WHAT WAS MAZATLAN A 100 YEARS AGO?
By Jackie Peterson
Stepping into the past, to imagine how people lived in the Mazatlan of around 1900, is as easy as walking through a door or up a flight of stairs. Or both. Two locations in Old Mazatlan are currently offering the public just such an experience. Casa Machado, the small jewel of a museum that hotelier Ernesto Coppel (of the Pueblo Bonito and most recently the Nuevo Mazatlan development on the north edge of the city) recently opened, is a brief but worthwhile step into yesterday. You'd hardly know the museum is there if you weren't looking for it. There is no sign to identify the place, just the open door with a carpeted stairway beyond it. The entry door is on the right-hand side of Calle Constitucion, a one-way street, in the block just before it reaches the Plazuela Machado in Old Mazatlan. You pay the modest admission fee of 10 pesos at the desk just inside the door and climb the stairs -- but wait. Even before you reach the top of the stairway, where several rooms are furnished as they would have been 100 years ago, there are blown-up photos of Mazatlan's good old days that will command your attention. Good old days? Well, that depends on your point of view. Some visitors will admire the rolltop desk in the study, the first room on the left at the top of the stairs. It had the ability to cover the clutter (or one's private business) at a flick of the hand when its owner received unexpected company. A photo on the far side of the desk shows a lovely Victorian building that was torn down on Calle Belisario Dominguez to make way for the modern monstrosity of a bank building that stands there now. There's also a picture of the old Mazatlan airport, of a vintage a little later than 1900. It sat where the University of Sinaloa campus is now, with its runway extending northward to the site occupied today by the baseball stadium. Next you come to the dining room in what would have been an elegant turn-of-the-century home. Set for a gala banquet, with embroidered table linen and crystal stemware, this table for an obviously well-to-do family would have been the scene of an extremely formal dinner party, or perhaps a holiday family gathering.. Then you reach the parlor and your back begins to ache just thinking about how uncomfortable the sofa and side chairs look. And then there's a bedroom, probably for a young daughter, who would have sweltered in this climate with the fancy netting draping her bed and impeding the flow of air. A couple of old-time catalogs, in Spanish, attest to the presence in Mexico of an early-day Sears Roebuck or similar, just as there was in the United States and in Canada. Considering the primitive modes of transportation available to the Mazatlecos of yesterday to get to the larger cities with the big stores, it stands to reason that local residents would have done a lot of their shopping by mail order.

Like a jewel in the crown, although slightly out of the time frame, an often-reproduced painting by famous local artist Antonio Lopez Saenz -- the one where the shrimps seem to be parading down the street -- hangs in the hallway. In the original. Also out of context for the setting -- but with a history going back to 1898 -- is a room devoted to Mazatlan's venerable carnival. It contains a select few of the costumes worn over the years by various queens and kings of Carnaval Mazatlan. Besides the intricate nature of the gowns, what will leave the viewer agog is the question of how carnival royalty managed to survive the weight of such (fake) jewel-encrusted finery. A few blocks away, at the Archeological Museum, you can walk through another door and find yourself surrounded by the past. A collection of photos extending from as early as the 1860s includes a view of the building housing the Casa Machado. Actually called Los Arcos de Cannobio, it is shown in a blowup of a 140-year-old scene with horse-drawn buggies passing by. These conveyances were nicknamed "arañas" (spiders) because of their spoked wheels, and well into the automobile era, in fact as late as the 1960s, they continued to exist here offering picturesque carriage rides. Many other historic photographs of Mazatlan, some borrowed from private collectors, will remain on view through Aug. 15 or even later, depending on public interest. So says Hector Torres Nafarrete, director of the museum, which the federal government took over, under the aegis of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, in December of 1998. Among the photos is a selection of scenes from revolutionary times (1910-1914), as well as a turn-of-century victim of the bubonic plague, apparently brought by ship to Mazatlan from San Francisco. There are so many scenes of Olas Altas, a visitor can almost trace its evolution from an early-day landing point to its status today as a pleasant waterside walk with (depending on the season) a sandy beach. Museum director Torres promised that there would be explanations of the photos in English by July 1. Admission to the museum, on Calle Sixto Osuna just half a block back of Olas Altas, is free. That's the good news. The bad: as a federal institution, the museum is open only from Monday through Friday, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., which means that the working people of Mazatlan have little chance to view this exhibit. Incidentally, while the INAH budget does not permit weekend staffing for the museum, it has done a magnificent job of housing the permanent collection of artifacts from this region. And a folder in English gives the gist of the museum's contents to those visitors who do not speak Spanish. With or without the photo exhibit, the Archeological Museum is worth an hour or two of a visitor's time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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