Textile Travel Guide and Tips: How To Be a Cultural Ambassador
Cloth Roads just published a blog post called Textile Travel Guide: 10 Tips to Be a Star Textile Ambassador. This comes as a just-in-time-reminder for me about cultural sensitivity and travel to indigenous parts of the world where handmade textiles still flourish. My trip to India was bumped up a day, so I am on an […]
Santa Fe, New Mexico Gala Supports Oaxaca Ceramic Arts
It was two days after the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market closed but the celebration continued. Los Amigos de Arte Popular de Mexico hosted a gala fundraising dinner at a private home filled with folk art treasures within walking distance of the city’s historic center. About forty people attended to support Innovando la Tradicion ceramics […]
Cultural Dialogs: Dance of the Feather in Teotitlan del Valle
On Wednesday night this week, the San Pablo Academic and Cultural Center hosted the first in a series of community dialogs about indigenous life in Oaxaca. The restored chapel was filled to standing room only with Teotitecos and friends who came to hear a panel discussion introducing the new book, La Danza de la […]
Want to Live in Mexico? Advice from a Wisecracker!
Nobody Knows the Spanish I Speak is a zany memoir by Mark Saunders (Fuze Publishing, LLC, McLean, VA, ISBN 978-0-9841412-8-9), who, with his wife Arlene Krasner, moved to San Miguel de Allende (SMA) shortly after falling in love with the place. The book’s tag line is “Drop out. Sell everything. Move to Mexico. Sounded like a […]
Liza Bakewell, MADRE: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun, Gets Oaxaca Welcome
http://wp.me/pRHvb-pB My friend and Oaxaca colleague Shannon Sheppard writes about her experience reading the book, her impressions, and connecting Liza with both the local and ex-pat community in Oaxaca. I think you will find her comments entertaining and informative. Click on the link above to read My mobile office is now two feet from Highland […]
Book Review — Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun by Liza Bakewell
Liza Bakewell takes us where we may never have thought to go: Down Mexico’s dusty back roads and cobblestone alleys, across neighborhood plazas lined with madre-derrogatory grafitti, through bustling markets, in a high speed car zig-zagging the wrong way down a one-way street, in provocative conversation with wise and deferential men, sequestered on the coast […]
Is Oaxaca Safe for Families?
I asked this question to my friend Lauren who spent a year there in 2009-2010 with her husband and three children. They rented a house in San Felipe del Agua, took Spanish lessons, and immersed themselves in the cuisine, the culture, and the very agreeable climate. “We had an amazing year in Oaxaca,” Lauren said. […]