María del Carmen, the best cook ever
By Dianne Walta Hart, June 30, 2006 

She’s the best. María del Carmen García Rangel, the best cook, la mejor cocinera, the only Feed the Hungry cook ever promoted.

As the first cook who has moved from a kitchen cook to a supervisory position within Feed the Hungry, María del Carmen will be taking responsibility for the kitchens within the city of San Miguel de Allende. Mary Murrell, the executive director of Feed the Hungry, said, “We are very proud of her.” 

Feed the Hungry provides nutritious, hot meals to more than 3,000 children a day from 25 kitchens in San Miguel and the surrounding community. Kitchens are built attached to schools, and women from the community are hired as year-round employees who receive medical insurance and a pension. They are trained in cooking a high-protein, vegetarian diet and they cook the food each day. At present, Feed the Hungry employs 40 women year-round. 

María del Carmen’s direct supervisor, Olivia Muñiz, who is Director of Kitchen Operations for Feed the Hungry, attested to María del Carmen’s qualities. “She’s a hard worker, a good person and honest. She has spent a long time in the program and has been promoted to a position created just for her.” 

After so much praise, I was struck by how far this woman must have come. She ought to be a proud, confident woman, I thought, but Olivia cautioned me. “She’s had a hard life,” she said, “you’ll see.” 

The first time I interviewed María del Carmen, we were to meet at Feed the Hungry’s headquarters. I looked around as I rang the doorbell. The corner of Cinco de Mayo and Las Moras was busy with people buying tortillas and nopales. Pickups raced by full of shrieking teenagers from the nearly Preparatoria El Pípila, and small children pushed their bikes uphill. I could see an intersection of schools, small stands and political propaganda painted in bright red and orange on corner buildings. No one answered the bell, so I impatiently walked up the street and back again to ring it once more. 

Across the street, a woman was sitting on the raised concrete that serves both as a sidewalk and a bench. She called to me and said there was no one there. I said I had an appointment at 11:30 and she said she did, too. 

I took a guess. “Are you María del Carmen?”
“Sí.” 

I crossed the street and sat down next to her. With the concrete cool underneath us, we began to talk. 

She looked like her advance publicity: definitely a city woman with dark, long hair, hoop earrings, large eyes accented by mascara and eyeliner, a full mouth covered with red lipstick, red fingernail polish peeling off her nails, a ring on her little finger, a sleeveless jeans top, black skirt, silver bracelet, stylish in a San Miguel way. Pretty, in her early forties, with a strong body and sturdy hands. 

I could hear a gargling, gobbling egret overhead in a mesquite tree behind me on the Fuego Nuevo school grounds and the rattle of an old car bumping down Las Moras and past El Nigromante primary school. In the blue sky above us were the marks of Mexico’s colonial towns: the wires that sag across buildings, crisscross the street corners, and create jigsaw puzzles in the sky. People walked by and said, “María” or “Carmen” or “adiós.” 

María del Carmen explained that she had lived in Colonia Allende for years.

“So everyone’s a friend?” I asked. 

She nodded. “But my family, they are not very close to me. I grew up in a family where I was the one to work in the house,” she explained.

Why? María del Carmen isn’t sure. One thought is that it was because after her mother had four boys, she was the next child born and her mother needed someone to help with the household chores. She worked, almost like a family maid, and began a lifetime of washing, ironing, cooking and cleaning. She helped her mother with their mill, where they made masa for tortillas. While she worked, her brothers and sisters studied and finished high school. María del Carmen, however, completed only the second grade.

Her husband was a handsome man when they courted by strolling around San Miguel’s Centro. When she was 20, they decided to marry and chose a church in El Pueblito (also called Xoconostle, located near Dolores Hidalgo). They took the bus, a long trip, but worth it since church weddings at El Pueblito didn’t cost anything. There was no party, no nice dress, and the only guests were the people at Mass. 

“Why did you marry him?” I asked.

