Tony Burton

Tony Burton's books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran"), "Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008). Amazon Author Page                                          Facebook Page

Pablo J. Villaseñor summarized Lake Chapala for Mexico’s 1853 Universal Dictionary of Geography and History

 1920s and earlier  No Responses »
Jun 052025
 

The talented nineteenth century poet and dramatist Pablo J. Villaseñor is best remembered today for his creative work. But, shortly before he died in 1855, he also wrote an entry about Lake Chapala for a remarkable, collaborative, national, multi-volume publication titled Diccionario universal de historia y de geografía.

Diccionario, Tomo 2
Here, in translation, are a few select excerpts from his 2200-word entry on Lake Chapala to give a sense of Villaseñor’s writing:

* CHAPALA: 13 leagues southeast of Guadalajara lies this delightful lake, surrounded by towns and estates of prodigious fertility. It is truly surprising that it has not been given the importance it deserves and that it is still so little known even by the people of Jalisco. . . . “It can be said that this lake is one of the most beautiful in the Americas, and in Europe there are seas less worthy of the name than the Mar Chapálico.”

After a concise description of the lake’s size, seasonal changes in depth, and main settlements on or close to its shores, Villaseñor laments that:

The unfortunate state of neglect of all our assets, and the lack of public spirit to undertake profitable projects, means that today only small fishing canoes and the occasional private boat or falúa [open decked boat] can be seen on Chapala, together with two that belong to the state government. [Ed. Note: The first steamboat was launched on Lake Chapala a decade later, in 1868.]

The indigenous people who live on the shores are generally farmers; but they also dedicate themselves ardently to fishing, and it is noteworthy that when the lagoon is perhaps at its most turbulent, on stormy nights, two or three fishermen will launch a miserable canoe, which is taking on water everywhere, to catch a few fish, the value of which does not exceed 8 or 10 pesos, if they are lucky. But the men who were born on the shore of the lake, who open their eyes to contemplate it every day, and who fall asleep on its beaches to the confused sound of its turbulent waves, have completely lost their fear. And we know someone who, when the storm raises the waves higher and the Mar Chapálico becomes more furious, throws himself into the water on a small raft, clutching a bottle of mescal, and in the depths of the lake falls asleep under the influence of the spirit, until the waves throw him back onto the shore. One of the magnificent spectacles that the lake presents is when a water bomb, commonly called a culebra [snake], falls on it: the storm thunders horribly over the waves; then the entire cloud detaches itself as a great column of water, and immediately another, gigantic and boiling, rises, with the entire lagoon as its base; the moment the cloud touches the waters of Chapala, it detaches itself, and the lake and the sky become tranquil and beautiful, like two mirrors placed one in front of the other.

One of the things that makes Chapala unique is its sweet, drinkable waters. They irrigate a multitude of orchards along the shore, where the finest fruits and vegetables are produced. They also serve as an immense watering place for the many livestock on the surrounding farms. The water is clear, and no alligators or other offensive animals are ever seen in such a vast lagoon. On the contrary, the delicate white, delicious catfish, and an infinite variety of other fish inhabit its waves. This makes the entire shore a delightful place to swim, especially Chapala, where you can walk on crystalline white sand.

Among the fertile towns along its shore, one of the most beautiful is the one that gives it its name. Chapala is a small but delightful town, at the foot of the beautiful San Francisco Hill, which has the shape of a cone. It is famous for its hot springs, where many sick people recover their health, and for its fertility and temperature, under which the most varied and delicious fruits are grown. Still present on its shore, lapped by the lake’s waves, are the ruins of the old Franciscan convent, which today is a sad patch of rubble with a destroyed church that serves as a parish.”

Villaseñor includes only a brief reference to Jocotepec:

Another town worth mentioning is Jocotepec, for the gigantic image of the Lord of Huaje venerated there. Contemplating its enormous stature, which exceeds four varas [3 meters], one immediately realizes that the unfortunate Indians still mix the ridiculous exaggerations of idolatry with Christian worship. For them, the Lord of Huaje is a greater god, and to demean him would be sacrilegious temerity.”

But he then offers a detailed account of the town of Mescala [Mexcala], and the role its residents played as “brave defenders of the island that bears that name” during the War of Independence.

Villaseñor agrees with several earlier prominent individuals (Samuel L. Trant, Mariano Otero and Manuel de J. Olazagarre) that it is worth studying if navigation could be improved on the River Lerma, Lake Chapala and the River Santiago, in order to better link Mexico City and Querétaro with the states of Jalisco and Michoacán.

He concludes by hoping that his remarks might inspire his readers:

Would that these ill-formed lines could ignite a spark of that enthusiasm that has raised the cultured nations of Europe to such heights!

Following immediately after Villaseñor’s account of Lake Chapala in the Diccionario is a much shorter piece, with overlapping content, written by Manuel Orozco y Berra.

And, Volume 9 of the Diccionario, an appendix published a few years later, includes a third description of Lake Chapala. It was a Spanish language translation of the earliest scientific account of the lake, written by Paris-born naturalist Henri G. Galeotti. First published in French in 1839, a Spanish translation appeared shortly afterwards in El Mosaico Mexicano, a journal edited by Victoriano Roa.

It is highly probable that the republication of Galeotti’s work in the Diccionario was the source of the excerpts used by Antonio de Alba in his important book Chapala (1954), the earliest serious attempt to document Chapala’s local history.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Lake Chapala Through the Ages: an anthology of travelers’ tales includes, with context and commentary, more than 50 original excerpts about Chapala from 1530 to 1910.

Sources

  • Pablo J. Villaseñor. ca. 1853. “Lago de Chapala,” in Lucas Alamán, José María Andrade, et al (comp). 1853-1856. Diccionario universal de historia y de geografía. 10 vol. Mexico: Tipografia de Rafael / Librería de Andrade. The Villaseñor entry for Chapala is Vol 2, p 666-668.
  • H. G. Galeotti. 1839. “Coup d’oeil sur la Laguna de Chapala au Mexique, avec notes géognostiques. géognostiques.” Acad. Roy. Soc. Bruxelles, Bull., 6, pt 1: 14-19.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Actress and artist Irene Bohus, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Lake Chapala

 1940s, 1950s  No Responses »
May 292025
 

Irene Bohus (sometimes Irene de Bohus), was born in New York in 1913, and died at the age of 72 on 27 March 1985 in a Mexico City hospital. Her parents, both born in Hungary, were Paul Bohus (1886-1966) and Irene Jelfy, who lived in Mexico City at the time of his death.

Irene Bohus’ link to Lake Chapala is via a work included in her solo exhibition at the Galeria Arte Contemporáneo (Amberes 12, Mexico City) in December 1953. At the exhibition, Bohus showed 26 oil paintings, including a self portrait and a portrait of Diego Rivera, and 8 brush drawings, one of which was titled Chapala.

While it remains unclear precisely when she was in Chapala, or whether she ever painted any other works based on her time there, Bohus is an important figure in Mexican art, not only on account of her own career, but also because of her close, even intimate, relations with both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Irene Buhos sketching image of Helen Crlenkovich for San Francisco mural. 1940.

Irene Bohus sketching image of diver Helen Crlenkovich for San Francisco mural. 1940. (WPA photo).

Irene Bohus apparently studied art with private tutors in Berlin, Paris and Budapest. Examples of her paintings are in the permanent collections of some major museums.

Hayden Herrera, in his biography of Frida Kahlo, explains that Bohus was an assistant of Diego Rivera in Mexico City and shared his studio when Diego and Frida divorced. In May 1940, alerted by American actress Paulette Goddard (another of Rivera’s paramours at the time), Bohus helped Rivera avoid police when they came to question him about the first (unsuccessful) attempt on Trotsky’s life. Bohus drove him to safety as Rivera hid under a pile of canvasses in the car. Not long afterwards, Bohus and Rivera shared a house at 49 Calhoun Terrace on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where Rivera was working on Pan American Unity, the mural he created in 1940 for the 1939-1940 San Francisco World’s Fair, also known as the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island.

Rivera had planned to include a portrait of Bohus in this mural, but she left him, apparently at the insistence of her mother, before it was complete, and so Rivera painted Emmy Lou Packard, another of his assistants, instead. It was widely rumored at the time (1940) that Irene was pregnant with Rivera’s child.

By the time the mural was finished, Diego and Frida had remarried. But Bohus and Frida had become close friends, and testament to the strength of their friendship, Bohus’ name remained on Frida’s bedroom wall up to the time of Frida’s death in 1954. Frida also had a copy of Village in the Sun, the Ajijic-based book by ‘Dane Chandos,’ in her personal library.

Irene Buhos. 1940. Portrait of Modesta.

Irene Bohus. 1940. Portrait of Modesta.

Several of Bohus’ own paintings from her time in San Francisco are in U.S. museum collections. Portrait of Modesta (charcoal and colored chalks, 1939) is in the de Young Museum/Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and three works from 1940, including Mexican Boy, are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Bohus left San Francisco early in 1941 and eloped to Maryland with Orlando Weber Jr., ‘a society ornithologist’ and the son of a wealthy executive of a 500-million-dollar chemical corporation, whom she had first met a couple of years earlier. They married in Elkton, Maryland, in March 1941, and honeymooned in Mexico City. Later that year, Weber went birding in Chiapas and Bohus was given a major part in El barbero prodigioso, a comedic drama directed by Fernando Soler, released in 1942. Bohus’ first short-lived marriage ended in scandal and divorce. The acrimonious court proceedings included claims that Bohus had affairs with Diego Rivera; Guatemalan diplomat Luis Aguilar de León; a married Mexican Army officer, Lt. Cenfuejo; and German-born movie actor and director Fernando Wagner. For her part, Bohus wanted an annulment and brought a $250,000 lawsuit against her parents-in-law for ‘fraud and conspiracy.’

Bohus’ second marriage, to Mario José Sebastian, was more successful. She continued to paint, and occasionally exhibit, and undertook family portraits for several prominent Mexico City families until well into the 1970s. And her influence lives on. Among other lasting achievements, Bohus was an inspiration to Marta Wiley, a talented and ambitious young art prodigy in Mexico City, who has built an extraordinarily varied and successful career as a renaissance thinker, performer and artist.

  • Artists with links to both the 1939-40 San Francisco World’s Fair and Lake Chapala.
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

  • Hayden Herrera. 1983. Frida: A biography of Frida Kahlo. Harper and Row.
  • Justino Fernandez. 1954. “Catálogo de las Exposiciones de Arte en 1953.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.
  • Daily News (New York, New York), 15 May 1942, 228.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Modernist university-city at Lake Chapala planned in the 1920s

 1920s and earlier  1 Response »
May 222025
 

A bold and ambitious plan was proposed in the 1920s to build a modernist city on the shores of Lake Chapala. The idea, first mooted in 1921, was formalized in 1923 when a 64-page pamphlet was published as the first, and apparently only, issue of The Chapala Round Table. The proposed site was at the eastern end of the lake near La Barca.

Edited by Orlando Edgar Miller and Alexander Irvine, the pamphlet made the case for establishing the Chapala Co-operative University, “the greatest educational movement of the twentieth century,” in a purpose-built city, where people moved about in “swift moving automobiles or flying machines.”

The Founders League of the Chapala Co-Operative University included Orlando Miller as President and author Alexander Irvine as Chairman. Also on the advisory board were international attorney V. H. Pinckney, electrical engineer L. Earle Browne, mechanical engineer H. Haedler and architect Irving J. Gill, who rendered this illustration, the frontispiece of the published plan:

Irving Gill. 1923. The Chapala Co-Operative university. (see text for source)

Irving Gill. 1923. The Chapala Co-Operative University. (The Chapala Round Table, vol 1 #1.)

Irving J. Gill (1870-1936) was a renowned U.S. architect whose innovative designs laid the foundation for modernist architecture in Southern California, where a dozen of his buildings are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. There is no evidence that Gill (1870-1936) or, indeed, most of the other members of the project’s Advisory Board ever visited Lake Chapala. Orlando Miller, however, had first visited the lake in 1921 and had developed good contacts with Mexican government officials.

Oscar Miller. Chapala Round Table, Vol 1 #1 (1923)

Orlando Miller. Chapala Round Table, Vol 1 #1 (1923)

The city would have a great civic center, wonderful gardens and shady trees. Heat, light and power for the community would come from water; there would be no dust, dirt or smoke. Education would be free. Working age members of the co-operative would be expected to work four hours each day. The university, “in addition to the usual classical, literary and scientific courses, will teach architecture, landscape gardening, city building, civic righteousness and eugenics.” Each home would have almost an acre of land.

Trades and industries, such as dairying, cattle ranching, horticulture, a sanatorium and a hotel, would be set up, and the management of thousands of acres of fertile farmland around the city would help finance its needs. An eight-year financial plan showed how all the necessary expenditures could be met as the city grew to house 25,000 people on its 250,000-hectare site.

The Chapala Round Table pamphlet was illustrated with four small photographs of Lake Chapala: a sunset, perhaps taken at El Fuerte; a panoramic view looking west from Cerro San Miguel in Chapala; a view of Chapala church and the shoreline east of Chapala pier, and an image of Villa Tlalocan, built by British consul Lionel Carden in the 1890s. None of the images are credited in the pamphlet, though the photograph of Villa Tlalocan is definitely the work of Chapala-born photographer José Edmundo Sánchez.

Most of the material in the pamphlet was “reprinted with special permission from the pages of The Psychological Review of Reviews.” However, only a handful of issues of The Psychological Review of Reviews were ever published, and there is no evidence for a second issue of The Chapala Round Table. Like these two magazines, the proposed university-city was a short-lived idea. It was never built, but that’s another story, for another place. (See my article elsewhere: “On To Chapala” — The Chapala University Movement of the 1920s.”)

Miller was not the only person to dream of creating a super city at Lake Chapala. Other luminaries who contemplated establishing a Utopian or intellectual city at Lake Chapala in the twentieth century included Mexican artist Gerardo Murillo, better known as Dr. Atl, and the English novelist D. H. Lawrence, who first visited Chapala only a few months before the publication of The Chapala Round Table.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of this period and of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Hair stylist turned sculptor Nina Ketmer lived in Ajijic in the 1960s

 1960s  2 Responses »
May 152025
 

Nina Ketmer (1921-1965), a Danish-born naturalized American citizen and sculptor, lived in Ajijic in the early 1960s, following her marriage in about 1961 to Dick Bishop. Bishop had a spacious home at the corner of Ocampo and Privada Ocampo, which had belonged to his deceased wife, Margo, who, prior to marrying Bishop, had lived there with artist Otto Butterlin. In 1964, in Margo’s memory, Dick and Nina Bishop gave an X-Ray machine to the Chapala hospital and “a rare pair of pre-Columbian ceramic figurines” from Nayarit to a Central Florida museum.

Dick and Nina had a shared love of fine horses and also owned a property several blocks further west, at Ocampo 186, where they stabled their horses.

Ketmer-The_Commercial_Appeal-5-Mar-1950Nina was born on 19 September 1921 in Taastrup, Denmark, and became a U.S. citizen in 1958 while living in New York City at 248 E. 50th St., where she worked as a hair stylist for the Charles of the Ritz Salon. When she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1950, her new employer—Gould’s Kimbrough Beaty Salon in Kimbrough Towers—advertised that Ketmer had studied with the famous stylist, Rene-Rambau, in Paris” and arrived in the U.S. after “fifteen years of experience in the finest European Salons… in Stockholm and Copenhagen, Denmark and in Paris.” Given that she was still only about thirty years old when she moved to Memphis, this promotional blurb must be somewhat exaggerated. It is unknown how, where or when she acquired her sculpting skills.

Among Dick and Nina’s circle of close friends in Ajijic were Bill Atkinson; writer John Mersereau Sr. and his wife, Margaret; writer Gina Dessart Hildreth and her husband, Phillip; writer Bob Somerlott; real estate developer Lou Wertheimer and his wife, Cathy; and Helen Kirtland, the founder of Ajijic Hand Looms, and her husband, Larry Hartmus.

The Mersereaus were also horse-lovers. When they commissioned Marcos Guzmán to build them a house west of Ajijic at Rancho Nuevo, Nina presented them with an equestrian statue of Margaret Mersereau, who loved charro and rode her young Arab thoroughbred filly in all the village parades.

Tragically, Nina Ketmer Bishop died suddenly of liver failure on 5 January 1965; her remains were interred in the local cemetery.

A few days later, in a heartfelt tribute to Nina, Gina Hildreth called her “a beautiful and gracious hostess,” and explained how her friends “respected her as an artist of great talent… admired her wit and have marveled at her devoted interest in developing a stable of fine horses.”

If anyone has (or knows the location of) any example of Ketmer’s work, please get in touch!

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic. Chapter 20 is about Helen Kirtland, and chapter 37 is about Dick Bishop’s long association with the village.

Sources

  • The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee): 5 March 1950, 74.
  • Guadalajara Reporter: 10 December 1964; 24 September 1964.
  • The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Florida): 22 November 1964, 26; 26 November 1964, 45.
  • John Mersereau Jr., personal communication by letter in 2008.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Did Aldous Huxley ever visit Lake Chapala?

 Other  1 Response »
May 082025
 

Did the great English author Aldous Huxley ever visit Lake Chapala? Let’s take a look at the evidence.

A single sentence of Ruta de la Ribera de Chapala, suggests that he did. The book is one in a series of guides to tourist routes in the state of Jalisco, published more than a decade ago by the State government. The single sentence (page 79) is, in translation:

Foreigners as diverse as the famous Werner von Braun—founder of NASA—or the renowned English writer Aldous Huxley, spent time in the region, attracted by the climate, which is said to be one of the best in the world.”

[Original: “Extranjeros tan dispares como el célebre Werner von Braun —fundador de la NASA— o el reconocido escritor inglés Aldous Huxley, pasaban temporadas en la región, llamados por el clima, que se dice es uno de los mejores del mundo.”]

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963), writer and philosopher, author of dozens of books, certainly spent some time in Mexico, as evidenced by Beyond the Mexique Bay, his book of travel essays published in 1934. That book was based, according to his biographer Sybille Bedford on five months in the Caribbean, British Honduras (now Belize) and Southern Mexico in 1933.

The final essay in Beyond the Mexique Bay is about D. H. Lawrence (a friend and mentor of Huxley) and The Plumed Serpent, the novel Lawrence drafted at Lake Chapala in 1923. Perhaps it is this final chapter that has led casual readers to suppose that Huxley was also in Chapala?

Unfortunately for anyone claiming Huxley ever visited Chapala, his life and movements are well documented and he never came anywhere near the Lake Chapala region.

The sentence quoted above does get two things correct: Werner von Braum did live for a short time (in the mid-1970s) in Chula Vista, the residential subdivision between Chapala and Ajijic, and the area does indeed have one of the best climates in the world! On the other side of the ledger, alongside the (false) claim that Huxley ever lived in Ajijijc, von Braum was not a founder of NASA, even though he did direct its Marshall Space Flight Center and was the architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle which sent Apollo spacecraft into orbit and to the moon.

Huxley’s only link to Lake Chapala is vicariously, via the travels and writing of biographer Sybille Bedford. Bedford, born in Germany in 1911, grew up in southern France, in Sanary-sur-mer, a town visited by D.H. Lawrence, which in the 1930s attracted intellectuals fleeing from central Europe, including Aldous and Maria Huxley, who became Sybille’s mentors and inspiration. Bedford’s travels in Mexico in 1946-47, which included an extended stay at Lake Chapala, were the basis for her fictionalized travel book, The Sudden View, first published in 1953 and re-issued later as A Visit to Don Otavio.

Huxley’s visit to Lake Chapala is a myth. Yet, despite lacking evidence—and like so many other Lake Chapala-related myths—it continues to re-surface periodically from the depths of cyberspace.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Related posts

Sources

  • Arabella González Huezo (ed). 2006. Ruta de la Ribera de Chapala. (Rutas Culturales Jalisco #4). Gobierno de Jalisco: Secretaría de Cultura.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Prolific painter Charles Engebretson ran an art gallery in Ajijic in the 1990s

 1990s onwards  1 Response »
May 012025
 

Charles (‘Chuck’) Leroy Engebretson painted and ran an art gallery in Ajijic for several years in the 1990s. A Marine Corps veteran, who served a decade in Korea and China, Engebretson was a life long artist who, according to his own estimate, completed more than 8000 paintings and 4000 portraits. Yet, his works rarely appear on the open market.

Engebretson was born on 1 April 1928 in Alkabo, North Dakota, grew up in Missoula, Montana, and died in Ogden, Utah, on 21 September 2017.

Engebretson was fascinated by art from childhood. Only three months into a scholarship at the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts, he was asked to teach some of the classes. At seventeen years of age, he curtailed his formal studies to volunteer for the Marines, and was posted in southern China a few months after the end of World War II. Here, Engebretson sold his first painting – to his Commanding Officer!

Charles L Engebretson. c 1998. Railway Station, Chapala. (Collection of the late Richard Tingen)

Charles L Engebretson. c 1998. Railway Station, Chapala. (Collection of the late Richard Tingen)

Engebretson was less fortunate during a subsequent posting to Korea, when he was on the wrong end of an artillery barrage, which left him with a broken back and other major injuries. After a prolonged recovery and honorable discharge, he found that his mobility was better in water than on land, and became a commercial diver, traveling around the world, in tasks related to ocean oil rigs and underwater pipelines.

