1970s – Lake Chapala Artists and Authors

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.

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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).

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. (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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 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

Guadalajara Reporter: 3 Apr 1971 (Artists Directory, Ajijic)
Peter Huf (email 2014)
San Francisco Gate: 17 July 2008. City of Oakland Craft & Cultural Arts, Galleries. https://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Visual-Arts-3203986.php

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

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.

Rosemary Carstens’ excellent online biography of Annette Margolis/Stephens/Nancarrow

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

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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.

Short YouTube video (Spanish) : Mi México, Tienda de Ajijic

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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.

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

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

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

John 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.

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.

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.

Galeria del Lago, Ajijic, and its 1972 Cookbook with Art

1970s 2 Responses »

Nov 072024

One of the more interesting formal publications relating to art in Chapala is a 44-page booklet titled A Cookbook with Color Reproductions by Artists from the Galería, published by La Galería del Lago de Chapala in 1972, and copyrighted by Arthur L. Ganung, the gallery’s then president.

A Cookbook with Color Reproductions (1972). Cover image: Eleanor Smart. Women with Green Hair.

Small full-color illustrations of original artwork are interspersed with dozens of recipes shared by members of the gallery and their friends. The recipes range from Cheese Straws – Ajijic (submitted by Neill James), Sopa de flores de calabaza (Antonio Cárdenas P.), Pork nopal (Gloria Marthai) and This is the best roasted chicken you ever ate (Russell Bayly) to Hungarian Meetatay (John R. Seybold) and Corn Flake Banana Bread (Hudson Rose).

The visual artists whose work is featured in the cookbook are Luis Avalos, Antonio Cárdenas, Marian Carpenter, Jerry Carr, Tom Faloon, Priscilla Frazer, John Frost, Arthur Ganung, Virginia Ganung, Lona Isoard, Antonio López Vega, Luz Luna, Robert Neathery, Eugene Nowlen, Marjorie Nowlen, José Olmedo, Hudson Rose, Mary Rose, Eleanor Smart, and Jack Williams.

Luis Avalos (age 12). Primavera. Watercolor.

Antonio Cárdenas. Canoa. Oil.

carpenter-marian-abstract

Marian Carpenter. Abstract. Weaving.

carr-jerry-red-lilies

Jerry Carr. Red Lillies. Acrylic.

faloon-tom-la-mujer

Tom Faloon. La Mujer. Watercolor.

frazer-priscilla-patzcuaro

Priscilla Frazer. Pátzcuaro. Duco.

frost-john-nude-with-flower

John Frost. Nude with Flower. Silk Screen.

ganung-arthur-market

Arthur L. Ganung. Market. Acrylic.

Virginia Ganung. Birds. Batik.

Lona Isoard. Fruits Still Life. Oil.

Antonio López Vega. Iglesia. Watercolor.

Luz Luna. Aztec. Collage.

Robert Neathery. Red Rain. Oil.

Eugene Nowlen. Festival. Mixed media.

Marjorie Nowlen. Happy moments. Collage.

José Olmedo. El indio. Yarn.

Hudson M. Rose. Anciano. Pastel.

Mary Rose. Untitled. Etching and aquarelle.

Eleanor Smart. Woman with green hair. Acrylic.

Jack Williams. River of Love. Mixed media.

La Galería del Lago de Chapala, often called simply Galería del Lago, was the most important and influential Ajijic art gallery in the 1970s. It was a cooperative non-profit founded on 27 November 1971 by Arthur and Virginia Ganung, assisted by Charlotte McNamara, Jack Williams and John Frost.

The gallery had about twenty founder members, and some 180 artists had purchased memberships by the time the gallery opened in the former Ajijic public market on the north side of the plaza (now the Ajijic Cultural Center), next door to what was then the village cinema.

The gallery was determined to be inclusive and appeal to the entire community, both Mexican and non-Mexican. It arranged evening lectures, a massive village fiesta on the plaza and classes in painting, craft-making and ceramics.

In August 1974 the the Ganungs departed Ajijic and the gallery moved to Colon 6, across from El Tejaban, for a couple of years, with Katie Goodridge Ingram as president. Having grown up in the village, she was particularly determined to encourage young Mexican talent and immediately established a fund to pay for materials and framing. The gallery also branched out by offering a Christmas exhibit of batiks in the garden of Quinta Johnson (then owned by Ingram’s mother, Helen Kirtland), concerts, an Art and Craft Bazaar, and a series of gourmet candlelight dinners.

In 1976 the gallery had outgrown its Calle Colón location and moved to larger premises on the north side of the highway near the gas station.

The list of artists shown at Galería del Lago is a Who’s Who of the artists then working in Ajijic. In addition to those featured in the cookbook, noteworthy exhibitors included Frank Barton, Jean Caragonne, Conrado Contreras, Frank Kent, Dionicio Morales, John Peterson, Julián Pulido, Georg Rauch, Sylvia Salmi, Gustavo Sendis, Sheryl Stokes Sourelis, Leonie Trager and Betty Warren. The gallery also displayed and sold paintings by the young artists of the Childrens Art Program.

The gallery also mounted group shows in 1976 in Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. Galería del Lago closed in 1977. After that, Ingram arranged monthly shows until 1983 at a smaller gallery inside her mother’s store, Mi México. (Ingram, later an award-winning poet, wrote a memoir about her early life in Ajijic, titled According to Soledad: memories of a Mexican childhood.)

Note: The history of Galería del Lago comes from chapter 41 of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village, a book which explores the origins and history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

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.

Source

La Galería del Lago de Chapala. 1972. A Cookbook with Color Reproductions by Artists from the Galería. Ajijic, Mexico: La Galería del Lago de Chapala. (Guadalajara, Mexico: Boutique d’Artes Gráficas, 1972).

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

The artists who contributed to Amigos de Salud fundraising giftcards

1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards 1 Response »

Sep 122024

Author and social activist Joan Frost, a resident of Jocotepec, was the leader of a group of friends who co-founded Amigos de Salud in 1974. That year, the group organized the sale of hand-colored greetings cards to raise funds for medicines for the Centro de Salud in Jocotepec, which was due to open 1 January 1975. The artwork for the first card was a black and white drawing donated by Bob Neathery; local schoolchildren helped hand color the cards to give them a special holiday flavor. A pack of ten cards (whether black and white or hand-colored) with envelopes cost 15 pesos (then about US$1.25). They were available for purchase at three main locations: Ramón’s Bar in Jocotepec, Servicios Unlimited in Ajijic, and Los Arcos supermarket in Chapala.

Carla Manger. 1982. Untitled street scene.

The cards became an annual event. Sold primarily in the months leading up to Christmas, the simple bi-fold cards, illustrated with original artwork, had no interior wording, making them perfect for any occasion. A large number of area artists, including many of the best in the region, allowed Amigos de Salud to reproduce their work to help raise funds. For some artists, it was valuable additional exposure.

The precise wording on the back of each card changed over the years in response to gradual changes in the focus of Amigos de Salud.

Carla Manger. 1982. La Quinta (Los Naranjitos) Jocotepec.

In Jean Caragonne‘s case, her painting of the view from her house in Chapala, titled Cerro San Miguel, was her very first painting at Lake Chapala! It was used on a 1986 card.

The youngest contributor to the Amigos de Salud cards was Adriana de Rocio Garcia Hernandez, aged 15 when her painting El pescador was used.

For about two decades, Amigos de Salud, which was also financially supported for many years by the Ajijic Mexico National Chili Cookoff (also co-founded by Joan Frost!), helped many health and educational programs, including the Lakeside School for the Deaf and the Women’s Development Clinic founded by Sylvia Flores.

Prior to Amigos de Salud, Joan Frost had helped coordinate medical consultations and surgeries for Chapala-area children via the Shriners organization. As the Lake Chapala area developed, and its needs and priorities changed, Joan Frost merged Amigos de Salud in 1993 into the newly formed Programa Pro Niños Incapacitados del Lago, whose worthy efforts continue to make a difference to this day. It is unlikely that any foreign resident will make a greater contribution to the welfare of children at Lake Chapala than the tireless and extraordinarily selfless Joan Frost.

The artists whose work appeared on Amigos de Salud cards included:

Blanca Aldana, Bruce Allen, Daphne Aluta, Jean Caragonne, Conrado Contreras, Victoria Corona Vega, Gustel Foust, Adriana de Rocio García Hernández, Bill Gentes, Petie Jensen, Oliver Johnson, Carla Manger, James Marthai, Dionicio Morales López, Edith Morris, Bob Neathery, Brian Pimlott, Georg Rauch and Jesús Sánchez.

If you can add to this list, or supply images of other cards, please get in touch!

Examples of greetings cards published by Amigos de Salud.

Bruce Allen. Photograph.

Daphne Aluta. Los pastores.

Victoria Corona Vega. Ofreciendo flores a la Virgen, San-Antonio

Victoria Corona Vega. Ofreciendo flores a la Virgen, San Antonio

Gustel Foust. Street scene.

William Gentes. Canoa.

Petie Jensen. Ajijic plaza and chapel.

Oliver Johnson. Untitled (street musician).

Carla Manger. c 1988. Mercado en la plaza.

Carla Manger. 1982. La Quinta (Los Naranjitos), Jocotepec.

James Marthai. Ajijic.

Dionicio Morales. Calle Real.

Acknowledgment

My thanks to Joan Frost’s son, John Burdett Frost, and to writer Dale Hoyt Palfrey for supplying images and examples of many Amigos de Salud greetings cards.

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 and their support of educational and health initiatives in the area.

Sources

Guadalajara Reporter: 28 Sep 1974, 15; 27 Mar 1976, 23.

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

Painter and sculptor Daphne Aluta lived in Ajijic in the 1970s and 1980s

1970s, 1980s 1 Response »

Aug 282024

Artist Daphne Aluta (1919-2017) moved to Ajijic with her then husband Mario Aluta in the late 1960s, and lived there for about twenty years. In September 1985 she was the first female artist ever to have her work featured in the Chapala area monthly El Ojo del Lago; all previous art profiles had highlighted male artists.

Daphne Aluta. Portrait. Courtesy of Ricardo Santana.

Daphne Aluta. Portrait. Date unknown. Courtesy of Ricardo Santana.

Born Daphne Craig on 24 June 1919 in Detroit, Michigan, she grew up in Evanston, Illinois, before studying at Cranbrook School for Girls and then graduating from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

In 1937 she married Richard Flu; the couple had a daughter, Stephanie. In 1941 Daphne married Frank L Greer and moved to Santa Barbara, California; they had two daughters and a son. Frank was an architect (he designed various public buildings in Santa Barbara) and it was only natural that Daphne, who loved sculpture as much as painting, began to help design homes.

Her marriage to Turkish painter and architect Mario Aluta, 15 years her senior, is recorded as taking place in Nevada in 1960. It is assumed that Daphne exhibited in the US before moving to Mexico, but no details of such exhibits are currently known.

During her time in Ajijic, in addition to painting and sculpting, Aluta designed and built several homes in the village. Aluta lived at various addresses in Ajijic, including Juan Alvarez 44 and, in 1971, Encarnación Rosas #20.

Daphne Aluta. Ajijic. Reproduced by kind permission of Ricardo Santana.

Daphne Aluta. Ajijic. Date unknown. Reproduced by kind permission of Ricardo Santana.

As an artist, her group exhibitions in Mexico included the Casa de la Cultura in Guadalajara (1970); the “Fiesta de Arte” held at a private home in Ajijic (15 May 1971); the ex-Convento del Carmen in Guadalajara (1980); the Club Campestre La Hacienda (1985) on the main Guadalajara-Chapala highway; and the “Help Save Lake Chapala” exhibit in Mexico City (1988).

The Lakeside artists exhibiting with Aluta at the Casa de la Cultura Jalisciense show in 1970 included Eunice Hunt; Peter Paul Huf; Mario Aluta; Chester Vincent; Bruce Sherratt and Lesley Jervis Maddock (aka Lesley Sherratt). Aluta’s acrylics were described as “strong and vibrant.”