She pointed to her head and laughed when she said, “Loca.”
They moved into a small room near San Miguel’s Centro Histórico, and María del Carmen set about making and selling her Jell-O cups, called gelatinas, that were topped with eggnog-like rompope and her tamales. She sold them from a table outside the room.

It took her about a year and a half to catch on that her husband had no intention of working. Even though the custom of asking permission from a spouse to work exists both in the countryside and in urban areas, María del Carmen didn’t have to ask, because her husband was never home. Also, contrary to tradition, she controlled the money. She would figure out how much money she needed to make the food she sold. The little money that remained, she used to feed her family of four children.

Years later, she found out that when they married, her husband had already had a three-year-old child with another woman. Sixteen years after the wedding in the El Pueblito church, he left María del Carmen and now they are legally divorced. 

Looking back, she doesn’t know how she endured the situation, taking care of the children by herself. I thought of a Spanish verb—aguantar—that means to tolerate, to resist, to remain steadfast, be patient, endure, to bear what life throws at you. Does aguantar refer to you? I asked.

She nodded and said, “Yes, I’ve done a lot of that.”

María del Carmen was born in San Miguel de Allende’s Centro, but when she was small, her parents moved to Colonia Allende. Today, she lives on the other side of that house and rents from a brother for 700 pesos a month. The whole family lives in the same area, and her house is down a narrow alley, right in the middle of all of them. 

María del Carmen’s four children range in age from 15 to 22 years old, and they’ve either finished high school or are in the process. The youngest, a daughter, is a student at Preparatoria El Pípila, but for her to continue, María del Carmen has to come up with a strategy to pay the registration fee required for students to attend public schools. None of the children has a steady job, but migration does not seem to be a consideration; María del Carmen remembers only one uncle who went to the United States for work. 

Did she have childhood friends? No, she was always working in the house. Good friends, now that she’s an adult? She knows the other cooks; she has gotten along with them at every kitchen she has ever worked in—but they do not socialize outside the workplace. No real boyfriends, just a man at one of the schools who listens to her and gives her counsel. 

What does she do to have fun? 
“Nothing.” 

I asked again, certain that there must be something. 
“Well, I watch television a little at night and sew napkins.” 
I suggested movies, dances, weddings, parties.

“Once I went to a quinceañera (a 15-year-old’s birthday party), but that’s it. Weddings are usually on Saturdays, but on weekends I cook and clean for a Mexican couple.”

What happiness she does experience comes from working with Feed the Hungry. “I feel at ease when I’m working. I want to be involved and improve how things are done. It’s also a relief to go to work because the program has confidence in me. And I try to do my best, be responsible.”

She was hired 13 years ago. “My children attended El Nigromante primary school and the students from there ate at [Feed the Hungry’s] Centro de Crecimiento kitchen. I accompanied my own children to lunch and a cook asked me to help. So it started.” 

María del Carmen spent eight years at Centro de Crecimiento, a school for handicapped children. The kitchen became so special to her that the cooks and the children were like the family she didn’t have as a child. She then moved to the nearby Fuego Nuevo secondary school for five years, and most recently she’s been at the Centro Multiple de Educación Especial in Colonia San Antonio. Her love of Centro de Crecimiento continues to play out because some of the children she knew there are now in the special education school. “I’ve known some of them almost all of their lives.”

Mary Murrell said that in María del Carmen’s new position she will be “completing inventories each week, making sure the kitchens are being run well, testing food when she visits to see if the recipes are being followed. She will also train our new cooks and substitute short-term if needed in one of our kitchens.” She will also work on new menus, for example, how to make tacos that the children like and slip in some dark green vegetables so that they get more calcium in their diets.

The job will require María del Carmen to take city buses or walk to San Miguel’s kitchens. “I’ll note what the kitchens need, like oil or soup. I’ll give the cooks money for cooking gas or to buy tortillas and I’ll give them their checks. I will need to make sure the blender works, if the kitchen keys close well, if they have the little cloths to clean. After that, I’ll go to the office and leave the sheets of information in the storage areas set up for each kitchen. On Saturdays, volunteers fill the orders for each kitchen and on Tuesday volunteers take the food to the kitchens.” 

