Carol Miller: going to the improbable place.

AuthorBerghoff, Ardis
PositionPERSONALITIES

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"Why" is author and sculptor Carol Miller's favorite word. Her curiosity about McNeo spurred her to move there from her native California at the age of twenty. During the ensuing 55 years, she has let the country and its culture determine the direction of her life and identity. Miller never finished college, yet as an autodidact she has become an expert in Mexico's people, language, history, art, geography, anthropology, and mythology, which in turn has led to prolific careers as a journalist (including work as a Life magazine correspondent and author of more than twenty books), translator, and sculptor with more than 200 shows and museum exhibitions to her credit. Her willingness to adopt a foreign country as her own has also taken her on ah unexpected path that has helped build bridges of understanding between Mexico and the rest of the world.

Miller is such an outspoken and articulate interpreter of Mexico that leaders in social, art, media, and political circles call her the country's "Renaissance Woman." At a roundtable of artists and academies in 1988, presidential candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari asked Miller what she thought the country's role should be in supporting the arts. She replied, "It seems to me that by the very nature of art, it's a personal enterprise. The government's responsibility is to create a climate in which art can flourish, but not to patronize art as such." She says he was delighted with her answer and formed the National Counsel for Culture and the Arts in part due to her ideas. However, she offended many people who were present and was excoriated for days in the press by those who thought government should directly support culture. "I was telling them to just get to work and do what they do," she says.

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Such is the advice of a woman with a strong belief in destiny. Indeed, fate has sent her to some unlikely places at seemingly just the right time. She arrived in Mexico in 1954 fresh off a bus that had wound its way from Indio, California, to Mexico City. She had $800 in her pocket and a desire to write about the "real Mexico," inspired by a family vacation to Mazatlan two years earlier. She had inherited an artistic bent from her mother, who designed interiors for Case Study houses in California, resourcefulness from a father who was successful in the rubber-tire business during World War II, and a worldly curiosity from her stepfather, who was a professional musician. These...

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