Lydia Carey

A rail boom is on the horizon, with dozens of new projects underway. But environmental, social, and economic pressures could complicate Mexico's plans.

The city is steaming, and chilangos are hunting down their favorite cool foods and the ubiquitous agua frescas sold in outdoor markets. We’re scouring the market, too, in search of our favorite hot weather treat, a cold chicozapote.

What is mezcal? And which should you buy so as not waste your time and money on anything less than the best? Here is a little background and a few tips if you want to be a pro at choosing and drinking Mexican mezcal.

As Mexico enters into the USMCA agreement this year, the fight for small farmers and the protection of native seeds is just beginning.

Tania Rosales, 37, lives with her family in the Reyes La Paz area of Mexico, just outside Mexico City. Their neighbourhood’s water comes from a local well. ‘At 8pm every night the water in our home is cut off – and there isn’t a drop until 8am the next morning,’ she says.

Most of us will think back on this year of pandemic and think only of the negatives, but the truth is there are also lots of positives if you know where to look. The struggles of the Covid outbreak have provided opportunities — of time, of space, of necessity — and many projects have been birthed over the last 13 months. Here are five of my favorite pandemic projects created in the last year in Mexico and the people whose passions started them in this year of uncertainty.

Oaxaca has so many things to offer — incredible food, beautiful landscapes, charming architecture — but one underappreciated gem is the state’s small, family-run distilleries sprinkled throughout the countryside. Here you find the masters of mezcal, the “elixir of the gods.” It’s a rapidly growing superstar among distilled spirits worldwide.

Before the pandemic, the night shift that Juan and Hugo work at a 24-hour taco stand in Mexico City’s Del Valle neighborhood did a booming trade. Nowadays a trickle of evening diners stop by for a taco, but the crowds of last year are mostly gone. It’s a common scene across the city, where those who can are mostly working from home (and no longer reliant on street food for a cheap meal) and the number of tourists, who were increasingly coming to samp

What would you do to make your dream a reality? Sleep on a stranger’s couch? Commute two hours twice a day? Live in poverty? Live in isolation? Mariana Domínguez did all that and more before she could start Cervecera Macaria, her new gypsy brewery in Mexico City, birthed in the middle of a global pandemic and one of the deepest global recessions in decades.

Four female winemakers in one of Mexico's most conservative regions are bucking stereotypes and changing the face of winemaking in Mexico.

Time-honored pan de muerto recipes are part of what keep Mexicans connected to the intimacy of the Day of the Dead holiday, and there is nothing like being in the kitchen to give you a sense of home in surrealistic 2020.

I never thought I would miss the obligatory cheek kiss...until it was gone.

A city beekeeper is using her influence to try and encourage beekeeping and the love of bees in Mexico City and beyond.

Less than a mile away from an endless stream of Mexico City traffic,

I am at the water’s edge, staring into the face of a grazing dairy

cow. In a bright blue boat with a flat bottom, I listen to the chirp of

nearby cranes and wave good morning to children being paddled

to school in canoes.

When I walked into the mass and saw twenty mariachis in the middle of the crush of parishioners I chuckled to myself, wondering what I had been thinking.

I know Mexico well at this point. Not so well that cultural quirks like Candelaria don't still draw me in, but well enough to know that no Mexican holiday is ever complete without music, dancing and of course, fireworks. Sure enough, there were workers setting up the firework tower outside and a fair-like atmosphere in the street.