By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
MERIDA, Mexico, Feb. 21, 2026 — So here I was, a week ago, on the home turf of my longtime friend and colleague Sara Monroy Huddleston.
Many people in Iowa know her for the more than 25 years she was a leader in diversifying and growing the population of Storm Lake in the northwest quarter of the state.
The past 18 months, people are coming to know her as the first executive director of the new “Multicultural Family Resource Center” in Greene County, helping our whole rural west central Iowa county diversify and grow in a steady and orderly way benefitting our industries, farms, schools and small communities.
I know her well. As a board member of the Multicultural Center in Greene County, I helped get her hired by the non-profit to lead us.
Over the years, I’ve told a number of people that if Sara Monroy had never left the state of Yucatan in southeastern Mexico, she might well be governor there today.
But she did leave, coming Iowa to attend Simpson College in Indianola, where she met Matthew Huddleston, another student, from Storm Lake, who became her boyfriend and eventually her husband. Sara and Matt have had a wonderful life, mostly in Iowa, including birthing and raising daughter Alexis Nicole Huddleston.
Kellen Karls and Lexi Huddleston, just married in Merida, Mexico.
The bride’s parents Matt Huddleston and Sara Monroy Huddleston, right after the wedding.
On Valentine’s Day night, Feb. 14, “Lexi,” as most call her, married the love of her life, Kellen Karls, of the Green Bay, Wis., area, in one of the most elegant weddings I’ve ever attended. The Catholic wedding mass, reception, dinner and dance were held amid eye-popping flowers and other decorations in and on the grounds of Hacienda San Diego Cutz. The hacienda, which dates to 1874 and was the home of a wealthy early industrialist before, in our modern times, becoming a busy event venue. Stories go that European royalty have married there.
Lexi and Kellen, who met as students at Drake University in Des Moines, told me that they decided on marrying in Merida because it was going to be so much easier for friends and family from the United States to travel to Mexico than it would have been for their Mexican family and friends to travel to the U.S. Plus — they’d been here — Merida, Mexico, is one cool place, even if February days can reach midday temperatures of 92 degrees Fahrenheit.
On the Plaza Grande, uptown. Flags in the city were at half-mast, mourning the death of a policeman.
It was getting that hot earlier on the wedding day when I meandered around Merida, the capital city of the Yucatan state. Merida has a city population of about 950,000, with a metro population of about 1.3 million. It appears to be booming, with development everywhere I looked. As you probably know, both Merida and the city of Cancun are major tourism destinations on the Yucatan Peninsula. Impressive place, for sure.
Just off the gorgeous Plaza Grande in central Merida, I stopped by the “Palacio de Gobierno” (Office of the Governor), which would have been Sara’s, even if only in my imagination.
I asked if I could meet Sara’s replacement, Gov. Joaquín Díaz Mena, but was told he wasn’t in the office on that Saturday. But I did visit the fantastic art gallery and hallways of the Palacio, featuring 27 huge murals portraying the history of Yucatan and of its indigenous Mayan people, all done by one of Mexico’s most important painters of the 20th century, the late Fernando Castro Pacheco.
Some of the murals featuring Yucatecan and Mayan history in one of the galleries at the “Palacio de Gobierno.”
The enduring lesson of those murals, and of the history of Yucatan, it seemed to me, is that freedom is priceless.
I moved on across the street to stroll through “the largest Cathedral in Latin America,” the massive Catedral de San Ildefonso, completed in 1598.
Then I moved down the street to Dulceria y Sorbeteria Colon, known as “El Colon,” an ice cream parlor founded in 1907 (!) and operated since then by three families. I had their famous chocolate “champola,” which was chocolate ice cream served in a glass of cold milk, with maybe a touch of soda water. Yeah!
Back to the Plaza Grande, I took a seat on a bench in the shade of giant palm trees. I was enjoying the people-watching and, even with my badly-broken Spanish, attempting conversation with two fellow bench sitters.
Suddenly, a young woman, with a radiant smile, led a small troupe of friends or followers came up to us, handed us each a shortbread cookie, frosted with a photo of her, and said to us something close to, “Feliz día de San Valentín!”
In small print in the frosting, I could make out her name, Clara Rosales, and that she had a title. There on the plaza bench, I Googled her and learned that she is a young, progressive, feminist who has been elected to the Congreso del Estado de Yucatán, or state legislature. She represents the southern part of Merida.
I ate the cookie, then decided to chase Rep. Rosales and her followers across the Plaza Grande. Noting that she was posing for photos with other cookie receivers, I asked if one of her staffers could take a shot of us together, and she said yes. I told her that my Valentine and wife, Mary Riche, “would love your politics.” Rosales beamed and said, “Me, too!”
The columnist with the cookie and with the Yucatecan legislator, Rep. Clara Rosales.
She handed me a second cookie, I handed her a U.S. $20 bill and said in English, “Campaign contribution!” She seemed to understand.
Wow! Our Sara Monroy Huddleston comes from a good place. And good people.
I loved meeting her mother Gema Rosete Hernandez, now 76. Her father Ricardo Monroy Aguirre died in 2008.
Among other family members attending the wedding were two Mexican diplomats. One, her uncle Víctor Manuel Barceló Rodríguez, now in his early 90s, served as Mexico’s ambassador to Uruguay until just a couple years ago. And her cousin Selene Barcelo Monroy is deputy counsel at the Mexican Embassy in Santa Ana, Calif. Also attending was her brother Ricardo Monroy, who is now editing books after a long career as a leading journalist and co-founder of the daily newspaper La Jornada in Mexico City. A cousin Eric Barcelo is now working in Columbus, Ohio, as a top information technology (IT) developer for Chase Bank, and there are now many more IT specialists coming in younger generations of the extended Monroy family. Sara’s cousins Maya Prado Monroy and Jorge Isidro Martinez Montoya, who have visited the Huddlestons in Greene County, are lawyers who work for the Senate in the Mexican federal government. The family has also produced several engineers who have led big infrastructure developments in Mexico.
“One thing that you can see throughout this family, over the generations, is the value and importance they’ve placed on education,” said Matt Huddleston, an IT guy himself.
Indeed. And, like Sara Monroy Huddleston, they’ve shared it — for the public good.
One more of the bride and groom, during their first dance at the reception. They’ll make their home in Waukee, just west of Des Moines. Kellen Karls is a software engineer with the Principal Financial Group. Lexi Huddleston Karls has just completed her master’s degree in strategic & digital communications at Drake U.
Sara Monroy Huddleston, back home in Iowa.
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