Word: paz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most of the past 131 years. Revolutionary heroes severed all ties to the Vatican as punishment for Catholic support of the landed elite and European intervention. Last week Mexican and church officials finally re-established diplomatic relations. "It is the end of an archaic debate," Nobel-prizewinning poet Octavio Paz told the local press. "We have problems too immense to be wasting our time with problems that are a hangover from the last century...
...Nothing worked." The avenue of adoption seemed blocked: Fred, 53, was considered too old for fatherhood by U.S. adoption agencies. Then the Redmans discovered Los Ninos International Adoption Center, a Houston-based, nonprofit organization that helps Americans adopt youngsters in Latin America. Within months the Redmans arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, where they were introduced to baby twin sisters and their Indian mother, who was offering the infants for adoption because she was too poor to take good care of them. A few days before Thanksgiving last year, the joyous parents flew home with their new seven-month-old daughters...
...weight to his taut cheeks, sketched lines under his eyes and erased the spontaneity from his grin. The face of Carlos Salinas de Gortari recalls Mexico's ubiquitous clay masks: one side smiles, free of trenchant thought; the other is a frieze of pained contemplation. That, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude 40 years ago, is typical of his countrymen: "His face is a mask, and so is his smile...
...when it is fashionable to bash Western culture and exaggerate the traditions of the southern and eastern hemispheres, Paz's work is a reminder that no part of the contemporary world is free of profound influences from another. His best-known poem, Sun Stone (1957), casts ancient Aztec symbolism in a modern mold. As a critic, he broke ground with The Labyrinth of Solitude, a study of Mexico as a New World nation improvising its future from indigenous traditions as well as revolutionary ideals from Europe and North America...
Like many Latin American writers, Paz has political credentials. He served for a time as Mexico's ambassador to India but resigned in 1968 to protest the authorities' killing of students during an antigovernment demonstration. In the 1930s Paz was a Marxist. Today communist holdouts regard him as a conservative largely because he has become a critic of "simplistic and simplifying ideologies of the left." His equally sharp disapproval of the rigid right has put him at the lonely center, where his poetry has taken on its deeply personal and moral tone...