Marcia Blondin: Four Decades From Here

In 2026, Marcia Blondin will mark 40 years since Puerto Vallarta quietly but decisively altered the course of her life. What began as a two-week visit in 1986 has unfolded into a lifetime of service to the city she now calls home—through writing, community storytelling, and an unwavering commitment to Vallarta’s cultural life. As she prepares to close Vallarta Mirror at the end of 2025 and step away from the demands of publishing, Marcia finds herself at another turning point: not an ending, but a narrowing of focus toward what brings her the greatest joy.

Her connection to Vallarta began the moment she arrived. In 1986, passengers still crossed the tarmac on foot, and as Marcia stepped onto the ground, she was struck by an unmistakable sense of recognition. “The second my foot touched the ground, I was hit with the same feeling I once had standing at dawn in the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi,” she recalls. It was a rare, overwhelming certainty—one she has experienced only twice in her life. The clarity was both exhilarating and unsettling. She was in Vallarta on her honeymoon, yet she immediately understood that this place held a deeper claim on her heart.

That moment would ripple forward through every chapter that followed. Over the next five years, Puerto Vallarta called her back repeatedly, until she finally answered for good in 1991. And now, nearly four decades later, as she intentionally sheds the weight of running a publication to protect her health and creativity, Marcia remains rooted in the same truth that greeted her on the tarmac: she belongs here. What lies ahead is not silence, but continuation—writing, witnessing, and celebrating Vallarta on her own terms, still firmly, unmistakably, from here.

Reuniting With Her Soul

After that first visit, Puerto Vallarta never loosened its grip. Between 1986 and 1991, Marcia returned as often as she could, pulled by something she could never quite explain to friends back in Canada. “I had to come back and reunite with my soul that refused to get back on the plane with me after my honeymoon was over,” she says. When people asked if she had a lover in Vallarta, she’d laugh and answer, “Well, kinda…”

Up north, daily life became a countdown. “The only thing that kept me going every day was knowing I was one step closer to being back in Vallarta, where I belonged.” By February of 1991, she stopped resisting and moved permanently.

An Unlikely Beginning

Her early years in Puerto Vallarta, she says in retrospect, were surprisingly easy. She lived in the maid’s quarters of an enormous beachfront penthouse, with access to a house far grander than anything she’d known before. “Lots of beach days,” she recalls, “and full run of the house when the owners weren’t there.” Her expenses were minimal, giving her the freedom to explore a creative life she had never fully been able to access before.

Over time, she began earning her keep by taking on more responsibility—coordinating workers, maintaining the property, refinishing doors, painting walls, tending gardens. Just as important, she discovered new artistic outlets. She began painting, dyeing clothes, making candles and jewelry—items she wanted but couldn’t simply buy in Vallarta at the time because they were “weird or different or not available.” She stayed in that penthouse for seventeen years, building a life that blended self-sufficiency, creativity, and freedom.

Writing “From Here”

Writing entered Marcia’s life more formally in 2013, when the editor of the Vallarta Tribune put out a call for contributors. Marcia answered. She was given a weekly limit of 750 words and asked, after submitting her first piece, to give it a title. “It was written from my heart,” she says, “which sounded dopey, so I called it From Here.”

The name stuck—and so did the voice.

At times, Marcia was writing up to three columns a week, including Comings and Goings, a preview and review of shows; a market column featuring local vendors; and From Here, which became the place for everything else—observations, reflections, and love letters to the city that had changed her life.

Her hope for readers was simple and deeply personal. “I hope that people who have fallen in love with Vallarta and can’t be here for whatever reason will still feel a connection with the city through me,” she explains. She writes for the people she wishes could be beside her when she sees, hears, tastes, or experiences something extraordinary—which, in Vallarta, she insists, happens daily.

“It’s a solitary thing, writing,” she says. “The words are only meaningful and real if they are read.” Hearing that someone bought tickets to a show she wrote about is the kind of feedback that keeps her going.

Carrying the Torch

After the Vallarta Tribune abruptly ceased publication, Marcia moved her column to the PV Mirror, founded and published by Allyna Vineberg. When Vineberg’s health began to fail and the paper teetered on the edge of extinction, Marcia stepped in—initially without fully understanding what she was taking on.

“I had no conception of how much work it was,” she admits. The technical demands alone were overwhelming. With the help of a patient and gifted collaborator, she learned the systems step by step. “Two years later, I still stumble and fall,” she says, “and he still picks me up and fixes my errors.”

The Vallarta Mirror, she learned, was “like having two full-time jobs.” When Allyna did not recover and passed away in December 2023, Marcia realized with real dread that she couldn’t simply hand the publication back. She had inherited not just a platform, but a responsibility to a community that relied on it.

Listening to the Body

For several years, Marcia has lived with a chronic neck condition aggravated by long hours at the computer. “I physically cannot do 12-plus hours a day anymore,” she says. The condition has forced her to stop nearly all physical activity except walking—and, more importantly, to reassess how she wants to spend the rest of her life.

“If you don’t do what you truly love,” she reflects, “your body will stop you until you figure it out.”

In November 2025, after careful consideration, she made the decision to stop publishing the Vallarta Mirror and its companion newsletter, Rearview Mirror. The publications will officially cease on December 31, 2025, honoring commitments to advertisers and contributors.

What Remains

What will continue is the work that brings her the most joy. From Here will live on through VallartaCalendar.com’s Around Town section and on Facebook. Freed from the weight of managing a full publication, Marcia plans to focus on what excites her most: writing about shows, events, restaurants, tours, and the endlessly fascinating nuances of Vallarta’s food and drink scene. She’s particularly intrigued by how bartenders can make the same cocktail taste wildly different from one bar to the next—and why.

She’s also eager to return to making things with her hands: sewing, jewelry, and whatever new creative path presents itself.

At the same time, she is deeply invested in the future of VallartaCalendar.com itself. “It is one of the most important aspects of living in Vallarta,” she says, noting that previous attempts at comprehensive calendars failed because of their complexity. Her vision is clear: if something is worth seeing, it will be on Vallarta Calendar. And if it’s not—well, perhaps rethink your plans.

Magic, Change, and Love

Looking back on nearly forty years, Marcia is convinced Puerto Vallarta holds a special kind of magic. “Old, ancient, healing magic,” she calls it. Growth and development don’t concern her the way they do some longtime residents. “No amount of cement will ever cover up the heart of this city,” she says. Vallarta, in her view, has grown not explosively, but intentionally—to accommodate the people who need to be here.

She believes the city has grown kinder over time—or perhaps she has simply learned how to attract kindness. Either way, the result is the same: a loving, adaptable community where reinvention is possible at any age. And, she adds with a laugh, “We have Costco now.”

Forty years ago, errands took all day. Now, life is easier—but “one thing a day,” she insists, “is still a good rule.”

A Grateful Goodbye—and Hello

What does Marcia want readers to know most? “That I love them,” she says. She treasures their feedback, but even more, their hugs. They are, in many ways, the reason she has kept writing.

As she approaches the 40th anniversary of that first fateful step onto the Puerto Vallarta tarmac, Marcia Blondin remains exactly who she has always been: a listener, a witness, a translator of magic into words. Still writing from here. Still in love. Still grateful.

And still inviting us all to see Vallarta through her eyes.