http://insidemex.com/people/lifestyle/the-forgotten-island
By Vivienne Stanton
I’m standing in the Casa del Poeta on Colonia Roma’s tree-lined Avenida Álvaro Obregón, imagining my feet subsumed in lake water. On the wall in front of me is an artist’s impression of Mexico City, then Tenochtitlan, in 1519. The image is bucolic: a neat, ordered city in the middle of a vast lake.
If a lake is like the Earth’s eye, reflecting its soul,… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in Marie Claire, September 2010)
I’m sitting at a small, wooden table by an arched open window, overlooking the town of San Miguel de Allende. Flat top adobe houses spread out across the valley, painted yellow, white, burgundy and blue. Clutches of trees rise above rooftops. Bougainvillea sprouts over centuries-old colonial walls. Beyond the town, the pale green Mexican altiplano, the high plateau, rolls out… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
A word used again and again to describe the Jewish community in Mexico to me as I researched this story was cerrada—closed. “Wealthy” was another. “They live in Polanco,” one taxi driver told me knowingly, speaking of the swanky Mexico City neighborhood where Orthodox Jews in black hats share park space with manicured Mexican mommies and synagogues share blocks with high-rise hotels and Hummer dealerships. “They… Read more
(Published in The West Australian Weekend Magazine, 3 May 2008)
By Vivienne Stanton
It’s 8am on a cool, late-winter morning, and we’re in the middle of a wooded mountainside in the central Mexican highlands, hunting butterflies. They shouldn’t be too hard to find. Each year, up to 250 million of the bright orange insects—dubbed the Elvis of butterflies, for their flashy, patterned wings—arrive here en… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in The West Australian Weekend Magazine, 29 March, 2008)
“The Bluuuuue Pannnnnnntheeeeeeeer,” yells the tenor-voiced announcer, “in dannnnnnger of extiiiiinnnnnnction!”
I’m in the Arena Mexico, drinking Corona from a paper cup and ducking, as potato chips fly over my head. Fans beat the rails and launch popcorn into the air. Lights flash. An 80s Rock Ballad blares from the sound system. The 16,500-seat stadium is jumping. … Read more