He also tried his hand at mining for gold in South America, and a number of other occupations, including living for a time in New Orleans and working as a street artist, painting the French quarter, and doing pastel portraits for tourists. According to one account, Engebretson was a co-artist for a 600-foot-long, 10-foot-high historical fresco of Louisiana for the walls of the Southern Pacific Train Depot, and another of his New Orleans murals was lost during a hurricane. Engebretson also painted a mural for the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Westminster, California.

Despite never completing a formal art education, Engebretson studied art wherever he traveled by taking classes from notable artists. His landscapes, seascapes, portraits and still lives employed a variety of techniques and mediums, including oils, watercolors and acrylics. Quoting the artist, his favored style was:

representational with an impressionistic flair. Over the years I have found that this works for me. I have used a variety of styles over time, but keep returning to this favorite means of expressing myself.”

In addition to gallery showings, his paintings and portraits were acquired for numerous private collections, including those of Princess Grace of Monaco, Lady Nancy Oakes, Sir William Bisson, sheik Isa Khalifa of Bahrein, and others. One of Engebretson’s most noteworthy accomplishments was a collection of 392 scenes of the Bahamas, which was purchased in its entirety by Magnavox Corporation.

Charles Engebretson. c. 1998. Seis esquinas, Ajijic.

Charles L. Engebretson. c. 1998. Seis esquinas, Ajijic.

In Ajijic, accompanied by his wife, Sharon, whom he had married in 1973, ‘Chuck’ became known as ‘Carlos.’ Engebretson painted and ran a gallery in the village until early in 2001, when they moved to Smithfield, Utah, where he painted a mural “Just One More Winter” for the Senior Citizens Center in 1997. A heart attack a few months later, slowed him down, but he continued to undertake some commission work in his final years, and taught art to seniors.

Engebretson was one of the 50 artists included in Cincuenta artistas, a book produced by CABA (Centro Ajijic de Bellas Artes) in 2000.

Chapter 42 of If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s Historic Buildings and Their Former Occupants translated into Spanish as Si las paredes hablaran: Edificios históricos de Chapala y sus antiguos ocupantes tells the story of the Chapala Railroad Station.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Sources

  • Nelson Funeral Home (Logan, Utah). “Charles (“Chuck”) Leroy Engebretson (obituary).”
  • Jeff Hunter. 2002. “An Artist’s Landscape.” The Herald Journal (Logan, Utah).
  • Estela Hidalgo (coord). 2000. Cincuenta artistas: expresión plástica en la ribera de Chapala. CABA (Centro Ajijc de Bellas Artes.)
  • Richard Tingen, 27 Oct 2017 interview in Chapala.
  • Thetis Reeves. 2001. “Chuck’s Swan Song,” Lake Chapala Review, Feburary 2001, p 47.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Novelist John Mersereau spent the 1960s in Ajijic

 1960s, 1970s  1 Response »
Apr 242025
 

When novelist John Mersereau retired in about 1960, he and his wife, Margaret, set off for Mexico, where they fell in love with the country and bought a house in Ajijic. The house, at Zaragoza #9, had formerly been owned by self-styled artist Dotty Strang. Strang had given free art classes to some local children, even though one of her local friends, contractor Marcos Guzmán, had advised that she charge something, however small, for the classes so that the children would value them.

John Mersereau - cover

The Mersereaus’ circle of friends in Ajijic included Dick and Nina Ketmer Bishop, Bill Atkinson; writer Gina Dessart Hildreth and her husband, Phillip; writer Bob Somerlott; real estate developer Lou Wertheimer and his wife, Cathy; and Helen Kirtland, the founder of Ajijic Hand Looms, and her husband, Larry Hartmus. The men, and Gina Hildreth formed an Ajijic chess club which held multi-week competitions.

Dick Bishop was one of Ajijic’s more colorful characters in the 1960s and 1970s, and forever associated with riding his large Arabian horse through the village. When the Mersereaus commissioned local contractor Marcos Guzmán to build them a house west of Ajijic at Rancho Nuevo, Nina Ketmer Bishop sculpted for them, as a gift, an equestrian statue of Margaret Mersereau, because Margaret also loved charro and rode her young Arab thoroughbred filly in all the village parades.

John Joshua Mersereau was born in Manistique, Michigan, on 23 January 1898. The family moved, while he was still a youngster, to Oakland, California, where John graduated from Oakland High School before studying, on and off, at the University of California. His college friends included Robert (‘Bobby’) Hyde, the author of Crude. Mersereau married Winona (‘Margaret’) Roberts and the couple had two sons: Charles, and John, Jr.

When the U.S. entered the second world war, Mersereau, then 43, enlisted in the Navy and was commissioned a lieutenant, serving as a speechwriter for the Twelfth Naval District. He completed his service after the war as a co-editor of a navy recruitment magazine.

Prior to retirement, the Mersereaus made their family home in Santa Barbara, California.

While none of Mersereau’s works were written, or set, in Mexico, his novel Murder Loves Company (1940) is a mystery story set at the 1939-1940 San Francisco World’s Fair. This Fair has numerous connections to Lake Chapala and his book is an interesting portrait of life in California at the end of the 1930s.

In addition to Murder Loves Company, Mersereau’s other published works include The Checkered Flag (1925), The Whispering Canyon (1926)—both of which were bought for movies—Gill O’ the Rangers (1930) and The Corpse Comes Ashore (1941). Mersereau also wrote a number of pulp magazine stories under the pseudonym Richard Race Wallace.

By coincidence, Mersereau’s story “Off the westbound freight” was published in 1934 in the same issue of Cowboy stories as a submission by ‘Bruce Douglas’— the pen name of Theodore Wayland Douglas (1897-1961)— who also later lived for a time in Ajijic.

After moving to Ajijic, the Mersereaus were visited by Kenneth Millar, a fellow mystery writer and friend from Santa Barbara. Millar (better known by his pen name Ross Macdonald) later used Ajijic as a setting for several chapters in his novel The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962).

In the mid-1960s, the Mersereaus contracted Marcos Guzmán to build them a house west of the village at Los Charales, where they lived until 1972. They spent the remainder of their lives in Forsythe, Missouri, where John died in February 1989 and Winona (‘Margaret’) in January 1994.

Acknowledgments

This profile could not have been written without the assistance of the late John Mersereau Jr., who shared memories of his father’s time in Ajijic with me in 2008. The article by Tom & Enid Schantz on the now defunct website of the Rue Morgue Press was also helpful.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic. Chapter 20 is about Helen Kirtland, and chapter 37 is about Dick Bishop’s long association with the village.

Sources

  • Tom & Enid Schantz. 2004. “John Mersereau.” Online (2004 to Jan 2025) at http://www.ruemorguepress.com/authors/mersereau.html
  • Santa Barbara News-Press: 11 Jan 1961, 11.
  • Guadalajara Reporter: 30 April 1964; 10 Dec 1964.
  • John Mersereau. 1934. “Off the westbound freight.” Cowboy stories (Vol. 26, no. 3).
  • John Mersereau. 1940. Murder Loves Company. Philadelphia & New York: J.B. Lippincott Company.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Portraitist Barbara Zagoria lived in Ajijic in the mid-1970s

 1970s  2 Responses »
Apr 172025
 

Barbara F. Zagoria was one of the many talented artists working in Ajijic in the mid-1970s. Born in New York City on 17 February 1933, Zagoria studied at the School of Art and Design, New York City (1947-1950) and the Art Students League, New York City (1949) before taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, from which she graduated in 1953. In later life she took more classes at the Art Students League in New York City (1979-1980) and did some postgraduate studies at the Special Security Team Travel School in Tempe, Arizona (1985).

Barbara Zagoria. Mexican lady and child (detail).

Barbara Zagoria. Mexican lady and child (detail).

In January 1952 she married Sam Zagoria and began work as a fashion illustrator with the Kramer, Tobias & Meyer Agency in New York. Two years later, she left that firm to work as a fabric designer for Paragon Mills for a year.

In the 1960s, Zagoria was a commercial artist in Massapequa, New York (1965-1966) before working as a freelance illustrator and teacher in Seaford (1967-1970). She founded the Seaford Creative Arts Workshop on Long Island, New York, in 1963 and continued to work with them until 1969.

She spent most of the 1970s at various locations in Mexico, where she was best known as a portrait painter. During that time she held several solo shows, including

  • Bellas Artes-Casa de la Cultura
  • Hotel Acapulco Princess, Acapulco (1975-1979) and
  • Hotel La Cupula, Guatemala (1977)
Barbara Zagoria. 1991. Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Barbara Zagoria. 1991. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. (North Country Blade Citizen)

Zagoria lived at Lake Chapala in the late 1970s, and held a solo show at Posada Ajijic in December 1977. This was apparently her first Lakeside show, though she was already well known in the area on account of the many paintings and posters she had done for the local theater.

In addition to exhibitions of fine art work, she also arranged public relations art exhibits for American Tourist Offices in Mexico and Guatemala.

After moving back to the U.S., Zagoria was a travel consultant for art tours organized by Ames/Plaza Travel (1986-2001) and participated in, and judged, art shows in Arizona and California. Her pastels were shown in a group exhibit in 1985 at Gallery of the Unknown in Phoenix, Arizona, and in joint shows in 1987 and 1989 at the La Jolla Art Assocation Gallery in La Jolla, California. She also held one-person shows at W. Plaza Gallery, Arizona (1985), Palomar College, California (1990), and at La Jolla, California (1991). Zagoria, a member of the California Art Association, gave demonstrations and judged numerous art shows in the state during the 1990s.

Zagoria lived “years in Mexico and New Guinea, and has visited South America, Central America, Russia and Greece among other places.” Her wide range of interests spans everything from archaeology, drama and jazz to parapsychology.

Her first husband, Sam, died in 1995. Zagoria later married David Blye, who works in stained glass. The couple live in Saddlebrooke, Tucson, Arizona, where Zagoria was, for many years, the gallery chairperson for the casual art gallery in the main clubhouse Javelina Room, used by the Saddlebrooke Fine Arts Guild.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village describe the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

  • Guadalajara Reporter: 24 July 1976, 21; 3 Dec 1977, 19.
  • North County Blade-Citizen: 5 July 1991, 216.
  • Newsday (Nassau Edition): 8 Aug 1963, 80.
  • Arizona Republic (Phoenix): 13 Nov 1985, 232.
  • Wm. A. “Antonio” Rigney. 2010. “At David’s and Barbara’s.” Blog post, 22 August 2010.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Pablo J. Villaseñor and his 1851 poem about Lake Chapala

 1920s and earlier  1 Response »
Apr 102025
 

Despite Pablo J. Villaseñor’s tragically short life—he died in 1855 at the age of 27—he has left us some memorable literature, including an evocative romantic poem about Lake Chapala, an entry about Chapala in Mexico’s multi-volume, Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografía, and a play with its own Wikipedia page.

Pablo José María Villaseñor Villaseñor was born 14 January 1828 in Guadalajara, and baptized there at Templo de Nuestra Señora del Pilar three days later. Villaseñor’s family owned the Hacienda de Cedros in Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos, so he would have been very familiar with Lake Chapala from an early age. He began studies at the Seminario Conciliar de Guadalajara in 1837.

His literary career began in 1846 when he started writing for a newspaper called El Látigo. He later also wrote for Voz de Alianza, and was a founder member of the Sociedad Literaría La Falange de Estudio.

On 19 February 1849 at the age of 21, Villaseñor married Petra Ignacia Garcia Camberos (1833-1911) at the Santuario de Guadalupe in Sayula, Jalisco. (Their son, Juan Villaseñor, was born the following year; he married in Guadalajara in 1877.) A few months after marriage, Villaseñor accepted the (largely honorary) title of abogado.

Pablo J. Villaseñor Villaseñor. Source: Romo Selis, 1945.

Sources: Image from Romo Selis, 1945, poem as presented in Navarro, 1853.

Villaseñor had a very active literary career, writing in various genres, and participating in various literary groups and magazines. In 1851, he contributed 16 poems to a collection he helped organize titled Aurora poética de Jalisco: colección de poesías líricas de jóvenes jalisciences, dedicada al bello sexo de Guadalajara (Poetic Dawn of Jalisco: a collection of lyrical poems by young people from Jalisco, dedicated to the fair sex of Guadalajara), published in Guadalajara by J. Camarena.

His emotive poem titled A Chapala (To Chapala), written in 1851, portrays the lake as a living, breathing entity, with sentiments such as love, longing, pain and melancholy, a stage for both remembered and untold stories of heroes and former glories.

Here’s an informal English translation of a sample stanza from the middle of the poem:

Time flies. What remains
Of the gloomy monastery?
Rubble, oh! and mystery,
The grass that grows there!
And the tombs of the heroes,
Forgotten among the sand;
And the sacred walls,
Made nests for reptiles.

Pablo Villaseñor died at the family’s Hacienda de Cedros on 13 November 1855.

Shortly after the poet’s death, historian Agustín Rivera y Sanromán (1824-1916), a long-time friend of the Villaseñor family, spent two weeks at Hacienda de Cedros. In a footnote in his 1910 life of Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Rivera noted that the “Villaseñor family of Guadalajara” had owned Cedros (which dates back to the sixteenth century) since “long before 1810″ and then described the family dining table:

I had the pleasure of eating at the dining room table, which had recently been restored and was worthy of a museum. It is large, made of unpainted wood, and the owners have been curious enough to inscribe on it the names of people who have eaten there. There I read the names of Bishop Mayor, Bishop Cabañas, Father Hidalgo, Archbishop Espinosa, and others. One of the respectable people with whom I dined is Mrs. Ignacia Garcia, widow of my friend the poet and lawyer Don Pablo J. Villaseñor.”

According to Enrique Palomar, the name of Primitivo Ron was also carved into the Villaseñor family dining table, because he had taught the hacienda owner’s only son, Lorenzo, while employed as a teacher in the local village school in Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos. Primitivo Ron gained infamy some years later in 1889 when he assassinated General Ramón Corona, the Governor of Jalisco, whose name is apparently also carved in this historic table.

Guillermo Romo was a close friend of the Villaseñor family. In a 1945 article, he included a previously unpublished biographical recollection of the poet’s life written by Clemente Villaseñor in 1858, in which he explained that, because Pablo Villaseñor,

was very ill and suffered from aneurysms, the applause of the public and the opinion they formed about his compositions—favorable or adverse—greatly affected him and sometimes he fell bedridden. He was very satirical in his private conversations.”

Villaseñor’s entry about Chapala for Mexico’s nineteenth-century Diccionario Universal de Historia y Geografía will be considered in a separate post.

And the Wikipedia page? Villaseñor’s most famous three-act drama, a tragedy based on historical events in Guadalajara, is El Palacio de Medrano: Drama en Tres Actos y en Verso, published in 1851, which (for some reason) has its own English language Wikipedia page.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Sources

  • Juan R. Navarro (publisher). 1853. Guirnalda poetica: selecta colección de poesias mejicanas. Mexico: Imprenta de Juan R. Navarro.
  • Enrique Palomar. 1982. “Una Mesa con Historia.” El Informador: 4 July 1982, 11.
  • Agustín Rivera. 1910. Anales de la Vida del Padre de la Patria Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. León, Guanajuato: Imprenta de L. López.
  • Guillermo Romo Celis. 1945. “Una visita a Cedros, solar de los Villaseñor.” pp 61-87 of Indice de las Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de Genealogia y Heraldica, Tomo I, No. 1 (marzo de 1945), pp 61-86. Romo Celis cites a document written by Clemente Villaseñor, dated 6 October 1858.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Chapala Wishful Thinking #4: Cart towing a canoa?

 1920s and earlier  2 Responses »
Apr 032025
 

This is the fourth in a mini series looking at examples of photo identification and interpretation errors related to the Lake Chapala area. In his article in the February 2025 issue of Estudios Jalisciences, Dr. Juan Arturo Camacho Becerra included this photograph, taken at Lake Chapala by Guadalajara-based photographer José María Lupercio. It was not the photograph itself, but the author’s interpretation of the photograph, that caught my eye.

The image was first published in El Mundo Ilustrado in 1903, and was later reproduced, slightly cropped, as a postcard in a series published by M. Hernández. I included the postcard version as Figure 2.5 in Lake Chapala: a postcard history.

Fig. 1 of article

Fig. 1 of article by Juan Arturo Camacho Becerra in Estudios Jaliscienses #139.  Note that, despite the caption, this must be Lake Chapala, not a river.

The interpretation given by Dr. Camacho on page 29 of his article is as follows:

The image is very revealing as to the technology of towing, since as early as 1868 steamboats were operating, making trips across the lake and touching various points. The railroad arrived in Guadalajara in 1888, so in this image, a primitive technology for towing canoas is still shown. From the photographer’s point of view, it seems to be near the shore, and the cart’s momentum will allow it to be launched into navigation. The photograph also gives us a visual testimony of the main activity on the lake at that time: fishing.” [The original Spanish text is given at the end of this post]

In my opinion, the photograph fails to support this interpretation. The idea that canoas (‘sail canoes’) were launched by being towed by cart into the lake is not found in contemporaneous descriptions, and would be extremely inefficient. If canoas were launched by being towed, then why have a cart at all? It would be far more effective to simply have oxen (or other beasts of burden) pull the boat direct.

Fishing was a major activity on the lake. But this canoa is most definitely not a fishing vessel, and the photograph offers no evidence related to fishing. Fishing canoas were open, in order to make it easy to handle nets and catch. Covered canoas—such as the one in Lupercio’s superb photograph—were cargo vessels, used to transport goods and produce (and sometimes passengers) from one lakeside village to the next.

A closer look at the photograph strongly suggests that this particular canoa has brought a load of wood, which is being offloaded into the cart in the shallows of the lake. This activity actually ties in very closely with Dr. Camacho’s reference to steamboats on the lake. Wood fueled the boilers which powered the steamboats and their large paddles. On average, sternwheelers burned about two cords (256 cubic feet) of wood an hour while traversing the lake, so piles of wood were stacked at strategic points on beaches around the lake to ensure that fuel was always readily available along their routes. The cart in the photograph may well be transporting wood to one of these woodpiles. But there are some alternative possibilities, since  large quantities of firewood were also required at that time to fuel the lime kilns working in many villages, and for domestic use, primarily in kitchens. (I consider this in more detail in Lake Chapala: a postcard history.)

Detail from Hernández postcard of Lupercio's photograph.

Detail from the Hernández postcard of Lupercio’s photograph.

This is why, I captioned the version of this photograph in Lake Chapala: a postcard history, as follows:

“Transferring cargo from sail canoe to cart, c. 1906. J. M. Lupercio; M. Hernández. A team of oxen waits patiently for a heavy cargo (perhaps wood) to be unloaded from a large, covered sail canoe (canoa). A cart this size could carry about one cord of wood (128 cubic feet).”

It is apparent from his article, which  includes several other less serious factual errors and questionable interpretations relating to the history of Chapala, that Dr. Camacho is, unfortunately, unfamiliar with my own research and writing. I am happy to discuss this further, with him or anyone, via comments or email.

Photo by José María Lupercio (El Mundo Ilustrado, 15 November 1903)

Photo by José María Lupercio (El Mundo Ilustrado, 15 November 1903)

Original Spanish text:

“La imagen es muy reveladora en cuanto a la tecnología de arrastre, ya desde 1868 circulaban vaporetos que hacían travesías por el lago tocando diversos puntos. El ferrocarril llegó a Guadalajara en 1888, de manera que en esta imagen todavía se muestra una tecnología primitiva para el arrastre de canoas, desde el punto de vista del fotógrafo parece estar en las orillas y el impulso de la carreta permitirá botarla a la navegación. La fotografía también nos presenta un testimonio visual de la entonces principal actividad del lago: la pesca.” (Juan Arturo Camacho Becerra, 2025, página 29)

Source

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Comments, corrections or additional material welcome, whether via comments feature or email.

Mexico My Home: Poems by Ira Nottonson, illustrated by Peter and Eunice Huf

 1970s  1 Response »
Mar 272025
 

Of all the books associated with Lake Chapala, perhaps the one with the most curious title is Mexico My Home. Primitive Art and Modern Poetry With 50 easy to learn Spanish words and phrases. For all children from 8 to 80. With only 32 pages, and with only a few words on every alternate page, the title is almost as long as the book!

Published in 1972, the book has fifteen short, child-friendly poems written by Ira Nottonson, with illustrations opposite each poem by artists Peter Huf and Eunice (Hunt) Huf. The illustrations are Mexican naif in style, though the Hufs’ art tended more towards abstraction or surrealism.

Nottonson-booklet-artwork

Sample page from Mexico My Home

 

Nottonson first met the Hufs, then living in Ajijic, at the Hotel Camino Real in Guadalajara one Sunday afternoon in 1971, when he spotted their selection of small, painted easels at a show in the hotel. Nottonson, who also lived in Ajijic, and was at the hotel by chance, introduced himself, and asked if they would illustrate several children’s books he was working on.

