About Us

Mission of the Amigo Club

The objective of this nonprofit corporation shall be to actively promote the Sister City relationship between the City of Ashland, Oregon, U.S.A., and the City of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, by supporting, without limitation, personal, educational, cultural, civic, social, medical, dental, and other exchanges between the two cities. To read a copy of the Constitution (amended in 2009), please click here.

Organization

The members are the governing body of the Amigo Club. Management of the Club is facilitated by a Board of Directors (BOD) that meets once/month to discuss Club business. The BOD is comprised of officers that are nominated and elected by the membership and that serve two-year terms.

Board of Directors (2024-2026):

Jaegar (Jay) Tapp — President. Jay has lived in Ashland since 2000 and is currently a business and management consultant in the fiber broadband Internet, publishing and urgent care industries. He has been a board member for the local Kids Unlimited program and helped found “Ink Out”. Jay has been involved with the Amigo Club for many years and has visited Guanajuato dozens of times since the sister city and Amistad relationships were conceived 50+ years ago. He is excited to help the Amigo Club advance its mission and, of course, work with his mother, Señora Chela.

Karen Grove — Vice President/website creator/Entre Amigos columnist. Karen has been active in the Amigo Club since moving to Ashland in 2015 and has been a Board Member since 2018. Even before moving to Ashland, Guanajuato was her favorite Mexican city. She has traveled extensively in Mexico and is pleased to be part of a group that is working to strengthen ties with our neighbor to the south. She and her husband enjoy hosting visitors from Guanajuato in their casita. As a professor at San Francisco State University (1989–2015), Karen worked in Chile as a Fulbright Scholar and taught a geology course in Spanish at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. She has studied Spanish since 1994 and advanced her skills via intensive study in Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, and Costa Rica, and via travel throughout Latin America. Her academic skills help her to maintain this Amigo Club website, write a column about Amigo Club activities for the local Ashland.News, and create her personal blog about geologic travels (landscapes-revealed.net).

Catherine Van Ausdall – Amigo Club Board Historian since 2018. Catherine was raised in Utah and moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1975 where she attained her BS degree in Geology. Since 1980 she has been a resident of Ashland where she worked as a geologist for the Ashland Mine. She also worked in environmental remediation, and hydrology projects throughout the Rogue Valley. Catherine is an accomplished cartographer contributing to the Benchmark State Map series. She later received a Master’s degree in Education at SOU. She and her husband, Sean, have raised four children in Ashland and have hosted students and official visitors from Guanajuato, Mexico. Catherine is grateful for the many lasting friendships made through Ashland’s sister city, Guanajuato.  She is dedicated to maintaining and preserving the Amigo Club’s rich history.

Señora Chela Tapp-Kocks — Guanajuato Liaison. Amigo Club visionary Señora Chela is the driving force, aided by the club’s board of directors and general membership, that has kept Ashland-Guanajuato Sister City relations vibrant for nearly 60 years. As a Southern Oregon University (SOU) professor, she led a small group that inspired both cities and their universities to formalize relations in 1969. She travels at least once a year as Amigo Club liaison director to Guanajuato and she maintains continual contact with dignitaries there. In 1994 she became the only foreigner to receive Guanajuato’s annual “El Pípila de Plata” award, normally given each year to a Guanajuato citizen for “friendship and service” to the city. In January 2024, she received SOU’s highest honor—the President’s Metal (https://ashlandamigoclub.org/senora-chela-grace-tapp-kocks-receives-sou-presidents-medal/).

Maria Lumbreras — Board Member at Large. Maria has lived in the Rogue Valley since 1992. She has 27 years of teaching experience, including several years as a Spanish instructor at SOU. She is bilingual and bicultural and has been participating in Amigo Club activities for many years with the goal of contributing her skills to fostering community through education, collaboration and cultural exchange. She joined the board in 2023 to do even more to grow mutual understanding through shared projects and to continue building bridges. She was chaperone for the official Ashland representative to Guanajuato in June 2024.

Marina Kendig — Board Member at Large. Marina has been active with the Amistad Program and the Amigo Club since 1991. Marina taught Spanish at SOU for 12 years. During this time she worked closely with SOU and Guanajuato students who participated in the Amistad exchange program. As a native of Guatemala, Marine has continued to bring cultural awareness that helps support the Amigo Club’s mission.

