Authors' Sala reading series continues 
By Linda Sorin, Aug 4, 2006

San Miguel Authors' Sala, Readings by Alice Denham and Alma Luz Villanueva
Friday, August 11, 5-7pm, Posada San Francisco, Plaza Principal 2
50 pesos, includes wine reception

The Authors' Sala continues its evenings of high-caliber literary presentations with readings by Alma Luz Villanueva, a writer, poet, academic and Latina-American author who reads from her poetry, and Alice Denham, former Playboy Playmate and author (in the same issue), who reads from her tell-all novel Sleeping with Bad Boys about the literary lions of the past.

Alma Luz Villanueva

Villanueva is the author of three novels: The Ultraviolet Sky, which won an American Book Award and was listed in 500 Great Books by Women; Naked Ladies, which won a PEN-Oakland Fiction Award; and Luna's California Poppies. She is also the author of a short story collection, Weeping Woman: La Llorona and Other Stories.

The stories have been republished in anthologies, magazines and textbooks. She has published six books of poetry. The most recent, Planet, won the Latin American Writers Institute Poetry Award. Her poetry has also appeared in a variety of magazines, textbooks and anthologies. For the past six years, Villanueva has taught in the MFA creative writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, where she also conducts "writer visits" during the year. Her newest book of poetry, Soft Chaos, will be out in 2007. She is now living in San Miguel de Allende and writing.

Villanueva will read selections ranging from her past work, to give an idea of her origins in San Francisco's Mission District, to the present in San Miguel, including what she considers her "border poems." "Every time I cross the USA/Mexico border, I imagine the ancient trade routes, when travelers simply crossed with no human-made borders to stop them," she says.


Que Bonito

I saw a woman with a rainbow of
roses on her back at the
corner of my street-
I saw a tired child today, a Mayan

boy of maybe seven, resting
with his wares in a damp
doorway, and I swear
I saw his Death kiss him

gently on his left cheek-
I was buying dried fuchsia
flowers from a woman who
looked a little like mi Tía,

and when I turned to walk
over, see if he was hungry,
he was gone (did Death kiss
his other cheek?)-my children

were never tired, maybe sick a
few days then back to their
true job of wearing me out
daily, also bringing me so much

joy I wanted to live-in the
market a small boy sold me
Chiclets, pointed to some
fruit, and as I paid for


our fruit he paid me with 
the most joyous smile,
making me want to live. A
beautiful man with a corrected

harelip makes me pause to see
his paintings-wedding scene, the
village surrounding bride and
groom, dark night with full

moon, a blue lake beneath
and huge, golden fish leaping
in the night sky, glowing with
moonlight-he tells me his

name, Carmelo, that he painted
these, that they sell for more in
the stores, "Que bonito," I
say and his smile is

perfect. Death will kiss us
all on both cheeks, some
still in the womb dreaming, some
over a hundred, dreaming their lives

for the first time-when Death
comes to kiss me I will sing
him a poem, and when he
murmurs, "Que bonito," I will
laugh and smile perfectly.


"Mexican Days" looks beyond San Miguel
By Carol Schmidt

I might not have come to San Miguel de Allende if I hadn't read Tony Cohan's first Mexico travel memoir, On Mexican Time. He, and all of us who write or gush about San Miguel, help to bring about the changes that he so detests by the end of that book.

In defense, the glowing segments on television showing adoring couples strolling past the Parroquia reach millions more retirees than any book ever will. Financial bloodhounds tracking down the latest real estate boom swoop in and scoop up the remaining "good deals" faster than any prospective retiree or dreamer who has to plan for a life change.

But his first book laid the foundation for me to decide to move here after only three days into a three-month San Miguel vacation to escape Phoenix's 115-degree summers, and I am not alone. His new travel memoir will make readers want to look elsewhere. Some will think that is a good thing.

On Mexican Time was written out of love. San Miguel got into his soul in his 15 or so years of balancing life between here and Los Angeles, and if you're a writer, you're compelled to write about such deep loves. I wrote 200,000 words of adoration about San Miguel in my first year here.

