They rushed into the cloister, convinced that they would find hidden treasures within. The revolutionary struggle of 1910 was simmering in Mexico and leader Emiliano Zapata's army dreamed of taking the capital. Many of the city's wealthy residents fled in fear of a Zapatista invasion, whose men had already arrived in neighboring Xochimilco and Milpa Alta. Zapata's rebels took over the Colegio de San Ángel from the Carmelite Order, confident that it contained riches worth plundering. They dug in and found no money, gold, or jewelry, but instead came across a mysterious discovery: 12 mummified corpses.
The school is a viceregal building built in 1638 on a fertile plain south of the capital. It is a monastery where several generations of Carmelite priests had lived for centuries in complete isolation and seclusion from the world, where they devoted themselves to prayer, meditation and the study of theology, and where women were not allowed to set foot. The brothers had a spacious garden of about 40 hectares and servants who were responsible for growing fruits and vegetables and raising the animals that fed the religious but which they also sold to support their holy project. This viceregal building defied the reform laws of 1859 that provided for the nationalization of ecclesiastical property, since the regent priest was the confessor of one of Benito Juárez's generals and intervened to prevent the expropriation. For this reason, decades later, the insurgents came to the place hoping for wealth, but they were sorely disappointed because the priests had made it their mission to transport everything of value for fear of losing it to the wave of Juarist reforms.
Glass-lidded coffins displaying unidentified mummies. Aggi Garduño
The rebels were not interested in the mummies and left the school. As they left, the neighbors entered the place and found the mummified bodies, a true revelation. “People were impressed by what they saw as miracles,” says Eva Ayala, director of what is now the El Carmen Museum, located in the old cloister of San Ángel and which gives its name to the colonial neighborhood in southern Mexico- City. After the revolutionary storm calmed, a new priest came to reclaim the Carmelite territories and decided to bury the mummies, but the neighbors objected. It is thanks to this resistance that the mummies have been preserved to this day, surrounded by secrets and legends. “People were surprised at the preservation of the bodies through natural mummification, because it is not a mummification like the Incas, the Egyptians or the Hebrews.” These bodies were preserved through natural humification through desiccation, which is what happens, for example, with an apple or “This is the case with a grape that becomes a raisin,” explains Ayala.
The mummies are preserved in good condition thanks to the work of the museum directors, who have arranged the crypt so that visitors can admire these corpses and learn about their history and the mystery that surrounds them.
The director of the El Carmen Museum, Eva María Ayala. Aggi Garduño
These mummies have not only fascinated several generations of San Ángel residents, but they also surprise the officials who preserve the museum, who speak of apparitions and strange nighttime noises that give them goosebumps, and the visitors who immerse themselves in the stories and legends surrounding these deceased. It is said that one of these bodies, that of a woman, was carried to her final resting place on a palanquin because she was not allowed to touch the sacred ground intended only for the brothers. Only men could come here, women weren't even dead.
Another such story is the legend of the Bride of the White House, about a young woman of the Viceroyalty period whose fiancé traveled to the south of the continent, perhaps to the Viceroyalty of Peru, and plunged her into an agonizing wait . , so he dies of sadness. The young man married on this pilgrimage, years later he returned to New Spain and one night rode near his ex-fiancée's house, where he discovered a light that attracted him. The man was surprised to see the woman, young, beautiful, vital, seductive. He anxiously climbed through the window and looked for her so he could kiss her. She took him in her arms, held him close, and then he discovered that she was a skeleton, a dead woman, holding him to her breast. The man died of fear. The corpse at the heart of this story is that of a woman dressed in white who the museum director believes to be a bride who died before her wedding. They are stories that capture the imagination so much that these mummies can also be seen in the cinema, in horror films such as Poison for the Fairies from 1986, directed and written by Carlos Enrique Taboada, and La Tante Alejandra the year 1980, Carlos Enrique Taboada directed by Arturo Ripstein.
Mortuary chapel of the old Colegio de San Ángel, now El Carmen Museum. Aggi Garduño
So far there is no certainty about who these people were, but Ayala says that some mummies could be viceroys, perhaps monks who were buried by their companions, while others may have died in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people, for which he had enough money for permission from the priests to rest eternally under the monastery church. Ayala is a clothing specialist and has analyzed the clothing of some mummies to find out when they were buried or what social class they belonged to. “I don't think they were very wealthy, aristocratic people, because I don't notice any particularly elegant clothing on them, but I do think they were from a privileged class,” he says. But the director is not satisfied with this explanation and wants to promote research that will unravel the secret of the mummies of San Ángel. “We have to carry out physical anthropology studies to learn more about them and to examine these corpses,” says the official in charge of preserving these corpses, dug up by the greed of the Zapatista insurgents who did not find the treasures which they were looking for, but rather they discovered a heritage that continues to fascinate today.
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