Gayle Brennan Spencer – sending random thoughts to and from South Austin
1528. That is the year Spaniards founded San Cristobal de las Casas on a site nestled in the mountains of Chiapas.
The vestiges of their low-slung buildings lend this colonial city a distinctive intimacy.
These snapshots, postmarked after our return, provide a glimpse of the architecture in the heart of the city that has grown to about 150,000 people.
Thick stucco walls. Wood-framed windows. Clay tile roofs. No fear of color. Whimsical details. And… wait… even a Burger King?
The contrast of edgy modern art housed within colonial-era walls is always striking, but even more so at Hecho en Oaxaca, an exhibit bringing urban art into the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MACO, in Oaxaca.
As a linguistically challenged blogger, translating websites from Spanish to English to conduct my own research would not be a reliable option. Instead I’ll rely on Carole Turkenick’s words from her Oaxaca Tips (a great, inexpensive resource to pick up at Amate Books the second you arrive in Oaxaca) relay the late-17th or early-18th-century building’s history:
The mansion initially belonged to the noble estates of the Pinelo and Lazo de la Vega families whose coats of arms are engraved in the stone façade on either side of St. Michael Archangel. Following Independence, the structure passed through a series of private owners including in the early 1900s a professor at the local Institute of Sciences and Arts who had the distinction of owning the first automobile in Oaxaca. By the 1970s, the building had seriously deteriorated and was taken over by the state to be converted into a museum of colonial history. The effort failed and the mansion passed to a local civil organization led by Francisco Toledo who together with the National Institute of Fine Arts opened the MACO in 1992. The building was restored again in 2009-2010,
Postcards from Barton Springs 