Sunday, June 8, 2014

ON THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF MY MEXICAN ADVENTURES

 
 
It's really hard for me to believe that it's been 25 years since I took that first train down into the heart of Mexico as a student.  I've been back there to work once (in 1995) and have gone there, literally, countless times since I started Sueños Latin American Imports back in 1999.  It's a second home, but is still a place of mystery and adventure to me.  Following is the entry I wrote exactly 25 years ago today, by hand, in pencil, in the pages of a blank journal.  I hope you enjoy following along with me.

Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua                                                                                 June 8, 1989

     Well, I finally made it!  I'm sitting quite patiently at the Ciudad Juárez train station.  So far the trip has been nothing less than eventful.  I travelled out to El Paso with 4 people in a cramped Datsun but I can't complain; it was cheaper than the bus or plane.  Upon arriving in El Paso we took a rickety bus to nowhere - actually somewhere, but I don't quite know.  It took us across the border all right, but it didn't stop at immigration.  Wandering aimlessly in the foreign city, we finally got to the place "to get our tourist cards stamped."  There was a little hassle but we got through it fine.  We proceeded by taxi to the train station to wait and wait and wait.  Although the train is late and we are all a bit wearied, it has given me many chances like these to reflect upon things.  I have to admit, it hasn't hit me yet.  Overall, I feel very content and happy with my decision to come here in this manner.  Sometimes apprehension is present but that is quickly replaced with excitement and happy thoughts of anticipation.  So goes my first day of my first adventure in a foreign land.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

GUEST BLOG POST...


Carlin, Dan. “Little Shop of ‘Miracles.’” The Arizona Republic. 27 Aug. 2004: E1, E2.

Print.


 

Little shop of ‘miracles’

 

Milagro buyers, store owner find good fortune in Latino charms

 

By Dan Carlin

 

            Robert Bitto runs an unusual store for an extraordinary clientele.

            Many of his customers hug him when they enter his shop, buy him presents on his birthday and invite him out for dinner throughout the week.

            They do so because Bitto is a friend, but also because he and his central Phoenix shop, Sueños Latin American Imports, have altered their lives in profound ways.

            “I meet the most interesting people here,” says Bitto, 36.

            “This stuff really opens people,” he says, gesturing to the kaleidoscopic collection of arts, crafts and religious tokens that fills the walls and covers the floor of his store. “I hear a lot of stories about what’s happened in connection with the things I sell here. You have to wonder what’s going on.”

            Bitto sells milagros (Spanish for “miracles”), rustic, metal charms shaped like body parts, animals and various allegorical subjects that are said to possess supernatural powers.

            Sometimes he sells them in bulk over the Internet, but mostly he delivers them one by one over the counter at Sueños, his bright yellow store on Seventh Avenue. The business has connected him to the curious culture of milagros, drawing him into the lives of the characters who shop there.

           

Finding comfort

 

On a recent afternoon, Cecelia Larson, a grave-looking woman with a tousle of dark hair, comes into the store with an ordinary request.

“My sister is having eye surgery tomorrow,” she says. “I want to put a candle and a milagro by her bedside to help protect her during the procedure.”

Bitto nods and sifts through a wicker basket on his counter filled with different milagros – pistols, horses, livers, lungs. After a few moments, he finds what he’s looking for and extracts a glittering metal eye form the pile.

He presents it to Larson for her approval, then slips the object into a small, yellow envelope and places it on the counter. Larson covers it with a protective and smiles slightly, as if suddenly reassured.

Many of Bitto’s clients are middle-aged Mexican-American women, but they are also young mothers, U.S. Marines, pagans, devout Catholics, elderly Anglo-Americans and teens, all joined by a belief in the power of milagros.

Bitto often hears how his milagros helped a couple to conceive or saved a customer from a debilitating illness or protected a loved one in danger.

Customers at Sueños speak freely about divorces and family problems, illnesses and tragedies. Many of them stop by the store simply because a visit makes them feel better.

“You just feel comfortable here,” says Jeanette Sinohui, a Sueños customer since 1999. “You can just come in a say hello, then turn around and leave without buying anything.”

