Mildred Palmer

Mildred Palmer, an Iowa born (1896), Montana homesteader, California real-estate agent and member of the creative team of Chautauqua performers, joins the first international flight to the Central American county of Guatemala in October of 1929.  The plane brakes down and the stock market crashes and she finds herself stranded with no means of support and no reason to return to the dirty dishes she had left in the kitchen sink.  

 

Palmer reinvents herself as a restaurateur in the sophisticated and elegant capital of Guatemala City known at the time as the Little Paris of the Americas.  El Patio Restaurant becomes the meeting place of the political and professional personalities of Guatemala City as well as the likes of German spies, Hollywood actors filing Tarzan movies, and archeologists like Sylvanus Morley, after whom the Indiana Jones movies were later fashioned.  

 

Palmer remains in Guatemala the rest of her life, moving to the Spanish Colonial town of La Antigua where, influenced by Fred Harvey in Santa Fe, she promotes early tourism.  She also invents micro lending, amasses a much-admired collection of indigenous weavings, and promotes the folk arts, all while renovating 7 houses including Casa de las Campanas and Casa Popenoe, in a style all her own, a mix of Pueblo, Bauhaus, Mission, Art Deco, Arts and Crafts, and California Spanish Colonial Revival.  Her work inspires the preservation of folk arts and the conservation of La Antigua, which becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

 

Mildred Palmer’s contributions to history had all but been forgotten, and her accomplishments slowly credited to others, until Ana Livingston Paddock and 10 years of research uncovered the true story told here in 360 pages in both Spanish and English, with an extensive bibliography and more than 250 photographs.