Holy Week — from Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday — is observed throughout Mexico. However San Miguel de Allende’s fervor and pageantry are some of the most powerful and beautiful. The image of El Señor de la Columna is carried in a procession from Atotonilco on the Sunday before Palm Sunday, and visits churches in […]
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I took one look around the tiny, dingy room I had rented and began questioning my sanity. It was December 2 and I was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, after a tiring 24-hour bus ride one thousand miles south of the border. During an earlier October visit, I had rented the cheap second-floor room […]
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Driving up the long rise into Mineral de Pozos, framed by the gray-brown humpbacked mountains once laced with veins of silver and gold, the visitor first sees the stone walls of the cemetery, the panteón, before he enters the town. It seems like a fitting introduction to a city that nearly died itself, sinking from a population […]
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An American acquaintance of mine, who believes himself to be quite astute about such things, is in the habit of asking whether San Miguel de Allende is the real Mexico and, if it’s not, where can it be found? I suppose the presence of 10,000 Canadians and Americans in this city of 75,000 puts him […]
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Earlier this year, a woman said to me at a cocktail party, “So you hate the United States?” “What?” I’m sure my eyebrows leaped nearly to my hairline with surprise. I wondered whether she’d been lying in wait for me. “You call yourself an expatriate. You even admit it right here.” Her left hand raised […]
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For some northerners, heading south of the border to live after a busy career, Mexico looks like the land of mañana. All they have to do is kick back and watch the monarch butterflies pass on their annual trek down to the state of Michoacan, while the maid whips up another batch of margaritas. This view does […]
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I’m sitting in a third grade class at the Independencia School in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Aside from the charming teacher, there’s hardly a full set of teeth in the room, although nobody’s smile appears to be diminished by this defect. The teacher’s name is Fatima Almeida and she does not work for the […]
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It started in 2001 with supplying a pair of shoes so that a young man didn’t have to go to college barefoot. He’d already won a scholarship. A San Miguel woman named Helen Morris provided them, and a relationship blossomed from there. Soon she was joined by Virginia Wheelwright and several others in providing financial […]
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The glory days of hacienda living are today just an intriguing piece of Mexico’s history. For the newly-arrived Spanish nobles it was a time of great wealth and great expectations that began with their arrival in Mexico in 1524, until the slow demise of the grand estates following the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This land, […]
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The church bells have been tolling most of the night, interrupted only intermittently by the blast of rockets soaring into the night sky. One resounding boom echoes throughout the city at midnight. This is when thousands of pilgrims will join the Processión del Señor de la Columna (Procession of Our Lord of the Column — so named for […]
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