 

Something to believe in

 

            Walking into the brightly colored interior of the store is a calming experience. Water trickles from a fountain in the center of the store while tiny mariachi or norteño music pipes in softly over the stereo.

            The orange wall of Sueños’ interior glow with the colors of the art and crafts Bitto has collected from all over Latin America – shiny ceramic chickens from Mexico, checkered quilts from Peru, delicate paper roses from Chile.

            One corner is covered with dozens of crosses of all sizes, made from Brazilian driftwood, Mexican bottle caps, plastic, silver and everything else imaginable.

            Sinohui says she comes in to see Bitto at least twice a month because it “lightens my day.”

            And she buys milagros for herself and her friends because of what they’ve done for her in the past.

            “As you go through life and medical things happen, (milagros) give you something you can believe in, that you can hold in your hand,” she explains.

            Bitto isn’t sure what to think when he hears stories of the milagros’ power. A self-declared fallen Catholic, he grew up without the cultural experiences of most of his customers (his father is an Italian immigrant, his mother is descended form 17th century Dutch and French settlers.)

            “I’m not a believer and I’m not a non-believer,” he says. “If the supernatural rears its head, I’ll look at it.”

            Plenty of Sueños customers cast a similarly skeptical eye on the more esoteric products sold in the shop.

            Karen Perry, a former lawyer, shops at Sueños to furnish her Scottsdale home and her condo in Rocky Point.

            When asked about milagros and the religious items in the store, Perry lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “There are a few things that are a little scary to me.”

 

Bad times, good times

 

            Bitto says he started Sueños to fill a niche for unique goods. After five years of working as an international accountant for American Express, Bitto considered getting a doctorate in anthropology.

            Plan B was to open a Latin American imports store with the contacts he’d built over the years. Through six months of studying in Mexico and years of traveling around Southern America, Bitto had gathered the names of artisans throughout Latin America, thinking they might be useful some day.

            He quit his job in 1997 and opened Sueños in a storefront at Camelback Road and Central Avenue. Two years later business outgrew the space, and he moved to Seventh Avenue.

            In a business as emotional as Bitto’s, store traffic tends to fluctuate on the mood of the country. When things are bad, business is good, and he says there has been a revival in milagros in the last few years.

            Marion Oettinger Jr., curator of Latin American art and interim director of the San Antonia Museum, says milagros have always reflected the concerns of the Southwestern Hispanic society.

            “They’re more than just objects,” Oettinger says. “They’re also a part of a cultural complex, and they can tell us a lot about the people who use them.”

            A few other stores in Arizona and around the West cater to the rising interest, selling milagros and crosses, but he familial atmosphere at Sueños draws customers from all over the state, and Bitto has even made friends around the world through Internet sales.

            And while stores like Casa del Corazon in Encinitas, Calif., or Milagros Gallery in Sonoma, Calif., stock milagros for collectors, Bitto attracts a working-class Mexican-American clientele. Most of the milagros at Sueños cost 95 cents each, or $28.95 for a bog of 100.

            Sometimes Bitto wonders if Sueños is worth the trouble. Prostitutes stroll the street on cooler days, and some mornings he has to kick drunks off the stoop of his shop.

            In January he was robbed, tied up in a backroom until a neighbor discovered him.

            “At that point, sales weren’t very good, and the robbery just made things worse,” Bitto says. “I came in one day and just yelled at the top of my lungs, ‘I hate this place!’”

            After word spread of the robbery, one customer offered Bitto two counseling sessions with a therapist.

            Bitto declined, but the kindness of the gesture made him realize that Sueños was much more than a store.

            “Whenever I think of closing this place down, I think of the impact on peoples’ lives, in the countries where I buy the stuff and here, and I can’t do it.”

Friday, April 4, 2014


TALES FROM THE JUNGLES OF CENTRAL AMERICA:  WAS “THE OLD GERMAN” REALLY A NAZI?


                Far from the jewel-encrusted elephants of the Raj, where Queen Victoria was styled “Empress of India,” there existed a colonial backwater where nothing of consequence occurred.  People in London who were eager to celebrate the fact that “we hold a vaster empire than has been” had ignored British Honduras, later renamed Belize, and left the people who lived there pretty much to their own devices.  A society developed in this tiny chunk of Central America comprised of shipwrecked English pirates, runaway slaves, Mexican refugees, and other assorted scalawags and miscreants, all under the protection of the British Crown, at least nominally.  I had the opportunity to spend 19 unforgettable days in Belize back in 1998.