Nottonson poem and Huf image

Sample page from Mexico My Home

Even though their ensuing partnership only resulted in this one book, Nottonson and his wife, Sandra (‘Sandy’) Baker Burton, became good friends with the Hufs, and with another couple: painter Beth Avary and her husband, Don. Beth also wrote some poetry. As Peter Huf explained to me over supper at his home in Germany, Ira “fancied himself as a modern poet . . . in the style of Beth Avary.” He was somewhat successful. The Guadalajara Reporter told its readers that Mexico My Home was “an unusually beautiful and practical book” of modern poetry.

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Ira Nathan Nottonson was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 14 February 1933, and died at the age of 85 in Boulder Colorado, on 27 March 2018. He graduated from Brookline High School in Massachusetts, and gained a degree in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before completing a law degree at Boston College Law School. In the 1960s, he apparently wrote scripts for several short dramas produced by the Playhouse Workshop. He was also a moderator for at least one episode (“The Game of Sex”) of the long-running series “Ideas on Trial.” He married Sandra Baker Burton in about 1968.

When they moved to Lake Chapala in late 1970 with their five children from previous marriages, the Guadalajara Reporter asserted that Nottonson had ‘retired’, despite being only in his thirties. The newspaper explained that Nottonson was living on income from a Night Club he owned in Cambridge, Massachusetts; from a TV production company he owned, and from his financial interest in an advertising agency. “Income from all these projects permits this young man to sit and write children’s books, three of which are in publisher’s hands for possible publication.”

After their relatively brief time in Mexico, Nottonson and his family returned to the U.S., where he was appointed general counsel to International Industries (1973-76), and then held various high-ranking positions with Postal Instant Press (1976-86). In the 1990s, Nottonson and his wife moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he taught law and business classes and wrote a regular business column for the Daily Camera.

In addition to poetry, Nottonson also wrote or co-wrote several business-related books, including The secrets to buying and selling a business (1994); Before You Go into Business, Read This (1999); Ultimate book to buying or selling a business (2004); Forming a partnership: and making it work (2007); and Small business legal tool kit (2007).

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

  • Ira N. Nottonson. 1972. Mexico My Home. Primitive Art and Modern Poetry With 50 easy to learn Spanish words and phrases. For all children from 8 to 80. Guadalajara, Mexico: Boutique d’Artes Graficas.
  • Guadalajara Reporter: 12 Jun 1971; 20 Nov 1971.
  • Anon. Ira Nathan Nottonson (obituary). The Daily Camera, 15 April 2018.
  • Peter Huf, interviewed at his home in Germany in 2014.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Talented artist Beth Avary painted Ajijic early in her career

 1970s  2 Responses »
Mar 192025
 

Mary Elizabeth “Beth” Avary was just beginning her career as a visual artist when she moved to Ajijic in late 1970 with her husband, Don, and their three young children. The family lived there for a year before returning to the US.

Born to Edward George Schaefer and his wife, Mildred, in Indianapolis on 14 April 1941, Beth Avary began to paint as a child. She took a summer program at the University of Kansas (1957), before beginning her formal art studies at Northwestern University (1959-1960). Then, after summer classes at the Chicago Art Institute (1960), Avary completed her studies at the California College of the Arts (1961-1965), graduating with a BFA with honors. She also took a summer program at the University of California Berkeley (1962).

Beth Avary. 1971. Untitled. Courtesy of Kimi Avary.

Beth Avary. 1971. Untitled. Courtesy of Kimi Avary.

Avary’s work was influenced not only by her appreciation and knowledge of different artistic styles, but also by travel, which included spells living in France, Thailand, Japan (her first solo exhibition was at the Miramastu Gallery in Tokyo in 1967) and Mexico.

She first met her future husband, Air Force pilot Donald Davis Avary, while working on a troop flight bound for Vietnam. The couple settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they raised their three children. Don retired from the Air Force in early 1969 and accepted a position with Western Airlines. The children were still toddlers when he was furloughed a year later, so the family decided to spend some time in Mexico. A relative living in Guadalajara suggested they try Ajijic. The village home they rented was at Donato Guerra #4.

Among the friends they made in Ajijic were painters Peter and Eunice Huf, and lawyer-poet Ira Nottonson and his wife, Sandra Burton. When Peter Huf and fellow artist John K. Peterson organized a Fiesta de Arte—originally called the “First Lakeside Artists Fair—in May 1971, Beth Avary helped (as did Donald Hogan who was murdered a few months later).

Beth Avary. 1971. Ajijic.

Beth Avary. 1971. Ajijic. Courtesy of Kimi Avary.

The event was held at Calle 16 de Septiembre #33, in Ajijic, the private residence of Mr and Mrs E. D. Windham, and this is the only recorded exhibition in which Beth Avary participated in Mexico.

The other participating artists were Daphne Aluta; Mario Aluta; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Fernando García; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Michael Heinichen; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael (Michel); Bert Miller; Robert Neathery; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; ‘Sloane’; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.

Peter Huf became a long-time admirer of her work. When I first questioned him about the various artists living in Ajijic when he was there in the early 1970s, Beth Avary was one of the first names he mentioned: “Beth was a very lyrical artist and had a psychedelic touch in a fine, feminine way.”

Over the course of her career, Avary explored several different genres of art. Her time in Ajijic helped her develop her own style, a celebration of landscapes that she termed naturalistic expressionism.

While living in Ajijic, she also wrote and illustrated Pablito Grows Up, a children’s story set in the village. The family returned to the U.S. when Don Avary was recalled by Western Airlines.

Beth Avary. Book illustration.

Beth Avary. 1971. Cover of Pablito Grows Up.

In addition to the show at the Miramastu Gallery in Tokyo (1967), Avary’s other major solo shows included Gallery 707, Los Angeles (1974); Institute of Noetic Sciences, Novato, California (1987-1988); Who’s Who In Art, Monterey, California (1999); Atelier Gallery, Santa Cruz, California (2000); and Schacknow Museum, Plantation, Florida (2006).

Beth Avary. Book illustration.

Beth Avary. 1971. Book illustration.

Avary’s works have also been shown in dozens of major invitational and juried shows at museums, galleries, conventions and festivals in the US, Mexico, Spain, Japan and Russia.

Beth Avary died on 4 May 2008. Two months later, examples of her work were exhibited at the Center for Integrated Systems, in Stanford, California, in a show which included works by three other artists: her son, Arthur (known for his digital art which “explores patterns and repetition in artwork throughout history”), Corina del Carmel and Diana Leone.

Aside: Beth and Don Avary were visited in Ajijic by Don’s brother Ned and his wife, Brigitte, and their young Manitoba-born son Roger Avary. Roger Avary is an accomplished Canadian-American film director, screenwriter and producer, who won a joint Oscar with Quentin Tarantino for their screenplay of Pulp Fiction (1994).

Acknowledgments

  • My sincere thanks to Kimi Avary Fallon and the late Don Avary for sharing their memories of their time in Ajijic with me.
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Wilhelm Schiess and his 8-peso boat trip from Chapala to Ocotlán in 1899

 1920s and earlier  2 Responses »
Mar 132025
 

As we saw in a previous post—Wilhelm Schiess described Chapala in 1899—Dr Schiess (1869-1929), a Swiss doctor, visited Chapala briefly in 1899 with his brother, Ernst, and later published a detailed account of their trip.

After a quick visit to Guadalajara, and seeing Juanacatlán Falls, the brothers had taken a special carriage from Atequiza to Chapala on Wednesday 6 December, where they had lunch at the Hotel Arzapalo, overlooking the lake. One bottle of red wine later, the brothers decided not to stay overnight at the hotel, but to take a boat to Ocotlán. This turned out be be far more of an adventure than they had ever imagined.

We could have stayed overnight in Chapala and taken the stagecoach back tomorrow. The steamboat arrives in Chapala only very irregularly and is mainly intended for transporting goods from the ranchos on the southern shore, so we could not rely on it…. Ernst therefore negotiated with two boatmen who agreed to take us to Ocotlán for 8 pesos [4 dollars]. The innkeeper warned us about the boat trip, as we would be completely dependent on the unpredictable whims of the wind, and an unreliable companion might leave us stranded for days along the way. But as if by a sign from heaven, a strong west wind suddenly rose, and the two sailors assured us that we would reach Ocotlán by 8.00pm.

“At 3.40pm, we had loaded our luggage onto the boat and set sail. The innkeeper and the few remaining guests stood on the shore, waving their white handkerchiefs in farewell for a long time. Chapala is located near the western end of the lake, which is roughly the size of Lake Constance. From our wide, flat barge, we had a magnificent view of the mountain range enclosing the western side of the lake, at whose foot Chapala, with its charming villas, was beautifully situated. The sail was hoisted on the mast in the middle of the boat and secured to both sides. We had the wind coming directly from behind us, which could not have been more favorable, as these barges can only sail with the wind at their back. With the massive waves, our boat rocked dangerously in all directions, making it difficult to remain seated on the rickety little chairs that had been placed in the barge for us.

“The two mozos were barefoot, with their light manta trousers rolled up above mid-thigh. They steered the rudder and sang a few melancholic, monotonous Mexican tunes. The lake had a murky yellow color, but in the evening light, one could almost believe it was the clearest, most transparent water. Ernst and I grew quieter and quieter, a sense of unease creeping over us. We tossed our cigars overboard. I noticed my brother growing paler and paler, and I could feel the same happening to me. Cursed seasickness! We had crossed the ocean without trouble, even laughing at our suffering fellow passengers, and now—less than an hour on this lake—we had to admit that we, too, were not immune. We moved our chairs closer to the edge of the boat, and not in vain! Just as quickly as the sickness had come, it passed. The two mozos smiled slightly and advised us to smell a lemon—an infallible remedy for seasickness, they claimed. Half an hour later, Ernst’s cheeks were rosy again, and I felt as well as before.

“Unfortunately, the wind grew weaker, the waves subsided, and the lake became as smooth as a mirror. The sail was taken down. If we had already been making slow progress with a good wind, the heavy barge now barely moved at all.
The two Mexicans took up small, clumsy oars and began paddling. We stayed close to the northern shore, which was occasionally hilly, with scattered trees and a few cornfields. At 5.30pm, the sun set. In the west, long after darkness had fallen, a magnificent, grand glow remained, as if a colossal forest fire were raging in the distance. Gradually, even this fiery spectacle faded, leaving only the dark silhouettes of the mountains. Everything around us was pitch black. Aside from the monotonous, slow strokes of the oars, and the drowsy singing of the two sailors, there was no sound in this desolate expanse. The lake lay utterly calm and smooth, and we soon realized that reaching our destination that evening would be impossible.

“We consulted with our two guides about whether it might be best to land and wait until morning. However, our companions were absolutely opposed to this idea. They began telling stories of robbers—each more terrifying than the last—and no treasure in the world could persuade them to dock at the shore. One of them claimed that his uncle had been murdered by native Indians just a few days ago, and even the captain of the steamboat had fallen victim to these people only a few weeks earlier. Listening to these tales, a deep sense of unease crept over us.

“The first quarter moon stood high in the sky, occasionally casting its pale light through the clouds onto our little boat. The lake was lightly rippled again, reflecting the silver moonlight. The mozos encouraged us to lie down on the floor of the barge and sleep. But could we trust these two strong young men? The innkeeper had recommended them, and besides, they couldn’t have gotten rid of us without the crime becoming known afterward. Moreover, Ernst still had his revolver…. So, we spread blankets over the damp wooden floor, stretched out, and covered ourselves as best we could. Our hard suitcases served as pillows. A sip of cognac, a piece of chocolate, a lump of sugar, and a small slice of sausage made up our frugal supper. Suddenly, Ernst, who was sleeping right next to me, jolted up in fright. He had dreamed that a mozo was leaning over him, trying to slit his throat. Instinctively, he stretched out a hand in defense—only to realize that the mozo was merely climbing over him to hoist the sail, with no sinister intentions. But just as the sail was raised, the wind died down again, forcing the Mexicans to keep stepping over us repeatedly. Finally, around 1.30am, even they grew tired. Their monotonous singing ceased, and we drifted into a small bay without landing. The two mozos lay down to sleep—one at the front of the boat, the other at the back.”

Terry-map-Chapala

Source: Terry’s Mexico Handbook (1909)

The Schiess brothers survived the night, and woke up the following morning to find that:

Our barge lay motionless in the bay, not far from the shore. Heavy clouds covered the sky, except for a narrow blue-green strip on the eastern horizon. Then, the sun rose in an absolutely magnificent display. A vast fire spread across the entire mountain range and reflected in the lake, which took on a brilliant green hue. This dreamlike illumination lasted only a few minutes before vanishing completely. It began to rain, and for a brief moment, two massive rainbows arched across a large part of the lake in the west. Soon after, the sun disappeared behind thick clouds. The mountains darkened and were later partially shrouded in mist. We woke our two companions and continued our journey, staying close to the shore. Our only provisions for breakfast were a small tin of sardines…. With the help of the oars, we made slow progress. Whenever the lake’s shallow depth near the shore allowed, the boatmen used long poles to push off the lakebed, which helped us move forward more efficiently. Ernst played the harmonica, and the two mozos sang.

“Each time we passed an indigenous settlement, the mozos made a tremendous racket, shouting for eggs and tortillas. In front of the huts, we saw a few indigenous people, wearing nothing but cloaks made of maize straw, busy piling up corn. They paid no attention to our pleas or, at best, called back that they had nothing to spare. Several small villages, hidden among the greenery, came into view. Their huts were made entirely of maize straw. Here and there, cows grazed on the dry meadows. We caught up with a sailboat similar to ours and bought a few cigarettes from the boatmen. This boat, which we soon left far behind, had already been traveling from Chapala for three days, so we had to consider ourselves lucky to have come so far in such a short time.

“At 10 o’clock, we spotted two miserable straw huts on land and an old woman hurrying back and forth between them. Summoning their courage, the mozos asked Ernst to keep the revolver ready, then—miraculously—went ashore. They returned beaming with warm tortillas made from red maize and a few fresh eggs. We devoured this dry breakfast with great appetite, though it had been slightly dampened by the rain. It was pouring in torrents, and water streamed from our hats as if from gutters. Trees stood deep in the water along the shore, their crowns dipping far into the lake. The southern shore was no longer visible—thick veils of mist shrouded the mountains.

“Around 11.30am, we finally arrived in the bay of Ocotlán, which is bordered to the east by a rocky mountain and to the west by some hills covered with cornfields. It was too late to catch the train to Zamora that day, but that hardly mattered, as we first needed to dry off. The rain had gradually seeped through the wool blankets, leaving us completely soaked. In the bay, the lake gradually took on a lagoon-like appearance. A vast number of ducks could be seen here. Passing through trees and reeds, we reached the mouth of the Río Grande.”

They finally made it to Ocotlán at around 1.30pm:

“Here, in one of the canals, lay the steamboat, which was built similarly to the Mississippi riverboats, with a colossal paddle wheel at the back, although it only had about half of its original paddles left. We made some purchases in the plaza, including candles to have festive lighting in the evening. At the Mexican hotel, where there was only one other guest besides us, we immediately sent the landlady to the kitchen, and soon we were served something warm to eat.”

After a meal and a good night’s sleep, they continued on their way:

Friday, December 8th. At 6.45am, the thermometer showed +12°C, and it felt quite warm to us now that we were in completely dry clothes again…. We climbed up the church tower; from a platform, under the bells, and surrounded by the various domes of the church, we had a wide, open view of the entire landscape. To the south, we could see a shining strip, the Chapala Lake, and beyond it, the beautifully shaped mountains. At our feet, the Rio Grande meandered with its green banks through the plain, gradually dissolving into numerous lagoons. Before us lay the plaza planted with orange trees, where a vast number of people were currently gathered. Beyond the flat rooftops of the houses, numerous hills could be seen, only sparsely wooded…. After lunch, we took the tram to the station, about 10 minutes away. . . .

“At around 1 o’clock, it was +21°C at the station. The train took us through a flat area with many lagoons, a splendid hunting ground for duck hunters. Here and there, we could see green fields. In La Barca, where there was again a tram connection to the town, we had a few minutes’ stop. What a scene it was at the station! Mexicans and their wives, along with a large number of children, walked from one train window to another, carrying baskets and trays, hawking their goods. You could buy sandwiches with half chickens, radishes, oranges, beer, goat cheese, tortillas—all at a cheap price. Mexicans are masters at quickly devouring massive bites, and the baskets emptied out rapidly. Blind and lame beggars, singing and playing harps, were led by their wives from one compartment to another. The heart-wrenching and ear-piercing songs had their effect, as copper coins were often thrown from the windows.”

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

  • Wilhelm Schiess. 1902. Quer durch Mexiko vom Atlantischen zum Stillen Ocean. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

In 1958 Herbert Mangham worried that Ajijic’s end was nigh

 1950s  2 Responses »
Mar 062025
 

A 1958 article titled “Art colony in Mexico will be high and dry” focused on whether Ajijic’s artistic community could survive if an alarming prediction made by a Mexican engineer came true. The engineer, after visiting the lake, gave it “just five years more of existence.” Fortunately, this did not come true—at least not yet—and the village art community continues to thrive.

Though the startling prediction proved inaccurate, Herbert J. Mangham, the author of the article, offers some interesting insights into the Ajijic artistic community of almost 70 years ago, which we will examine shortly. 

Mangham-1958-title

But, first, who was Herbert Mangham? Fortunately for me, and saving me hours of research, Terence Hanley, author of a blog devoted to “Weird Tales and other weird fiction and science fiction magazines of the pulp era” has already published the results of a deep dive into Mangham’s life.

Summarising Hanley, Mangham was a pen name of Herbert Joseph Maughiman, born in Des Moines, Iowa, on 27 April 1896. He was only a child when his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he took journalism classes at the University of Missouri. After serving in the U.S. Army medical corps for a year (1918-1919) he joined the staff of the Kansas City Star and was soon earning extra money by submitting jokes, poems and stories to various magazines, including Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, Snappy Stories, Argosy Allstory Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post and Weird Tales. In addition, he had several pieces published in The New Yorker between 1925 and 1942.

Chapala, July 1950. Photo: Dr. Erich Fred Legner. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, from University of California Riverside

Chapala, July 1950. Photo: Dr. Erich Fred Legner. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, from University of California Riverside. The building at the right hand edge of the photo is Capilla de Lourdes; the building in the center is Villa Montecarlo.

Maughiman was also an accomplished pianist who played at cinemas, night clubs and other venues. He spent extended periods of time living in Europe, Mexico and Central America, and had been living for several years in Guatemala City, before dying and being buried there on 14 September 1967.

Maughiman appears to have spent much of the 1950s in Mexico. His article “Dim-Wits over Mexico” appeared in the December 1951 issue of Vogue, and the following year “The Life of Bobby Ortiz y Riley” was published by Prairie Schooner, which included this biographical note of the author:

“Herbert J. Mangham gives his address as “c/o American Consulate, Mexico, D.F.” We have this note from him: “I was born in Des Moines, schooled in Salina, Kansas, and Kansas City, before finished off at Kansas City Junior College and the University of Missouri. To support myself I have been pianist, journalist, shipyard timekeeper, bridge instructor, artist’s agent and model (they liked my bones). My writings first appeared, almost simultaneously in Black Cat and Nathan & Mencken’s Smart Set. In the past few months I have appeared in periodicals as varied as Vogue and the Farmer’s Magazine (Canada).”

Writing to the editor of the Kansas City Star in 1954, Maughiman claimed that:

“My fame is thin and localized, and my fortune is contained in a slim envelope of war bonds. But my life is richly threaded with travel, good friends, radiant women, varied foods and adventure.” (McCarty, 1967)

Lake Chapala was suffering in 1958. The lake was still recovering from its lowest ever level three years earlier, and, as Evan Atkinson pointed out at the time, “The water is clouded with mud and, as its level has dropped ten feet in the last few years, mud flats up to a mile wide ring its shoreline. There are no real beaches and the coagulated slime of weeds and lilies squelch any pleasure from aquatic sports.”

Ajijic lakeshore. ca 1957. Photo: Jacques Van Belle.

Ajijic lakeshore. ca 1957. Photo: Jacques Van Belle.

In his 1958 article about the art colony in Ajijic, Maughiman reported that:

Ajijic soon will be fronting on a desert waste instead of one of the world’s most beautiful lakes, according to a Mexican engineer who had just visited that region. He gives Chapala, Mexico’s largest lake, just five years more of existence.”

According to the author, “the high saturation points” for artists drawn to Mexico are Taxco, Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende, and:

The composition of these exotic Greenwich Villages is the same—a few good painters and writers, a number of second-raters and would-be’s, a shifting body of students in uniform (beards, heavy spectacles, sandals, dirndls, levis, whatever is modish at the moment), artisans, keepers of shoppes, and a few people who can live permanently or temporarily on private incomes. Most of the people who give the colonies their character are Americans . . .
“The colonists’ association with the natives is confined largely to shopkeepers and the helper classes, whose low charges permit a semi-feudalistic way of life that was unknown to most of them back home.”

