Miraflores ~ autographed
Miraflores: San Antonio’s Mexican Garden of Memory
by Anne Elise Urrutia
Foreword by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto
Now available. Featured at the Texas Book Festival 2022.
***Direct from the Author (Continental USA only) ***
The Twig (San Antonio local bookstore)
Nowhere Bookshop (San Antonio local bookseller)
Miraflores reveals the story of an internationally significant cultural landscape in Texas
—Trinity University Press
Dr. Aureliano Urrutia, a prominent physician from Mexico City, built Miraflores garden after immigrating to San Antonio, Texas from Mexico in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution. A man of science, he valued nature, art, literature, history, and community. The garden was built from 1921 to 1962. Its plants, architecture, sculpture, and artisanship formed a cultural landscape reflecting Urrutia’s love for and memory of his homeland. Despite being one of the country’s unique cultural landscapes, the garden today is decayed and barely recognizable.
As a teenager, I first ventured in to photograph the disappearing family garden of my great-grandfather. Over the years my research on Miraflores and the Urrutia family history inspired me to rebuild, through words and pictures, the doctor’s lost landscape. Miraflores: San Antonio’s Mexican Garden of Memory recounts the garden’s history and uncovers his message of cultural heritage communicated through this once beautiful and expressive place.
The beauty of Miraflores as a garden to delight and instruct calls out to be resurrected.
—Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, from the foreword
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto contributes a foreword to the book. Formerly of the Rockefeller Foundation and Stanford University, he is a native San Antonian and an independent scholar of U.S. Latino and Latin American arts and culture.
Published by Trinity University Press, ©2022.
Posted December 11, 2022; updated on January 18, 2023.
