Cultivating curiosity and wellbeing in Mexico
In 1843, a collection of letters was published under the name of Life in Mexico as a sort of travelogue relating the impressions and observations gleaned and recorded by Madame Frances Calderon de la Barca during her sojourns in Mexico as the wife of Spanish diplomat. It is of special Continue Reading →
I was somewhat dismayed to find out that,on a recent trip we made to Teotihuacan pyramids, we were were literally within about five kilometers of the incredible Padre Tembleque aqueduct system as we drove from Teotihuacan toward Pachuca. We had no idea the aqueduct was there and that the Arco Norte Continue Reading →
Morelia is the capital of the state of Michoacan, Mexico. It is Michoacan’s largest city and features an abundance of beautiful colonial architecture. It is the birthplace of José María Morelos y Pavón (1765), a hero of the Mexican independence movement. The city, which was called Valladolid from 1545 to 1828, Continue Reading →
Toniná Chiapas: I just came across an article stating that recent excavations (undertaken since 2010 by INAH, the Mexican National Institute of Archaeology and History) confirm that the “Acropolis” of Toniná, Chiapas, comprises one off the largest pyramids in Mesoamerica. See the article link below. The pyramidal structure measures 74 Continue Reading →
Searching through the digital libraries that are currently available on-line can render some wonderful finds. Here are a couple of illustrations from the Tovar Codex, attributed to Mexican Jesuit priest Juan de Tovar, from the John Carter Brown library online. Many more illustrations are included in the JCB Archive of Early American Continue Reading →
Dia de la Independencia y el Grito de Dolores Mexico’s Independence Day is one of the country’s main patriotic holidays or Fiestas Patrias. It falls officially on September 16 and commemorates the throwing off of the yoke of Spanish rule. The celebration of the event begins on the evening of Continue Reading →
Teotihuacan, birthplace of the gods, is one of the most spectacular archeological sites in Mexico. The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon can be seen from afar, rising out of a high, arid plain in Central Mexico near Mexico City. The steep steps of the Pyramid of the Sun, whose Continue Reading →
Las Pozas, Xilitla: The Enchanted Gardens of Edward James At a place known as Las Pozas, only a few kilometers outside of the town of Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, in the heart of Mexico’s La Huasteca region, Englishman Edward James conceptualized and built an astounding showcase of surrealistic structures in Continue Reading →
Today I want to share a wonderful find: an encyclopedia of Guerrero, Mexico (Enciclopedia Guerrerense) and its appendix, Guerrerismos, or idiomatic terms and phrases of Guerrero state. The online encyclopedia of Guerrero is in Spanish but does have links to translations via the Google translation service. It is indexed in Continue Reading →
This is a continuation of a previous post about a journey from New York to the Mexican mining town of Real del Monte (Mineral del Monte) undertaken by a detachment sent by the Real del Monte Mining Company in 1824. The men had landed in Tampico and had come through Continue Reading →
We are book scroungers. Books of every age and provenance fill up bookshelves, trunks, and closets, and a few uncommon curiosities have made their ways into our ever-growing libraries over the course of the past three or four decades. One of these is a small-format, ragged, and weathered booklet–almost more Continue Reading →
Six Months in Mexico is a book written by Nellie Bly (pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman, 1864-1922) and published in 1888. Nellie Bly worked as a columnist at the Pittsburgh Dispatch in the late 1800s, focusing on women’s rights, education, and conditions in the workplace. When pressured by her Continue Reading →
The College of Mexico (El Colegio de México) publishes a condensed history of Mexico (in Spanish) that gives a rapid-fire overview of the history of this key Latin American country from the times of the early Mesoamerican civilizations (c. 2500 BC) through to the modern years after the Mexican Revolution. Continue Reading →
The Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has announced its most important discoveries for 2013, amongst which figure the discovery of the tail of a hadrosaur in the state of Coahuila and the prehispanic settlement of Chactún in the southern state of Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula. The Continue Reading →