Guanajuato is a city revered by Mexicans for its role in their long battle for political independence from Spain. Guanajuato is also important as the birthplace of Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist, who through his murals -- famous throughout the world for their aesthetic power as well as their socialist message -- brought to Mexicans of all colors a feeling of national pride and unity.

San Cayetano

We arrived from Oaxaca, city of Benito Juárez, the stern taskmaster of Mexican liberalism, destroyer of churches and builder of constitutions, to the cool mountain air of Guanajuato, whose favorite hero is Cervantes, courteous master of irony and elegance, celebrated each October with a month-long international festival of the arts, The Cervantino. Indeed, Guanajuato is eminently civilized with narrow, tightly curving streets that demand a slow pace and an obliging attitude, punctuated by small secret plazas to coax the weary to continue the quest. We czme at night, hot, tired and rumpled to a city of subterranean tunnels, which twist and turn just like the rivers they replaced. It is a Venice without water, for the tunnels connect the different parts of Guanajuato and the existing walkways are often single-file alleys. Houses leap up the steep mountainside like so many colorful mountain goats tumbling over one another trying to reach the top. One of the many beautiful colonial silver cities of central Mexico, Guanajuato, drew such wealth from its mines that it was allowed to defy gravity, mostly, and rationality, absolutely.

In the small green heart of the center lies el Jardín de la Union (residents of rival cities sniff at the oddly proportioned "slice-of-cheese" garden), but it is of no use whatsoever to go to Guanajuato and not sit beneath its manicured laurels. The sidewalk cafes bordering el Jardín de la Union, offer sustenance by flickering lamplight with the music of wandering mariachis, and, of course, the high drama of people watching. A university city as well as the state capital of Guanajuato, there is a constant bustle of grandmothers with toddlers, business-suited men of purpose, and students with book bags looking for romance. Older hotels with much history and hard beds border it, and it is the place to begin.

A university city as well as the state capital of Guanajuato, there is a constant bustle of grandmothers with toddlers, business-suited men of purpose, and students with book bags looking for romance.

Teatro Juárez

A pretty little jewel box of a building, the Teatro Juárez;, sits near the Jardín Union. Daintily balancing above the columns of its neo-classic façade are statues of eight of the nine muses -- Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, is excluded. (The Man of La Mancha would not be pleased.) A tribute to the era of Porfirio Díaz--President Díaz himself attended the opening performance of Verdi's Aida on October 27, 1903 -- the theater is still in active use and continues to dazzle. Porfirio Díaz brought Mexico thirty years of peace and prosperity by courting foreign ownership of key Mexican resources; he also fostered a derivative official architecture with his inordinate love of all things French, the Teatro Juárez included. A favorite gathering place of students and weary visitors, the broad stairs of the Juárez Theater offer an exercise in restraint leading to the opulent interior, where there is no rest for the eye. The auditorium seems to have been decorated during a convention of oriental rug designers given the freedom to transfer their motifs to every conceivable space.

It would not be respectful to point out the irony of naming such a flamboyantly luxurious space, the Teatro Juárez since its namesake, Benito Juárez was, perhaps, Mexico's most severe president, and a man of intense focus and serious intent. It is fitting, however, to walk the few blocks to visit the former home of a Juárez minister, Don Manuel Doblado, which is now the El Quijote Iconographic Museum. It is an incredible place, and one of my favorite spots in all of Guanajuato. It is possible, I suppose, to find room after room dedicated to images -- in paintings, sculptures, drawings, wire constructions, coins, eggs and even postage stamps of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza -- boring and repetitive. Yet, often, graceful notes from concerts in the large central patio--it was, after all, once a governor's mansion visited by the Emperor Maximilian--may follow you through the rooms of quixotic memorabilia. It is a peaceful space to ponder the usefulness of pursuing ideals. Cervantes, of course, wrote his great novel as Spain was beginning to lose the integrity of its own mission. The seductive corruption of New World silver--much of it from the hills outside Guanajuato--had already helped in the dissolution of the sixteenth-century Spain of high purpose and resolute power.

The seductive corruption of New World silver -- much of it from the hills outside Guanajuato -- had already helped in the dissolution of the sixteenth-century Spain of high purpose and resolute power.

Jardín de la Unión

To make the trek to the grim Alhóndiga de Granaditas, several blocks on the other side of the Jardín Union, is to shadow the steps of hundreds of Mexican schoolchildren and their parents who annually visit this important shrine to Mexican Independence. Now it offers welcome shade, fascinating exhibits, and a tidied up version of the independence story, but in late September 1810, the Alhóndiga was the last bloody refuge of Guanajuato's hated Spanish population. The Alhóndiga, just completed the previous November, had been built by the criollo (Spanish-born ruling class) government to store grain for the Guanajuato population during times of scarcity. An army of indios and castas, some twelve-thousand strong, inundated the town led by the Father Hidalgo, whose impassioned church-front speech for independence, the famous Grito jump-started the mexican movement for independence. They attacked the Alhóndiga, which now stored not corn for the hungry, but Spanish criollos and their treasures. Marching under the standard of their beloved Virgen de Guadalupe and led by a priest full of vision but possessing no plan, the dark and the poor, armed with picks and knives, finally overcame the guns of the Spanish, and slaughtered them.

