Our son Chris spent a year as a teaching assistant in a teachers’ training school in Atlacomulco de Fabela, about two hours from Mexico City. The Fabela in the town’s name refers to Isidro Fabela (1882-1964), the most distinguished son of Atlacomulco, whose statue stands in the main square. His parents were landowners in what then would have been a small rural town.
I already knew vaguely that Fabela had been a historian of the Mexican Revolution (in which he was a participant), but had wanted to know more since seeing his statue. Our visit to Mexico City this year provided the opportunity. We stayed briefly with a long-time friend, Chris West, whose home in southern Mexico City provides a good view from its terrace of another statue of a famous Mexican Jorge Negrete, a singer whose home once stood on the opposite corner (now replaced with a very ordinary apartment block). Chris joined us for a morning excursion to the Plaza San Jacinto in San Ángel a little further south of his home. On the north side of a charming and unbusy (except for Saturdays when the weekly art and craft market opens) square stands an early 17th century mansion, the Casa del Risco, named because it was built on a rocky outcrop (a risco). The house was originally a monastic foundation, but by the mid-18th century it was occupied by secular owners. Fabela acquired the house in 1933.
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| The Virgin of Guadalupe, Miguel Cabrera (1695-1768), oil on canvas, Casa del Risco, Mexico City |
Fabela trained as a lawyer. Prior to joining the Revolution in 1911, he was a friend of many members of the intellectual circle known as the Ateneo de la Juventud (Athenaeum of Youth). After the counter-revolutionary coup of General Victoriano Huerta he was obliged to leave Mexico in 1913. In 1914 he was commissioned to persuade the major European powers to recognize the revolutionary regime of Venustiano Carranza, a delicate task when most of the countries he visited were at war. He evidently made a good impression, since France later granted him the honour of Légion d’Honneur. His diplomatic mission also took him to the most important Latin American countries. He mobilized opposition to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, for which Haile Selassie gave him an Ethiopian decoration. Fabela opposed the Nazi annexation of Austria, as a plaque given to the Casa del Risco by the Austrian government commemorates. He was also honoured by Spain for helping Republican exiles to settle in Mexico after the Civil War. Indeed, a display of his medals and decorations is so large that he must have spent a substantial part of his life receiving honours. Fabela was Mexico’s representative to the League of Nations and a judge at the international court in the Hague. He served for three years as governor of his home state, the State of Mexico, and helped Adolfo López Mateos (another mexiquense, or native of the state of Mexico) become President of Mexico in the year of Fabela’s death.
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| The fountain of the Casa del Risco |
While doing all this he found time to teach law and to publish numerous books of jurisprudence, diplomacy and history. And to leave a library with an ample card catalogue, and an archive consisting of 4,000 files and more than 300,000 documents, all catalogued online at https://isidrofabela.org.mx/indice.php.
His former home is now a museum where his art collection is displayed, the family dining room and his study are preserved, and his library and archive made available on appointment. The entrance takes the visitor into the central courtyard, dominated by a fountain, elaborately decorated with tiles, Chinese porcelain, Japanese, Spanish and Mexican ceramics. This style of decoration came about because decorated ceramics were so expensive that, when broken they were recycled as decorative displays. The Asian connection is emphasized by a large wooden chest displayed on the first floor. It was used to carry silver and gold to pay for Asian merchandise arriving on the Manila Galleon when it docked in Acapulco in January or February between the late 16th century and 1815.
Fabela evidently had a taste for the Baroque, since most of his collection of paintings, displayed in seven rooms, is Mexican or European Baroque, although in the quiet of his study he evidently spent a little time gazing on a few more modern mildly erotic pieces. Mexican masters on display include Miguel Cabrera and Cristóbal de Villalpando, and a 19th-century landscape sketch by José María Velasco. British art is represented by two Henry Raeburn portraits of an aristocratic man and a noblewoman.
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| El sátiro viejo, Ernesto García Cabral (1890-1968), ink on paper |
The library reading room was empty except for a schoolgirl engaged in some kind of art project. There was a small display of photographs about a lawyer, Dr. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, commissioned by the court to determine whether Ramón Mercader, the assassin of Trotsky, was insane or of sound mind and thus able to stand trial. A smaller display was of a much gorier kind, devoted to José de Jesús Negrete Molina (1873-1910), alias El Tigre de Santa Julia. Cuarón donated the skull to the library as a criminological exhibit. Like many a Mexican rogue, and many a much more bloodthirsty narco gangster today, El Tigre was lionized in popular culture as a daring defender of the poor, in his day by the famous printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, and in 1973 in a film directed by Arturo Martínez, entitled El Tigre de Santa Julia.
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| The skull of the Tigre de Santa Julia |
José Guadalupe Posada, The very sensational judgement of Jesús, or "El Tigre de Santa Julia"
The presence of such a grisly object among a collection of learned publications and papers is not particularly out of place in Mexico. In 2018 Jan and I visited the original building of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás Hidalgo in Morelia, capital of Michoacán state. There a room is devoted to the 19th-century founder of the university, Melchor Ocampo (1814-1861), a scientist, lawyer and liberal politician, and author of a famous letter setting out Ocampo’s definition of the perfect marriage. Ocampo was executed in 1861 by conservative pro-Spanish forces. He had told his daughter that when he died his heart would be in the university he had founded. His literal-minded daughter had her father’s heart removed and preserved in a glass container. If you would like to see Ocampo’s heart, on display, with his writings and assorted memorabilia, including the bullet-riddled and bloodstained shirt in which he died, visit the august centre of learning that he founded.
The heart of Melchor Ocampo
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