Inside the chapel of the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, José Clemente Orozco painted a man on fire. He’s in the dome, 32.5 meters up, a burning figure rising through the center of the vault, and the 56 other frescoes Orozco painted around him in the late 1930s fill the walls and vaults below him. You will spend most of your visit with your head tipped back, and your neck will tell you about it later.
Orozco was born in 1883 in Zapotlán el Grande, now Ciudad Guzmán, in the south of the same state of Jalisco. He was one of the three great Mexican muralists, alongside Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and the darkest of them by a distance. Where Rivera’s murals tend to celebrate, Orozco’s tend to accuse. Americans can see him at Pomona College, where he painted Prometheus in 1930, and at Dartmouth, where The Epic of American Civilization took him from 1932 to 1934. But Guadalajara has more of his work than anywhere else, and it’s the best reason we know to spend a few slow days in Mexico’s second city.
The Hospicio Cabañas, before and after the paint
The building came first, and it would be worth seeing with bare walls. Bishop Juan Ruiz de Cabañas founded it in the early nineteenth century as a refuge for orphans, the elderly, the disabled and the chronically ill, and the Neoclassical architect Manuel Tolsá designed it. Construction ran from 1796 to 1810. The plan is a rectangle about 164 by 145 meters, broken up by 23 courtyards, so you’re always stepping from shade into light and back. It kept working as an institution until 1980, when the Instituto Cultural Cabañas moved in. UNESCO listed it in 1997, and its citation names both the architecture and the murals.
Orozco’s frescoes are what made the place famous, though. The Man of Fire, El Hombre de Fuego, is the center. UNESCO reads the cycle as humans submitting to machines, and you don’t need the gloss once you’re under it. It’s genuinely unsettling work! The contemporary art world still treats the building as a site worth responding to. In 2014 the French artist Daniel Buren covered 18 of the 23 courtyards with his own installation.
Orozco on the stairs, and a market in concrete
Walk west along the long pedestrian plaza to the Palacio de Gobierno, the state government building, finished in 1790 after an earlier palace collapsed in an earthquake. This is where Miguel Hidalgo, the priest who started Mexico’s war of independence, arrived in late November 1810 and, on December 6, issued a decree abolishing slavery in New Spain. Orozco painted Hidalgo here, torch raised, in a mural known as Hidalgo incendiario. There’s a second Orozco fresco in the building too, on the revolutionary laws of Mexico. Both are free to see, which feels about right for murals about the public.
Then go east again, past the Cabañas, to the Mercado San Juan de Dios, which everyone in town calls Mercado Libertad. The architect Alejandro Zohn built it between 1957 and 1958, and it opened on December 30, 1958. It’s about 25,000 square meters of covered market with around 4,000 stalls, often described as the largest covered market in Latin America. Most people come for the food and the bargains and never look at the building. Look at the building! It’s a piece of serious mid-century Mexican architecture doing an everyday job, and that’s rarer than it should be.
Clay in Tlaquepaque, and a young Barragán
Tlaquepaque, now swallowed by the metro area, has the nickname “La villa alfarera”, the potter’s village. Its Museo Regional de la Cerámica has eight halls of work from across Jalisco and Mexico, on a pedestrian street of galleries and workshops. Before the Spanish arrived, Tlaquepaque and neighboring Tonalá were part of one kingdom ruled by Cihualpilli. Our honest view? Tlaquepaque’s main drag has gotten polished for visitors. Go to the museum, then wander a few blocks off it.
One more name. Luis Barragán, the architect of pink walls and silent courtyards who won the Pritzker in 1980, was born in Guadalajara in 1902 and trained as an engineer here. He practiced in the city from 1927 to 1936, mostly on private houses in Colonia Americana, before moving to Mexico City. Casa Cristo is one of his first buildings. It’s an early, more ornamental Barragán, nothing like the minimal work that made him famous, and that’s exactly what makes it interesting. You can see someone still looking for his voice.
For more of Mexico’s built and natural oddities, see this underground home in Mexico City or our gallery of the colorful doors of Mexico. The muralists and Barragán both belong in our reference library of makers who shaped the craft.
