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The Chapala Profile: Lake Chapala’s first English language newspaper?

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

Sep 252025

English-language newspapers at Lake Chapala may have a longer history than I thought. At the time I wrote about the Chapala Blade, I was fairly sure that that short-lived tabloid from the early 1960s was likely to be the earliest local periodical ever published at Lake Chapala. But, by an amazing coincidence, I recently stumbled across a one-line reference to an even earlier newspaper, The Chapala Profile.

This was in a 1967 article about a Mr Joseph Forcheaux, then 38 years of age, who was combining a career as a minister with living a full-time carnival life. Forcheaux explained to the journalist interviewing him that, finding himself in Mexico, and wanting his ministry to reach a wider audience, “he founded, edited and published his own newspaper in Mexico…. In 1960 he began the Chapala, Jalisco, Profile, which was the only English language newspaper in the Mexico state of Jalisco.” The Chapala Profile was a weekly paper, “entirely hand set by Mexicans who didn’t speak English,” and that when he decided to leave Mexico and return to the U.S., he “sold the paper to a retired army master sergeant in 1963.”

Headline in The Globe, 5 Aug 1967, 11.

Whether or not this is entirely accurate is unclear. I’ve been unable to locate any corroborating evidence, and a quick dive into Forcheaux’s life suggests that he often lived on the edge and may sometimes have stretched the truth.

Joseph George Forcheaux was born in 1929 in the Bronx, New York. After graduating from Haaran High School, he served with the U.S. Army in Japan and Korea (1948-1952). In Japan he helped found the Okinawa Boys Scouts organization, which had 1200 members by 1950. But in 1951 he was one of several men the draft board was reportedly trying to locate.

Only a few months after marrying Betty Jane Baumgardner (1931–2001) in April 1952, Forcheaux was arrested by Salinas police on an AWOL charge. He then began taking classes, under the G.I. Bill, at Pasasdena City College in California, where he majored in juvenile psychology.

Excerpt from 1967 article about Forcheaux

In 1955 he was arrested and detained for driving a stolen car. In 1956 he started traveling with carnivals. But in 1957, Forcheaux turns up in Canada, where he was released from Toronto’s Don Jail in October with 37 cents and a seven-day notice to leave Canada. He appealed the decision on the grounds that he couldn’t “return to the United States, the land of his birth, having forfeited U.S. citizenship by joining the Canadian Army without U.S. permission.”

From 1958 to 1959, Forcheaux was apparently in Central America, before moving to Mexico in about 1960, where he started The Chapala Profile.

According to the 1967 article about him, Forcheaux returned to the Universal Church of God in Los Angeles every winter, to study theology in a small seminary of 11 brothers. He became a minister and started the House of Mercy, a rehabilitation center there for alcoholics and drug addicts.

Joseph Forcheaux died at age 81 on 10 December 2010. I think he might have had some great stories to share if only I’d heard about him sooner!

A brief history of English-language periodicals related to Lake Chapala

The two longest-running English-language periodicals reporting on events at Lake Chapala are The Guadalajara Reporter and El Ojo del Lago. The first issue of the weekly Guadalajara Reporter (formerly The Colony Reporter) left the presses in December 1963. Over the years a series of fine correspondents ensured good quality Lakeside content. They included Anita Lomax (1915–1987), a Texan who arrived in Ajijic in 1956 and started her column in 1964; Joe Weston; Beverly Hunt, who with her husband, Allyn, purchased the paper in 1975); Joan Frost; Ruth Netherton; Ruth Ross-Merrimer, Tim Hogan; Merry Barrickman; Teresa Kendrick; Jeanne Chaussee; and last—but certainly not least—the incomparable Dale Hoyt Palfrey, whose grandparents had lived at Lake Chapala in the early 1950s, and who moved to Ajijic (with her late husband Wayne) more than fifty years ago.

El Ojo del Lago, a free monthly, started in September 1984. Published by Richard Tingen, at the instigation of Cody and June Nay Summers, Diane Murray was its first editor. Tod Johnson was appointed editor-in-chief in 1988, when the publication organized its first annual El Ojo del Lago Awards Show. In 1992, award-winning writer Rosamaría Casas, recently retired from the Mexican Foreign Service, took over as editor; she was succeeded by Hollywood screenwriter Alejandro Grattan-Domínguez at the end of 1994.