                Starting my imports business was always “Plan B” in The Great Plan of my life.  “Plan A” was to ditch Corporate America and go back to school to get a PhD in Anthropology with a special concentration in Archaeology emphasizing the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica.  By the late 1990s I had taken the entrance exams and some classes to get me going in the right direction but I lacked any sort of field experience.  So, in the beginning of 1998 I signed up to be a volunteer at an excavation of a Classic Maya site called Blue Creek which was sponsored by a university in Texas.  I would be down “in country” for a few weeks to help on the dig and to learn everything I could about archaeology in context.  I don’t think I had been more excited about anything ever before.

                The site of Blue Creek, near the “town” of Blue Creek, is located in the northwestern corner of Belize, just a few miles from the Mexican border.  I’m hoping it hasn’t changed much, but when I was there that part of the world was pretty raw.  The area was a dense and humid jungle with intermittent clearings of green pastures and farmhouses courtesy of the Mennonites, a religious group which had moved to British Honduras in the late 1950s from the prairie provinces of Canada.  Originally from Central Europe, these straw-hatted, straw-haired people seemed out of place in the Central American jungle, speaking a form of 17th Century German and maintaining their Central European folkways.  Because of the proximity of the town to our camp, we had Mennonite cooks and a Mennonite washerwoman.  I will never forget Margaret, the bespectacled and stout bonnet-wearing cook fixing heavy German breakfasts for us daily.  Was I in Latin America?

                The expedition sometimes hired people from another local town called San Felipe to help with the digging.  The people of that town and of some of the scattered settlements in that region were descendants of refugees of the Caste War, a conflict between European Mexicans and the indigenous Maya that lasted throughout most of the latter half of the 19th Century.  The refugees were mostly ethnic Maya and spoke Spanish and some English (required in school because English is the national language of Belize).  They identified more with Mexico, listening to Mexican music, reading Mexican magazines, etc.  As an aside, of all the places in Latin America, these people are the only ones outside of New Mexico I’ve found who refer to themselves as “Spanish.”  And I include my home state of New Mexico as a part of Latin America.  As one of my sociology professors at UNM once said, “I must say in all sincerity that Latin America begins at the Río San Juan.”  So, in this area, the “Spanish” had been there the longest of any of the contemporary peoples.

                Our transportation in Belize from the camp to the dig and to the towns was in the form of old pickup trucks that took a beating on the lumpy dirt roads of the backcountry.  We would ride in the back, and I have never been so jolted in vehicles in all my life.  Our daily routine would take us to a place in the road near San Felipe to pick up a few workers.  Usually there were two younger guys, Ricky and Milardo, who were eager for work, mostly because the archaeological field work was easy compared to working for the Mennonites or cutting sugar cane all day on the plantations near Orange Walk.  Because I knew Spanish I got to know the workers pretty well and we talked at length on the road and in the field. 

Every day on the road out to the ruins we passed an overgrown compound set away from the road but visible through the jungle.  It had high walls and these walls were covered in vines and a tangle of other plants.  The place looked almost abandoned.  I asked Ricky what this place was.

“The Old German lives there,” he said.

“Who is he?” I asked.  “A Mennonite?”

“No,” Ricky said, “He moved here before the Mennonites got here.  Maybe about 10 years before the Mennonites.”

                I thought, why would a German man move to the middle of nowhere in the mid-1940s?   I wanted to find out his story so I began to ask around. 

                In our free time we would wander into “town,” and would take some of our meals at a place we nicknamed “The Taco Burger” run by a middle-aged Mennonite woman named Judy.  Next to Judy’s place was a small general store run by Judy’s younger cousin Helena.  Helena was pretty talkative and I always chatted with her when I went in there to buy things (to this day I still have cloth I used for face rags that I bought in her store).  I asked Helena about The Old German and she told me that it was not in her nature to gossip, but the man kept mostly to himself and only interacted with the townspeople on rare occasions.  She told me that the town was going to have a bake sale in the next few days and he would probably be there because he always attended such events.

