(Photo by elzoh) 

“I didn’t just hail from a different place. I had a different kind of life,” writes Gianpiero Petriglieri of the mobile lifestyle that comes with his work training global business leaders. 

I am not a global leader, or eve… Read full post »

If I got in my car this too-hot afternoon, I could be in Juarez in time for dinner. 

When we drive across the Rio Grande for Sunday lunch with his grandparents, I tell my son that if we… Read full post »

My keyboard looks like a pirate’s maw, gaping holes that were once keys, stains on others, and its hard drive is jammed full of photographs: pyramids, pink stone, parades, fireworks behind cathedral spires, and hundreds of hotel rooms I could never afford on a hotel reviewer’s in… Read full post »

Morelia, Michoacán

            Surprisingly few people know about Morelia, the beautiful city in the center of Mexico. I admit that, even if it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the capital of Michoacán, I ha/… Read full post »

I am trying to write this from my temporary home in Morelia, Michoacán, one of the places red alerted for travelers, to sum up Mexico’s War on Drugs so I can write about some of the things (extra)ordinary people are doing about it, but it is Sunday night, and/… Read full post »

I grew up on a farm in your quintessential middle-of-nowhere. While my dad cursed his cows and tractors and broken down trucks—“peckerhead” should have been my first word, my mom nursed a vast  vegetable garden, a flock of Thanksgiving turkeys that were notoriously too large… Read full post »

“When we see a pretty flower, we stop to look at it and smell it, right?”

My son keeps his face hidden. He gets shy when strangers gush at him.

“And seeing that flower makes us happy, right?”

He nods into my chest.

“Well, people in Mexico feel that… Read full post »

“Who is that man?” my son asks as soon as we arrive.

The man playing Jesus is wearing a white tunic. There is fake blood on his face.

I take a deep breath and… Read full post »

Yes, it’s difficult; but what isn’t? Yes, it’s not what it used to be; but what else is new since you became a parent? Yes, you have to pack half your house; but do it anyway. Travel with your children. Travel while they’re… Read full post »

The doorbell buzzes.

It is probably Alfredo, our neighborhood auxiliary policeman who is not so old but is missing a prominent front tooth. He visits periodically to collect our twenty-peso contribution to his force-of-one. More often, he drops by to ask for a donation to help him through the latest… Read full post »

 (My latest Love in Mexico correspondence essay is live on National Geographic's Glimpse.org. An excerpt is below, or read the whole thing here.) 

“Dulce, dulce, dulce, dulce,” sings my two-year-old son as I stroller him over cobblestones.

Yes, &ld… Read full post »

On our second morning in Mexico City, my son’s Matchbox convertible somehow landed in sludge. Noelle, who has decided I can use her name forward now that this post has been live for a while, is my husband’s colleague (and my closest fellow gringa mother, or… Read full post »

Morelia, Mexico 

Two articles have come to my attention this week, one an op-ed in the Washington Post by Edith R. Wilson, a former advisor to the World Bank, and a post by CBS Travel Editor Peter Greenberg, the “Contrarian Traveler.” The gist of each was this:/… Read full post »

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?

"Questions of Travel" by Elizabeth Bishop

Driving across Guatemala in my old Salvadoran Volvo, Steve and I planned a school we would open in some remote corner of that land of so… Read full post »

“Señora, his feet!” The woman rushing at me over the cobblestones, well-dressed in a beige pantsuit, all but gasped in horror.

I stopped pushing my son’s flimsy stroller, but before I could defuse the situation, she had my toddler’s bare feet in her hands.

&ldq… Read full post »

“Un momento,” called A’s teacher Anita as we strollered away from his Montessori school one afternoon.

When she caught up, she handed my husband a small slip of white paper printed faintly on one side.

“Today they came to give vaccinations. A had one for polio.… Read full post »

 Glazed dishes being stacked into a traditional open-top, wood-fired kiln, Capula, Mexico

For the Super Bowl, we headed across the street to a steak place with a big television. We ordered Victoria beers and hammered-thin bistec served a la mexicana or arrachera, with gr/… Read full post »

 My son may not be safe in all the ways that he could be. He might not be safe at all. But I want more for him than his bodily safety and my peace of mind. I also want him to grow up flexible and free and… Read full post »

My husband and I—both born and raised U.S. citizens—have lived in Central and South America in the past, and on both sides of the border, in New and Old Mexico; so we have heard a lot of immigration stories.

We have even had minor immigration… Read full post »

Monarchs live for only two months unless they are born in the fall, then (if they live east of the Rockies) they fly thousands of miles to Michoacán and hang out on the same bunch of fir trees their great-great… Read full post »

La venganza—that’s what stomach distress is called in Mexico. Moctezuma’s revenge on Mexico’s invaders.

La venganza set in for me the Saturday before Christmas. We’d been at a party until our toddler broke Baby Jesus out of the nativity scene and my husband and I imple… Read full post »

This year I am a correspondent for National Geographic's Glimpse.org. This essay about how travel has changed me and how I have changed as a traveler is the first of my articles there to go live. Here's a bit of the essay below; link below for the whole shebang.

 … Read full post »

When the posada’s night clerk opened the door to our “cabana,” I blanched. Before me was a cubicle with four plywood bunks laid over with thin blue vinyl mats reminiscent of high school gym class. My husband forged ahead, toddler in arms. There was barely room for him… Read full post »