Though details are scant, California artist and educator Benny Barrios, considered Sacramento’s pioneering Mexican American painter, took a group of adult students to Jocotepec in 1967 for an art workshop. Benjamin ‘Benny’ Barrios was born in Bixby, Arizona on 20 March 1925 and spent his childhood in Clovis. His parents were from the town of […]
Artist and sculptor Violet Wilkes lived for about twenty years in retirement in Chapala with her husband, John, beginning in the early 1960s. Violet (‘Vi’) Wilkes (née Macintyre) was born on 1 November 1894 in Glasgow, Scotland. For reasons unknown, she crossed the Atlantic in 1911 to be raised by an aunt and uncle in […]
Many of the artists and authors associated with Lake Chapala have clear links to Christmas. Admittedly, some links are more tenuous than others. Here, in no particular order, are some that come to mind: German-born photographer Hugo Brehme, who is credited with having introduced the first photographic Christmas cards into Mexico. Brehme photographed Lake Chapala […]
American actress Selena Royle lived in Guadalajara for almost thirty years, beginning in the mid-1950s. She later penned a very popular book about the city which included some interesting observations about Ajijic and Chapala. Selena Royle’s life (Wikipedia) Born in New York City on 6 November 1904, Royle worked on stage, radio and in more […]
Born in Guadalajara on 3 January 1879, Jorge Enciso became a designer, painter, muralist and museologist. Enciso’s first formal art studies were at the studio of master Brazilian-Mexican painter Félix Bernardelli, who introduced him to impressionism. The illustrious group studying with or working alongside Bernadelli included Gerardo Murillo (better known as Dr. Atl), Luis de […]
I might never have stumbled across John Wadleigh’s novel The Bitter Passion (1959), were it not for a review by Tom Ray, who said that he had been told by a friend in Mexico: “that some of the Norte-Americano expatriates had been asked to leave the Lake Chapala area. This sensitive, well-written novel deals with […]
This image, which periodically resurfaces on social media, is sometimes mistakenly claimed to be an old photograph of Ajijic. In fact, the photograph is a cropped section of a photo of Jamay, Jalisco, taken by Dwight Rodgers Furness in about 1907. Furness was the son of the founder of the Hotel Ribera Castellanos, a lakeside […]
Legendary travel journalist Stanton (Stan) Delaplane (1907-1988) and his family spent the summer of 1970 in Ajijic. Delaplane was a prolific San Francisco journalist who won a Pulitzer prize in 1942 for his reporting about the proposed ‘State of Jefferson’ (for break-away residents of northern California and southern Oregon) and two National Headliner Awards awards […]
From the 1930s onwards, several architects, most of them graduates of the Guadalajara engineering school, undertook modernist projects in Chapala. They included Pedro Castellanos Lambley, Juan Palomar y Arias and Ignacio Díaz Morales. But the one who became by far the most famous was Luis Barragán. Who was Luis Barragán? Often described as the most […]
Emil Zubryn was born on 11 July 1909 in Brooklyn, New York, to Nicholas Zubryn (30) and his wife Mary (29), newly arrived immigrants from Austria. His father worked as a building maintenance employee of the New York Telephone Company. Emil’s parents later lived for 12 years in Phoenix, Arizona, before spending their final years […]
Several Mexico City-based photographers visited Chapala over the Easter period in 1908 to ensure that President Porfirio Díaz’s visit that year was adequately covered in the national press. One of the more noteworthy was Heliodoro J. Gutiérrez, who was sent there by El Tiempo Ilustrado, which included about twenty of his photographs in its 26 […]
According to American writer Oakley Hall, the novelist Christopher Veiel (born in 1925) was living at Lake Chapala at the same time he was in 1952. It is not known what, if anything, Veiel was working on during his time in Mexico, but his first (and apparently only) novel was published two years later (1954) […]
Víctor J. Reynoso Tapia was born in Tepic, Nayarit, in 1929 and became an outstanding illustrator and painter. He studied, and later taught, art at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Guadalajara. His works were included in several exhibitions in Guadalajara. As a student he had three drawings included in an end-of-academic-year […]
I’ve shared the story of American author Neill James, who arrived in Ajijic for the first time in September 1943, several times previously, with varying degrees of detail, ranging from a summary version of her life to the lengthier, more nuanced version threaded through Foreign Footprints in Ajijic and an in-depth 38-page research paper. The last […]
Two fun and vibrant paintings related to Lake Chapala by “Ellen Black” appeared on the New York art market in recent years. The first, titled Chapala and dated 1967, was an oil on canvas measuring 30 x 24 inches, listed by Doyle Auctioneers & Appraisers in August 2021, with a provenance of “Galerie Internationale, New […]
