FORUMS & LETTERS

(Editors’ note: This letter was sent to Lic. Cecilia Romero Castillo

commissioner of Nacional Migration Institute (Instituto Nacional de Migración) on September 24.)



Dear Commissioner

I would like to send you my best regards through this letter, as well as my sincere acknowledgment of the great improvements the National Migration Institute has achieved under your direction. 

I would like, as well, to express to you my concern about the closing of the delegation office of the Institute in San Miguel de Allende, Gto, as I expressed to you by phone some days ago. For this reason, I am sending you certified copies of the agreements signed on January 11, 2005, and January 31, 2006, by which the City Council of San Miguel approved the donation to the National Migration Institute of a 2,000-square-meter lot for the construction of an immigration station with its own offices. This is to let you know of the great interest the local government has in collaborating and keeping the delegation of the Institute within the city. I would also like to express my certainty that the current City Hall 2006–2009 and its Mayor Jesús Correa Ramírez are in agreement.

To remove the immigration offices from San Miguel de Allende would directly inconvenience more than 12,000 immigrant residents who would have to travel to another location, probably Celaya, to take care of any immigration business, which would severely harm the municipality and the life of the city, since these immigrants, although not born in San Miguel, have voluntarily decided to live here, to cohabit and to participate in the city’s development and conservation. 

San Miguel is currently consolidating a tourism destiny for retired people, particularly Americans and Canadians, who in coming years will acquire a house in our city and will live out their retirement in this great site. They would also be users of the Institute. It would certain be a severe blow to the economic development and the creation of jobs in San Miguel de Allende to remove the offices. I think that with only the immigrants who currently live in the city the immigration office’s expenses could be paid. 

Therefore, I ask you to reconsider the decision to move the delegation offices of the National Migration Institute, since the Institute’s services are essential for San Miguel de Allende. 

I reiterate the certainty of my convictions. 


Best regards,



Luis Alberto Villarreal García
Senator for the state of Guanajuato


CCP.- Lic. Juan Camilo Mouriño Terrazo, Secretario de Gobernación. Para su conocimiento y seguimiento.

CCP.- H. Ayuntamiento 2006-2009 de San Miguel de Allende, Gto. Para su conocimiento.

CCP.- Lic. Jesús Correa Ramírez, Presidente Municipal de San Miguel de Allende, Gto. Mismo fin.
CCP.- Archivo.




Editor,

My aunt Helen Wale (1902-1975), née Helen Stuart MacGregor, Radcliffe 1924, was apparently a principal founder of the Biblioteca Pública in San Miguel de Allende. My family was amazed to learn recently that the little library Aunt Helen founded (in the fifties?) not only still exists, but has grown to become one of Mexico’s leading libraries—possibly with Mexico’s largest collection of English language books. Wow!! 

I was in San Miguel briefly (for the third time) in the mid-nineties and it never occurred to me then to check whether the library still existed in some form. We didn’t realize we were arriving on the very busy weekend of the annual Sanmiguelada, so we didn’t get as much done as we had wanted.

But I did visit Aunt Helen’s grave marker, presumably in a Protestant section of a larger burial ground. For my family’s records, I would very much like to know the name of that cemetery, which I believe was not far south of her home and on the east side of Ancha de San Antonio, which apparently becomes the main road to Celaya.

I was saddened to learn of the death of Stirling Dickinson (1909-1998) in an auto accident a few years ago. Both of us, I believe, grew up in the same Chicago suburb, Winnetka, IL. Aunt Helen and the Wale family also lived there briefly during World War Two, and may have been influenced there by Dickinson or his family to move to San Miguel after her 1952 Puerto Rico divorce.

I remain very fond of San Miguel de Allende and hope to get back there soon.

John Q. Magie (in Chicago)