As regards the demise of the lake, Maughiman explained that:

The engineer quoted is not the ultimate authority, but most reports are equally pessimistic. Although the lake level rose 11 feet in 1955 as a result of unusual rainfalls, it now continues to recede. … Since 1944, Chapala has lost five billion cubic meters of water, uncovering 45,000 acres of land. This land, a source of conflict between the farmers and influential politicians, is temporarily rich farming country; but it becomes salty in time.”

And, in the worst case scenario?

The country may readjust by resettlement and adaptation, but the colonists can scarcely readjust to a vista of salt waste in place of a much-hymned lake. They will have to pack up their levis and flit.”

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

  • Terence E. Hanley. 2016. “Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967),” Blog post at Artists & Writers in The Unique Magazine, 13 Jan 2016.
  • Terence E. Hanley. 2023. “Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967)-The Basket.” Blog post at Artists & Writers in The Unique Magazine, 2 May 2023.
  • Herbert J. Mangham. 1951. “Dim-Wits over Mexico.” Vogue, December 1951.
  • Herbert J. Mangham. 1952. “The Life of Bobby Ortiz y Riley.” Prairie Schooner, Vol. 26, #1 (Spring 1952), 44-55.
  • Herbert J. Mangham. 1958. “Art colony in Mexico will be high and dry.” The Birmingham News, 26 Mar 1958, 26.
  •  Ira B. McCarty. 1967. “About Town.” Kansas City Times, 28 Sep 1967, 73.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Modernist artist Milton Avery and his link to Lake Chapala

 1940s  No Responses »
Feb 272025
 

Milton Avery has been widely recognized as one of the most famous modernist painters born in the U.S. There is little point in recapping his extraordinary career and achievements here. But, for anyone unfamiliar with his life and work, here are two good starting points:

By way of establishing a basic time line, Milton Clark Avery was born in Altmar, New York, on 7 March 1885. Avery moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1905, where he studied briefly at the Connecticut League of Art Students, and then moved to New York in 1925, where the following year he married fellow artist Sally Michel (1902-2003). The couple shared joint studio space and worked together. Michel subsequently focused more on promoting her husband’s career than her own. Her decision to undertake commercial illustrations to keep the family afloat allowed her husband to devote himself to his art.

Avery, largely self taught, is best known for developing a simplified style of painting featuring broad, contoured shapes with veiled fields of color. Avery was close friends with, and influenced, many younger artists, including Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler, all now recognized as major Abstract Expressionists.

Milton Avery. 1945. Seaside.

Milton Avery. 1945. Seaside.

Avery had his first solo museum exhibition, at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington D.C., in 1944. Shortly afterwards, Paul Rosenberg, who had fled France to establish a gallery in New York, agreed to buy twenty-five of Avery’s paintings twice a year. This might have been a daunting commitment for some artists. But Avery was never short of ideas, all competing to be the first to reach canvas, and he completed almost all his paintings the same day he started them.

This success enabled Avery to travel. In 1946, perhaps inspired by the magnificent 1940 exhibition of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Avery, with his wife and daughter, spent three months in Mexico.

Milton Avery. Crucifixion.

Milton Avery. 1946. Crucifixion.

Among the major paintings inspired by this visit was “Crucifixion.” When it came up for auction in 2011, Sotheby’s estimate was between 1.0 and 1.5 million dollars. The painting is based on a woman praying in front of a crucifix at the Parroquia, the main church in San Miguel de Allende.

Though the family spent most of their time in San Miguel, they also took brief trips elsewhere, to places such as Mexico City. Avery did numerous watercolors in Mexico, and also made “made many quick sketches in small notebooks, observing specific colors and atmospheric conditions,” which he would refer back to when painting oils once he was back in New York.

One of these side trips was to Chapala, as recalled, shortly after his passing, by his wife when she was interviewed by Dorothy Seckler:

Milton was very impressed with the beauty of Mexico because it is such a dramatic and beautiful country. And we went down there with no particular itinerary. But on the way down, we met a couple and they were going to San Miguel de Allende. So they said, “Why don’t you come along, it’s this lovely little colonial town.”

So we went intending to stay overnight and we stayed six weeks. And so we met a lot of people there and made a lot of new friends and went sketching every day. Milton did a whole series of watercolors while he was down in Mexico.

He said, though, that Mexico was so picturesque in itself that it was very difficult to make a painting. It was so pictorial.
. . . But even so. When we got back to New York he did a series of paintings from these watercolors, some of which I think were very stunning.

. . . and we left San Miguel and went down to Guadalajara [Chapala] which was on this great lake where they find a lot of the pre-Columbian idols because people used to throw the idols into the lake there to appease the gods. And actually, one of the nicest paintings—one of Milton’s minor masterpieces I think—was “Mexican Seaside” which was just shown in London and that was done from a sketch he made by Lake Chapala.
. . . [in] the review in the London Times, the critic said that this was undoubtedly a masterpiece. And the interesting thing was it was done in ’46, but it’s very much like the late things he did in Provincetown in 1960. Amazing. I mean it was like, in terms of colors and shapes it was like a forerunner. It had that same type of quality.”

  • Can you help? Do you have an image of “Mexican Seaside,” or know its current location?

Three years after visiting Mexico, Avery had a heart attack, from which he never fully recovered, though he continued to paint, and was able to visit Europe for the first time. He had a second heart attack ten years later and died in New York on 3 January 1965.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

The literary and artistic connections of the Mi México building in Ajijic

 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards  2 Responses »
Feb 192025
 

There are not many genuinely old buildings left in Ajijic. Most of those that survived into the 1970s have since been modified or remodeled beyond recognition. One exception is the building at Morelos #8, one block back from the pier, which housed (until mid-February 2025) the store Mi México. It is a rare survivor, largely unchanged for the past 80 years or more.

Mi Mexico, 1982. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Mi Mexico, 1982. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

I don’t know for sure who built it or precisely how old the building actually is. But I do know—based on my research into the influence of foreigners at Lake Chapala—that this building was acquired in 1937 as a vacation home by U.S. entrepreneur Louis E. Stephens, then living in Mexico City. Stephens had first learned about the delights of living in Mexico—and of Ajijic in particular—from screenplay writer Charles Kaufman, who had lived in the village in 1929. Kaufman’s novel Fiesta in Manhattan (1939), which tells the story of a young village musician and his wife who are encouraged to leave their lives at Lake Chapala for the bright lights of Manhattan, is actually dedicated by its author to the people of Ajijic.

Stephens and his then-wife Annette Margolis (later known as Annette Nancarrow, artist and assistant to José Clemente Orozco) were exceptionally well-connected. They were members of the literary, artistic and cultural elite of Mexico City, and often offered the use of their Ajijic property to friends.

The most significant of these friends (from our narrow perspective) was U.S. fashion designer Helen Beth Kirtland, whose husband was a noted Mexico City rare books dealer. When Kirtland decided to separate from her husband, Stephens offered her and her three young children the use of his Ajijic home.

Mi Mexico, 1996. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Mi Mexico, 1996. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Their first visit in 1946 was for only a short time, but a year later Kirtland moved to Ajijic permanently with her children and never looked back. She founded Telares Ajijic (Ajijic Hand Looms), employed weavers and, through enterprise, good fortune and hard work, built up a highly successful business. She also opened her own store, Mi México. Her children all grew up in the village.

After completing college in California, her daughter, Katie Goodridge Ingram, born in Mexico City in 1938, returned to Ajijic and ran the Galería del Lago from 1975 until it closed in 1977. Ingram then opened her own gallery as part of Mi México, which she ran from 1978 to 1983. Ingram, an award-winning poet, later wrote an absorbing and beautifully written memoir of her childhood in Mexico City and Ajijic—According to Soledad, memories of a Mexican childhood—which garnered rave reviews following its publication in 2020.

Many other famous artists and authors have vacationed in or visited the Mi México building over the years. They include Algerian-born painter Violette Mège and her award-winning artist husband, Michael Baxte, in the 1940s. And, because of Kirtland, German poet Gustav Regler lived and wrote here in the late 1940s, and Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther) did so in the 1950s. Helen Kirtland’s tocaya and good friend Helen O’Gorman (wife of architect-artist Juan O’Gorman) visited more than once.

Mi Mexico, 2024. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Mi Mexico, 2024. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Kirtland later married American sculptor Mort Carl, who deserves the credit for building Ajijic’s first tennis court in an empty lot immediately behind the Mi México building. Carl’s work became better known after he abandoned Kirtland and Ajijic to return to the U.S. And, much more recently, I’m reliably informed that novelist Edgar Taylor Morris lived at Mi México while writing All the Clouds’ll roll away.

Mi México has now relocated to Riberas del Pilar, but this Ajijic landmark’s historical, literary and artistic heritage deserve to be recognized for many years to come. The building’s owners want to sell. Any ‘renovation’ would need prior approval from the Chapala municipality, which has apparently promised to preserve the facade. Will local authorities step up when needed to ensure its future? Only time will tell.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Dwight Furness and his son’s postcards of Hotel Ribera near Ocotlán

 1920s and earlier  1 Response »
Feb 132025
 

Dwight Furness (1861-1924) was a wealthy and influential Chicago investor who grew up in Furnessville (named for his family) in Indiana. He arrived in Guanajuato as a 26-year-old—to represent a Missouri-based mining company—before quickly branching out on his own, buying and trading mineral ores. Furness was appointed U.S. consular agent at Guanajuato in 1889, and retained this position until 1907.

In 1890, Furness married Anna Rodgers, a Methodist missionary. The couple had ten children (five sons and five daughters), two of whom died as infants.

Furness, who gained a reputation as a fair and benevolent businessman, built up several highly profitable general merchandise and minerals trading companies, conducting more than $2 million worth of business a year. His business interests ranged from mines to land and financing, and extended across several states, including Aguascalientes, Durango and Jalisco. In 1902 he paid Ignacio Castellanos and his wife, Esther Tapia Ruíz, $200,000 pesos in gold for 7000 acres of land, including a section of lakefront known as Rivera Castellanos.

Dwight Furness. c 1907. Hotel Ribera Castellanos. (Fig 6-6 of Lake Chapala: A Postcard History.)

Dwight R. Furness. c 1907. Hotel Ribera Castellanos. (Fig 6-6 of Lake Chapala: A Postcard History.)

While Furness planned to farm most of the land, he recognized the enormous economic and tourist potential of Rivera Castellanos, “one of the finest scenic spots in Mexico” with “nearly three miles of lake and river front.” It was ideally located, easily accessible from the main Irapuato-Guadalajara railroad.

Furness began planning a modern “summer colony” and a large “commodious” lakefront hotel which would take full advantage of some nearby thermal springs. This was the first serious competition for Lake Chapala’s earliest purpose-built hotel, the Hotel Arzapalo, completed in Chapala in 1898.

A correspondent for The Mexican Herald was immediately enthusiastic. After pointing out that “in winter months people of the tableland cities go down to Veracruz or Tampico for sea bathing and boating,” but that summer months could be uncomfortable both in the cities and on the coast, the journalist extolled the Rivera Castellanos’ wonderful year-round climate:

There is no finer all-the-year-round climate than that which may be enjoyed along the shores of Lake Chapala. The air is itself a tonic, the lake breezes invigorating, and the worn out business man, or society woman, finds in a few days that the system is generously renewed.”

To finance the project, Furness incorporated the Lake Chapala Agricultural and Improvement Company in Phoenix, Arizona, in July 1902. The company raised $600,000 dollars in capital, and Furness began building an “American style” town and hotel. Construction of the first homes and the Hotel Ribera began in the summer of 1904.

The Hotel Ribera, overlooking the lake, opened in 1906 and was fully functional by 1907. Banner advertisements in advance of its inauguration used the tag line, “The Riviera of Mexico,” a line designed to strike a chord with the well-heeled clientele being targeted. The hotel, about five kilometers by road south of Ocotlán and approximately the same distance west of Jamay, billed itself as the “Sportsman’s Paradise,” the perfect headquarters for hunting during the winter season, especially since the area had no mosquitos and no malaria.

Soon after the hotel opened, Dwight Furness’ eldest son, Dwight Rodgers Furness (1892-1960) used his then amateur photography skills to take a series of promotional postcards showing the hotel and its surroundings. (Dwight Rodgers Furness subsequently studied in the US, became a professional photographer, and was chosen in 1918 to head the pioneering U.S.A. Aerial Photography School started by George Eastman.)

The earliest Dwight R Furness postcards of Hotel Ribera date from about 1907. They are printed on several different papers, including an AZO paper sold only between 1907 and 1909, a VELOX paper dating to that same narrow time period, and an AZO paper sold between 1904 and 1918. A small number, presumably reprints, are on ARTUR paper which was not sold prior to 1911.

Dwight Furness. ca 1907. View from bridge, Ocotlán.

Dwight R. Furness. ca 1907. View from bridge, Ocotlán.

Most tourists staying at the Hotel Ribera reached Ocotlán via the Central Mexican Railroad. After alighting at Ocotlán station, they took a short boat ride to the hotel, passing under this bridge (which spans the Santiago River) into the lake and then heading east, hugging the lakeshore to the hotel.

Furness-Postcard-Credit-Imprint

Almost all known Furness postcards have this imprint on the reverse

Almost all Furness cards relate to the Hotel Ribera, with images of the plant-lined driveway, different buildings, hotel interiors and various views of the hotel from the lake. Other cards show moonlight over the lake, the view from the main bridge in Ocotlán, and the main street of Jamay, the nearest village to the hotel.

Dwight Furness. ca 1907. Jamay. (Published by Alba y Fernández, Guadalajara)

Dwight R. Furness. ca 1907. Jamay. (Published by Alba y Fernández, Guadalajara)

The quality of the composition and printing of Furness’ photographs, taken when he was a teenager, is not as high as that achieved by professional photographers of the time, one of whom—Winfield Scott—lived nearby. Either his father wanted to save money or he preferred not to commission Scott because of his rival business start-up. (Scott, the official photographer for the Mexican Central railroad, had settled in Ocotlán in 1901 and was trying tried to establish his own rival hotel and “Inland Sea Boating Club.” Scott, incidentally, may have been the first person to advertise the Lake Chapala climate as the “best on earth.”)

In a curious later twist of fate, Scott—despite not taking the early promotional photos of Hotel Rivera—became the hotel’s manager in 1919.

The Hotel Ribera gained a reputation as “Mexico’s best resort.” Rooms with full board were between US$1.50-2.00) a day in 1907 when two well-heeled federal politicians—Vice-President Ramón Corral and Finance Secretary José Yves Limantour—stayed overnight before taking a steamship ride to spend a few nights in Chapala. Such patronage ensured that The Hotel Ribera Castellanos quickly became a highly desirable and popular destination, and all manner of politicians and celebrities vacationed there over the next decade.

Soon after the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Furness decided to spend more time in the U.S. and sold the hotel to Enrique Langenscheidt Schwartz, a prominent and well-connected German businessman based in Guanajuato. It was Enrique’s son who hired Winfield Scott as manager in 1919.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

  • Arizona Republic (Phoenix, Arizona) 24 Jul 1902, 4.
  • El Mundo Ilustrado: 5 Oct 1913.
  • Jalisco Times: 7 May 1904; 4 Nov 1904; 8 Nov 1907; 29 Mar 1907; 27 Sep 1907; 17 Jan 1908; 1 May 1908.
  • The Mexican Herald: 18 Feb 1902, 3; 21 May 1902, 2; 31 May 1902, 4; 4 Jan 1907; 13 May 1907; 27 Sep 1907, 8; 5 Jun 1909. 5 Sep 1909, 3; 27 June 1910, 5; 24 Aug 1911, 7;
  • El Abogado Cristiano Ilustrado: 24 Dec 1903, 16.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Wilhelm Schiess described Chapala in 1899

 1920s and earlier  2 Responses »
Feb 062025
 

Dr Wilhelm Schiess (1869-1929) visited Chapala briefly in 1899, during a winter trip to Mexico with his brother, Ernst. His detailed account of their trip, with dozens of photographs, was published in 1902 as Quer durch Mexiko vom Atlantischen zum Stillen Ocean (“Across Mexico from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean”). It was well received at the time as an accurate, first-hand account of several little-known parts of Mexico. Sadly—and presumably because the book was never translated—Schiess’s work has received relatively little attention.

Carl Wilhelm Schiess was born in Basel, Switzerland, on 12 July 1869 to Prof. Dr. Heinrich Schiess, a well-known ophthalmologist in that city, and his wife, Rosalie Gemuseus.

Schiess had already completed his medical training before visiting the US and Mexico with his brother in 1899. The two young men entered Mexico via New Orleans, before traveling by rail to Torreón and Durango, and crossing the Western Sierra Madre to Mazatlán. From there, they took a steamer to San Blas, and then proceeded to cross the country from west to east, via Tepic, Tequila, Guadalajara, Chapala, Zamora, Uruapan, Pátzcuaro, Morelia, Mexico City and Amecameca to Veracruz, before returning north via Orizaba, Cordoba, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas. Quite the itinerary to complete in just two months!

The Schiess brothers had lots of adventures along the way. Like many other early travelers in Mexico, they even climbed to the summit of Popocatepetl Volcano, and photographed the interior of its crater. They visited remote mines and explored archeological sites, including Xochicalco.

The brothers arrived in Guadalajara on Monday 4 December 1899. The following morning, they left the city to view Juanacatlán Falls. They were very impressed by their grandeur, and the book includes photographs of the falls themselves, of a group of women washing clothes below the falls, and this photo of a then pristine River Santiago (aka Río Grande), immediately above the falls. After a full day exploring, they returned to their hotel in Guadalajara.

Wilhelm Schiess. 1899. Río Grande at Juanacatlán. (opp. p. 137)

Wilhelm Schiess. 1899. Río Grande at Juanacatlán. (opp. p. 137)

The next day (Wednesday 6 December) they left the city by train en route to Chapala:

We set off at 10:20. Since our journey would not be long, we sat in second class. By 11.30am, we arrived in Atequiza, where the temperature was only 12°C. Back home, with such a cloudy sky, one would surely predict rain soon. However, no one here believed in rain at this time of year; instead, they assured us that the sun would soon shine again.

“Behind the train station, an eight-horse stagecoach was already waiting, along with a half-open carriage drawn by five mules. We took our seats in the carriage, which we had entirely to ourselves. We galloped off, and although this road seemed smooth compared to those we had previously encountered, we were still jolted and shaken considerably and had to hold on tightly to avoid being thrown from the carriage. As we sped along, one of the postillions frequently jumped down from the coach, ran as fast as he could alongside the carriage, and urged the mules to an even faster pace with his whip and shouts. The second driver swung his endlessly long whip from the coach seat.

“We raced along, always closely following the mail cart, passing over the rough cobblestones of Atequiza. The road led up and down hills, with little vegetation in sight—only a few bare trees with white blossoms here and there. An hour before reaching Chapala, we occasionally caught glimpses of the lake far below us. At a furious pace, we raced down the hill, and the two white church towers of Chapala approached with a completely different speed than the towers of Guadalajara had a few days ago. That time, we sat on exhausted animals, whereas today, five lively mules were pulling us along. At 1.30pm, we arrived in Chapala and stopped in front of the large, comfortably furnished hotel.”

The hotel was the Hotel Arzapalo, where:

In the spacious, European-style dining hall on the ground floor, we enjoyed our lunch and, from our table, had a magnificent view of the lake through the small orange garden in front of the hotel. The hotel is located directly on the shore. A bottle of red wine gave us the courage to ponder further adventures. Besides us, only a small family had taken a seat in the otherwise empty hall, giving the place a rather deserted appearance. The season had long since ended. In summer, many families, mainly from Guadalajara, come here to spend their time rowing and swimming. The sandy beach is perfect for children. The Chapala Lake is said to have a very mild climate, yet we happened to arrive on one of the least pleasant days imaginable. Now, people are even complaining about the cold!”

Wilhelm Schiess. 1899. Chapala. (opp. p153)

Wilhelm Schiess. 1899. Chapala. (opp. p. 153) The distant building on the left of the image is Villa Montecarlo, built by Septimus Crowe. In the middle is Villa Tlalocan, completed in 1896. The white residence on the right is Casa Capetillo.

Chapala itself is a small village, whose main street, consisting of closely built small houses, runs westward from the hotel, going up and down the hills along the lake. It is separated from the lake by beautiful gardens, where magnificent specimens of evergreen trees, blooming oleanders, blue morning glories, and red geraniums can be found. Small side alleys lead from the main street down to the lake. Along the lakefront, as well as partially in the water, there are trees through which one has a lovely view of the four or five stately villas of the village.

“Next to the hotel is the steamboat landing, which extends into the lake. It is planted with young trees and furnished with well-maintained benches for visitors. There is no daily regular steamboat service, even in summer. Behind the hotel rises a brown, barren hill that stretches westward along the lake. Along the village street, near the small water ponds, we noticed some women washing and bathing, who covered themselves upon our approach. The villas, with their terraces, offered a rather charming view from the lake, and in fine weather, living here must certainly be pleasant. East of the hotel, near the lake, stands the large white church, which presents a picturesque sight. Now and then, the sun shimmered through the dense clouds, bringing a bit of life to the otherwise deserted village. On the southern side of the lake, as well as in the west, high mountains could be seen everywhere. The lake has a somewhat dark and wild appearance—at least under this lighting—yet one still sees orange and banana trees. At 2.30pm, the temperature was 19°C, while the water measured 18°C. However, today we had no desire to go for a swim.”

