James Fitzpatrick's Traveltalks series is a staple of TCM, who often play these short films at the end of feature presentations in order to fill a time slot. While James would venture to many faraway lands in pursuit of interesting and lively footage for his Technicolor camera, this installment isn't really anything out of the ordinary. For whatever reason, Fitzpatrick made more Traveltalks taking place in Mexico than I think any other country he documented. He filmed and talked about both urban and rural areas of the country, and their respective customs and scenery. Here, he's discussing Lake Patzcuaro, which is 230 miles west of the mexican capital. Native Americans (known as Tarascans) live nearby, with Fitzpatrick saying they still live the same way they did centuries before Europeans arrived in the New World, which is more or less what I expected to hear. However, the Tarascans hunt for fish using canoes equipped with odd looking nets, which are quite big and shaped like the wings of a butterfly. It's quite nice to see them gliding over the water in formations. We also learn that the children here are well behaved, and are seldom heard unless they are spoken to first. Fitzpatrick also visits a local church in order to show how Spanish customs have been adopted by some of the populace, even if many of them prefer to live a quiet life free from european intervention. Like most other Traveltalks, Fitzpatrick's voice tends to drone over you after a while, but this one has some of the nicest scenery I've seen so far. I feel like there aren't enough of these shorts where he covers locations that involve large bodies of water, so overall, this was a good change of pace. It's also interesting to see mexico at a time when World War 2 was underway, but those living there couldn't care less as the country was neutral.
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