Daphne Aluta. Undated. Nude. Photo courtesy of Tom Thompson.

At the Fiesta de Arte in 1971, Aluta’s work hung alongside art by Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; 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.

Painters from the Chapala area exhibiting alongside Aluta at the ex-Convento del Carmen in 1980 included Georg Rauch; Eleanor Smart; Betty Warren; Stefan Lökös and Gustel Foust.

At the Club Campestre La Hacienda exhibition in 1985, Aluta’s fellow artists included 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.

Other artists in the 1988 Mexico City exhibit included Nancy Bollembach, Luisa Julian, Conrado Contreras, Rick Ledwon, Georg Rauch, Enrique Velázquez and Laura Goeglin.

Daphne’s fourth husband was Colin MacDougall. They married in Ajijic in 1974, in a small ceremony at the home of Sherm and Adele Harris, who were then managing the Posada Ajijic.

After living in Mexico for 30 years, Aluta returned to the U.S. in 2000, to make her home in Ventura, California, where she died seventeen years later on 6 July 2017.

Note

This is a revised and expanded version of a post first published 23 June 2016.

Sources

Santa Barbara News-Press, 11-15 July 2017.
Guadalajara Reporter: 13 June 1970; 27 Jun 1970; 3 April 1971; 31 August 1974.
El Informador: 5 June 1970; 4 May 1985; 26 January 1980.
El Ojo del Lago, September 1985.

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.

Ajijic in the 1970s: the photos of Beverly Johnson

1970s 2 Responses »

Jul 042024

Ajijic’s unofficial photographer in the early 1970s was free-spirited Beverly Johnson (1933-1976), one of the many people who helped make Ajijic tick in what old timers still remember as the ‘good old days.’ Beverly and her five young children moved to Mexico in the early 1960s and settled in Ajijic, where she hoped to eke out a living from singing.

Photo of Beverly Johnson by Helen Goodridge. Reproduced by kind permission of Jill Maldonado.

Photo of Beverly Johnson in Ajijic by Helen Goodridge. Reproduced by kind permission of Jill Maldonado.

The tenuous roots that she initially put down in Ajijic grew steadily over the years, despite her premature death in 1976, and her children have maintained ties to the village that endure to this day.

As Ajijic’s unofficial village photographer, Beverly was often asked to shoot personal portraits, wedding photos, landscape shots, first communions, baptisms and even portraits of recently deceased children for their families to remember them by.

At least one exhibition of Beverly’s photos was held in Ajijic. It was in about 1971 at the Galería del Lago (now the Ajijic Cultural Center), next to the old movie house. One of Beverly’s daughters recalls that her mother’s photos were also exhibited by Laura Bateman, who held shows in her own home before opening Ajijic’s first purpose-built gallery, Rincón del Arte at Hidalgo #41.

Some of Beverly’s photographs have been published previously. Beverly’s children kindly provided all but one of the photos for an article on MexConnect — A Tour of Ajijic, Chapala, Mexico, in about 1970 — with daughter Tamara choosing the selection and providing the captions.

Beverly’s daughter Jill has rightly observed that her mother’s black and white portraits of Ajijic families are “timeless and most precious.”

Gallery: All photos © Copyright Beverly Johnson, c 1973.

It is hoped to stage an exhibition of Beverly Johnson’s photographs at the Ajijic Museo de Arte (Priv. Flores Magón 3-A, Ajijic) to celebrate her important contribution to village life in Ajijic in the 1970s.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Tamara Janúz, Jill Maldonado, Rachel Lyn Johnson and Miriam Pérez Johnson for their support in helping preserve their mother’s photographic legacy, and to Carol Shepherd McClain for graciously sharing the photographs used in this post to illustrate Beverly’s work.

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 30 is devoted to Beverly and her family.

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

Canadian artist Leonard Brooks, one of many links between San Miguel de Allende and Lake Chapala

1970s 1 Response »

May 232024

Canadian artist Frank Leonard Brooks (1911-2011), usually known simply as Leonard Brooks, was a painter and textile artist who made his home in San Miguel de Allende for more than fifty years.

He and his wife, Reva, a photographer, occasionally visited Chapala, but never for any extended period of time. It was something of a surprise to me, therefore, when this interesting collage acrylic on canvas painting titled “Chapala,” painted by Leonard in 1978, came up at auction in Los Angeles in 2020.

Leonard Brooks. 1978. Chapala. Credit: Abeil Auction.

How did the Brookses come to live in San Miguel de Allende? They arrived in 1947 to teach at the city’s first school of Fine Arts, then being run by American artist Stirling Dickinson, who had established himself in the city a decade earlier. Leonard Brooks, born in England, had finished a stint as a war artist, and he and Riva only intended to stay for a year, while they worked out what to do next, but fell in love with Mexico and with San Miguel de Allende. For half a century, they helped San Miguel de Allende develop its vibrant art and music scene, now deservedly famous nationwide.

A series of exhibitions of Leonard’s paintings in the 1950s received favorable reviews. Paintings by Leonard and prints of Reva’s photos were bought by many famous visitors to San Miguel, including film director John Huston. While Leonard’s early paintings were usually representational, many of his later paintings were impressionist or abstract. They included collage acrylics, many inspired by his San Miguel studio and garden.

Reva was chosen by The San Francisco Museum of Art in 1975 as one of the top fifty female photographers of all time. Her work was recognized and admired by such famous exponents of her art as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

Leonard made periodic visits to Canada to exhibit and sell his paintings at galleries in Vancouver and Toronto. From the late 1960s onward, his paintings, tapestries and collages were featured in several hugely successful exhibitions. In 1998, both Leonard and Reva had hugely successful solo shows in Canada, in Toronto and Kingston, respectively.

Leonard also wrote several best-selling books on painting techniques, and found time to illustrate two articles in the popular monthly Ford Times, including an article about Mexico in December 1953.

Back in San Miguel, Leonard was not only an artist and one of the founding partners of the city’s first specialist art gallery, he was also a highly accomplished musician who played first violin with the Guanajuato Symphony Orchestra. In the 1960s, Leonard started offering free music lessons to local children, and subsequently headed the music program at the San Miguel Cultural Center for 25 years. Among the many local youngsters encouraged by Leonard to play the violin were Daniel Aguascalientes and his five brothers, who later formed Hermanos Aguascalientes y sus violines internacionales.

Leonard and Reva Brooks made a truly extraordinary contribution to San Miguel de Allende. Their joint art and photography collection is now managed by Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Other artists with strong ties to both Chapala and San Miguel de Allende

Californian Priscilla (“Pris”) Frazer (1907-1973) first traveled to Mexico in 1955 to study with James Pinto at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende.

William (“Bill”) Gentes (1917-2000) studied at the Instituto in 1968, before living for many years in Chapala.

Canadian artist Duncan de Kergommeaux (born 1927) won a Canada Council Grant in 1958 to travel in Mexico and study at the Instituto Allende.

Tully Judson Petty Jr. (1928-1992) attended San Miguel de Allende School of Fine Arts in 1948 and lived in Ajijic in the mid-1960s.

Chicago painter Harry Mintz (1907-2002) taught at the Bellas Artes school in San Miguel in 1958, where he met and fell in love with Rosabelle Vita Truglio, a visiting summer student; they later lived and painted in Chapala.

Betty Binkley (1914-1978) lived in Chapala in the 1940s and lived her later years in San Miguel.

George Rae Marsh (Williams), aka Georgia Cogswell (1925-1997), and her first husband, the novelist Willard Marsh, spent time in both Ajijic and San Miguel. After Willard’s death, George Rae married sci-fi writer Theodore Rose Cogswell (1918-1987) in San Miguel; they then divided their time between Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende and the U.S.

Bob Somerlott, a well-respected writer of both fiction and non-fiction, lived intermittently at Ajijic in the 1960s before moving to San Miguel de Allende, where he resided for almost forty years.

Auguste Killat Foust (1915-2010), better known as Gustel Foust, lived five years in San Miguel before moving to Guadalajara and then Ajijic, where she lived from 1978 to 1984.

At least four artists born in Ajijic—Florentino Padilla (c 1943-2010), Javier Zaragoza (born 1944), Antonio Cárdenas Perales (born 1945), and Antonio López Vega (born 1953)—studied in San Miguel de Allende. All four had started painting in the free art classes (now known as the Children’s Art Program) begun in Ajijic by Neill James in the 1950s; James recognized their talents, lobbied on their behalf, and—along with other sponsors—helped fund their studies.

Sources

John Virtue. 2001. Leonard and Reva Brooks – Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Tony Burton. 2007. “Did You Know? Famous artists pioneer art community in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.” MexConnect.com.

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.

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

Acclaimed watercolorist Millard Sheets visited Chapala several times, starting in 1947

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s 3 Responses »

Aug 312023

Renowned American painter, educator, designer and architect Millard Owen Sheets was born in Pomona, California, on 24 June 1907, and died in Anchor Bay, California, on 31 March 1989.

Details of his biography are readily available online, at Wikipedia and at the website of the California Watercolor gallery.

But, in summary, Sheets studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, where, even before graduating, he was exhibiting watercolors in the annual shows of the California Water Color Society and teaching watercolor techniques at Chouinard.

Millard Sheets. 1983. Lake Chapala, Mexico. Reproduced by kind permission of California Watercolor gallery.

Note: Giclées of this painting are available via the website of the California Watercolor Gallery

He exhibited widely across the U.S. and Europe, and gained national recognition as a fine watercolorist. His life, work and painting style made the pages of Art Digest, Eyes on America and a book published by Dalzell Hatfield in Los Angeles in 1935.

During the second world war, Sheets was an artist-correspondent for Life magazine and served with the United States Army Air Forces in India and Burma.

As an art educator, Sheets worked at Chouinard Art Institute, Scripps College, and was Director of Otis Art Institute (1953-1960), fomenting the development of hundreds of young artists.

Millard Sheets. Chapala Church. (EBay photo)

Later in life he designed and executed dozens of major mosaic and mural projects. His commissions ranged from Los Angeles City Hall to Detroit Public Library, the Mayo Clinic, the mosaic dome and chapel at the National Shrine in Washington DC, and the Hilton Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Works by Sheets are in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum (both in New York; the Chicago Art Institute; the National Gallery (Washington D.C.); the DeYoung Museum (San Francisco); and the Los Angeles County Museum.

Sheets made multiple visits to Chapala between 1947 (believed to be the first time he visited the lake) and the early 1980s.

Millard Sheets.1979. Noon, Chapala. Reproduced by kind permission of California Watercolor gallery.

Note: Giclées of this painting can be purchased on the website of the California Watercolor Gallery

Sheets’ 1947 trip to Chapala was in the company of long-time friend Merritt (‘Muggs’) Van Sant (1898-1964) and fellow artist, master woodworker and designer Sam Maloof (1916-2009), who was working for Sheets at the time and had learnt Spanish as a child from a Mexican-born housekeeper. Interviewed in 2002 by Mary MacNaughton for the Archives of American Art, Maloof recalled, albeit all too briefly, their trip to Chapala:

“… we flew to Guadalajara and I could have stayed for three years for what it cost us for three weeks. Of course it had to be the best hotel rooms and I had a room by myself. Millard and Muggs Van Zandt [Sant] had a room together and we had to rent a car. They had a brand new Buick with a driver that drove us all over and we’d all put money in the kitty every morning and Muggs would be the banker and we traveled from Lake Chapala to Morelia.”

Katie Goodridge Ingram (who first brought Millard Sheets’ link to Lake Chapala to my attention) remembered Sheets bringing an artist group to paint in Ajijic on at least one occasion.

Note: This is a work in progress. If you can offer any additional information about Millard Sheets’ visits to Lake Chapala, 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.

Source

Mary MacNaughton. 2002. Interview of Sam Maloof conducted January 2002 by Mary MacNaughton, for the Archives of American Art, in Maloof’s home/studio in Alta Loma, California.