Mexican Days grew out of a magazine assignment to explore lesser-known parts of Mexico. Cohan was pondering the offer when he arrived back in San Miguel after a long absence, only to encounter Salma Hayek's and Antonio Banderas's stunt doubles hanging on cables from the façade of the Hotel Posada de San Francisco on the Jardín, fake gunshots mocking fireworks, during the filming of Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The disruption to the city made him flee almost immediately.

He had been carrying with him a New York Times review of the latest edition of The Merck Manual of Medical Information, describing something called "dissociative fugue"-one or more episodes of sudden, unexpected and purposeful travel from home (fugue) occur, during which a person cannot remember some or all of his past life.

In other words, not his words, Cohan was "antsy." He had to get away. This vague dis-ease followed him throughout the assignment.

He thinks he is through it when he returns to San Miguel about a year later, but San Miguel is far worse in his eyes than even a year before, and he is off again, this time to Bolivia and various parts of South America. The last line of the 275-page book is: "I felt the rush of anticipation, mixed with fear."

The San Miguel he had returned to so briefly is far beyond the stresses of gentrification, in his eyes. A friend says, "People used to worry San Miguel was going to become the next Santa Fe," he tells Cohan. "We're way past that. Welcome to the new Florida."

Cohan still loves much of San Miguel that cannot change: splashes of bougainvillea everywhere, jacarandas floating lavender over the town in the spring, "the perfect feng shui of San Miguel's hillside setting." It was "the same everywhere with the last good places." He remembers a friend's words "about wanting to be at the center or at the edges, not in some globalized expatriate limbo." 

He plans his South America trip.

During his year on the magazine assignment, he visits and captures many places very well: the Sierra Gorda, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Xalapa, Tlacotalpan, Mérida, Katanchel, Palenque, Chiapas, Coatepec. Many of his scenes will stay with me.

What comes first to my memory is his description of Katanchel, a jungle resort with archaeological significance that so impresses him he recommends it for a friend's honeymoon.

The newlyweds have a few days of bliss before a massive hurricane destroys the region, threatening their lives. Travel books even today still recommend stays at the idyllic resort that no longer exists, he writes.

Cohan's political thoughts were tied to trends in music, and upon buying a CD compiled by Raúl Hellmer, the work of musicians whose music otherwise might have been lost, he was led down a historical trail of the late '60s when the music was changing, shortly before Hellmer died in 1971. White rockers were getting rich on black blues, Bob Dylan shocked the music world by abandoning his acoustic sound, and protest music was making folklorists like Hellmer seem like quaint "sentimental liberals, their preservationist battles a lost cause." Was all lost, "swatted away by history's cold hand?"

And yet the music plays on. A son jarocho group at one Veracruz restaurant "serenading the tables with an electrifying, rouse-the-dead 'La Bamba' that all but rendered coffee superfluous, the harpist's staccato solo lifting the hairs on the back of my neck."

Even when Cohan is describing something intensely personal, such as his fears when he falls and wonders if he will die there alone in the jungle, he still has a distance to his writing. He is the omniscient observer even if he is writing in the first person. He is the brooding Leonard Cohen, not the electric Joe Cocker, to use examples of singers from the late '60s when the music was changing.

This book will sell very well and acquaint thousands with a different view of Mexico. He admits he could have taken numerous journeys and written completely different views of Mexico. He didn't go to anyplace on the immense coasts, or anywhere in the north, or anywhere along the US border. 

Any of these magazine assignments would have resulted in other Mexican Days.

But these images need to be shared; they are lesser known to the public than Puerto Vallarta, Tijuana, Cuidad Juárez or Nuevo Laredo.

This journey was a good one, for the reader as well as the writer. I am looking forward to a book about Bolivia and other South American days.

Carol Schmidt and her partner of 27 years, Norma Hair, own www.fallinginlovewithsanmiguel.com  which includes their blogs, forums, photos, news, and SMA FAQs.