At least for the next month, Guadalajara is taking its place — alongside Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and the Chinese “Bodies” exhibit that showcases preserved and dissected human remains — as the locale for two gruesome but probably necessary museum exhibits. 

Plenty of people will tell you that witchcraft works in Mexico. A spiritual cleansing can safeguard against bewitchment. A wife can put a spell on a husband to stop him philandering. A storekeeper can hire a witch to put his rivals out of business. 

A hundred years after his death, Porfirio Diaz is remembered not only as Mexico’s longest ruling president, but also as the person credited with putting Chapala on the map as a tourist destination.

The “Black Widow” of Chapala 

With a string of suspected poisonings, a strangling and an empty coffin, the case of the “Black Widow” is a narrative Raymond Chandler would have been proud of. Yet Maria Socorro Rodriguez, the femme fatale of the story, was no fiction. A Mexican woman who married a string of wealthy U.S.-born retirees, Maria is suspected of bringing them all to an early grave.

The U.S. Episcopal Church’s approval of gay and lesbian marriage, passed at its General Convention in Salt Lake City July 1 following on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decision favoring gender-blind marriage just a few days earlier, appears not to have had an earthshaking effect — either positive or negative — on its sister province to the south, the Anglican Church of Mexico, despite close social and historical ties between the two churches.

1965

Cast readies musical review

“Sing for your Summer — 1965,” annual musical review produced by Tapa-Teatro of Guadalajara (in English) to benefit the Dr. Banda free clinic in Colonia Seattle was in fine form on opening night at the Teatro Experimantal in the Parque Agua Azul. The show casts nearly all American actors and singers and is built around Broadway musical hits.