the palacio nacional at night

At over two hundred meters long, the baroque facade of the Palacio Nacional stretches impressively along the entire eastern edge of the Zócalo. It is from the main balcony of this august building that the president shouts the “Grito de Dolores” on the eve of Mexican Independence to the tens of thousands of people crowded below. Despite the beauty of the building, particulary at night when it is handsomely illuminated, I had never considered venturing inside the complex, which houses several small museums, the national archives, as well as the president’s office.

admirers of rivera's mural

How foolish I was; as any guidebook will tell you, the Palacio Nacional also boasts a breathtaking triptych of Diego Rivera murals. The series, collectively known as “The Epic of the Mexican People” dipicts centuries of Mexico’s history, from pre-Hispanic myths and cultural traditions, through the violence of the conquest and Independence, up through the early twentieth century. These murals are incredible; a person could spend hours examining the endless details, each fragment of a scene revealing something else about Rivera’s take on Mexican history. Currently, the murals are undergoing a renovation, but they seem to only be working on one section of the triptych at a time, leaving the others exposed for the public.

prior to the construction of the third story

The site of the Palacio Nacional is itself historically significant: here was the palace of Moctezuma II, known as the “New Houses.” After the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec palace was nearly destroyed, and Cortés ordered a new palace for himself constructed on the same spot, supposedly using some of the very same red volcanic tezontle stones. After the death of Cortés, the palace became home to the viceroy and was nearly destroyed again when it was lit on fire by supporters of a rival archbishop. It was reconstructed and then went through a new renovation in the late seventeenth century, softening it’s fortress-like appearance into the stately facade we see today. (Although, interestingly, the third floor wasn’t added until the 1920s under Plutarco Elías Calles.) Anahí says that it’s rumored that the plans for the palace were mistakenly interchanged with those of a prison in Peru, and although I haven’t been able to substantiate this myth, it’s easy to imagine this imposing building being used for incarceration.

detail from "the epic of the mexican people"

I suspect most tourists who visit the Palacio Nacional don’t go much further than the Rivera murals, but the complex actually extends back several blocks east of the Zócalo. Beyond the murals, the people wondering around the grounds are an odd combination of soldiers and bureaucrats, with a sprinkling of well-dress families admiring the church that lies at the center of the palace. I was pleasantly surprised to find a small, but lovely garden of indigenous Mexican plants. We also discovered a small gallery featuring rotating exhibits on Mexican art and culture. Unless you’re really in a bind, I would skip the unimpressive gift shop, where you can buy such incongruous gifts as a traditionally embroidered neck-pillow for airline travel.

The Palacio Nacional also is home to the Benito Juarez museum, where you can visit the offices he kept when he was the president. Hailing from a peasant family in Oaxaca but eventually becoming the first (and only) indigenous president fo Mexico, Juarez is a fascinating historical and political figure. I was therefore frustrated to find that the museum was closed, with no useful information about how or when the museum is open to the public.

Despite my disappointment, the Palacio Nacional is definitely worth visiting, not just for the impressive Rivera murals, but for the history of the building itself. As you wander through the grounds, it’s easy to imagine the different historical periods reflected through each renovation. Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes described the palace as “both a traveling and an immobile construction” in how its architecture contains design elements that span continents and centuries. Reading this description, however, I chuckled, thinking of the limits of this immobility: like many builings in the Centro Historico, the palace is sinking, with many stone door frames that had once been at right angles now visibly askew.

Palacio Nacional; Zócalo (eastern end); Centro Historico. Tourists are limited to entering and exiting from the main gate on the Zócalo where they must pass through metal detectors and show identification, so be prepared. Free admission.

I believe that the Museo Nacional de Antropología is wonderful to visit, not only for the amazing pre-Hispanic artifacts it houses, but for the building itself, designed by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and completed in 1964. It’s peaceful to walk around the large central courtyard, the design of which impresses me no matter where I’m standing.

This Thursday the Museo Universitario del Chopo is opening an exhibition brought to Mexico City by the Spanish organization Asociación Cultural Visible. The main purpose of this association, and thus, of the exhibition, is to open spaces for the GLBT community in order to achieve visibility and change the way that the broader society conceives these groups.

The highlight is the work of Yoko Ono, who made an installation with a tree where you can hang a little paper with your deepest desires. A piece that, as Ono says herself, attempts to encourage public participation and gather the people’s good purposes.

Other artists participating in this exhibition are the filmmaker Derek Jarman, as well as artists from Spain, France, Germany, Brazil, Cuba and Chile. Other activities will be part of the exhibition, such as workshops, and lectures. If you want to see the whole program click here.