Through the years, María del Carmen says that she has learned to cook food previously unknown to her and work with people she normally wouldn’t have met. She waved her hand and said, “I learned to organize what goes here, what rice goes there, who needs what.” Certainly a skill—organizing and supplying the special requirements of each kitchen—she’ll need in her new job.

If she has a dream, it’s that someday she’ll have her own piece of land and a little room that would allow her to again sell the tamales and gelatinas in the afternoons after she has finished her job as the head of San Miguel’s cooks. 

Aguantar does represent what she has endured in her life. But there’s another verb—triunfar—that also describes María del Carmen. She triumphed when nothing was expected; she nurtured others when no love was given to her; she let her solitude guide her to find a family in work; and her work bred a desire to be Feed the Hungry’s best cook ever. La mejor cocinera.

María del Carmen is now part of a larger team that consists of Feed the Hungry’s staff—the director of the kitchens, office manager, executive director, the manager of the warehouse and the computer/budget guru—along with volunteers, board members and friends willing to show up and sample those tacos with green vegetables hidden in them. The tacos are designed to get the children to eat calcium-rich vegetables, something they are not accustomed to having.

Her supervisor, Olivia, said to her, “You will learn new things and have new experiences. That’s what life should be. The things in our lives that have not been so good always change. New things, different things happen.”
Triunfar seemed to be beating out aguantar.

Feed the Hungry is a nonprofit corporation in the US and Mexico. A donation of US$65 will feed a hungry young girl or boy for an entire year. For more information about how you can help feed hungry children, visit the website at www.feedthehungrysma.org or call Mary Murrell, Executive Director, at 152-2402.



Graduation: A new and different story
By Virginia Wheelwright

On the evening of June 7, at the Ángela Peralta, the Universidad de León, Guanajuato Branch, had its graduation ceremony for 59 students. Among its graduates were four who received scholarships from Jovenes Adelante. Two, with averages over 9.3, are sisters, Margarita and Guadalupe Campos Tapia, who studied Administration and Law, respectively. 

Marisol Cruz Cervantes, the third Jovenes student, was also accorded a special honor for having the class’s highest average in Accounting, 9.86. Actually, she deserved even more of an accolade, for during the past two years she has not only maintained this average but also worked full time as an accountant for the Hotel Real de Minas. We are very proud of her. 

The fourth of the Jovenes graduates, Juan Pablo Ruvio Barrientos, is getting his degree in Chemical Engineering from Tec of Celaya and is already working for the Avon Corporation in that city. 

Jovenes Adelante provided the $4500 that each student needed for a college education. The students worked hard for something no one in their families or local communities had ever dreamed of—a professional career. Their families not only encouraged them, but had to forego the financial help that the youngsters might have given. They, too, deserve credit. 
This fall, Jovenes Adelante will provide scholarships for 23 students, 8 of them freshmen, to at least nine colleges and universities. 

You can enjoy being part of the catalyst that is effecting change by making any contribution you can to Jovenes Adelante, c/o V. Wheelwright, Box 175, La Conexión, Aldama 3, San Miguel de Allende, or, from the United States, Jovenes Adelante, c/o V. Wheelwright, Box 175, 220 N. Zapata Hwy, 11, Laredo, TX 78043. 

For more information, including tax-free possibilities, contact Virginia Wheelwright at wheelplus@cybermatsa.com.mx or phone 152-1861, Sue Beere at suebeere@cybermatsa.com.mx,  phone: 152-1846, or Helen Morris, helenmorris04@yahoo.com,  phone: 152-3013.


Sexual diversity celebration in San Miguel

San Miguel’s Festival of Sexual Diversity takes place July 19 to 23, offering the first opportunity in our rich community for sexually diverse cultures to come together in celebration of their differences and similarities within an atmosphere of respect and reflection.

