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Every day in Patzcuaro, in the early morning, the bread lady sets up shop on this platform formed by the top of the town cistern where water is gathered from a natural spring at that place. The monument shrine behind her marks this spot as important and blesses the abundant waters. It seems to me appropriate that bread and water, two elementary components of human life are coupled together at this spot. The bread lady is tending to business and not thinking of life’s coincidental metaphors. Her location is simply a convenient place for neighborhood commerce, so much so that around mid day when the bread is sold and she goes home, the Paleta man takes over. He sells his delicious Mexican frozen confections on a stick which are flavored with tropical fruits. My favorite is the tamarindo paleta. The building in the background is the former Jesuit College.


 

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We were in a fascinating shop where I was buying a diminutive wall shrine made of painted tin that held two skeleton people, called Catrinas, dancing a tango (only in México). Leo pointed out the window at this scene and I snapped a shot.

We are looking at the front door of the local high school where an enterprising young man, bending over with a red shirt, is selling paletas and candies from his home made cart that fits to the back of his bicycle. Note how the students, boys and girls are in uniform. Some of the parents are there to meet their children and a couple of the teachers are talking with some of the younger looking boys.

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One afternoon on our wanderings around town we came across a delightful little B & B called Posada Mandala www.paginasprodigy.com/posadamandala Leo was chatting with the proprietor who is an author from a literary family. He was gracious and chit chatty and while he and Leo were speaking I took a look around at the simple charm of this five room hotel.  Decorating one wall of the small central courtyard was this collection of home made ex-votos which are painted in gratitude for prayers answered, saving the applicant from various tragedies that befall one in this vale of tears.

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This is a local paving technique using cattle vertebrae between the flat stones of an entry way. This same technique is employed at the Museum Popular where much attention is paid to this kind of floor.  It struck me as being a bit macabre but nonetheless a thrifty use of readily available materials (again, only in Mexico). 

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This is another ancient door with a charming woodpecker door knocker. When we were in the waiting room at the bus station in Guadalajara the TV was playing really funny Woody Woodpecker cartoons. I was reading a catalog of the Mexican painter Juan Soriano in which the poet and editor, Octavio G. Barreda, describes Soriano’s distinctive profile and manner as, “skittish in the manner of a strange bird, perhaps, one of Disney’s woodpeckers.” I am beginning to suspect that Mexico has a big love affair with woodpeckers and Woody especially. When we were visiting the ruins of the Purepecha ceremonial site of Tzintzuntzan we heard woodpeckers tapping away at the tall trees that shade the entrance to the site, so I know Woody’s cousins are in evidence there. 

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The bell tower of Templo de San Francisco rises above a long row of trees draped with deep violet colored Bougainvillea vines.

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On Fridays there is a special market in the Plaza San Francisco that offers both plants and pottery with a sprinkling of other goods. Theses plants are, of course, peppers of several colors and degrees of spiciness. One of the major food stuffs of Mexico for the last several thousand years, peppers are full of vitamins.

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Every day of the week there is a lot of activity at the central market right off the Plaza Gertrudis Bocanegra, Gertrudis was a local hero and martyr of the independence. Her plaza is also known as Plaza Chica to be distinguished from La Plaza Grande a couple of blocks away. These two open spaces planted with towering old trees and pleasant flower gardens are the two major meeting places and playgrounds for everyone in town. 

The Market has any number of areas with like kinds of merchandise neatly arranged in small booths forming a labyrinth of crowded alleyways. Inside the market is another world and all the bustle of life and commerce is active from early morning on into the night. At the booth above floor mats woven from the reeds of Lake Patzcuaro are offered and bags full of dried fish minnows,  called charales, that are highly prized in Patzcuaro. Also on the right is stacked a kind of thin split fire wood that is the resinous heart wood of local trees. These sticks burn hot and fast making perfect kindling or providing a quick fire for fast cooking.

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Here is the enormously picturesque Templo del Sagrario begun in the 17^th century and expanded in the 18^th century. The building on the right is the high school I was telling you about and further along is the Templo which used to be known as The Virgin of Health.