Other relatively short-lived English-language publications over the years have included the Chapala Riviera Guide (1989–1993), edited by Jorge Romo, and the Lake Chapala Review (1999–2014), founded by Helyn Bercovitch, and edited by Darryl Tenenbaum and Judy King.

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Sources

The Globe (Worthington, Minnesota). 1967. “Joseph Forcheaux,” The Globe, 5 August 1967, 11.
Guadalajara Reporter: 25 February 1967, 10; 25 November 1978, 17.
Dale Hoyt Palfrey. 1994. “In the beginning were the words.” El Ojo del Lago, September 1994.
The Kalamazoo Gazette: 12 Jan 1950, 32.
The Miami Herald: 30 Sep 1951, 19; 12 Dec 1964, 6.
The Californian: 23 Aug 1952, 2,
Tallahassee Democrat: 27 Jan 1955, 2.
The Standard (Toronto): 26 Oct 1957, 2.

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

Jack Bailey on Jocotepec, Chapala, Chula Vista and Ajijic in the 1960s

Other No Responses »

Aug 142025

Nebraska-based photographer and journalist Jack Bailey (1901-1977) made numerous trips to Mexico in the course of his career. An article he wrote in 1964, while visiting friends in Guadalajara, is the only currently known mention of an obscure and (perhaps mercifully) long forgotten publication named the Chapala Blade.

In several articles, Bailey included detailed descriptions of many other aspects of life at Lake Chapala. The titles of the articles are, in themselves, a giveaway of Bailey’s prime focus: they include “American Colony Grows At Lake Chapala: Beautiful Monotony,” “Haven for Retired Americans,” “A Most Delightful Setting – Holiday Paradise Called Chapala,” and “An American Colony Has Sprung Up on the Shores of Lake Chapala.”

Strangely, however, almost all the photographs illustrating these articles are of other parts of Mexico, not Lake Chapala. The prime exception is this image of a modern residence in Chula Vista.

Credit: The Grand Island Independent, 11 Mar 1965, p12.

Reporter-photographer and businessman Jack Bailey was born in Denver, Colorado, on 27 April 1901, and died, following a heart attack, on 20 February 1977, while attending an Arizona State Photographers’ meeting at the Grand Canyon. He began his newspaper career on the Kansas City Journal and the Omaha Bee News before moving to Grand Island, Nebraska, in 1930 to work for the Grand Island Independent, where he went from reporter and feature writer to wire editor and, from 1950, the paper’s first “roving reporter.”

Alongside his journalistic work, Bailey opened his own photographic studio in Grand Island in 1941, and developed other business interests. Bailey and his wife, Bobbie Wasson, visited Europe in 1960 for six months. In January 1963, Bailey announced plans to spend several months in Mexico, saying that, while they had been south of the border several times before, they wanted to explore more: “This time we will seek out more of the quaint, unusual places which the average tourist misses.”

Their provisional itinerary included Querétaro, Veracruz, Acapulco, Taxco, Pátzcuaro, Morelia, Uruapan, Jocotepec, Ajijic, Chapala, Guadalajara, San Blas and Mazatlán.

Bailey’s first article about the Lake Chapala area, datelined Jocotepec, was published in March 1963, while he was staying at Granja Azul, which he describes as “one of those quaint motels which few Americans find because it is off the beaten track. Only one person speaks English and she is an elderly lady who learned when she was a child and never forgot.” The Granja Azul cost 110 pesos ($8.oo) a day per couple, including three meals!

Bailey revisited the area for extended visits the following two years. Here are a selection of excerpts from his various articles related to the area:

Sailboats seem to float lazily on the smooth blue waters while fishermen in row boats appear almost dormant as they wait for their nets to fill with the white fish for which the lake is famous…. [around Lake Chapala] hundreds of Americans have come to build their homes, remodel Mexican adobe huts and spend the rest of their lives. Faces of Americans are almost as common as those of Mexicans in this condensed section of Mexico.”

