Lakeside Living

Carol D. Bradley

Email: cdbradleymex@gmail.com Phone: 33-2506-7525

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” ~Desmond Tutu

The Lake Chapala Society hosts Open Circle every Sunday at 10AM, a popular community gathering in Ajijic, to enjoy a diverse range of presentations.

The presentations will be on the south lawn, close to the gazebo, the entrance will be by the side door on Ramón Corona, chairs will be socially distanced. Gate opens at 9:30.

We recommend bringing a hat and bottled water, and please remove containers upon departure. Attendance is limited to 80 persons, please make your reservation if you want to attend https://opencircleajijic.org/reserva-

tion_form.php

Use of masks and temperature checks on entry is mandatory.

Lake Chapala Society LCS, is seeking to update its list of charitable, social, and support organizations. These groups could include environmental, social issues, animal welfare, support groups, etc. -- any group that contributes and gives back to the Lakeside area. If you are involved with a group and want to ensure the group’s inclusion in LCS’ inventory, please contact Diana Ayala, LCS Development Director development@lakechapalasociety.com

February presentations include:

David Bryen Please consult Opencircleajijic.org for specific dates and details unavailable at press time.

David Bryen: Intolerance, Polarization and the Longing for Community

Loretta Downs: Grief, Gratitude and Grace: Healing form Loss. Dr. Todd Stong

Todd Stong: Dr Stong is well-known in our area for his involvement in studies and projects related to the Lake Chapala, local wells, water treatment and related matters. He donates his expertise and is widely considered our region’s most objective and informed advocate for Lake Chapala. Richard Diehl. Check the Open Circle website for definite date and topic.

is: Bare Stage Theatre’s February production

The Savannah Sipping Society by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope & Jamie Wooten and runs February 25th, 26th & 27th. In this delightful, laugh-a-minute comedy, four unique Southern women, all needing to escape the sameness of their day-to-day routines, are drawn together by Fate—and an impromptu happy hour—and decide it’s high time to reclaim the enthusiasm for life they’ve lost through the years. Over the course of six months, hilarious misadventures, and the occasional liquid refreshment, these middle-aged women successfully bond and find the confidence to jumpstart their new lives.

Roxanne Rosenblatt directs.

Linda Goman, Kathleen Morris, Kathleen Pharis & Barbara Pruitt make up our stellar cast.

Tickets are $200 to join in the fun. Seating is limited so reserve now at barestagetheatre2018@gmail.com.

We are located at #261 on the mountain side of the Carretera in Riberas del Pilar across from the Catholic Church. Door and Bar open at 3:00 pm. Seats are held till 3:50 pm, show at 4:00 pm. All Covid 19 protocols will

Cast: (sitting) Kathleen Pharis, Barbara Pruitt, (standing) Kathleen Morris & Linda Goman

be in place: Audience limited in size; Masks are mandatory; And curtains will be open for air flow. Please Like, Follow & Share our Facebook Page: www.facebook. com/barestagetheatre2018/

Once again Los Amigos Big Band and 4to Sentido Restau-

rant team up for what promises to be one spectacular event.

Fiesta Latina takes place on Friday March 4 at 5pm where area residents can enjoy an evening of Latin influenced music along with food and beverages to match the theme!

The 17 piece Los Amigos Big Band features some of Guadalajara and Lake Chapala’s finest musicians and this dynamic ensemble has garnered unanimous praise for their innovative and spectacular performances.

Michael Reason has just accepted the appointment as the

new music director and has put together a program full of sambas, salsa’s, bossa nova’s and many more Latina styles. “Many favorites will be part of the set list including The Girl from Ipanema, Oye ComoVa, Besame Mucho, Brazil and, of course,

Tequila” says Reason.“In fact with so many foot tapping numbers I expect the dance floor to be packed!” he continues.

Joining the band will be the acclaimed singer Mariana Vigueras. Mariana is well known to Lakeside audiences but this will be her debut with the Amigos Big Band. Mariana, however, is no stranger to jazz styling and sings regularly with the KM Big Band in Guadalajara. Doug Voet will be joining Mariana as vocalist and will host the performance as the most charming and witty EmCee. 4tro Sentido Restaurant has a large covered venue with wonderful views of both lake and mountains and is situated on the Carretera in San Antonio directly opposite the Chula Vista Golf Club.

