Miraflores

San Antonio's Mexican Garden of Memory

By: Anne Elise Urrutia, Toms Ybarra-Frausto (Foreword by)

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Paperback | 28 June 2022

At a Glance

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144 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.8 x 22.8 x 1.27

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Aureliano Urrutia, a prominent physician and public servant 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 Asunsolo, and Dionicio Rodriguez, 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.

Aureliano Urrutia, a prominent physician in Mexico City, built Miraflores garden after immigrating to Texas during the Mexican Revolution. A man of science, he valued nature, art, literature, history, and community. The garden, whose name roughly translates to "behold the flowers," was built primarily from 1921 to 1945. Its plants, architecture, sculpture, and artisanship formed a cultural landscape reflecting Urrutia's love for and memory of his homeland. Though recent decades have rendered much of the garden decayed and barely recognizable, it is now part of San Antonio's historic Brackenridge Park. Miraflores: San Antonio's Mexican Garden of Memory recounts the garden's history and celebrates the importance of the cultural, historical, and artistic meaning of a place.

Industry Reviews

"The images give a vivid sense of what has been lost ... and what would need to be restored to bring the site back to its former glory." - San Antonio Report

"Miraflores is a multi-layered masterpiece. It successfully combines rigorous biography, meticulously detailed art historical documentation/reconstruction, and extensive cultural history as context, all with a spell-binding lyricism, coming together to create the definitive text on the garden and the man behind it." - Southwest Contemporary

"The story of Miraflores garden may be a part of Anne Elise Urrutia's family history but the San Antonio writer says it is also an integral part of the city's cultural heritage... Urrutia explores the history and significance of the garden that was built by her great-grandfather, Dr. Aureliano Urrutia." - San Antonio Magazine

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