After considering their options, the brothers decided not to stay overnight in Chapala, but to take a boat that afternoon to Ocotlán:

We could have stayed overnight in Chapala and taken the stagecoach back tomorrow. The steamboat arrives in Chapala only very irregularly and is mainly intended for transporting goods from the ranchos on the southern shore, so we could not rely on it. The only way to continue directly was to hire a sailing boat. Ernst therefore negotiated with two boatmen who agreed to take us to Ocotlán for 8 pesos.”

We will examine the book’s lengthy description of their boat ride to Ocotlán, which turned out to be far more of an adventure than they had expected, in a future post.

Links to a Swiss castle

Carl Wilhelm Scheiss is the unexpected link between Chapala and a famous Swiss castle. In 1900, shortly after his return to Switzerland, his aunt, Mrs. Rosina Magdalena Gemuseus, purchased Spiez Castle on Lake Thun in the Swiss canton of Bern, and invited Scheiss and his wife, Helene Schiess-Frey (1882–1962), to live there. In July 1900, Schiess opened a medical practice based in the castle, parts of which date back to the tenth century. He lived in the castle for several years, with office hours every morning to 11.00am, and clinics for eye diseases every Tuesday and Friday morning.

The village of Spiez grew rapidly: roads were improved and villagers added a new stone church and many new homes. In about 1906, close to the time his son was born, Schiess commissioned a firm of Basel architects to build him a large family home in the village, with an attached medical office.

In 1907, Schiess’s aunt sold him some of the outlying castle properties, including the old church, rectory, manager’s house, cherry orchard, vineyards and an area of forest. Schiess continued to live quite modestly, accustomed to making home visits to patients by bicycle. Contemporaries described him as a friendly, helpful and keen doctor, who worked tirelessly without any break during the terrible 1918 flu epidemic.

Following the death of his aunt on 3 February 1919, Schiess inherited the castle itself. But the upkeep was costly, and Schiess soon found himself having to sell valuables from the castle to cover ongoing maintenance expenses. By 1922 he started looking for a potential purchaser. In the absence of finding anyone, a group of villagers established a foundation five years later with the idea of preserving the castle for future generations. On 14 August 1929, barely two weeks after the Spiez Castle Foundation took over the castle, Schiess died unexpectedly of heart failure.

The castle and gardens opened to the public in June 1930 and are now used for conferences, concerts, exhibitions and other events. Curiously, it is apparently not known which precise rooms of the castle were once used by the doctor and his wife.

Note: Translations of Schiess’ text are by the author and were AI-assisted.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center. The fascinating stories behind the first vacation homes and hotels in Chapala are the subject of If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s Historic Buildings and Their Former Occupants, translated into Spanish as Si las paredes hablaran: Edificios históricos de Chapala y sus antiguos ocupantes.

Sources

  • Tony Burton. 2016. “A 1902 travel account, and unexpected link between Mexico and a Swiss castle.” Post dated 25 February 2016 on Geo-Mexico.com.
  • Wilhelm Schiess. 1902. Quer durch Mexiko vom Atlantischen zum Stillen Ocean. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
  • Alfred Stettler. 2004. “75 Jahre Stiftung Schloss Spiez: Die Anfänge” in Jahrbuch: vom Thuner und Brienzersee, Uferschutzverband Thuner- und Brienzersee.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Fritz Alseth’s whimsical sketches of Chapala and Ajijic in 1988

 1980s  2 Responses »
Jan 302025
 

Commercial illustrator Fritz (Fred) Alseth (1924-2006) resided at Lake Chapala in the late 1980s. During his time at the lake, he provided illustrations for El Ojo del Lago, and also for a series of cards promoting the local area, from Chapala to San Juan Cosalá, with an emphasis on hotels and tourist locations.

Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.

Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.

Alseth’s sketches for the cards are all dated 1988. They provide a fun way to look back at what the area was like at that time. The images in the gallery are arranged in approximate order from west to east, starting with San Juan Cosalá and ending with Chapala Haciendas. Enjoy!

Alseth-1988-SJC-Balneario
Alseth-1988-SJC-Balneario
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Danza-del-Sol
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Danza-del-Sol
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-street-scene
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-street-scene
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Mi-Mexico
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Mi-Mexico
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Posada-Ajijic-3
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Posada-Ajijic-3
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Posada-Ajijic-2
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Posada-Ajijic-2
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-plaza-Super-Grisa-supermarket
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-plaza-Super-Grisa-supermarket
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Plaza-and-Chapel
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Plaza-and-Chapel
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Plaza
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Plaza
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Restaurant-El-Meson
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Restaurant-El-Meson
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Mariana
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Mariana
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-La-Floresta
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-La-Floresta
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Real-de-Chapala-2
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Real-de-Chapala-2
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Real-de-Chapala
Alseth-1988-Ajijic-Hotel-Real-de-Chapala
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Chapala-Hotel-Nido
Alseth-1988-Chapala-Hotel-Nido
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Chapala-trees
Alseth-1988-Chapala-trees
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.
Alseth-1988-Chapala-Haciendas-hotel
Alseth-1988-Chapala-Haciendas-hotel
Drawing by Fritz Alseth. 1988.

Note regarding copyright. Attempts to identify the copyright owner of these images have been unsuccessful. Use of the low resolution images in this post is believed to fall under the fair dealing exemption, section 29 of copyright legislation in Canada.

Acknowledgments

  • My sincere thanks to business consultant Alejandro Wagner (the owner of Mi México store) and to fellow writer and long-time Ajijic resident Dale Hoyt Palfrey for supplying the illustrations used in this post.
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Evan Atkinson’s Candid View of Chapala in 1958

 1950s  2 Responses »
Jan 232025
 

Canadian journalist and adventurer Evan Evans-Atkinson (who used the name Evan Atkinson for his early writing) wrote “Candid View of Chapala. An Honest Report on Retiring In Mexico” for the New York-based periodical Travel in 1958.

“Candid View” was one of several articles in the 1950s that publicized Lake Chapala as an option for inexpensive living. Earlier articles included Regina Shekerjian’s “You can Afford a Mexican Summer” (1952) and John Russell Clift’s “Chapala: Mexico’s Shangri-la” (1953).

However, unlike those articles, and two later short books—Thomas McLaughlin’s The Greatest Escape (1983) and R. Emil Neuman’s Paradise found (1986)—“Candid View” presents the arguments both for and against living cheaply in Mexico.

Who was Evan Atkinson?

Adventuring journalist Evan Evans-Atkinson (who used the name Evan Atkinson for his early writing) was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, on 13 December 1924.

His father, Capt. Norman Evans-Atkinson, was a UK-born, Cambridge-educated geologist and prospector who served in the British and Indian armies before arriving in Canada in 1921 for the Cedar Creek gold rush in British Columbia, where he made a living by staking and selling mineral claims, and helped save the first-growth cedars at Cedar Point, near Likely.

After graduating from St. George’s School in Vancouver, Evan, who began building and sailing boats during childhood, attended the University of British Columbia, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He met his first wife, English-born Joan ‘Toni’ Henley, at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Aside: In 1950, during a solo motorcycle ride across North America, Toni had met Bob Hope. A photograph of Toni, with Bob Hope riding pillion on her bike in 1950, was published in The Harbour City Star in 2003, a few days after Hope’s death at the age of 100.

After Evan and Toni married in 1952 in Portsmouth, UK, they purchased a 27-foot ketch, which they sailed to Paris and lived on while Evan studied at the Sorbonne. Studies over, they spent almost a year exploring the Mediterranean, before selling the boat in Cannes, and returning to England to find a larger vessel to sail back to Canada.

They eventually located a 36-foot yawl, with ample headroom for 6’4″-tall Evan, and left England in the summer of 1954, calling in at Lisbon and the Canary Islands, before sailing west to the Caribbean. They landed at the island of Antigua barely two weeks before Toni gave birth to their first child, Wanda. Baby safely on board, they then meandered around the Caribbean Islands as far south as Barbados, from where Toni and baby returned to Vancouver, while Evan planned to sail the boat home via the Panama Canal. He made it as far as Costa Rica before a mechanical mishap resulted in significant damage to the boat. An American bought the boat, and Evan returned home aboard a banana boat.

According to one newspaper account of their exploits, Evan had “supported himself and the family for several years, during his venturesome voyaging, by selling children’s stories to English magazines,” while Toni had contributed to the family finances by painting and selling watercolors of boats.

Once back in Vancouver, Evan began his career in journalism. He worked for several newspapers, in a variety of positions, over the years, including The Province and The Sun, with several extended travel breaks away from the office.

Evan and Toni Evans-Atkinson, Ajijic (Travel, November 1958)

Evan and Toni Evans-Atkinson, Ajijic (Travel, November 1958)

Soon after the birth of the Evan-Atkinsons’ second child, Bruce, in 1956, the family left for Mexico, where Toni developed her artistic talents, trying her hand at weaving, while Evan wrote. They lived part of the time in a converted school bus, and several months in Chapala, which gave Evan the material for “Candid View of Chapala.”

Candid View of Chapala

Subtitled “An Honest Report on Retiring In Mexico,” “Candid View” does indeed present both sides of the arguments for and against living cheaply in Mexico.

Atkinson states that “the cost of living is fantastically cheap when you know your way around.” However, he cautions, this is only “one side of this low-cost paradise. There is never a word about the real disadvantages of becoming a gringo on a low budget.” The following paragraphs offer stark warnings about noise, health issues, smells and pollution, concluding “On a low budget, there is no escape from the smell, squalor and clamor.”

And while the weather is “wonderful nine months a year . . . the other three can be miserable.”

In 1958, the lake was still recovering from its lowest ever level three years earlier: “The water is clouded with mud and, as its level has dropped ten feet in the last few years, mud flats up to a mile wide ring its shoreline. There are no real beaches and the coagulated slime of weeds and lilies squelch any pleasure from aquatic sports.”

How many foreigners were living at Lake Chapala in 1958?

“Some 500 gringos live in Ajijic and Chapala, and almost every one of them is completely and utterly idle. In spite of a reputation as an artist’s colony, the number of people making even the feeblest attempt at painting or writing is less than two dozen. Eighty per cent of this expatriate population is elderly, retired on pensions and waiting for the inevitable. Most of the remaining twenty per cent live on alimony or some similar disability pension, on their parents or on their wits.”

Some amenities were lacking at Lake Chapala. The nearest supermarket was in Guadalajara. “The mail service, apart from mangling parcels, works well and takes about three days airmail to New York and seven days regular… You can make long distance calls, yet are not pestered by a local telephone system. TV hasn’t found this place yet.”

Despite all the negatives, and the difficulties of establishing close friendships with Mexicans, Atkinson and his family all loved living in Chapala: “We are living in one of the most expensive towns in the area. We have a servant and a five-room house with water, electricity and sewer connections. Our cost of living averages out to $110 dollars a month.”

The article ends with a summary of Mexico’s “regulations for retirement.” At the time (1958), the minimum income required for a foreign retiree was US$320 a month.

Life after Mexico

In 1967, Evan and family left Canada for Polynesia on Pacer, a 41-foot trimaran they had built. They planned to sail around the world, but discovered that their son suffered from chronic sea sickness. They abandoned this dream and returned to Vancouver, where Evan resumed his career as a journalist.

In 1979, Evan Evans-Atkinson left his job at The Sun to work on the Canadian Constitution. He suffered a severe stroke in 1995, and died in Vancouver on 3 January 2011, at the age of 86.

Toni moved to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in 1979, where she gained prominence as a noted watercolor artist; she died in Nanaimo in 1992.

Evan’s second wife, Mary—a student of fine arts and graduate of Le Cordon Bleu Paris—wrote British Columbia Heritage Cookbook (1984).

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

  • Evan Atkinson. 1958. “Candid View of Chapala. An Honest Report on Retiring In Mexico.” Travel (New York), Volume 110, No 5 (Nov 1958), pp 19-22.
  • The Harbour City Star (Nanaimo): 30 Jul 2003, A3.
  • Nanaimo Daily News: 11 Jun 1981.
  • The Province (BC, Canada): 2 April 1954; 10 May 1956; 14 Jan 1957; 20 Oct 1967; 21 Dec 1974.
  • The Times Colonist: 28 Jul 1967.
  • The Vancouver Sun. “Evans-Atkinson, Evan” (obituary). The Vancouver Sun, 15 January 2011.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Ballerina and artist Carla Manger helped build a primary school in Nextipac, Jocotepec

 1960s, 1970s, 1980s  2 Responses »
Jan 162025
 

Professional dancer Carla Manger (the name she was known by in Mexico) was born in Wattenscheid, Germany, on 7 August 1914. Her birth name was Carla Marie Windeler. After completing the equivalent of high school in Bochum, she danced in Oldenburg, Bielefeld and Stetin, before studying and dancing for three years at the Folk Arts School (Volsartschule) at Essen.

Carla, who also studied with noted German dance instructors Mary Wigman and Harold Kreutzberg, became an accomplished performer not only of classical ballet, but also modern dance and Russian, Polish, Hungarian and Spanish folk dances. During World War Two, she spent five years dancing professionally in Germany and Poland, including a lengthy spell at the Staats Theatre in Kraków, Poland. (Many years later, Howard Fryer, who lived near Carla Manger in her final years, claimed to have heard that “she was one of Hitler’s favourites and danced for him on numerous occasions.”)

Near the end of the war, Carla returned to Germany and later opened a  studio and ballet school in Hameln-Weser (Hamlin). She and a dance partner ran the school and gave many performances in West Germany for nine years until she decided to leave Germany for the U.S. She arrived (unaccompanied) in the U.S. as “Carla Luecke” on 7 April 1955. Her first husband, Carl Frank Luecke (1902-1985), had moved to Los Angeles, California, decades earlier.

Carla Manger, 1958. (Credit: Wichita Falls Times, 29 June 1958)

Carla Manger, 1958. (Credit: Wichita Falls Times, 29 June 1958)

After working briefly as a housekeeper in Port Jervis, New York, Carla moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1956, where she became a dance instructor at Gross School of Fine Arts in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Two years later, in 1958, she bought the Betty Jeane Studio of Dancing in Tucson, Arizona, filed for divorce from Luecke, reverted to her maiden name of Carla Windeler, and renamed the studio the Carla Windeler Dance Studio. An advertisement for a dance performance in 1961 by her students described their director as “Carla Windeler, former Ballerina of European Opera.”

The Wichita Falls Times published a story by Carla in 1957 about the “bell clock” ( a kind of alarm clock), she had been given by her brother in 1939 at the start of her professional career. Carla had taken it everywhere, and described how it woke her at 2.00am one day in 1943, so she could hurry to the station to meet a Red Cross train carrying her younger brother, wounded in war, who was en route back from the front to a hospital.

In 1944, Carla was in Kraków, Poland, when the Russians arrived. She and many others fled. It took Carla four months to finally reach her family home in Bochum, which was bombed and destroyed shortly afterwards. Suddenly, under the rubble, the clock rang! Carla dug it out, but the glass was smashed; her father fashioned a replacement out of a broken window. After the war ended in May 1945, Carla took the clock with her to Hameln. Not long after she arrived in the U.S., the clock was “so tired” it stopped working. Luckily, an expert in Wichita Falls was able to restore the movement without damaging the polished window glass, which was Carla’s last link to her family home.

In about 1963, Carla married Henry Kinast Manger. Henry, born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1904, had divorced his previous wife, Helen, in 1962, after five years of marriage, on the grounds of cruelty.

After moving to Jocotepec, Henry Manger is known to have helped archaeologists Clement Meighan and Len Foote during their excavations at Tizapán el Alto on the southern shore of Lake Chapala. He also donated land for a school in Nextipac, on the eastern outskirts of Jocotepec, and organized local parents to build a school and a house for the teachers. These plans continued even after Henry Manger’s unfortunate death in a Guadalajara hospital on 15 June 1968. According to local teacher Manuel Flores Jimènez, in appreciation of Manger’s generosity, the school had a bust of Manger on prominent display for many years.

With help from well-wishers, Carla was able to install, doors and bathrooms in the school by 1970, and bought school uniforms. That year she arranged a Christmas party for 175 boys and girls, despite having only just been discharged from a stay in hospital.

Carla also gave free dancing lessons to local children; some 80 youngsters were participating in 1970. Iin addition, she ran exercise ballet classes, and gave ballet classes at the Chula Vista Country Club.

Carla Manger. c 1988. Mercado en la plaza.

Carla Manger. c 1988. Mercado en la plaza.

The Nextipac school (now the Escuela Primaria 15 de Mayo) continued to thrive and expand. In 1976, Henry Manger Jr. raised funds in the US for the cement, tiles and gravel needed to build a 6th Grade classroom, helping to ensure that Nextipac children could complete their primary school years without having to leave their barrio.

At least three of Carla Manger’s paintings of Jocotepec were chosen by Joan Frost for reproduction as Amigos de Salud greetings cards: a street scene and a view of La Quinta (Los Naranjitos), both dated 1982, and an open-air market on the plaza.

Carla was one of numerous Lakeside artists whose work was included in a group show titled “Pintores de la Ribera” at Club Campestre La Hacienda (mid-way between Guadalajara and Chapala) in May 1985. Other artists showing on this occasion were Daphne Aluta, Eugenia Bolduc, Jean Caragonne, Donald Demerest, Laura Goeglein, Hubert Harmon, B. R. Kline, Jo Kreig, Carla W. Manger, Emily Meeker, Sydney Moehlman, Xavier Pérez; Tiu Pessa, De Nyse Turner Pinkerton and Eleanor Smart.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Sources

  • Arizona Republic: 6 May 1961, 12.
  • Tucson Daily Citizen: 21 April 1961.
  • Wichita Falls Times: 26 Aug 1956; 23 Sep 1956; 14 Apr 1957, 52; 20 Mar 1958.
  • The News (Paterson, New Jersey): 16 Oct 1962, 32.
  • Howard Fryer. 2010. El Nitty-Gritty.
  • El Informador: 4 May 1985.
  • Guadalajara Reporter: 30 July 1966; 28 Feb 1970; 25 Mar 1972; 26 Jun 1976, 21.
  • Clement Woodward Meighan and Leonard J. Foote. 1968. Excavations at Tizapan El Alto: Jalisco. University of California.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Diplomat and poet Francisco Izábal Iriarte found peace at Lake Chapala

 1920s and earlier  1 Response »
Jan 092025
 

Orator, poet, jeweler and diplomat Francisco Izábal Iriarte was born in the port city of Mazatlán, Sinaloa, in 1871, but lived much of his adult life in Guadalajara. Claims on social media that he (and two sisters) settled in Guadalajara after 1910 are contradicted by contemporaneous newspaper accounts which show that Izábal was definitely a resident of Guadalajara by the 1890s, perhaps even earlier.

Poem by Izabal IriarteIzábal, who never married, was exceptionally well connected and a member of numerous civic and political committees and groups. He was a prominent leader of the Sinaloan community in Guadalajara, and led fund-raising efforts whenever his native state suffered from storms, disease or earthquakes. In 1897, he was one of the small group accompanying General Cañedo, then Governor of Sinaloa, on a business trip to Mexico City.

Izábal was a member of the Guadalajara city council, and worked with numerous other prominent individuals, including Manuel Cuesta Gallardo, Eduardo Collignon, Andrés Arroyo de Anda, Enrique Álvarez del Castillo, etc. Among other things, Izábal was actively involved in plans to rename city streets.

Despite being a prominent supporter of President Porfirio Díaz, Izábal and his family emerged relatively unscathed, with most of their extensive landholdings, including the Hacienda de Peñuelas in the state of Aguascalientes, still intact, after the ravages and retributions of the Mexican Revolution.

Izábal published several poems in the 1890s in a relatively short-lived journal called Flor de Lis; these included one in memory of the illustrious Lake Chapala-connected poet Esther Tapia de Castellanos. In 1902, Izábal wrote at least two poems relating to the lake which were published in the national periodical El Mundo Ilustrado.

Here is one of them, with a loose translation into English:

Al Lago de Chapala  / To Lake Chapala

¡Que serena quietud y qué divina
la paz de tu ribera, soñadora
á la luz del crepúsculo que dora
el agua con la lumbre vespertina!
¡Cuánto adoro tu calma peregrina
al fugor de esta tarde encantadora,
oyendo la cadencia arrulladora
con que canta la onda cristalina!
Aquí está, suspirando bajo el cielo
mi corazón, que triste y sin consuelo,
llegó hasta ti, cansado y dolorido;
la calma de tus ondas es la calma
que anhelan los ensueños de mi alma
en sus profundos éxtasis de olvido!		 How serene the stillness, and how divine
the peace of your shore, dreamy
in the light of the twilight that gilds
the water with evening’s glow!
How I adore your wandering calm
in the glow of this enchanting afternoon,
listening to the soothing cadence
with which the crystalline waves sing!
Here lies, sighing beneath the sky
my heart, which, sad and inconsolable,
came to you weary and in pain;
the calm of your waves is the calm
for which the dreams of my soul yearn
in their profound ecstasies of oblivion!

