Guadalajara

Until I was eighteen, my culinary and other horizons were closely centered on northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Perhaps I would never have set out to explore the food of regions beyond my own if it had not been for parental veto of my original plans. When I graduated from my mother’s old school, Loretto Academy, in El Paso, I announced that I wanted to go to college in the United States—Stanford University and Webster College in Missouri were my first choices. My parents refused, saying that they wanted me to go to a Mexican school so as not to lose touch with my roots. The real reason, I am sure, is that it was the 1960s and they were afraid I would turn into a hippie. So I found myself, like many daughters of “good” Mexican families, at a sort of finishing school whose mission was to prepare me to be the perfect housewife—the Instituto Familiar y Social in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state. It was the first time I had lived away from home in Mexico. Part of the reason for selecting a school in Guadalajara was that we had good family friends there—the Aragóns, who had lived in Agua Prieta while I was in high school—who my parents knew would keep an eye on me.