The country is experiencing an immigration renaissance of sorts. It’s not uncommon to find families from Europe, the U.S., Canada and other parts of Latin America in towns and cities across the country, settling in and making Mexico their new home.
While there is no official tally of the number of foreign families living here, if their obvious presence in cafes, parks, plazas, schools and in online forums and Facebook groups is any indication, their numbers must be in the thousands if not tens of thousands.
So, what is attracting these families to Mexico? Is it the weather? A lower cost of living? The amazing food? The friendly culture? A desire to learn Spanish? A safer school environment? (Believe me, as a U.S. citizen, that’s one of the big reasons my family has stayed so long in Mexico.)
Mexico News Daily wants to find out, so we’ve prepared a survey for our readers who are part of expat families in Mexico.
Please fill out our online survey below and tell us your story. Some of your answers to this survey could be used in a future article about the results.
The driver of a double semitrailer is reported to be in grave condition after he tried to outrun a train at a level crossing Wednesday morning near Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas.
The driver suffered burns over 60% of his body when his truck was hit by a train headed from Altamira, Tamaulipas, to Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, causing the fuel he was transporting inside the tankers to explode on impact. The driver was apparently traveling from Ciudad Madero to the capital of Tamualipas with 30,000 liters of diesel in each trailer.
The accident took place at 11:30 a.m. on the Libramiento Naciones Unidas, near El Olmo ejido in the municipality of Victoria.
The accident sent a huge billowing cloud of gray smoke into the air and blocked traffic on the highway for several hours while the area was secured, debris was removed and the driver was transferred to a nearby hospital.
The smoke billowing from the wreckage could be seen for miles.
The train driver, who was uninjured, said the semi tried to beat the train across the tracks.
Time calls the Riviera Nayarit 'a hidden gem.' deposit photos
After a slew of recent “best of” lists highlighting Mexico’s grandeur — the 50 best bars of North America, Travel + Leisure naming Oaxaca the best city in the world — comes a mention from Time magazine.
Its 50 World’s Greatest Places of 2022 list includes the Riviera Nayarit, the only Mexican location on the list.
The Riviera Nayarit is a long corridor of coastline that extends the length of Nayarit state to Puerto Vallarta and encompasses some of Mexico’s most popular vacation destinations such as beach towns Punta Mita, San Francisco, Sayulita and Nuevo Vallarta.
Time’s justification for choosing the Riviera Nayarit included several luxury resorts that will open this year including Susurros del Corazón and the Four Seasons’ Naviva in Punta Mita, as well as Secrets Bahia Mita and Dreams Bahia Mita in the Bay of Banderas. The magazine also highlighted the soon-to-open Islas María Biosphere Reserve — a former federal jail turned educational center and tourist destination — and the 23 beach towns that can be explored along the state’s coast.
Time’s yearly list is compiled by international correspondents and contributors to the magazine with a specific focus on new and exciting experiences that can be had in each place selected. These places are all growing and thriving, says Time, as well as working towards being sustainable.
In an interview with NTV, Nayarit Tourism Minister Juan Enrique Suárez chalked up the win to the increased investment in the state by local authorities and the endemic traditions that draw tourists to this part of Mexico.
“This is extraordinary news,” Suárez said. “Today we should feel good that Nayarit has been listed as one of the most important destinations in the world” and the only one from Mexico.
At the sound of a conch shell trumpet, participants in a temazcal ceremony face each of the four cardinal directions.
After several musicians in the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra — all of them expats — had told me that they had had very rewarding experiences at a temazcal near the ruins of the Guachimontones circular pyramids, 50 kilometers west of Guadalajara, I decided to investigate.
The temazcal is the Mexican version of the traditional sweat lodge that has been in continuous use by native peoples of North America for as long as civilization has existed. In this part of Mexico, the sweat lodge takes the form of a round, one-room construction made of adobe that can hold about a dozen people. It has one very low door and no windows except for a small hole in the roof.
The word temazcal is said to come from the Náhuatl word temazcalli. The verb tema means “to bathe” and calli means “house.”