Shaun Franks — Board Member at Large. A long-time leader in clean energy, Shaun has worked on solar projects in Southern Oregon since 2010. His contributions span over 300 solar projects, adding more than three megawatts of installed solar capacity to the community. Beyond his solar industry work, Shaun served on the Board of Trustees for Southern Oregon University (SOU), helping to guide the institution’s future and advance its sustainability initiatives. He is also a member of the Medford Rogue Rotary, promoting fellowship and service through various projects and activities. He has been excited to use his skills to help carry out Amigo Club activities by becoming an active member in 2025.

Carolina Mona-Keene — Board Member at Large.

Betzabé “Mina” Turner — Immediate Past President. During her 15 years as president (2009–2024), During her 15 years as president (2009–2024), Mina and the Board of Directors secured the club’s tax-exempt status, created an endowed scholarship fund for exchange students supported by the annual Guanajuato Nights fundraising dinner/auction, initiated the monthly “Entre Amigos” newspaper column, and worked diligently to strengthen the sister-city relationship between Ashland and Guanajuato. Born and raised in Lima, Peru, Mina was working as a publisher’s assistant when she met Kernan Turner, an Associated Press (AP) Bureau Chief. They lived and worked for years in Lima, Peru; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Madrid, Spain, before retiring to Ashland and joining the Amigo Club in 2002. Mina is an Oregon-certified court and health care Spanish/English interpreter and an interpreting instructor for bilingual teachers and medical providers in the Southern Oregon and Willamette Education Service Districts. She was honored by the Amigo Club on December 7, 2025 at their Amigo Mingle event “A Toast to the Turners” (https://ashlandamigoclub.org/our-second-amigo-mingle-a-toast-to-the-turners/).

Kernan Turner — Immediate past 501(C)3 and Grants Coordinator/Historian/Entre Amigos columnist. Kernan joined the Amigo Club shortly after moving to Ashland following nearly 30 years living and working as an editor/reporter and bureau chief for The Associated Press in Latin American countries, Spain, and the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.  He has also served as the club’s historian and guided the committee that established tax-exempt status for the club’s support of Sister City relations. He initiated the “Entre Amigos” column to provide the local community with information about the Amigo Club’s sister-city activities and wrote the monthly column from 2015–2024 for the Ashland Daily Tidings and, since 2022, for Ashland News. Along with Mina, Kernan was honored at the Amigo Club’s December 7th Amigo Mingle event “A Toast to the Turners”.

Lynn Lamoree — Immediate Past Secretary. Lynn has been active in the Amigo Club since moving to Ashland in 2013 and she served as Secretary from 2017–2023.  Lynn was born in Escondido, California and spent most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area.  She received her AB from the University of California Berkeley (Sociology), and her MA from San Francisco State University (Education:  Marriage and Family Counseling).  Lynn has always been interested in the world outside the United States: she was a political risk coordinator for an international oil company in Texas, and has lived in Tunisia, Iran, and Kenya.  In Mexico, she has found many new and wondrous places including Baja California, Mexico City, Acapulco, Chiapas, Oaxaca, and of course Guanajuato.  She and her husband, Tom, host Guanajuato friends when they visit Ashland and have themselves visited the lovely city many times.  These precious people-to-people friendships, both in the Amigo Club and with Mexican friends, continue to enrich Lynn and Tom’s lives.

Other active Amigo Club members who assist the BOD for specific events/activities:

Amy Lepon, Brad Hildreth, Jay Ach, Marty Fabian-Krause, Suzanne Haveman, Tom Lamoree, John Enders.

The history of the Amigo Club is the history of the Sister city relations between Ashland and Guanajuato, Mexico 

Please click on file link to get a complete history of the Amigo Club: How It All Began – Updated 2022

The visionary behind the ties between the two cities is known in Guanajuato and Ashland as Señora Chela, a professor emerita of foreign languages and literature at Southern Oregon College (now Southern Oregon University—SOU) who saw similarities between the two cities, including impressive mountain settings, rich cultural legacies and top-notch theater.

For three decades, Sra. Chela guided students from her Spanish classes on chartered bus tours of Mexico during the Christmas holidays.  The tours always ended up at Guanajuato.

In 1968, supportive Ashlanders formed a Friendship Committee that became the nucleus for the Amigo Club.  Dr. Marvin Kocks and Ken Jones were co-chairmen.  (In time, Sra. Chela and Dr. Kocks would marry in Guanajuato.)

The year 1969 was the turning point.  The college organized a “Day in Guanajuato” festival on the campus that attracted thousands of people from the Rogue Valley and some 35 Mexicans from Guanajuato, including city and university officials.  Ashland and Guanajuato officially declared themselves “Friendship Cities,” which soon evolved into official Sister-City status.

