November 28 2008 Page 2

Agoda is the on line company that we book through when we travel.

      Irrepressible Spirit:

   Carlos Vidal Cruz

Tara Spears

Ask any taxi driver where you can continue your fitness routine while on vacation, and you’ll be directed to Gym Carlos on Bahia de Bandera street in La Penita. The facility offers a wide variety of workout machines, pulsing music to keep your momentum going, and best yet, onsite personal trainer, Carlos Vidal.  It is Carlos’ sincerity, knowledge, and enthusiasm that make this gym five star.  “Weight training has made such a difference in my life,” Carlos said in halting English, “It has been my lifetime dream to operate a gym where people come to improve their fitness and health.”

               The amazing Carlos is not only a hard-bodied example of what pumping iron can do for the physical, but he exemplifies positive mental attitude-which is a dominate characteristic of any successful athlete.  What is astonishing about Carlos’ zest for life and career choice is that he was paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury at 16. “I had the same outlook as other young people: work to get money to have a good time on the weekend,” he reflects.  “You never worry about the future.” Although Carlos loved school and was a top student, after the auto accident he was forced to stop attending Secandario (high school) because in the early 1980s there weren’t services for the disabled.  “I spent years confined to bed. Fortunately, I had always loved to read. I became interested in health issues, nutrition and exercise. I decided to teach myself how to be fit and healthy.”  Bored with inactivity and concerned about a weight gain, Carlos devised an exercise program that he could do to regain strength.  His first weights were made by his father of cement.  Thrilled with the physical and mental improvement Carlos experienced, he dared to dream of someday owning and operating his own gym- and helping people maximize their health.

Carlos’ enthusiasm for weight training was catching: soon after beginning his own regimen, two of his buddies started working out with Carlos at his home.  The three friends pooled their resources to purchase the first set of weights. For the next twenty years, Carlos studied physical conditioning;  applying what he learned, first to himself, then to the people who came to his impromptu home gym.  “I saved as much as I could, purchasing additional equipment to better help target different areas of the body,” Carlos earnestly explains. “I realized I was good at developing effective exercise programs that achieved results for others.  I feel proud that as the word spread, more people came to me asking for fitness advice.”

 Finally, in 2004, Carlos actualized his dream by opening his spacious gym at its current location.  Gym Carlos has two comfortable exercise rooms loaded with a complete array of workout equipment that target specific muscles-  everything from stationary bikes, free weights, and incline boards to resistance machines.  There is a conference room/kitchen where Carlos meets with customers to discuss nutrition and design individual fitness training programs.   When queried about the use of steroids associated with bulking up, Carlos indignantly replied, “I strongly advise my clients to avoid all dangerous drugs.  True strength and definition can only come from discipline and hard effort.  It isn’t a quick process.”   

 Gym Carlos is open from 6 to 11 am and 4 to 10 pm  Monday through Friday, and 6 am to noon on Saturdays.  During the initial visit, Carlos assesses the customer’s needs and physical condition to design an individual exercise plan: he then takes you through the routine instructing on proper form and the correct way to use the equipment. “Safety is very important- improper form causes injury and will prevent you from achieving your fitness goal,” said Carlos. “I evaluate the client’s progress every two months, and revise their exercise program accordingly.” The monthly membership allows the client to choose a convenient schedule for their workouts.

 Carlos demonstrating equipment at his gym.    Looks easy……

 When Carlos isn’t pumping iron, he likes to relax  playing the guitar, sing karaoke, draw, and read.  As the Riviera Nayarit area has grown, with an increase in foreigners visiting and relocating here, Carlos began studying English. “I want to be able to communicate with my clients. Besides,” he says with a shy grin, “I like learning stuff.”  While many would have given up on life or turned to begging when faced with the setbacks Carlos has experienced, his positive outlook and motivation spurred him on to earn a livelihood that supports not only himself but his 80 year old mother and sister.  It is no surprise that the community respects this self-made businessman.