In Jocotepec, at the weekly Sunday paseo (serenade), “The boys and girls team up by twos and threes and walk around the plaza in opposite directions eyeing one another as they go. The parents fill the benches on the sidelines and watch their children seek a boy or girl who may later become an in-law.”

Ajijic

Ajijic “is strictly an Indian village with adobe block homes and cobblestone streets…. Years ago it became a gathering place for writers, artists seeking refuge from the outside world. Many of these have since left and now it is regaining its previous charm. There is one writer who remained, however, and she has created a square block wilderness of beauty where she lives, writes and has a tourist shop…. Her name is Neal [Neill] James and she has written a number of books.”

Bailey considered her home, with its “huge murals painted on some of the walls”, and her yard (open to the public), which was a jungle of bananas, papayas and many other unusual trees and shrubs, “well worth driving miles out of your way to see.”

Bailey had a word of caution for anyone thinking of moving to Ajijic:

[Many Americans] must drown their loneliness – which they refuse to admit – with drink…. Once one drives through the village of Ajijic he will understand why. The Americano’s home–a beautiful structure-is surrounded on all sides by the small drab nondescript homes of the natives who live on a few hundred pesos a year. The adobe huts are depressing and no matter in which direction the Americano looks he sees poverty while by comparison he is living in the lap of luxury…. It is depressing to say the least. And the sad part about it is promoters are luring retired Americans to come here and live.”

Chula Vista

In 1963, Bailey reported that modest five-room homes in Chula Vista could be purchased for $4,500 and six-room homes with three bedrooms for $5,000. A year later, he revised these prices upwards to between $8,000 and $20,000, and described Chula Vista, where “the other half lives,” as:

a community of between 40 and 50 families built on the side of a hill overlooking the lake… composed primarily of retired people who have come down here to spend the declining years of their lives. The village is well laid out with hard surfaced streets, a good street lighting system and a deep well which furnishes plenty of good drinking water as well as plenty for their lawns and gardens.”

By 1965, Chula Vista had about “90 homes built on the side of a mountain overlooking Lake Chapala…. The residents are all citizens of the United States, who have moved here to retire. The residents include retired army colonels and generals, business executives. retail store operators and a few federal employees on substantial pensions.”

If one had to take a choice between Ajijic and Chula Vista there is no question about which place we would choose. It would be Chula Vista because there most of the residents are in the same social strata and the poverty of the Indians is missing. We could not see how anyone could live in Ajijic beside the backward fishermen who barely eke out a living. Such a climate would quickly turn us into social workers so we could help them raise their standard of living.”

Chapala

Visiting Chapala in late February, Bailey commented that, “The beach was filled with swimmers; speedboats racing by sent waves rolling shoreward and young lovers rode the crests in small canoes.”

Bailey appreciated the dozens of beautiful lakefront homes in Chapala, “by taking the boat trip which hugs the shoreline,” but was especially enamored of the town’s rose gardens:

Chapala is famous for its roses and it is doubtful if roses anywhere grow more profusely than they do in the parkway along the lake front. The parkway runs for several blocks and is filled with nothing but roses. Many of the flowers are almost as large as plates and it is not uncommon to see from 20 to 25 blooms on a single bush. Almost every variety and color can be found in the Chapala parkway. The city has been cultivating and breeding these roses for years.”

Both photos believed to date from the mid-1960s. Credits: Top: Editorial Fema (Mexico City); Bottom (publisher unknown) postcard in collection of Jorge Varela M.n.

Both photos believed to date from the mid-1960s. Credits: Top: Editorial Fema (Mexico City); Bottom: Ediciones Guadalajara.

On the other hand, he lamented, while sitting on the pier and watching visitors go by, how:

Some of the garbs worn by the female members of the tourist clan not only caused other tourists to gasp in amazement but caused the natives also to turn their heads and choke back a laugh. The crazy outfits aren’t confined to women alone. Many men, with their pot bellies, don outlandish colored shorts, jackets of purple and red and a type of sombrero a Mexican wouldn’t be caught wearing at midnight.”

