The Mexico City Reader

Coyoacán II

Coyoacán Square, my friends tell me, is one of the nicest corners in Mexico City. I stare, nonplussed for a moment, before conceding: yes, it is, inasmuch as any corner that might be called nice is a rare bird, and getting rarer. But deep down I’m fully aware that the square, the plaza, or el mero Zócalo as the taxi drivers call it, leaves much to be desired. Let’s examine the square. Coyoacán actually has two squares, one facing the church and the other next to it. The first is named Plaza del Centenario and the second, Jardín Hidalgo. Each of the two squares boasts a colonial monument. The first has the church gates, which in the absence of adjacent walls no longer open or close or lead anywhere at all. Three archways have been preserved as historic relics, as mementos of better days. The garden faces the single landmarked house in Coyoacán—the home of Hernán Cortés, no less. This building has housed government offices, a police station, and even a prison. Later it was abandoned, and now there is nothing but a courtroom and something that resembles a library from the outside (I’ve never confirmed whether it contains any books). 96 Coyoacán II   And of course there’s the church, whose interior was remodeled back in the 1950s, to the point of making it unrecognizable. One can still take in the exterior of the church without feeling consumed by indignation : the façade and the walls of the apse, which lead to Caballo Calco Street, flanked by tamale stalls and juice kiosks. Coyoacán Square, which was probably a nice corner during the seventeenth century, has fallen prey to the memory of its glory days. To understand its transformation, we might compare the square to a woman who was a devastating beauty at the age of twenty. She aged gracefully, feeling confident about her looks until she reached forty; from then on, she starts feeling ugly and takes action to regain her beauty by dressing not like a well-preserved thirty-something but like her former twenty-year-old self. Something similar happened to the square. It matured naturally— that is to say, houses grew up around it that corresponded to what their inhabitants expected of a house—until the turn of the century. Then came the Revolution, which inspired landlords—who were never revolutionaries—to discover the beauties of colonial architecture. From then on, nothing has been built around Coyoacán Square unless it’s colonial in style. But like the lady in my analogy, whose efforts to regain her beauty are inspired by faded memories and made possible by the wonders of technology, the plaza’s quest for colonial beauty has produced mutant styles and other aberrations. One house, for example, was built in the late 1930s. This is a “colonial ” example of Hollywood baroque. It was inspired—like most houses at the time—by the Pasadena railway station in California: massive, with fake tiled roofs, the walls painted pale yellow (now a cadaverous gray), its doors and windows framed by elaborate moldings. The house stands in the center of the lot, surrounded by gardens, a design that would have been unthinkable during colonial times. But then light dawned. Somebody (I think it was my Uncle Pepe López) discovered the “real authentic colonial style.” And this is? Plastering everything with tezontle stone. The houses went cubic. They might have a corner niche, for the sake of atmosphere, holding a Virgin of Guadalupe, and cheap, T-shaped Coyoacán II 97 metal windows. At street level, their storefronts were rented out to drugstores , shoe shops, or whatever. Inside, the rooms followed no particular order, and if they got too dark, light wells to the rescue. The exterior was finished in tezontle, with pink stone trimmings. Today, things have changed again. We’ve become more refined. Façades are now sober and whitewashed. A huge slab of a front door, filched from an abandoned church; next to it, a donut-shaped stone once used for tying horses. This ring, an owner confides, is strikingly similar to the hoops gracing pre-Columbian “ball courts”—whose purpose , it must be said, remains in doubt. Some contend they were used to play a game not unlike basketball, while others argue they were gallows for hanging the players...