A wayward descendant of Mexico's national hero, a femme fatale who recites poems in cantinas, a Tunisian prostitute in Barcelona, a Spanish psychiatrist who fights brave bulls, the wise owner of the world's oldest restaurant. They are just a handful of the characters portrayed in VIDAS: Deep in Mexico and Spain, the first travel memoir to explore Mexico and Spain with the perspective of an American and the knowledge of an insider. VIDAS: Deep in Mexico and Spain is a passage from adolescence to maturity, a tribute to nature and the open road, an exaltation of love, food and wine, a journey from the tender, mortal flesh to the luminous world of the spirit. It is also travel writing at its best, an evocation of peoples, places and rituals seldom glimpsed by natives or foreigners. "If you are seventeen, at large in Mexico, seeing new things and learning every hour, any cheap dive, any impulse or encounter is pure as the snows on Popocatepetl, stained by hot ashes." A wayward descendant of Mexico's national hero, a femme fatale who recites poems in cantinas, a Tunisian prostitute in Barcelona, a Spanish psychiatrist who fights brave bulls, the wise owner of the world's oldest restaurant. They are just a handful of the characters portrayed in VIDAS: Deep in Mexico and Spain, the first travel memoir to explore Mexico and Spain with the perspective of an American and the knowledge of an insider. VIDAS: Deep in Mexico and Spain is a passage from adolescence to maturity, a tribute to nature and the open road, an exaltation of love, food and wine, a journey from the tender, mortal flesh to the luminous world of the spirit. It is also travel writing at its best, an evocation of peoples, places and rituals seldom glimpsed by natives or foreigners. "If you are seventeen, at large in Mexico, seeing new things and learning every hour, any cheap dive, any impulse or encounter is pure as the snows on Popocatepetl, stained by hot ashes."