On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel

On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel
by Tony Cohan

On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Tony Cohan
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-01-09
ISBN: 0767903196
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Broadway

Book Reviews of On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel

Book Review: Captures the "smell of the place"
Summary: 5 Stars

The goal of a travel book should be to convey to readers far away the physical and emotional feeling of a specific locale. For San Miguel de Allende, Tony Cohan does this perfectly. His portrayal of the challenges and experiences he faced when he uprooted from the US and moved to Mexico are colorful, lively, and filled with detail. His stories and accounts give real insight into the way myth and tradition blend with everyday life in modern Mexico. As someone who recently spent his first month in southern and central Mexico, I am struck by the degree to which he captured the feeling of San Miguel and other small towns like it. Cohan's sense of joy and wonder at what he's seeing and learning spill out of the pages, leaving the reader anxious as hell to experience Mexico.

A bunch of reviewers trashed this book for being too self-centered, too generalist, and too focused on shopping trips. Those people miss the point. Part of the joy of living in Mexico, for Tony Cohan and for other Americans and Europeans who move there, is precisely being able to buy your vegetables, tortillas and shoelaces from a person you know rather than a faceless corporation. If you don't understand this, visit Mexico (not Cancun or Acapulco, but Oaxaca, San Cristobal, Guanajuato and the like) and you will. It's a micro-book, and it makes no pretentions to be otherwise.

While the author at times gets a little carried away with his romanticization of San Miguel, he brings a perspective that really resonated. If you go in expecting one individual's personal account rather than a travel guide or an anthropological study, you'll be more than satisfied. Well-written and fun, it's a fantastic read, and a must if you don't know much about Mexico.

Summary of On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel

An American writer and his wife find a new home?and a new lease on life?in the charming sixteenth-century hill town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

When Los Angeles novelist Tony Cohan and his artist wife, Masako, visited central Mexico one winter they fell under the spell of a place where the pace of life is leisurely, the cobblestone streets and sun-splashed plazas are enchanting, and the sights and sounds of daily fiestas fill the air. Awakened to needs they didn?t know they had, they returned to California, sold their house and cast off for a new life in San Miguel de Allende. On Mexican Time is Cohan's evocatively written memoir of how he and his wife absorb the town's sensual ambiance, eventually find and refurbish a crumbling 250-year-old house, and become entwined in the endless drama of Mexican life. Brimming with mystery, joy, and hilarity, On Mexican Time is a stirring, seductive celebration of another way of life?a tale of Americans who, finding a home in Mexico, find themselves anew.
In the mid-1980s, Tony Cohan and his artist wife, Masako, decided they had had enough of the hectic pace and inherent insecurities of life in Los Angeles and made tracks for the historic town of San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. At first they rented rooms in a hotel. Then, when the hotel became less appealing, they graduated to renting an apartment. Almost inevitably, they eventually found themselves buying a 250-year-old hacienda on the verge of collapse, with wonderfully elegant Spanish colonial architecture and a garden brimming with papayas, avocados, and custard apples.

What followed was a love affair with a country and its people that has endured. On Mexican Time is a lyrical attempt to capture the Mexican magic that bewitched the two of them. Cohan introduces us to a quirky cast of Mexicans and expats, including murderers, idealists, philanderers, and writers. Spanning 15 years, the book conveys something of the curiously intangible passage of time, as we watch girls become mothers, marriages drift apart, and friends come and go. The text is rich with sensuous details, and Cohan is excellent at conveying the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a country that he clearly adores.

On Mexican Time is much less of a glib chronicle than other books of the "charming new life in paradise" genre. Although he is not averse to the odd moment of portentousness, Cohan makes a gentle and elegant guide through the experiences of expat life in San Miguel. --Toby Green

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