I’ll confess to a fraught relationship with colonial architecture. On the one hand, there are plenty of breathtaking, soaring monuments to… the other hand.

Early in our time together, Dorothy and I thought it would be swell to tour the entire Mission system in California, starting at Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá and driving up the coast to finish at San Francisco Solano. I can’t say whether we genuinely planned on visiting all 21 Missions, or how long we’d planned to take. Because the wheels fell off at the very next Mission up the coast, San Luis Rey de Francia.

Two turned out to be plenty. Maybe it’s better now, but back then the historical info at each Mission managed to artlessly gloss over the fact that the Missions were built with slave labor. Which seemed like a significant fact in its own right, but the Happy Natives narrative that was offered in its place was horrific. As if a German World War II memorial had chosen to focus on extolling the economic miracle of the Reich’s industrial output. Nice factory, Volkswagen.

Oaxaca is chock full of stunning Colonial buildings. Sadly, there’s nothing to do but suppress the cognitive dissonance and try to take them at face value. It’s probably easiest to do that at Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, if for no other reason than the way it’s used today. The church is the Church, and has its own crimes to answer for, but the Museo and the Jardín are inspiring examples of how a people can repurpose their painful past to tell their own stories.

Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán

The complex at Santo Domingo de Guzmán is broken up into three parts. The actual building is split between the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán and the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, Santo Domingo. The balance of the grounds is taken up by the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca.

Built by the Dominicans as a convent, the original construction dates to 1608, although the structure wasn’t completed until 1724, when the construction of Chapel del Rosario began. Today, the Catholic Church still uses Chapel del Rosario to conduct services, while the convent side of the structure houses the Museo.

As you’d expect, this is no Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. It’s a gaudy, extravagant testament to the power of… the other hand. It’s the Liberace of churches, and is spectacular in every sense, both good and bad.

Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, Santo Domingo

The Museo occupies the rest of the structure, and is less gaudy than the Chapel, but only because the bar has been set so high. It’s still plenty fucking Baroque, especially given that it was built for nuns. No vows of poverty and austerity for these nuns, no sir. These are no Little Sisters of the Poor, these here are your Dominican nuns. Your fancy nuns. I’m sure a lovely chocolate got placed on each one’s pillow every night.

But what makes the Museo special isn’t what it was, it’s what it’s become. What had been a convent now houses a museum telling the full story of the Oaxacan peoples, from long before the Spaniards showed up. What had been, in many ways, the hub of an occupying force became an opportunity to celebrate both the rich histories of the peoples the Spaniards were trying to conquer and the efforts of the Oaxaqueños to resist Spanish rule. I can’t tell you how thrilling it was to walk into a colonial building and get treated to a history of the Resistance.

There’s more than that, as there are exhibits focusing on the art and culture of the region. Most notably, there’s an incredible exhibit on the artifacts unearthed from Tomb 7 at Monte Alban, just half a dozen miles west of Oaxaca de Juárez. We didn’t take any pictures, but if we had you’d be able to see this:

By the way, we were unsurprised to learn that famed Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo had his hands all over the Guzmán. He was instrumental in founding the Museo as well as the Jardín. He also founded the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, right across the street from the Guzmán, as well as the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín and Taller Arte Papel Oaxaca, both in Etla. That man got around.

More than that, Toledo understood something that no one else did at the time: the connection between culture and commerce. Oaxaca is a Unesco World Heritage site and a major tourist attraction because of the centrality of traditional culture, not despite it. A hotel and convention center wouldn’t have made that true, but literally everything Toledo touched and influenced supported the indigenous peoples and their traditional art forms in ways that drove economic development for all participants.

It’s not a cookbook that can be repeated everywhere. You need a pretty strong cultural bedrock, like Oaxaca’s, to make it work. But Toledo’s work, and Oaxaca itself, are proof that you don’t have to choose between art and commerce. Done right, you can have both.

Francisco Toledo, thank you.

Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca

As delightful as the Museo is, representing the traditional Oaxacan fuck you to propriety and authority, the Jardín is all that and more. The convent was nationalized in 1859 by Oaxacan hero Benito Juárez when he was President. The structure was turned over to the military for use as barracks, and the open area that became the Jardín, which had originally been the convent’s orchard, was used as their parade grounds.

In the late 1990s, the Mexican government proposed turning the Guzmán into a convention center and luxury hotel, with the grounds slated for a parking lot. In response, Francisco Toledo, concerned about the impact to a historic location, proposed creating a cultural museum and ethnobotanical garden. He garnered enough public support that the government backed down and adopted his plan wholesale. So very on brand for Oaxaca. The Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca opened in 1998.

The key to the Jardín is the Etno of Etnobotánico. It isn’t merely a botanical garden, showing off the native flora. It’s a carefully curated exhibit, showcasing the relationship between the native peoples and the incredibly diverse plant life found in the state. For the most part, plants aren’t there because they’re pretty, they’re there because they have a history of utility and meaning to Oaxaqueños.

The Jardín is also unlike a traditional botanical garden in the sense that you can’t just walk through it. As lovely as it would be to stroll through and maybe have a picnic, that’s not permitted. The potential for damage to the specimens is high, and the experience is meant to be docented and educational. For example, there is no signage anywhere in the Jardín, as they don’t want signs mucking up the view (although they’re discussing QR codes for the future). Which makes it pretty impenetrable without a guide.

