5 April – Roads & Kingdoms
Alejandro Cota Maclis looks gravely at the remains of his grandmother’s garden, a five-by-fifteen-foot patch of limestone and churned dirt. At the back, grape vines lean like broken caryatids against a ramshackle fence of sticks and wire. A committee of vultures perch in the high, green tops of date palms. Behind him, an austere limestone church—the Mission of Santa Gertrudis—stands on a lonely rise in the center of the silent village. (more…)
9 March – Lucky Peach
Alan Pasiano had spent a quarter century on or below the water before he struck gold. He’d worked diving for abalone and saragassum seaweed in small towns on the pointed western elbow of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, fished for tuna on big ships in the Pacific, cooked sea turtle (before it was illegal) on a cargo boat in Panama, and welded the hulls of oil tankers for Mexico’s state-run oil monopoly, Pemex, in Rosarito. But it wasn’t until the 80s, when he started diving for urchin, that he got rich. (more…)
Michael Snyder 