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

Fred Carmichael wrote a two-act play set in a small hotel in Ajijic

1960s, 1970s No Responses »

Aug 102023

Prolific playwright Fred Walker Carmichael (1924-2009) visited his brother Thomas M. Carmichael in Ajijic at some point during the latter’s residence there with his family from 1966 to 1972. Fred subsequently wrote a play, dedicated to Tom, set in Ajijic entitled Mixed Doubles: A Comedy in Two Acts (Samuel French Inc., 1973). Curiously, despite its close connection to Ajijic, this play has never been performed at the Lakeside Little Theatre.

Fred Carmichael was born in Pelham, New York on 1 February 1924. His love for the theater began when he acted in Peter Pan in his teens with the Clare Tree Major performing group. He performed in many plays and eventually turned to writing. He was the author of more than 50 plays, including: Exit The Body (1962); The Best Laid Plans (1965); Any Number Can Die (1965); All the Better To Kill You With (1968); Victoria’s House (1969); Done To Death (1971); Foiled by an Innocent Maid, or The Curse of the Iron Horse (1977); Said the Spider to the Spy (1987); Don’t Mention My Name (1993); Coming Apart (1994). Fred Carmichael and his wife Patricia owned and operated the Caravan Theatre at the Dorset Playhouse in Dorset, Vermont, for twenty-seven seasons from 1949 to 1975.

The first performance of Mixed Doubles was at the Dorset Playhouse, and featured Fred Carmichael playing two parts in a production staged by his wife. It has been regularly performed in community theatres (including the Borelians Community Theatre in Port Perry, Ontario, in 1981; the Red Barn Theatre in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1986; and Boise Little Theater in Idaho in 1988. It also played to packed houses in New Orleans in 1986, when the Community Theater there put on several performances at the Bayou Barriere Country Club. More recently, in April 2010, the play was put on in Mexico, at Rosarito Beach, in Baja California.

Mixed Doubles: A Comedy in Two Acts, described by Village Voice as “perhaps the funniest of his laugh-a-minute plays”, is set in a small hotel in Ajijic called the Casa Pericolo. The first act, about a separated middle-aged couple who occupy connecting suites and have a romantic fling, takes place in October. In the second act, set in the following June, the adjoining suites are respectively occupied by an unmarried golden-age couple and a band of inept drug smugglers.

The Casa Pericolo is fictional, but in the late 1950s, there was a small bed and breakfast establishment in Ajijic called the “Posada del Perico,” operated by Bruce Ackland, and, in much more recent years, a “Hotel Perico” on the libramiento.

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 are about the history of the literary community in Ajijic and the Lakeside Little Theatre.

Note: This is an updated version of a post first published 27 June 2017.

Sources:

Times Picayune. 1986. Review of “Mixed Doubles”. Times Picayune, (New Orleans) 19 June 1986, p 167.
Frederick Walker Carmichael (Obituary)

American artist Emily Meeker lived in Chula Vista from the 1960s

1960s, 1970s, 1980s 2 Responses »

Jul 062023

American artist Emily Meeker (1908-1983) was a long-time resident of Chula Vista who had previously led an extraordinarily exciting life in India and elsewhere.

Born Emily Preston in Abilene, Texas, on 26 June 1908, her architect father moved the family to Brazil three years later. Emily later attended the New York School of Interior Design in 1926, where she won a scholarship for a 6-week trip to England and France. With her sister and mother for company, the six weeks eventually became three years, and included art classes as they toured France in a Model T Ford. When the Depression hit, Emily’s father cabled: “Broke. Home best way you can.” They could only afford a cabin in steerage class, but talked their way into dining first class and dancing second class.

Emily married New York native Don Meeker in 1932. Don lived and worked in India, as the representative of Colgate-Palmolive-Peet in India, Burma and Sri Lanka. Five years into their marriage, Don switched jobs to join Warner-Lambert. After a year in New York, while Don familiarized himself with the company, they were returning to India in 1939, when, just as they embarked at Genoa for the ship home, Mussolini took over the railways. The ship left port for Bombay (now Mumbai) and was repainted and transformed mid-voyage into a troop ship. The Meekers traveled extensively each year to cover all the territory that Don was overseeing. Their adventures included unexpectedly having to share their reserved compartment on a long distance train with three locals and their belongings: “a canary in a cage, a pot of roses, jugs of drinking water, foul-smelling food, bed rolls, and prayer rugs.” On another occasion, trekking in Kashmir with twenty two helpers and eighteen ponies to carry their supplies, Emily lost her footing and slid to the brink of a 400-foot-deep ravine; the helpers formed a human chain and just managed to stop her slide in time.

In 1942, the couple returned to New York to see out the end of the war. Three years later, war over, they returned to Bombay; it took them five months, and they had to travel via Lisbon and South Africa. Back in India, Emily took up golf, and became the women’s champion of “West and East India and Ceylon.” She was also elected president of the Bombay American Woman’s club. The Meekers were guests of the Aga Khan III in his palace when he celebrated his 60th year of Ismaili rule.

In 1948, Emily visited her mother in Abilene, Texas, for the first time in ten years. She held an exhibit of artworks there. Three years later, she designed costumes for a play held in the city, and in 1960 she exhibited 40 oils and pastels at the City Library, and gave a gallery talk about the status of art in India. in 1962 she exhibited a selection of her paintings in India, though the claim that this was the first art show in India by an American woman seems somewhat far-fetched.

This Bombay (Mumbai) watercolor, currently for sale at Barbara’s Bazaar in Ajijic, dates from 1954, when the Meekers were still living in India.

Emily Meeker. 1954. Woman in Bombay. Courtesy Tom Thompson.

Emily Meeker. Bombay, 1954. Courtesy Tom Thompson.

Emily began a new phase of her life after Don’s retirement in 1963. They read about Chula Vista, visited and, on their first trip, bought a view lot on the appropriately named Privada de la Vista, where they built their new home overlooking the lake. They moved in the following year, after several weeks visiting family in the US.

In May 1964, Emily, who normally golfed at either the sporty 9-hole Chula Vista course or the Chapala Country Club, had a hole-in-one at the 4th hole of the Guadalajara Country Club. This was reportedly the first ever hole-in-one by a female golfer at that course.

After her husband died in 1966, Emily continued to call Chula Vista ‘home’ for more than twenty years, until her own death on 18 November 1993 at the age of 85.

In the mid-1980s, Emily exhibited in several group shows in the Chapala area, the most noteworthy of which was “Pintores de la Ribera” in May 1985 at the Club Campestre La Hacienda (km 30 of the Guadalajara-Chapala highway). Fellow artists at that show included Daphne Aluta, Eugenia Bolduc, Jean Caragonne, Donald Demerest, Laura Goeglein, Hubert Harmon, B. R. Kline, Jo Kreig, Carla W. Manger, Sydney Moehlman, Xavier Pérez; Tiu Pessa, De Nyse Turner Pinkerton and Eleanor Smart.

In 1987, Emily’s artworks were exhibited in a group show at the Piaf Restaurant in Guadalajara.

Few artists associated with Lake Chapala led such a varied and adventurous life as Emily Preston Meeker.

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

Abilene Reporter-News: 2 June 1946, 58; 11 July 1948, 50; 13 November 1951, 8; 25 August 1960;
Maura Drechsler. “Travels of a Lakeside Painter,” El Ojo del Lago, April 1987, 1-3.
El Informador: 4 May 1985.
Guadalajara Reporter: 19 March 1964, 5; 28 May 1964, 1.

Helen Marie Krustev has an abiding passion for portraying Mexico

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards 1 Response »

Jun 222023

Helen Marie Krustev, born in the USA on 16 September 1933, and wife of Bulgarian-born artist Dimitar Krustev, is an accomplished portraitist in her own right. Helen Marie had private art training in the Middle East before studying in Des Moines, Iowa, where Dimitar was one of her teachers. She continued to develop her own art while working with Dimitar on numerous cultural tours in Europe, Mexico and elsewhere.

Helen Marie Krustev. Untitled.

Helen and her husband moved permanently to Ajijic in the year 2000. Her love of Mexico, and enthusiasm for portraying the country’s dozens of indigenous groups, shines through in her work. In recent years she has specialized in painting portraits, usually in acrylics, of people such as the Tarahumar, Huichol, Cora and Maya, depicted in their colorful traditional clothing, and often facing away from the artist.

Helen Marie Krustev. Canoa y chinchorro.

Helen’s work has been exhibited, often alongside that of her husband, in several galleries in Mexico. In 1989 the couple held a joint showing of their work at the Art Studio Galeria in San Antonio Tlayacapan. In February 2000, they held another noteworthy joint exhibit, titled Caras de México, in the lobby of the Las Hadas hotel in Manzanillo.

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.

Source

Diario de Colima, 25 Feb 2000.

Juan Olivarez: Ajijic artist turned village photographer

1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards 6 Responses »

Jun 082023

Juan (‘Juanito’) Olivarez Sánchez was born in Ajijic on 12 July 1944 and died there at the age of 77 on 28 May 2022.

Like numerous other local artists in Ajijic, Olivarez’ interest in art began as a student of the Children’s Art Program (CAP) started by Neill James. Olivarez was among the first generation of students to benefit from CAP which began in the mid-1950s.In the 1960s, Olivarez helped teach the next generation of youngsters. Later students of Juan Olivarez included, in the early 1990s, Bruno Mariscal, described by Lyn Adams as: “Truly a jack-of-all-trades, this talented man is also a well-known rotulista or sign painter. His padrino, Juan Olivarez, started training him in this craft when he was around 18 years old.”

Olivarez’ considerable artistic talent was recognized by the highly experienced art educator Jack Rutherford, a professional Californian artist then living in Ajijic with his wife and their four children. Rutherford was instrumental in arranging for Olivarez to spend several weeks in Studio City (then Ajijic’s sister city) in 1970. Rutherford persuaded Studio City Chamber of Commerce to sponsor Olivarez and to find him a family to board with while he took art classes. Rutherford and his family drove Olivarez up to Studio City, where he was a house guest of the Heckers; Mrs Robert Hecker was a fellow art student. A lively welcome reception in Studio City was held in honor of Olivarez’ arrival before the Rutherford family carried on to spend the summer in Laguna Beach.

Juan Olivarez. Untitled landscape. Coll-JLV

Juan Olivarez. c 1960. Untitled landscape in the Neill James Collection. Reproduced by kind permission of his family.

Jesús López Vega informed me that Olivarez was a member of the “Jardín del Arte,” a group of young local artists at the start of the 1970s, which later became known as “Asociación de Artistas de Ajijic.” This group was a forerunner of the “Ajijic Society of the Arts” (which continues to this day), the largest organization of its kind for artists (Mexican and foreign) in the area.

By 1975, Olivarez was directing a gallery in Ajijic, the Galería de los Artistas Cooperativos, a sign of the bustling art scene in the village at the time. Competing with the long-running Galería del Lago, the Galería de los Artistas Cooperativos was located at 16 de Septiembre #9. It opened on 14 December 1975 with a solo show of 25 works by Frank Barton, an American artist then living in Ajijic, fresh off a successful show in Mexico City.

Olivarez had become interested in photography from a relatively early age, initially acquiring a simple Kodak camera to help him develop his drawing technique, and then discovering the lure of photography as a hobby. He was probably the first native-born photographer to become Ajijic’s unofficial village photographer, taking over this role from, among others, Beverly Johnson.

Juan Olivarez. El Charracate. Reproduced by kind permission of Tom Thompson.

Olivarez photographed hundreds of family gatherings, parties and special occasions, and amassed an extensive collection of photographs of Ajijic, covering a very wide range of subjects and events, many of them no longer celebrated in quite the way they once were. Late in life, recounting his experiences to journalist Sofía Medeles, he explained how his photos had originally cost only 50 centavos each. His photographic business was unable to survive the advent of the smartphone, which replaced conventional cameras.

Alongside his photography, Olivarez continued to paint small pictures and do some commercial sign painting. Many of his paintings remain in possession of his family and I hope to add additional images of his work to this profile shortly.

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

Lyn Adams. 2007. “The gallery and art of Bruno Mariscal.” MexConnect.com
Sofía Medeles. 2022. “Remembering Juan “Juanito” Olivares, prolific photographer of Ajijic.” Semanario Laguna, 15 de junio de 2022.
The Van Nuys News: 26 Jun 1970, 17.
Guadalajara Reporter: 13 Dec 1975.