The Mennonite community had the bake sale in what was considered the “core” of Blue Creek Village, a grouping of farmhouses and outbuildings which looked like a piece of rural Pennsylvania that had been dropped out of the Central American sky like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.  While I was disappointed that I did NOT see Pennsylvania Dutch shoo-fly pie among the baked goodies, I did catch glimpse of The Old German.

He was of average height and very fit for a man in his 70s.  He had silver/white hair parted and combed nicely.  He wore contemporary clothing and was clearly not a Mennonite.  Was I staring at him?  His brown eyes met mine and he turned away like a shy person.  I felt no desire to approach him.  I thought, whatever brought him to such a forsaken place was his own business.   As difficult as it was, I put my curiosity on the shelf and enjoyed the bake sale.

Whenever I think of the many things that happened in Belize, I always think of The Old German.  Who was he and why was he there?  Of course, in my mind, he had fled Europe because he was a Nazi and he was leaving behind a checkered past.  Was he a prison camp guard?  Was he Eva Braun’s gynecologist?  What treasures of the Third Reich were housed in his jungle compound?  For years I entertained these questions.  Perhaps, though, this man was just an ordinary citizen whose family was killed, and wanting to forget the horrible events of the war he went as far away as he could to try to escape his awful memories and build a new life.  I am thinking that now this man would be in his early 90s if he is still alive.  The Old German will always be one of my life’s big question marks.  As a curious person, it is difficult for me not to know the real story.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014


THE AGUILAR SISTERS AND THE FOLK ART LABEL QUEENS










            In my 15 years in business and my even more years of collecting, hundreds of thousands of pieces of arts and crafts have passed through my hands.  These pieces are made from every material conceivable and come from all the corners of Latin America:  from the frigid south of Chile to the windswept llanos of Venezuela to the humid jungles of Belize.  I have pretty much seen everything.  Most of these items – upwards of 90% - have no signatures and bear no mark of the person, village or co-operative responsible for their creation.  They come to the customers as anonymous ambassadors of culture, time and place.

            In one of my first paid speaking gigs back in 2008 I was called to talk on the nature of folk art, with a specific emphasis on Mexico.  When I was asked to give this lecture I had no idea what the level of interest in the subject would be and was happy to walk in to 50 attentive people greeting me.  The nature of folk art is based in the “commonness” of the items, I explained, and that the forces that create the art come up from the traditions and folkways of the people.  Unlike fine art, for the most part folk art is ephemeral and not made to last, physically or otherwise.  The pieces and styles may or may not endure while the traditions and cultures behind them continue.

            In American culture we’ve grown up with the idea that a signed creation is a better creation and that if it’s a “name brand” the quality of whatever we are buying is superior.  I haven’t understood how this branding can been applied to folk art, and the thinking seems as contradictory as having a yoga competition, but I guess our culture will take ways of thinking towards one thing and apply it to another.  In the past 20-30 years there has been a growing movement of collecting “masters of folk art” and pieces with signatures and marks on them.  A clay market figure sold by a street vendor in Oaxaca might not be of better quality than another, but we know that anything made by the Aguilar sisters is superior.  Where does that come from?

            Some of this excitement or “demand” has been created artificially by importers or stores that carry the work.  With the exclusivity of “the masters” they can jack up prices and have more sales.   I started to figure this out on a trip to Peru when I arrived at a town that was supposedly dominated by a crafter family (with a common last name) that has been pumped up by a large importer in Texas.   The craftspeople in the town had not even heard of this family.  One of my customers who claimed to collect pieces from these great Peruvian folk artists was somewhat disappointed to hear this story (and was even more disappointed when I did not return home laden with signed pieces).    

To this day I have customers asking for name brands and I do carry some pieces from well-known crafters and workshops partly because they are appealing to me but mostly to cater to the wishes of the customers.  I have had many “label queens” walk through my doors and I myself even fell under the spell of one of the Aguilar sisters, the bright-eyed Guillermina, who was gracious enough to visit my store and conduct full-house workshops in my back room back in 2003.  So, maybe I’m not even immune to being star struck, to some degree (or dropping names?).