Highlights

-A Broadway show, “From New York to San Miguel,” arranged in collaboration with Pride NY -Tito Vasconcelos’ show “El Código ta’ pinchi,” by Cabare-tito in Mexico DF -Las Reinas Chulas, a theater-cabaret group from Mexico DF -Nora Huerta’s show “Dominga la Chimisculera” -Marisol Gasé and Fernando Rivera Calderón present “Bette Davis Doesn’t Fit in This Place”

-The “Rona and the Mamadas” show from Querétaro
-Edgar de Luna, a showman and impersonator from Querétaro
-The “Cornisa” circus group from San Miguel
-Transvestite shows, go-go boys and a DJ from León

Recreational activities will include a pool party at Loma Largatija, a fashion show, bar parties and dances.

Several artistic events are also planned, including four individual shows: Sebastián Belaustegui at Galería Le Noir, Lothar Muller and Jerry León, both at Galería Carlos Muro, and Norma Suarez, location pending. A collective exhibit of art and photography will also be featured, along with a film festival.

To round out the activities, roundtable discussions on topics relevant to sexual diversity will be held with psychologists, theologians, sexologists, sociologists and experts on law.

Scheduled Roundtable Topics and Presentations
-Body Painting Class by Penelope Rivera
-Workshop on Homophobia and Violence by Eber Sosa
-Roundtables on Sexual Diversity by Martha Barrios
-Grupo Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir, A.C.
-Conference with gynecologist Dr. Sandra Gutiérrez
-Presentation by Las Libres Centro de Información y Educación Sexual Region Centro A.C.
-Drag Queen Workshop by Grupo Elige A.C.
For more information about the festival, see www.bombao.com. 
Festival of Sexual Diversity
July 19–23, La Carpa and various locations in San Miguel



Midday Rotary celebrates first anniversary

The Rotary Club of San Miguel de Allende-Midday celebrates its first year of operation on Friday, June 30. The club’s mission statement declares, in part, that “Rotary Clubs throughout the world are encouraged to perform international service, frequently in conjunction with the Rotary Foundation (one of the major private foundations in the world).” The existing Rotary Club of San Miguel has been involved in attracting Rotary Foundation funds to the needs that exist in the San Miguel area, but it is felt that by virtue of improving communication between the languages, the formation of a second area Rotary Club can substantially increase the amount of funds available for local needs.

“One goal of the new club is to make the many English-speaking Rotary visitors to the area aware of the needs that exist in the surrounding communities, with the intent that these Rotarians will return to their home clubs and inform those members of the local needs. The new club will also utilize internet marketing to encourage other Rotary Clubs worldwide to become involved in local projects.”

In one short year, through their website www.rotarysma.org  and through marketing to other clubs, Midday Rotary has attracted help from several US Rotary Clubs.

The Rotary Club of Mill Valley, California, provided school uniforms and school supplies for the girls of Casa Hogar Don Bosco for two years (US $12,000 Rotary International matching grant). Members of the Mill Valley Rotary Club will be visiting here in November to work in the orphanage. 

The Rotary Club of Washington, Missouri, and the Sylvan Learning Center in Washington, Missouri, sent 125 English-language primary school books to the Biblioteca Pública in San Miguel for the Sala Infantil. Midday Rotary paid shipping costs.

The Rotary Club of South Padre Island, Texas, purchased a motorized pontoon boat to ferry school children and workers from the isolated village of Don Juan across a lake to San Miguel de Allende. Midday Rotary will manage the maintenance funds for this project.

The Arcadia Rotary Club of Phoenix, Arizona, and the Public Library of Phoenix sent 500 Spanish-language books to the Biblioteca Pública and the library’s Sala Infantil. Midday Rotary paid shipping costs.

The Rancho Bernardo Sunrise Rotary Club, in California, donated US$400 for one corrective eye surgery (“Adopt an Eye Project,” a joint project of the Lions Club and Midday Rotary that provides eye surgeries to poor Mexican children to correct cross-eye problems). 

