The forgotten story of a Chicago artist-adventurer who left behind his social position to make a difference in a small Mexican town

In San Miguel de Allende, I learned of Stirling Dickinson, a larger-than-life Chicago native who transformed this place, for better and worse.

By Mark Brown

For better and worse, Dickinson is widely credited with putting San Miguel on the international tourist map by helping start and promoting two art schools that became a magnet for a large community of Americans and Canadians who moved here.

That ex-pat community, in turn, became the backbone of a tourism-based economy that enabled the town to grow from a population of around 7,000 when Dickinson arrived in 1937 — four centuries after the founding of the first Spanish settlement here — to more than 72,000 today. Another 100,000 people live in the surrounding area.

Ten years after Dickinson’s 1998 death, San Miguel was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which cemented its status as one of the world’s top tourist destinations and accelerated the proliferation of high-end restaurants, boutiques and galleries that have greatly transformed the quaint, quiet place that originally attracted Dickinson here.

Soon after I joined this February’s parade of northern visitors coming to San Miguel to escape the cold, I found myself wanting to know more about this larger-than-life Chicago native who has a street and a baseball field named after him and whose bust stands on a pedestal at the foot of one San Miguel’s fanciest neighborhoods.

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