My own law of collecting has always been “collect what you like.”  I always say that my business came out of a “hobby that went berserk,” but as a businessman I do have to cater to the desires and needs of the customers, which change over time.  There has always been room for the label queens but I am glad to say that my warehouse space is dominated by the unsung heroes who busy themselves happily in their faraway workshops anonymously.

Sunday, March 2, 2014


I Will Never Forget You:  The Day I Received a Cease-and-Desist Letter from the Frida Kahlo Attorneys
 

            Those who are into Mexican art or Mexican culture, even those who have a vague familiarity with Mexico, know something about Frida Kahlo.  She painted scores of pictures of herself – her autoretratos - and her face is unmistakable.  People are divided on what to think of her look with no middle ground:  she was either one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, or, well, the opposite of that.  Over the years Frida has become an icon, and like so many famous people others have ascribed things to her that weren’t really true or have co-opted her likeness for their own purposes.  I have to smile when I think about, for example, when I was down in Brazil in 2009 and I saw a large colorful banner of a unibrowed Frida staked out on the beach at Buzios to mark the place where a Frida admiration society was supposed to have a meet-up (yes, I did go up to them and ask).  Frida’s image appears everywhere, and as a dealer of arts and crafts I have trafficked in Frida merchandise for 15 years, selling objects with her likeness on them pretty much every day.  Today, for instance, I sold a jewelry box with a decoupage of Frida on the lid of the box (being shipped to Illinois, I believe) made by an anonymous crafter from Mexico.  I don’t know who makes a lot of the stuff that I get in or purchase on my buying trips.  From the small villages to the folk art galleries in the larger cities of Mexico, you can always find Frida’s familiar gaze staring right at you in one form or another.
            In the summer of 2010 I checked my eBay listings, which usually number to about 2,000, and I saw that a number of them were missing.  I thought it was strange and was a little concerned because eBay almost never gets hacked.  I didn’t think too much of this until I pulled up my Juno inbox and saw several emails that explained everything.  There were a few emails from eBay saying that the missing items were pulled because of copyright violations and that I would not have my fees refunded for these listings.  There were some other vague threats that eBay made and I was hit with a three month “probationary period” that didn’t amount to much.  I was a little concerned that all of this was happening to me without first having an explanation or without someone asking me to elaborate on whatever issue they had with me.  Then I opened an email from an attorney which explained everything.
            I was selling items that had copyrighted images of Frida Kahlo on them, and even though I wasn’t actually creating these items I would be sued if I did not stop selling them.  The attorney was representing the elderly daughter of Nikolas Muray, a man who had taken volumes of rich color photographs of Frida during the time he knew her in the 1930s and 1940s.  A huge chunk of his work comes from the time when Frida had her first solo show in New York in 1938.  The images from that shoot are iconic and easily recognizable.  They are everywhere.  I sent an apologetic letter to the attorneys and told them that I would comply with what they asked.  I further explained that I was not making any of these crafts myself and that if they were going to try to crack down on copyright infringement they would have a long haul ahead of them, as so many people slap Frida’s face on everything from crosses to flower pots.  I also went a step further and told them that since I do actually do a lot of the buying for my business myself and interact with legions of crafters from around the hemisphere that I would be happy to help out Muray’s estate and let people know they should stop using these images.  What happened after this was quite unexpected.
            The next email I received was from the photographer’s daughter who wanted to thank me personally for doing the right thing and to spread the word.  She lives in a small town in Utah and besides Social Security she makes her living off of the royalties of her father’s work.  I told her that I would do everything I could do to help her.  We sent a few volleys of friendly emails back and forth and she eventually sent me a signed copy of a collection of her father’s photos and letters from Frida titled I Will Never Forget You:  Frida Kahlo and Nikolas Muray.  I treasure the book not only because it was a gift but because it represents to me how a potentially adversarial situation can be turned around and changed to a win-win. 
            I will end this post by keeping my promise and by asking people who are using these images in their work to please refrain from doing so.  There are many Frida Kahlo images and paintings that are in the public domain and can be used in crafts without violating copyright.  There is a woman in Utah who will really appreciate your honoring the legacy of her father.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014


THE LATTER DAYS OF THE LOTERIA?  THE END OF DON CLEMENTE?

 

                “Don Clemente, Buenos dias.”

