Ocampo's heart, in the heart of Morelia, Mexico
Also, tiny black-and-white birds nesting in church walls, musicians strolling across pink-cobbled plazas, and kissing teens perched on the edges of massive, ancient stone fountains
I left Oakland, California on Monday, on a direct flight to Morelia, Mexico, in the highland state of Michoacán. After a mere four hours, we landed in an inky night on a tarmac with precious few other planes. I made my way down the gangplank, my roller suitcase bumping over the ridges, to the pavement below, where uniformed men directed me with flashlights to customs. The night air was soft as velvet. A persistent cricket trilled nearby. There were just a few of us in the tiny airport, and it didn’t take long before I was through customs.
It’s no exaggeration to say I’m in a magical place. First, the entire downtown is pink. Former palaces, government buildings, plazas, mansions, and church after church are all built of pink cantera stone with even pinker grout holding it all together. Second, these buildings (“buildings” seems too pedestrian a word for these stunners) go on and on. Block after block of gorgeous, 17th-century colonial architecture. It’s grand, it’s breathtaking, it’s calming. A sense of quietude and gravity seems to emanate from these structures.
The sheer beauty of the proportions, the massivity (if that’s a word) of the stones, the thickness of the walls, the dark, hand-carved wood beams in the ceilings, are all deeply reassuring. Gazing upon a massive stone fountain burbling water in the Jardín de las Rosas, where teens perch to kiss their loves while a pink baroque church tower rises behind them, I thought, you just can’t misbehave in these quarters. They lend dignity to everything and everyone around them.
Maybe that’s why so many of the little girls I pass, holding their mothers’ hands, have such tidy hair, pulled into little knots, buns, and ponytails and affixed with grosgrain ribbons in Mexico’s colors. The children all seem to attend private Catholic schools here, and they’re all uniformed in variations on dark pants or skirts, crisp white shirts, and white socks (knee highs on the girls), although I did see two amazing lines of elementary school girls dressed in red and green plaid with smart red cardigans attended by a nun in habit. They reminded me of the cover of the famous story “Madeline.” They were just like that.
Or the shoeshine men in their stalls ringing the Plaza de Armas or scurrying about in the surrounding collonaded passageways across from the grand Catedral Metropolitana de Morelia, believed by some to be the most beautiful in Mexico. They carry small, burnished-with-age wood stools, kits tucked under their arms, and they have plenty of work. Well-dressed men sit and chat amiably as they get their supple leather shoes polished. It’s like I’ve been transported to the 1950s.
There are many magical things here, and some unusual ones as well. On my second morning here, I found myself peering into yet another grand courtyard with an imposing statue in the center. A sign in Spanish said something about a man named Don Melchor Ocampo and his heart. I assumed it meant this man was generous, or perhaps it was like the sacred heart of Jesus, which I’ve seen multiple times now in the many churches here—Jesus pointing to his own disembodied heart. In any case, I assumed it was a metaphor.
The building turned out to be the Michoacan University of Saint Nicholas de Hidalgo, and a sign pointed the way to a museum dedicated to Ocampo on the first floor. I made my way up the stairs. The young lady attending the single, rectangular room told me that Ocampo is beloved and revered for separating church and state. I learned he was a mestizo, a radical liberal, attorney, scientist, and politician. He also despised the Catholic church for taking advantage of indigenous peoples with punishing ecclesiastical fees and was eventually mysteriously executed by “conservative guerillas.”
But the weirdest thing was that there, at the end of the room, on a pedestal set upon a raised diaz, was his heart, his actual heart, suspended in a jar of formaldehyde. To see the man’s actual heart displayed there, pretty as you please, was… arresting to put it mildly!
I’m reading the fantastic La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City, by Jonathan Kandell, and I just finished 30-odd pages replete with descriptions of Aztec priests reaching into the chests of their victims to pull out still-beating hearts and stuff them into the mouth of the Aztec hummingbird God Huitzilopochtli.
I immediately connected the two. It occurred to me that Mexico might not want to highlight this past… but it’s clearly captured the country’s imagination even if semi-subconsciously (there must be reams written about this). What’s really weird is that the Spanish version of Wikipedia describes the existence of the heart at the college (including a photo of the heart) in the “Legacy” section with no compunction, but the English version has an entirely different write-up under “Legacy,” with no reference to or attendant picture of Ocampo’s heart.
This both does and doesn’t surprise me. It’s poignant and fascinating.
Call it coincidence, but last night, I dined at a restaurant called La Conspiracion de 1809 on the advice of the New York Times Style Magazine (it was terrible, but I’ll save that for another article). The maître d' brought me two tastes of Mezcal, one of which is his favorite, Negro Corazon, from Oaxaca. There, emblazoned on the label, was a human heart adorned with flowers and a Monarch butterfly.
The heart. The human heart, again.
I promised in the subhead to tell you also about the little black-and-white finches (?) nesting in the crevasses of the church walls so that when you walk by, the wall erupts in a plethora of chirps. It’s magical.
So is the fact that every evening, the zocalo (main plaza) is full of families seated snugly on benches enjoying the many free performers, or the soothing music piped in all day long from the round bandstand in the center of the square. Violinists, guitarists, and accordionists add their bits. Balloon sellers stroll about. No one is in a hurry here.
The main thing that marks me as a tourist is my gait. The way I seem to want to motor up the street with my legs, so determined to get where I need to go. Buying cheese this morning at my local market, I was shocked by how long it took to pay. It’s as if people are moving underwater. My American-ness rises up, annoyed. Then, the part of me that needs desperately to relax realizes the opportunity here. I take a deep breath and a step back. Which, for me, is a giant step forward.
Christy, Thanks so much for sharing these stunning pictures and narratives. As an admirer of the human spirit (and the places that reflect their builder-protector spirit), this depiction is really stunning.