The event is timed to coincide with the famous Rio Carnival which will be in full swing on March 4! So dine, drink and dance to celebrate Carnival time with the Los Amigos Big Band at Fiesta Latina!

Los Amigos Big Band concerts always sell out fast so early booking is highly recommended

The show starts at 5pm and due to Covid protocols seating is limited to 125. Tickets for the performance are $350 and must be reserved in advance by email at LABBtickets@gmail.com

Los Amigos Big Band

Casa de Cultura,

Jocotepec presents

Jocotepec International Art Exhibit.

15 + artists & artisans. Something for everyone.

Grand Opening:

Feb 4 2022, 6 PM. Exhibit is open until Feb 25th .

Refreshments, meet the artists and more.

Lakeside Published

Writer’s Group is back at El Gato Feo Cafe + Roastery with their “Meet the Authors” event. There will be 3 authors reading from their works and answer-

Audience enjoying a reading from Lakeside author Mel Goldberg.

ing a live Q+A at the end of each reader.

Authors will have copies of their books for signing.

This event will take place the second Wednesday of every month.

Next one: February 9th. Readings start at 11.

Come early for coffee and enjoy live music by Sergio Casas playing from his Personal Selections.

Meeting held in the lovely salon of Estrellita’s Bed & Breakfast. (Where El Gato Feo Cafe is located)

Open to the public.

Speaking of Writers, the longstanding Ajijic Writers Group meets in the garden of La Nueva Posada on the first and third Friday of each month at 11AM.

Local writers read from their works in progress. The audience is invited to offer constructive feedback and comments.

Stay for lunch to meet the writers and enjoy the inspiration. Sign up to read your original work.

La Nueva Posada is located on the lake at #9, Donato Guerra in Ajijic.

Open to all levels of writers.

La Nueva Posada

Lope de Aguirre: Traitor, Hero, Madman?

By Robert Drynan

Lope de Aguirre was born into an impoverished family of petty Spanish nobility in the province of Oñate in 1511.

When Pizarro arrived in Spain to obtain permission from Charles I to launch his third expedition, Aguirre got wind of the stories of the riches to be had. Six years later Aguirre landed in Perú. In 1538 he participated in the Battle of Salinas that led to the death of Diego Almagro.

In 1544 first viceroy of Peru, Blasco Núñez Vela arrived from Spain with orders to implement new laws to end the abuse and enslavement of the natives. Deeply resentful of the arrival of a bureaucrat of the Spanish court, Gonzalo Pizarro organized an army. Capturing Núñez in 1546 he abolished the new laws. Aguirre participated in the campaign that freed the imprisoned viceroy but failed to restore him to power. Aguirre and others fled back to Central America.

In 1551 Aguirre returned to Perú, but a magistrate, Francisco de Esquivel, ironically accused him of violating laws protecting the Indians. Arrested and by Esquivel’s order, publicly flogged, Aguirre swore vengeance. Legend has it that Aguirre pursued Esquivel on foot for three years and four months, finally confronting and killing the magistrate in his mansion in Cuzco.

Under sentence of death for the murder of Esquivel, Aguirre evaded the penalty for the next several years in uprisings against the rulers of Perú. He occasionally fought on the royalist side, but apparently the judgment was ignored in exchange for his military services. He was again accused of the murder of a provincial governor, but pardoned when he joined forces with royalists to put down another rebellion. At the battle of Chuquinga in 1554, Aguirre was badly wounded and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

By the late 1550’s bitter and unstable, close to fifty years old, Aguirre had fought in countless battles, been crippled and had nothing to show for it but a mestiza daughter, Elvira, and a reputation as a tough fighting man. His erratic, violent behavior earned him the nickname Aguirre El Loco. He bore a deep sense of betrayal and resentment for the Spanish crown.

In 1559 Aguirre thought his moment had come. The Viceroy of Peru approved an expedition to search for El Dorado. He placed about 370 Spanish soldiers and a few hundred Indians under the command of a young nobleman, Pedro de Ursúa. Aguirre’s reputation as a soldier secured him a senior position in the military leadership of the venture.

