The very famous American author James Michener (1907-1997) wrote more than forty books, of varying quality, in his lengthy writing career, including Mexico, a sweeping historical novel published in 1992. He began writing Mexico in 1961, but then abandoned the idea (or the manuscript was lost, depending on who’s telling the story) for about thirty […]
Why has it taken me so long to write about U.S.-born photographer C. B. Waite and his important contribution to documenting Mexico at the start of the twentieth century? The main challenge has been to unravel the discrepancies and inconsistencies in most previous accounts of his life and work. So, before examining Waite’s major contributions […]
Mexico’s National Photo Archive (Fototeca Nacional) combines the work of two photographers—Winfield Scott (1863-1942) and Charles Betts Waite (1861-1927)—into a single collection titled “C.B. Waite / W. Scott.” The two men did have several things in common: of similar age, both were prominent US-born photographers working in Mexico at the start of the twentieth century; […]
I recently came across a short, but interesting, piece describing Chapala in the mid-1940s. I currently know nothing about its author, Temple Manning, beyond the longevity of their syndicated byline, first used in the 1920s and still going strong in the 1960s. Here are a few excerpts from Manning’s description of “Chapala — A Mexican […]
Ajijic’s unofficial photographer in the early 1970s was free-spirited Beverly Johnson (1933-1976), one of the many people who helped make Ajijic tick in what old timers still remember as the ‘good old days.’ Beverly and her five young children moved to Mexico in the early 1960s and settled in Ajijic, where she hoped to eke […]
For Canadians, who celebrate 1 July as Canada Day, here is a list of Canadian artists and authors who have historical connections to Lake Chapala and who have been profiled on this site. Enjoy! Visual artists Henry Sandham (1842-1910), a well-known Canadian illustrator of the time, illustrated Charles Embree‘s historical novel, A Dream of a […]
Prolific author Emily Huntington was born on 22 October 1833 in Brooklyn, Connecticut, and died on 2 November 1913. Though Wikipedia claims that she died in Mexico City, contemporaneous newspapers make it clear that she died of heart trouble at her home in St. Paul, Minnesota, a few days after her eightieth birthday. Huntington, who […]
At the start of the twentieth century, Jacob Kalb, a Jewish immigrant of Austrian ancestry, owned and operated the Iturbide Curio Store in downtown Mexico City. The store, selling all manner of Mexican tourist souvenirs and mementoes, opened in 1903 on the ground floor of the Hotel Iturbide. The hotel occupied the historic Palacio de […]
In the mid-1890s, New Orleans poet Mary Ashley Townsend, born in 1832, and her husband, Gideon, became, almost certainly, the first American couple to own property in the town of Chapala—and they didn’t even have to pay for it, because it was a gift from their eldest daughter, Cora. Mary Ashley and Gideon lived in […]
Before the advent of trains and motor vehicles, the only way to get to Lake Chapala was to walk, ride or take a stagecoach (diligencia). The first regular Guadalajara–Chapala stagecoach service began in 1866. While the trip could be done in ten hours, it usually took twelve or more, and the mix of excitement, speed, […]
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, a photo I took of Ajijic in 1980 (below) shows, almost precisely in the middle, the bare hillside known as Cerro del Aguila (“Hill of the Eagle”) or Cerro Colorado (“Colored Hill”). According to a local legend, the hillside was formed during the centuries-long migration of the […]
Canadian artist Frank Leonard Brooks (1911-2011), usually known simply as Leonard Brooks, was a painter and textile artist who made his home in San Miguel de Allende for more than fifty years. He and his wife, Reva, a photographer, occasionally visited Chapala, but never for any extended period of time. It was something of a […]
Many artists and authors have visited Lake Chapala in search of, or in homage to, their literary or artistic idols. But what about those who have also spent time collecting ancient stone and pottery idols and artifacts? There are far more members of this latter group than I first thought. The first academic report of […]
American photographer Sumner W Matteson has not received the attention he deserves for the thousands of outstanding images of landscapes and people in the US, Cuba and Mexico he took at the start of the twentieth century. Sumner Warren Matteson Jr was born on 15 September 1867 in Decorah, Iowa, and died in Mexico City […]
The text of “A Brief History of Ajijic,” by June Nay Summers (1916-2001), comes directly from her own 1993 booklet Lake Chapala Villages in the Sun. The full text of the article is on the web, and parts of it were paraphrased during a recent Open Circle presentation in Ajijic. But how accurate is her […]
