Mexico Books

Anyone who has spent time in these mountain communities and has seen his work, knows that Alex Harris has developed the ability to capture it's soul. Unhappily, his photos also represent a way of life that is dying. These villages represent the oldest non-Native communities in the US. For those who may never have the privilege of entering these spare homes, Alex has brought us inside and provided us both soulful and intimate portraits. Thank you Alex.

As a native of Northern New Mexico, I often see all sorts of photo books documenting the touristic attractions to the area. However, Alex Harris' book acurately documents the real life of rural northern New Mexico. The best you could buy!!

Despite statements to the contrary, this book is not out of print. It is still available. Publisher ships within 24 hours.

The majority of this collection is from the Southwest or Mexico but interestingly there are similar pieces from less expected places e.g. Eastern US, central Europe, the Philippines. A significant number of the pieces are pictured. The text mixes technical information about the art pieces with information about how they came into the collection. The art itself ranges from primitive to superb folk art - executed in a variety of media. Among the pieces that catch my attention is a crucifix with an angel at Jesus' side and the retablo of Our Lady of Refuge.

This is an excellent volume for those interested in folk devotional art or Mexican / Southwestern art.

Reviewed by Kelli Glesige for Reader Views (1/07)

"Ribbons of the Sun" is the story of [..]Rosa who lives with her family near Santa Maria del Sol. Her father earns a living by working the fields and selling flowers in the village. Even though her abuelita, or grandmother, tells her the village is not the place for a young girl, Rosa always dreams of going to the village with her father to sell flowers. One day Papa tells Rosa it is now time for her to go to the city with him.

Rosa is so excited and can hardly contain herself, for a trip to the village has been her lifelong dream. Excitement turns to sheer terror when Rosa finally realizes why Papa has brought Rosa along. Money is tight for the family, and Papa sells [..] Rosa to a cruel patron who mentally and physically abuses the innocent child. She is assaulted and humiliated time and again and then blamed for her actions, and her spiritual strength abandons her. Sadly enough, Rosa has no idea what is actually happening to her, as she is just beginning to grow into womanhood and has never had anything explained to her. Now with child, Rosa is thrown out of the house and must find a way to stay alive, living on the unsafe streets. No one needs or wants a worker with a baby in tow.

"Ribbons of the Sun" is a story meant to open our eyes to the problem of child exploitation that exists throughout the world. Author Harriet Hamilton spent fifteen years in Mexico and considered herself as a messenger to bring this problem to the attention of as many people as possible. "Ribbons of the Sun" delivers her message.

"Ribbons of the Sun" is an eye opener. It is about a problem I do not enjoy talking about or thinking about. It is sad and cruel. However, Harriet Hamilton has done a good job of getting her message across so others might be able to help the innocent children. This book is for older teens and adults only. "Ribbons of the Sun" was published posthumously.

Child trafficking is a brutal fact of life in some parts of the world, and Rosa is a victim of this practice. She and her parents live in a small Indian village in Mexico where their life is one of grinding poverty. The crops fail yet again. Rosa hopes against hope that her father will take her to the city with him when he goes there to sell flowers to the tourists. Her dreams are answered, and with great excitement; Rosa and her father travel to Santa Maria, but instead of selling flowers, Rosa is sold to a household where she will be employed as a servant. Rosa can't understand this betrayal, and waits impatiently for the weekend when she is sure that her father will come back for her--but she waits in vain.

Her life of servitude is punctuated by the brutal rape by the man of the house on a weekly basis. When Rosa's pregnancy is discovered by the lady of the house, she is turned out into the street to survive by her wits. Alone and friendless, Rose believes that she has dishonored her family, and after the baby is born, she decides to end her life as soon as she finds a home for her child.

Based on fact, this heartbreaking story brings attention to issues we only hear about; child abuse and exploitation. Hamilton clearly describes the harsh realities of being a child slave in an impoverished country. Rosa is a fully realized character who experiences despair over the conflict between her people's traditional ways and city life. Details of rural historical Mexico's culture and religions are integrated into the story smoothly.

However, life takes a turn for the better when Rosa's suicide is prevented, and she finds sanctuary in a mission that helps young girls in her predicament. Will she ever see her family again? This book is impossible to put down, and one that you will never forget.

Reviewed by: Grandma Bev

Nash ranks in there with characters like Monte Walsh and Gus MacCrae. The book had a profound effect on me, causing me to review my own past. I'd love to have a hardcover copy of the sequel, "Passage to Quivira." Tks.

A wonderful character study. Beautifully evocative of the southwest at the crossroads of this century. Ignacio Ortiz is a man to be admired. Thank-you, Mr. Zollinger, for bringing him to us

With his beautiful and recently unfaithful wife and their children, the protagonist Daniel makes a new start teaching English on a ranch in Mexico. When the industrialist-rancher has him beaten and steals wife and children, I am reminded of McCormack's ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. Both have Texas authors writing about disenchanted Texans going to Mexico, being brutalized, facing loss of a lover and death by the hand of a powerful patron. However, Rio Ganges is a horse of a different and fascinating color -- not a Faulknerian prose poem but a unique, clear, lyrical voice -- not about self-reliant survival, but self-surrendering winning. This helps to provide, unlike PRETTY HORSES, one of Aristotle's ingredients for a good story -- an end, a telos.

