I have a friend who moved to Mexico because it was the best option to be able to afford care for her husbands dementia. The pictures she shares of the lake she lives near look a lot like the lake in the Life Magazine pictures.
Those are great pictures. Thanks for posting this!
Set several decades earlier, but I just finished reading Under the Volcano with it's extremely detailed and evocative descriptions/ Some of these pictures could almost serve to illustrate it (the horseback ride chapter for instance). It is set in Cuernavaca (just south of Mexico City).
A challenging read, not quite sure how I feel about it overall but do want to watch the movie now.
There's been a bit of a discussion at the new place (where 80% of my feed is replies to or from Sifu, atrios, and Kevin Kruse) about how much money is needed to retire somewhere nice. I wonder what the number was for the people in these pictures, say as a fold of median US income at the time. I'm guessing a lot more attainable than today.
6: My aunt and uncle had some friends who retired to Mexico from Colorado. They came to visit with their RV. It was cheaper. They got some medical care but came back seasonally for doctors' appointments, since Medicare doesn't provide coverage outside the US. Having supplemental insurance that covers routine care abroad is one of the perks of being a Federal retiree.
The painter Remedios Varo was also working in Mexico when these photos were taken. She fled from Spain, and part of her motivation was financial. Leonora Carrington also painted in Mexico City. If you have a chance to see the work of either of these geniuses, go.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky_House_Museum
hugely endorse 8.
conlon nancarrow lived in mexico for decades, composing away like a mad thang. a mexico, where the cost of player piano shenanigans is cheap cheap cheap & there's less fbi harassment!
nancarrow recordings were the single step too far for my dearly beloved departed dog. the better half would fire up nancarrow & she'd give him a mournful look & then lie down with her nose pressed to the door to outside with her front paws ostentatiously over her ears. considering everything else that gets played, it was remarkable to me that only nancarrow provoked her to this extent.
at any rate about 2 or so years ago my sister was trying to track down a recording she'd heard once years before on kpfa & hadn't gotten the title or composer, she described it as two tangos entangled in a car crash, making it easy peasy to point her to nancarrow's tango?
Oh good, I found the story from the archives about Nancarrow and Bret Stephens' grandmother.
That was very interesting and I hadn't remembered it.
I guess the very next comment was me saying I wouldn't read it. But I wasn't stuck in a hotel room then.
I also had not read that the first time and found it fascinating now.
Are you in Bethel, Pennsylvania too.
At some point in my research into my deadbeat paternal grandfather, I found an announcement of his second marriage in a south Texas newspaper. The newlyweds were headed to Mexico City and Acapulco for their honeymoon, it said. This was all less than a year after my dad's younger brother (whom I love dearly, who almost died earlier this year) was born in faraway central Wisconsin. I feel like I generally take this all in a disinterested spirit of setting records straight and gathering information, but it was kinda wild how much blind fucking rage I felt upon reading that. There were, let's just say, many times between sixth grade and getting a PhD/teaching Spanish/studying Latin American literature when it would have been significant for me to learn that I had generations-deep roots in Mexico and Latin America, and while it's easy to blame this guy, there were probably four or five other broken links in the chain. But it is easy to blame him.
When I went to San Antonio last year I met my dad's second cousin, who gave me basically his whole collection of photos and documents from his great-grandmother, my great-great-grandmother Eugenia, born in Argentina and raised mostly in D.F. (Her youngest sister and youngest brother, who died of various "fevers" in youth, are both buried in the Panteón Francés. I'm not all in on ancestor worship or anything, but I do truly want to visit this cemetery.) I am actually attempting to write a book about all this stuff, but it's difficult -- it branches in so many directions and the emotional center moves around a lot.
The relevance, strained as it is, is that this hypothetical honeymoon would have been around 1952, so a similar time period. The 100% Anglo/Southern side of the family was based in Brownsville at this point, ironically closer to the border than my Mexican-born great-grandmother who had moved to Kansas. In my grandmother's files, I found a grainy, tiny photo of "banana boats at the port" of Brownsville in the 1940s. (She must have paid her temporarily-in-laws a visit. She passed away two years before it occurred to me to ask her roughly a million questions about it all -- we just never talked about that guy.)
It reminds me of one of MFK Fisher's stories of her stay in Mexico in the 1930s. Her brother was dying of cancer, and the only thing that cheered him up a bit was mariachi music. The best mariachi in the area was a young boy from the hills. It was worth waiting and listening to all the other musicians to hear him late in the evening. Fisher watched him for a while and realized that he was a young girl. Girls weren't allowed to play mariachi, so she had disguised herself as a boy to follow her art. It was a rather poignant story, and I couldn't help but think of this story while looking at those pictures. Mexico was very different back then and so were the people who would live overseas.
Fisher was a mainly known as a food writer, but she was a great observer. Her accounts of her stay in Europe in the 1930s were fascinating. So much calm, so much beauty but every so often there was a flash revealing something of great forces that would change all of that.
Mariachi Mulan is surely a Disney animation waiting to happen.
& of course there is penelope fitzgerald's trip to saltillo in 1952, see here: https://granta.com/peripatetic-penelope-fitzgerald/
Mexico was very different back then and so were the people who would live overseas.
It really is a triangle!!
My girlfriend went down to Mexico for a six-week immersion course in Spanish after getting laid off in the 2008 recession and ended up living there for six years.
21: thank you! PF has always been one of my models but I didn't know about that. Of course there's a silver mine.
There's the 1936 Mexican film Redes co-directed by the Austrian-American director Alfred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here to Eternity) and Emilio Gómez Muriel with cinematography by the American photographer Paul Strand and an absolutely fantastic score by Silvestre Revueltas. The film anticipates Italian neorealism and is worth checking out.
I hope I have understood the assignment
24: ahh the fabulousness of penelope fitzgerald! & it was a good article, a short but perceptive summary of her life trajectory up & down the socio economic scale, leaving open how much her husband's post ww2 situation resulted from wartime trauma vs other issues that might have surfaced even without the war. h lee's bio is good at faaaar greater length.
think i'll treat myself to a reread of at freddie's.