When most of us think about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the perception is that the conflict was between the native people and Spaniards. But Black people can trace their roots in Mexico to the same day in February 1519, when Hernán Cortés, with 610 Europeans and 300 enslaved people, consisting of African and indigenous Cubans, landed at Cozumel to begin the conquest of the Yucatan (as Mexico was then known to the Spaniards). 

Some destinations are worth considering for medical tourism, according to the editors at International Living magazine, a publication for American expatriates. Take Costa Rica, for example, a country that abolished its army and dedicated part of the money to healthcare. Now nearly 15 percent of international tourism comes to visit Costa Rica for medical services performed by highly trained, bilingual doctors.

Some of the best bargains can be found among Tonalá’s narrow streets, where most of Guadalajara’s local goods can be purchased. In this neighborhood, you can find some of the best crafts in the country. This includes wide-mouth clay bowls designed to serve a cazuela cocktail, Guadalajara’s signature citrus punch. The area is particularly known for silver and gold crafts, hand-painted pottery, papier-mâché and clay figurines. 

As of publication, the death toll in Mexico City and several adjacent states was put at more than 200. It was expected to rise as rescue efforts continued. If Tuesday’s afternoon quake had struck in the early morning as in 1985, the death count would surely be much higher. Worse yet, this week’s earth whammy comes less than two weeks after a shattering quake of magnitude 8.2 killed about 100 people in southern Mexico, mostly in the poor, indigenous state of Oaxaca. 

As recently as October 2016, Mexico’s ambassador was confident Donald Trump would not be elected president. “It’s not going to happen,” Miguel Basañez told me at the time. But it did happen — and Mexico’s hope that it could work with Canada to present a united front against the Trump administration came undone when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was informed that Trump would work out “a bilateral agreement” with Canada alone to salvage the mutual benefits both countries derived from NAFTA.

When Donald Trump invited Carlos Slim, one the world’s richest men and the single-largest investor in the New York Times, to dinner at his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, it became clear that Trump’s admiration for Mexican “leaders” meant businessmen, not politicians. “What President-elect Trump wants to do in coming closer to the Mexican business community has an impact, not only nationally but regionally with Latin America, and opens the doors for good business relations overall,” said Larry Rubin, president of the American Society of Mexico. 

Indeed, it is an opportunity to have an American president in the Oval Office who wants to pick up the phone and speak with Mexico’s president to talk about solving problems. It is an opportunity to invite the young, dynamic, and intelligent Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau join that conversation. It is an opportunity to speak honestly and assess, two decades after it was implemented, on what’s good about NAFTA.

Bush and Fox were friends, ranchers, businessmen, and came from the same rugged landscape that made their working together a done deal. Both men were determined to take the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the next step by addressing the limitations and flaws in that agreement. The limitations were political (no free movement of people across borders) and economic (no single currency for the United States, Canada, and Mexico).

The announcement that Donald Trump has become the presumptive Republican candidate for president following his resounding victory in Indiana’s primary is being met with amused approval in—of all places—Mexico City. Forget the man in the street in Mexico City selling a Donald Trump piñata. Despite official protestations to his anti-Mexican rhetoric, Mexico’s elite may actually favor Trump.

Along the entire two-KM stretch from the eastern part of Tijuana to the wall on the U.S. border, hundreds of people sleep in makeshift tents of cardboard and cloth, tunnel-like holes, and sewage ditches and on the bridges and the sides of the levees. The banks are strewn with trash washed down by the Tijuana River, which stinks from the sewage. This is the “city” of people who have no one. The underside of the border bridges and the banks of the concrete-lined channel are home to hundreds of deported homeless migrants.