Daniel's wife leaves him to live with the patron on the ranch. Daniel, devastated, follows a rational course. He catches a bus back north toward the modern side of the Rio. There, I suppose, he would follow up with antidepressants and counseling to learn how his own father's abandonment of him contributes to his marital failure, and individuate with photography, his real calling. After all, the children living in luxury with their mother in Mexico are still young enough to forget. However, Daniel knows the importance of fathers to children.

At a stop on the roadside, he buys a hawk with a beak like his father's nose. He switches to a bus headed south to Mexico City and rents a room there on the street Rio Ganges. A submissive homosexual fellow tenant passionately purses him. Daniel becomes intimate with Laura, a spiritually and badly burn-scarred woman. She insists he accompany her to the basilica marking the spot where a canonized Indian saw the Virgin.

As a young soldier, Daniel had visited the Seville Cathedral. His conclusion that it was built to allay Conquistador guilt over pillaging the Indians had clinched his religious apostasy since that time. He goes with Laura anyway.

Laura decides to walk on her knees up the steps into the shrine like the penitents. Daniel, embarrassed by it all, refuses to follow her. "Then a black-dressed woman stopped beside us as she walked out of the basilica's sanctuary... The nearly toothless woman lay her fingertips against Laura's [scarred] cheek... The woman was muttering something I couldn't make out -- it wasn't Spanish -- and Laura rested her hand on top the woman's. I couldn't tell who was praying for whom."

Daniel rides the conveyor belt around and around beneath the image of the Virgin. Until "I passed beneath the angels at Guadalupe's feet I dropped to my knees and threw up my hands... Then I dropped on the rubber belt ... but howl was the best I could do... Gasping I looked up at [Laura] from her torn knee to her face...

'Stay with me,' Laura said..."

Daniel does not stay. Despite the patron's private police, who shoot poachers on sight, he takes Laura's pistol and departs to try to retrieve his children.

Rio Ganges is an original novel by David Theis about an abandoned son who must endure trial and depredation. He seeks a new life in Mexico, yet when his wife leaves him for a wealthy patron, he must learn to confront and deal with his anger and guilt. His quest to regain his family is a stirring, emotional, gripping, highly recommended odyssey.

This is a really fine book, immensely informative and also entertaining, handsomely designed and generously conceived. Jan Reid, himself a fine writer, has brought together a collection of fine writing on the subject of a big river, the Rio Grande. He follows the river from its source in the mountains of Colorado, through fertile valleys, desert, and roaring canyons to its turgid mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. While there are many words devoted to the many miles of landscape, Reid's primary interest is the social and political history that makes up the borderlands from El Paso to Brownsville. A region divided by a national border still contested by those who have lived and worked here for countless generations, Rio Grande country as it is characterized in Reid's book is both Texan and Mexican, with all the extremes that combination implies - no country for old men, you could say.

Given the world we live in, drugs and guns figure prominently along the river. Robert Draper tells of U.S. Marines stationed there to apprehend drug runners and the shooting of an 18-year-old boy herding goats. Don Ford recounts his experience as a cowboy smuggler of Mexican marijuana. Reid's own contribution (besides the lengthy and fascinating introductions to each section of the book) is an account of three armed Americans busting prisoners from a jail on the Mexican side of the border. And the Border Patrol is a constant dark presence, as in Elmer Kelton's "The Time It Never Rained."

There is humor, dry and otherwise, in Molly Ivins' report of a drunken mishap involving the mayor of Lajitas, who happens to be a goat. John Spong describes a loopy effort to build an exclusive resort with a luxurious golf course in the Big Bend. Gary Cartwright provides a sadly comic tour of his favorite haunts in Mexican border towns. Tom Miller describes the life of a parrot smuggler. We get an excerpt from John Nichol's humorous "Milagro Beanfield War." There's also a surprising visit by the young John Reed waiting in Presidio for the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa to reach Ojinaga, still in the hands of the federal army.

Meanwhile, the entire book is richly illustrated with period photographs, all of them in glorious black and white. This is a terrific book with hours of good reading for anyone interested in rivers and the mix of cultures and history that make up the borderlands between Texas and Mexico.

Jan Reid has composed a unique anthology of writing on one of the two great southwestern rivers in his book "Rio Grande." Its main fault, if it has any, is that it is much too short. I could argue with the selections, but found them all of note and so would prefer more, rather than changing the ones Reid used in this book.

I grew up along the other great southwestern river, the Colorado. Both rivers originate in the Rocky Mountains and wind through canyons between mountains in the desert, one reaching the Gulf of California and the other the Gulf of Mexico. Both have fascinating geology, biota and human history. Reid is primarily concerned with the latter. From the beginning of the river in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado to its mouth (if you can call it that) between the border cities of Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico, he brings us samples of fiction and non-fiction about the great Río de las Palmas, Río Bravo del Norte or, as we Norte Americanos know it, the Rio Grande (pronounced " Rio Gran" in much of Texas). Modern and relatively modern authors from John Nichols ("The Milagro Beanfield War") and Paul Horgan ("Great River") to Woody Guthrie ("Seeds of Man") and James Carlos Blake ("In the Rogue Blood") and older writings, such as John Reed's "Insurgent Mexico" (1914) and Robert T. Hill's "Running the Cañons of the Rio Grande" (1901), all cast their spell and the spell of the land through which the Rio Grande travels, even if it is sometimes not as nice as we would like it to be.

