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One
of the proudest people in Mazatlán these days is the municipal director
of cultural affairs, Ricardo Urquijo. Many people know him as manager of
the Angela Peralta Theater. But they may not know that he also serves as
director of the next-door Municipal Center for the Arts. Through a series
of grant applications, Urquijo has been trying to let the world know what
the municipal center is doing to enrich the lives and the talents of children
throughout the municipality of Mazatlán. In mid-October he received word
from Washington, D.C. that the school had been awarded a $10,000 prize from
the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. It was kept low
key for security reasons, because the American first lady, Mrs. Laura Bush,
would be handing out the awards personally. A crop of 13 neighborhood outreach
programs, just two of them in Mexico and the rest in the United States,
were to be given prizes in the peculiarly named “Coming Up Taller” program.
The report on the Mazatlán center’s activities caught the judges’ eyes because
it mentioned that teachers from the municipal center go out to the various
villages to offer the local children workshops in all the arts disciplines
that children study here in town: classical and contemporary dance, folk
dance, music, singing, plastic arts, theater, film appreciation and literature.
Roundtrip airline tickets to Washington for Ricardo, his wife Ceci and Hector
Acosta, a representative student at the center, were provided so they could
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receive the award. But for some reason the Urquijos were routed separately
and it happened that the awards were to be presented the Monday after the
long Thanksgiving weekend. Ricardo recalls a nightmare of a trip whose itinerary
included stops in Orlando (Orlando?) and Atlanta before reaching Washington.
“On the last leg of the flight,” he says, “I changed from my traveling clothes
into a suit and tie, and when we landed there were people waiting to drive
us to one of the congressional office buildings where the ceremony was taking
place. “We got there just as the event was ending, with people singing ’America
the Beautiful.’ Fortunately, my wife’s flight had arrived earlier so she
had accepted the prize on my behalf. But Mrs. Bush, on hearing why we got
there so late, took us into a side room and spent a little time talking
to us. She’s such a gracious lady! A White House photographer even took
our picture with her — but said he’d send it later.” Ricardo presided over
a Sunday breakfast celebration the weekend after the Mazatleco contingent
got back from Washington. Honored guests were the teachers at the center,
although not all 60-plus of them could attend that day. Also seated at the
head table were Mayor and Mrs. Gerardo Rosete. When Ricardo handed over
the award to the mayor — it is a municipal school, after all — Rosete announced
that he would use the $10,000 as down payment on a nine-passenger van for
the center’s outreach program, and that city government would chip in the
rest of the money. |
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