In bustling Cancún, we connected to old world dining at La Parilla on Avenida Yaxchilán in the Centro or downtown district of the city. Here in the lovely tiled interior, mariachis serenaded us while we dined on camarones a la tequila and Huarache Azteca con popal y arrachera. We also shopped at the sprawling La […]
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Index to Mexico this month (all 12 months) June 1, 1565. Andrés de Urdaneta sets sail from the Philippine Islands on what eventually becomes recognized as a landmark voyage in sailing history. His return to New Spain, by sailing across the Pacific Ocean from west to east, is the earliest documented successful voyage in this […]
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Index to Mexico this month (all 12 months) 1, 1857 Conservative general Tomás Mejía assaults the British consulate in San Luis Potosí and steals $240,000. The British government subsequently demands that this sum be included in the external debt owed them by President Juárez. 1, 1873 The birth in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, of the […]
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Each year, the Mexican state of Quintana Roo is swarmed by foreign tourists. Even in 2020, in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the city of Cancún alone saw upwards of two million tourists. Being that the region was one of the few permitting entry to foreigners, I decided to make the journey from […]
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When I first saw guava fruit I mistook it for lemon. It happened on my first trip to Aguascalientes during the summer rainy season when a tree — its branches loaded with tiny round yellow fruit in the backyard of a house — caught my eye. I soon learned the popular exotic fruit known as […]
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Index to Mexico this month (all 12 months) April 1, 1536. Pánfilo Narváez’s expedition had been shipwrecked off the Florida coast in 1518. After 18 years of traversing the continent, on foot, four survivors, including Alvaro Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado finally make contact with other Spaniards near the Pacific Ocean […]
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More than 8 million people in Mexico, about 6% of the total population, speak one or more of the country’s 68 original (indigenous) languages. [1] Najo’obiñ’eje, Welcome, bienvenidos, in Mazahua. Pjiekak’joo, “We speak”, the name of the critically endangered Tlahuica language. Despite an official proclamation following the Mexican Revolution of the elimination of racial prejudice […]
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In a land of smokey mezcals, rompopes, single-distilled raicillas, cervezas, tequilas, and Kahlua—that thick, sweet coffee liqueur made in Veracruz whose name in Nahuatl means the house of the Acolhua people—wine would seem to scarcely merit a mention. But in the 30 miles stretching between San Juan del Río and Bernal, known as the Querétaro […]
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Mexico is the land of fiestas, and never more than during the month of December, when the feasts are so many that they overlap by several days. Starting on December 3, the beginning of the nine-day tribute to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and continuing through until January 6, Three Kings Day, there is non-stop celebration. In addition […]
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When European ships were wrecked at sea, a Christian burial was usually afforded those whose bodies washed up on the shoreline. That was not the case here. Somewhere on a desolate stretch of a Baja California beach lie the bones and cargo of a once majestic Spanish galleon. It was around 1576 when she vanished […]
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