Historias de Amor; Museo Universitario del Chopo at the Academia de San Carlos; Academia 22, Col. Centro; phone number 55352288, ext.110; Zócalo subway station

Macha Mexico has been neglecting this exhibit for no reason, but fortunately it’s still time to go. Tamara de Lempicka was a talented Russian painter from the 1930′s, who rubbed elbows with Josephine Baker, Amedeo Modigliani, and Diego Rivera, among others. So there couldn’t be a better place for this exhibit than the building of the Fine Arts Museum, which was built during the same years when Lempicka created the best part of her work.

Described as an independent woman and committed with her artwork, Lempicka was extremely skilled to portrait other women in a glamourous way, showing how strong and sexy can be a female body. During the nineties, Tamara de Lempicka became an icon among Hollywood stars after Barbra Streisand bought one of her paintings. Madonna used one of Lempicka’s images in the opening scene of the video “Open Your Heart”, and was inspired by Lempicka’s paintings to create the aesthetics in the video “Vogue”.

Lempicka lived in a long series of cities in Europe and after the war, she moved to New York where she became a successful artist. But she spent her last days in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she was trying to deal with the effects of arteriosclerosis that affected her at the end of her life. When she died in 1980, her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl–a beautiful way to say goodbye to a life full of exquisiteness.

Tamara de Lempicka; Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Avenida Hidalgo no. 1, Centro, 5521 9251‎, Bellas Artes Metro station; from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. On Sundays the entrance is free. Until September 2009.

As part of the annual GBLT Cultural Week, a series of activities will take place in Mexico City starting this month.

This annual event has had to deal with a series of obstacles since 2003, including the death of its original organizer, the activist José María Covarrubias, and the refurbishment of the Museo del Chopo, its original venue. The upside of this situation is that, over the years, the organizers had to look for other spaces taking the GLBT Week  to a broader cultural scene in the city.

This year, the program features photography, discussions about queer theory in Mexico, and the celebration of the Vampiro de la Colonia Roma, the traditional gay novel, writen 30 years ago by Luis Zapata. The entrance for all the activities is for free.

Here are some of the highlights:

Familias Mexicanas, by Óscar Sánchez, photographs documenting GLBT families in Mexico. Galería del Centro Cultural José Martí, Avenida Hidalgo y Doctor Mora, Metro Hidalgo. From June 5th to June 28th.

Lectures on Queer Theory in Mexico. Lecturers: Francesca Gargallo and Elsa Muñiz. Centro Cultural España, Guatemala No. 18, Col. Centro, right behind the cathedral, June 18th, 6 pm.

Happy Birthday, Vampiro, celebration of the 30th anniversary of El vampiro de la Colonia Roma, by Luis Zapata, Salón Marrakech, República de Cuba 18, Col Centro.

If you want to see the whole program, click here.

Miniature Shoes at the Museo del Calzado

More than two years past between when I first read about the Museo del Calzado in the Moon Guide to Mexico City‘s section on “Surreal Mexico City” and the day I finally set foot inside this delightful museum dedicated to shoes. The museum, which is run by Centro Historico shoe emporium El Borceguí–an institution unto itself–was closed for renovation the first several times I tried to visit. It was well worth the wait, however, and with free admission, it was a wonderful way to pass several hours in the Zócalo.

Granted, I’m biased towards spending an afternoon gazing a footwear. I have incredibly large and wide feet that render most women’s shoes too small or too delicately contoured for my feet, a situation which has perhaps led me to fetishize all those beautiful shoes I will never be able to wear. Whatever the cause, I’m a bit of a shoe nut, and El Borceguí’s Museo del Calzado was full of eye-candy for those of us who appreciate a fine pair of treads, but don’t feel the need to partake in Carrie Bradshaw-inspired, bankruptcy-inducing shoe-shopping binges.

The museum is housed in one large and well-lit room on the second floor above El Borceguí’s retail space. The main collection of shoes are displayed on the floor in cases organized chronologically, spanning several continents and several millenia. There are sandals from ancient Egypt and wooden shoes from Holland. One of the more interesting cases focuses on Chinese foot-binding and displays many examples of the small slippers used to showcase bound feet.

As would be expected, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide a considerable portion of the exhibit, including a dozen varieties of sexy Victorian boots, several obscene platforms, and many delicious leather pumps.