Southern Oregon University and the University of Guanajuato formed a student exchange program known as Amistad (friendship).  Since its beginning in 1969, more than 750 students, American and Mexican, have participated in the program.  And hundreds of American and Mexican citizens of all ages have traveled back and forth between Ashland and Guanajuato, many on special trips led by the Amigo Club.

Since 1969, the queens of Guanajuato’s major summer festivals have ridden in the Ashland Fourth of July Parade.  Each year, Ashland sends high school students as ambassadors to a June festival in Guanajuato.

The Amigo Club has organized major celebrations for each 10-year anniversary, the last one in 2009 when some 80 Mexicans came to Ashland for a week in April and about 70 Ashlanders went to Guanajuato in August.  Today, plans are underway for the 50^th anniversary celebration in 2019.

The Amigo Club helps sponsor gatherings and host families for visiting Guanajuatenses and entertains and coordinates activities for the Fourth of July visitors.

Mostly through an annual dinner/auction called Guanajuato Nights, the Club has raised more than $120,000 for an endowed scholarship fund for SOU and University of Guanajuato exchange students.

The City of Ashland actively supports the Sister City program and has donated fire trucks, ambulances and medical equipment to Guanajuato, in addition to offering training to the Guanajuato police and firefighters.

The Ashland-Guanajuato connection has become one of the oldest and most active in the Sister City program envisioned by President Dwight Eisenhower after World War II as a people-to-people program intended to further world peace.

City Similarities—Ashland and Guanajuato have a lot in common

• Each has an Amigo Club whose members are local citizens dedicated to strengthening Sister City ties.
• Ashland is the home of Southern Oregon University and Guanajuato has the Universidad de Guanajuato, founded 275 years ago as a Jesuit institution, but now a public university.
• The Ashland Public Library and Southern Oregon University each have a “Guanajuato Room,” and the University of Guanajuato and the city’s Casa de Cultura each have a “Sala Ashland.”  Guanajuato has a “Calle Ashland” and a “Paseo Ashland,” and Ashland has a “Calle Guanajuato” beside Ashland Creek behind the historical downtown plaza.
• Funded by Barry and Kathryn Thalden, a mural of Guanajuato was designed and painted on Calle Guanajuato by Mexican artist Laura “Loreta” Rangel Villaseñor in 2017, and a mural of Ashland was designed and painted on a wall in Guanajuato by Ashland artist Denise Baxter in 2018.
• Tourists flock to each city, drawn by their beautiful natural settings, picturesque downtowns, and historical, cultural and recreational attractions. A publication of UNESCO, which added Guanajuato to the World Heritage list in 1988, gives this description: “Nestled in a narrow gorge of the Sierra Madre in the heart of Mexico, Guanajuato is one of those post-Columbian towns hewn out of rock that seem to spring straight from the mountains. … The town lies above a network of subterranean streets.  Its majestic old mansions, baroque and neo-classical churches, palaces, convents and hospital have all the charm of a bygone era.”
• Both cities are cultural centers. Guanajuato’s counterpart to the Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is the International Cervantes Festival (Festival Internacional Cervantino), an annual three-week celebration that features artists from around the world. The festival is considered one of Latin America’s most important cultural events, just as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is one of the most prestigious regional theaters in the United States.
• Both cities are home to many artists and galleries. The Ashland Gallery Association says Ashland “has received national recognition by being selected as the number 2 small art town in the nation,” and ranks high in the book titled “The 100 Best Art Towns in America.” Guanajuato was the birthplace in 1886 of Diego Rivera, the muralist credited with single-handedly changing the course of his country’s art.  The Diego Rivera House Museum, located in the historic center of the city, is where Rivera was born and lived for the first six years of his life. Guanajuato also has many artist galleries and is known as a center for beautifully-produced artisanal handicrafts.
• Ashland and Guanajuato each have historical significance. Ashland was a crossroads for pioneers arriving from the east over the Applegate Trail and those traveling north and south between the Willamette Valley and California.  Beginning in the early 1850s, these emigrants to Oregon settled along streams known today as Ashland and Bear Creeks and replaced the Native American population.  Early stagecoach and railroad lines connected Ashland with points north and south. Founded in the early 16th century, Guanajuato became the world’s leading silver-extraction center in the 18th century.  It played a major role in the War of Independence led by the rebel priest Miguel Hidalgo in 1810.  Former President Vicente Fox Quesada came from Guanajuato.