My haphazard exploration of Mexico City continues, and over
the last two days I’ve visited some unsung and unexpected museums.
On Thursday, my local friend Brett introduced me to the
beautiful back streets of the San Angel neighborhood. It lies nearby my own Coyoacán, and I’d been
there twice for errands and attractions (see Mummies), but my fly-bys had taken
me only to the main avenues, which were busy, noisy and generally unattractive.
Two steps beyond them, however, the real San Angel opens up,
or rather closes in, as you find yourself lost in narrow, winding cobbled
streets, past ivy-covered walls, old iron balconies, imposing hacienda fronts, pocket
parks with burbling stone fountains, and 16th-century churches.
The neighborhood features upscale shopping and restaurants, and
we poked into several touristy stores built into the historic facades of
colonial mansions, where the building itself was more interesting than the racks
of colored scarves and day-of-the-dead figurines. And we had lunch at a highly glamorous spot
called the San Angel Inn, an apparently well-known restaurant occupying the
galleries and garden patios of an old Carmelite monastery. Several tuexdo’d waiters attended our table;
I had roasted quail with a garden salad, and we shared a slice of mango cake for
dessert as the sparrows hopped around our patio tablecloth looking for
crumbs.
But San Angel also hosts a museum called the Museo Casa Del
Rio, free to the public, which features the fine art collection of Don Isidoro
Fabela, a Mexican politician, in a 18th-Century house that was his home. Photographs weren’t permitted indoors, but
the collection of European and Mexican baroque and medieval paintings (including
a large Rubens) and 19th century furniture was simply exquisite. Prior to Don Fabela’s time the house played a
role in the Mexican-American War, its cupola offering a key view of the approaching
American troops (followed by a closer view, as they then occupied the house), and the cupola is now devoted to
a memorial of the war, with photographs of soldiers and an actual US recruiting
poster. But the most jaw-dropping
exhibit is the huge courtyard fountain composed entirely of plates and cups.
We also went to the Museo Carillo Gil, a modern art museum,
but after the likes of Rubens neither of us could get up much enthusiasm for art
based on aerial photos of soccer fields accompanied by a strip of sod on the
floor. The museum did feature José
Clemente Orozco’s 1940s illustrations of the Spanish Conquest based on Bernal
Diaz del Castillo’s account, which dripped and screamed with apocalyptic violence.
The next day I found myself in the Juarez neighborhood, close
by the Wax Museum, and on the spur of the moment went in. It seemed somehow wrong, after viewing medieval
European art for free, to pay 115 pesos to see a wax Michael Jackson, but at
least photos were permitted (nay, encouraged), and in the jostling swarm of
excited kids of all ages it was impossible not to join the fun.
The selection was of course geared toward Mexican statesmen,
athletes and pop singers, which itself was educational (I knew a few of the
presidents, but could place no one in the Bullfighting room) but being a museum
of pop culture it was inevitably infiltrated by American effigies from Rihanna
to Barack Obama to Wolverine.
You could get a combo ticket for the wax museum and the
Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum in the same building, but I found myself satisfied
with just the wax museum.