Dimitar Krustev’s subjects ranged from dignitaries in Ohio to indigenous people in Mexico

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards 4 Responses »

May 252023

Dimitar Iliev Krustev (1920-2013) was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 12 January 1920 and died in Ajijic on 11 February 2013. After studying at The Natioual Academy of Art for Portrait Painting in Sofia, Krustev served in the army under German rule for three years during the second world war. He moved to the US in 1947 to take a bachelor’s degree in commercial art at Kent State University, and then completed a masters degree in art history at the University of Iowa.

Dimitar Krustev. Portrait of a young man. Reproduced by kind permission of Ricardo Santana.

Dimitar Krustev. 1969. Portrait of a young man. Reproduced by kind permission of Ricardo Santana.

Krustev took US citizenship and he and his wife, Helen Marie, a former student, lived most of their married life in Des Moines, Iowa. Krustev worked as a commercial artist for the Des Moines-based magazine Better Homes and Gardens for nine years before opening the Des Moines Krustev Studio of Art. Krustev, who specialized in portraiture, loved teaching art, and many of his hundreds of students went on to enjoy considerable commercial and personal success. Krustev also enjoyed leading art study groups to Europe, Ajijic and elsewhere.

In the 1960s, as a member of The Explorer’s Club, Krustev began to travel to distant locations to document, photograph and paint the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In 1968 he became the first person known to have successfully navigated the Usumacinta River from its headwaters in Guatemala to the Gulf of México. Krustev’s fascination with people living in near isolation in what are commonly perceived as extreme environments led to his particular interest in the plight of the Lacandon Maya who live in the rain forest of Chiapas in southern Mexico.

Krustev’s experiences resulted in several books, including River of the Sacred Monkey (1970), Voices in the Night (1992), The Journals of Dimitar Krustev, an Artist–Explorer (Volume One) (1996), Black Hand Over the Jungle (1997), and Lacondón Journal 1969: From the Journals of Dimitar Krustev Artist-Explorer, published by Editorial Mazatlán in December 2012, only months before the artist’s death. His books and journals, supported by exquisite portraits, provide extraordinary insights into the changing daily lifes of the people who befriended him at a time when their traditional way of life was under siege from modernizing influences. Krustev is also the subject of a film titled The Bulgarian Gaugin.

After traveling back and forth between Des Moines and Ajijic for almost thirty years, Krustev and his wife established their home and studios in Ajijic in the year 2000. Ajijic became their base for more traveling, painting, teaching, and many joint shows. Among the artists inspired by Krustev are Pauli Zmolek (who painted her own scenes of the Chapala area) and Lois Black.

Dimitar Krustev. Boats of Ajijic. (Greetings card)

This conté drawing titled Boats of Ajijic shows typical fishing boats and fishing nets on the shore of lake, with Cerro Garcia in the background.

Krustev’s first major show in Mexico was in 1972 when he presented portraits and landscapes at the Mexican-North American Cultural Institute in the Zona Rosa, Mexico City. He also exhibited in Guadalajara and throughout Europe and the USA.

His earliest recorded exhibit in Ajijic (which accompanied a showing of his film of the Lacandon Maya) was at the Posada Ajijic in August 1977. He first ran workshops in Ajijic at about this time. Four years later, in 1981, he advertised an 11-day workshop in Ajijic for $552.60 a person; the fee included air fare from Omaha, room and art instruction.

In 1989, Krustev and his wife, Helen Marie Krustev, held a joint showing of their work at the Art Studio Galeria in San Antonio Tlayacapan. They held another noteworthy joint exhibit, titled Caras de México, in the lobby of the Las Hadas hotel in Manzanillo in February 2000.

Several of their shows in Mexico were organized by Katie Goodridge Ingram, who ran two successful art galleries in Ajijic—Galería del Lago and Mi México—for many years. Ingram explained to me that “Many of his works were a combination of conté and charcoal and pastels, though he also painted in oils” and that she was enthralled by his work among the Lacandon:

partly because of their inherent beauty and their attempts to preserve their old ways and partly because of the tragedy involved in the confluence of two cultures. I admired the adventurer who went into the jungle and, fearing the imminent extinction of these people, drew the wonderful faces, garb and lifestyle of the Lacandon Indians.”

[Katie Goodridge Ingram is the author of According to Soledad: memories of a Mexican childhood, a fascinating fictionalized memoir of growing up in Ajijic in the 1940s and 1950s.]

Krustev’s work has been exhibited all over the world, and his paintings are in many prominent, private collections in Africa, USA, Europe and Mexico, where several fine examples are in the permanent collection of Ajijic Museo de Arte.

Papers and archives

The Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian include two color silent film reels from Krustev’s trips (in the 1970s and 1996), as well as 180 35mm transparencies and two sound cassettes. His manuscripts and journals are archived at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.

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

Diario de Colima: 25 Feb 2000.
Ojo del Lago, March 1989.
Des Moines Register: (obituary) 3 Mar 2013.
Katie Goodridge Ingram, personal communication.
Guadalajara Reporter: 20 Aug 1977, 17; 11 April 1998, 13; 5 Nov 2011; 3 Jan 2014;
Kent Stater: 28 Oct 1947.
Omaha World Herald: 7 June 1981.
David Bodwell and Richard Grabman (editors). 2013. Lancandon Journal—1969: From the Journals of Dimitar Krustev: Artist-Explorer. Editorial Mazatlán.

Young Ajijic artists helped by Studio City, Ajijic’s sister city in California

1960s, 1970s, 1980s 1 Response »

Apr 202023

Ajijic’s sister city connection to Studio City in California had already been going five years by the time journalist Bill Reed wrote about it in 1967. The sister city program was part of the People to People initiative begun a decade earlier by former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1964 the executive board of People to People held a lunch meeting at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala, a meeting attended by Eisenhower’s son (John D. Eisenhower), Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, former president Miguel Alemán, the Jalisco state governor Juan Gil Preciado, and other guests who listened to a keynote address by Walt Disney (in which he claimed “Jalisco” was his favorite song).

According to the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News (in January 1963), the idea to twin Ajijic and Studio City came from Eric Lindhe, a retired US Army colonel who had lived seven years in Ajijic and suggested the idea to Jim Hawthorne, Studio City’s honorary mayor. Lindhe undertook to liaise with villagers and help organize a formal sister city relationship. The press report also mentioned that a more recent Ajijic resident, retired civil engineer Don Savage, “has been working on a project to get water into the town’s homes for the first time.”

Press Telegram, 1962

The first tangible impact of the sister city connection was in September 1962 when a Studio City resident, the uncle of Ann Mosher, visited Ajijic and presented donated poster paints to the children taking art classes in Neill James’ library. That program grew into the Children’s Art Program, now held under the auspices of the Lake Chapala Society.

Mosher explained to fellow donors that the children made cards which tourists bought for a peso each, with part of the proceeds going direct to the aspiring young artists.

The Chamber of Commerce in Studio City had initially wanted to send medicines and children’s clothing to Ajijic, before learning that customs regulations might be an issue, so they sent large bottles of poster paint instead.

Despite knowing the potential problems, in October the Kiwanis Club in Studio City organized a major clothing drive for Ajijic children and collected close to a ton of clothes and shoes! Simultaneously, the Studio City Chamber of Commerce (SCCC) announced a 10-day tour to Mexico, to include Ajijic, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Taxco and Acapulco.

In November 1962 the Studio City Merchants Association joined with SSCC to host a Mexican Fiesta to raise funds, and at the end of month, thirteen Studio City residents left Los Angeles for Mexico. According to press reports, Mexicana airline assisted with the transportation of the donated clothing.

All thirteen visitors were overwhelmed by the “extraordinary cordiality of their hosts south of the border.” The group traveled to Ajijic from the airport in a “special bar-equipped bus.” Some sixty charros in multicolored serapes met the bus on the outskirts of Ajijic to escort the Studio City group to the plaza, where an estimated 4000 villagers gathered to cheer and welcome the group with music, folkloric dancing, church bells and confetti. “Torchlights blazed on all sides (there are no street lights in Ajijic).” This was the start of a three-day whirl of receptions, visits, parties and dancing. The visitors encountered no anti-US sentiments in the village, which “may be partly because the Americans residing in Ajijic have taken a special, helpful interest in the town and its problems.”

The following March the Los Angeles Times reported that plans were underway for a return visit by a group of Ajijic villagers to Studio City in April (via bus to Tijuana), and that Studio City residents had started to fund raise for a “long-needed” school in Ajijic, which “could be built for as little as $1,500.” This visit was subsequently postponed more than once, in part because a school teacher from Ajijic was acting as the group’s interpreter, so it needed to take place during a school holiday.

In April it emerged that the six large boxes of clothing that had been held at Guadalajara airport since the previous December had finally been granted duty-free status and had been released, following the personal intervention of the President, to Col. Eric Lindhe for onward transport to Ajijic.

Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1963.

Fund raising continued apace in Studio City, including a Bowling Tourney for the “rehabilitation of a boys’ school” in Ajijic, and the auction of a Tink Strother oil painting of an Ajijic woman preparing tortillas. Strother had lived in Ajijic the previous year.

In July an “advance party,” comprised of Ajijic residents Don Savage and his wife, and their 22-year-old maid, Mariana Yañez (the niece of Ajijic mayor José Serna Flores), arrived in Studio City. Savage persuaded Studio City officials that any funds raised by SCCC to affray the expenses of a visit by Ajijic children could be far better utilized to help pay for the expansion of Saúl Rodilas Pina boys’ school in the village. The school, for grades 1 to 6, was attended by 400 boys at the time, and needed to expand but had run out of money. Villagers wanted to buy bricks and steel beams to add two classrooms and a kitchen. Savage pointed out to his SCCC hosts that the expense of obtaining passports and visas for Ajijic students would be considerable. The SCCC sent a check for $650.00 to Ajijic for the school and continued to fund raise. Eric Lindhe gave a talk in Studio City in December and raised a further $105.00 to outfit junior soccer teams in Ajijic.

In March 1964 the SCCC voted to provide $300.00 to bring two boys, two girls and two teachers from Ajijic to visit Studio City. At the end of the academic year, the Ajijic students finally arrived.

The four students named in newspaper reports were Rafael Chávez (13 years old), “Frederico” (Federico) López (11), María del Rosario Díaz (14) and María Guadalupe Reyes (13). They were chaperoned by teacher Martha Zuñiga (20) and school principal Velia Hugo. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Hugo had moved to Ajijic with her family as a 10-year-old and spoke perfect English. Also accompanying the group was delegado José Ramos Pérez and the village padre, Ramón Barba. Their Studio City hosts financed an itinerary that included visits to Disneyland, a beauty salon, shopping for clothes, a baseball game at Dodger’s Stadium, Revue Studio, boating and the naval air station at Long Beach. In their honor, Los Angeles mayor, Sam Yorty, officially proclaimed the week of July 9-16 “Ajijic Week in Studio City.”

Two years later a second group from Studio City, about 20-strong, stayed in Ajijic for several days at the end of November 1966. They toured the village boys’ and girls’ schools, and the new vocational school to which SCCC had contributed funds. By then, SCCC had plans to raise at least $1,000 to launch a food program of breakfasts for 200 needy Mexican youngsters in Ajijic. Blaine Hodgson, a retired US army officer living in Ajijic, had offered to oversee the program.

Velia Hugo kept in close contact with Studio City and the local newspaper reported in January 1968 that she was raising funds for a basketball court and that members of the SCCC also hoped to build a clinic in Ajijic, and start a kindergarten. A letter exchange was organized between students in Studio City and Ajijic, and in May the SCCC was planning to expand the small library in Ajijic and was considering establishing a retail outlet in Studio City to sell wares from Ajijic.

