Not long ago, as the Reporter’s lakeside staff sat around chewing the fat at a rare social gathering, a colleague remarked that he was mystified by the title of this section of the newspaper.
Seems like a no-brainer to me, but for the enlightenment of readers who aren’t on the same page, here’s my take on why it’s called Laguna Chapalac. It’s all about where we are, who we are and what goes on here.
Laguna is a Spanish word referring to bodies of water, such as pools, ponds, fresh water lakes and salt water lagoons. In this case a lake, Mexico’s largest one in fact. Chapalac is the name of the legendary Tecuexe tribal leader who ruled the north shore territory from Poncitlán at the time of the Spanish conquest.
Chapala, the lake’s moniker, was derived the chief’s name, itself associated with other terms in the native vocabulary. Chapanique, translates from Coca as wet place. Chapaxtla or Chachapatlán comes from Nahuatl, signifying place where pots are abundant, in reference to the ancient ritual practice of depositing drops of blood or tears into tiny clay pots that were tossed in the lake’s waters to mollify the ancient gods.
Some linguists interpret Chapala as meaning the place of grasshoppers on the water. Perhaps the hopping bugs once thrived on endemic aquatic foliage that has been obliterated by modern civilization.
The lake was christened El Mar Chapalico by Fray Antonio Tello, the Spanish friar (1567-1653) who penned the Crónica Miscelana de la Sancta Provinicia de Xalisco, a massive six-volume historical encyclopedia of the region. He labeled Chapala as a sea based on its immense dimensions. Large as it seems today, you have to keep in mind that Tello wrote about the lake nearly 300 years before a third of it was amputated in the early 1900’s to expand land area for farming.
For what it’s worth, I should mention that “laguna” is also a word for gap, applied to things totally unrelated to lakes. For example, a laguna legal is a loophole in the law. A laguna mental is a mental lapse, something I experience far too often.
The area where we live is called La Ribera de Chapala, literally meaning the Chapala lakeshore, and commonly abbreviated as lakeside. Mexican folks with shaky spelling skills make the mistake of writing rivera, the term for a brook or stream, alternately capitalized as Spanish surname.
Those who prefer the title Riviera de Chapala hold absurdly highfalutin notions of the place and have probably never set foot in Cannes or Nice.
At any rate, the Laguna Chapalac column emerged in the distant days when Allyn and Beverly Hunt ran this newspaper – then known as the Colony Reporter – and expanded content to track the multiple activities of interest to the area’s burgeoning foreign populace.
When Michael Forbes and Sean Godfrey took charge in 1994 they renamed the weekly The Guadalajara Reporter to reflect a more global perspective of the readership and erase whatever negative connotations of colonialism were implied in the original title.