miraflores: san antonio’’s mexican garden of memory

Aureliano Urrutia, a prominent physician in Mexico City, built Miraflores garden after he immigrated to San Antonio, Texas, from Mexico in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution. A man of science, Urrutia professed the importance of nature, art, literature, history, music, and community.

Everything in Miraflores, located near the headwaters of the San Antonio River--the plants, architecture, sculpture, and artisanship--formed an atmospheric landscape reflecting Urrutia’s love for and memory of his homeland. Sculptures and fountains created by Luis L. Sanchez, Ignacio Asúnsolo, and Dionicio Rodríguez, and other Mexican artists and artisans evoked the ideals of Mexican culture, all surrounded by Talavera tile and plant species native to Mexico.

The wear of time saw many of the garden’s features, artworks, and landscape elements decayed, lost, or significantly altered. Despite being one of the country’s unique cultural landscapes, situated at the edge of historic Brackenridge Park, the garden became barely recognizable.

In Miraflores, Anne Elise Urrutia, the great-granddaughter of Urrutia, recounts the garden’s history, drawing on family archives and other primary sources to reconstruct this remarkable story.

Miraflores celebrates the importance of green spaces in urban areas and the vitality of a place’s cultural, historical, and artistic meanings. Urrutia’s garden was a magical gift to Texas and an international tribute to his Mexican homeland.

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, formerly of the Rockefeller Foundation and Stanford University, is a native San Antonian and an independent scholar of U.S. Latino and Latin American arts and culture.