The Chagrin Valley Rotary Club of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, the Interact Club at the Chagrin Falls (Ohio) High School, and the Suzuki Children’s String and Piano Program of San Miguel plan to provide 50 musical instruments to the children of three orphanages in San Miguel (US$17,000 Rotary International matching grant). The Rotary-sponsored Interact Club, plus the Spanish Club and the String Club at Chagrin Falls High School, will do a follow-up mission to the three orphanages in San Miguel. 

On July 1, seven high school students from the Interact Club of Trail, British Columbia (sponsored by The Rotary Club of Trail, BC), will be visiting San Miguel for one week. The students will be working at various organizations during the week to give them a well-rounded view of life in San Miguel de Allende. They will be helping to build a house (Casita Linda), working at Casa de Los Angeles and visiting and working in the three orphanages. The Rotary Club of Trail, BC is also donating $1,000 Canadian.

The Rotary Club of San Miguel de Allende-Midday meets every Tuesday at 12:30pm at the Villa Jacaranda Hotel, Aldama 53. Visiting Rotarians and others interested in Rotary are invited to attend this meeting. Lunch follows at 1:30pm in the hotel dining room. For more information go to www.rotarysma.org.  The Midday Rotary Club will not meet on July 4.



Biblioteca Pública reminders

There will be no House & Garden tour this Sunday due to the Mexican elections.

The next public Board of Directors meeting will be held on Friday, July 28 at 11am, Sala Quetzal.

The Biblioteca Pública has special events programmed on July 1, 8, 15 and 19 and requests that groups planning to visit the institution check with the General Manager.



Greening of Colonia Santa Cruz de la Paz

The Garden Club of San Miguel, in conjunction with the homeowners of calle Providencia in Colonia Santa Cruz de la Paz, Louis Franke of Los Magueyes Vivero, and Timoteo Wachter, a San Miguel landscaper and designer, have just completed the first tree planting of the many barren streets in this simple but charming colonia located off the Libramiento to Dolores Hidalgo across from Colonia Independencia.

The medium-sized pirul chino trees were chosen by Louis and Timoteo because they are evergreen, grow quite rapidly and require minimal water. In three years calle Providencia will be a green, shady oasis for the parents and kids who live on this block. 

The homeowners (and their children) dug the holes and planted the 11 trees. They will water them as needed. The San Miguel Garden Club, through its tree fund, paid for the trees, soil and miscellaneous costs.

This fund was set up by Jean Dorr in 2005 and was patterned after the tree fund for Israel, which turned a desert land into a land of plenty. The Garden Club’s mission is to plant as many trees as possible in the colonias of San Miguel. These trees are necessary to increase moisture and cut down on dust and airborne bacteria, as well as to beautify the streets. 

An individual or group may make a donation of 100 pesos or more in honor of a birthday, anniversary, death, wedding or just to celebrate life. A personalized note is sent to the person being honored, or his or her family, letting them know trees are being planted with them in mind. A donation of 5,000 pesos will pay for trees on an entire street. 

Contact Sarah Clancy with donations or inquiries  at clancysarah@yahoo.com or 152-8671.Greening of Colonia Santa Cruz de la Paz

Ana Roy

Ann (Ana) Roy was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on December 6, 1925, to Don and Bethel Roy. She died peacefully at home the morning of May 24, 2006, in San Miguel de Allende.  In between those dates she lived a life marked by creativity, compassion, commitment to social causes and dedication to her friends. Her search for meaning in life and her self-expression inspired friends, students and colleagues.

In 1947, Ann became an early literary sensation when Houghton Mifflin published Absolutely Normal, her book of drawings accompanied by an ironic and intellectually amusing text.

She married Robert Emmitt and collaborated with him on a classic book about the Ute Indians, The Last War Trail, published by University of Oklahoma Press and recently reprinted. 

Her second husband was the artist John Nevin, a well-known painter from Marfil, Guanajuato, who passed away last year. 

In the 1950s, Ann and John moved to Marfil, Guanajuato, where Ann started a women’s sewing cooperative and designed clothing that was marketed under the label “Marfil.” Her designs featured Mexican textiles and embroidery. In 1971, Ann and her two sons moved to Tepoztlan, Morelos. Ann taught classes at CIDOC, the Center for Intercultural Documentation, a Latin American research center founded by Ivan Illich.

