Colonia alamos benito juarez biography

Here, surely, were all the makings of a rotten trip.

First, my prearranged taxi stood me up. Then, as dusk deepened over the Sierra Madre and the desert stretched darkly in every direction, the only cabbie at the Ciudad Obregon airport looked me in the eyes and demanded $ to take me the 60 miles I needed to go. No deal.

And so as night fell on the Mexican state of Sonora, I fidgeted at an airport rental car counter miles south of the Arizona border, agreeing to pay too much for a few days in the company of a Plymouth Neon.

No comfort knowing that I stood on the threshold of the jumping-bean capital of the world. Not much help recalling that all this was traceable to two not particularly urgent questions:

Where exactly did the founders of Los Angeles come from years ago? And could it be true, all these years later, that an American colony had taken root here, a town with no coastline, virtually no night life and no public airport of its own?

I now have the answers. Further, I have a new favorite little town in Mexico.

Alamos is the sort of backwater that many Mexicophiles daydream about: affordable, historic, underpopulated, architecturally rich, bougainvillea-draped and protected from mass tourism by its awkward inland location. If you buy the idea that stepping into a s

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