Francisco Izábal Iriarte. 1902. “Al Lago de Chapala  / To Lake Chapala”

In 1906, Izábal accompanied his two sisters, Aurelia (two years older) and Alejandra (two years younger) when they left Guadalajara by train en route to Chapala. (It is unclear if they alighted at Atequiza to take the stagecoach, or continued as far as Ocotlán in order to catch the steamer back to Chapala).

Their brother, Dr Conrado Izábal Iriarte (1875-1936), was a medical specialist. After studying in Mexico City and Paris, Conrado held a high-ranking position at the Hospital General de México from 1907 to 1911, and moved to join his siblings in Guadalajara in 1916, where, seven years later, he co-founded the Unión Médica de Guadalajara.

Calle Libertad, ca. 1908. Photo: Smarth. Postcard published by Alba y Fernández.

Chalet Izabál Iriarte (Calle Libertad), ca. 1908. Photo: Smarth. Postcard published by Alba y Fernández.

The family home in Guadalajara, known as Chalet Izábal Iriarte, with its distinctive tower, was located at Libertad 1139 (now renumbered as Libertad 1705), and was apparently designed by Guillermo de Alba. In recent years, the elegant building, eclectic in style, has been occupied by a “La Casa del Waffle” restaurant. While several blog posts claim the building dates from around 1915, it must have been completed several years earlier, given the fact that it appears on this postcard, which is one in a series published by Alba y Fernández prior to 1909. The photograph colorized for the postcard was taken by Librado Garcia “Smarth.”

During the early years of the Revolution, Izábal’s connections gave him the chance to serve his country in foreign office posts, including spells as the Mexican consul in Galveston, Texas, and in Douglas, Arizona.

A large portion of the family hacienda of Peñuelas was appropriated for redistribution to ejidos in 1940. The hacienda is located on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, formally designated by UNESCO in 2010 as a World Heritage Site.

Francisco Izábal Iriarte died in Guadalajara, from complications of diabetes, at the age of 76 on 31 December 1947.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Sources

  • El Tiempo: 22 Jan 1903, 1.
  • El Informador: 22 April 1916; 19 Mar 1936, 5; 1 Feb 1945; 17 May 1970, 12-D.
  • El Mundo Ilustrado, 28 Sep 1902; 21 Dec 1902.
  • Flor de Lis: 15 Jun 1896, 3; 15 Nov 1896; 15 Jan 1897.
  • La Gaceta de Guadalajara: 20 May 1906, 2.
My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Lake Chapala on a postcard: Librado García “Smarth”, Mexico’s most enigmatic photographer

 1920s and earlier  1 Response »
Jan 022025
 

Among the early grayscale postcard photographs of Lake Chapala are several well-composed views signed L. V. García. In researching this photographer, I stumbled across an article which included this image of Lake Chapala, captioned “L. V. García. Alrededores de Guadalajara: Chapala, Jalisco. Ca. 1900,” held in the Fondo Fotográfico Antonio Alzate of the National University (UNAM).

L. V. García. Alrededores de Guadalajara: Chapala, Jalisco. (c 1900). Col: UNAM, IIH, Fondo Fotográfica Antonio Alzate.

L. V. García. Alrededores de Guadalajara: Chapala, Jalisco. (c 1900). Col: UNAM, IIH, Fondo Fotográfica Antonio Alzate.

This postcard is unusual, and quite avant-garde for its time. It may be slightly later than 1900, given that several other photos of Chapala by the same artist were definitely taken post-1904. But the strong composition, details, and novel way of embracing the lake in artistic flowers, make this card more of a work of art than any mere traveler’s memento.

Librado V. García, it turns out, was one of the most enigmatic Mexican photographers of all time. While virtually nothing is known about his personal life, he opened photo studios in both Mexico City and Guadalajara, and adopted the moniker “Smarth” as he moved away from conventional portraits and landscape images towards artistic photographs that helped lead a revolution in Mexican photography.

García was responsible not only for the artistic card above but for numerous conventional photographic postcards of Chapala, including two cards, one signed “L. V. García” and the other “FOT. GARCIA” which were taken from the jetty in Chapala and show the shoreline buildings east of the church. Closer inspection showed that the FOT. GARCIA version (which has the number 209 in tiny print at the bottom right) is an enlargement of one small section of the other version. These two cards were presumably published at different points in the photographer’s career. A third postcard, with the identical photo, is also known, though it lacks any credit, title or number on the front.

In addition, there are several “Edic. García” or simply “García” postcards that are clearly the work of the same photographer, especially since the way “García” is written—partially enclosed in a line that serves to underline the name—exactly matches how it appears on several “L. V. Garcia” cards.

Given that only about 200 photographs by Librado García “Smarth” are known, the addition of these postcards to his oeuvre may offer some clues as to when and how the artist gradually became a master of composition and technique.

L. V. García. Chapala, Jalisco. (c 1900).

L. V. García (Fot. García). Chapala (c 1900).

In an interview in the 1920s, García claimed to have been born in a cave in the mountains of either Sinaloa or Jalisco. According to art collector and researcher David Torrez, García was born in 1892 on the hacienda de la Cuesta, close to the Jalisco/Nayarit state limits.

In that same 1920s’ interview, García claimed that his birth was never registered, and so he had no idea of his real age or date of birth. He had chosen the name Librado García himself, and had worked as a telegrapher and for the postal service before being inspired to investigate photography after a friend took his portrait as a decapitated body holding his head in his right hand.

García bought a camera, read the manual, experimented and taught himself. If there are any grains of truth in this fabulous tale they presumably help to account for his artistic originality, perceived closeness to indigenous Mexico, and reputation for incorporating a strong sense of nationalism in his images.

This enigmatic photographer with his creative backstory presumably believed that his photographs should be judged squarely on their artistic merits and that opinions about them should not be influenced by any knowledge of the photographer’s personal background, education or life experiences.

According to Jaliscan artist and politician José Guadalupe Zuno, Smarth‘s career as a master portraitist began in 1911, a date supported by photography researcher José Antonio Rodríguez who traced Librado García’s career back to a listing for his photo studio (at Avenida Madero #66) in a 1911-12 Mexico City directory.

L. V. García. Alrededores de Guadalajara: Chapala, Jalisco. (c 1900).

L. V. García. Alrededores de Guadalajara: Chapala, Jalisco. (c 1905).

The start of his career as an artistic photographer may date from 1911, but García was clearly active well before this, as proven by his postcard views of Lake Chapala, some of which were mailed prior to 1910. On the other hand, some of his photographs must be post-1904 since they show Casa Braniff (as it is popularly called), construction of which began that year.

García was clearly already well-known in Guadalajara, and presumably had a studio there, several years before opening “Foto Smarth” at Avenida Corona #128 in Guadalajara in October 1915. During the next decade, Smarth was very active in Guadalajara. In 1918, and again in 1919, he advertised his search for “three apprentices without pretensions,” and regularly donated prizes to major local fund-raisers such as the raffle held for the Red Cross in February 1918.

Smarth was a fun-loving character with a reputation for throwing interesting parties. In February 1920 he organized a masked ball at his photo studio in Guadalajara one evening for young ladies “wearing capricious dresses”, where the intent was to display originality and good taste. The following October, he sent out invitations for a new exhibition of photographic works. The local paper was certain that the show would gain the artist new admirers.

Smarth’s photographs were included in a group exhibition of local artists at the Guadalajara Male Teachers’ School (Escuela Normal para Varones) in September 1921.

In August 1922, El Informador reported that “Sr Librado García, Smarth” had just returned to the city from a few days’ vacation in Cuernavaca. Two days later, there were references in the paper to a “Sra de Smarth” and “Srtas Smarth”, suggesting either that Librado Garcia had a wife and daughters, or an unlikely coincidence of names.

The following March, Sr and Sra Smarth are named on a lengthy list of those present at the official inauguration of the railroad from La Quemada (near Magdalena) to Tepic. This was a major event. President Álvaro Obregón did the honors, accompanied by his eventual successor Plutarco Elías Calles, and dozens of high-level politicians, railway officials, guests and members of the international press. One Chapala-related curiosity about this list is the inclusion of Miss Helen Creighton, a Canadian author and folklorist who was employed as a teacher at the American School in Guadalajara and took several snapshots of Chapala that year.

From 1924 to 1926, Librado Garcia taught photography workshops in Guadalajara at the Young Women’s Industrial School (Escuela Federal de Arte Industrial para Señoritas), a school established to promote economic independence for young women. In December 1924, the school celebrated its first year with a seasonal fiesta and exhibitions showcasing student work in fields ranging from sombrero-making, fashion design and embroidery to decorative art, bookbinding, drawing and photography.

Smarth‘s classes were especially popular. A display of student photography in November 1925 “showed the notable progress made by students, and accounted for the large number of students taking the course.” The numerous enlargements and photos taken by students of each other and their teachers were praised as especially artistic, demonstrating a mastery of the use of light to obtain images with varying tonalities.

For some years, the photographer apparently maintained studios in both Guadalajara and Mexico City simultaneously before deciding to close the Guadalajara studio to focus exclusively on work in the capital.

By the early 1920s, Smarth‘s portraits had matured into true works of art, characterized by strong composition and the use of settings or backdrops often drawn or painted by the photographer himself for the specific individual. Smarth was among the first to hold portrait sessions where he would choose the attire of his sitters and experiment with a variety of poses and backgrounds. Smarth took striking portraits of many notable figures of the time including the American ballerina Rosa Rolanda. Rolanda, the wife of Miguel Covarrubias, not only sat for painters Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro but also posed for photographers Edward Weston and Tina Modotti.

Photos by Smarth appeared in many of the leading papers and magazines of the time, including El Universal Ilustrado, Revista de Revistas, Jueves de Excélsior and Cúspide in Mexico City and El Informador in Guadalajara.

From about 1926, García chose to live primarily in Mexico City, making occasional trips back to Guadalajara. For example, he is recorded as leaving Guadalajara at the end of March 1929 on the night train to return to Mexico City “where he has lived for some time”.

Smarth, described as a photographer with “imagination and elegance,” was a prize-winner at the 1929 Expo Seville (Feria Iberoamericana) in Spain, as were his Mexican colleagues Antonio Garduño, Hugo Brehme, Roberto A. Turnbull, Ignacio Gómez Gallardo and Tina Modotti.

It was also in 1929 when Mexico’s first monthly national photo magazine was launched. The inaugural issue of Helios, Revista Mensual Fotografica announced the creation of an Asociación de Fotógrafos de México (with Macario González as president) and invited readers to participate in photographic contests. Helios ran until 1936, and competition winners included several Guadalajara photographers—Librado García, Ignacio Gomez Gallardo and Eva Mendiola—as well as Tina Modotti and Eva González.

A major collective exhibit of works by Mexican photographers was held in December 1929. This show, titled “Guillermo Toussaint y 11 fotógrafos mexicanos”, took place in the Galería de Arte Mexicano, located in what was then Mexico City’s Teatro Nacional (now the Palacio de Bellas Artes). Carlos Mérida and Carlos Orozco Romero, the organizers, invited 11 photographers—Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Hugo Brehme, Rafael García, Librado García Smart, Agustín Jiménez, Ricardo Mantel, Luis Márquez, Juan Ocón, Roberto Turnbull, Aurora Eugenia Latapi and Aurora Latapí (her mother)—to show their work, alongside sculptures by Guillermo Toussaint.

According to Cynthia Pérez, Smarth‘s activity as a photographer ceased in about 1936. He dropped out of sight in the 1930s; his life has been little researched and his work is little known.

The stunning black and white photos taken by these talented photographers were the forerunners for the marvelous cinematography of movies filmed in Mexico in the 1930s, movies that heralded the golden age of Mexican cinema.

Over the years, Smarth and his work soon became largely forgotten, though one significant group show in 1953 did include several of his fine photographs. This was a collective exhibit organized by the University of Guadalajara at the “Galeria de Art Contemporáneo” in downtown Guadalajara. Titled “Plástica Jalisciense (1668-1953)”, it included photographs taken by Smarth, José María Lupercio, Ignacio Gómez Gallardo, Lola Álvarez Bravo and Juan Victor Aráuz, as well as sculptures by Miguel Miramontes and innumerable paintings.

Lingering memories of Smarth lived on in Guadalajara. Columnists in El Informador periodically bemoaned the fact that the work of the city’s talented photographers, especially Librado García “Smarth,” Ignacio Gómez Gallardo, José María Lupercio and Pedro Magallanes had been forgotten. One lament, by Dr. Pedro Rodríguez Lomelí, came in a general piece headlined “Decline of Art in Jalisco.” Decades later, in the 1960s, one journalist claimed that the reasons why their fine work had been forgotten were “time, ingratitude and ignorance.”

Fortunately, Smarth’s artistic reputation has been more than restored in recent years, and he is now widely recognized as one of the earliest artistic photographers in Mexico. This re-evaluation coincided with a 2008 exhibit at the Museo de Estanquillo (Colecciones Carlos Monsiváis) in Mexico City, which included three unattributed nudes of Jaliscan painter Chucho Reyes Ferreira. Art researcher Carlos Córdova identified them as the work of Smarth and showed that they belonged to a series of unsigned portraits of Reyes, some of which had originally been published in 1920. Examples of the photographs were then included in a traveling exhibit about the development of portraiture titled “Te pareces tanto a mí” shown in Oaxaca, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Puebla in 2010. Carlos A. Códova’s research into Smarth and other early photographers won him the National Photography Essay Prize in 2010 and was published in 2012 as Tríptico de sombras.

By then, another researcher, José Antonio Rodríguez had shown that Smarth was responsible for several photos previously attributed to other famous photographers, including an image of a single alcatraz (calla lily), previously displayed as the work of Edward Weston.

In 2016 there was widespread press coverage when the Patricia Conde Galería in Mexico City assembled a small but powerful exhibition of 20 photographs titled “Smarth: Obras maestras de Librado García, fotógrafo.” A second major exhibit of his works titled “Librado García Smarth: entre el pictoralismo y la vanguardia,” opened 1 July 2021 at Casa ITESO Clavijero in Guadalajara.

The idea that “modern” Mexican photography really got underway only after the arrival of outsiders, such as Tina Modotti and Edward Weston in 1923, needs serious revision. By then, an artistic revolution in Mexican photography was already well underway, led by Smarth and others.

Smarth’s early postcards of Lake Chapala were the starting point for a truly memorable artistic journey, one that helped change the face of Mexican photography and still resonates with art lovers today.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources:

  • Carlos A. Códova. 2012. Tríptico de sombras. Mexico City: Conaculta/Cenart/Centro de la Imagén.
  • Francisco Javier Ibarra. 2005. “Pioneras de la fotografía en Jalisco.” El Informador: 06 March 2005, 30.
  • El Informador: 3 February 1918, 4; 3 February 1918, 3; 3 September 1919, 4; 17 Feb 1920, 8; 6 Oct 1920, 7; 25 Sep 1921, 5; 23 Aug 1922, 7; 25 August 1922, 7; 6 March 1923, 1, 8; 1 December 1924, 5; 22 November 1925, 8; 1 April 1929, 4; 3 October 1965, 27; 23 October 1966, 25.
  • Arturo Jiménez. 2010. “Fotografías con desnudos de Chucho Reyes y Nahui Ollin dialogarán en Guadalajara.” La Jornada, 8 Sep 2010, 8.
  • Cynthia Pérez. 2016. “El Misterio Detrás de un visionario, Librado García Smart.” Cuartoscuro. July 2016.
  • José Antonio Rodríguez. 2011. “Librado García Smart: cortejar a la sombra.” Alquimía. Vol 14, No 41 (Jan-April 2011), 20-36.
  • Pedro Rodriguez Lomeli. 1939. “Decaimiento del Arte en Jalisco”. El Informador, 4 June 1939, 11, 12.
  • Cecilia Vilches Malagón and Martín Romero Sandoval Cortés. 2016. “La tarjeta postal como fuente de información para entender la historia de un país“, in Imatge i Recerca: Jornades Antoni Varés (14es: 2016: Girona) Tribuna d’Experiències – 2016.

Comments, corrections or additional material welcomed, whether via the comments feature or email.

A Christmas Potpourri of Lake Chapala Links

 Other  1 Response »
Dec 232024
 

Many of the artists and authors associated with Lake Chapala have clear links to Christmas. Admittedly, some links are more tenuous than others. Here, in no particular order, are some that come to mind:

German-born photographer Hugo Brehme, who is credited with having introduced the first photographic Christmas cards into Mexico. Brehme photographed Lake Chapala more than once; many of his superb black-and-white postcard images are hauntingly beautiful.

Toni Beatty. Christmas Cheer, Mesquite, NM. Print on metal.

Toni Beatty. Christmas Cheer, Mesquite, NM. Print on metal.

Another photographer, Toni Beatty, found creative freedom while living in Ajijic in 1976. The image above (reproduced with her kind permission) is an example of her more recent, extraordinary, work which involves digitally-enhanced photographs printed on metal to emphasize their vivid colors and luminescence.

Both Eunice (Hunt) Huf and Peter Huf, who met and married in Ajijic in the 1960s, were regular exhibitors for many years at Munich’s Schwabing Christmas Market. In 1994, Peter Huf founded the market’s Art Tent, and oversaw its operation until 2014.

The work of several Lakeside artists was included in the “Collective Christmas Exhibition” in December 1968 at Galeria 1728 (Hidalgo #1728) in Guadalajara. These artists included Gustel Foust, Peter Huf, Eunice (Hunt) Huf and José María Servín and Guillermo Chávez Vega.

In California, two Lake Chapala-related artists—Bruce Sherratt and Robert Clutton—had works in the 1971 Christmas Show at the prestigious Vorpal Gallery.

New Orleans poet Mary Ashley Townsend was given a magnificent Christmas present—the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala—by her daughter, Cora, in 1895. Mary Ashley and her husband enjoyed several lengthy stays there over the next few years.

Architect George Heneghan and his wife Molly Heneghan, a graphic designer, first visited Ajijic in 1970 to spend Christmas with Molly’s parents. They liked what they saw, stayed for several years and George designed the Danza del Sol hotel in the village.

Prolific non-fiction author Joseph Cottler (1899-1996), an accomplished guitarist and violinist who visited Ajijic on numerous occasions, co-wrote (with Nicola A. Montani) a musical score entitled “Lovely babe : Christmas carol for three-part chorus of women’s voices with piano or organ accompaniment” (1946).

Illustration by Regina and Haig Shekerjian

Illustration by Regina and Haig Shekerjian from A Book of Christmas Carols.

More Christmas carols came from Regina Tor (deCormier) Shekerjian and her husband, photographer Haig Shekerjian, who were frequent visitors to Ajijic from the early 1950s to the 1980s. They co-wrote A Book of Christmas Carols (1963) and illustrated Nancy Willard’s book The merry history of a Christmas pie: with a delicious description of a Christmas soup (1974).

Numerous artists contributed their work over the years to the annual fundraising greetings cards sold to benefit Amigos de Salud, a non-profit started in 1974 by novelist Joan Frost. They included Daphne Aluta, Jean Caragonne, Gustel Foust, Bill Gentes, James Marthai, Bob Neathery and Georg Rauch. Amigos de Salud supported the Lakeside School for the Deaf and in 1993 merged into the Programa Pro Niños Incapacitados del Lago, whose worthy efforts continue to make a difference to this day.

Enterprising Hollywood actor and artist Todd “Rocky” Karns retired to Ajijic with his wife and family in 1971 to paint, and produce and direct shows at the Lakeside Little Theater. Karns’ best-known movie role was as “Harry Bailey” in the classic Christmas holiday movie It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

American author Garland Franklin Clifton lived in the Chapala area in the 1960s. He wrote Wooden Leg John. Satire on Americans living in Mexico, a series of 20 letters dated from Christmas Day 1967 to Christmas Day 1968.

Charles Pollock was born in Denver, Colorado, on Christmas Day 1902. He painted for a year in Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala in 1955-56, producing his Chapala Series, exhibited in New York in 2007. Charles’s younger brother Jackson Pollock became an icon of the American abstract art movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Also born on Christmas Day (but in 1906) was American journalist Edgar Ellinger, who wrote about “the small, captivating town of Ajijic” in 1953 for the Arizona Republic under the title, “Mexican Town Offers Peaceful Way of Life.”

Frieda Hauswirth Das (1886-1974) painted in Ajijic in the mid-1940s and spent Christmas 1945 in Monterrey, Mexico.

American anthropologist Frederick Starr (1858-1933) attended a performance of the Pastores (Shepherds), a Passion Play, in Chapala in December 1895 and wrote the experience up for an article published in The Journal of American Folklore.

Anthropologist George Carpenter Barker is noteworthy for his editing and translation of a copy of a manuscript found in Chapala in 1948 after a performance of a nativity play on Christmas morning in the village churchyard. The manuscript was apparently committed to paper, from older oral sources, by Aristeo Flores of El Salto, Jalisco, around 1914.

