years into a thuggish criminal group; its own president was implicated in the killing of five people in 2012, their bodies having been found on the FEG grounds. The state government took over the building - which was demolished in July 2014 - putting a nail in the coffin of the checkered 66-year history of the FEG.

The new park envisioned on the plot will be a place where “people can walk or run, with fountains where people can go to read and climb on the trees,” said Secretary of Infrastructure and Public Works (SIOP) chief Netzahualcoyotl Ornelas Plascencia. Meetings with residents in four nearby colonias were held to determine the type of park they wanted to have.

The 20-thousand-square-meter park will give priority to older adults, some three-to-four thousand of whom live in the area.

“We are creating an open space with walkways, a jogging track, some playground and exercise equipment, and an interactive fountain in the center,” said SIOP spokesman Eduardo Aguirre Nungaray.  Also planned are a sculpture pavilion and an area for open air movie screenings. In addition, the park will be wheel-chair friendly with ramps and handrails and pod tactile guides built to specifications arrived at in consultation with the State Council for the Attention and Inclusion of Handicapped People. About 1,000 people in the area are handicapped, said Nungaray.

Cerro Tapatio

The area below the former quarry and sand pit abandoned some 40-odd years ago on Tapatio Hill known as El Hoyanco (the big hole) is benefiting from a surplus of dirt resulting from the excavations of the Tren Ligero 3 subway tunnel. Some 1.5 million cubic meters of material will have been dumped into the hole by the end of this year, on which a 98-thousand-square-meter new metro park will be formed. The cost of hauling the fill is included in the train project. The finished park, located just off the Guadalajara-Chapala highway in Tlaquepaque, should open about the same time as the new subway line, at the end of 2018. The state will invest about 30-million pesos to finish the park, which is expected to cover themes of ecology, recreation, education, sports and culture. Some 600 trees will be planted, with pines and encino at the top of the terraced area, a cactus forest on the middle rung, and in the lower area, a low deciduous forest, similar to the foliage found in the Rio Santiago Canyon.