San Antonio is a fabulous destination. You should
really go, at
some point. The place is extraordinarily pretty at Christmas, with
colored lights strung in the live oak trees lining the Riverwalk,
in
the relaxed semi-Colonial air. If you're after a hotel, I'd
recommend the Plaza San Antonio, with great service and
peacocks strutting around on its croquet lawns. As a casual
tourist you'll be dazzled by this romantic atmosphere - and the
history, and the music, the food, my God. It's an easy city to
love.
Ridiculously easy.
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As a tourist, though, you're going to get the (correct)
sense of
missing something important. The San Antonio of the Mercado
and the Cathedral buzzes with the street energy of a foreign
capital. This is a city of badly-kept secrets and in some ways it's
a puzzling, fractured place. You'll pick up vibes all over the place,
especially if you're sensitive to architectural remnants and
half-erased shapes.... as a casual tourist, sadly, you're going to
miss the best part. Unless you have somebody to talk to.
San Antonio really needs to be told, not just shown.
(Is this going
to be on-topic? Yup. Admittedly it's going to be a long story, but
it's going to wrap around and all make sense. This IS a travel
piece. I swear.)
So if you and I were down there for Christmas at the
same time,
I'd kidnap you and drive you up Broadway from downtown, one of
my favorite stretches of road. We'd park on the small asphalt
triangle of Earl Able's parking lot at Broadway and Hildebrand,
north of downtown, and look west across this frantic
intersection. (Earl Able's is a tiny, rounded Art Moderne diner and
landmark, with corny slogans on the walls, and pie. You want
some pie?)
Across the street is an early 60's-style office building
on the
corner property. All back behind it, stretching out to the
southwest, see, all the way back west to 281, and all south
along Broadway, is the gorgeous live-oak-and-stone-bridge
wonderland of Brackenridge Park. All that dark forest is the big
urban park, with the zoo, the mini railroad, all those cool things.
If you look behind the rear parking lot of that office
building,
though, there's a small fenced area that looks like a neglected,
overgrown private cemetery, except instead of headstones, it's a
collection of statues and architectural fragments. Mysterious.
And off-limits to the public. And this stretch of Hildebrand here,
between Broadway and 281, it's like a curvy racetrack, and it
smells like rhino farts and monkey chow from the zoo just over
the back fence.
And there used to be two ornate, grand archways on
the north
edge of this property, by the roadside, leading nowhere, covered
with colorful Mexican tilework in a Spanish colonial vernacular, like
carriage archways. With a beautiful hand-painted image of the
Virgin. Vandalized. All this fragmentary evidence was driving me
nuts, I got really curious, so I parked and walked over one day,
looking for an explanation, taking my life in my hands walking
along Hildebrand, and on top of the larger arch there was an
oxidized bronze plaque.
It said DOCTOR URRUTIA.
(Let's go inside Earl Able's. You want some pie? Actually
that
meringue looks a little rubbery, go for the pecan, I think.)
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I got really intrigued with Dr. Urrutia. Mom and Dad
lived in this
neighborhood in the mid 50's, and I asked Mom, and she said, "Oh
yeah. He had a huge mansion there, like a palace, they tore it
down where he sold the property to USAA. You could see him
coming out in the mornings, and he always wore an opera cape.
He was old by the time, in his 70's or 80's, but he used to come
out and feed his peacocks running around. In this cape." My
uncle Ben chimed in about how that old doctor had about 10 kids,
and all of them were doctors, and about half of them had horns.
Ben is old and wise and completely trustworthy and also full of it.
So I turned to the web. . . and you're not going to
believe me.
The grand property across the street was called Miraflores,
and
Dr. Urrutia was Dr. Aureliano Urrutia, who died in his sleep in
1975, at the age of 103. After having five wives, the fifth about
40 years younger than he, 18 children, after practicing medicine
for 81 years, inventing medical procedures still used today, being
one of the first surgeons to separate Siamese twins - but that's
not the interesting part.
Dr. Urrutia was a Mexican political exile when he
arrived in San
Antonio in 1915, in his early forties.
He'd been born into full-blood Indian poverty in 1872
in
Xochimilco, the town of the floating gardens, a little south of
Mexico City. Urrutia rocketed out of the floating gardens like an
underwater surface-to-air missile. By 1895 Urrutia had graduated
at the top of his medical school class, sponsored by the president
of Mexico himself, Porfirio Diaz. Diaz named him his personal
physician at the age of 22.
Presidente Diaz got in trouble in 1910 and stepped
down with his
head still attached, his fortune intact - he'd been ruling for 30,
35 years if I remember right - but after Diaz, from 1910 to 1920,
Mexico wasn't ruled as much as it was repeatedly raped. This was
the age of bloody insurrections, clumsy intrigue, peasant
revolutions, open warfare, dust and blood. Orozco, Villa, Zapata.
More than once, the course of Mexico's history swiveled back and
forth on the murderous impulses of drunk corporals and illiterate
machine-gunners.
Diaz was replaced by a vegetarian idealist Francisco
Madero in
1910, but Madero had unleashed forces that he couldn't control.
He lasted about thirteen months. Madero's brother/advisor was
brutally murdered, a messy killing with a sword thrust into his
good eye for a first inning. Then Madero himself was openly
betrayed and shot in the neck. This made way for possibly the
worst president Mexico ever had, which is really saying
something: a drunken military gangster named Victoriano Huerta.