The SCCC also helped sponsor a 13-year-old Ajijic artist, Ramón Navarro, to leave Ajijic and live with an aunt in Los Angeles to take formal art classes. According to press reports, Navarro was, in August 1968, “exhibiting his oil paintings and watercolors at an art show in Guadalajara” and his talent had been discovered by Irma McCall, a former resident of Ajijic residing in Long Beach. (McCall’s article, “Ajijic–Paradise Under the Mexican Sun,” was published in the 11 March 1962 issue of the Independent Press-Telegram.) Studio City support for Navarro continued for several years. In 1973 the Women’s Division of SCCC gave him a scholarship to complete his education in the US.

The SCCC announced plans to invite Navarro and several residents of Ajijic to a block party in September. The Ajijic group was comprised of four adults—J. Trinidad Ramos Jr, president of the Ajijic Chamber of Commerce; businessman Rufino Palacios; Velia Hugo and Esperanza Briones, both teachers at the Girls’ School; and four 6th grader students: Rosemaría Jiménez (13), Antelma Plasencia (12), Rubén Romero (12) and Arnulfo Beas (13).

Velia Hugo addressed teachers at a luncheon at Riverside Drive Elementary school, telling them that, in Ajijic: “The number of children in our classes varies with about 100 children in first grade, 62 in fourth grade and 32 in sixth grade…. These children have only one teacher in each class.” She also explained that, with DIF support, hot breakfasts were being provided to about 500 village children.

J. Trinidad Ramos told the local press that after 6th grade in Ajijic, boys received “manual training” and girls studied sewing and dressmaking. He estimated that there were “more than 300 American families” living in the village, and stated that the resident Americans, spearheaded by Mr and Mrs Booth Waterbury of the Posada Ajijic, were interested in starting a medical center.

Studio City helped another young Ajijic artist in 1970 when the SCCC sponsored 24-year-old “Juan Olverez” (= Juan Olivarez) to study art for a month in Studio City. American artist Jack Rutherford, who had been living in Ajijic for several years and recognized the young man’s talent, had contacted the SCCC, which arranged for Olivarez to become the house-guest of Mr and Mrs Robert Hecker for the summer, while Mr and Mrs Rutherford and their four children enjoyed a working holiday in Laguna Beach.

Note: Juan Olivarez was born in 1944 and would have been 26 in July 1970. Sadly he died in 2022 before I was able to ask him about his memories of Studio City and about his later artistic career, which centered on photography, as detailed in this profile.

As Ajijic grew, so contacts with—and financial support from—Studio City became more sporadic, though they continued until at least the mid-1980s. In 1971, for example educator Margaret Hyatt spent several days in Ajijic and returned later that year to give a month-long literacy tutor-training and demonstration course to young adults in Ajijic. A group of Studio City residents visited Ajijic in November 1973, to begin arrangements for a return trip for a 30-member delegation from Ajijic, including a youth soccer team, the following year. In 1976, SCCC organized the donation of medical equipment for Ajijic’s first public health clinic, which opened in May 1977. The SCCC also raised funds in 1977 for “school and church supplies” in Ajijic, and were still supporting a Scholarship Fund for Ajijic as late as 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 Ajijic’s art community and its health and education facilities.

Note

Other Lakeside communities with sister cities include:

Chapala-Lake Arrowhead, California (included on official 1972 list of all sister cities)
Jocotepec-Watsonville, California (begun 15 September 2018)
Chapala-Jin Xi, China (the highway through La Floresta was renamed Boulevard Jin Xi in 1994)
Chapala-Barrhead, Alberta, Canada (from about 2007).
Chapala-Pico Rivera, California (from June 2024)

Sources

Guadalajara Reporter: 16 July 1964, 8.
Los Angeles Evening Citizen News: 19 Jan 1963, 4; 5 Dec 1963, 7; 3 Jul 1964, 6; 3 Jul 1964, 6; 13 Jul 1964, 6.
Los Angeles Times: 7 Mar 1963, 138; 7 Apr 1963, 234; 15 Apr 1963, 2; 23 Jun 1963, 201; 4 Jul 1963, 107; 9 Jul 1963, 73; 27 Aug 1963, 2; 9 Jun 1964, 94; 31 Jul 1980, 209 12 Jul 1984, 211.
Press-Telegram, 30 Sep 1962, 109.
South Pasadena Journal: 03 Nov 1971, 10.
Valley News: 07 Feb 1967, 99; 05 Jan 1967, 49; 29 Dec 1967, 15; 04 Aug 1968, 50; 20 Sep 1968, 35; 22 Sep 1968, 12; 04 Feb 1971, 90; 16 Nov 1973, 43; 08 Oct 1974, 25; 02 Sep 1976, 42; 31 Mar 1977, 35; 01 Nov 1977, 32.
Valley Times, 2 Oct 1962, 15; 25 Oct 1962,17; 19 Nov 1962, 15; 27 Nov 1962, 2; 10 Jul 1964, 2; 25 Sep 1968, 8.
Van Nuys News: 21 Jan 1968, 6; 09 May 1968, 49; 26 Jun 1970, 17; 30 Jun 1970, 13; 17 May 1973, 105; 07 Aug 1973, 12.
Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet: 04 Jan 1966, 10; 04 Oct 1966, 47; 7 Oct 1962, 3.

Artist-author Henry F Edwards lived in Ajijic in the 1960s and 1970s

1960s, 1970s No Responses »

Mar 232023

Artist and author Henry F. Edwards lived in Ajijic, with his wife, Corinne, and their numerous children, for many years in the 1960s and 1970s.

Henry ‘Hank’ Edwards was born on 9 May 1933 and completed studies at the University of New Mexico; San Diego State University; and the University of California. He served in the Navy on the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La and then worked for a decade in the space industry, as a scientist-engineer on advanced satellites. Having made profitable investments, he retired young to travel the world; the family lived in several different countries before settling at Lake Chapala for more than a decade, most of the time in Ajijic, and a much shorter time on the southern shore of the lake.

Edwards published and republished several books. The one most directly related to Ajijic is titled The Sweet Bird of Youth . This book, published in 2008, consists of two parts: “Fall of the Globo” and “Living the Lucky Life,” previously published in 1977 and 1997 respectively.

“Fall of the Globo” is a fictionalized memoir of his time in Ajijic. Ajijic is renamed Tzipan in the book, and Jocotepec becomes San Pedro, while Henry and Corinne become Harold and Colleen. The book is a roman à clef, where many of the characters are only thinly disguised. It includes stories about building the Edwards’ family home, nicknamed “El Castillo” because of its castle-like turret, a couple of blocks north of Seis Esquinas. They had previously rented a property at Independencia #41, where artist John K Peterson later lived for a time.

Parts of Playing Prince in a Palace (2009) also relate to the family’s time in Mexico, while The View from Across the Lake (originally published in 2002) is about life on the southern shore of the lake before they then decided to move to Guatemala.

Edwards also penned an article titled “On Lake Chapala” for the Lake Chapala Review, which offers a chatty account of what life in Ajijic was like when he and his family lived in the village. The illustration accompanying that article was drawn by Simón Velásquez, son of long-time village artists Enrique and Belva Velásquez.

What was Ajijic like when Hank Edwards was living there? Well, it was a lot smaller than it is today, as evidenced by this simplified sketch map drawn by Hank and included in The Sweet Bird of Youth:

Sketch map of Ajijic, c. 1970, by Henry F Edwards.

The ‘paved road’ is the current carretera, completed in the early 1950s, a decade before Edwards arrived in Ajijic. (A 1976 US newspaper quotes Edwards as planning to spend summers on San Juan Island, “and the winters in Ajijic where we have lived for the past eight years.”) The line labelled ‘End of Town’ on the map is especially instructive in that there was apparently very little construction north of the carretera, even in about 1960. The “Castillo” was on the edge of the town.

Edwards pursued his art interests while in Ajijic, and held a one man show of 36 oils, done over five years, at what was then the Jalisco state gallery in La Floresta.

Edwards exhibited in a group show in March 1976 at the “José Clemente Orozco Gallery” in Ajijic, a gallery directed by Dionicio Morales at a location three blocks from the plaza on Guadalupe Victoria. Other artists in that show included Jonathan Aparicio, Frank Barton, Antonio Cárdenas, Antonio López Vega, Dionicio Morales, Julian Pulido, Sid Schwartzman, and Havano Tadeo.

Hank and Corinne (Bush) Edwards co-starred as the leading couple in the farce “Here Lies Jeremy Troy” presented by the Lakeside Little Theater in April 1976 at the Chula Vista Country Club. Corinne had performed in Victoria, BC, Canada, and in several previous Lakeside Little Theater productions.

At the time of “”Here Lies Jeremy Troy,” Hank Edwards apparently sponsored the short-lived Wes Penn Gallery (named for the deceased artist ex-husband of author Jan Dunlap). The gallery was trying to organize a two-person exhibit of paintings by Peter Huf and his wife, Eunice Hunt Huf, who, after living in Ajijic for many years, had moved back to Germany. A short press comment adds that, “Hank Edwards and Corinne Bush plan to leave Ajijic at the end of April, at which time the Wes Penn Gallery will be managed by Cristina Rigby of Jocotepec.” Cristina Rigby, it is worth noting, was the wife of British Hollywood writer Ray Rigby (The Hill).

Henry Edwards. c 1970. Street scene.

Hank and Corinne left Ajijic in May 1976, after throwing a medieval costume party for Frank and Kathy Barton who had taken over “El Castillo,” but returned the following year, when Hank became an active member of the informal cultural group TLAC (Todas las Artes Combinadas).

At the end of the 1970s, Edwards and his wife moved back to the US, where they lived in Oregon and Arizona. Corinne died in about 2016. When I was last in touch with Henry, several years ago, he still owned an island in the middle of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, an island where he and his wife had once hoped to build a castle . . .

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.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to both Alan Pattison and Henry Edwards for sharing their memories of Ajijic with me via phone, in July 2014 and November 2016 respectively.

Sources

Henry F Edwards. 2008. The Sweet Bird of Youth (BookSurge)
___2009. Playing Prince in a Palace (BookSurge)
___2009. The View from Across the Lake (BookSurge)
___2007. “On Lake Chapala,” Lake Chapala Review, April 2007
Guadalajara Reporter: 13 March 1976, 21; 3 April 1976, 31; 3 April 1976; 22 May 1976, 22; 16 Apr 1977, 19.
The Islands Sounder: 10 Nov 1976, 19.

Eccentric artist Lona Isoard lived in Ajijic in the 1960s and 1970s

1960s, 1970s No Responses »

Mar 022023

Lona Mae Christians, later Isoard, (1903-1992) was a long-time resident of Ajijic in the 1960s and 1970s. She was born 8 November 1903 in Williamsburg, Colorado, and died 22 Sep 1992 in Walnut Creek, California, aged 88. Lona married her husband, Max Conlin Isoard (1900-1974), then a medical student, in June 1926. The couple had a daughter, Antoinette Ruth (Toni) Isoard, born in about 1940.

The family lived mostly in California, first in San Francisco (1928), then Sacramento (from 1930-at least 1955). In September 1951, Lona and Max Isoard arrived back in New York from Le Havre, France, on board the SS Liberté.

A 1938 newspaper article reveals that Isoard was a well-known polo player: “Among the players in the first game, will be Mrs. Lona Isoard, prominent in state polo circles.”

Lona Isoard: Still Life with Fruit. (ca 1972)

Lona Isoard: Fruit Still Life (ca 1972)

By all accounts, Lona Mae Isoard was quite an eccentric character. The late Tom Faloon commented to me that she was a “nutty lady”, adding that her sister and brother-in-law also lived in Ajijic. Katie Goodridge Ingram, former gallery owner, remembers that Lona lived at one time in the small, lakeside cottage belonging to “Russian” dancer Zara. (This cottage later became known as “Iona’s cottage”, taking its name from another eccentric American, a former teacher and world traveler, Iona Kupiec, who lived there from 1962).

In 1966, Lona Isoard remodeled a home in Ajijic at Calle Independencia #39 for herself, and an adjoining home, sharing the same street address, was occupied by her younger sister, Henrietta (and her husband, Herbert B. Phillips).

The following year, Lona spent three months visiting her daughter in California, where the two women acted together on stage in Oakland, California, in April 1967 in a production of the farce Botheration.