This temazcal was built by Godofredo Oseguera, founder of Proyecto Mixcouatl, which is dedicated to the preservation of pre-Hispanic traditions.
Pictogram of a Mexica temazcal lodge in the 16th-century Mexica history, the Codex Magliabechiano.
Oseguera says that the temazcal has always been used for a variety of purposes, including physical and mental health, communication with immaterial beings and far more mundane ends such as the processing of grana cochineal (insects used to produce crimson dye) and the smoking of corn seeds to protect them from insects.
Symbolically, the temazcal ritual represents a return to the womb, a renovation in which participants hope to find the inner child they may have lost contact with.
As far as health goes, the most important benefit of the temazcal is said to be cellular regeneration. The steam supposedly produces negative ions that are breathed in and directly affect the body’s cells, regenerating them. Positive changes in one’s health due to frequenting a temazcal are said to eventually translate into psychological benefits such as anger control, balance and self-confidence.
I received permission to attend Oseguera’s temazcal session and arrived on a Sunday morning.
Godofredo Oseguera at the entrance to the temazcal he built on “land that called to him.”
The ritual, as Oseguera practices it, begins with a ceremony on a flat spot inside a circle of rocks under the open sky. Participants place offerings of flowers, fruit or seeds inside the circle and, as a conch shell is blown, face the four cardinal directions one by one, giving thanks for the benefits that have come to them from the north, south, east and west.
Participants enter the temazcal in a predetermined order. Red-hot volcanic rocks are then brought to the door. Each rock is greeted with the words, “Bienvenida, abuelita” (Welcome, grandma) and rubbed with copal incense.
The rock itself is considered our ancestor and wise beyond measure because it has been around for eons and knows Earth’s entire history. A pair of deer antlers were originally used to receive and place the rock — which is about 20 centimeters in diameter — into a flat depression in the center of the floor. When a sufficient number of abuelitas have been “seated,” the heavy cloth door is closed.
The participants are now invited to say a few words about what they are asking for or hope to gain from their experience. Next, the person in charge picks up a thick bundle of aromatic herbs (sage, eucalyptus, marigold, rosemary, thyme, lemongrass, etc.); dips this large “brush” into water; and then thoroughly wets both the abuelitas and the people sitting around them. Huge white clouds of water vapor now fill the small room, reducing visibility to almost zero. Even the narrow ray of light from the ceiling hole can barely be seen.
“¡Bienvenida, abuelita!” Each hot rock is warmly greeted.
After several such ablutions, the participants are sweating profusely. Through the swirling white clouds comes Oseguera’s voice: “If anyone would like more heat,” he says, “you can move closer to the center of the room.”
Several people actually do this. They are in training to endure “the warrior’s temazcal,” which features much higher temperatures than the normal one.
Time passes. More rocks are brought into the room. More water is thrown on them and onto the participants until the air seems thick enough to cut with a knife. Now a strange whistling sound can be heard, coming from the well-saturated rocks.
“The ancients called this ‘el canto de las abuelitas’ [the song of the grandmas],” comments Oseguera.
Decorations on the walls of a temazcal by Jalisco potter and artist Martín Navarro.
By this time, a psychological change has taken place inside the temazcal. The participants have shifted around, some sprawled out on the floor. They talk freely to the entire group. It’s a bit like a therapy session. There is talk of dreams, absent spouses, learning Spanish, living with cancer. Most speakers cannot be seen through the haze, but everyone participates. A woman experiences a new awareness. “Bienvenida a la niña interna,” (Welcome to your inner child) says Oseguera.
Twenty years ago, Oseguera was learning ceramics from indigenous people in the coastal town of El Tuito, Jalisco. At a certain point, they invited him to their local temazcal. For five years, he attended on a regular basis. One day, his friends announced they were giving him a gift.
“The gift they gave me was the honor of managing the temazcal,” said Oseguera with a smile. Later, he expressed the desire to have his own sweat lodge. “You must only build [it] on your own property,” he was told, “and you should only buy land after that land has first invited you to do so.”
