Architecture of Memory
I wasn’t expecting to find my great-grandfather’s name carved into the yellow stucco entrance portal of the Panteón de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the main cemetery in San Miguel de Allende, but there it was. My father pointed it out casually: Tomás Serrano, city councilman at the time the cemetery was established in 1948. I hadn’t even known he was a city councilman, just a leather worker and father of eleven kids.
And so while I’d come to Mexico to visit the dead for Día de Muertos, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I would be visiting with the dead—learning the texture of their lives, and extending the living memory of their stories out by one more generation.
In early November, San Miguel—that most and least Mexican of all Mexican cities—transforms into a very beautiful, very curated, rather Disney version of one of Mexico’s favorite traditional celebrations. Tens of thousands of tourists, Mexican marigolds and papel picado everywhere, doorways and vestibules set up with altars of varying degrees of commercial appeal…the joyous public theater of death.
But my dad knew where to look for the private celebration beneath the spectacle, and over the next few days, he would take me and my partner Andrew through three different architectures of memory.
Our first stop was for Stirling Dickinson, buried in what everyone (including the gringos) calls the “Gringo Section” of the cemetery. A fence and gate separate it from the rest of the grounds, and the contrast on Día de los Muertos is stark. On the Mexican side: riot and color, faded plastic plants alongside fresh flowers, families gathered around graves covered in marigolds (cempasúchil, to the Aztecs) and bottles of Coca-Cola, beer, and tequila…DIY memorials alive with personality and chintz.
On the American side: somber uniformity, no Day of the Dead visitors, each tombstone exactly like the others. Here there is disrepair and decay, but without warmth or remembrance around the graves.
Except for one. Stirling Dickinson’s gravestone stands out because my family had it specially made years ago to honor this remarkable American, a second father to my family and indeed of San Miguel itself. My dad had been saying that the stone would need to be remade soon, since it was falling apart when he’d visited a year earlier. But we were surprised to find that we weren’t the only ones to be willing to put out money to honor his memory: on arriving, we saw that the tombstone had been recently remade, in expensive granite but a perfect copy of my father’s original design. The new benefactors—an American-owned luxury rentals company—had added their name to ours at the bottom of the stone, and we were pleased. Stirling was painfully shy, but he was always making new friends…even in death, apparently.
Stirling had been my grandfather Simón’s best friend. When Simón left my grandmother and their eight children to start a new family in St. Louis, Stirling stepped in as family benefactor and friend—the American expat who stayed when the Mexican artist left. I have to believe that he would have much preferred to have been laid to rest on the other side of the gringo fence.
The next visit took us far back in time, to the main crypt of the famous Parroquia of San Miguel Arcángel, accessible only a few times per year via a wooden staircase below a massive slab of floor in front of the main altar. We descended with a Mexican woman who also wanted to visit her ancestors. Marigold flowers completely encircled the opening in the floor, lined the stairs, and ringed the edges of the crypt, where we and the woman started searching for our respective ancestors.
Not far from the ornate wall tomb of Anastasio Bustamante, Mexican president and independence fighter, we found the tiny floor stone of Maximiano Delgadillo, father of Francisca, who later married Tomás Serrano. Next to Maximiano’s tombstone was one bearing the same last name: young Pascual Delgadillo, died 1935, suicide, reasons unknown but speculated on by my family to this day. Apparently it took some doing to get the church to allow him to be buried there. I’d never heard of him before that day, and his story—just fragments, really, at this point—made me sad.
Independence heroes, my great-grandfather, a boy who killed himself, all resting together. And then tourists wearing Coachella hats and chatting a bit too loudly, a bit too cheerfully, started pouring down the stairs, and we left.
Emerging out of the famous Parroquia façade into the bright winter sun, we crossed the patio to the smaller church of San Rafael, more commonly known as the Santa Escuela de Cristo. No marigolds here, no other visitors. The columbarium was shut off by a floor-to-ceiling gate, and the lights were off. My dad pointed through the bars to the general area where he remembered Tomás and Francisca’s remains to have been interred—Tomás in 1973, Francisca in 1985. There are pictures of her holding me, and if I think hard, I remember her.
Standing there in the dark, looking through the gate at where my great-grandparents rest, I thought about that plaque at the cemetery entrance. Tomás had helped to create a space for the dead that is still today alive with remembrance. And now he and Francisca rest here, behind a locked gate, in the shadows, just steps from the marigolds and the tourists and the public celebration.
My dad was quiet for a moment. Then we left.
Later in the week, Andrew and I slipped into the Church of San Francisco during mass—one of colonial Mexico’s Churrigueresque masterpieces, all ornate stone and baroque glory. We followed women carrying flowers past worshipers to the vestry, past a life-sized Jesus lying in a glass coffin that has creeped me out since I was a kid, then down into the crypt chapel where my grandmother Irene rests, since her death about ten years ago.
The columbarium of the Church of San Francisco is…strange: aluminum doors the size and shape of bus station lockers filling the ancient stone archways, names in labelmaker letters, cempasúchil strictly prohibited. One metal wall has been overlaid with a giant overexposed photograph of Michelangelo’s Pietà, covering the grid of tiny doors like a bizarre, somber, tacky Advent calendar. Breathtaking colonial architecture above, storage facility below. But we maintained the ritual, sitting in silence for a few moments with about a dozen other visitors.
Anytime I’ve visited that place, I am at first saddened and almost offended by the fact that my grandmother rests there after the difficult and remarkable life she had. But eventually I come around—it’s ok. More than ok, it is right, it is fitting: there, in her favorite of San Miguel’s dozens of colonial churches and chapels, among the generations of neighbors who she’d lived her whole life with, where her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids can visit on the most Mexican of holidays, and where the architecture distills both time and memory for those of us who are still alive.