Why Guadalajara Mexico?

It Takes Two for This Tango

     When Bob proposed to his second wife, Alice, her father said, “You realize that you could end up living anywhere in the world, don’t you?” 

     His first wife, Ann, had died of cancer and a wife and mother was needed for his two boys. 

     Alice was quite beautiful and had children of her own. They became a blended family.

Bob and Alice's blended family

     Bob loved foreign languages and when I married him, he  spoke French, German, and a little Italian. He’d gone to France on a Fulbright Scholarship right after graduation from Princeton University where he had helped a professor translate a philosophy text for him. He had fallen in love with Ann, “Miss Southwestern”, and she had applied for the Fulbright scholarship and urged him to apply. She didn’t get it but he did, they married and off they went to Europe for a honeymoon, where he wrote his paper, and they traveled all over.

Bob and Ann on the Queen Mary 1952

     Bob served during the Korean War in Germany. While married to Ann, they lived in Newcastle, England while he worked for Proctor and Gamble. Bob also worked for Holiday Inns, International Division, and traveled all over the world for them. That was a little frustrating for him because, he said, “When I woke up, since all the rooms looked the same, I wasn’t sure whether I was in Germany or France or somewhere else.”

     Bob, the Princeton philosophy major, discovered he truly believed in the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and this ended his marriage to Alice who was Catholic. Not long after this our friends introduced us even though he lived in Tennessee and I lived in Southern California.

     Bob told me the story about what his second wife’s father said about ending up living anywhere in the world. Quite frankly, I told him, I’m more worried about being bored living in one place for too long.

Bob and Bev August 23, 1979

    In college, my Master’s Thesis advisor, G. Ray Kerciu, was having trouble getting a sufficient number of people signed up, for a 6 week painting and drawing course in Mexico. He said that if I got 20 people enrolled, I could go free. Sounded like a winner to me, so I did just that. The tour called for two weeks in Guadalajara, two weeks in Puebla and two weeks in Mexico City, and that’s where I was when the first steps were taken on the moon.

     After college, I became the Director for the Downey Museum of Art in Southern California. The City of Downey’s Sister City was Guadalajara, Mexico!!! So of course, I went with tours down there and set up exchange exhibitions for artists in our museum.

     After our marriage in the Washington D.C. temple we lived in Arkansas and Nashville, TN. The International bug bit again and Bob got a job as IT Director with Johnson Control World Services on the Island of Kwajalein, an Army base in the Marshall Islands. We lived there for five years or so until Johnson Controls lost the contract to Raytheon and all the top managment positions were being replaced.  At this point retirement loomed on the horizon because at 65 and the peak of his earning career, Bob could not find employment. We started talking about where we would like to spend our retirement years. Our household belongings were in storage in Nashville and our 1200lbs from Kwaj were being shipped to San Francisco to be stored until we decided where we would end up.

     We went to Southern California to stay with my mother who was not doing well living alone, and absolutely did not want to go into a Senior Citizen home. We had an eight year old daughter, who we had home schooled, but had to attend 3^rd grade while in California due to education laws there. When she came home from school saying she didn’t have to read except for half an hour, that did it. Prior to this she’d spend hours reading whole series of books.

     Bob suggested we could retire in Saudi Arabia, or maybe Greece, where he could add another language to his repertoire. He’d already learned Russian, attempted Japanese, and had a little Marshallese under his belt by this time. I dug in my heels and said, “No.” to these suggestions. I said, “How about New Zealand?” He replied, “They speak English there.” What about the beautiful mountains? “I’ve seen the real Alps.” They have sheep and the Māori who are the Tangata Whenua, an indigenous people, of New Zealand, I countered. “They have British food which is horrible, because I lived there and know it well.”

     Bob said, “I want to go where they speak a foreign language, eat foreign food, the signs are in another language and the landscape is totally different from anything I’ve ever experienced.”

     “What about Mexico?” I said. After a little research at the library, he came back saying, that Mexico was probably the most foreign place you could go that was easily accessable to the U.S. Having experienced Mexico City, I told him, I’d only agree if we could live in Guadalajara. And that began the process of paperwork, visas, etc. everything in quadruplicate because there would be four of us. All of the paperwork had to be in two languages, English and Spanish. (Hey, Bob, you liking this yet?) We had to get inoculations, a bank account where we could draw out money in Mexico, a post office address that would forward mail to us down there (bills still needed to be paid) and arrange for household goods and our car to get down there too.

     I have no sympathy for illegal immigrants. Mexico had many restrictions on our Visas. We could not work there or take a job from a native person. That limited us to teaching English or practicing one of the arts, like writing, painting and drawing, music, photography, sculpture etc. We had to jump through a thousand hoops, it seemed. And we had to renew our visas every year.

     Finally we went down there on a scouting-it out trip. We stayed at the hotel I stayed in when in college.

     Bob loved it. We had a deal.