In San Miguel
There’s something sad, and a little bit wrong, about how lovely San Miguel de Allende seems to the foreign visitor. It is the gringo’s Platonic ideal of what Mexico should be: streets one can wander safely at anytime of the day or night; 16th Century cathedrals with colonial gothic paintings and pealing bells; warm light in winter that intensifies the painted buildings in the golden hours after dawn and prior to dusk; shopping emporia; rooftop dining sans winter overcoats; the form of a genuine Mexican city with a real community of workers walking home or taking the bus, and parents laughing with their children on their way home from school — even as they dodge the tourists on the cobblestone streets. For the artist, it is a mecca, and has been since the GI Bill funded post-war workshops for the unusual veteran who wished to learn how to paint or sculpt. For the photographer, it is pure magic, as attested to by the number of first-rate workshops run here by name-brand mentors. For me, it’s the loveliest place I know to spend a week or three in any season but summer, even as I acknowledge the city is not quite real, protected by its tourist economy from the harsh possibilities of so many Mexican cities that are equally lovely, or would be were it not for the gravitational pull of the USA’s drug habits. We love it, even as it is a reminder that Porfirio Diaz at least got it right when he lamented poor Mexico, “so far from God and close to the United States.”
As always, click on image to begin full-sized slide show.