La Alameda

I've mentioned the Alameda often, so you might wonder why it's so important. For one thing, it's the oldest park in Mexico City, built around 1595 on the site of an Aztec tianguis (market), and it's so beloved that every city in Mexico also has a Parque Alameda. (The DF actually has two: the Alameda Central and the Alameda Sur.)At one time the "important" people of the city, led by a man named Revillagigedo (the name of the street we live on), tried to keep the "common" people out, without success. The Alameda has pathways that lead to several beautiful fountains and the usual food, trinkets, shoeshine, newspaper and magazine stands that all parks seem to have. At one side of the park is the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, which houses the mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday afternoon in the Alameda Park), a mural painted for a hotel that was destroyed in the 1985 earthquake. Miraculously, the mural was unharmed and later moved to this site. Every day groups of men play chess in front of this museum. At the other end is Bellas Artes, and facing Avenida Juárez is a very large white marble monument to el Benimérito Benito Juárez, first Indian President of Mexico.

Special events take place in the Alameda every weekend: sometimes music and dance, markets of artesania or foods, last weekend a combination tent revival and health care booths. The police who patrol the Alameda on horseback wear cowboy outfits and sombreros.



The mural is very interesting. Rivera painted many people important in the history of Mexico (among many others: Juárez, Sor Juana, Porfirio Díaz, Cortés, even Winfield Scott, the American general who occupied the city in the 1840's) and himself as a young boy and Frida as a young woman standing beside La Catrina, the skeleton figure created by Guadalupe Posada, who is to her left. Fine art, popular art, history and holidays are interwoven here. Last weekend we went to the Dolores Olmedo Patiño Museum in the south of the city. An elaborate Día de Muertos ofrenda there included a life-size reproduction of the mural with the figures as skeletons in papier mache.