“Dios mediante” (God willing) said the nun at the end of our friend Chris West’s phone call. He had reserved two places for us on a tour of her convent’s chapel in Tlalpan, designed by Luis Barragán (1902-2988), probably modern Mexico’s finest architect, and blessed (not finished as the nun leading our tour explained) in 1963.
Tlalpan is an ancient district of Mexico City, rather off the main tourist itineraries and relatively untouched since Spanish colonial times by the concrete of developers. Its narrow streets are lined by the walls of many old buildings pierced by just a few windows behind sturdy metal bars, for the light is all interior, hidden from those of us on the streets. The entrance to the convent is an unprepossessing wall and a large wooden door.
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| The entrance to the convent on Calle Miguel Hidalgo. |
The nun who led the tour, explained that the convent was originally located in a private home rented from a Spanish family, where the closed order could avoid “the laws of Juárez.”
Juárez, an “Indian” from Oaxaca in southern Mexico, as any school student will know is the hero of Mexican history who doggedly resisted the invasion of the forces of Napoleon III in 1862, and who fought conservative Mexican monarchists in the civil war provoked by the Laws of the Reform. Juárez’s laws decisively separated church and state, confiscated many church properties and restricted the liberties of the Catholic clergy. He may be a hero in school textbooks, but not in convents, monasteries and seminaries.
The legacy of the Reform could still be felt in the post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in western Mexico where a cruel civil war between followers of Christ the King and the federal government was fought. Barragán was born in Guadalajara in western Mexico and was profoundly Catholic. In 1955 he offered to convert the convent of the Clarisas Capuchinas into a modern complex, at the heart of which is the chapel and its associated spaces.
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| The altar and the santísimo. To the right the latticework separating the main chapel from the chapel of the faithful. |
The chapel itself is a small, spare space quite adequate for the 60 nuns who then occupied the convent – there are now only 12, all of advanced years. Barragán designed the spaces, the colours of the walls, the latticework work and stained-glass that admit plentiful natural light, and the furniture. The altar is unusually simple for a Mexican religious space, pride of place given to El Santísimo (the Holy Sacrament). There is but one side chapel, to the left of the altar and shaped like the prow of a boat, a tall stained-glass window at its front, and a huge wooden cross at the rear. The. cross is lit directly on only one day of the year at Easter, when the nuns worship in the side chapel. On an upper level at the rear of the main chapel is the choir, no longer used because too few nuns are able to walk up the stairs, where more latticework work admits more natural light. There are only two small electric lights set in the ceiling to supplement the natural light, used only for vespers, which the remaining nuns no longer celebrate. In fact, there are probably no more than half a dozen electric lights in all the spaces designed for the nuns by Barragán. They must have the smallest electric bill in all of Mexico.
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| The side chapel, shaped like a prow, its stained glass and the cross. |
Our tour took us to a corridor through which the priest enters for daily mass. Here there is a small wooden opening through which the nuns confess to the priest, who is seated in the confessional in the Chapel of the Faithful. The corridor leads to the sacristy where a mother superior ordered that a full-length mirror be installed because priests came to mass with their robes in disorder (Barragán made provision for no mirror). The Capuchins are the second order of the Franciscans (the first being the male friars/priests, the third the secular faithful). Technically, mass should be conducted by a Franciscan priest, but there are now so few that only one of the four priests who preside in the chapel is a member of the order. The remainder come from the Pontifical University in Tlalpan.
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| The altar seen from the side chapel. |
Next came the Chapel of the Faithful, where the nuns’ family members and the public can gather on only two days a year (Christmas and Easter). The faithful have a full view of the altar and cross, but cannot see the nuns. The last two rooms visited were provided for family visits (one permitted every three months). The room for the nuns is small with sturdy wooden furnishings and two starkly modern paintings by Chucho Reyes (1880-1977). On one side is yet more latticework and behind it a solid wooden door that closes off a much larger room, again with one or two of Chucho Reyes’ paintings, which is opened to allow conversation between visitor and nun. Because there are now so few nuns, visits are no longer conducted in these rooms.
Barragan also designed a refectory (not open to the public tours).
After the tour, the nuns offer for sale a variety of items: some religious charms, bookmarks featuring Santa Clara (the patron saint of the order – hence Clarisas Capuchinas), assorted sweets, and a very Mexican drink, rompope (a sort of egg and cinnamon punch). The bottles had no labels, so I assume that they were made (and consumed?) by the nuns. A Japanese couple who took the tour and understood very little (they spoke no Spanish and understood only a little English) asked me to find out for them what was the mysterious liquid in the bottle.
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| The oratorio de Amaxalco. |
Our next visit in Tlalpan was much less successful. The Oratorio de Amaxalco is an 18th century chapel saved from demolition by the citizens of Tlalpan, but as we discovered, not open to the public. We could view it only through the iron of the gates.