Several years later, the right conditions for constructing a temazcal presented themselves to Oseguera. “There was a zapote tree near Teuchitlán under which I loved to sit and read,” he recounts. “Some strange things happened to me under that tree, and then one day a man came up to me and asked if I would be interested in buying the property on which I was sitting — for a very low price. I felt that this piece of land had indeed called to me and that the time had come for me to build my own temazcalli.”
Before entering the temazcal, a participant makes an offering of seeds.
In some places, the temazcal ritual has been “watered down,” so to speak, or blatantly turned into just another tourist attraction, but Oseguera continues to offer traditional temazcal sessions. Beginning in September of 2022, he will welcome visitors to his new Crow Rock Center, in Jalisco’s Sierra del Águila, a 90-minute drive from Guadalajara, two hours from Lake Chapala.
If you’d like to have a real temazcalli experience, send him a message on WhatsApp at 384-101-5379, and an English-speaking friend of his will contact you.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, since 1985. His most recent book is Outdoors in Western Mexico, Volume Three. More of his writing can be found on his blog.
State police search for El Chueco in a remote area of the Sierra Tarahumara. Gobierno de Chihuahua
Complicity with municipal police allowed the alleged murderer of two priests to seize criminal control of a significant part of the Sierra Tarahumara region of Chihuahua, according to state authorities.
José Noriel “El Chueco” Portillo Gil – the 30-year-old presumed leader of a Sinaloa Cartel-affiliated criminal cell called Gente Nueva (New People) – is accused of murdering two elderly Jesuit priests and two other men in the municipality of Urique last month.
According to a Milenio newspaper report, Chihuahua authorities have established that Urique police were in cahoots with Portillo, who is also accused of murdering a United States citizen in 2018. That complicity appears to have been facilitated by El Chueco’s uncle, who is the municipal police director in Cerocahui, the town were the priests as well as a tour guide and a 22-year-old man were murdered.
Chihuahua Attorney General Roberto Fierro Duarte said in an interview that Portillo’s association with police afforded him power and impunity in the area. The presumed gangster is now in hiding as federal and state authorities conduct an extensive manhunt in the region.
National Guard troops patrol the town of Cerocahui, where state officials say the local police were working with El Chueco.
While Portillo has so far remained elusive, authorities have detained 13 other people with links to him and his crime group. Among those who have been arrested are a cousin of El Chueco and a sicario, or cartel gunman, both of whom were in possession of Urique police force firearms. Neither gun had been reported as missing or stolen.
Chihuahua Security Minister Gilberto Loya told Milenio that it was “very important to determine legally what happened to those weapons.”
As a result of the weapons seizure, the state Security Ministry and the army conducted a review of the Urique municipal police force and discovered that many of its officers hadn’t passed control and confidence tests and therefore shouldn’t have been working as police, let alone carrying weapons. The authorities consequently seized a total of 56 firearms and ammunition that had been carried by the unaccredited officers.
Loya stressed that the police force shouldn’t have had weapons for 50 officers when fewer than 20 had passed the tests required to carry them. For the same reason, authorities seized 23 firearms and ammunition from police in the Sierra Tarahumara municipality of Maguarichi.
Weapons seized from unaccredited municipal police officers in Urique. AEI Chihuahua
Loya said it was important to confiscate weapons that may have been more at the service of organized crime than police officers dedicated to protecting their communities. He said that he has advised all municipal police forces in Chihuahua that they must present documentation within two weeks showing that their officers are certified to carry weapons.
The security minister also told Milenio that he is confident that Portillo will be apprehended soon. “The days of freedom he enjoys today are numbered,” Loya declared.
Assisted by three army helicopters, some 1,000 soldiers as well as a navy-trained state police SWAT team are currently searching for the accused murderer in the Sierra Tarahumara. “We’re going to caves, ravines, abandoned mines, [looking] between mountains [and] in the most remote places in the entire Sierra,” said Chihuahua Attorney General Roberto Fierro Duarte.
“We’ll capture him without a doubt,” the official asserted, although he conceded that authorities have a challenge on their hands. “This individual knows the Sierra very well. In addition he has lookouts and a range of [other] people … who allow him to escape quickly,” he said.