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This wall is part of the Templo del Sagrario complex and like the rest of those buildings it is constructed of adobe. I like this view because of the rich earthy texture of the natural materials and also because you can see the way the walls and buildings are constructed. First comes the adobe bricks which are muddy clay mixed with straw. When the adobe is exposed like this you can clearly see the golden straw glinting in the bright sun and I was wondering how long ago that grass was green and growing, three or four hundred years ago? The adobe is covered with a plaster mix and then painted. Wooden beams are used for doors and windows and the roof framing which is then covered with unglazed clay tiles. All of Patzcuaro is made in this manner. Sometimes there are stone foundations for the adobe walls and sometimes the adobe is covered and protected with flat stones or glazed tile.

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This little honey was helping her mother clean the ancient patio at La Casa de los Once Patios which used to be a convent for the nuns serving the Templo del Sagrario pictured above. The Casa de los Once Patios has lost a few of its patios over the centuries but it is still a considerable complex with charming flower filled patios finished with baroque architectural embellishments. It is now an artisan’s collective offering the finest lacquer, weaving, copper and pottery in Patzcuaro. I can’t get over the cute girl and I love her cowgirl boots. 

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This is another view of the Casa de los Once Patios and you can see what I mean about the wealth of potted plants. This collection is mostly composed of various kinds of begonias. Here the architecture is quite simple and graceful with roman arches and sturdy small pillars fashioned from the local hard limestone which has an attractive pinkish cast to it.
 

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This is one of the indigenous log cabins, called trojes,  used by the Purepecha Indians who live in up in the mountain forests. This one has been placed in a corner garden of the Casa de los Once Patios as a demonstration of local building. Note that even the roof is made of thin split wooden shakes. The old wood takes on rich patinas with lichens contributing to the visual interest.

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A large modernist mural decorates an old stair wall at Casa de los Onze patios. I couldn’t find out the painter or history of the commission except that it is part of the nationally commissioned public art movement that was intended to instill the people with a sense of pride and importance in their shared heritage. On the right is Don Vasco Quiroga again who is holding a spinning wheel as a symbol of his teaching the Indians in the 1530’s more advanced European technologies such as spinning and weaving.

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A lady vendor sits surrounded by her product. She is selling woven straw articles from small tables to trunks and baskets. Each item is a masterpiece of quality basketry and they all smell of delicious fresh straw.

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Patzcuaro folks have a healthy and sophisticated sense of humor. This is an advertisement on the delivery box attached to a motor scooter for a pizza parlor. Not only is this home-grown custom rig executed with professional graphics but the back ground is the silhouette of the Morelos statue on the Island of Janitzio in Lake Patzcuaro. Isn’t the universal appeal of pizza amazing?

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This is a painting of San Pascual the patron saint of kitchens hanging in the front hall of our favorite restaurant in Patzcuaro, Cha Cha Cha. San Pascual is often times depicted floating around his kitchen presumably transported by a particularly potent batch of Mole Poblano or some such concoction. Here Pascual is sedate and benevolent and I love his neat apron.

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When last we visited Patzcuaro we met Michael Warshauer a retired baker from the United States who has a delightful and informative blog on Mexican foodof the Patzcuaro region. . Don’t miss his photo blog, recent photos –an extensive essay on the Patzcuaro market. Michael suggested we meet at a Sunday only restaurant at Tzurumútaro, a nearby village and off we went to rendezvous with him and his charming wife Susan. 

When we arrived we immediately recognized Sra. Amparo Cervantes and her daughter, Mireya, from a convention of local Michoacan cooks in Morelia that we attended in November of 2006, called Encuentro de las Cocineras. I had taken photos of many of the cooks at this convention in their booths with the dishes they were preparing and when we returned to Boston I published the best of these portraits on our menu covers at the Casa Romero.

We understood that this happy reunion was to be an auspicious occasion as we already knew what a great cook Sra. Cervantes was and also how discerning and perceptive Michael is from reading his bilingually literate and informative Mexican food blog. Our expectations were surpassed with the main treat of that day, traditionally made corundas which Leo proclaimed as “this side of heaven”, the lightest corundas he had ever eaten.

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Part of Sra. Cervantes crew of talented cooks, the woman on the left, placing hand made tortillas on her pottery grill was actually making them fly; her touch was so deft and tender. The stone corn masher is absolutely authentic made from an abrasive volcanic stone one can see the same technique being used in the pre-Columbian codices describing cooking. The kitchen here is partially open to the elements and it adjoins a dining pavilion shaded by a ceramic tiled roof protecting the diners from the afternoon sun.

