INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL OF ALAMOS, MEXICO

INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL OF ALAMOS. Friday to Saturday, Nov 20-22. This year’s theme of El Camino Real 2009 showcases the work of photographers Roel Pena (Caborca), Gustavo Ybarra (Hermosillo), Chris Engholm (San Diego), Hal Wamback (Alamos – former Az Republic photographer), Bob Rink and John Eskey (both from Phoenix) and Micheal Hyatt (Tucson). The inauguration is Friday night with workshop times and locations to be announced.

Alamos #12: Travel Article about Alamos, Mexico

Here is a good traveler’s overview of Alamos from a travel writer…

http://www.gonomad.com/alternatives/0510/alamos.html#at

Alamos #11: Slideshow of Alamos, Mexico

Watch the video by clicking RIGHT HERE, and then click the PLAY button on the viewer.

Have fun!

Alamos #9: Book on Alamos for Travelers

There are a number of books written by residents of Alamos. A good one to start with for traveler’s is Emily Preece’s Over These Cobblestones: An Alamos Sojourn, published in 2009. It contains a good historical overview and an engaging account of daily life as experienced by a foreign resident. The bibliography will lead you to other titles, depending on your interests. It also contains a brief account of Hurricane Norbert and the destruction of large parts of the town in 2008

Alamos #6: The Day of the Dead

November 5– The town of Alamos presents like a demure lady with a lot of talent. The car rumbles on roughly-laid cobblestone lanes between sun-drenched walls, passing a quaint park and enters the plaza. Eerily, there is near silence…no radio, no car backfiring, no fireworks to shatter the utter solace of the scene. The church tower rises in the archways of the colonial portals as the morning sun thaws the ironwork of the gazebo in the zocalo garden. The sky is crisp, cobalt, spotless except for a pale Gibbons moon setting beyond the buttes. There is silence. No one in the square but a few old men on benches sunning their eyelids. The setting epitomizes what the Mexican wistfully defines as tranquillo. And it’s damned weird to find it in a town of 5,000 souls.

We arrive at the home of M.H. not a stone’s throw from the church, down a hill to the east and situated at the forested foot of “El Mirador,” the formidable hill to the east of town that you can ascend by car or trail to capture a dawn photo of the Sierra Madre and the town. The house is typical of the great ones that lay throughout Alamos in ruins until a wily entrepreneur from Pennsylvania began acquiring titles and flipping properties in the forties. His first adobe fixer went for $7000. With extensive renovation, wealthy Americans turned the courtyard haciendas into mansions filled with authentic furniture, art, and plants. Hotel owners did the same, and soon a gaggle of socialites and their tony friends from the north were attending daily soirees and generating social legends that are retold and rewritten today. Many lived part of the year here; others stayed on all year and through the heat of the summer months when the temperature can linger at 105 degrees. Due to its elevation at 5,000 feet, however, Alamos fancies near perfect weather most of the year.

Day of the Dead

I had come to Alamos to attend the events associated with Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, on November 1st and 2nd. The first day is dedicated to children who have passed. From the mirador above the house, you could look east toward Chihuahua and Copper Canyon and below see the Cementario filled with colorful flowers, the food vendors setting up, and the cars arriving. You could see how the river runs through the heart of town to flow east and into the green barrancas of the Sonoran desert. The tall limbs of echo{} cacti rise above the green shrubs and low trees and is used as fencing throughout town. I followed a road toward the Cementario and over a new pedestrian bridge over the river, which was flowing, smelly, but not deep. Upstream a pickup truck grinded its geared trying to negotiate the wide muddy riverbed. A year ago, Hurricane Norbert had caused the river to rise 15 feet and tear out whole neighborhoods of homes, killing an unknown number of people. The government figure is 5 but people here all have friends who are missing family members, maids, workers, and kids. Some of the narrow lanes had become raging rivers that carried cars down to gulches, some filled with families who perished. From the mirador I could see a red-painted new colonia of tiny homes built by the government to house some of the displaced.