Isoard was active in the local Ajijic art scene and occasionally exhibited. For example, her work was included in the May 1971 group show, “Fiesta of Art”, held at the private home of Mr and Mrs E. D. Windham, Calle 16 de Septiembre #33, Ajijic. (The other artists involved were Daphne Aluta; Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; 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; 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.)

Lona showed a self portrait in the TLAC (Todos las artes combinados) show at Posada Ajijic in April 1978.

An example of Isoard’s work, a still life of fruit, was included (along with works by many of the other artists in the 1971 group show) in A Cookbook with Color Reproductions by Artists from the Galería (Guadalajara, Mexico: Boutique d’Artes Gráficas, 1972).

Note: This is a revised version of a post first published 28 January 2016.

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.

For more about the extraordinary history of the art community in Ajijic, please see the relevant chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village (2022).

Sources

Daily News (California), 2 Jun 1926, 15.
Guadalajara Reporter: 25 June 1966; 2 July 1966; 4 Feb 1967; 8 April 1978, 19.
Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California), 8 April 1967.
Santa Cruz Evening News, 14 May 1938, 2.
The Sacramento Bee, 31 Oct 1957, 18.

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

Prolific American author Robert Lewis Taylor lived in Ajijic in the 1970s

1950s, 1960s, 1970s No Responses »

Feb 162023

Robert Lewis Taylor (1912-1998) worked as a journalist on the St Louis Post-Dispatch before joining the staff of the New Yorker magazine. He wrote numerous books in a productive literary career which spanned four decades and included a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his novel The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, a novel about the travails of a 14-year-old boy and his father during the 1849 California gold rush.

Taylor was a frequent visitor to Ajijic from about 1973, and kept a home there (“Casa Sastre”) until at least 1978. Bill Atkinson, a longtime Chapala resident who knew Taylor, once proudly showed me the copy Taylor had given him of his biography of W. C. Fields, with a personal inscription dated 1974.

During his time in Ajijic, Taylor focused on writing books. Interviewed by a journalist in 1978, Taylor, then 65 years old, explained that he preferred research (“digging is such good fun”) to writing, and that he had devoted the past five or six years to writing books:

Every morning I get up at 5:30 a.m. and, oozing pain from every pore, I drink some coffee and then I start writing and keep it up until about 1 p.m. without leaving my desk.

At our home in Ajijic, Mexico (he and his wife also have homes in Connecticut and Florida which they use frequently) I’ve got the housekeeper trained to keep people away from me. She’s marvelous! When she’s there no one gets to see me before I’m through working.”

In the afternoons he relaxed by playing tennis, swimming, lifting barbells and shooting pool.

Adapted for TV, 1963

Robert Lewis Taylor, was born in Carbondale, Illinois on 24 September 1912. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign he worked at the Carbondale Herald and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for three years and had articles published in the Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. Taylor joined the New Yorker in 1939 and continued to write for the magazine until 1961, even submitting copy during the years he served in the Navy (1942-1946). He married Judith Martin in 1945.

None of Taylor’s writing was specifically about Mexico, though two of his novels do relate to Mexico as it was in the early nineteenth century. A Journey to Matecumbe (1961), the story of a boy on a journey from Illinois to the Florida Keys, was adapted in 1976 as the Disney movie Treasure of Matecumbe. Two Roads to Guadalupe (1964) recounts the adventures of two brothers who served with Alexander Doniphan’s Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Taylor’s other published books include: Adrift in a Boneyard (1947), Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief (1948), W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (1949), The Running Pianist (1950), Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness (1952), The Bright Sands (1954), Center Ring: The People of the Circus (956), Vessels of Wrath: The Life and Times of Carry Nation (1966), A Roaring in the Wind: Being a History of Alder Gulch, Montana (1977), and Niagara (1980).

His obituary in the New York Times remembered him in his prime “as tall and good-looking, a brilliant comic writer and sharply—some say caustically—witty.”

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 literary and artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

Barbara Stewart. 1998. “Robert Lewis Taylor Is Dead, Novelist and Biographer, 88.” (obituary). New York Times, 4 October 1998.
Brownsville Herald: 4 November 1976.
Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek): 19 February 1978, 35.
Michael Hargraves. 1992. Lake Chapala: A literary survey; plus an historical overview with some personal observations and reflections of this lakeside area of Jalisco, Mexico. Los Angeles: Michael Hargraves.

British artists Richard and Nancy Carline painted Ajijic in the 1960s and 1970s

1960s, 1970s No Responses »

Feb 092023

Talented British artists Richard and Nancy Carline never lived in Ajijic, but did visit friends in the village more than once and completed several paintings of the area.

Richard Cotton Carline (1896-1980) was born in Oxford to a family of painters. After studying in Paris, and doing some teaching, he working on developing camouflage designs for the military before serving on the Western Front and in the Middle East as an Official War Artist during the first world war. During the second world war, Carline wrote the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s official report on industrial and aircraft camouflage; his work on camouflage projects was highlighted in a 2016 exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum. The quality of his work as war artist and camouflage expert is almost unparalleled.

Richard Carline. Carrying burdens in Mexico. Credit: Christie’s.

In the interwar period, Carline taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford and held his first solo show at the Goupil Gallery in 1931. He was an active member of the AIA (Artists’ International Association) and, according to Mexican art critic Justino Fernández [1], spent eight months in Mexico in 1936. The more commonly repeated version is that Carline visited the USA and Mexico in 1937-1938, where he was impressed by both the value of public murals and the value of encouraging them via such programs as the Federal Art Project.

In the early 1940s, on behalf of the AIA (Artists’ International Association), Carline lobbied for the UK to have a public mural program, based on those in Mexico and the US, as a way of enabling artists to contribute to the war effort. Sadly, the AIA’s efforts met with only limited success, but did not deter Carline from establishing a National Mural Council in 1943 to promote the commissioning of murals by industry. Three years later, Carline was chosen as the first Art Counsellor of UNESCO.

Richard Carline. Ajijic after rain. Credit: Canterbury Actions

Richard Carline. 1975. Ajijic after rain. Credit: Canterbury Auctions

Carline was an aficionado of picture postcards and wrote Pictures in the Post: Story of the Picture Postcard and Its Place in the History of Popular Art, first published in 1959. He also wrote The Arts of West Africa (1935), Draw they Must (1968) and Stanley Spencer at War (1978).

See Richard Carline’s Wikipedia entry for a more complete biography.

Richard and Nancy Carline married in 1950 and had two children, one of whom (Herminone) is also a professional artist.

Nancy Mona Carline (née Higgins) (1909-2004) trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and then worked at the Sadlers Wells Ballet, where she met Vladimir Polunin, who encouraged her to return to the Slade and take the course he was teaching in stage design.

See Nancy Carline’s Wikipedia entry for a more complete biography:

Nancy Carline was an ardent advocate of art education and exhibited regularly, including in shows arranged by the Royal Academy, the London Group, the New English Art Club, the Artists’ International Association, and the Wildenstein Gallery. A retrospective of her life’s work was held at the Camden Arts Centre in 1980.

Nancy Carline. Ajijic. Credit: Canterbury Actions

Nancy Carline. Ajijic. Credit: Canterbury Auctions

Though the details of Richard Carline’s first trips to Mexico remain unclear, his later visits, accompanied by wife Nancy, were to visit Laura and Jack Bateman and their children in Ajijic. Laura Bateman ran an art gallery in Ajijic for many years. How the two couples first met each other is unclear, but they became firm friends. Based on the dates of paintings of Lake Chapala completed by the Carlines, they visited Mexico in 1967 and 1975, and perhaps on other occasions as well. Shortly after their 1975 trip, Richard Carline wrote to German artist Dr. Frederick Solomon (1899-1980) in New Hampshire explaining that he had returned to Lake Chapala because he “found it so fruitful for painting.” But, because they had bought a reduced fare ticket, “we did not have very long in Mexico – but by going to paint we can deduct this as an expense of artists from income tax.”

Nancy Carline. 1975. Mexico (Ajijic). Credit: Canterbury Auctions

Paintings by both artists were sold by the Canterbury Auction Galleries in the UK in 2020. Richard’s “After Rain Ajijic Mexico 1967” had a pencil inscription stating it had been exhibited at the London Group in 1968/9. Two Lake Chapala-related paintings by Nancy were in the same auction: “Ajijic Mexico Lake Chapala”, and “Mexico” (which had “Ajijic” and “1975″ written on the back).

The Carlines’ close friendship with the Bateman family had another very significant link to the Lake Chapala art world. The Bateman’s eldest daughter, Alice, after attending a village school in Ajijic, studied art for a year at the University of Guadalajara in 1963. The following year Alice lived with the Carlines in London, when she moved to the UK to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design). Alice Bateman, who later also studied sculpting in Italy, lives in Texas and has enjoyed a stellar career as a sculptor.

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.

Reference

[1] Justino Fernández. 1969. Catálogo de las Exposiciones de Arte en el año 1968. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.

Feliciano Bejar and his marvellous magicscopes

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s No Responses »

Jan 122023

Of all the notable artists associated with Lake Chapala, the one who made the most waves in international art circles in the latter part of the twentieth century was Feliciano Béjar.

Feliciano (‘Chano’) Béjar was born on 14 July 1920 in Jiquilpan, Michoacán. Jiquilpan had been in close proximity to Lake Chapala for centuries until the eastern third of the lake was drained for agriculture a decade before Béjar was born.

A self-taught artist, who overcame polio as a child, Béjar was revered for his inspired sculptures, painting and weaving. His most famous series of works, dubbed ‘magiscopes,’ imaginatively combined glass with metals, plastics and other recycled materials; they stimulate viewers awareness of the unlimited power of the human eye to see and interpret abstract sculptures.

Feliciano Bejar. Boat seller.

Béjar attended the Colegio Salesiano of Guadalajara (1932-1934) and his childhood interest in art was stimulated by meeting José Clemente Orozco when that great artist was painting his remarkable murals in Jiquilpan in 1940.

There is little point in me rehashing all the details of Béjar’s life, which are readily available online, including in this Wikipedia article.

If it had not been for serendipity, Béjar might never have become an acclaimed artist. He had traveled widely in Mexico before leaving for New York in 1945 to work, paint and buy himself a Chevrolet. Béjar painted during the day and worked nights in a department store.

Feliciano Bejar. Posada del niño

In 1947 he left some paintings at a frame shop which, by chance, was patronized by gallery owner Ward Eggleston. Helped by Nathaniel Coleman and his wife, a wealthy art-loving couple who had struck up a friendship with Béjar in the department store, Eggleston made arrangements to hold a solo show of Béjar’s work at his gallery the following year.

Meanwhile, Béjar had bought a car (despite not knowing how to drive) and persuaded a friend to drive him and the car back to Jiquilpan. Shortly after their safe arrival, his friend borrowed the vehicle to visit his own family; unfortunately he then totaled the automobile in an accident.

Béjar returned to New York for his solo show, the first of several he would hold at the Ward Eggleston Galleries. Nathaniel Coleman remained his chief promoter and sponsor; he purchased some two hundred of Béjar’s works over the years; the terms of his will meant that more than half of them eventually returned to the artist.

Feliciano Bejar.Sunset at Lake Chapala

According to a contemporary review of the first New York show, at the Ward Eggleston Galleries in 1948:

“It was difficult to leave the Ward Eggleston Galleries after viewing the paintings of Chano Bejar without being haunted long afterwards by the pinks and yellows and greens in his “Fiery Horse,” a dream creature out of Mexican Indian mythology who flamed and quivered with motion that threatened to shatter the very canvas which held him.”

Béjar’s art remained unrecognized in Mexico, until after he was sponsored by UNESCO to travel to Europe in 1949 for a group show of Latin-American artists which included several of his works. On his return, the Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales took a keen interest and arranged several shows over the next few years. A retrospective exhibit of his works in Los Angeles in 1956 was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. These shows helped establish Béjar’s reputation and resulted in dozens more solo shows. UNESCO produced a film in 1964, “The world of Feliciano Béjar,” and Béjar’s work featured in the Mexican pavilion at the New York World Fair in 1965. During his long artistic career, Béjar held more than 150 solo shows in Mexico, the US and Europe.