Authorities believe that Portillo – for whom a reward of 5 million pesos (US $243,000) has been offered for information leading to his arrest – is still in the Sierra Tarahumara region, but have nevertheless expanded their search to other parts of the state and country.
“We haven’t just been looking for him in … [the surrounds of] Cerocahui or Bahuichivo,” Loya said, referring in the second case to a small town where El Chueco owns a luxury home.
“… We’ve broadened [the search] to the rest of the state and other states of the republic and … [he’s also sought] in the United States.”
Some concerned residents reported the light to authorities, while others joked about it on social media. Twitter @FerCastill05
A strange red light in the sky inspired awe and speculation on Thursday night in Tamaulipas after appearing around 10:50 p.m. and becoming visible throughout the southern end of the state.
Many residents of the city of Tampico shared photos and videos on social media of the glowing pillar. Some thought it could be a meteorite or rocket, while others joked about alien invaders.
“Well, Tampico is going to be the first city colonized by aliens. Goodbye,” Twitter user Fer Castillo wrote, sharing an image of the light pillar.
After receiving reports from concerned citizens, regional Civil Protection officials released a statement assuring worried tamaulipecos that there was nothing amiss, and attributing the light to sprite clouds, a rare type of flickering red lightning.
A Tampico meteorologist shared a diagram showing how light pillars form. Twitter @Meteoalert_TAM
Alexander Dadderio, a Tampico meteorologist, said that was incorrect. The stationary light column was, in fact, an example of the phenomenon known as a “light pillar,” which occurs when light reflects off tiny ice crystals in high-altitude clouds, he explained on his weather forecast page, MeteoAlert Tampico.
“There are a lot of conspiracy theories about a light that can be seen in the sky. The experts who aren’t experts at anything except making memes attribute it to sprite clouds or even earthquakes,” he wrote on Twitter, explaining that it was actually a light pillar reflecting from some light source on the ground.
That source could be the moon, a refinery, a Pemex gas flare, or many other things, he said.
“It’s very rare that it appears in the summer, but if there are very high cirrus clouds, it can be faintly seen on days like today,” Dadderio said.
The lights were Tampico’s second unusual meteorological occurrence in as many days: a shelf cloud swept over the city on Wednesday. Twitter @Martinp35126123
Weather conditions in the U.S. state of Texas caused a similar pillar to appear in March, over a refinery near Houston, he noted.
The eerie phenomenon appeared just a day after an ominous shelf cloud swept over the city, caused by stormy weather at sea.
The fentanyl seized in July by the army. If it was pure it represented a massive number of doses.
An announcement by the Mexican government about the largest seizure of illegal fentanyl in the country’s history appeared to ignore the complex realities of how this synthetic opioid is produced.
On July 13, Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office stated that 10 people in the northern state of Sinaloa had been charged with illegal possession of fentanyl and methamphetamine with intent to sell. These charges came on the heels of the largest seizure of illicit fentanyl ever made in Mexico.
Days earlier, on July 7, the Defense Ministry announced it had seized over half a tonne of fentanyl in powder form from a property in Culiacán, the state capital of Sinaloa. In recent years, most of the clandestine fentanyl labs destroyed by Mexican authorities have been located in Sinaloa.
“The most relevant fact is that, in this operation, 542.7 kilograms of fentanyl were seized. This is the largest decommissioning … in the history of this lethal drug,” stated Ricardo Mejía, Mexico’s deputy minister of public security.
An investigative agent surveys the scene in Culiacán after a recent drug seizure that the government called the largest in the country’s history. FGR
The operation in Culiacán appears to have been sizable. Alongside the fentanyl, 555 kilograms of methamphetamine, 31 kilograms of cocaine, 19 kilograms of opium gum, and almost 7 kilograms of heroin were seized. Furthermore, over 70,000 kilograms of chemical precursors and almost 68,000 liters of chemical substances used to make synthetic drugs were also found.
Data on fentanyl seizures often mask a more complex reality, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Authorities, consumers, distributors, and even illegal producers are often unaware of the actual amount of pure fentanyl present in the synthetic substances being sold or seized.