To contact Carlos: (cell) 322-121-6110       (home)   327-274-0787

Bahia de Bandera #13

To Contact Tara:   terri_sprs@yahoo.com

 Day of the Iguanas

On a morning in a Oaxacan market, photographer Graciela Iturbide made one of the most enduring images of Zapotec life

By Lynell George

Smithsonian magazine, September 2008

Day of the Iguanas

In the early 1920s, Diego Rivera returned to Mexico City from a trip to Oaxaca and began telling friends about a place where strong, beautiful women ruled. Soon Rivera was painting such women, and within a decade, the list of artists and intellectuals that followed the road south to Oaxaca included Frida Kahlo, Sergei Eisenstein and Langston Hughes. Photographers came too: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston. To varying degrees, they were all taken with the indigenous Zapotec women on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the culture in which they really did enjoy more power and freedom than other women in Mexico.

Graciela Iturbide didn't travel to the region until 1979, but the photographs she made there have proved to be some of the most enduring images of Zapotec life. And her portrait of a woman named Zobeida—titled Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas) and included in Graciela Iturbide: Juchitán, a recent collection of Iturbide's work—has practically become a symbol of Zapotec womanhood.

By the time Iturbide made her trip to the isthmus city of Juchitán, she had already shed several skins. Married at 20, a mother of three by 23, she seemed set for a traditional life as an upper-class wife in Mexico City. But her 6-year-old daughter died from an illness in 1970, and later Iturbide and her husband divorced. Although she had been studying filmmaking, Iturbide signed up for a still photography class taught by the Mexican master Manuel Alvarez Bravo. She was one of only a few students to enroll, and the class developed into an apprenticeship.

Iturbide had begun photographing in Mexico City and among the Seri Indians in the Sonora Desert when, in 1979, she was invited to take pictures in Juchitán by the artist Francisco Toledo, a native son and an advocate for the region's arts and culture. Iturbide spent a few days observing the Zapotec women, who seemed to project an almost ethereal self-possession—independent, at ease with their bodies and comfortable with their power, which came from control of the purse. "The men work" on farms and in factories, Iturbide says, "but they give money to the women."

The women also ruled the marketplace, where they sold textiles, tomatoes, fish, bread—"everything," Iturbide says, "all of it carried on their heads." It was amid the market's tumult one morning that she spotted Zobeida (whose name has also been given, incorrectly, as Zoraida). "Here she comes with the iguanas on her head! I could not believe it," Iturbide says. As Zobeida got ready to sell the lizards (as food), the photographer says, "she put the iguanas on the ground and I said: 'One moment, please. One moment! Please put the iguanas back!'"

Zobeida obliged; Iturbide raised her camera. "I had a Rolleiflex; only 12 frames and in this moment," she says. "I didn't know if it was OK or not."

It was more than OK. A year or so later, Iturbide presented several of her Juchitán photographs to Toledo, to be shown in a cultural center he had founded in the city. Somewhat to her surprise, Our Lady of the Iguanas—which she considered as but one image among many—was a hit. Residents asked for copies of it, and they put it on a banner. "The image is a very important one to the people of Juchitán," Iturbide says. "I don't know why. Many people have the poster in their house. Toledo made a postcard." The locals renamed the image "The Juchitán Medusa." "There are many legends about the iguanas and other animals, and maybe that image relates," Iturbide says. "Maybe."

Although Iturbide returned to Juchitán many times for the better part of a decade, she also traveled widely, photographing in Africa, India and the American South. To her surprise, the Juchitán Medusa also traveled—turning up as an element in a Los Angeles mural, for example, and in the 1996 American feature film Female Perversions (starring Tilda Swinton as an ambitious, conflicted lawyer). When Iturbide went to Japan for an exhibition of her work, the curator told her he was glad she didn't bring her iguanas, says Rose Shoshana, founder of the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, California, which represents Iturbide.

Ultimately, the pictures the photographer made in Juchitán were important to both her work and her reputation, says Judith Keller, who curated a recent Iturbide retrospective at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. "It reinforced her concern about the lives of women, and it validated her thinking that this is an important topic and this is something she should continue with," Keller says. In October, Iturbide will be awarded the Hasselblad Foundation International Award.

As for the Lady of the Iguanas herself, Zobeida died in 2004, but not before the image made her something of a celebrity. As anthropologists debated the exact nature of Juchitán society (matriarchal? matrifocal?), journalists would seek her out to ask, inevitably, if she was a feminist. Iturbide says Zobeida would answer: "'Yes. When my husband died, I work. I take care of myself.'"

Lynell George writes about arts and culture for the Los Angeles Times.