English-language newspapers at Lake Chapala may have a longer history than I thought. At the time I wrote about the Chapala Blade, I was fairly sure that that short-lived tabloid from the early 1960s was likely to be the earliest local periodical ever published at Lake Chapala. But, by an amazing coincidence, I recently stumbled […]
Several posters on social media sites such as Facebook have claimed that this image, which dates from the 1920s, shows Avenida González Gallo in Chapala, with the Chapala Railroad Station in the background. The photograph was taken by Guadalajara-based photographer Juan Aráuz Lomeli and first published in 1926. When Aráuz Lomeli published it as a […]
Arriving in Chapala in 1895, Italian count Guiseppe Antona and his friends dismounted at the ‘Inn of the Nueva Purissima’ (sic) which was “more suited to be called a stable than anything else,” since the rooms had no windows. Antona had arrived at a building (long since demolished) known as Mesón de la Purísima, believed […]
This beautiful postcard of Lake Chapala sold recently on eBay. The card had been mailed to California, most likely in early 1957, as the lake was recovering from its worst-ever drought. I’m familiar with more than 1000 postcard images of Lake Chapala but this photograph was new to me. It turns out, from the message […]
Teacher and journalist Irma McCall was a resident of Ajijic during the 1960s, and penned a full-page article about Ajijic for a California newspaper in March 1962 in which she called Ajijic an “unspoiled paradise.” At the time, according to McCall, the village had about 2000 inhabitants, ‘principally fishermen,’ and an estimated 200 Americans. McCall […]
Though it seems that she never lived at Lake Chapala, fiber artist Jeanine Cappel, a regular visitor to Guadalajara, was familiar with the lake from at least as early as the mid-1960s, and exhibited in Ajijic in the late 1980s. Jeannine Cappel (née Lange) was born in Chicago on 29 January 1929, and died in […]
Nebraska-based photographer and journalist Jack Bailey (1901-1977) made numerous trips to Mexico in the course of his career. An article he wrote in 1964, while visiting friends in Guadalajara, is the only currently known mention of an obscure and (perhaps mercifully) long forgotten publication named the Chapala Blade. In several articles, Bailey included detailed descriptions […]
Some curious travel posters, purporting to be ‘photorealistic’ images of Ajijic, are currently (August 2025) listed on eBay. Each is available in a variety of prices and sizes, ranging from $5 for 4 x 6″ to $49 for 36 x 48″. Here is the first of the two images currently listed: This pretty (but fictional) […]
Martin Dreyer (1909-2001) and his wife, Margaret “Maggie” Webb Dreyer (1911-1976), spent several weeks in Ajijic in 1962. The Dreyers, both established artists, had opened a joint gallery in Houston a few years earlier. Martin’s entertaining account of their stay in Ajijic is an interesting read. Martin Dreyer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1909, […]
Mark Coomer (1914-2004) was a much traveled and highly successful commercial artist whose varied works over a long professional career continue to show up regularly at auction. He jumped onto my radar because of a news clipping from 1955 attesting to him donating a painting of “a Mexican market scene near Ajijic, Jalisco, on Lake […]
The rich literary history of Lake Chapala over the past 130 years is exemplified by the extraordinary diversity of short stories that have used the lake as their setting or backdrop. This post considers some of the noteworthy twentieth century examples. The earliest short story (English or Spanish) set, or partially set, at Lake Chapala […]
Stuart Phillips (1901-1981) had work included in a group show in Ajijic in 1971, some years after he retired from an executive position in Chicago. Details of his art education and training are currently unknown. Stuart Grosvenor Stapleton Phillips was born 6 November 1901 in Londonderry, Northern Ireland to an English father and Scottish mother. […]
The Chapala Blade, a short-lived 1960s’ tabloid, is almost certainly the earliest local periodical to be published at Lake Chapala. It began only a month or two after the first issue of the Guadalajara-based Colony Reporter. Unfortunately, almost no evidence remains of the Chapala Blade. No copies of Chapala Blade are known to have survived. […]
For Canadians, who celebrate 1 July as Canada Day, here is a list of Canadian artists and authors who have historical connections to Lake Chapala and who have been profiled on this site. Enjoy! Visual artists Henry Sandham (1842-1910), a well-known Canadian illustrator of the time, illustrated Charles Embree‘s historical novel, A Dream of a […]
It is not surprising that the iconic and historic Chapala Railroad Station, designed by Guillermo de Alba, and completed in 1920, has appealed to so many photographers and artists over the years, and his grandson Martin Casillas de Alba is the author of several books related to Lake Chapala and his family’s links to local […]