Fentanyl is a highly potent opioid and as little as 2 milligrams can already be lethal for most users. This means that just 1 kilogram of pure fentanyl could produce around half a million lethal doses.
Therefore, the half-tonne seized by authorities in Sinaloa is unlikely to be pure fentanyl since this would represent a truly colossal amount of doses.
Fentanyl illegally produced in Mexico is commonly mixed with other substances to obtain higher yields in production. Sugars such as lactose, mannitol, and inositol are some of the substances most commonly used to increase fentanyl volumes, according to information from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Fentanyl Signature Profiling Program (FSPP).
And discoveries within clandestine opioid processing laboratories have also found substances such as metamizole and acetaminophen, both of which are used to increase the volume of the final fentanyl product. Fentanyl is also often mixed with other drugs, such as heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine.
Much of the seized drugs was in the form of powder, as seen in pictures shared by the Attorney General’s Office. Whether and to what extent they were cut with other substances is uncertain. FGR
During field investigations, InSight Crime has found that government agencies in Mexico have the ability to detect whether a substance has fentanyl, but are not always able to determine how much is present. This largely depends on the tools a specific laboratory has access to. This inconsistency has led to a systemic failure in data collection, and implies that the government does not know the real dimension of the phenomenon.
The problem is reflected in the official data provided by security forces. For example, the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR), the National Guard, the Defense Ministry (Sedena), and the Mexican Navy (SEMAR) all use different measures to quantify fentanyl seizures. This makes it essentially impossible to know how much fentanyl has been seized by the government.
According to data obtained by InSight Crime, Sedena records fentanyl seizures as powder or in units (pills or vials). Meanwhile, the National Guard records the number of pills, bags, wrappers, and packages as well as the weight of the fentanyl in solid and liquid form. Finally, the FGR and SEMAR record the weight of solid or liquid fentanyl, as well as the number of pills.
As mentioned earlier, these units of measurement do not reveal how much pure fentanyl is present in the drugs.
Besides authorities, even drug cooks are often not aware of how much fentanyl is in their product, according to several subject matter experts consulted by InSight Crime in Mexico City.
“Even if [cooks] manage to make the product, they don’t necessarily have the chemical knowledge to know the right measurements or to achieve purity. So several contaminants remain,” Silvia Cruz, a Ph.D. in pharmacobiology and researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute, told InSight Crime.
Reprinted from InSight Crime. Victoria Dittmar and Sara Garcia are writers with InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime.
Two dancers perform in a Danzatlán 2022 promotional image. Facebook / Danzatlán
From July 23 to August 1, the event Danzatlán 2022: International Festival of Dance will take place in the cities of Texcoco, Huixquilucan and Toluca in México state, and at the National Center of Arts (Cenart) in Mexico City.
The festival is a project of the Culture and Tourism Ministry of México state in collaboration with the Elisa Carrillo Foundation. Elisa Carillo is one of Mexico’s best known promoters of dance. She has earned many prestigious awards around the world including being the first Mexican to be named prima ballerina in the Berlin State Ballet, one of the most important ballet companies in the world.
The Elisa Carillo Foundation regularly hosts two major events to support and encourage dance in Mexico. Danzatlán, a yearly extravaganza with classes, shows, and round-table discussions, was forced to go virtual in 2020 and partly virtual, partly in-person in 2021.
“After everything that we have been through in the past two years during the pandemic, it’s marvelous for the public to have this opportunity,” said the ballerina in a recent interview.
This year’s festival will include many highlights including a piece called #The_Wall, choreographed by Yeri Anarika and interpreted by Carillo herself on July 23 at 7 p.m.
“This is a contemporary piece and it’s very important for our festival because we are trying something different, something new,” said Carillo.
There will also a presentation of Bolero, a dance choreographed by Maurice Béjart to the music of Bolero, an orchestral piece composed by French composer Maurice Ravel in the 1920s. The dance gala “Elisa and Friends” will include five internationally renowned dancers — Marcelo Gomes, Lucía Lacarra, Herman Cornejo, Kimin Kin and Carrillo — all winners of the Benois de la Danse prize. That event will take place in Toluca on July 31 and in the Elisa Carrillo concert hall at the México state Bicentennial Cultural Center (CCMB) as part of the closing of the festival.
