Aguachile relaunch

Summer's almost gone, at least in Norway where I have stayed the past months working on my book on the PRD and the Mexican left, which I hope will be out on this side of 2012. The blog has very much suffered as a result, but with a book off to the publisher as of Friday night - duly celebrated with copious amounts of oak-aged tequila - it is a fitting occasion to take stock of this blog, which I've maintained and updated several times weekly for two years now, even if much neglected the past few months.

I made a big decision some months ago to resign from the college where I have been teaching for three years, and which hired me right after finishing my U.S. Ph.D. There were many reasons involved, but in essence my wife and I found that it was time to make a move after many years in the United States. I also wanted to pursue other interests beyond teaching at a liberal arts college, which in many ways was more exciting than I imagined, but in other ways also somewhat disillusioning from what I had expected. My two bases will now be Norway and Mexico. 

I've used the blog as a companion to my own academic writing on Mexico, and I've created it solely because of a passion for Mexican politics, which became my field of study. It has been a fantastic medium to reach and interact with others who share my love for the country and a deep interest in its politics.

I've been very happy to see the blog's view hits rise steadily the past years, and I've interpreted this, perhaps a tad pretentiously, to mean that it has helped fill a niche on blogging in English on domestic Mexican topics and particularly party politics. This, and the great conversations and new contacts and friends that have come out of it already, encourages me to keep on blogging, or essentially to share some thoughts on what I think are important topics in Mexico that deserves more attention, and that perhaps are overshadowed particularly by the ill-fated "war" on Mexico's drug gangs, more correctly the mafia.

I am a trained political scientist but no security specialist, and in any regard a range of excellent sources already exist on this topic - and I am not referring to Stratfor. Given a change of jobs, and the coming to an end of my book, I will also have more time available: What disillusioned me perhaps more than anything about working in a U.S. academic environment, wonderfully rigorous and professional as it is, was the extreme workload and lack of sufficient own time. I therefore plan to continue the blog in one way or another, though I have yet to settle on the coming format. In the meantime I only want to say thanks to those who have stopped by here already and who I hope to interact with even more in the future.