Aguirre resented Ursúa. A younger man, less qualified as a soldier than Aguirre, but with powerful family connections. Ursúa brought along his mistress, distracting him from his responsibility as leader of the expedition. Descending into the dense rainforest of the Amazon Basin, the endeavor soon foundered. They raided indigenous settlements for food and ransacked them for valuables, slaughtering the inhabitants without mercy. They found no city of gold and little food. Word of their depredations preceded them and they were met only by hostile natives. Disease and malnutrition depleted their numbers.

Aguirre became the leader of disgruntled soldiers who survived the first stages of the expedition. He overthrew Ursúa, and installed Fernando de Guzman, the second in command, as a puppet and stopping long enough to build two small vessels, continued eastward on the river.

Then in a gesture of defiance, Aguirre declared their independence from Spain, naming Guzman “Prince of Peru and Chile.” Becoming increasingly paranoid, Aguirre ordered the death of the priest accompanying the expedition, followed by Ursúa’s lover, Inés de Atienza, and then even murdered Guzman. Finally, Aguirre executed Pedro de Ursúa, who, though removed from command, had been under Guzman’s protection.

There is some question whether Aguirre continued down the Amazon River to the Atlantic or somehow managed to cross the wilderness north of the great river and descend the Orinoco River to the Atlantic from Venezuela. The latter course is suspect, because the expedition would have to ascend rivers traveling against their current to reach the Orinoco, an unlikely prospect. It is more probable that he followed the same route as Francisco de Orellana who arrived fifteen years earlier on the small island of Cubagua, not far from the later permanent Spanish settlement on the Island of Margarita, Aguirre’s landfall.

The inhabitants of Margarita Island welcomed the ragged survivors and offered them refuge. Aguirre instead attacked the settlement, looting it and hanging its governor and as many as fifty locals, including women. Aguirre and his badly decimated force remained for several months on Margarita recovering from their long journey. On Margarita Aguirre wrote and sent his famous letter to Spanish King Philip II, who had replaced King Charles I in 1558.

Aguirre’s letter to King Philip explained his reasons for declaring independence. He felt betrayed by Spain. After so many hard years in service to the crown, he had nothing to show for it. He complained of judges who had executed many loyal men for false “crimes.” He railed about priests and colonial bureaucrats who came after the conquest to strip the explorers and soldiers of the fruits of their services. He described himself as a loyal subject, driven to rebel by royal indifference. The reaction of Philip II to this histrionic document is unknown, although Aguirre was almost certainly dead by the time he received it.

Royalist forces from the mainland attempted to undermine Aguirre by urging his men to desert, offering them royal pardon. Several did, even before their leader made his assault on the mainland. Landing in the small coastal town of Borburata, (near present day Puerto Cabello) Aguirre marched to the larger settlement of Barquisimeto, where pursuing Spanish forces loyal to the king cornered him. His remaining men deserted, leaving him alone with his daughter Elvira.

Surrounded and facing capture, Aguirre killed his daughter, to spare her the horrors that awaited her as the daughter of a penniless traitor. Aguirre’s own men shot him before Spanish troops could capture him. Spanish soldiers dismembered Aguirre’s body

and distributed his parts among the surrounding towns.

Lope de Aguirre’s revolt was but a footnote to Spanish rule in the Americas, but he did leave an interesting legacy. Aguirre was neither the first nor the only conquistador to go rogue and attempt to escape rule of the Spanish crown in the New World. Cristóbal de Olid had nearly carved out a kingdom for himself in Honduras in 1523-1524.

Most modern narratives have preferred to characterize Lope de Aguirre a paranoid madman or a megalomaniac. Nevertheless, a few researchers have reached a different conclusion. The few records that remain, apart from Aguirre’s letter to the king, were written by participants in his abortive rebellion. Scholars such as Hernán Neira, Institute of Philosophy and Educational Studies, Universidad Austral de Chile; Juan Manuel Fierro, Department of Languages, Literature and Communications, Universidad de la Frontera: and Fernando Viveros, doctoral candidate of Humanity Sciences, Universidad Austral de Chile, have argued that Aguirre was unfairly maligned by contemporaries who accompanied the expedition and published memoirs intended to save their own skins.