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Sra. Amparo Cervantes herself, with one hand she selects a corn leaf wrapped corunda from the steamer and holds the triangular bundle over the plate. With an imperceptible twist of her wrist she unwinds the flavorful corundas releasing a host of fragrant aromas. 

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I found this naive mural at the front entrance of the Parque Nacional in Uruapan, a town close by Patzcuaro and I have included it here because it is shows how life imitates art in Mexico, or at least how pervasive is the folk culture.

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This is a troop of Purepecha Indians dressed in traditional costume to perform the dance of the little old men. Ironically the dancers are all boys, some of whom look to be about 10, give or take a year. They are all portraying old bent-over men. They place sturdy bamboo matting as a percussive stage on which they perform. The line of “old men” hold to each other’s walking sticks presumably to indicate their frailty and as the music picks up tempi the dancers throw off the weariness of age and perform a kind of frantic tap dancing, slapping thick leather sandals against the wood mats with complex rhythmic syncopation. One thing that strikes me about this dance is how universal tap dancing is in one form or another. Have you seen the Irish River Dancers or the Morris dancers in an English village? I’ll bet they have some form of tap dancing in Tibet. Note the tiny dancer dolls in the foreground that the boys make and sell for pocket money.

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I love the bright colors of the boy’s and men’s costumes all embroidered with animals and what I now see are probably letters on the cuffs of their trousers. It looks like they may spell out Michoacan? Does anyone know what the word is?
 

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The men and boys enjoy a good laugh after a particularly spirited “old man” completed his fantastically fast dance.

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One of the reasons I go to Patzcuaro is to study this enormous wall mural painted by the incomparable master, Juan O’Gorman who was a student of Diego Rivera and also the architect for Diego and Frieda’s famous twin studios in San Angel, Mexico City.
 

O’Gorman was a prolific painter employing the classic fresco technique painting on wet plaster. He manages to include a huge amount of the historic action of the state of Michoacan into his picture and all these details fascinate me. The painting takes up the entire back wall of the local library which is in the Ex-convento de San Augutin begun in 1576. A great number of the Ecclesiastical buildings were secularized during the Juarez Presidency in the mid nineteenth century and reassigned for educational purposes dedicated to the people.

 My photograph of the mural only shows about 3/4s of it, cutting off the bottom because it just wouldn’t fit in my picture frame.  I try to go and enjoy the painting everyday that I am in Patzcuaro and I never tire of examining all the action. It’s like seeing a narrative story unfold. O’Gorman’s visual imagination is prolific and no detail is glossed over. I study the picture with my binoculars and try to follow the mysterious English translation in the guide pamphlet in order to identify the goings on.

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At the center of this portion of O’Gorman’s mural is a portrait of Don Vasco Quiroga holding a fish net, an innovation that he introduced from Europe that greatly aided the Indian population especially on Lake Patzcuaro where distinctive butterfly nets are still in use today. Don Vasco was a fan of Thomas More’s book, Utopia, and both More and the title Utopia are depicted on either side of the bishop. On the right beyond the broken brick wall are some of the revolutionary heroes including the unfortunate Gertrudis Bocanegra spouting a fountain of blood from her single gunshot wound.

 O’gorman’s view of history and especially Mexican history can be rather caustic and frightening. I see an overall balanced portrayal of the swinging polemic that although speaks of man’s psyche without sentimentality. He includes the good with the bad implying the possibility of political evolution and the fulfillment of the human spirit


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In the lower left is a self portrait of O’Gorman and his wife. Juan is holding a manifesto that reads in translation:

“Years have passed; the centuries and the natives are not defeated in spite of the conquest putting an end to the best of their population. Exploitation has not knocked them down, nor misery or diseases. They have not died of hunger. They have resisted work in the mines, roads or railways; they have plowed the land with their hands in order to feed us. Their treasures were stolen, they saw their temples fall. They loaded stones on their backs to build churches. But their resistance is a hidden strength that some day, when liberated from the chains of oppression, an art and a culture will continue to exist like a giant volcano erupting.”

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Greeting all citizens and visitors to Patzcuaro is this handsome bronze statue, larger than life size, memorializing the Purepecha king Tangaxuhan who made a treaty with the conquistador Christobal de Olid, negotiating a peace and converted to Christianity in 1523. Then the brutal thug Nuño de Guzman broke the treaty and viciously tortured and executed Tangaxuhan in 1530. Tangaxuhan is said to have said, “Scatter my ashes across my kingdom so my people will remember who they are.”