Unlike most of my writing, this is a very personal post. It was 1980—and I was in my mid-twenties—when I first saw Lake Chapala. I was only there a few hours, took a few photos, and was not overly impressed. It was to be several years before I revisited. What I hadn’t realized, until quite […]
When not writing about mariachi, historian Dr Álvaro Ochoa Serrano has dedicated much of his life to writing about Lake Chapala. His latest book, titled La Ciénega de Chapala, published in 2023, is an extraordinarily well-researched account of the history of the eastern end of Lake Chapala, told through four detailed and elegantly written case […]
Juan Aráuz Lomeli (ca 1887-1970) is known to have taken photos of Chapala from the 1920s onward. The somewhat unusual surname Aráuz or Arauz—the accent is optional—is of Basque origin. Though not a full-time professional photographer, Juan Aráuz Lomeli stamped “ARAUZ – FOT.” and an address in Guadalajara on the reverse of the photos he […]
In the late 1930s the government of President Lázaro Cardenas financed the completion of a paved highway from Mexico City to Guadalajara via Toluca, Morelia and Jiquilpan (Cardenas’s birthplace). To commemorate the first part, Mexico City to Morelia, author and art historian Pedro Ceuleneer de Gante was commissioned to write a short guidebook illustrated by […]
Juan Victor Aráuz Gutiérrez (1914-2000) and his father, Juan Aráuz Lomeli, were photographers who lived and worked in Guadalajara. Because they sometimes photographed the same subject at the same time, there is uncertainty in the case of some images as to which of the two men was the photographer. Juan Victor Aráuz Gutiérrez (sometimes mistakenly […]
One curiosity in the permanent collection of Guadalajara’s Instituto Cultural Cabañas is this pretty painting by Ignacio Ramírez titled “Vista de Chapala.” The painting is dated 1986, even though the view it depicts is clearly from many decades earlier, as evidenced, for example, by the absence of Casa Braniff (completed in 1905) and of several […]
While trawling through the archives of the Guadalajara Reporter many years ago, I stumbled across a one-line reference to the German-born film producer Hans Oppenheimer. Anita Lomax, the weekly newspaper’s Ajijic correspondent, commented in 1964 that “Hans Oppenheimer, writer and poet” had just left Ajijic for a visit to Mexico City. Earlier that year, Oppenheimer’s […]
A striking series of color-tinted postcards was published by S. Altamirano in the mid-1920s. The application of color on these cards was far more sophisticated than that used earlier by (among others) Alba y Fernández. The reverse side of these cards carries the imprint, “Editor S. Altamirano, Av. Colon 165, Guadalajara.” The front of the […]
Some years ago, I stumbled across an early, unattributed short story which mentioned Lake Chapala and made several references to the town of La Barca, and to José Velarde (“The Golden Ass”). The story, titled “The Sorceress” and published in 1894, was about the impacts of superstition, religion and sacrifice. Recently, while researching a short […]
“The Sorceress: How an American Engineer was Sacrificed to the Aztec Gods.” by Edwin Hall Warner. 1894. The calzada principal in La Barca runs a meandering course easterly through the town to the garita. The houses on each side are of the usual Mexican type, the more pretentious of stone, others of adobe, with barred […]
Two young US artists—Everett Gee Jackson and Lowell Houser—who had first met at art school in Chicago, arrived in Chapala in 1923. Apart from short trips elsewhere they spent the next three and a half years at Lake Chapala—living first in Chapala, then in Ajijic, and then returning once again to Chapala—before continuing their highly […]
Photographer and hotelier Winfield Scott was born in Galesburg, Michigan, on 15 July 1863 and died in Los Angeles, California, on 19 January 1942. Scott spent six months in Mexico in 1888, and then lived in the country, with occasional breaks in California, from 1895 to 1924. From 1890 to 1894, he was working in […]
In a departure from our normal style, this post looks at a 1925 editorial in the long-running Guadalajara daily El Informador titled “La Villa Veraniega de Chapala” (The Summer Resort of Chapala). Quotes used throughout this post are informal translations of the original Spanish. The most likely candidate for the editorial’s authorship is the newspaper’s […]
Several popular curio shops in downtown Mexico City at the start of the twentieth century stocked all manner of wares to sell to tourists and travelers, and some even published their own postcards of Mexico. An 1898 list in The Mexican Herald of stores selling “Opals and Mexican Curiosities” included Granat & Horwitz (in the […]
Author Bart McDowell (1923-2009), who later became a senior editor of National Geographic magazine, first visited Ajijic in 1952. Born in Texas on 10 September 1923, Hobart (‘Bart’) K. McDowell Jr. graduated with a degree in political science from the University of California before completing a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. […]