Old world charm draws tourists south
Colonial mission churches and an eccentric Englishman's surreal sculpture garden were stops along the way during a Butler man's recent Mexican vacation.
Dr. Dennis Keyes, a Butler dentist, spent nine days in Mexico in February.
He traveled there with his wife, Marg, and said “while there we met with my sister, Claire, who rents a place” in San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, four hours northwest of Mexico City.
Keyes said San Miguel de Allende is a city built along on an old silver trail. In the mid-16th century, silver had been discovered in Zacatecas in north central Mexico, and a major road between this area and Mexico City passed through San Miguel. Thus San Miguel became an important military and commercial site.
Keyes said San Miguel is filled with beautiful old colonial mansions, but the city almost became a ghost town. But, he said, in the 1920s and 1930s, Americans and Canadians arrived and settled in the city, and today 30 percent of the population is English speaking.
Joined by friend Madelaine Gersh, the Keyes wanted to see the mission churches built by Junipero Serra, a Franciscan monk sent to Mexico by the Pope in the 1700s.
“He built five mission churches, all are UNESCO World Heritage sites,” said Keyes. “We saw three of them.”
To be considered for the United Nation designation, the site must have outstanding universal value and meet at least one of 10 criteria such as representing a masterpiece of human creative genius or bearing unique testimony to a cultural tradition.The first reached was the largest mission, Santiago de Jalpan.It had a long, low building and wall, its facade a combination of local culture and European Catholicism.The church facade was decorated with saints in alcoves, and it had a pillar representing the stairway to heaven, Keyes said.“All missions have this tower, all of them expressed differently,” he said.In addition, he said, all missions built by Serra share certain features in common including a central fountain topped with some sort of cross and crossed arms as a decorative motif.Keyes said some of the saint statues on the facades of the missions have had their heads removed.“The Mexican revolutionaries did this. They didn't want the people respecting the people depicted by the statues,” said Keyes.Keyes said the mission in Jalpan was probably the most ornate inside, the others' interiors were “pretty basic.”He said over the years the missions were looted several times in insurrections and revolutions and the church decided not to replace the stolen furnishings.“After he (Serra) finished the churches, the Pope sent him to Southern California where he built mission churches there, the most famous one San Juan Capistrano,” said Keyes.The tourists also visited the Nuestra Senora del Agua in Lando de Matamoros and San Miguel Conca, the smallest mission church noted for the checkerboard pattern on its stairway to heaven.The party also visited a fourth church which was not a mission, the Temple of Jesus Christ of Nazareth at Atotonilco.The church, said Keyes, is plain on the outside but the interior has been called the Sistine Chapel of the Americas.
The walls and ceilings of the interior are almost completely covered in murals, sculptures, inscriptions and oil paintings.Also decorating the inside are painted wooden panels surrounding the 500-year-old vestibule and statues of the crucifiction.They then traveled on to the town of Xilitla.“It's a very interesting town. It's in the middle of nowhere,” said Keyes. He said the town is on the eastern slope of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains which stretch down to the Gulf of Mexico.Coming down the mountains, Keyes said, “you descend into the jungle. There is lush vegetation, flowers of all kinds, orchids, exotic birds, parrots.”Xilitla is far off the beaten track and some eight hours' travel from Mexico City.Keyes said Xilitla was just another small town in Mexico until Edward James, an English poet and artist, settled there in the 1940s.James, reputed to have been the illegitimate son of the king of England and with “more money than he knew what to do with,” said Keyes, had left England in the wake of a scandalous divorce that left him ruined in the eyes of polite society. James had been friends and hobnobbed with artists such as Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso.Once he had moved to Xilitla, he began work on his sculpture garden, Las Pozas (the Pools). The site contains natural waterfalls and pools filled with surrealist statues and structures made out of concrete.The Keyes party stayed at James' former home, now a hotel called Posada el Castillo. Keyes called it “a strange little place, surreal, a spiral staircase and forepole. The hostess slides down the forepole.”The hostess is Gabriella Gastelum, said Keyes. Her father, Plutaro Gastelum, and James built both the hotel and the sculpture garden.Keyes said thousands of people worked for years on James' sculpture garden, and it took 20 years to build.When he began to run out of money, James, who had traded pieces of art with Dali, Picasso and others when he was younger, began selling off his art collection to continue work on the garden.
Keyes said they spent a whole day touring the sculpture garden.“It was just like young Mexican kids selling tickets to get in,” he said. “There couldn't have been more than 10 people. We had to sign a disclaimer that none of our photos would be used for commercial purposes.”“I guess the garden area that we actually walked through was 20 acres, but how much there actually is, I don't know,” Keyes said.On the way out of Xilitla, Keyes said his group also stopped at pit caves, vertical caves that are a habitat for green parrots.“We went into the caves and waited for the parrots to come home at night,” Keyes said.“They will find a nook or cranny and fly right into it,” he said.
Mexico borders on the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, between Belize and the United States and borders the north Pacific Ocean, between Guatemala and the United States.Mexico comprises a total area of 1,964,375 square kilometers, or slightly less than three times the size of Texas.Its climate varies from tropical to desert and its terrain ranges from high, rugged mountains to low coastal plains, high plateaus and deserts.The site of advanced Amerindian civilizations, Mexico came under Spanish rule for three centuries before achieving independence early in the 19th century.The global financial crisis beginning in late 2008 caused a massive economic downturn the following year, although growth returned quickly in 2010. Ongoing economic and social concerns include low real wages, underemployment for a large segment of the population, inequitable income distribution and few advancement opportunities for the largely Amerindian population in the impoverished southern states.The elections held in 2000 marked the first time since the 1910 Mexican Revolution that an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, defeated the party in government, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. He was succeeded in 2006 by another PAN candidate, Felipe Calderon.Since 2007, Mexico's powerful drug-trafficking organizations have engaged in bloody feuding, resulting in tens of thousands of drug-related homicides.The United States has intensified security measures to monitor and control legal and illegal personnel, transport, and commodities across its border with Mexico.Mexico must deal with thousands of impoverished Guatemalans and other Central Americans who cross the porous border looking for work in Mexico and the United States.Belize and Mexico are working to solve minor border demarcation discrepancies arising from inaccuracies in the 1898 border treatyMexico remains a major drug-producing and transit nation. It is the world's second-largest opium poppy cultivator. Opium poppy cultivation in 2009 rose 31 percent over 2008 to 19,500 hectares yielding a potential production of 50 metric tons of pure heroin, or 125 metric tons of “black tar” heroin, the dominant form of Mexican heroin in the western United States.Marijuana cultivation increased 45 percent to 17,500 hectares in 2009. The government conducts the largest independent illicit-crop eradication program in the world.Mexico continues as the primary transshipment country for U.S.-bound cocaine from South America, with an estimated 95 percent of annual cocaine movements toward the United States stopping in Mexico.Major drug syndicates control the majority of drug trafficking throughout the country. Mexico is a producer and distributor of ecstasy, a significant money-laundering center, a major supplier of heroin and the largest foreign supplier of marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market.<I>SOURCE: The CIA World Fact Book</I>