Dudley Kuzell, husband of Betty Kuzell, was a baritone in the Ken Lane Singers and The Guardsmen quartet. The Kuzells lived at Lake Chapala for many years, from the early 1950s. The Ken Lane Singers accompanied Frank Sinatra on his 1945 recording of America the Beautiful; Silent Night, Holy Night; The Moon was Yellow; and I only Have Eyes for You, and on his 1947 recording that included It Came Upon the Midnight Clear; O little Town of Bethlehem; and the iconic White Christmas.

John Maybra Kilpatrick who painted a WPA mural in Chicago in 1947, retired to Ajijic with his wife Lucy in 1964 and lived there until his death in 1972. Kilpatrick had been a commercial artist for the H. D. Catty Corporation of Huntly, Illinois. In 1952, the corporation copyrighted colored Christmas wrapping paper designed by Kilpatrick, entitled “Merry Christmas (Snow scene with 3 figures in front of houses)”.

Novelist, playwright and travel writer David Dodge settled in Ajijic with his wife Elva in 1966. Early in his career, Dodge co-wrote (with Loyall McLaren) Christmas Eve at the Mermaid, which was first performed as the Bohemian Club’s Christmas play of 1940.

Award-winning novelist Glendon Swarthout, whose short story entitled “Ixion”, set at Lake Chapala, was later turned into a screenplay by his son Miles Swarthout as Convictions of the Heart, spent six months in Ajijic with his wife and son in 1951. Among his many successful novels was A Christmas Gift (also known as The Melodeon), published in 1977.

Guadalajara poet Idella Purnell frequently visited Lake Chapala, where her dentist father owned a small home, in the 1920s and 1930s. Her short story “The Idols Of San Juan Cosala“, which we have used as our Christmas post some years, was first published in the December 1936 issue of American Junior Red Cross News and reprinted in 2001 in El Ojo del Lago.

– – – – – – –

Happy Christmas! – ¡Feliz Navidad!

Note: This is a revised version of a post first published in December 2016.

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Foto Esmeralda: Father and son photographers Demetrio and José Cruz Padilla

 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s  2 Responses »
Dec 192024
 

A one line comment by Fernando Parra on a Facebook post with an image signed “Foto Esmeralda” caused me to stop dead in my tracks. Foto Esmeralda was one of the three or four most prolific Chapala-based postcard publishers of the twentieth century. Yet, prior to Parra’s comment, I had unquestioningly accepted a claim made elsewhere that Foto Esmeralda was the studio name for the photographer Jesús González Miranda.

Photo by José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. 1950s.

Photo by José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. Date unknown. (1950s?)

However, according to Fernando Parra, the person responsible for photos signed Foto Esmeralda was his late uncle, José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. It is unclear when, or how, the mistaken claim about Jesús González originated, but Parra is absolutely correct that he has no connection to Foto Esmeralda photographs. Even so, it is not quite so simple: it turns out that only some of the photos signed Foto Esmeralda were taken by José Cruz Padilla Sánchez (1933-2005), while others were taken by José Cruz’s father, Demetrio Padilla López (1899-1989).

Demetrio Padilla López and his wife, María Guadalupe Sánchez García, were living in Guadalajara, when José Cruz was born on 3 May 1933. Demetrio, originally from Tonaya, Jalisco, later became a professional photographer, and, according to his granddaughter, one of the first photographers to ply his trade in the late 1930s in Guadalajara’s newly opened Parque Agua Azul.

Recognizing the potential tourist market for photographs at Lake Chapala, Demetrio began to make regular weekly visits to Chapala. José Cruz was eight years of age when he first accompanied his father to the lakeside town in 1941, and did so often thereafter. Demetrio made a simple camera for his son, who, after completing four years of primary education, began to help his father take and develop photographs.

Lakefront bars. Photo by José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. 1958.

Lakefront bars. Photo by Demetrio Padilla López. 1958.

In about 1950, José Cruz’s parents moved to Chapala. They lived in a rented home at Calle Juárez #599, where Demetrio established Foto Esmeralda. The photo studio, used by both Demetrio and José Cruz, remained in operation for roughly 40 years, until the early-1990s.

Not long after moving to Chapala, José Cruz married Consuelo Urzua Beltrán there on 5 July 1951. Tragically, Consuelo died suddenly only seven years later, in 1958. The couple’s two young children went to live with their maternal grandparents at Manzanillo #479 in Chapala. Four years later, in 1962, José Cruz married Mercedes Reyes Aparicio, by whom he had 13 children.

Photo by José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. Date unknown.

Photo by Demetrio Padilla López. Date illegible. (1958?)

In addition to studio photographic work such as formal portraits, Demetrio and José Cruz produced and sold postcards from shortly after their move to Chapala. José Cruz was helped in the studio by a sister, and later by his children, especially his daughter Luz.

From the mid-1950s on, José Cruz supplemented the family income by spending several months many years working as a seasonal laborer in Canada and the U.S. The earliest U.S. social security record of him is from January 1962; the records show that he used several slightly different variants of his name over the years, including José Cruz Padilla, Jcruz Padilla and J-Cruz Padilla. Among other temporary jobs, he picked grapes in California.

Regular trips to the U.S. did not prevent José Cruz from being active in local Chapala politics. For instance, in 1967, Padilla represented the “Sindicato Marinero” in a display advertisement supporting Luis Cuevas Pimienta as a candidate for State Diputado. By 1982, after several years of living full time in Chapala, José Cruz was named a Regidor for PRI in Chapala, and he attended the Grito the following year in that capacity.

José Cruz died in Chapala on 13 February 2005. QEPD.

Photo by José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. Date unknown.

Photo by Demetrio Padilla López. Date unknown.

Foto Esmeralda black and white postcards range, in terms of date, from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s; only a very small number (mainly those showing special events) include precise dates. Because Demetrio and his son both used the studio over such a long period of time, the definitive attribution of particular images to one or the other of the two photographers is fraught with difficulty.

In addition to postcard views, José Cruz also took studio portraits for birthdays and special occasions, and attended parties and events. Many of these studio portraits were taken in front of a beautiful hand-painted backdrop depicting an imaginary, idealized Mediterranean-looking landscape. With the help of family members, he did all the developing and printing out of his own dark room, and finished prints were available before guests left their party. José Cruz strongly preferred to work with the available light, and rarely, if ever, used a flash.

Postcards were displayed and sold on the pier and waterfront in Chapala by family members, with the assistance of local youngsters, who were given a commission for sales to tourists.

When color photography became more accessible, José Cruz added some full color postcards to his portfolio. Developed and printed in Guadalajara, they included several of racing yachts in action on the lake, probably taken around the time the World Flying Dutchman Championships were held at Chapala in 1971. The address given on the reverse of these cards was Manzanillo #479, Chapala (the home where his children were raised by their maternal grandparents).

Photo by José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. Early 1960s.

“Veleros en Chapala” (Chapala sailboats). Postcard. José Cruz Padilla Sánchez. c. 1970.

The advent of relatively inexpensive color photographs initially reduced the appeal of “old-fashioned” black and white images, though, interestingly, many people subsequently reversed their preference, because they decided that monochrome prints were more characterful.

Reliance on having developing and printing done in Guadalajara inevitably led to some issues of quality control, and in some cases, the outright theft of negatives and their unauthorized reproduction. José Cruz’s eldest daughter, Luz Padilla Urzua, recalls how films were sometimes “lost” in Guadalajara, only for prints of photographs taken by her father to show up for sale in street markets and flea markets.

She also shared her belief that her grandfather, Demetrio, had been responsible for introducing Jesús González Miranda to photography, so perhaps there is a link, albeit it a very tenuous one, between González and Foto Esmeralda after all!

Note: The lengthy family tradition begun by Demetrio, and carried on by José Cruz, continues to this day. Two of José Cruz’s children—Adriana and Octavio Padilla Reyes—supplement their work in Chapala as itinerant photographers with private commissions.

Appreciation

My sincere thanks to Fernando Parra for first alerting me to the true authorship of Foto Esmeralda images, and to José Cruz Padilla’s daughter, Luz Padilla Urzua, for explaining details of her father’s life and work to my ever-reliable research assistant, Maricruz Ibarra. Thanks, too, to Dr R B Brown for his generous donation of several Esmeralda postcards.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Three additional Foto Esmeralda images are included in Lake Chapala: A Postcard History, which shares the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

  • El Informador: 18 Oct 1967; 19 Sep 1983.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Roger Emil Neuman found “Paradise” at Lake Chapala in the 1980s

 1980s  3 Responses »
Dec 122024
 

Among several “how to live cheaply in Mexico” books hitting the market in the 1980s was Paradise found: how to live in North America’s best climate for under $300 a month, by R. Emil Neuman, published in 1986.

Neuman-cover

Roger Emil Neuman (1941-2001), born in Detroit, Michigan, on 7 June 1941, was the son of Adolph Neuman (1916-1994), who worked as a designer for Ford Motor Company for 40 years, and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Barker (1917-1995). He graduated from Allen Park High School in 1959, gained a “BS degree” in accounting, and scored in the top 5% of all candidates in his CPA exam.

Neuman died at his home in Carlsbad, California, on 6 November 2001, and was buried alongside family members at the Glen Eden Memorial Park near Detroit, Michigan.

According to one obituary, his resumé included service in the US Army. In Paradise Found, Neuman describes having worked as a Congressional Investigator in Detroit for 12 years, before moving to San Diego in 1978.

In California, Neuman became an early self-publisher and mail order marketer, setting himself up as the president and CEO of United Research Publishers (URP) in Encinitas, California. URP issued about 25 works by 10 different authors between 1978 and 2005, mainly related to either health or self-help topics. It was a highly successful business: his Detroit Free Press obituary claims it was “the most successful mail order book publishing business in the United States” at the time. Neuman, described as kind, brilliant, philosophical and funny,” made numerous generous donations to churches in Michigan and California, and also supported children’s programs in far flung parts of the world.

Neuman grave marker, Michigan

Neuman’s grave marker, near Detroit

The story line of Paradise found: how to live in North America’s best climate for under $300 a month is that Neuman decides to take his retired father to visit Lake Chapala to consider moving there. The book, which includes many photos, is written in non-specialist language (a high school reading level) and was published in relatively large print. The story is told via reported interactions with a series of individuals who explain how they came to retire to the area, and why they love living there.

Neuman offers lots of sage advice along the way, with brief, and largely accurate (at the time), accounts of how house purchases, shopping, language, expenses, migration permits, can best be managed by a newcomer.

As background, he writes that:

Wealthy Americans visited Lake Chapala in the late 1880s. Many Americans built homes and spent part of each year on the Lake. For example, Albert Braniff, founder of Braniff Airlines, built a large home near the Lake is about 1885. Tennessee Williams reportedly spent a good deal of time here writing many of his famous novels.”

Even if the details of this paragraph are not quite right, the basic sentiment is accurate. Relatively wealthy foreigners (not just Americans) certainly visited Chapala in the last decade of the nineteenth century. And there is a house known as Casa Braniff in Chapala, though it has no connection to the Albert Braniff of Braniff Airlines. Casa Braniff, designed by English architect George E King, was completed in 1905 for Guadalajara historian and lawyer Luis Pérez Verdía, who sold it two years later to Mexico’s own “Alberto Braniff,” a Mexico City businessman, with no family connection to the Braniff Airline family. As for Tennessee Williams, he only spent a single summer (1945) in Chapala, while writing “The Poker Night,” the basis for A Streetcar Named Desire.

Neuman’s informants in Paradise Found include Jack (73), who rents a home for “only $150 a month. Nice place. Two beds, full cooking facilities, a courtyard, laundry area, big swimming pool out front.” and who figures that he lives here “for under $300 a month. I mean good living too.” Adjusted for US inflation, $300 in 1986 is the equivalent of about $850 today.

Another informant, Tom, a retired truck driver aged about 55, had found Hawaii and California too expensive, Florida winters too cold, and had been living in Chapala with his wife for several years. Heat and all utilities were less than $5 a month, annual taxes were $27, they had their own cook, gardener and maid, and he “lived like a king on about $600 a month.” Tom told Neuman that he was afraid too many Americans will find out about the place and turn it into a tourist area.

Neuman claims that homes ranged in price from about $15,000 ($42,000 today) for a smaller home of 700 square feet or a fixer-upper, to $350,000 ($982,261 today) for a 4,000-square-foot “mansion.”

He also sagely recommends that “Lake Chapala is not for everyone. Before buying you should rent a home for at least six months. This will give you time to check things out thoroughly before you make a commitment to buy.”

Neuman quotes some typical hotel prices. Rooms (double occupancy) at the Hotel Real de Chapala were $20 a night (more in December), the same price as the Hotel Chula Vista. Double rooms at the Hotel Montecarlo were $22 a night, while for budget travelers, the Hotel Nido charged $7 single and $10 double a night.

Posada Ajijic menu, ca. 1986.

Posada Ajijic menu, ca. 1986. (Click to expand)

Comparing restaurant menus and prices, Neuman describes how La Viuda restaurant in Chapala, around the corner from the Hotel Nido, offers excellent food and service, and is “owned by Gus, who also owns the butcher shop next door where most American buy their meats.” Gus is Gustavo Sánchez, a direct descendant of Chapala-born photographer José Edmundo Sánchez.

Helpfully, Neuman includes menus for La Viuda, as well as the Real de Chapala hotel, El Mesón (Ajijic) and Posada Ajijic, “the main “hang out” for Americans living around the Lake… The Posada is owned by a Canadian couple who have plenty of restaurant experience. That’s why this place is so popular.” The book lists restaurant prices in pesos. At the time the book was published (1986), the exchange rate was about 900 pesos to a dollar, the following year it was 2200 pesos to a dollar. Neuman, who trained as an accountant, clearly published his book at precisely the right time for anyone thinking of moving south!

At the back of the 148-page book are a several pages of simple Spanish vocabulary, and a basic map of Lake Chapala. This map was originally surveyed and drawn in about 1816 by Spanish cartographer José María Narváez (1768-1840), and was subsequently used, with only minor changes, in many later publications, including Terry’s Mexican Handbook (1909), which is the version Neuman reproduces (without credit) in Paradise Found (1986). Few maps can boast such longevity!

Other works written by Roger Emil Neuman include Write Perfect Letters for Any Occasion (1990); You can collect $$$ from Uncle Sam (1975); How to Collect Big $$$ From Uncle Sam (1985); The Complete Handbook of Health Tips: based on the latest dietary and scientific findings and traditional remedies (1985); How You Can Achieve Financial Independence in Mail Order (1986); and The Complete Handbook of U.S. Government Benefits: How to Collect Big from Uncle Sam (1989). Many of these titles were released in more than one edition, and some had foreign language editions.

The books were promoted via nationwide advertising campaigns, which stressed the advantages of ordering direct from the publisher. For example, an advert in 1987 for Paradise Found informed readers that:“You can order direct from the publisher and save. Send only $12.95 plus $1 postage and handling to: United Research Publishers, 249 South Highway 101, Dept. UP-6, Solana Beach, CA 92075.”

The “departments” in the address presumably enabled Neuman to gauge the relative success of different market areas and ad styles.

While Paradise Found is much derided by modern readers as hopelessly out-of-date and wildly inaccurate in terms of prices quoted, the real question is whether or not these claims were valid when the book was written and first marketed. In my view, they were not as wild as often assumed. For example, the somewhat staid Frommer’s Guides to Mexico published, in 1986, one titled Mexico on $20 A Day, which equates to about $600 a month, the same figure quoted by Tom the truck driver.

On the other hand, some of the claims made by Canadian business consultant Thomas McLaughlin in The Greatest Escape, or How to Live in Paradise, in Luxury, for 250 Dollars Per Month, first published in 1983 (and reprinted in 1985), and competing in the same market sector, strike me as far more dubious. McLaughlin (who died in 1987) divided his time between Ontario and Lake Chapala for several years, marketed his book aggressively with the help of a retired business consultant in Ontario, Gerry Gailius, and organized tours to the lake.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

  • North County Times: 12 Nov 2001, 14; 8 Jan 2002, 32.
  • Detroit Free Press: 18 Nov 2001, 18.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Basil Merrett and his drawing of the D. H. Lawrence house in Chapala

 1920s and earlier, 1940s  3 Responses »
Dec 052024
 

Among the miscellaneous, difficult-to-file, items I’ve encountered during my decades of research into the authors and artists associated with Lake Chapala is this curious one-of-a-kind drawing by Basil Merrett.

I got quite excited when I first saw this drawing (listed on eBay in 2016) because it purports to show the house rented by D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, for their three-month sojourn in Chapala in 1923, during which the English novelist wrote the first draft of The Plumed Serpent.

According to folk art collector and enthusiast Jim Linderman on his personal blog about “outsider art,” Merrett’s work is believed to date from the late 1940s or early 1950s, and is comprised of about 1000 works, mostly postcard size (6″x4″),  divided into several numbered series, each relating to a different topic. The Lawrence drawing is #44 of the “Famous Authors and Poets” series.

Basil Merrett. The D. H. Lawrence house, Chapala.

Basil Merrett. ca 1966? The D. H. Lawrence house, Chapala, in 1923.

Linderman also says that Merrett “was institutionalized at Bethlem Royal Hospital in London as a psychiatric patient.” Bethlem Royal Hospital, which was commonly known in the UK as Bedlam, was founded in the fourteenth century and is England’s oldest hospital for the treatment of mental illness. It is unclear how long Merrett may have been a patient there but, if he was there in the 1930s and 1940s, he would have had to endure some pretty dire conditions. While it came far too late for Basil Merrett, the Bethlem Royal Hospital opened its own gallery, Bethlem Gallery, in 1997, which showcases the work of visual artists who have, or have experienced, mental distress.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

The artist Basil Merrett is believed to be Richard Basil Merrett, born 23 April 1910 in Lydney, a parish on the west bank for River Severn in the English county of Gloucestershire, U.K. His parents were Richard Merrett, a tinworker, and Martha Florence Clarke. They had married in about 1903, and Basil had an elder sister, Florence, born in 1904. Basil reportedly attended the Lydney Craft School (which later became the Lydney Art School).

In 1939, according to the Register for Gloucestershire, Basil Merrett was still living with his parents; the Register lists his “occupation” as “incapacitated.” Without knowing any details of the psychological challenges faced by Basil, we can only surmise that his care allowed him ample opportunity for reading and art. Basil Merrett, illustrator extraordinaire, died in July 1969 and was buried in Lyndley.

DH Lawrence house in Chapala, ca 1950, Photo by Roy MacNicol

D H Lawrence house, Chapala, ca 1950. Photo: Roy MacNicol (Moore & Roberts, 1966)

Basil Merrett’s source for his illustration of the Lawrence House in Chapala in 1923 was certainly not based on any first-hand experience of Mexico. It was apparently based on this photograph, which appears in Moore and Roberts’ book D. H. Lawrence and his world, published by Thames and Hudson in 1966, where it is credited as “Lawrence’s house at 4 Zaragoza, Chapala, Mexico. 1923. Photo R. MacNicol.” It is unknown if the photograph had been published previously, though if Merrett’s illustration actually dates from the 1950s, then clearly it must have been! (If you know of an earlier publication featuring this photo by Roy MacNicol, please get in touch!)

In any event, the date of 1923 given in Merrett’s caption cannot be correct. First, the photographer—American artist Roy MacNicol (1889-1970)—was nowhere near Lake Chapala in 1923. MacNicol first visited Chapala in the early 1950s, and bought (and added a second story to) this house in 1954. His photo presumably shows the house at about the time he purchased it. Secondly, the photograph clearly shows the house after its remodeling in about 1940 by the famous Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who, as described in a 1941 article in House and Garden, added the highly distinctive “oriental halfmoon entrance gateway” shown in the photo.

So, sadly, even though Basil Merrett thought he was drawing the D. H. Lawrence house in Chapala in 1923, he was, in fact, drawing the house as it appeared some thirty years after Lawrence’s visit.

The story of the D. H. Lawrence house in Chapala is told in chapter 39 of If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s Historic Buildings and Their Former Occupants (translated into Spanish as Si las paredes hablaran: Edificios históricos de Chapala y sus antiguos ocupantes).

Source

  • M. O. Goldsmith. 1941. “Week-end house in Mexico: G. Cristo house, Lake Chapala.” House and Garden, vol 79 (May 1941).
  • Harry T. Moore and Warren Roberts. 1966. D. H. Lawrence and his world. London: Thames & Hudson.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Historian Luis Pérez Verdía and his iconic house in Chapala

 1920s and earlier  6 Responses »
Nov 282024
 

The iconic landmark right in the heart of Chapala commonly known as Casa Braniff (Paseo Ramón Corona 18) was originally built by influential Guadalajara lawyer and historian Luis Pérez Verdía. The building has significant historical and cultural connections.

Construction of this magnificent edifice began in 1904 on the site of Chapala’s sixteenth century friary, close to the parish church. By the end of the nineteenth century, the friary buildings had fallen into disrepair and were used by the Hotel Arzapalo as stables for the teams of horses that pulled their stagecoaches.

Romero ? / S. Altamirano. c 1925. San Francisco Church and Casa Braniff.

San Francisco Church and Casa Braniff, c. 1925. Photo: Romero (?). Publisher: S. Altamirano.

