LITERATURE & BOOKS

A lesson for the expatriate
By Kimberly Kinser

San Miguel Authors’ Sala
John Virtue & Donald Miles
Fri, Apr 4, 5pm
Villa Jacaranda
Aldama 53
50 pesos

John Virtue will read from his biography of Stirling Dickinson, Model American Abroad. For many, this reading will be a welcome remembrance of Dickinson’s vital energy in San Miguel. For others, it will be a lesson of how a dedicated expatriate became revered by his Mexican neighbors.

Virtue fell into writing biographies. As a very close friend of Leonard and Reva Brooks, he found himself “the last man standing” when Leonard was looking for a biographer in 1994. Evolving from journalist to biographer, Virtue had 50 hours of tape and notes from 235 interviews for his first published biography, Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende.

One of the people he interviewed extensively for the Brooks’ book was Stirling Dickinson. Virtue’s lifelong career in Latin American journalism, first as a correspondent for United Press International, then as executive editor of El Mundo, a daily newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and for the last 19 years as director of the International Media Center and an educator of mid-career journalists in Latin America for Florida International University, made him the perfect biographer to interview the people who loved Stirling Dickinson: the Mexicans in the campo communities outside the city limits. He calls it “Stirling’s World.”

Ironically, the San Miguel that Dickinson had helped create by founding the art school Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes was not, in the end, where he felt most at home. “Stirling's World” was with the people he had chosen as family after leaving his native home in Michigan: the Mexican people in most need.

Any good story includes the protagonist overcoming obstacles. In Model American Abroad, readers learn that Dickinson was labeled a Communist by the US government. The art school was taken off the list of institutions funded by the GI bill and subsequently closed.

Because of the community Dickinson created, one or another art school has been alive and well in San Miguel for over 70 years. He was involved with three schools: the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes from 1938-1949; his own school, called Bellas Artes, 1949-50; and the Instituto Allende from 1951 onward. Dickinson liked to think the three schools were philosophically linked, inasmuch as he was involved with all of them. However, the Instituto was founded by Felipe Cossio del Pomar and former state governor Enrique Fernández Martínez.

Virtue has much more to share on this important figure in San Miguel history. He will be joined by Donald Miles reading his book on Cinco de Mayo.

Kimberly Kinser is the creator of Pizarra Blanca Writers, an Amherst Artist and Writers workshop offered in San Miguel.