After 12 years as the voice and face of Guadalajara’s prestigious American School, Janet Heinze is set to retire this July. The personable general director bubbles with pride about the school, which boasts a student body that is 80 percent Mexican (15 percent American, 5 percent “other”), and a curriculum that is predominantly and unwaveringly English.

Having been elected earlier this year, Tonatiuh Bravo Padilla was formally sworn in as rector of the University of Guadalajara (UdeG) on April 1.

My article in last week’s Reporter described how the flow of the Lerma River to Lake Chapala had been reduced by 90 percent or more from 1930 to 2001. This was due primarily to a grossly excessive commitment to irrigation in the Lerma River basin, and the construction of over 500 dams and reservoirs that could store the river’s entire flow.  Despite 40 years of discussions and hundreds of pages of studies and rules, no solution has been executed. The key factor is this: for each one percent saved of the 80 percent of the river’s flow that is now used for irrigation, it will be possible to provide domestic water for 400,000 persons.

The recently opened southern extension of the Periferico (beltway) that links the Guadalajara-Chapala highway with the northern extremes of Tonala and Guadalajara makes driving to the city’s famed zoo a smooth 65-kilometer, one-hour jaunt from Chapala. I drove the entire road this week and here is my report.

When Adrian D. Griffin arrived in Guadalajara over three years ago, lured away from his position at the University of Texas to play principal trumpet in the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra, he had a book project in the works with the prestigious Oxford University Press and, not surprisingly for a Midwest-reared American, spoke only English.

There are rituals of impending spring that draw visitors to the state of Michoacan: vast swarms of birds darkening the sky as they fly north, the smell and smoke of  burning  foliage, rows of planters strewing seeds for the next harvest and the mating of the Monarchs before they begin their long journeys to their northern homes.