Two early Chapala-related paintings deserve a special mention. Béjar’s solo show at the Galeria José María Velasco in Mexico City in 1962 included “Tuxcueca.” Completed in 1947, this painting of a humble village on the south shore of Lake Chapala is probably the only time the village has ever been painted by a major artist. A second 1947 oil on canvas was included in Béjar’s 1965 show at Galeria Mer-kup, also in Mexico City: it was titled ‘Chapala.’

Feliciano Bejar. Three magiscopes.

Magiscopes were first shown in 1966 at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and at Mappin Art Gallery in London, UK. Inspired by childhood toys and games, Béjar’s magiscopios are somewhat reminiscent of Renaissance clocks, astrolobes and other scientific instruments, coupled with the visual allure of kaleidoscopes.

During this highly productive period of his life, Béjar also prepared designs for several European ceramics makers, including Spode, and designed stage sets. The artist held strong opinions about all manner of social and environmental concerns, and shared them via a weekly column in the 1980s in Mexico City daily El Universal.

Francisco Béjar, one of the more remarkable self-taught artists to emerge in Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century, died in Mexico City on 1 February 2007. His work continues to be highly sought after by collectors.

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

Modern Mexico: March-April 1949 (Vol 22 #2); July-August 1950 (Vol 23 #4)
Justino Fernández. (multiple years) Catálogos de las Exposiciones de Arte, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.

Did Bert Pumphrey, whose art is highly collectible, ever live at Lake Chapala?

1950s, 1970s, 1980s No Responses »

Dec 292022

Despite several popular art sites listing Bert Pumphrey’s exhibitions as including three in Ajijic, I have yet to find any details for them. Pumphrey’s distinctive work is so highly collectible, that he would certainly deserve a place among the Lakeside greats (and in the Ajijic Museum of Art) if his association with Lake Chapala can be proven.

The three exhibitions listed for Bert Pumphrey in Ajijic are:

La Nueva Posada, Art Shows in the Garden, 1955
Casa de la Cultura, Ajijic, Plaza Principal 1978
Galeria AXIXICC, Ajijic, 1985

The 1955 entry clearly cannot be correct. Either this was an exhibit in the (Old) Posada Ajijic, or the year is inaccurate and it should be 1995. Either way, I have found no confirming evidence anywhere for this or the other two shows. If you can help, please get in touch!

Despite drawing a blank as regards the Ajijic exhibitions, my search for answers has enabled me to compile a more accurate account of Pumphrey’s life and work than those currently available on the web.

Bert Pumphrey. Undated. Un militar.

Bertrem (Bert) Pumphrey was born in Welby, Salt Lake City, Utah, on 30 January 1916. After graduating from Provo High School in 1936, Pumphrey took classes for a year at the Chicago Art Institute. From 1937 to 1941, he studied on a scholarship at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he was strongly influenced by Henry Lee McFee and Tom Craig

At the second annual exhibit of Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity (organized by Los Angeles County Museum) in 1941, Pumphrey’s painting “Rainy Season” and a work by famous Japanese-American modernist Sueo Serisawa received honorable mentions for painting.

In 1940, while still a student, Pumphrey had registered for military service, and after completing his studies the following year he enlisted in the army. He served as a surgical technician in the Army Medical Corps in Asia and the Far East

His first major group show after the war was at the Los Angeles Art Association in 1946, in a collective exhibition titled “They Have Returned,” with one critic writing that “Bertram Pumphrey’s oils of India convey that land’s rich decoration and vegetation and the accompanying poverty.”

Later that year in September Pumphrey held his first solo show (of 47 oil paintings) at the prestigious Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

In 1947, Pumphrey had the first of at least two solo shows at the American Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles. His 22 canvases were described by Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier as “rich in color and human interest.” Millier also recorded that Pumphrey had “recently worked” with Tom Craig on a large mural or murals at the San Antonio Hospital, Claremont, and had completed a large 40′ by 12′ mural commission in a private Hollywood home.

In 1947-1948 Pumphrey taught art part-time at the Art Barn School of Arts in Salt Lake City, giving himself ample time to develop his own art while still having a reliable income.

Bert Pumphrey. Undated. Hasidic Rabbis Dancing.

Pumphrey moved to Mexico in 1948, and exhibited relatively infrequently in the US after that date, though he retained links with California, giving classes and participating in group shows in Lafayette and Oakland in 1954. By this time he had married Isabel. The couple apparently kept homes in both Tlalpan, a suburb of Mexico City and in California, dividing their time between the two places. Isabel became a naturalized US citizen in 1984 on her 54th birthday.

In 1955, Pumphrey painted murals depicting typical scenes from Bavarian villages on the walls of Sam’s Hof Brau in the historic Kost building in Sacramento. Four years later, he completed a large mural for the Seagulll Motel in Salt Lake City, assisted by his twin brother, Joe, who was also an artist.

His first major solo show in Mexico was at the Galería Pemex in Mexico City in January 1960. It included 106 works, in a variety of media, from oils on masonite and linoleum to watercolors and ink drawings, and of varied subjects, demonstrating the artist’s impressive versatility.

Pumphrey’s smaller solo show the following year at the Mexican-Northamerican Cultural Institute in Mexico City featured 19 oils and 17 watercolors; it included a self portrait alongside animal, coastal and jungle studies.

Pumphrey’s techniques and preferences changed markedly over the years. In 1971, the Oakland Museum showed a short film “Bert Pumphrey, Pleasanton Artist,” which depicted how Pumphrey liked to paint: using palette knives, including some of his own design, to cut through successive layers of paint to achieve the color, texture and form he wanted. (This technique was similar to that used for traditional lacquer work in Mexico). For these paintings, Pumphrey worked on masonite, rather than canvas, and on a table, rather than an easel.

Bert Pumphrey. 1969.

Pumphrey completed murals for several public buildings, clubs, churches and private homes in Mexico (presumably mainly in 1950s), as well as murals in the Kost building, Sacramento (1955) and the Seagull Motel, Salt Lake City (1959).

Bert Pumphreys’s confirmed group shows include Los Angeles Art Association (1946, 1947); Chaffey, Ontario, California (1947); Biblioteca Cervantes, Mexico City (1952); Artists’ Market, Oakland, California (1954) and Valley Art Center, Contra Costa, California (1955).

In addition to the three possible shows in Ajijic and one (also unconfirmed) in the Virgin Islands, Pumphrey’s solo shows included Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (1946); American Contemporary Gallery, Los Angeles (1947, 1948); Palette Club, Salt Lake City (1947); Galería Pemex, Mexico City (1960); lnstituto Mexicano-Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales, Mexico City (1961); Little Gallery, Philadelphia (1967); Cory Gallery, San Francisco (1969); and La Cienega Gallery, Los Angeles (1971).

The artist spent his final years in South Pasadena, where he died on 20 June 2002.

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

Bingham Bulletin 12 Sep 1941, 5; 3 Sep 1954, 3
Contra Costa Gazette 11 Feb 1954, 5; 22 Jul 1955, 4
Contra Costa Times 25 Feb 1954, 5
Daily Herald 08 May 1936, 3
Justino Fernández. (a) 1953 (b) 1961 (c) 1962. Catálogos de las Exposiciones de Arte en los años 1952, 1960 and 1961. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.
Los Angeles Times 16 March 1941, 21; 16 March 1941, 21; 23 Mar 1941; 24 March 1946, 26; 6 Jul 1947, 26; 21 Sep 1947, 28; 04 Jul 1948, 45; 25 Jul 1971, 425
Oakland Tribune 14 Feb 1954, 91; 31 Jan 1971, 125
Pasadena Star-News. 2002. Bertrem Pumphrey (obituary). 29 June 2002.
Philadelphia Inquirer 04 Jun 1967, 141
Sacramento Bee 22 Jan 1955, 52
Salt Lake Tribune 02 Nov 1947, 64; 10 Aug 1947, 48; 14 Dec 1947, 72; 12 Jul 1959, 29; 18 Oct 1964, 78
San Francisco Examiner 29 Sep 1946, 135; 28 Dec 1969, 142

Renowned Japanese artist Masaharu Shimada found inspiration in San Antonio Tlayacapan

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards No Responses »

Dec 152022

Japanese artist Masaharu Shimada, who specializes in sumi-e pen and ink drawings and has held dozens of acclaimed exhibitions in Mexico and his native Japan, lived for several months each year in San Antonio Tlayacapan from 1986 onwards. His exquisite works include numerous evocative monochrome impressionist landscapes of Ajijic and San Antonio Tlayacapan.

Sumi-e, which means black ink painting, developed over several centuries in Japan, after Zen Buddhist monks from China first introduced their deceptively simple techniques and style back in the fourteenth century. Chinese ink is applied to paper using brushes traditionally made of hair, bamboo or feathers.

Born in Nakagyo, Kyoto, in 1931, Shimada graduated from the calligraphy department of Tokyo Gakugei University in 1953 before teaching himself the techniques of sumi-e. He held his first solo show of sumi-e at the Chuokoron-sha Gallery, Tokyo, in 1961.

Masaharu Shimada. 2000. Cerro y lago de Chulavista.

In 1967, he visited Mexico for the first time and stayed six months. Two years later, he produced his first book, México en Sumi-e, published by Mokuji-sha, Tokyo.

He returned to Mexico in 1970 and held a solo show at the University of Guanajuato. In 1972, during his third visit to Mexico, he had a one-person show in Valle de Bravo, in the State of México.

Over the next decade, he revisited Mexico almost every year, before deciding in 1986 to establish a seasonal home in San Antonio Tlayacapan on Lake Chapala.

Masaharu Shimada. 1999. Casa antigua de San Antonio Tlayacapan.

During the course of his long love affair with Mexico, Shimada has produced several more books, including México Pintado en Tinta China and Colección de Pinturas en San Antonio (both published by Editorial Work House, Tokyo) and México Pintado en Tinta China, published in 2003 by Editorial Artes Gráficas Panorama S.A. de C.V. in Mexico City.

Shimada’s major solo exhibitions in Mexico include: University of Guanajuato (1970); Valle de Bravo (1972); Museo Alhondiga de Granaditas, Guanajuato (1978); Galería Arvil, Mexico City (1977, 1979); Casa de Cultura, Guadalajara (1988); Instituto Cabañas, Guadalajara (1989); Museo Pueblo de Guanajuato (1980, 1983, 1988, 1995); Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora (1996); Televisa, Guadalajara (1998); Nikkei Cultural Center, Mexico City (1999); Museo Casa de Arte Olga Costa-José Chávez Morado, Guanajuato (2001); Yakult Cultural Center, Guadalajara (1994, 2002); and Galería Ramón Alva de la Canal, Xalapa, Veracruz (2016).

The 48 sumi-e works Shimada displayed at the last named show included Lago y casa de San Antonio Tlayacapan, Chapala, Jalisco (1995); Fantasía de árbol de nopal (1996); Nopales (1997); and Panorámica de Guanajuato (2000).

The catalog of images from this exhibition can be viewed on issuu.com.

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.

Post-1970 studies of the Ajijic retirement community

1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards No Responses »

Dec 082022

By the 1970s the Ajijic retirement community was sufficiently established that it attracted academic attention. The earliest study, never formally published, was by Dr Edwin G Flittie, a professor of sociology at the University of Wyoming. Flittie visited in 1973 and subsequently presented copies of “Retirement in the Sun,” his analysis of the retirement community, to the Lake Chapala Society Library. Like several later studies of foreign migrants, Flittie considered the Chapala-Ajijic region as a single unit, and not as two communities with their distinct histories as regards tourism and retirement. Flittie interviewed more than 100 retirees and found that many had failed to appreciate the substantial cultural differences between the US and Mexico, or recognized that the emphasis for many local residents was “not on material gain but rather on the attainment of a satisfying existence traditionally based upon agrarian economic self-sufficiency.”

