Centro Historico de Mexico City

This morning, Sheryl and I arrived at our 10th floor apartment to discover that the building is under renovation/reconstruction for major earthquake damage. We are hoping that the earth stays still for our stay. We had a scheduled murals tour at noon, so we unpacked and headed out.

Oscar took us first to the Diego Rivera Museum which is really just one mural. It is one heck of a mural - it is a very detailed history lesson of Mexico. He took us through all the leaders, personalities and meanings of each of the subjects depicted. Of course, as it is Rivera, the subjects are about class struggles and political corruption. Mexico is thick with both. If you make it to Mexico City, please do hire yourself a guide who can tell you what you are looking at. It was fascinating.

Next stop were the murals in the Museo de Bellas Artes. Here you see the three main artists that dominated the murals movement: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Each had iconic and gorgeous murals here. They each used their canvasses to express themes of Mexican stories and history. Again, the explanations and stories told by our guide were invaluable in helping us really enjoy/love these immense works.

Diego Rivera’s most prominent mural was originally designed as a commission from the Rockefellers in New York. It prominently displayed Lenin as a hero. Rockefeller paid Rivera for his time and then destroyed it completely. My question is, What were they thinking? It was going to be bunch of flowers and butterflies? In any case, he redid the mural here in Mexico City with an addition of Rockefeller on the “evils” side of the mural. Again, this mural is full of recognizable characters and highly political meaning.

Don’t miss these murals if you do come here.

Gail arrived this afternoon with some Mexican pesos from some trip she took back in the 1980s. They were 1,000- and 10,000-peso notes. Well, sometime in the 1990s these bills were devalued by removing the last 3 digits, so instead of 23,000 pesos, we were looking at 23 - or about a buck fifty USD. We were off to a good start with a big laugh.Baca selengkapnya