December 1963 was, as the Four Seasons would later sing, a significant month.
Americans were still in shock at the assassination of their charismatic young president just three months after Martin Luther King, Jr. had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Neil Armstrong’s stroll on the lunar surface was another six and a half years away.
Guadalajara at that time was widely touted as Mexico’s most idyllic city – a welcoming and leisurely metropolis of less than a million souls, whose charming colonial downtown core was easily accessible from the tree-lined suburbs, which to the north-west stretched a mere two blocks past the gleaming new Minerva Glorieta. Gorgeous Lake Chapala was about an hour’s drive away, via a harrowing two-way road that looped around the Hotel Tapatio and petered down from four lanes to two at the airport. No wonder in the years that followed World War II, (and later as disenchantment with U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew) the region became a magnet for Americans looking for alternative lifestyles. Mexico allowed war veterans and retirees to live in a style they could hardly enjoy in the United States: the minimum monthly income requirement for an FM3 resident visa in those days was 3,000 pesos, equivalent to 240 dollars.
Although they had chosen to live in a slow-paced culture where the fates rather than logic often prevailed in everyday matters, the (mostly) Americans who settled in Guadalajara and Chapala in the 1950s and 60s found it hard to shake off their in-built instinct to organize themselves and engage in their favored free-time activity: “do-gooding.” Guadalajara had U.S. diplomatic representation since 1881, the American Society of Jalisco formed in 1945, the Benjamin Franklin Library in 1949, the Instituto Cultural Mexicano Norteamericano (ICMN) in 1951, the Lake Chapala Society in 1954, the American School of Guadalajara and American Legion Post Three in 1955 and Chapala Post Seven in 1961. English-speaking church congregations began to spring up, while a club “explosion” saw names such as Duplicate Bridge, Junior League, Shrine Club, Salvation Army, AA, La Luz Guild, appear on the horizon.
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