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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, in the worst case scenario?

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

Sources

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

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

Tony Burton

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

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