Entrance into events is free to the public. The list of events will be posted on the festival’s official Facebook page and other social media platforms.
A rescue dog that helped save lives after a powerful earthquake toppled buildings in Mexico City in 2017 has retired after eight years’ service.
The Australian shepherd, named Zorro, was honored Saturday in a retirement ceremony in Tequisquiapan, Querétaro, where he was a member of the volunteer fire department. Emergency services personnel and other citizens also paid tribute to the dog’s owner, Mirco Gallina, an Italian native who collaborated with Zorro on countless rescue operations.
One of the most important missions the pair participated in was the response to the September 2017 earthquake, which caused extensive damage in Mexico City and other parts of central Mexico. Zorro is credited with helping to save the lives of nine people who were trapped beneath rubble in the capital.
Gallina told attendees at Saturday’s ceremony that Zorro started work as a rescue dog in Italy, where “we mainly worked in mountains and forests.”
“He didn’t rescue anyone in Italy because the times we went out to work the people [we were attempting to save] unfortunately died,” he said.
Zorro and his master subsequently moved to Mexico where they continued their rescue work. “In the 2017 earthquake he rescued nine people alive,” he said. “Being here is very cool and very emotional,” Gallina said before thanking those present for the affection they have shown Zorro.
Luis De Carvajal's manuscripts featured minute lettering and decorative flourishes like gold leaf. Ronnie Perelis
A Spanish Jew practicing his faith secretly in 16th-century colonial Mexico is jailed by the Inquisition for heresy and for leading Mexico’s underground Jewish community. His prison diaries and other texts on Judaism he writes there are discovered and used to sentence him to death. The texts are the earliest example of Jewish writing in the Americas, held in the National Archives until they’re stolen in 1932. A researcher accuses a rival academic of the theft, but the manuscripts remain missing until 2016, when a U.S. collector spots them for sale in New York City.
The intrigue-filled odyssey of the diaries of Luis de Carvajal el Mozo (the Younger) — from their creation to their disappearance to their return to Mexico City in 2017 — reads like a plot for a Dan Brown novel, but it really happened.
When Baltzar Brito, director of Mexico’s National Library of Anthropology and History, first laid eyes on the manuscripts in New York City in 2016, he says he “knew in his heart they were the originals.”
Brito was on a team of experts from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History and its Culture Ministry sent to authenticate the diaries after collector Leonard L. Milberg alerted Mexico that he had bought them and wanted to return them to Mexico.
Members of the intergovernmental team that went to the U.S. to retrieve de Carvajal’s manuscripts for Mexico. Baltazar Brito is on the right.
Experts on Judaica in Mexico City and around the world were atwitter at the news that a holy grail of early Jewish writings had finally been found — the first known Judaic writings in the Americas.
Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo, a Portuguese poet, calligrapher, merchant and devout Jew was part of a well-to-do and powerful New Spain family. His uncle, Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, was a conquistador who was made governor of Leon for his victories in the New World but made an enemy of the viceroy of New Spain, Lorenzo Suárez, who was determined to destroy the entire family and take their lands.
Suárez denounced the family to the Holy Inquisition for secretly practicing Judaism, punishable by death. Luis de Carvajal el Mozo was arrested by the Inquisition but released and told to convert to Catholicism. De Carvajal instead became a leader in Mexico’s underground Jewish community. Arrested a second time, he would not survive his second round of imprisonment. But during his second incarceration, de Carvajal continued writing his diaries and other musings on his faith.
Before he was eventually executed, says Dr. Alicia Gojman de Backal, a history professor at the National University of Mexico in Mexico City, de Carvajal was tortured so badly, including being pulled on the torture rack, that he revealed the name of 120 fellow Jews, including his mother, sisters and best friend Miguel de Lucena. De Carvajal’s captors forced him to listen as these “heretics” he had named, including his mother, were tortured in the cell next to his, Gojman de Backal says.
