February 2024

Go for Broke Susa Silvermarie Time is on our hands. Motionless it hangs like a joke next to the boat we thought was moving. Our lives stand still for the big Exam. Go for broke, reel in real meanings. There’s a good reason time is in our hands. ****** On Becoming a Memory Allison Quattrocchi […]

By Helen Gallagher and Denning Chambers A short while ago Denning Chambers gave a most interesting talk, at The Lake Chapala Society Open Circle, on the origins of American music. She has kindly agreed to share some of the content of this talk with readers of El Ojo. From birth, Denning was gifted with an

With the world being so crazy right now, last week I was needing to ground myself a bit, and I was remembering one of my real life heroes: Bear Heart, an Algonquin Shaman living in Albuquerque New Mexico, of all places.  I was a transplant from Alaska, living in Albuquerque as well.  I don’t remember

When the founders were writing the constitution and establishing the federal government of the USA, they had a number of concerns. A primary concern was to restrict the power of the federal government so as to not infringe on the rights of the individual and the states. One of the primary reasons they had fought

Mexico City, 1962 I was sharing a piano bench with my teacher, Mr. Ortega, when he pulled a small paper from his leather briefcase at his feet. “Poncho, please take a look at this. It’s a piano competition for kids your age. It’s in Stalingrad.”  Unsure, I responded. “Stalingrad?” I knew it was in Russia.

Mark Twain’s Words to Live By What could be better than a conversation with one of the most brilliant and wise men in modern history, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced,” and William Faulkner called him “the father

I received a call from Moonie King one afternoon in early December. The call started out with a greeting from Sandra Zamora, who now runs the Tepehua Community Center, and has been mentored by Moonie the last few years. After our brief hello, she passed the phone to Moonie, who got right to the point.

Constitución Mexico’s Constitution of 1917 redeemed the otherwise horrific, sometimes even apparently-pointless Mexican President Venustiano Carranza called for a constitutional convention in 1916 hoping to legitimize his post-Revolution government. Carefully excluding the liberal supporters of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, he’d hoped merely to  tweak the Reforma’s Constitution of 1857 (which had replaced the Constitution

This year has proven to be the coldest in 10 years in our Lakeside area. I see my garden responding to the cold. Now that the sun’s intensity has returned the plants are trying to start themselves again after an extended cold spell. The plants are troopers, trying to adapt, knowing that they should now

 I have questions, questions that have haunted me for years. And I want answers. Oh, I know I could find the answers with a smidge of research. But I am lazy and suspect the answers, logical, scientific, historical, economic, and socio-political based as they may be, are faulty, incomplete, and likely conspiracy-driven by drag queens.