Editor’s Note
This piece celebrates the Capilla de Jesús Market in Guadalajara as an architectural and civic masterpiece. While its exact architect remains a mystery, its design—a vibrant hub of commerce centered around a striking tower—captures the essence of joyful urban life.
Just look at the image. It is an absolute joy: it is the city at its best. It is the interior of the Capilla de Jesús Market. Built around 1942 as part of the sensible celebrations for the fourth centenary of the founding of Guadalajara. Its authorship is unknown: Aurelio Aceves? Rafael Urzúa? What is certain is that it is a masterpiece. Four wings of stalls bordering the streets and inside, a courtyard with, at its very center, a magnificent tower. From the tower appears to hang a very white pavilion with a series of arches very much in the Tapatía School style.
But the most important thing happens below: real life. Buyers and sellers in cheerful bustle and coexistence. Splendid fruits, a multitude of products, color, joy, delicious things to eat, fresh, right there: an unbeatable remedy for the downhearted. That is the age-old way our people know how to live. Nothing to do with the horrendous refrigerated box stores, like Walmart, where many people like to collaborate with unfair competition, buy foreign, crowd into pitiful checkout lines to pay “cheaper,” and continue contributing so that commercial injustice automatically becomes social injustice. Probably no downhearted person improves upon seeing the icy aisles of the so-called “supermarkets,” which are more like undermarkets.
The buyers at the markets arrive – mostly – on foot. Along the way, they greet neighbors, discuss the day’s news, gossip, get good exercise, and build neighborhood: they simply strengthen the sense of community.
Some carry practical foldable carts that allow them to roll their groceries with little effort. They don’t pollute with huge trucks or get tangled up in horrible, sun-baked asphalt parking lots like at the anonymous undermarkets, whose massive structures disfigure and make the entire surroundings desolate and hostile.
It is no coincidence that in France, for example, there is a strong movement against what they call “les grandes surfaces” (the big box stores), meaning the commercial air-conditioned boxes of external and internal ugliness, economically and socially harmful, which ruin the small, traditional, viable, and beneficial commerce. In many cities, these stores are already prohibited. As is a long-standing custom, while civilized countries have already been there and back, we are just going, naively building these serious mistakes. One of the most recent is El Batán, a noble neighborhood upon which fell a monster out of all proportion that contributes to the degradation of the context and to the wealth of the world’s richest man, who neither knows nor cares where El Batán is (nor Guadalajara).
So let’s celebrate and enjoy and favor with our presence and our purchases the noble and ancient neighborhood markets, like Capilla de Jesús, like Rizo, like Juárez, like Hidalgo… and let’s recover, for example, the San Diego market, the one that was inexplicably and sneakily abolished by the City Council to put in bureaucracy and who knows what else. Precisely, if the central neighborhoods of Guadalajara truly want to be revitalized, it is vital to preserve and strengthen their markets.
Fortunately, so many markets continue with their life. The ones to whom it is necessary to show again their enormous advantages are the multitude of middle-class people who find it very elegant and very practical to attend the harmful box stores. Long live the Capilla de Jesús market, long live all the other real markets.