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Sources

The Grand Island Independent: 29 Jan 1963, 1; 8 Mar 1963, 3; 9 Mar 1963, 3; 11 Mar 1963, 10; 30 Mar 1964, 16; 21 February 1977, 1.
Jack Bailey. 1964. American Colony Grows At Lake Chapala: Beautiful Monotony.” The Grand Island Independent, 23 Mar 1964, 20.
Jack Bailey. 1964. “Haven for Retired Americans.” The Grand Island Independent, 1 April 1964, 27.
Jack Bailey. 1965. “A Most Delightful Setting – Holiday Paradise Called Chapala.” The Grand Island Independent, 3 April 1965, 9.
Jack Bailey. 1965. “An American Colony Has Sprung Up on the Shores of Lake Chapala.” The Grand Island Independent, 5 April 1965, 13.

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

The mystery of the Chapala Blade: Ajijic’s first tabloid?

1960s 1 Response »

Jul 032025

The Chapala Blade, a short-lived 1960s’ tabloid, is almost certainly the earliest local periodical to be published at Lake Chapala. It began only a month or two after the first issue of the Guadalajara-based Colony Reporter. Unfortunately, almost no evidence remains of the Chapala Blade.

Credit: The Grand Island Independent, 2 Jan 1962, p11.

No copies of Chapala Blade are known to have survived. We don’t know who wrote or published it, or how many issues ever circulated. The limited, skeletal, information we have about the Chapala Blade comes from an article by a veteran U.S. journalist in a 1964 Nebraska newspaper.

Photographer and writer Jack Bailey (1901-1977) was visiting Guadalajara. Most of his article is about the beautiful rented home in the city, where friends (Mr and Mrs Paul Pappinfoss of St. Cloud, Minnesota) lived, and where they watched a Sunday bull fight on the television. He also describes a nearby “new housing project being financed by the Rockefeller interests. It covers an area of about 10 square blocks in which modest priced homes in the $7,000 bracket are being built for Mexicans and Americans who are looking for an inexpensive way of life.”

According to Bailey, the typical two-bedroom home in this development included a small backyard and a maid’s quarters of two rooms with a private bathroom. He was especially struck by the view down the street, which looked like “an artist’s palette after it had been used for months,” with homes “painted every color imaginable from bright red to royal purple, with blues, greens and yellows mixed in between.”

Bailey was on a day trip to Lake Chapala when he encountered the Chapala Blade, an experience which left an indelible impression on him:

While having lunch at Lake Chapala, a member of the fourth estate, if he could be called that, gave the newspaper business a black eye. He moved from table to table selling the Chapala Blade, a four page tabloid which told about the social happenings at Ajijic and Chula Vista.
After a diner purchased a paper he tried to sell them a yearly subscription to the sheet, a paper most people would have little use for. He stopped at our table and when we turned him down for the yearly subscription he put on his begging act, something you would not expect from an able-bodied 35-year-old American.
“I’m not like the other Americans who have retired down here,” he said. “This is my only of making a living. I have to sell subscriptions to the paper or I cannot live.”
We were so disgusted we could hardly show him any courtesy. He had come closer to begging than the poorest of the Indians who might have a reason. It certainly did not add respect for newspapermen.”

This is the only known reference to the Chapala Blade. If any copies ever come to light, they would surely offer some interesting insights into the rapidly expanding 1960s’ English-speaking community at Lakeside.

The best source for what Ajijic was like at that time, in terms of everyday living and events, is “Lotus Land,” a 21-page, mimeographed booklet about Ajijic penned by Ralph Jocelyn McGinnis (1894-1966), a U.S. sports writer, publicist and painter who was then living in the village.

Note: The first issue of the Colony Reporter (now The Guadalajara Reporter) left the presses in December 1963. The first issue of El Ojo del Lago came two decades later in 1984, the same year that a short-lived Ajijic-based publication named Welcome (produced by Andrés Ivon) also first appeared. Some years later, at the very end of the 1980s, the late Jorge Romo Rebeil published the Chapala Riviera Guide (which ran from 1989 to 1992) and La Ribera, its sister Spanish-language periodical.

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

Jack Bailey. 1964. “View Low-Cost Housing Project. Prudent Matadors Leery of El Toro.” The Grand Island Daily Independent, (Nebraska): 31 March 1964, 10.

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