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.
Price: $32.95
Pages: 144
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Imprint: Maverick Books
Publication Date:
28 June 2022
Trim Size: 8.50 X 8.50 in
ISBN: 9781595349361
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX), ART / Sculpture & Installation, GARDENING / Regional / Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX), HISTORY / Latin America / Mexico
"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
As a teenager, Anne Elise Urrutia ventured into Miraflores, the disappearing family garden of her great-grandfather, Aureliano Urrutia, in San Antonio, Texas. Over the years she has continued to explore the garden and its history. Her research on Miraflores has allowed her to rebuild, through words and pictures, the doctor’s lost landscape and receive his message of cultural heritage communicated through this once beautiful and expressive place. Urrutia, a native San Antonian, is the recipient of an International Latino Book Award silver medal, the Mimi Lozano Best History Book award, and the San Antonio Conservation Society Foundation Publication Award. She holds an English degree from Colorado College and blogs at quintaurrutia.com. She lives in Western Massachusetts.
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.