Spanish tours run all day long, but there’s a single tour in English every day, from 11:00 – 1:00. They take 25 people on each tour, and not a person more. We know this because we arrived at 10:50 and found they were sold out. We came at 10:30 the next day, to find they were sold out. We were finally able to get in on our third try, by getting there at 10:00, securing our spot, and waiting an hour.

When the tour finally started, it was clear they weren’t fooling around. Our tour guide was one of their PhD researchers. The Jardín is divided into distinct biomes, and he walked us through all of them. There are plants represented from across Oaxaca’s rich pageant: tropical rainforests, tropical dry forests, cloud forests, desert and semi-desert biomes, and Alpine biomes.

As the most recent use of the Jardín’s space was as a military parade ground, there were no plants there when work began. Every specimen in the Jardín was planted as part of the overall design. There are currently examples of over 1,000 species, with the goal being a total of 1,300 species. Which, incredibly, would be only 10% of the plants native to Oaxaca.

All of which is to completely undersell the Jardín’s eye-bleeding beauty. Here are some views from the balconies of the Museo, and one from the grounds.

Maize

The tour itself started where it should have, with maize.

This is no ordinary maize. This is the OG, the abuela, the source. There are over 35 strains of domesticated maize cultivated in Oaxaca, and they all stem from this plant. Cultivars of Granmama have been grown as far back as six to seven thousand years.

The ears are tiny, maybe two inches long, and there’s no cob, just some minuscule corn seeds. Kind of like the inside of a pea. As fertile as she has been in spawning domestic cultivars, Granmama herself doesn’t provide any food.

Agave

Unsurprisingly, agave plants are strongly represented in the Jardín. There are over 200 distinct agave species in Oaxaca, but only about thirty of them are used in making mezcal. The rest are used in construction and textiles.

Kapok (Pochote)

Kapok trees are also important in the history of Oaxaca. Mayans used the kapok, or pochote, fibers in weaving, and worshipped the trees as foundational to their world myths. Our guide shared an origin myth that god had split the tree in two and produced the first peoples. Mayans considered the pochote a world tree, connecting the underworld, middle world, and upper world. It’s distinctive spikes protect it from animals attempting to eat its thin bark.

Incredibly Useful Plants

Many of Oaxaca’s plants are useful all over the world, and many of those are rainforest plants.

The greenhouse held two of the most useful plants, from a medical and commercial perspective. Unfortunately, the greenhouse can also be a hothouse…

Minus the Instagram Shaving Mirror filter, they look more like this:

That’s better.

The plant on the left is a Vanilla Orchid, and the one on the right is a Cabaza de Negro, or Mexican Yam. The Oaxacan Vanilla Orchid is a wild strain which has been domesticated, and is the primary genus from which commercial vanilla is harvested. It is found throughout Mexico, but our docent claimed it was first cultivated in Oaxaca. He has a PhD and I don’t, so there you go.

The Mexican Yam is even more interesting, and more influential. It contains diosgenin, a steroid that was used as the precursor for the synthesis of progesterone and cortisone. We all owe quite a bit to the humble Mexican Yam.

While Vanilla Orchids and Mexican Yams have had impact all over the world, perhaps no plant has been more influential in Mexico’s history than the Opuntia, or Prickly Pear Cactus.

It’s not the plant itself that’s special, although its edible fruit (called Tuna, which is super confusing at ice cream stalls) is quite a popular snack. Rather, it’s a little parasite called Cochineal that makes Opuntia exceptional.

Left to their own devices, the insects will kill their host, so Opuntia farmers have to wipe them off to preserve their harvest. In a happy accident, the female Cochineal produces Carminic Acid. Which, when crushed, produces the most amazing natural red dye. We got lessons in Cochineal when we visited a weaving studio in Teotitlán del Valle, and again when Dorothy and my sister Nef took a class on natural dye techniques.

Prior to the Spanish Conquest, Aztecs and Mayans used Cochineal both for dying textiles and coloring manuscripts. When the Spanish showed up and discovered Cochineal, they did what colonists do: they exploited the fuck out of it, with only silver beating it as an export commodity. In fact, the Guzmán convent was built with the funds provided by Cochineal export. Thankfully, the conquistadores were immune to irony.

For the statisticians amongst you, it takes five million bugs to extract 32 pounds of carminic acid. These days you’ll find it in food coloring, lipstick, and Campari. Rub some crushed bugs on your lips and drink up!

Remains of the Archaeological Day

The monks who built the Guzmán left behind some of their works, beyond the building itself.

The monks burnt limestone in these kilns to make mortar, and used the mortar to build the Guzmán.

There was also a laundry on premises. It was in a forbidden zone (another reason letting people wander loose is a bad idea), but we were able to get a glimpse.

Soap trees would have been planted nearby, which is what the Jardín has done.

Our guide referred to this as a Pipé or Pipay tree, but I can’t find any information on it. I also can’t recall exactly how soap was extracted from this tree, but my notes indicate that a PhD said it was true, so shut up.

Crazy Fucking Plants

Sure, the Etno part of Etnobotánico is fascinating, rich, and culturally resonant. All the reasons you read this blog. But the truth is there are just acres and acres of insane, otherworldly specimens at the Jardín. I’m always willing to pander to my readers, so please enjoy some Crazy Fucking Plants.