They rushed into the cloister, convinced that they would find hidden treasures in its bowels.
Mexico was boiling with the revolutionary struggle of 1910 and the army of leader Emiliano Zapata dreamed of taking the capital.
Many of the city's wealthy residents were fleeing for 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 Order of the Carmelites, certain that it hid riches worth looting.
They dug inside and found no money, gold or jewelry, but instead came across a mysterious discovery: 12 mummified bodies.
The school is a viceroyalty building built in 1638 on what were fertile plains located south of the capital.
It is a cloister where several generations of Carmelite priests had lived for centuries in total confinement, separated from the world, where they dedicated themselves to prayer, meditation, the study of theology and where women could not set foot.
The friars had an extensive 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 resisted the Reform Laws of 1859, which established the nationalization of ecclesiastical assets, because the regent priest was the confessor of one of Benito Juárez's generals and intervened to prevent the dispossession.
That is why decades later the insurgents arrived at the place and hoped to gain wealth, but they were severely disappointed, because the priests had taken charge of moving everything valuable for fear of losing it to the Juarista reformist wave.
Coffins with glass lids in which unidentified mummies are exhibited. Aggi Garduño
The mummies did not interest the rebels, who 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 considered a miracle,” says Eva Ayala, director of what is now the El Carmen Museum, established in the old cloister of San Ángel, which has given its name to the colonial neighborhood located in the south of Mexico City.
After the revolutionary storm calmed down, a new priest came to recover the domains of the Carmelites and decided to bury the mummies, but the neighbors opposed it.
It is due to this resistance that the mummies have been preserved to this day, surrounded by mystery and legends.
“People were surprised by the preservation of the bodies due to natural mummification, because it is not mummification like what the Incas, the Egyptians or the Hebrews did.
These bodies were preserved by natural humification due to drying, which is what happens, for example, with an apple or a grape, which becomes a raisin,” explains Ayala.
The director of the El Carmen museum, Eva María Ayala. Aggi Garduño
These mummies have fascinated not only the several generations of residents of San Ángel, but they also surprise the officials who preserve the museum, who speak of apparitions and strange nocturnal sounds that make the skin crawl, and the visitors, who immerse themselves in the stories. and legends that surround these deceased.
It is said that one of these corpses, that of a woman, was carried on a litter to her final resting place, because she could not touch the sacred ground intended only for the friars.
Only men could set foot here, women not even dead.
Another of these stories is the legend of the
Bride of the White House
, about a young woman from the viceregal era whose fiance went to the south of the continent, perhaps to the viceroyalty of Peru, leaving her immersed in a wait full of anguish, so dies of sadness.
The young man got married on that pilgrimage, years later he returned to New Spain and one night he rode near the house of his ex-fiancée, where he discovered a light that attracted him.
The man was surprised to see the woman, young, beautiful, vital, seductive.
He climbed through the window, anxious, and looked for her to kiss her.
She took him in her arms, held him tightly and that's when he discovered that it was a skeleton, a dead woman who held him against her chest.
The man died of fright.
The corpse that fuels this story is that of a woman dressed in white, who the museum director believes is a bride who died before her marriage.
They are stories that feed the imagination to such an extent that these mummies have also appeared in cinema, in horror films such as
Poison for the Fairies
, from 1986, directed and written by Carlos Enrique Taboada, and
La aunt Alejandra
, from 1980, directed by Arthur Ripstein.
Mortuary chapel of the old Colegio de San Ángel, now El Carmen museum. Aggi Garduño
So far it is not certain who these people were, but Ayala says that some mummies may be viceregal, perhaps monks buried by their companions, while others may have died in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people who had enough money to obtain permission from the priests to rest eternally under the cloister church.
Ayala is a clothing specialist and has analyzed the clothing of some mummies to establish when they were buried or to what social class they belonged.
“I don't think they were very wealthy, aristocratic people, because I don't notice very elegant clothes on them, but I do think they were from a privileged class,” he says.
But the director is not satisfied with that explanation and she wants to promote investigations that decipher the mystery of the San Ángel mummies.
“We have to do physical anthropology studies to know more about them, to investigate these bodies,” says the official in charge of preserving these corpses unearthed by the greed of Zapatista insurrectionists, who did not find the treasures they were looking for, but discovered a legacy that at the same time Today it continues to dazzle.
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