#ciudad guzman

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Olympus om 3 Kodak 200 35mm

Ciudad Guzmán jalisco 2025

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Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco

September 2018

[onlymexico]

Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco

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Olympus Om 3 35mm saltillo Ciudad Guzmán aka zapotlán el grande 2025

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Accidente en Jalisco dejó dos muertos y siete heridos

Accidente en Jalisco dejó dos muertos y siete heridos

México.- Dos personas perdieron la vida, luego de que el vehículo en el que se trasladaba chocó con un tráiler en la carretera libre estatal 401 en kilómetro 56+486, en el municipio de Amacueda.

Tras el fuerte impacto, una de las víctimas mortales salió eyectada, mientras la otra terminó prensada en el interior de la camioneta Ford Explorer, color verde.

Los familiares identificaron a las…

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Esta semana en Instagram:

> Un día de lluvia en Ciudad Guzmán 🌧️

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Familia

Despedidas have been a recurring event of my Peace Corps experience. The first step of the process was saying goodbye to friends, family, coworkers in the States. Three months later I was saying nos vemos to the family I found in PCM-17 and in PCM staff. And now, almost exactly a year after submitting my application to PC I am finally here in site, where I will be for the next two years. Yesterday was my first day in the office and at around 3pm when I got on the bike to head down into town for lunch, I thought to myself, “So, this is it? This is what everything has been leading to over the past year.” And of course I was filled with doubt: “What am I doing here? How am I going to be successful, content, and complete here?”

The whole day I had been looking forward to talking with Marco, a former professor and now a kind-of friend, after work. The first thing he asked me about was my work and we laughed, “Que chance,” about the serendipity of me being assigned to work with the forest fire department of the National Forestry Commission of Mexico, given that Marco and my research together focused on forest fires in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. Having been deprived of meaningful human contact and having just completed a stressful first day of “work”, I found myself trying to keep the conversation going with him, to get him talking, to draw his stories out of him, to spend all night in that coffee shop and forget about where I was. Hearing that Marco is hoping to work at Instituto Mora in Mexico City, where I worked last summer, I realized, or was reminded, that I have been looking for a reason to not do This. This as in live in the ranchito of Ciudad Guzmán, work with machisto and homophobic counterparts, and be here in the elsewhere.

Marco is giving a GIS training at Instituto Mora in a few weeks and I’ll go visit him for a few days in DF, where I will hopefully get this bug out of my system. Having a few days with him in the city that I came to call mi hogar will be a close of that camino and the opening of another.

Somewhere on the meeting of these two caminos I am found by my host family here in Ciudad Guzmán. They invite me to their son-in-law’s 25th birthday party. Two years older than I and he already has three children and one more wife than I will have ever. I am overwhelmed with feelings of love and respect when Alfredo, my host father, tells me about how Elva, his wife, was such a great dancer and how they would “dance disco like in Saturday Night Fever.” They had the “fiebre”. As the cumbia catches my attention I feel the fever too. I think to myself, “Cumbia is my thing. Me gusta.” Dancing in my seat making faces at the 2 year old girl clinging to her parents refusing to play with the other kids reinforces my love for cumbia. But then the birthday boy-man-father passes by, reaches for the laptop, and changes the song. The schh of the güira fills the patio as I realize not only is this bachata, but this is The Bachata Song Darte un Beso. Tears come to my eyes thinking about the people for whom espero que no les falte nada. That’s also when I realize, “No, me equivoqué. Bachata is my thing.” At some point the worry about missing this person or that person fades away and I am grateful for now, por que ahí está el secreto, for the connections, kinships, and relationships I share right now with those who have become my family in this moment, for these two years, and for forever. The family who has brought me here to Mexico, carried me through PST, and welcomed me here to Ciudad Guzmán. This camino is not mine alone.

[cuerpodepaz]

Capacitación at CEFOFOR

Following this post are some pictures of this past week at the CEFOFOR training center in Ciudad Guzman. CEFOFOR is the Centro de Formación Forestal, and provides training for community leaders from around México to make their communities more resilient in the face of climate change (which is a priority here in México!). This manifests as educational training in things like ecosystem services, fire management, and also training in appropriate technologies, which was the focus of our visit as Environment trainees.

CEFOFOR is a program started and supported by CONAFOR (Comisión Nacional Forestal) the national forest service. As opposed to the US Forest Service, CONAFOR incorporates community resiliency around México’s extensive but threatened forestlands into their natural resource conservation and management plans. 

One of my favorite installations on site was the Farmacia Viviente (”Living Pharmacy”), a showcase of México’s medicinal plant species. Mexican traditional medicine follows Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine in the world as far as its use and practice, and is a source of pride in cultural heritage here in México, since medicinal practices were condemned as witchcraft and all but obliterated by the Spanish upon colonialization (it is estimated that 95% of the knowledge and ritual was lost, but is slowly being recovered). Many of the volunteers snickered and scoffed at the medicinal practitioner as she explained the workings of herbal medicine, and the interconnectivity of man and nature, but I was too enthralled to pay them any mind. I plan to pursue traditional knowledge in my future site, as southern Puebla and Oaxaca are rich in this culture of herbal medicine. Moreover, as many of the communities we will be working with in México are disadvantaged and impoverished, farmacias vivientes are sources of alternative health care and food sovereignty.  

On the last day of our training we visited an ejido (which is community land whose structure and use is based on a mix of pre-Hispanic and colonial agrarian parceling systems) called Emiliano Zapata to build a Patsari Stove, which is a fuel-efficient outdoor stove made of earth and cement. The ejido welcomed us warmly, and showed us the many appropriate technologies they have on site, including their strawbale community center, composting toilets, and other fuel-efficient stoves. Despite their small size, with the help of CONAFOR, they are aiming to turn their community into a training center and demonstration site for off-grid living and community resiliency, although the terminology they used was quite different. 

They said that Emiliano Zapata, the great revolutionary and the namesake of the ejido, also had a strawbale house. But I think that the name is also appropriate because this type of practice is what will revolutionize México in this century, as opposed to top-down political change, which is, frankly, pitifully corrupt.  

After we constructed the stove, with the help and guidance of CONAFOR staff, including University students from Guadalajara, we were invited to have a late-afternoon comida of chicken birria and pomegranate ponche. The comisariado ejidal and his band Espejo Norteño, sang their traditional songs about forbidden and lost love, and then invited Mr. Alex Glass up to sing a Neil Young song.

The week at Ciudad Guzman, in addition to being enlightening and informative, was beautiful. Every morning I’d wake up before dawn to sit on the roof of the dormitories for a while, then join some of the other trainees in TRX, rope climbing, or yoga before our breakfast. We also summited the nearby mountain in the national park Nevado de Colima. Now back in Querétaro, we have a day of rest before beginning week 7 of training.