Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, July 2, 2006

On the year 1817, the Spanish captured the Mexican independence leader Pedro Moreno. Moreno was originary from Lagos, Jalisco (today known as Lagos de Moreno), then a tiny and quiet village located on the hills of northern Jalisco. He was beheaded and his head was exhibited at the entrance of the town to set an example. Many years later, the Mexican government erected a monument to him at that same spot. They perhaps did not realize the irony in deciding that the monument should be a bust, and not the whole body. “The head is so out of proportion... I would like to propose to get rid of it and make a full-bodied one, what do you think?”, we were asked by Carlos Helguera Soiné, our host here (and also my uncle) who is, amongst many other things, the un-official sculptor of Lagos.

Lagos de Moreno does not figure in any tourist book, nor is the region of Los Altos de Jalisco. Nonetheless, this region has great colonial architecture as well as a strong literary and artistic tradition, which led to the city’s regional nickname, “The Athens of Los Altos”.

Maybe due to the same fact the Lagos is often overlooked, it has managed to retain its history and memory in a very unusual way. In contrast to other cities of the region and the rest of Mexico, its historic downtown has been remarkably well preserved, keeping the tranquility of the XIXth century. Its small plazas and churches have survived the atrocious invasion of commercial Mexican architecture. And near the main plaza, there is the house of the Helguera family, one of those places that escaped the winds of time.

The first Helguera arrived to the region from Spain in 1536. One of them bought the house of Lagos shortly after it had been built (circa 1750). After changing hands for a while, it was purchased by someone on the maternal side of the Helgueras (the Soiné González) before the independence and around the time when Pedro Moreno was beheaded in the plaza. After that, some nine generations of Helgueras have lived in it, and after the death in the 1960s of Elena Soiné, a matriarch of the town and the official owner then, Carlos took over the management of the house and lives there now. From the beginning, he observed a strict rule of preservation of the aunt Elena, to the point of the placement of every piece of furniture and every painting. The house is like a museum, with embroideries by the earlier generations, armoires with XIXth century pieces of clothing worn by people like my great-grandfather Luis Soiné as well as his books in German, and the intact Eighteenth-century kitchen with black vaults that likely contain the smoke from all the dishes cooked there for three centuries.

The soul of the house is Carlos himself, who in the classic –and utopian—tradition of the idealist Helguera family, is a tireless cultural entrepreneur and a professional sculptor of a strictly realist kind. In his studio, we spoke about the role of realism in today’s art. As I am more of a “social sculptor” and he an academic one, our dialogue would appear hard to bridge, and yet it was greatly gratifying.

I gave a workshop on the EPD project at the cultural center of Lagos, with local artists and professors as participants who offered us tostadas with beans. Showing great interest, their questions drifted toward the inevitable terrain of “what is performance art?” and “what is a found object?”. One local art teacher asked me with great worry on whether doing “traditional” art was “bad” and on whether her efforts should be directed to making contemporary art from now on. Thinking on my previous conversation with Carlos, I thought appropriate to say that, even though it is important and potentially enriching to learn about today’s art tendencies, just to make “contemporary art” out of imitation does not make much sense specially when one has not assimilated or understood the codes and references that constitute the visual vocabulary of this art. And whereas it is not desirable to promote a cultural agenda that sticks only to traditional forms, it is equally counter-productive to make conceptual art only because it is the kind of art made elsewhere.

I had, however, the selfish impulse of going even further and saying no, that contemporary art should be forbidden in Lagos, and that nothing ever should change here because there were already too many places where everything changes and that change only seems to generate uniformity of thought and creativity. I left Lagos with a feeling of sadness, of not wanting to loose that parenthesis of memory that is symbolized by that unusual house and its countless family items, in a city that is well guarded by the hills of Jalisco and the ignorance of Lonely Planet. But those barriers of timelessness are quickly eroding, as it is shown by the arrival of Wal-Mart and of two U.S. chains (KFC and Domino’s) in the main plaza. It would be good if what we consider progress would not destroy or devalue everything that stands on its way. Perhaps my reaction is nothing else than the acknowledgement that the present finally invaded the last frontier of my private memories and my most intimate unrest. Even then, I will still suggest to Carlos to help keep the oversized head of Pedro Moreno, perhaps not in the spirit of celebrating the local hero, but maybe as a celebration of those wonderful historic misunderstandings and the glorious jewels protected by forgetfulness.

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Lagos de Moreno no aparece en las guías de turistas, que ni siquiera mencionan la región de Los Altos de Jalisco. Y sin embargo, esta región, que se encuentra entre Guadalajara y Guanajuato, tiene una gran arquitectura colonial y ha producido muchos de los grandes escritores y artistas de México. Quizá por el hecho mismo que Lagos de Moreno es una ciudad que suele pasar desapercibida, ha retenido su historia y su memoria de forma poco usual. A diferencia de otras ciudades, su centro histórico se ha conservado de forma prodigiosa, manteniendo el sabor y la tranquilidad del siglo diecinueve, y sus plazas y sus iglesias han sobrevivido al ataque de la atroz arquitectura moderna comercial mexicana. Y la casa de la familia Helguera de Lagos es uno de los ejemplos principales de esta continuidad histórica. El primer Helguera llegó de España a esta la región en 1536. Un Helguera compró la casa de Lagos hacia finales del siglo dieciocho (la construcción de la casa data de hacia 1750). Desde entonces, unas nueve generaciones de ancestros han vivido en esta casa que hoy mantiene y habita mi tío Carlos Helguera Soiné, preservando el arreglo original. La “casa de Lagos”, como toda nuestra familia la ha conocido por generaciones, y con sus ruidos fantasmagóricos en sus patios y en sus pasillos, es un ejemplo vivo del realismo mágico. La casa, como museo, contiene bordados de las tatarabuelas cuando estas eran niñas; trajes decimonónicos en los closets y libros en alemán del bisabuelo que era profesor de la universidad, y una cocina cuya bóveda preserva el humo de los platillos cocinados ahí desde el siglo dieciocho. Dejé Lagos con una cierta tristeza por no querer perder aquél paréntesis de memoria, representado por aquella casa y la infinidad de objetos familiares que contiene, la autenticidad de Lagos resguardada por los cerros de los altos y la ignorancia de su existencia por Lonely Planet.