MEXICO-PARACHO. THE WORLD'S BEST GUITARS Paracho, a legendary Tarascan village of guitar makers in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Michoacàn, is probably the world's capital of guitars. Paracho artisans have been perfecting their craft, the best handmade guitars of Mexico, for over 200 years. Each guitar, made from finest woods, has it's own unique styling and beautiful craftsmanship. In Paracho, with a population of around 15,000, work between 1000 and 1200 guitar makers, the main street is lined with stores and workshops selling guitars but only a couple of the workshops on the main street belong to the better makers. Paracho's makers divide their production into three classes and the great bulk of makers produce popular guitars directed at the national market. Estudio guitars are better built instruments, usually with local woods such as palo escrito. Not much more than a dozen build true concert guitars, and these makers, generally speaking, have benefited from classes given in Paracho by world class luthiers from Spain, Germany, and the USA. Some of these makers, like Abel Garcia, have acheived world class reputations and have long waiting lists with prices that match those of Spanish builders.

“Mi vestido soy yo”, My Clothing My Self, used to say proudly Frida Kahlo. Frida’s relationship to her body was complex and her attire, inspired by the typical style of the Zapotec women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, not only made Frida an object of veneration but also gave her an identity. Through her ethnic dress Frida identified with the Tehuanas, an archetype of the pre-Columbian Mexico represented. The myth of Tehuanas arises in the mid-nineteenth century, powered by artists, adventurers and speculators who traveled the Isthmus when it was one of the points of passage between the two oceans, before the Panama Canal. All the chronicles of travels express a particular fascination for the Zapotecas women of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. When the Tehuanas dance the sones during their festivities, the Velas, floral skirts and huipiles, the traditional embroidered shirts, transform the dance floor in a sort of magical mobile garden. But the showy trajes and the rich golden ornaments that accompany them are above all an instrument of auto-representation for these active women which control the local markets, an independent economic power reflected in the self confidence. Even in the festivities, when the women dance more among them than whith the men, often seated and watching. The real national anthem of Tehuantepec is La Zandunga played every noon also by the clock of the town hall of Tehuantepec, the sleepy unofficial capital of a matriarchy unique in Latin America. The Tehuanas do not need to show off their independence, when the band attacks the first Son Istmeño hundreds of women dance to the slow melancholy of the music while the large skirts create the impression of a physical volume greater than the actual, the silhouette is transformed into a large cone which transmits a image of stability and firmness and men appear thinnner. The Vela goes on for days and nights, powered by unimaginable amounts of alcoholic beverages, and when the sun of a new day comes up start Byzantine diatribes on the dress to wear in the next Vela.

The Sierra Madre is a vertical landscape of mountains split by labyrinths of canyons as Barranca del Cobre, bigger and deepest than the Colorado’s Grand Canyon, a silent world far from the cliché of a colorful and tropical Mexico, with ghost towns where for centuries thousands of miners worked for the Silver Barons, deserts full of cactus and Western scenarios where the most famous local hero, Pancho Villa, reigned unopposed during the Revolution’s years. Here live also 50.000 Raramuris, better known as Tarahumaras, whose ritual world has been narrated also by the French writer Antonin Artaud (Au Pays des Tarahumara).

Graced with beautiful desert landscapes populated by gigantic cactuses, oases, rough mountains and old Spanish churches, Baja California is one of the most exotic destinations in Mexico, with popular spots like Tjijuana or Los Cabos, with its own special blend of boutique hotels and beach activities, but its secret charm is hidden in lonely places that maintains a palpable air of isolation from the rest of Mexico. Baja is the earth’s second-longest peninsula with more than 1200km of the mystical and majestic legacy of remote cave paintings, crumbling Spanish missions and luxury beach resorts, the Carretera Transpeninsular offers stunning vistas at every turn and side roads pass through tiny hamletss and wind along the mountains. Loreto, a pretty small town with an excellent choice of hotels, is a water-sports paradise and home to the magnificent Parque Nacional Bahía de Loreto, where the shoreline, ocean and offshore islands are protected from pollution and uncontrolled fishing. Here in 1697 Jesuit Juan María Salvatierra established the peninsula’s first permanent mission at the beginning of a Camino Real that colonized also the US California. All along the coast turquoise waters and white-sand beaches with a skyline of cactuses and mountains are the door to discover places like the lava-block walls of the former Jesuit Misión San Ignacio de Kadakaamán. In the lonely town of Santa Rosalia cool abandoned locomotives and other pieces of machinery remember the mining times when the city was literally owned by the French Boleo Company that leaved an inusual heritage of Caribbean style wood buidings.

Since prehispanic times, cacao his part of Mexico's history, culture and gastronomy. Its scientific name, Theobroma cacao means "food of the gods." The tradition of cultivation of cacao was starting with the Olmecs, the first Mesoamerican culture, was depeloped by to the Maya who used the cacao as a beverage for the elite class, a ritual offering and a form of currency. The Maya developed trade routes and passed along their use of cacao to the Aztecs. Cacao was introduced into Europe after the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadores in Mexico in 1519 and became their favorite drink after they began adding sugar to the beverage. Cacao was considered one of the treasures of the New World and in the early-16th century spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world. Mexico has been producing cacao for more than 3,500 years but today produces less than one percent of the world's cacao, but there are still thousands of tons of cacao grown and processed each year in Mexico and Tabasco, approximately 80% of Mexico's total production. Today in Tabasco small cacao farms and old ranches from colonial times are now home to cacao farms. Mature cacao trees are harvested several times each season, between October and April. Today, chocolate is available in countless forms all over the world, but there's nothing like pozol, known as the poor man's drink of Tabasco because people of the lower classes mixed ground cacao with corn to have the taste of chocolate. Still today street venders sell pozol in the markets and small shops, pozolerías. Near Comacalco Doña Sebastiana Juárez Broca, popular as Tia Tana and winner in 2002 of the Slow Food prize, founded 7 cooperatives, 4 of men and 3 of women. 1104 of Chontalpa area, between workers and families are involved. The sustainability of cacao is a matter of urgency of Tabasco because the recuperation of the plantations is slow and many farmers have switched to more resistant crops like sugar cane.

The Judea Cora, the less known Mexico’s Holy Week, is the more complex and spectacular manifestation of the Cora cosmogony. The Cora, an indigenous people living on the Western Sierra Madre in the Mexican state of Nayarit, are famous for their rituals still permeated of an impressive cosmogony considered by many antrhopologists one of the more interesting of the Latin America for its syncretism mixing their traditional religion with the Christianism. Those rituals are difficult to document because the Coras don’t like any kind of visual recording. In a climax of violence, reputed by many anthropologists the heart of the ritual itself, the Judea, the “infernal militia”, establish a kind of reign of the terror seeking to kill Jesus Christ. For four days and four nights the village of Santa Teresa del Nayar lives in a wild-eyed atmosphere with many participants often uncontrollable for the unbridled use of alcoo. Hundreds of borrados, men painted in black, red, and white, struggle with wooden swords while in the church are celebrated ceremonies from which the catholic priest of the village is excluded, until the Holy Friday when after the dead of Jesus Christ finally all quietens.