In searching for a good place to watch the Texas Longhorn football games, we found a new tex-mex restaurant called 7 Salsas close to Dallas Cowboys headquarters. There’s a pretty bartender and a football-loving manager who cheers along with us. After trying out a number of supremely obnoxious sports bars, we sat down at the […]

My sixth and final review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the jungles of Paraguay. Lily Tuck brings us The News from Paraguay, during the late 1800s in a time of war and turmoil for this land-locked country in South America.
I always find it nice to have a map when I’m […]

Oh my gosh. There’s babies poppin’ out everywhere!
I slip back to northern Mexico with The Hummingbird’s Daughter where Teresita Urrea was a mid-wife and a healer. The book starts with Teresita’s own birth, and we see so many babies born through her eyes and her gentle, but strong hands. She brought life wherever she went, […]

When we left our travels, we were in Northern Mexico, skirting the border to the US. We travel now to New Mexico, where the people live north of the border, but share a culture with their family to the south.
We’ve been here before with Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Like Teresa Urrea in The Hummingbird’s […]

Okay, so Gary Jennings’s Aztec doesn’t qualify as magical realism, but I thought since we were here in Northern Mexico that we might talk about the Chichimeca.
So you know how anyone can post on Wikipedia, and you don’t know if what you’re getting is completely accurate? Well, try searching “chichimeca” on Yahoo! You should come […]

Another story that takes place in Northern Mexico is Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. It’s a tale of being enslaved by tradition, and the quiet and not-so-quiet rebellions against the chains that bind.
It’s Cinco de Mayo weekend, with lots of festivities happening around town. It’s not a huge tradition in Mexico, but here in […]

In The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea takes us on a journey more than a thousand miles north of Colombia. We start in the state of Sinaloa in Mexico with the Urrea family and The People. From there we travel north again to Sonora, follow holy men into Chihuahua and even venture beyond the Rio […]

My brother visited Colombia several years ago, and his journey was almost as exciting to me as my father’s trip to Peru in the late sixties. As a sheltered American, it’s hard for me to step out of my comfort zone to explore places of such wildness and danger. And though I may never visit […]

I asked my man what images came to mind when he thought about Colombia. He said, “Marijuana, cocaine, drug lords, guerrilla warfare. Isn’t that what everyone thinks of?” He went on to say, “Unless you’re a real nerd. And then you might think about coffee.”
But I don’t like that image. It’s a stereotype in the […]

From Chile, we travel north along the Pacific coast of South America to Colombia with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. From the first line of the book, we know that this will be an incredible adventure. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that […]