Alan Chazaro

2 weeks ago | sfgate.com | Alan Chazaro

There’s ongoing debate as to where baseball truly originated, but even Cooperstown diehards would agree that, basically from the jump, the sport went international. The game first migrated southward in 1847 during the U.S.-Mexico War, when American soldiers won a decisive battle and captured the wooden leg of future Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna, using the military general’s prosthetic limb to play what is said to be the first baseball game in Mexico at a park in Xalapa, Veracruz.

2 weeks ago | sfgate.com | Alan Chazaro

It’s a simple concept. Every postseason, the Warriors give away thousands of T-shirts to their fans, with the unworn apparel draping every seat in the arena hours before the game starts. The shirts represent a symbolic request for each ticket holder’s participation in the ceremonious, collective sporting experience that will take place. It’s the great unifier in modern sports in which no person is above or beneath the next, making every fan appear to be of the same cloth — quite literally.

3 weeks ago | mexiconewsdaily.com | Alan Chazaro

A few weeks ago, a new food venture opened up in downtown Xalapa, in an area of the city near the university with a high concentration of delectable cafes frequented by youthful couples, students and artists. Whenever anything opens in this part of town, I’m excited to see what it’ll add to an already impressive culinary scene.

3 weeks ago | sf.eater.com | Alan Chazaro

If you drew a wobbly timeline of Mexican beer history — beginning in the 16th century, when Spanish colonizers landed in modern day Veracruz and introduced the European libation to Mesoamerica, and through subsequent centuries, including the inception of Mexican lagers in the 1890s thanks to the development of railroad technologies, when Santiago Graf imported the proper materials and equipment needed from the United States to brew the first ever Vienna-style lager in Toluca, Mexico — you’d...

4 weeks ago | mexiconewsdaily.com | Alan Chazaro

For being such a compact and lightly visited city, Xalapa — the quaint capital of Veracruz — has provided the rest of Mexico with some of its most important amenities. Aside from being one of the country’s main coffee producing regions and the namesake and origin of jalapeños en escabeche, is where Chedraui began. The nation’s most profitable Mexican-owned supermarket, Chedraui currently accounts for 19.3% of national grocery market sales.