They argue persuasively that Aguirre was driven to his acts of defiance by the oppression of the late arriving bureaucrats into the Americas representing the Spanish crown and imposing an oligarchy that dispossessed the soldiers and explorers who had earned a share of the wealth they had discovered and extracted with their own blood and sweat. Lope de Aguirre they assert was one of the earliest voices to speak out on behalf of the liberation of HispanoAmerica from Spanish oppression.

NOTE: And what of the indigenous peoples who were dispossessed of their lands, wealth and freedom? How can we inhabitants of the twenty-first century possibly understand the natives’ perception of the events that fell so catastrophically upon them? Some welcomed the Spaniards as gods, at least until the acquaintance became more intimate. They fought back desperately and valiantly. And they saw their world end forever.

In 1938 Orson Welles aired on the radio a dramatization of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. Many of the public who tuned in believed that the invasion of the earth by aliens was real and a national panic occurred. Those were more innocent days, but close enough to our own time, that we might appreciate a little better the sense of dismay of the Amerindian people who encountered the invading Europeans.

Since that time the imaginations of film makers and fantasy novelists have attempted to describe what might be the events if in fact an alien force of distinctly higher technical accomplishment were to invade our planet. Others have speculated that aliens’ may have already visited the Earth.

Why wouldn’t the harquebus and musket, the crossbow, the metallurgy of armor, tempered steel swords, mounted men and horses have a similar impact upon indigenous populations? Wouldn’t the galleons under full sail seem to those simple folk, as space ships and UFOs might have to early twentieth century Americans?

And how to communicate: languages or other means? What would be the consequences to us of a twentieth century alien invasion . . . eradication . . . enslavement? Should we extend the hand of friendship or attack, fight back with all our strength and will? The Amerindians must have puzzled over these issues. They were realities to them, not fantasies of novels or films.

If we were to face an alien invasion, should we hide our treasures? And what might be the real treasure the aliens would seek; the treasure that is most important to our civilization or something of unimagined importance to them? The indigenous peoples of the Americans didn’t place the kind value on gold and silver, or even gem stones, that their European invaders did. What was the real El Dorado? What did the Amerindian peoples of the Amazon possess that might have transcended the value of gold, silver and gem stones the Spanish invaders sought?

Robert Drynan

By Kathy Koches

Since my birthday is on January 5th I always keep my Christmas tree up un-

til at least the 6th or 7th . I used to get teased about this a lot when I was a kid, but I didn’t care—after all not everyone can have a Christmas tree on their birthday, right?

Then I moved to Mexico and discovered the wonderful tradition of Three Kings Day. January 6th is believed to be the day the three magi arrived in Bethlehem, bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. In Mexico, and many other parts of the world, this is the day when presents are exchanged. Christmas is a purely religious holiday and the children wait anxiously for Three Kings Day when their shoes are filled with candies and presents are received. No one here in Mexico thinks it strange that I have my Christmas tree still up! We always get a Rosca de Reyes (Three Kings cake) which is the Mexican equivalent of fruit cake (but much better.) A plastic baby Jesus is baked into the cake and whoever gets the piece with the baby has to bring tamales to the fiesta on Candelaria, February 2nd. There are parades and fireworks and lots of parties.

However, on January 6, 2021 a horrific event took place in the United States. At the instigation of the defeated former President, a riotous mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building, breaking in and desecrating its halls. Congressmen and women were afraid for their lives as the mob surged into the building, threatening to kill the Speaker of the House and hang the Vice President. Fortunately, the many brave law enforcement officers were able to keep them from reaching their intended targets and the ballots from each states’ electors were kept safe. At 3:30 am Congress returned and completed their duty to certify the election of the new President.

Democracy was threatened and the Capitol was breached. This date will always be remembered as a date that will live in infamy in the minds of U.S. citizens, just like December 7th and September 11th are now. It will never be “just another day.”

As I sit here on my patio in the sunshine of Mexico, looking out at beautiful Lake Chapala, finishing up the Rosca de Reyes and writing this story, I am glad that the date January 6th means something entirely different here, and is a date to be celebrated and enjoyed. I suppose, after all, it is just a matter of perspective.

Kathy Koches