The most heart-rending chapter is "Ciudad de la Muerte" by Cecilia Balli. This chapter is about the three hundred women murdered in the border city of Juárez, over the last ten or so years. As I live only about 50 miles north of the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Chihuahua, I have some personal interest in these monstrous crimes. I am quite happy that we forbade our children to ever go across the border when they were in their teens, despite the fact that all of the victims so far have been Mexican and our kids were decidedly American. Also several teenagers who crossed the border (especially at night) have gotten into major trouble. I just don't trust the situation and Balli's essay really gets to the heart of that fear of the border city. Still, I have crossed the border on a number of occasions, but only a few times at Juárez.

Despite all this the border lands and the Rio Grande have a rich history and culture. Reid has caught this, but I still would like more. Where is La Llorona, the wailing woman, who morns the children she allowed to drown in the river or the Confederate invasion up the Rio Grande of New Mexico in 1861? Both center on the river and both have a lot of local color. Still, I guess it is better to be left asking for more than wishing you had not read the book in question!

I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to gain some of the historical and literary flavor of this once great river, now polluted and tamed, squeezed, like the Colorado, of nearly every drop, before it finally reaches the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a really amazing book. What a wonderful synthesis of knowledge on ancient and modern Maya! Highly reccommended!

Stanzione presents an insightful, respectful, dynamic account of his experiences among these Maya people by combining approaches from religious studies and anthropology. The book is also graced with beautiful and revealing black and white photographs and drawings of the everyday ritual practices in and around Santiago Atitlan. Especially important is Stanzione's reporting of contemporary versions of Maya mythology about the creation of the world, the lives of plants, the sexual relations of deities-all in relation to Christian practices and sacred stories that are important to the Maya. Readers interested in religious change, syncretism and transculturation as well as the ways the Maya suffer and resist state violence and the attacks of missionaries will find this book a very valuable resource.

First check out the editorial reviews here to understand what this book is about. This is a fascinating and beautiful collection of material reflective of Mexican art through the ages. There are ancient manuscripts, drawings rendered from old books, photgraphs of pre-Columbian pottery and art, ancient petroglyphs from the southwest, maps and recent art pieces by Chicano/a artists all recreated tastefully and rendered in an eye appealing manner. The concept of the exhibition and art book created from the exhibition is spectacular and unique. The idea is to tie the evolutionary art process from pre-Columbian times to the contemporary art produced in the southwest. The concept suggests that art is migratory, influenced by culture both past and present, linked to both but unique in it's modern evolutionary vision by contemporary artists. The lands from which this art has evolved is based in Aztlan, a mythical land dating back to pre-Columbian cultures by remains in the hearts and minds of people on both sides of the border. The link between Mexico and the United States and it's people is explored and highlighted by the art of the southwest. This migration, in search of a new land, that continues today, began with the Mexica(Aztecs)pilgrimage and establshment of Tenochitlan in what is now modern Mexico City; this is where the Mexica were said to seen the eagle on the nopal cactus and then build their city of Tenochitlan. The mythical land of Aztlan lives on and is reflective in the art of the southwest. This book explores the relationship, in both essay and photograph, between the citizens of Mexico and the United States and even those who live in the neither land in the fields and dark shadows of Aztlan. This is an oversized book with a wealth of information to help you develop your own understanding of the relationships between past and present in the art of the southwest. Recommended for high schools , community libraries and the southwest art book lovers homes.

After seeing the exhibit at LACMA, this book was a great compliment to the art that was shown. It ranged from pre columbian to modern and was very intersting and informative. The photgraphs in the book are complimented by the narration and anaylsis by the author.

This book was recommended by a friend who reads mysteries and knew of my "literary habit". I picked it up early one recent weekend and could not put it down. Excellent character development, fine descriptions of Western New Mexico and a very engaging story. I cared about the characters and how the story would end. IF you like regional mysteries from authors like Hillerman and Burke, you have to give Nettleton a try.

Craig Nettleton combines his knowledge of New Mexico, with his background as a clinical psychologist, and his familiarity of with Lebanese/Arabic culture to make this a great weekend read. I would highly recommend this book!

This is a wonderful, comprehensive travel product for anyone planning a trip to Rocky Point, Mexico. The videos and photos are a great way to see hotels/vacation rentals before you make a reservation. I particularly liked the interactive maps! The CD is set up very well and is extremely easy to use.

This is a wonderful, comprehensive travel product for anyone planning a trip to Rocky Point, Mexico. The videos and photos are a great way to see hotels/vacation rentals before you make a reservation. I particularly liked the interactive maps! The CD is set up very well and is extremely easy to use.