She taught courses on women in Mexico and on the symbol systems of the tarot, astrology and the I Ching. 

As part of La Luna Colectiva, Ann worked with other women to explore issues affecting women. Making use of her background in art history, she developed a slide show that portrays the decline in the feminine from benevolent ancient goddesses to contemporary devalued images of women. She also collaborated on a series of articles about women in Mexico and participated in the 1975 United Nations’ International Year of the Woman Conference in Mexico City. 

Her passion for social justice led her to support anti-imperialism, women’s liberation and indigenous movements. It involved her with the prisons of Chile and the struggles of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chiapas. Her thirst for information and her desire to communicate made Ann a vital link to the political realities of the last half of the 20th century.

In the 1980s she moved to Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, where she continued interpreting astrological charts and writing. A major project at this time was her translation into English of The Drums of Monimbo, originally written in Spanish by César Arias of San Miguel. The book tells the story of the insurrection by the inhabitants of Monimbo that sparked the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua. The translation was adapted to radio and broadcast by Pacifica’s WBAI in Berkeley, California.

Ann moved to San Miguel Allende, where she devoted her time to poetry and San Miguel’s community of poets, writers and artists, as well as continuing her work as a social activist.
In the spring and summer of 2001, her sons Willie and Ian died within six weeks of each other. Then, Fernando Maqueo, her collaborator in poetry translations and readings, passed away suddenly. Shortly after his death, Ann was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a disease that causes muscle weakness. Essentially bedridden for the last two and a half years of her life, Ann lived her confinement with grace and equanimity. She maintained sharp intellectual vigor, and her up-to-the-minute international news analysis kept her friends, young and old, asking questions and discussing social issues and politics to the very end. 

Ann had a wonderful sense of humor, a great imagination and a love of mischief. She lived life fully and on a large stage. She will be greatly missed.

She is survived by her brother, John Roy, and his wife, Florence, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and granddaughter Natalia Nevin of San Antonio, Texas.



Remembered by friends

Ana Roy was something else. She was born in 1925 in Oklahoma, which at that time had been a state for a mere 20 years. I don’t suppose she was named for Annie Oakley, but 50 years earlier, she might well have been a sidekick of Oakley’s on the frontier. Ana didn’t carry six-shooters like Annie, but she was a rabble-rouser, a fighter, and, like Annie, a flamboyant dame. 
And, like Annie, she was a frontierswoman. Only Ana Roy’s frontiers were different. Ana traversed intellectual, artistic, geographical, cultural and spiritual frontiers with aplomb and gusto. She was intellectually vigorous and a verbal sharp-shooter. She had a keen perspective of intellectual and cultural vistas. And she was a perceptive observer of the textures and shadings of the hills and valleys in between the vistas. 
I will carry Ana with me, con/textualized in the images provoked by her writings and by the memories of “cafecitos” in her Homobono kitchen. Scooting the cats off the chairs, drinking coffee from chipped cups, and animatedly discussing politics, childhoods in Texas and Oklahoma, astrology, Mexico, embroidery projects, good books, history, and on and on.
We shared an interest and passion in all of the above. I realize I will not share this particular mélange of interests with another. In memory of those conversations and those particular combinations of interests, I thank you, Ana, for being the woman and scout that you were. You and I know you’re not headed towards Heaven—you’re just scouting new horizons. 
Georgeann Johnson

It’s been more than 15 years that I have known Ana Roy, and never a dull moment! She was an artist, a poet and a friend with thought-provoking ideas. She had a wonderful sense of humor and a strong sense of social justice. We were fascinated by the fact that, coming from very different backgrounds, we came to the same conclusions and we started writing a book about it: “1968 was a year that could break your heart.” San Miguel will not be the same without her. 
Clarita Collins

Ana was a perpetual whirlwind, leaving dusty piles of projects to do, read, discuss, distribute and save everywhere in the apartment on Homobono where she lived when I first met her. She was the strong, dear one who let me make my own decisions but was the backbone I needed so I could make an incredible and positive life shift. 
Ana was so much a part of the goddess gatherings in San Miguel that enriched and inspired so many of us. She was happy to identify as the wise crone, and she aged gracefully, staying interested in world affairs and all of the writing she was planning to do. 

