Thinking of her happy 26 years of living at Lake Chapala, dancing along the way with flamenco, tango and son, New York City-born Joyce Noriega says, “After all, it’s my second home.” Then she thinks: “Or should I say Paris is my second home? Maybe Brussels? London?” It’s a true puzzle for ultra-cosmopolitan Joyce, now 92 and very much full of life. She does have a lot to connect her to Mexico though, having a Mexican father and a famous grandfather – Manuel Noriega (no relation to the dictator) who, though born in Spain made his mark in Mexico starring in almost 200 movies. Joyce’s mother was Nicaraguan, her childhood home was Spanish-speaking, and her neighborhood was filled with Puerto Ricans and Cubans. She recalls that she and her sister led the children playing in the streets in a sort of continual West Side Story-type song and dance routine – minus the Jets. She didn’t speak English until she went to school at six.
Joyce studied to be a teacher in New York and continued to teach when she moved to London in 1969 to work at the American International School. There, she met her husband, Terry Lawrence. He was loving and accepting of his perpetual motion machine of a wife until his death at Lakeside a decade ago. They moved to Paris in 1972, where she studied French at the Sorbonne, to Brussels in 1980, and to the French Riviera from 1992-1995 when she had a job as USO director for the 6th Fleet. Juggling activities and clean-up after shore leaves from Marseilles to Monte Carlo seems to be the only one of her jobs she wasn’t enthusiastic about, though she didn’t mind the seven-room villa above the Mediterranean she managed to trade for Navy living quarters. In 1995, she and Terry returned to the US to live in San Diego and then on to Ajijic in 1999. She has never lost her fluencies in English, Spanish and French, her European friends, her taste for European culture – art, music, architecture – and her love of teaching. At Centro Amor en Acción, Chapala, she taught literacy to underprivileged children and trained staff in teaching techniques.
This is too far into a tale of Joyce not to turn attention to music when it is so central to her joy in life and to her life at the Lake. After beginning with Baroque music on the recorder, Joyce moved to the study of the oboe. She was an early member of Michael Reason’s Lake Chapala Orchestra, then mostly expats. It has evolved to the highly professional, largely Mexican organization today. The dearth of oboe players in the area got her invited to play in the Jalisco Philharmonic – second oboe to her teacher, the principal oboist Carrie Smith – when Holst’s ‘The Planets’ required three oboes. After a performance of the Philharmonic today, you can find Joyce backstage being greeted as a well-loved insider. And you can see her in pictures of cornerstone placement for the performance space at Haus der Musik and in various chamber ensembles over the years. She has never stopped contributing to and supporting local musical life and being beloved by the music community.
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- PROFILE – Joyce Noriega Profile - November 29, 2025
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