                Although I’ve never met her, I have an image of María firmly in my mind.  She answers the phones at the sales office for Don Clemente, the original mass producers of Mexico’s iconic Lotería game whose presses have been running non-stop since 1887 cranking out millions of these games.  María’s voice is smoky, almost sultry, like a film star from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.  In my head this receptionist is a combination of María Felix, Isabela Corona, and Dolores del Río (for those not acquainted with these stars, they are definitely worth a look-up).  She is usually quick to be professionally cheerful, but over the past few months the lilt has been missing from that raspy voice of hers. 

                While María is quick to point out that my company is probably the #1 seller of these picture bingo games in the United States – and I do sell untold crates of these games – my orders are not enough to stop a downward trend the company has seen in the past few years.  As Mexico and the rest of Latin America go increasingly digital, it seems that interest in this once highly popular game is diminishing.  The Lotería is seen as an older person’s game and a relic from another time.  It’s losing ground to the likes of Angry Birds and Grand Theft Auto V.

                I knew something was going on when this company started cutting its product lines.  Historically, they have sold all sorts of games from finely made decks of Spanish playing cards to Serpientes y Escaleras , which is similar to the Chutes and Ladders game, but with more interesting pictures and situations.  They’ve also sold party supplies like confetti and streamers.  Competition from China and the easing of trade restrictions in Mexico have cut into a lot of Don Clemente’s other businesses.  I’m concerned about their core, though, which has been a staple in my business since Day 1 and has represented an enduring fixture of Mexican popular culture.

                In a phonecall before Christmas I promised María that we would put our heads together to come up with some plans to revive the sagging sales of the game.  She said that the future of the game might be in the United States with an increasing Hispanic population and with many Americans wanting to learn Spanish.  I really couldn’t come up with many ideas other than to promote the game more through my business which I have already been doing.  Should the company create a phone app?  An interactive multi-player internet game?

                I’m aware that cultural trends ebb and flow and what is hot one year is not hot the next, but when something that seems so entrenched in a culture is fading away, I can’t help but feel kind of sad.  I will continue to sell these games as long as my customers want them, but I have a feeling that one day soon I will call the Lotería sales office and the rich voice of María will be replaced by a mechanical “this number is no longer in service” message. 

Sunday, February 9, 2014


HOW I WILL PICK TOPICS TO WRITE ABOUT FOR MY BLOG
 
 

            I’ve figured out a way to make myself get into the habit of writing for this blog.  To keep it interesting for both me and the readers, I am going to pick my topics randomly, out of this painstakingly painted fish-themed olla which was made in the town of Capula, just outside of Morelia.  I took the time of writing topics on small scraps of paper and will delve into the olla every other day or so.  I thought a lot about what I would write about and the topics on the scraps of paper include possible tales/descriptions of people, places, the crafts themselves, small business as experienced by yours truly, and personal musings about adventures in Latin America.  I don’t know if this sort of methodology has been used before but I patterned it after a chore jar or swear jar.

            In a few days, I will pick my first scrap of paper and get to writing.  Thanks for following along.

Thursday, February 6, 2014


IT ALL STARTED WITH A LITTLE CLAY DEVIL
 
 

 

            I figured that it would be appropriate to use my inaugural blog post to talk about the second most frequently asked question people pose to me after, “What’s your ethnicity?” (or some variation of that).  The question is, “How did you ever get started in the business of importing arts and crafts from Latin America?”  That is a very good question.  I have been importing handicrafts from all points south since 1999 and it has been my sole source of income for 15 years.  Hundreds of thousands of pieces and millions of dollars, pesos, soles, reais, lempiras and quetzals have flowed through me.  I get a nice discount at the post office because I have mailed out close to 50,000 packages over the course of my business (so far).  Sometimes I have to take a step back myself and wonder how I got to this point and what got me started in this.  I have to say that it all began 25 years ago with a little clay devil from Ocumicho.