To design his new home, Pérez Verdía commissioned British architect George Edward King, who had previously built Villa Tlalocan for the British consul, Lionel Carden, and who, with his son, had offices in several Mexican cities, including Guadalajara. Expected to cost $30,000, the “fine residence” was to be “a modern structure in every way.” By June, with work well underway, the estimated cost of the house had already risen to $40,000. Contrary to later conjecture, the bricks for Pérez Verdía’s house were not imported from Europe; they came from King’s own brickyards, located alongside the Central Mexican Railway on the southern outskirts of Guadalajara.

When the house was completed early in 1905, the state government agreed to exempt the property from all municipal and state taxes for a period of ten years.

Two years later, in March 1907, Pérez Verdía offered José Yves Limantour, the federal finance minister, the use of his house over the upcoming holidays. Apparently, the letter only reached Limantour after he had already arrived in Chapala. Shortly afterwards, Pérez Verdía sold the house, complete with its furnishings, for $57,000 to Alberto Braniff, a wealthy Mexico City businessman, who bought it as a gift for his widowed mother.

The quixotic design of the house, now the Restaurant Cazadores, was perfectly encapsulated in words by American poet Witter Bynner, who first saw it in 1923 while in Chapala with D. H. Lawrence: “We came by a pretentious Victorian brick villa, in the convulsive style of architecture—bay windows, turrets, cupolas, stained-glass windows.”

Casa Braniff (with church behind). Photo: Tony Burton, 2007.

Casa Braniff (with church behind). Photo: Tony Burton, 2007.

Who was Luis Pérez Verdía?

Pérez Verdía, born in 1857, grew up in the intellectual milieu of Guadalajara and was a member of the Ateneo Jalisciense, Jalisco’s leading artistic-scientific society. The society, active at the very start of the twentieth century, brought together a host of distinguished writers, artists and musicians, including photographer José María Lupercio, violinist and painter Félix Bernardelli, and artist and author Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl).

In the 1880s, Pérez Verdía was the lawyer in Guadalajara who represented Ferrocarril Central Mexicano (Mexican Central Railway) as it acquired land and overcame all obstacles to build its spur line, completed in 1888, connecting the city to existing tracks at Irapuato.

Pérez Verdía was the official representative for Jalisco at the 11th International Americanistas Congress in Mexico City in 1895, an event also attended by Cora Townsend and her mother, Mary Ashley Townsend (Cora bought Villa Montecarlo as her mother’s Christmas present that year!),  British consul Lionel Carden, who had already begun building Villa Tlalocan, and anthropologist Frederick Starr.

Pérez Verdía was involved in various development projects in Chapala. In 1896, he reportedly bought Isla de Alacranes (Scorpion Island) from the federal government for “the nominal sum of twenty-one dollars.” He planned to pay a bounty to rid the island of scorpions and “convert the Isla into a pleasure resort like Coney island.” About five years later, he sold the island to Ernesto Paulsen, who intended to build a “general sporting resort” there. The island, a site revered by the indigenous Huichol people, is partially protected today.

Pérez Verdía was also a member of the group of powerful and well-connected individuals that formed the Jalisco development company in 1902, with grandiose plans to build an electric railroad from Guadalajara to Chapala, hotels, supply electric light to all settlements from Jocotepec to Chapala, and finance large scale irrigation works, and install a public potable water system in all towns.

A similarly powerful group, including Pérez Verdía, founded the Chapala Yacht Club in 1904, though it would take another six years before it finally realized its goal of constructing a lengthy pier with boathouse and clubhouse.

In 1905, the Chapala council empowered Luis Pérez Verdia to represent them in their efforts to get help from the Jalisco State government to combat the proliferation of lirio (water hyacinth) that had invaded the harbor during the rainy season. Documents in Chapala’s archives show that a contract was drawn up with Jesús Cuevas for daily cleaning of the beach, with all lirio to be removed by boat for disposal elsewhere.

Besides working as a lawyer, and later as a magistrate and state congressman, Pérez Verdía founded Jalisco’s college for teachers (Escuela Normal). He took up a diplomatic post as Minister of Mexico in 1913 in Guatemala, where he died the following year.

Pérez Verdía’s three-volume Historia Particular del Estado de Jalisco (1910) was an astonishing labor of love which remained an important source of state history for decades, prior to being superseded by the monumental four-volume multi-author Historia de Jalisco in 1982.

Pérez Verdía’s many other published works include Apuntes Históricos de la Guerra de Independencia en Jalisco (1886); Compendio de la Historia de México (1892); Biografía del Sr. Don Prisciliano Sánchez (1881) and Estudio biográfico del Sr. Lic. D. Jesús López Portillo (1908).

Pérez Verdía claimed custody of his granddaughter

Luis Pérez Verdía married Trinidad Pérez González Rubio in Guadalajara in 1877. Their daughter, Aurora Pérez Verdía, fell in love with José Ignacio Arzapalo Pacheco, the son of businessman and hotelier Ignacio Arzapalo (who had opened his eponymous hotel in Chapala in 1898) and his second wife, María Pacheco. Aurora and José married in 1900, and their only child—María Aurora—was born the following year. Tragically, Aurora died shortly after giving birth. A few years later, in 1904, the little girl also lost her father. She was then cared for by her paternal grandparents.

But tragedy struck again. Her grandfather, Ignacio Arzapalo Sr., died in 1909, only a year after he had opened his second elegant hotel in Chapala, the Hotel Palmera. According to Arzapalo’s will, both hotels plus his life insurance and some property in central Guadalajara were left to María Aurora (then aged 7), with Lic. Enrique Pazos appointed as María Aurora’s guardian to manage her affairs until she came of age. This inheritance was worth at least US$300,000 at the time (equivalent to $7.5 million today); for whatever motives, Luis Pérez Verdía, her maternal grandfather, immediately challenged the arrangement.

When the ever-impatient Pérez Verdía decided that his legal challenge was proceeding too slowly, he took matters into his own hands. He kidnapped María Aurora in broad daylight from her nurse in a public park in Guadalajara, and contested Pazos’ right to be her guardian and administer her share of the estate. Not surprisingly, this sequence of events led to sensationalist press headlines.

One version, “Wealthy Orphan Vanishes,” claimed that orphan Aurora Arzapalo, heiress to millions, had been kidnapped and that the police had arrested several suspects among her relatives, “all of whom are wealthy but would fall heir to some of the Arzapalo millions if the child were out of the way.”

The drawn-out legal case, which caused a scandalous rift between two of Guadalajara’s most distinguished families, who had at least two direct ties by marriage, eventually wound up in the Supreme Court, where Pérez Verdía finally won. But this success was short-lived. While serving as Mexican ambassador in Guatemala, Pérez Verdía died there in 1914. María Aurora, still barely a teenager, then lived in Chapala with her paternal grandmother, María Pacheco.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Sources

This article is based on several chapters of If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s Historic Buildings and Their Former Occupants translated into Spanish as Si las paredes hablaran: Edificios históricos de Chapala y sus antiguos ocupantes. For detailed references, please refer to the notes in that book.

Note

The author is proud to announce that the Asociación de Cronistas Municipales del Estade de Jalisco, A.C. (Association of Municipal Chroniclers of Jalisco) recently awarded him the Luis Pérez Verdía medal for his research into the history of the Lake Chapala area.

Presea Luis Perez Verdia, 2024

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Jesús González Miranda (1898-1995)

 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s  No Responses »
Nov 212024
 

The most prolific photographer of Chapala of all time was Jesús González Miranda (1898-1995). Active for over half a century from 1938 until the late 1980s, González signed the bulk of his work, including hundreds of picture postcards, “FOTO. J. GONZALEZ“.

Jesús González. c 1950? Fishermen on beach.

Jesús González. c 1950? Fishermen on beach.

González was in his mid-thirties when he first arrived in Chapala. Born in Cuquío, Jalisco, on 17 January 1898, the son of Florencio González and his wife, Maria Miranda, he lived much of his childhood and youth in Guadalajara where his first occupation (of many he would hold during his lifetime) was as a hairdresser, working at a shop on calle Juan Álvarez.

Life in the city led to him becoming a fan of the theater and González participated in shows at the Teatro Degollado and Teatro Principal as a dancer and member of the chorus. This gave him the opportunity to meet many of the famous artists of the time.

Jesús González. c 1940? Water supply from the lake via 'pipones.'

Jesús González. c 1940? Water supply from the lake via ‘pipones.’

In Guadalajara, on 22 September 1922, he married 21-year-old Isabel (“Chabelita”) Mireles Cruz, from Sabinas Hidalgo in the state of Nuevo León. González gave his occupation to the notary registering the marriage as “painter.” The couple, who had no children, subsequently moved to Chapala.

According to Javier Raygoza, González initially moved to Chapala to join his uncle, Dionisio Miranda, in 1926, and stayed to work in a hairdressing salon owned by Juan Enciso. González’s second wife and children told me that he first moved to Chapala a few years later, in 1932.

Jesús González. c 1940? Folk dancing on 8 December in front of parish church.

Jesús González. c 1940? Folk dancing on 8 December in front of parish church.

Regardless of when he first arrived, González was soon regularly providing music for dances, weddings and special events. While Raygoza suggests that González was the first person to introduce public music and movies to Chapala—when he set up speakers, a record player and other equipment on the main plaza in 1933—a fellow photographer, José Edmundo Sánchez (who died that year), had previously done something similar most Saturday afternoons.

Jesús González. c 1960? Boats on the beach.

Jesús González. c 1960? Boats on the beach.

González began taking photographs and producing postcards in about 1938, specializing in taking portraits of individuals and groups of visitors, the famous and the not-so-famous, enjoying themselves near the pier or in the Beer Garden, the iconic restaurant-bar overlooking the beach. He apparently learned photography from Demetrio Padilla López, a Guadalajara-based photographer who visited Chapala regularly in the 1930s. Business was especially brisk on weekends and holidays.

Jesús González. c 1938? #A-1 - crowded beach.

Jesús González. c 1938? #A-1 – crowded beach.

In his early years in Chapala, prior to the demolition of buildings in central Chapala to create Avenida Francisco I. Madero, the main thoroughfare leading direct to the pier, González photographed patrons of the Widow’s Bar (Cantina de la Viuda). Its proprietor was María Guadalupe Nuño, whose husband, José Edmundo Sánchez, had published numerous postcards of Chapala in the 1920s and early 1930s.

In addition to portrait photos, González also sold hundreds of different postcards featuring local buildings and views at a time when there was a clean, sandy beach in front of the Beer Garden, and when day-trippers outnumbered residents most weekends.

In captioning his postcards, González employed several different numbering systems, the meaning of which he took with him to the grave, making it close to impossible to identify specific series or dates. Very few González images can be precisely dated, though the details of individual buildings and scenes, many of which changed significantly during his lengthy photographic career, do sometimes allow us to narrow the time frame for when they must have been taken.

Jesús González. c 1967. Iconic photo of swimmers on pier. (Fig 8.19 of Lake Chapala: a postcard history)

Jesús González. c 1967. Iconic photo of swimmers on pier. (Fig 8.19 of Lake Chapala: a postcard history)

Some months after the death of his wife, Chabelita Mireles, and following a chance encounter involving a bicycle, González married Margarita Manzo on 30 March 1966. They had three children, the eldest born in 1970.

González, whose nickname was “El Chorchas,” was accorded due recognition for his outstanding photographic endeavors in a television segment devoted to his work. Unfortunately, an attempt organized by Javier Raygoza in the early 1990s to produce a book of González’s photographs as a tribute to the great photographer ultimately came to nothing.

José de Jesús González Miranda died in Chapala on 13 December 1995.

Jesús González. c 1945. Lakefront bar (right) in front of tower of Villa Ana Victoria (demolished a few years later)

Jesús González. c 1945. Lakefront bar (right) in front of tower of Villa Ana Victoria (demolished a few years later)

Over his fifty-plus years of photographing Chapala, an extraordinary number of subjects had stared, at one time or another, into his lens as he captured school groups, weddings, ceremonies, and all manner of public and private events.

Several years after his death, a number of González’s photographs were published in two collections relating to Lake Chapala arranged by Manuel Galindo Gaitán. According to Galindo, González “left an important collection of photos, irrefutable testimonials of life at Lake Chapala from the earliest years of the last century.” The sentiment is correct even if the time frame is not.

González has bequeathed us a treasure trove of images, a visual testimony whose cultural context and historical significance demand that they be adequately safeguarded for future generations to appreciate.

Jesús González. Date unknown. Sunset over lake.

Jesús González. Date unknown. Sunset over lake.

Appreciation

My sincere thanks to Margarita Manzo viuda de González and her children for answering my questions about Don Jesús, and for their generosity in sharing examples of his postcards. My thanks, also, to Rogelio Ochoa Corona for introducing me to the family and for sharing his personal recollections of ‘El Chorchas,’ and to the late artist Sylvia Fein, who gave me several González postcards dating from the mid-1940s.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Several additional González images are included in If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s Historic Buildings and Their Former Occupants (translated into Spanish as Si las paredes hablaran: Edificios históricos de Chapala y sus antiguos ocupantes) and in Lake Chapala: A Postcard History, which shares the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

  • Aurelio Cortés Diáz. 1988. Semblanzas tapatías, 1925-1945. Guadalajara: Gobierno de Jalisco, 175.
  • Manuel Galindo Gaitán. Estampas de Chapala (2 vols). Guadalajara: Ediciones Pacífico, S.A., Vol 1 (2003) and Vol 2 (2005).
  • Javier Raygoza Munguía. 1995. “Don Jesús González Miranda “El Chorchas”.” Página Que sí se lee! 18 de diciembre de 1995, edición 49.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.

Harry Furniss and a circle of Canadian writer friends at Chapala in the 1970s

 1970s  2 Responses »
Nov 142024
 

Among the many Canadian visitors to Lake Chapala in the 1970s were Harry Furniss and his second wife, Enid. Late in life, Harry, the grandson of English artist and cartoonist Harry Furniss (1854-1925), wrote a three volume memoir, full of off-beat memories and humor, interspersed with small line drawings. It includes a chapter about visiting long-time friends Leslie and Eleanor Powell in Chapala, who first settled there in 1973.

Harry and Enid Furniss

Furniss cover

Raised in Montreal, Harry Furniss (1920-2015) wrote radio dramas in his spare time, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) during World War 2 (when he was captured by the Germans), before being appointed Director of Public Relations (RCAF) Overseas, in London, U.K. He married his RCAF-Womens Division aide, Enid, in London, in 1947. Enid (1911-2016), of English, Spanish and French heritage, had driven ambulances in London during the blitz.

After they settled in Canada, Harry spent a decade as a journalist for the Toronto Telegram, Reuters news agency, and The Vancouver Province, and then established his own corporate public relations consultancy. After decades of building and cruising pleasure boats on the rugged coast of British Columbia, Harry and Enid lived their final years in Victoria on Vancouver Island. Married for 68 years, Harry died there on 26 November 2015, at the age of 95, and Enid the following year on 27 December 2016.

The third volume of Harry’s memoir, Family & Friends, includes a chapter about visiting friends, Leslie and Eleanore Powell, who had settled in Chapala some years earlier.

Leslie and Eleanore Powell

U.K.-born Leslie Cooke Powell (1908-1999) was working at the Montreal Gazette when the second world war erupted. He joined the RCAF public relations department during the war, and served in North Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe, before being appointed Director of RCAF Public Relations (Overseas), based in London, England, where—in 1946, a year after the war ended—he married Canadian journalist Eleanore Roberta Martin.

Back in Canada after leaving the armed services, Powell worked as the Montreal Gazette’s aviation and military editor, before starting his own public relations company. He subsequently became the national PR director of the Canadian Red Cross Society, and of Canadair.

Eleanore Powell was a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen during the Second World War. After joining the women’s division of the Royal Canadian Air Force, she worked as a public relations officer in Ottawa, Newfoundland, and later for the RCAF Overseas headquarters in London, England. In 1999, following her death, her estate established the Robert and Alyce Martin journalism scholarships (named after her parents) for students entering the Master of Journalism program at Carleton University in Ottawa.

What was Chapala like in the 1970s?

The Powells’ first visit to Chapala was in 1973, and they subsequently visited the lake many times (and had a house there) in many of the next 17 years. Chapter 4 of Furniss’s book includes excerpts from letters he and Enid had received from the Powells describing their time at Chapala.

Sketch by Furniss

Sketch by Furniss

On their first trip, in 1973, the Powells drove down and stopped for a couple of nights at the Rincón del Montero hotel in Parras de la Fuente en route to to Mexico City. A week later, they drove west along Highway 15 to Morelia and then branched off along the southern shore of Lake Chapala to Jocotepec, where they stayed at La Quinta, then run by Bob Whipple: “It took us nine hours to drive from Mexico City to our ultimate destination, Jocotepec. An excellent road, much of it toll, with beautiful scenery.”

They stayed in a two room unit at La Quinta, which cost, for two, including three meals a day, $310 Cdn a month, plus 10% for service. After two weeks, the Powells “chanced upon an idyllic little house nearby at Chapala” and signed a one-year lease. Needing help with the Spanish in the lease, they were referred to a fellow Canadian (Bill Strange) who lived nearby. He wasn’t home, so Powell asked an English-speaking lawyer to check the contract. The lawyer refused any payment when he learned that the two men shared a mutual friend: “my old hometown pal and once-Mayor of Montreal, Pax Plante, who now lives in retirement nearby!”

Pacifique Plante

French Canadian lawyer Pacifique “Pax” Plante (1907-1976) became known as “the “Elliot Ness” of Montreal, after fighting city crime in the 1940s and 1950s and organizing the prosecution of many notorious gangsters and mafia members. Plante retired to Mexico in 1958 and lived there to his death in 1976. Understandably paranoid about the need for privacy and security, Plante built his retirement home high on the hillside east of Jocotepec. It had a commanding view over the only access route which winds up from the highway, and was designed to be mistaken from a distance for a chapel, not a private dwelling.

In one of those strange coincidences in life, Bill Strange turned out to be Captain William Strange, who had been Director Public Relations (Navy) Overseas when Powell held the equivalent position in the RCAF. Strange, and his wife, architect Jean Strange, had retired to Chapala in 1965, and the coincidences did not end there. Powell later learned that Strange had married his WREN assistant, just as he had married his RCAF-WD aide.

Once they had their casa (rent $64.00, all prices in Canadian dollars), the Powells were able to slash their living expenses. Return trips to Guadalajara on the air-conditioned coach were $1.45 for two. Pork was $1.80 a kilo, a pint of strawberries 40 cents, a cleaning lady charged 40 cents (then five pesos) an hour. For relaxation, the waters at San Juan Cosalá beckoned for $1.28 a day. They estimated that two people could easily live in Chapala at that time on $200.00 a month.

When the Funisses visited the Powells in 1975, they discovered that other mutual friends—John and Lenore Clare—were already occupying the Powells’ guest quarters, so they took a room at the Hotel Nido for $6.80 a night for two, including dinner.

John and Lenore Clare

Clare-coverJohn Purvis Clare (1910-1991), who studied at the University of Saskatchewan, served as a public relations officer for the Royal Canadian Air Force in North Africa. During his lengthy journalistic career, Clare worked for The Saskatoon Star Phoenix, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Telegram, and was the war correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, as well as managing editor of MacLean’s Magazine and an editor at Chatelaine and Geos. His short stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and many other magazines. He also wrote The Passionate Invaders, a humorous novel, published in 1965, about ‘the first armed invasion of the United States from Canada in more than a hundred years.’

Lenore Reinke Clare (1907-1991) worked for the T. Eaton Company before accepting a position with RCA Victor, with involvement in all phases of casting, writing, producing and recording. She then built and managed a recording studio for Harry E Foster, and continued to work there through the war. She married John Clare in 1945, joined the CBC in 1957 and was a supervising script editor at CBC, in charge of the script department, from 1959 to 1972. Her wide-ranging interests helped take CBC’s radio plays to a whole new level.

After a few days catching up with their friends, the Furnisses then took a self-contained casita in a U-shaped motel in Ajijic, which cost $160 a month. They stayed for a month or so, exploring Ajijic and its environs.

Later letters to the Furnisses from the Powells include references to a “bang up July 1 (Canada Day) party at the Chula Vista Motel” given by Hector Márquez (who owned the main farmacia in Chapala), a paragraph musing on the possibility of becoming the Honorary Canadian consul in Chapala, and delight following the 1976 devaluation of the peso that everything was now even cheaper than previously. In 1977, the Powells rented a different house for the winter for $75 a month.

The Powells returned to Chapala in 1984, after a gap of four or five years, and rented a two-bedroom casa with huge garden for $160 a month. The following year, they rented a place for the winter in Guadalajara. Their last trip to Mexico was over the winter of 1989-90.

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Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village explores the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

  • Harry Furniss. 2003. Family and Friends, A memoir, vol 3. Canada: Trafford Publishing.
  • The Times Colonist (Victoria, BC): 5 Dec 2015; 13 Jan 2017.
  • North Bay Nugget: 28 May 1991, 12.
  • Telegraph Journal: 19 Dec 1949, 3.
  • The Toronto Star. 1991. Clare, Eleanor (Reinke). (obit). The Toronto Star, 29 July 1991, 50.
  • Le Devoir: 11 August 1976, 6.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

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