Soon after you arrive at Lakeside you begin hearing the name of one of Ajijic’s first foreign settlers – the travel writer Neill James who came to Ajijic in the 1940s to recover from an accident and remained to start a silkworm farm, a silk spinning and embroidery industry, a tradition of weaving, and most importantly, Ms James hired a tutor who supervised local children as they completed their homework and then taught them to paint.
A couple of weeks ago in this column you learned the result of that tutor’s work – the dozen or so Ajijic artists who make their living today because of the classes this woman set up for them.
Ms James and her sister lived in the property that is now the Lake Chapala Society which is centered by the well-known Neill James Library, the largest collection of English books in any non-English speaking country in the world.
The following article appeared in the October 1945 Modern Mexico Magazine which was published in New York City by the International Chamber of Commerce. Judy King transcribed the article for a June 2002 issue of Living at Lake Chapala. The article’s author not was not identified in the Modern Mexico Magazine issue.
Usually the interesting foreign women in Mexico live in the provinces. As does Neill James, often called the most colorful woman in the Americas. World traveler, lecturer, radio commentator, author, whose new book, Adobe Hut in Heaven , telling about her residence town Ajijic, Jalisco, will come out within a few months.
Miss James has written four Petticoat Vagabond travel books taking in a great part of the world including Lapland, the Orient and Mexico. Above and beyond this, however, she is a beautiful and charming woman (cast an eye on the picture) who has made for herself in Mexican hearts, as well as those of the Jalisco resident and visiting foreign colony, a warm place. This despite a series of mishaps, which would have slightly dimmed, to put it mildly, the radiance of the average foreigner.
On her own and alone, Neill James has circuited the globe three times, visiting 37 countries in the Orient, Europe, Africa and South Seas. Seven years ago, she spent nine months of the winter in the Arctic traveling two thousand miles driving her own reindeer across Lapland from the Russian frontier to the fjords of Arctic Norway. Dressed in the fur clothing of the Laplanders she lived with the nomads who follow the reindeer. She spent a month with the largest cod fishing fleet in the world, operating in Lofoten Islands off the coast of Arctic Norway 150 miles above the Polar Circle.
For three years, this dauntless traveler resided in Japan. She visited the Orient on three occasions. Her last trip abroad in 1940 was to Japan, spending a year in the grass huts of the hairy Ainu, white aborigines of Asia, on the strategic Island of Hokkaido, and traveling in Korea, Manchuria and Mongolia and down through the war zone of Northern China. Her book, Petticoat Vagabond in Ainu Land, describes these adventures in Asia.
In 1942, Neill James came to Mexico intending to remain six months, gathering material for a travel book. However, a week before her scheduled departure she suffered a near fatal accident on Popocatepetl Volcano. As a guest of the Club Exploraciones de Mexico she had climbed the 17,899-foot volcano to sleep two nights at the bottom of the crater and to spend a day in viewing the hot sulfur lake on the floor of the crater. On descending the volcano she slipped on a steep icy area and fell spinning down the mountain, to be miraculously saved for a five-month bout in the hospital.
The next year, 1943, she went with three friends to visit Paricutín, Mexico's rip-snorting baby volcano. The view shack where the party took shelter collapsed under the weight of the ash and sand thrown out by the volcano burying the party and inflicting a double triple fracture on Miss James who was struck by an ironwood beam. Came another four months in the hospital. "If I had to spend three years recuperating from 9 fractures in any one place, I'm glad it happened in Mexico," said Neill James.
"In my little adobe house in Ajijic, I live alone and in the open, sleep out-of-doors, cultivate a pocket-handkerchief sized flower and vegetable garden…and write. To the amazement of my Mexican neighbors, I actually do the work in my garden, and water it by hand. It's astonishing how much a plant drinks. A carrot, for instance, drinks about as much water as a medium sized elephant! I have some orchids, too, but the climate here is very dry for orchids. So I rigged up an automatic watering system by simply puncturing a pin hole in a pottery jar, filling it with water and hanging it above the cluster of orchids where the water would run down the tree trunk drop by drop. It works beautifully.
"I came to Ajijic to recuperate. When I landed I was so crippled I had to be helped out of the boat. Daily I worked to regain my health. I sunbathed, swam in Lake Chapala, and exercised. Now I walk upright and without crutch or cane.
"By way of diversion and to aid the women and girls of this village earn some money, I revived an old embroidery home industry, and put them to making beautifully embroidered but tailored blouses for women. They worked with such enthusiasm and the project grew so rapidly that now it occupies my entire spare time and encroaches upon my writing time. My job is to direct the project, furnish raw materials and find a market for their produce! Tourists have made my little adobe house a Mecca and few leave without one or a half dozen hand made embroidered blouses 'Made in Ajijic.'
"I love Mexico! It has all the old world culture of the Occident, the glamour, mystery, and color of the Orient and a very special brand of mañana of its own more devastating than the legendary lotus in captivating the footloose stranger wandering in the realm.
"I think it has the brightest postwar future of any of the Republics in the Americas. Such a rich country, too! If only the average Mexican could come into his own share of his country's natural wealth, there would be little poverty.
"I predict a surge of tourists southward over the Pan American Highway, by car, by train, boat and airplane. A number of the trickle that comes this way now have expressed a desire to return and settle. I am afraid that come the end of the war, Mexico will have to erect strong barriers to protect her Paradise.
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