            In 1989 I spent a semester studying Spanish and Mexican culture at an institute in Morelia, Michoacán, in Mexico’s colonial heart through The University of New Mexico’s Conexiones program.  I was in the centro within walking distance of the magnificent cathedral and all of the major historic sites where everything was made of the region’s hallmark cantera rosa stone.  Every day I lived in Morelia I was surrounded by colorful folk art and centuries of history.  I was a poor student and couldn’t afford much (well, we can forget about the cool leather jacket I bought and the fake Rolex), but I was always drawn to the handcrafted items which overflowed in the marketplaces and were offered by vendors who would set up impromptu stalls in front of the massive stone buildings.  As a center of commerce for nearly half a millennium now, Morelia has always drawn in people from surrounding villages to trade.  At my disposal were some of the finest pieces of arts and crafts anywhere in Mexico.  My first purchase was a little happy devil playing a drum created by a vendor who hazarded the poor roads all the way from the tiny Tarascan (Indian) town of Ocumicho in the western part of the state (more on this town in a future blog).  The little devil cost me 5,000 pesos, which was the equivalent of about USD$1.82 back then.  I vowed that once I got done with school and got my career going that I would buy more of these pieces and amass a collection of Mexican folk art.  I had no idea when I bought that devil that it would lead to what I have now.
 
 

            Christmas 1989 I was back in the States and when I went gift shopping up to Santa Fe with my childhood friend Trent, we walked into a store that specialized in handicrafts from around the world.  I was really shocked to see that the store had pieces from Michoacán, and specifically, Ocumicho.  I was even more shocked to see the prices on the pieces.  What I paid $1.82 for was selling in that shop for $10 to $12 apiece.  In my classes in finance they called this an “arbitrage opportunity,” when you buy goods at a lower price than what you sell them for.  What a great business idea!  Ah, but we have many ideas, especially when we are young.  I finished up my Christmas shopping in The City Different and tucked away the thoughts of arbitrage in the back of my head.

            After graduation I landed a job with a “big nameless, faceless American multinational corporation” and was transferred back to Mexico, this time the country’s monstrous capital, Mexico City.  The job was boring but it afforded me the weekends off to travel, with a three-day weekend here and there.  One long weekend I took a bus back to Morelia and acquired more Ocumicho and other folk art pieces because I now had the money to do so, and I could be more discerning.  I hauled the take back to the States but was soon transferred again to São Paulo, to work at the company’s Brazilian headquarters.  Brazil was another country with different art.  I perused the marketplaces there just as I had done in Mexico, finding many treasures offered directly by the artists.

            I worked for that “nameless faceless multinational” for a few more years before I had made the decision to quit Corporate America.  I had the idea to go back to school to get a PhD in anthropology with a concentration in archaeology, which was a totally different path I was traveling down with my career in international finance.  I always thought the field of archaeology to be my true passion (maybe even now?) and took the entrance tests, took prep courses, volunteered on a dig in Central America, and did everything I could to be accepted into a program somewhere.  I tried for almost 3 years to get into a program but I had no luck.  Apparently, there was a big glut of applicants at pretty much every school.  Because I believe in being prepared, I did have a “Plan B” and that plan was to open up a store to sell folk art not just from Mexico, but from all over Latin America.  Phoenix didn’t have a store like that (and hasn’t had one since I closed down the physical store back in 2009), so I thought I would give it a go.  The thing for an entrepreneur to do when he reaches the edge of the cliff is to jump, right?  With credit cards and money I had banked, I decided to try it.  My store opened on Central Avenue in Phoenix on September 16, 1999 with a web site to go along with it.  I still believe that I was either the first one ever to have a site completely dedicated to selling Latin American folk art on the internet or at least I am the longest lasting.  I am so glad I got my start online so early on, as there are tens of thousands of links and references to my business out there and I was able to grow that part of my business as shopping on the web grew.  I’ve had my ups and downs and trials and tribulations and all that over time, but 15 years – and 50,000 packages - later I still own the business.  I no longer have the brick-and-mortar store, but my company, Sueños Latin American Imports, has endured and has taken me to sunny San Diego where I have a small warehouse and an office with a view.

            It’s been a heck of an adventure.  I have learned and experienced a great deal.  I have traveled to obscure places in the hunt for merchandise and have made many friends along the way.  I want to use this blog to share what I have learned and experienced and to make the crafts I sell come alive.  I hope you will follow alongside me and we can take the trip together.  I also do hope that you find what I have to say, well, interesting and perhaps enriching.