Columns

Last week’s April 2 column’s “callout” here (called by some a “sub headline”) was long. Long enough to be dealt with as a slice of Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1392 “Canterbury Tale.” (And thus the father of “April Fool’s Day” and the grand “Chaucerian” list.)  

Just before the crowded, over-loaded days of Pascua, both local Mexicans and northern residents here reluctantly noted the United States’ political embrollo tumble toward numerical chaos.  The cluster of U.S. candidates for president shrunk.  Now chiefly centering on two/three candidates for each party, instead of vast stages crowded with accusatory dreamers.  While that was welcome to many rational minds, this change seemed to bring no profound intellectual clarity or emotional charity with it. 

A number of readers, here from the United States, have recently had the same rare impulse: cutting their daily electronic intake of what one reader calls “idiotic political developments” north of the border.

The passion of Jesus Christ is the central event that divides Western civilization for both believers and non-believers.

When Lena Curiel’s kidnapped young mother, Chela, was found, it was said she refused to come home.  Several members of the extended Curiel family, plus three armed family friends, were sent to bring the stolen young mother home. They were led by the family doctor and a bruja. (In the 1960s, brujos, male and female, rural and city, were popular.)   

Last week’s column here snagged some readers’ curiosity.  Campesino vocabulary –1950s, ‘60s – changed a lot, courtesy of U.S. war vets.  They migrated to Mexico, bringing a fresh Spanish vocabulary to rural Mexico.  Example: Lysander Kemp’s essay regarding Jocotepec/Nextipac appeared in Issue Six, 1955, of the much applauded “Discovery” literary magazine.  Kemp also was the unparalleled translator of Octavio Paz’s ground-breaking biography of Mexico, “The Labyrinth of Solitude.”  Meanwhile …