The Wild Neill

       When once the dust of Mexico has settled upon your heart, you cannot then find peace in any other land, wrote Neill James in her 1944 travel book, Dust on My Heart. She was a philanthropist and a mystery woman, perhaps a US intelligence agent during some of her travels. A single independent woman, likely a lesbian, she was much-maligned. She was called cantankerous, crazy, a provocateur, a prevaricator. For sure she was her own woman, inventive and whole.

       When she wrote Dust on My Heart, James was on a supposed six-month tour of Mexico, writing the fourth of her books in the “Petticoat Vagabond” series, about her adventures in cultures around the world. Little did she know that she would spend the next fifty years in the small, mountain village of Ajijic, until her death at the age of ninety-nine. Her home residence was donated to the Lake Chapala Society and has become a hub serving Lakeside foreigners and the Mexican community for more than fifty years. Here is the first paragraph of Neill James’ Dust on My Heart:

I am by instinct, a global vagabond. I cannot rest from travel. Glamour of the unknown has lured me thrice up and down and around the world. Alone, I have shared the home life of peoples in extremes of latitudes, longitudes and altitudes. I have tented on arctic snows beneath the Northern Lights with fur-clad Laplanders who follow the reindeer, have supped with gentle Fiji Islanders, and tattooed Maoris, and have breakfasted on seaweed in the grass huts of the Ainu. I have worshipped in a Malay Snake Temple at sea level and joined Buddhists at prayer on lofty Fujiyama. Restrictions imposed by a world at war (WWII) foreshortened my horizon, and guided my eager footsteps south to Mexico.

       In 2019 I blogged about the heroic women writers here in Ajijic, and included my beginning glimpse of Neill James. Since then, I have heard some first-hand stories of her ferocious way of life. I am glad to have a picture of her that sees past the official sanitized version, which recalls only her splendid philanthropy. I invite you to imagine past it to the wild Neill who lived right here where you walk on the grounds of the Lake Chapala Society, the Neill who lived life exactly the way she pleased. Read her work, form your own opinion. Books by Neill James (1895-1994):

Dust on My Heart: Petticoat Vagabond in Mexico
Petticoat Vagabond In Ainu Land
Petticoat Vagabonds Up and Down The World in Asia
White Reindeer
Atlantic Rendezvous
Penkerth, Journey’s End