An imagining of what de Carvajal looked like while imprisoned by the Inquisition, for a special edition of his works. INAH
Unable to cope with having turned in his family and friends, he tried to commit suicide in jail but failed. His diary details how he fell to his knees in anguish at one point listening to his mother’s screams as she was pulled on the rack.
“His spelling is a bit difficult [to read] because it has two types [of script], one more careful and another [not] because, apparently, he didn’t have proper conditions in which to write,” says Brito.
The diaries were discovered and used against de Carvajal when he testified before the Holy Inquisition. Condemned to death, he was burned at the stake on December 8, 1596, in Mexico City’s public plaza along with his mother, sisters and de Lucena.
De Carvajal’s writings consist of three manuscripts — The Memories of Luis de Carvajal, The Law of God, and The Way of Worshiping God and Devout Exercise of Prayer, which addressed how to pray during Yom Kippur. The diaries are adorned with calligraphy and gold leaf scraped from a Bible. More than 400 years old, they’re in perfect condition. Although they were signed with the pseudonym of “Joseph Lumbroso,” they were verified by handwriting comparison to have been authored by de Carvajal.
The manuscript was digitized in Spanish and English after it was turned over to Mexico. Princeton University
All three became part of the Inquisition’s records and eventually part of the Inquisition Collection at Mexico’s National Archives. For centuries, the diaries were studied by researchers from around the world.
Then, in 1932 the diaries — which consisted of three separate manuscripts — disappeared without a trace. A historian on the National Archives staff who was writing a book on de Carvajal accused a rival, Jacob Nachlin, a visiting Yiddish-speaking professor of Jewish and Polish History, of the theft.
Nachlin spent three months in jail, but since the diaries were not found, he was eventually released for insufficient evidence. Some scholars believe his accuser may actually have been the guilty party. The mystery of how they disappeared and how they ended up in London has never been solved.
In 2015, the manuscripts first appeared in the catalog of Bloomsbury Auctions in London, which listed them as 17th- or 18th-century works by an unknown author. When asked, Bloomsbury said the diaries came from the library of a family in Michigan who had them in their possession for decades. The three manuscripts were being sold as a set for US $1,500.
UNAM historian Alicia Gojman de Backal says de Carvajal was tortured so harshly that he gave up the names of 120 members of the Jewish community, including family and friends.
Purchased by a rare book dealer, they turned up again in New York City in 2016 at an auction house, which listed them as “replicas.” Renowned collector Leonard L. Milberg became suspicious. He felt it would have been nearly impossible for someone to replicate the calligraphy and microscopic text written in Latin and Spanish.
Milberg contacted some scholar acquaintances, and they agreed that the replicas could be the originals stolen from the National Archives in Mexico. He contacted the Mexican consulate in New York City and in his Manhattan office, Milberg made a 40-minute presentation to Consul-General Diego Gómez Pickering and convinced him of the manuscripts’ authenticity and historical significance.
The fact that they were being auctioned gave them both a sense of urgency. Pickering set the diplomatic machinery in motion and had Brito fly to New York to authenticate the diaries.
Brito analyzed the handwriting and the paper, written on beaten cloth with a type of ink used in the 16th century, and confirmed that the diaries were indeed the originals. After their authentication, Milberg agreed to donate the manuscripts to the Mexican government after they were first displayed in a New York Historical Society exhibit entitled The First Jewish Americans.
On March 21, 2017, the 450-year journey of the diaries came to an end. They were returned to Mexico City where, after being digitized in Spanish and English, they were safely stored in a climate-controlled vault.
BNAH Assistant Director José Guadalupe Martínez said that the manuscripts represent “the seed of Jewish literature in America, which makes it a brave document.”
“Luis de Carvajal is not a man of letters as such,” he said, “but he has an impressive memory and he cites Old Testament prayers without error; he was a very erudite man.”
Sheryl Losser is a former public relations executive and professional researcher. She spent 45 years in national politics in the United States. She moved to Mazatlán last year and works part-time doing freelance research and writing.
