On Mexican Time - A New Life In San Miguel Los Angeles-based Novelist, Tony Cohan, Shares His Experiences And Insights. When Los Angeles-based novelist Tony Cohan and his artist wife visited friends in central Mexico in 1985, they fell under the spell of an irresistible place where the pace of life is leisurely, the cobblestone streets and bougainvillea-splashed patios are seductive, and the sights and sounds of daily fiestas fill the air. What began as a casual three-week stay in the 16th century hill town of San Miguel de Allende soon took on greater significance as a magnetic sense of potential home came to rest within the two travelers. Awakened to needs they didn't know they had, and confronted with a profound sense of dissatisfaction with their lives in urban California, Cohan and his wife returned to Los Angeles, sold their house, put their possessions in storage, and cast off for a new life. On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel is a beautifully evocative and entertaining true story of two Americans who find a new home - and a new lease on life - in a distinctive little town nestled on a hillside 170 mile northwest of Mexico City. Alternately moving and humorous, this literary memoir recounts how the couple gradually develop a deep bond with the place and the people, the culture, history, landscape, food, language, sensibility and lifestyle. Moving into an old hacienda hotel Cohan and his wife Masako enter the daily drama of Mexican life, with its endless fiestas, memorable characters, little tragedies and incidents. Food, color, light, and Mexico's fulsome sabór creep into their life, language and dreams. Eventually they buy and abandoned 250-year-old house - with twenty foot ceilings, yard-thick adobe walls, and dried-up garden - and set about bringing it back to life. Knife sharpeners, rattan weavers, tamale makers, and burros laden with firewood come to their door. Their garden blooms, their kitchen countertop groans with chiles, squash, and mangos bought in the open-air markets. And San Miguel, once voyage's end, becomes a point of departure for excursions throughout the region. The book capture the charms and frustrations of adapting to a very different way of life, the contrasts of Tony and Masako's life in San Miguel to their life in Los Angeles, and the cultural, emotional, and spiritual challenges and insights their new existence brings. With evocative language and reflective tone Cohan enfolds the reader in a voluptuous ambiance where dinners last five hours, every day it seems there's a parade, a wedding or a funeral, and time and death are directly apprehended, palpable realities. He also immerses us in the powerful interconnectedness of family and community that serves as the foundation for life in San Miguel and which seems to have been virtually stripped away here "up North" in the name of "rights" and "individualism." Brimming with mystery and joy, hilarious at times, often moving, Cohan's unique memoir is filled with local stories and indelible characters: the ragtag army of workmen who renovate the house; neighbors and shopkeepers who become fast friends; gringo visitors and fellow expatriates who call San Miguel home; even the prisoner in the local jail who was serving a life sentence for killing the same man twice but then negotiated for his release by helping the government recover a cache of rare books. On Mexican Time conveys the daily drama of Mexican life, its beauty, sensuality, romance, artistry, fiestas and processions, as well as its peso devaluations, recessions and recoveries, storm, floods, earthquakes, water shortage, and encroaching gentrification. It is simultaneously a vivid portrait of San Miguel - which has slowly transformed from a sleepy, forgotten town into one of the world's most desirable travel destinations - and an irresistible journey of personal discovery and metamorphosis. Tony Cohan was born in New York and reased in California.l He attended Stanford University and the University of California where he graduated with a B.A. in English. He has lived and worked as a drummer in the U.S., Europe, North Africa and Japan with jazz legends Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and many others. For the last sixteen years he has divided his time between Mexico and Venice, California, where he lives with artist wife Masako Takahashi.
		A Conversation with Tony Cohan Q: What brought you to San Miguel de Allende in the first place? For years we had known a very interesting couple - a filmmaker and an artist - who would disappear each summer into Mexico. When we would ask where they went they were always a little reticent about telling us. This, of course, fueled our curiosity. Then one day I saw a picture in a magazine of a bougainvillea-splashed courtyard and the spire of a charming local parish church. I realized it was the town where our friends went. The allure was immediate. Q: What do you mean when you say "In Mexico...the invisible counts for so much?" Mexican culture has three layers. Up front is contemporary Mexican culture which isn't too much different from our own. Behind that is Spanish culture which began with the conquest of the region and which - thanks to Catholicism - has a powerful mystical strain. Finally there is the pre-Columbian culture which celebrated the invisible mystery of nature and the gods. So when you are in Mexico there's a tremendous sense of the unseen elements of life that appear through the prism of religion and ancient culture. People you meet may not be notable in their appearance but often in the course of conversation you discover there's much more to them and that their roots run deep. Q: What was the turning point for you at which you decided you wanted to actually own a house in San Miguel? It happened by accident - although all our experiences in Mexico had prepared us for that accident. I was walking in the town plaza and ran into an acquaintance who was dealing some real estate. He asked me if I wanted to see a couple of houses. Reluctantly my wife and I followed him to this old ruin of a place - a 250-year-old house that had been abandoned for eight years. Against all our rational voices and reservations we found ourselves buying the property. it all took place as if in a trance, and suddenly we (along with a Mexican back) bore the title to this old ruin. Q: What are the biggest misperceptions Americans have about Mexico? I think some Americans probably persist in thinking that Mexicans don't work very hard when in fact they work themselves to the bone. Some also seem to think that Mexicans suffer from not having a culture like ours when in fact they have a tremendously deep, profound, resonant, living culture that is rich in food, art, jokes, music, folklore, and much more. Q: What is the greatest change you've observed in San Miguel since your arrival in 1985? The biggest change has been the discovery of San Miguel by Americans and international tourists. When we first arrived it was a slightly know place. Now it is a tourist destination. The downside of that is that people are visiting San Miguel superficially. They arrive expecting an experience that isn't very exotic - an experience comforted by "first world" amenities. To meet those expectations various parts of the town have become, in some respects, less indigenously Mexican . Hotels are becoming more international and less Mexican in style, waiter are all trained to speak English, and so on. On the other hand, the same thing is happening everywhere in the world. It is San Miguel's great good fortune that the old colonial infrastructure, and its distance up in the Mexican mountains, has allowed it to remain, in most respects, the town we first encountered and will probably protect if from becoming just another tourist watering hole. More than ninety percent of the people who live in San Miguel are Mexican. They carry on their lives as they choose to . The churches remain full, the festival continue as they always have. it will never become a town full of foreigners. Q: What have you found in Mexican culture that we seem to have lost? What I constantly observe around me in Mexico is a powerful interconnectedness of family and community such that no matter the trail of the individual, there is always a fall-back of love and belief that in our culture seems to have been stripped away in the name of "rights" and "individualism." What we often fail to realize is the price we have paid for those rights and for the individualism. In my Mexican life I'm constantly offered a reflection of how high that price has been. In some respects writing this book has been an examination - through the instrument of Mexico - of my American self because my experience there, for good or ill, is lived by comparison to my American experience. Thus I become most vividly American to myself when I go on Mexican time. Q: What do you want readers to get out of this book? Through our encounter with Mexican life I want to incite in them a sense of broader possibilities. It makes little difference whether they find those possibilities right where they are or whether they are stimulated to reach out into other cultures. The key is that they take a chance by broadening their experiences and extending the borders of their existence. This website: Copyright © 2000 Studio Q Int'l Inc / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.