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)

Book People

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

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.