Flittie estimated that about 60% of retirees were aged 60 to 74, and 14% were 75 or older. Very few were fluent in Spanish and 88% reported that their social life centered on fellow expatriates and other English-speaking individuals. Flittie found that most retirees lived much as they would have lived in the US. The main problems they faced were related to excessive drinking, marital and family discord (men adapted better than women), boredom, bribery, interactions with the local community, domestic help and old age. Flittie returned briefly in December 1977 to research the impacts of the massive 1976 devaluation of the peso from 12.5 pesos to a dollar to about 22.5 pesos to a dollar.

Juan José Medeles Romero, in his 1975 thesis proposing an urban development plan for Ajijic, detailed how the village had approximately tripled in size between 1900 and 1950, and then doubled in size the following decade. And this was even before the addition of numerous subdivisions such as Rancho del Oro and La Floresta. Curiously, Medeles ignored the impacts of foreigners and only mentioned them in passing.

A few years later, Mexican sociologist Francisco Talavera Salgado focused solely on Ajijic when, in Lago Chapala, turismo residencial y campesinado, he examined the varied impacts of foreign residents on the local community. His important findings are described in detail in several chapters of Foreign Footprints.

At the end of the 1970s anthropologist Eleanore Moran Stokes also homed in on Ajijic. She divided the evolution of the village after ‘Discovery’ into three phases: Founder (1940s to mid 1950s), Expansionary (mid 1950s to mid 1970s) and Established Colony (mid 1970s through the 1980s).

Several of her informants considered the representation of Ajijic in the Dane Chandos novels (Founder phase) to be non-fiction; to Stokes, this was “the local equivalent to a creation myth.” The nature of migrants changed in each stage. During the Founder phase, Ajijic served, in her view, largely as an artists’ colony. These “young single well-traveled” artists were resourceful and independent individuals who had little impact on the village beyond the employment of domestic help; most of them learned the language, liked the cuisine, and blended into the local community.

Later (Expansionary phase) arrivals tended to be members of the affluent and retired middle class, many of whom had traveled widely, either in the military or working for international corporations. These newer arrivals did materially change the village. By infusing cash into the local economy and starting businesses they created “a new wage labor class in the village.” By upgrading village homes they distinguished their residences from those of local families. By retaining their language, food and lifestyle preferences, these incomers established a social distance from their host community, even forming “privileged associations for recreation, friendship and religion.” In essence, many of these migrants wanted to make many aspects of life in Ajijic more like the US.

Such tendencies continued into the Established Colony phase. Vacant houses became increasingly scarce and agricultural land was parceled for vacation and retirement homes. The foreign community greatly boosted philanthropic activities, especially those helping children, though this stage also saw a marked social stratification develop within the foreign community.

Stokes estimated that foreigners occupied about 300 of the 950 houses in the village in 1979, but comprised less than 8% of the population. Like Talavera, she viewed retirees as agents of change, not merely spectators of ongoing social processes, though they felt a sense of powerlessness in regards to what they saw as deficiencies in the provision of such services as water, electricity, telephone, garbage collection and police.

Sociologist Charlotte Wolf, who moved to Ajijic with husband Rene in the early 1990s, was interested in how individual retirees adapted and constructed a new life for themselves in Ajijic.

Among the conclusions in 1997 of Lorena Melton Young Otero, who looked specifically at US retirees, was that they created new jobs, donated to charities and hastened “modernization,” but that their presence was driving up the cost of living for local people. In a later paper, she examined in detail the mourning ritual and other customs in Ajijic following the death of a child (angelito).

The evolutionary framework developed by Stokes was used by geographer David Truly to examine how the type of migrant has changed over the years and to develop a matrix of retirement migration behavior. Like Stokes, Truly concluded in 2002 that newer visitors (including retirees), and unlike earlier migrants, had less desire to adapt to the local culture and were more keen on ‘importing a lifestyle’ to the area.

Stephen Banks, author of Kokio: A Novel Based on the Life of Neill James, conducted dozens of interviews to study the identity narratives of retirees while living in Ajijic in 2002-2003. All respondents depicted Mexicans, both generally and individually, as “happy, warm and friendly, polite and courteous, helpful and resourceful.” However, at the same time, many shared instances in which they thought Mexicans had been untrustworthy, inaccessible, lazy and incompetent. Banks concluded that the responses revealed:

a struggle to conserve cultural identities in the face of a resistant host culture that has been colonized…. The Lakeside economy is dominated by expatriate consumer demand; indigenous commerce in fishing has disappeared as new employment opportunities opened up in the services sector; local prices for real estate (routinely listed in US dollars), restaurant dining, hotel lodging and most consumer goods are higher than in comparable non-retirement areas; traditional Mexican community life centered around the family has been supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, by expatriate community life centered around public assistance and volunteer programs… and the uniform use of Spanish in public life is displaced by the use of English.”

Lucía González Terreros is the lead author of two recent papers that explore the complexity of defining residential tourism and how alternative definitions relate to property rights, transaction costs and common goods. The research arose from her personal concerns about the rapid increase in the number of foreigners in Ajijic since 1990.

Equally interesting is the work of Francisco Díaz Copado, who looked at how Ajijic is being shaped by both local and foreign “rituals,” such as the annual Fiesta of San Andrés and the Chili Cookoff respectively. In his 2013 report, Díaz Copado also examined “the different ways in which people describe and name the different zones of Ajijic… [which] reflect some historical conflicts.” Two annotated maps sharply contrast traditional locations and names with those used by retirees.

Marisa Raditsch investigated the impacts of international migrants settling in the municipality of Chapala “based on the perceptions of Mexican people in the receiving context.” This 2015 study found that these perceptions tended “to be favorable in terms of generating employment and contributing to the community; and unfavorable in terms of rising costs of living and some changes in local culture.”

Social anthropologist Vaira Avota, writing in 2016, also looked at the relations between foreigners and locals in Ajijic. She drew a sharp distinction between “traditional immigrants,” who wanted to truly understand Mexico’s culture, traditions,… [learn] Spanish and willingly participate in local activities,” and “new immigrants,” who wanted to live in a version of the US transplanted to Lake Chapala.

The impacts of this shift in migrant type were further explored by Mexican researcher Mariana Ceja Bojorge, who focused squarely on the relationships and interactions between local Ajijitecos and foreigners. She concluded in 2021 that the shift “endangers the acceptance of the presence of the other” and that “Although the presence of foreigners has generated economic well-being in the area, it has also been responsible for the reconfiguration of space, where locals have been forced to leave their territory.”

This is a lightly edited excerpt from the concluding chapter of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village, which offers a comprehensive history of Ajijic including full bibliographic details of all the studies mentioned.

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.

Norman D Ford on how Ajijic changed between 1950 and 1970

1960s, 1970s No Responses »

Nov 102022

Inveterate world traveler Norman D Ford (1921-2009) described Lake Chapala and Ajijic in several of his books, including in Bargain Paradises of the World (1952). By 1970, he had decided that Lake Chapala was “no longer the cheapest place in Mexico. Since 1950, about 1,500 American couples have moved into its two dreamy villages of Chapala and Ajijic. Prices have inevitably risen. But building costs still average only $4 per square foot, and you can hire a maid for $12 or a cook for $16 a month.”

“You can have a modern home built for under $5,000…. For two, you can budget about $70 for food and $30 for utilities and your maid per month. The rest is for high living–golf, riding or swimming by day, followed by some of the most fabulous parties on this continent.”

Ford was born in the UK on 8 January 1921, the only child of Frederick William John Matthew and Jessie Shortland Ford. He grew up in Wales, and became a lifelong adventurer, especially keen on cycling, hiking and kayaking. During six years service as a radio operator in the Merchant Navy during the second world war, Ford traveled as far as the U.S., Sri Lanka and New Zealand.

A few days after the war ended, Ford declared himself president of the Globetrotters Club, a then loose-knit organization which produced “a monthly newsletter describing how to travel the world at rock bottom cost, plus a list of other members.” This helped popularize low budget adventure travel to all manner of unlikely destinations.

In early 1947 he moved permanently to the US where he worked as an editor and began to write travel and retirement books, starting with Where to Retire on a Small Income (1950). The success of this book, and several later books, enabled Ford to quit his day job, move to Florida, and focus on freelance writing. By 1980 travel writing had become increasingly competitive, so Ford moved to Boulder, Colorado, and switched to writing popular books about health issues. He spent the last years of his life in Kerville, Texas, where he died on 19 June 2009 at the age of 88.

Ford wrote a more detailed account of Ajijic in Fabulous Mexico where everything costs less. The following excerpts are from the 10th edition (1970).

AJIJIC. Alt 5,030′, pop 3,500. An ancient Tarascan fishing village, Ajijic nestles on the lush shores of Lake Chapala beneath a steep, green and aesthetically contoured mountain range…. You notice the neat, trim plaza with its well painted bandstand, the picturesque fishing nets strung along the shore. What lies behind those bare adobe walls? Inside are white patios lush with flowers, well equipped art studios and the comfortable homes and apartments of Ajijic’s 300 permanent American residents.”

Ford summarizes how foreigners ‘discovered’ Ajijic and began to change it:

Years ago, a retired British engineer seeking a Utopia discovered this garden spot and built himself an impressive lakeshore home fronted by an acre of color-splashed blooms. After World War II, veterans studying in Guadalajara found they could live well here on their G.I. Bill payments. Artists moved in, led by several well known modern painters. Several writers and musicians followed together with a group of enterprising ladies who reorganized Ajijic’s dwindling handlooms crafts into a thriving industry. With a few exceptions, this group still forms Ajijic’s Old Guard. Getting in early, they bought up the choicest lots and homes, secured long term leases on the lowest rentals and today, most of these old timers offer outstanding examples of the way in which the good life can be enjoyed in Mexico on little.”

Ford explains that while some of these incomers were still paying “fantastically low rents” [$7.50 to $15.00 a month] “and living well on very small budgets,” some were “constructing lavish homes costing up to $14,000 and $15,000. New homes are sprouting all around the village and to the west, ultra modern homes are studding a new hillside subdivision.”

He concluded that “Ajijic today is a slightly raffish, slightly bohemian rustic village where retirees outnumber the artists five to one.” The foreign community was changing: “Ajijic is still no place for suburban conformists but neither is its nonconformity disquieting. Drinks and gossip are still favorite pastimes but criticism today centers on the unstable electricity, the water supply which sometimes runs dry in May, and the water hyacinths which clog the lake rather than on eccentric people.”

Besides writing about Mexico, Ford wrote dozens of other books, including Florida: A Complete Guide to Finding What You Seek in Florida (1953); How to travel without being rich (1955); America’s 50 best cities in which to live, work, and retire (1956); America by car : planned routings to all that’s worth seeing (1957); Where to retire on a small income (1966); Good night : the easy and natural way to sleep the whole night through (1983); Keep on pedaling : the complete guide to adult bicycling (1990); 50 Healthiest Places to Live & Retire in the United States (1991); The sleep Rx: 75 proven ways to get a good night’s sleep (1994); and Natural remedies: techniques for preventing headaches and the common cold (1994).

When Ford looked back on his varied experiences on several continents, including cycling trips in 38 countries, he concluded that:

travel half a century ago was much more rewarding and much more fun…. Overall, the world was much safer then with far less risk of being robbed or mugged. In fact, every year since 1945 I’ve witnessed a world-wide deterioration in the quality of life and the quality of the travel experience. Each year, more Coca-Cola signs appear and almost every country is rapidly losing its national character while it fuses into a faceless industrial monoculture.”

That is so true! The world has changed, and is continuing to change, though not always for the better.
Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village (2022) explains the changes that have taken place in Ajijic since 1940 in far more detail.

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Sources

Steve O’Rourke. 2022. “Norman D. Ford, 1921-2009: Avid Bicycle Tourist and Inspirations.”
Kerrville Funeral Home. 2009. Norman D. Ford (obituary) .
Norman D Ford. 1952. Bargain paradises of the world.
Norman D Ford. 1964. Fabulous Mexico where everything costs less. (Tenth edition, 1970)
Norman D Ford. Undated. The Foundation of the Globetrotters Club.

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