The Guadalajara Reporter
Guadalajara's Largest English Newspaper
The small towns around Lake Cajititlán are known for their arts and crafts, but locating the artisans is sometimes quite difficult, as they tend to work unobtrusively inside their homes or under a shade tree in the backyard. In San Juan Evangelista, however, you will actually find a Plaza de los Artesanos, surrounded by workshops where lumps of clay are turned into works of art.
Representatives of Bosque la Primavera joined together with activists from several animal-rescue organizations to liberate deer, raccoons, a lynx and other wild creatures on Monday, March 5, the day before the 32nd anniversary of a federal decree designating the Primavera Forest a Protected Area. The following day, a photo exhibit on the beauty of the forest and its creatures was launched at the Guadalajara Palacio Municipal and the Bosque’s birthday was crowned by a panel discussion on “The Past, Present and Future of the Primavera Forest” at the Guadalajara City Museum.
Jon Lovett is an internationally recognized expert on Natural Resource Management and professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Twente in Holland. Invited to Jalisco by his Ph.D. student, Arturo Balderes Torres, Lovett has spent the last few weeks studying the Primavera Forest and culminated his visit with a talk at the headquarters of the Mexican Association of Forest Professionals in Guadalajara.
It’s normal to see shopping carts filled with electronics rolling away from Wal-Mart towards the waiting cars of happy purchasers, but last weekend the heavily laden carts were being pushed the other way by conscientious consumers anxious to give their worn-out computers, printers and other devices a “decent burial.”
San Lucas is one of those sleepy little communities lying along the shore of Lake Cajititlán, just 20 kilometers northwest of Chapala. Well, sleepy it may appear if you walk around the plaza and fail to spot even a stray dog, but don’t be deceived by appearances. There’s plenty of activity going on behind the scenes in almost every backyard, for this little town has been home to makers of metates and molcajetes for at least 600 years and probably a lot more. Metates, of course, are flat slabs of volcanic rock for grinding lime-softened corn, while molcajetes are round mortars traditionally with three legs, used for pulverizing chili peppers, tomatoes and other ingredients used in salsas. Today, as in the past, each of these kitchen tools is hand-made from appropriate native rock which, as you might suspect, can be found in great abundance only minutes from the village.
Many years ago I became a member of a Mexican family when I married Susana, one of the nine children of Francisco and Carmen Ibarra of El Platanal, Michoacán. Most of the Ibarra children grew up on the grounds of a hydroelectric plant located in a remote corner of a veritable Michoacán jungle and run by their father, an electrical engineer. The children had no other playmates but themselves and not even schoolmates, as their mother was the local “school marm” sent by the government to teach at La Planta, as the power-generating facility was called.
Here’s a real mixed bag for you: a hiking trail that starts only three kilometers from the controversial Villa Panamericana (Pan Am Games Athletes Village) just outside Guadalajara and shows you both the best and the worst sides of the Primavera Forest.