Well, guess who had operated on Huerta's eyes. Guess
who'd
been implicated in the murder of Madero. Guess who was made
Huerta's close advisor and trusted Minister of Government in
1912, and was supposedly more or less acting president. Guess
who! None other than the guy who lived across the street from
Earl Able's. Our friend, Doctor Urrutia.
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In the full sunshine of 1913 Dr. Urrutia was known
for trying to
pass a raft of reform legislation under Huerta, things like a blue
law, streetcar reform, and ordering the closure of the pulquerias.
(Pulque is a rich sort of fermented beer
made from agave, like tequila
and mescal, but brewed instead of distilled. Pulque has a long
long
history in Mexico.... the Olmecs and Zapotec civilizations made and
drank pulque -- it was the liquor of choice for Aztecs, for
whom public
drunkenness was an offense punishable by death, but who had a five-day
pulque frenzy at the end of the year... the Nahuatl had a goddess
named
Mayaheul with 400 breasts, each of which oozed pulque. To which I
say,
you go girl.
Hacienda pulquerias grew up as peasant-class
breweries and underground
drinking clubs. my understanding is that this was a peasant tradition,
wrapped around native traditions and legends (probably ethnic and
class
dynamics at work). with names like the Plumed Serpent or whatever,
strong centuries-old local identities, like English pubs. and I get
the sense that pulque was as deeply rooted and necessary to
make Mexican peasant life bearable, as vodka is/was in Russia.
The other thing about pulque is that it's
never been successfully bottled,
and it's extra perishable, and sort of a secret.
When Dr. Urrutia tried to close the pulquerias
in 1912 I guess he did so
ostensibly on public health grounds, because during the Diaz presidency
more and more peasants were getting toxemia from sloppy brewing practices.
Since this was the revolution, though, and since pulquerias
were logical birthplaces and hiding places for a Peasant Revolutionary
Network, and good places to hide ammunition and stuff, I'm supposing
that Dr. U had more on his mind than wholesome beer. That's just my
guess.)
But after dark, Urrutia was also accused of a medical
assassination - a federal
senator from Chiapas who publicly spoke against Huerta, Belisario
Dominguez, was arrested as an enemy of the government, in the
Jardin Hotel, on October 7, 1913, then taken to a cemetery,
where dark persistent rumor has it that Dr. Urrutia cut out his tongue.
Without anesthetic.
Huerta threw eighty congressmen into prison at one
point.
Urrutia himself issued an ill-advised ultimatum to the US
government, wanting official recognition, and Woodrow Wilson
responded with battleships to Veracruz. In the late summer of
1914, as this government fell apart, a lot of the Huertistas and
the well-to-do and ex-governors and henchmen drained out
through Veracruz. Dr. Urrutia was arrested there by General
Frederick Funston and was allowed to exile himself to the US: by
ship from Veracruz to New Orleans, train from New Orleans to San
Antonio, and two rail cars of treasure smuggled across the border
later, to finance his new American life and humanitarian career.
All of which brings us back here to Earl Able's parking
lot.
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It doesn't matter, really, whether Urrutia was an
innocent exile or a war
criminal or something in between. (Oh, I should have told you,
somewhere in here, that as a full-blood Indian, with charisma,
Urrutia would have provoked an extra edge of fear and respect
from some of his countrymen. It's wrong to say that all Mexicans
are superstitious, of course, but it's right to say many Mexicans
would still go a long way out of their way to avoid the kind of
personal bad Indian medicine that Dr. U would have dripped with.)
It doesn't matter. The two gates on Hildebrand have been taken
apart and carted off to SAMA. All that remains of his medical
empire is a strange, off-limits garden behind that early 60's-style
office building across the street.
Dr. Urrutia's story is a great example of San Antonio's
untold
backstory. I had to dig for this one, but you won't have to go
this far to find out why there's deer kept in the Quadrangle at
Fort Sam Houston (for Geronimo's lunch, when he was captive
there in 1886), or who Clara Driscoll wanted to piss on and why,
or the uncomfortable medical news about the defenders of the Alamo,
or
or two hundred other San Antonio stories. Of course every city,
even Cincinnati, has a backstory, but the ones around here seem
more sensual, more dramatic, human, tied to the landscape. You'll
enjoy this city so much more if you have somebody weave it for
you.
For another thing, the career of Dr. Urrutia also
speaks volumes
about the relationship of San Antonio to Mexico, and San
Antonio's curious double political nature, and what happens when
people weave their complicated histories back and forth across
this semi-tropical shadowland frontier. Stand in front of the
Alamo, and you're standing closer to Mexico City than you may
realize. A crime there isn't the same crime here. Some things are
talked about, some aren't.
And there's one more fatality to insert. Three years
after Urrutia
established himself here, in 1917, he crossed paths with that
General Frederick Funston in the lobby of the St. Anthony Hotel.
You know, the American who ran him down. As the story goes,
Urrutia froze, stood his ground - you can practically see him
clutching the panels of his black cape - and shot Funston el mal
de ojo, the evil eye. It's a matter of public record that Funston
died of a heart attack on that spot.
If San Antonio is half-Mexican, and it is, and always
balanced on
the edge of the spiritual border, then you do well to understand
that Mexico has its own unseen sources of emotional power, its
own rules, blood and dust, its own thing. You're allowed to be a
tourist and smile at bad medicine and el mal de ojo and the
Day
of the Dead if you want to. But the moment you're willing to
admit that such a thing is possible, is the same moment San
Antonio will ease into focus and open like a flower.
(How was your pie?)
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