I last saw her on a visit to San Miguel in the winter of 2004; we spent an afternoon together. Ana was weak but alert and could still talk about a million subjects.
I will miss you, Ana. Rest in peace.
Barbara Wishingrad

Ana Roy was someone I knew and admired for the 15 years that I have lived here. We shared a passion for social justice and have both been dismayed by US foreign policy, as well as some of the trends in Mexico, particularly as regards the Zapatistas. From Ana I learned much about Mexican traditions and attitudes and have come to love this country and its people enough to become a citizen.

Throughout our many visits, we had long and intense conversations about a myriad of topics. When she was no longer able to read, I frequently read to her from the Progressive, and we shared laughs over Molly Ivans.
Her passing leaves a great void in my life. We will all miss her terribly.
Peggy Bell

Ana Roy was an extraordinary human being, beloved friend and esteemed colleague. She was also a kind of “surrogate mother” to me, as she was for a number of other women whom she mentored as feminists, activists and writers. She was feisty, politically committed and wise, and she had an amazing capacity to understand: emotional reactions, the truth behind the news, moral dilemmas. 

She was an insightful, incisive and creative thinker who cared passionately about people and justice on all levels: personal, social, and spiritual. 

Like most mother–daughter relationships, ours was not without conflicts and ruptures as well as transcendental moments of sharing and love. She, more than anyone, encouraged me when I was struggling mightily to learn Spanish, not only as an exploration of language but also of culture and identity; to stay in Mexico in spite of seemingly insurmountable economic problems and to write. For all that, I am deeply grateful; it is in large part due to her influence that I am who I am now. 
Holly Yasui

Ana died unexpectedly in spite of a disease that kept her confined to her house and immobile for almost the last three years of her life. The force of her spirit, the richness of her inner life, her sense of humor and the company of her friends gave her the fortitude to overcome with great courage a physical state that would have vanquished anyone else. 

An extraordinary combination of sharp, rational and analytical intelligence, with a creative force that was expressed in painting, drawing, poetry and writing, Ana dedicated the last part of her life to the study of international politics, which she found unsettling and threatening, while trying at the same time to understand in all its existential dimensions the deep wound caused by the premature loss of those who were most beloved to her. Far from losing herself in self-pity or resentment, Ana tried to find the sense of life, of her life, and lovingly share her intuitions, her discoveries, the things she herself learned, everything she felt that might also illuminate the way for those around her.

Always interested in sharing her experiences, her knowledge of life and her condition as a woman, Ana also taught us how to die with dignity. She left this world with full consciousness of life and death, quietly and in peace.
Elisa Servin 
(translation: Holly Yasui)

Ana was truly a wise, courageous, compassionate soul. Now she is gone. San Miguel will never be the same for me. 
Anita Hernández

listening to the echo of your words
catching a glimpse 
through the doors you opened
thanking your gifts
taking in your teachings
hurting for the “no longers...”
burnt by your source of fire

I find myself
with you.
Lilia Trápaga

We met Ana in the fall of 2004 after arriving to start the Center for Global Justice. She became an invaluable advisor to me and the Center, which she enthusiastically supported. Aged 33, arriving in Mexico in 1958 to live here, the arc described by her life over the next 48 years—fully bicultural, creative, politically radical—was one I wanted to emulate. Certainly to learn from, as one learns from pioneers. 
Mainly, we liked each other’s company. The amateur psychoanalysis was a good excuse for us. I have been finding that Ana’s voice penetrates my own writing, liberating me to write in a new way that I feel comfortable with. Read her if you can. Following the human rhythm of her stories and poems might liberate your writing. We can talk about it through Jackie Mosio’s blog on Ana: Analog. We can keep her in our midst that way.
Bob Stone