In addition to the main exhibit, there is also a second story terrace that runs along the perimeter of the room. This level of cases features a display of miniature shoes made of porcelain and other materials. My favorite part of the second floor was the collection of shoes worn by famous people. Highlights include space boots donated by NASA and running shoes worn by Mexican Olympic athlete and suspected-lesbian Ana Gabriela Guevara.

I highly recommend the Museo del Calzado for shoe-fetishists and anyone else who likes to gaze appreciatively at some fine footwear. Because the admission is free there is no pressure to take in the entire collection (which can be a little daunting) in one visit. Come back whenever you need a quiet escape from the bustle of the Centro Historico.

Museo del Calzado; Bolivar 27 (between Madero and 16 de Septiembre), Second Floor, Centro Historico; (55) 5512 1311 ext. 35; Hours: 10-6 Monday-Saturday

The concept of “family” has been changing over the years. Around the globe, the traditional model of dad-mom-children is not the only example to follow anymore, and Mexico is not an exception in this trend.

An example of this is the series of photographs taken by Óscar Sánchez since 1996 of queer families living in Mexico City. Twelve of them are being exhibited in the Centro Médico subway station, as part of the Semana Cultural Lésbica Gay 2008 (Gay and Lesbian Week, 2008). The series represents a useful effort to documenting the changes that are taking place in Mexico regarding the practice of shaping alternative families, in the outskirts of society. The exhibition works to move these families closer to the mainstream.

It is worth to mention that in 2007, Mexico City’s congress passed leyes de convivencia or “the law of cohabitation,” in order to make official the unions of same-sex couples. Supposedly, this new legal status would empower gay and lesbian couples, giving them the same rights that straight couples enjoy. However, the law was mainly symbolic, and didn’t make significant changes to rights that queer couples already had. For instance, they were already allowed to leave possessions to the same-sex partner when they die, and could make medical decisions if their partner goes into a coma. The paper work that has to be done is the same as before.

These images will force subway passengers to face a reality that is often ignored by the mainstream media, who chose not to keep up with the transformations of society.

Mexican Families; Centro Médico subway station, from 6th to 30th June 2008.

According to the Anahuacalli website, Rivera’s aim at the Anahuacalli was to create a City of the Arts, where architecture, music, theater, dance and crafts could flourish. This was what Diego had in mind when he designed the museum’s courtyard as an open-space theater, along with a gallery and a place where seminars and workshops could be held. The physical presence of the building is awesome–it rises up like a cross between a fortress and a pyramid–but perhaps because I visited on a weekday afternoon when the courtyard (and museum) were largely empty, I found the museum grounds to be desolate, almost sterile.

Access to the museum’s collections are only allowed via guided tours that begin approximately every hour throughout the day. The tour I attended was in Spanish, and was led by a listless though well-informed young lady who recited a memorized script describing the high lights of each room’s artifacts. Our guide kept a fast pace, despite the fact that there were only six of us on on the tour, which didn’t allow more than a minute or to wander around each room.

When I did stray from the tour guide to explore some of the objects in the room that she wasn’t elaborating on, I became aware that the displays were without the explanatory labels one might expect in a museum with artifacts from dozens of different pre-Hispanic cultures. Apart from the information out guide was providing, without any previous study of pre-Hispanic art, I felt lost in the museum, ignorant of the context and history behind the pieces around me. In that respect, Anahuacalli is not an anthropology museum, but truly an art museum, with pieces left to be approached as works of art, rather than artifacts. Without the opportunity to explore the museum at my own pace, however, it was difficult to carefully examine more than a piece or two in each room.

Several ceilings throughout the museum were designed by Rivera. My favorite is a mosaic picturing two faces framed within a vaguely anatomical heart; a hammer, sickle, and white dove loom above. The view from the top of Anahuacalli is a dramatic end to the tour. On a clear day, you can take in the expanse of the southern part of the city and even see snow-topped Popocatépetl to the southeast.

Unless there are special events or exhibitions going on during your visit, I would recommend Anahuacalli only to those with a great deal of interest in pre-Hispanic art or to the most dedicated Diego Rivera stalkers. For those in search of Frida, you will find none of her art and will be left to guess at her influence on the conception and design of Anahuacalli.

Located in Colonia San Pablo Tepetlapa in the southwestern part of Delegación Coyoacán, Anahuacalli is reachable by taxi (one from central Coyoacán would cost less than 40 pesos) or, for the more public transportation savvy, one of the peseros on Division del Norte.

The cost for entry is 45 pesos, which also includes entry at the Blue House Frida Kahlo museum in Coyoacán within one month of your visit.