Before the Alhóndiga, Hidalgo's people had been a procession of the dispossessed -- sometimes whole families marching as if on a religious pilgrimage -- and the only hope the Mexican-born patriots, the gachupines (liberal conspirators), had for freedom from Spain. After the Guanajuato blood-bath, the native-born Mexican upper classes, Spanish born or Mexican-born, would have nothing to do with Hidalgo and his thousands. Hidalgo's masses marched rather aimlessly, with their religion and their passion, all over the Bajio, the rich Mexican heartland, capturing cities and Spanish wealth. There was hatred and there was destruction, but there was no common strategy and no nation-building. It was another decade before the Spanish left Mexico. It was only another year before Hidalgo's head, joined by the heads of three other co-conspirator, hung on the fence outside the Alhóndiga de Granaditas.

Schoolchildren on the steps of the Alhóndiga

Guanajuato is a city revered by Mexicans for its role in their long battle for political independence from Spain. Guanajuato is also important as the birthplace of Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist, who through his murals -- famous throughout the world for their aesthetic power as well as their socialist message -- brought to Mexicans of all colors a feeling of national pride and unity. For the first six years of his life, the young Diego Rivera, son of an atheist school-teacher father, who was also a city official and liberal newspaper editor, and a pious Catholic mother, explored the fascinating streets of the mining town. He also covered the walls of his room at 47 Pósitos with his drawings. While the young Diego loved drawing the treasures of childhood, his toys and trains, he also adored listening to his father and his liberal cronies. The senior Diego and other Guanajuato liberals wished to bring education to the indigenos in the countryside and reforms to a Guanajuato suffering from economic decline and increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. The walls Diego Rivera would draw on as an adult, the walls the whole world would come to see, give witness to those endless discussions of his father and his buddies that the child Diego Rivera heard around their favorite benches in Guanajuato's Jardín Union.

Tunnels run beneath many parts of the city

The site of the Diego Rivera Museum is on a small side street not far from either the Alhóndiga or the Jardín Union. His birthplace is now a museum on three floors. What is missing in the dark lower rooms, a replication of the Diego living quarters, with proper, heavy middle-class furniture, is present in the art and light-filled upper stories. Examples from different periods of Diego Rivera's life as an artist (did you know he had a rather lengthy stretch as a cubist?) are here as well as family pictures and a reproduction of Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda.

Diego Rivera was a huge, bear of a man, over six-feet tall with a large belly, and protruding eyes -- Frida Kahlo, his most famous wife, affectionately called him carasapo, or "frog-face." He was a prodigious eater, worker, and lover, fathering children on two continents, and filling vast walls in Mexico and the United States with his murals. He was also an endless spinner of stories and radical political activist, and, because of the fortunes of timing and talent he not only produced the murals for which Mexico is famous, he helped father an artistic renaissance in that medium. One of the second-generation of Mexican muralists and another Guanajuato favorite son, José Chávez Morado lives and works in Guanajuato. It is his murals which popularize the Father Hidaldo-Mexican Independence story on the walls of The Alhóndiga. His work reminds me of The Lion King, and, I suppose, both art forms -- the Mexican muralists and the Disney Studios -- have noble intent. Rather more interesting, is the Morado mural at the Museum of the People of Guanajuato, just up the street from the Rivera home. The Fractured Estípite, fittingly on the rear wall of an ex-chapel, within the museum, tells the story of Mexico's mid-nineteenth century struggle to free itself from the Spain of sword and cross.

But it is the sword and the cross which built the most beautiful of Guanajuato's monuments to the God of imperial Spain, the San Cayetano temple. Financed by massive quantities of silver extracted from the La Valenciana mines, which still produces silver, San Cayetano is stunning. Finished in 1788 at the height of the Mexican Churriguerresque period -- Mexico's own contribution to the Baroque architectural vocabulary -- the church contains mesmerizing carving and gilding both inside and out. In the eighteenth-century, Mexico gave the world tons of silver and some of the most fascinating architecture that exists in the entire New World. By mid-century, Europe was growing a bit tired of the over-blown furbelows and cherubs of the Baroque, but colonial Mexico continued to pile on the curves and swags, covering the Churrigueresque trademark shape, the estipite -- picture a upside Washington monument, sans point, kind of shape -- with ever more vines and decoration. And although the façade of San Cayetano is relatively restrained -- and, therefore, all the more beautiful -- the altarpiece inside the sanctuary is typically excessive and, yes, it does inspire awe and admiration. The gilded and graffito wood of the altarpiece piles design upon design reaching up toward the church dome not unlike the houses of Guanajuato itself as they climb toward the top of the silver hills they rest rather uneasily upon. It was hot the day we visited, and we bought some sodas from a nice man who told us where to catch the bus back down to town. He gently offered me a straw, and we smiled at each other, sharing in the complicity of knowing that this was a bit of a nicety for a four-peso can of diet coke. He was a gentleman in the shadow of both a church and a town built from silver and the dry Sierra Madre.