Edward Hopper's Saltillo

A brief trip away from food

A long time ago, I wrote a short piece on Edward Hopper and his connection to Northern Mexico. It was published on a now-dormant blog. I’ve wanted to improve and expand upon my original thoughts for a long time but lacked a home for a newly revised piece until I remembered the travel section in this newsletter. It’s not a perfect fit, and honestly, I am bracing myself for a flurry of unsubscribes when I send it out, which seems to be the nature of Substack. Unlike my other posts in this section, there are no recommendations or lists about where to eat. I cannot provide you with an extensive list of book recs solely about affordable and easily available northern Mexican food should you wish to buy them; so many of my books and booklets on the subject are long out of print and either extortionate to buy secondhand or simply unavailable. (Popular cookbooks sparsely cover Northern Mexican food compared to other parts of Mexico; if I were Mexican, I’d want to address this by writing my own book.) In the meantime, you can consult the University of Texas at San Antonio’s digitized collection of Mexican cookbooks here. I hope you enjoy this piece and tolerate my (temporary) drift away from food writing.

Edward Hopper. “Roofs”, 1946. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Edward Hopper has been described as a pictorial poet who recorded the vast spaces between humans and their environment. His works possess an indelible nostalgia. Although he is popularly associated with the United States of America through famous works such as Nighthawks, which records the inter-war lonely cityscape of Greenwich Avenue in New York City and Morning Sun, where his wife sits in solitude upon a bed elevated above an impersonal city street, it is Edward Hopper’s Mexican paintings that I love the best.

I spent part of my childhood in Saltillo, the city where Hopper and his wife Jo stayed on several occasions. I have visited the hotels and restaurants he frequented, gazed upon the same rooftop views and sat in my bedroom window listening to the sounds of animals as they went about their business in the cold desert night. I carry the open spaces of Mexico, the blue-stained mountains of Saltillo and its cluttered, stepped cityscapes in my heart.

Hopper went to Mexico in the summer of 1943 with his wife, Jo, searching for new inspiration. Their first trip to Mexico was made by train from Penn Station, wartime petrol rationing having derailed his original plan to travel by car from New York City to Cape Cod for a summer holiday. Cape Cod was no longer a place of quiet escape because of the increasing threat from the German submarines and American planes that droned overhead. Hopper chafed against the restrictions wrought by the petrol shortage; he missed the independence his car afforded him.

‘To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re travelling.’

The couple arrived in Mexico City only for Hopper to swiftly dislike its hustle and bustle. Still, the couple managed to visit Guadaloupe and its famous cathedral, the floating gardens of Xochimilco, the Aztec pyramids and the monastery of San Agustin Acolman. Hopper wasn’t inspired to paint them, and after advice from Katherine Kuh, a champion of modern American art based at the Art Institute of Chicago, the pair decamped to northern Mexico and settled in the temperate and less populated city of Saltillo- once known as the ‘Athens of Mexico’ because of the large number of twentieth-century intellectuals it attracted. “We left Mexico City toward the end of July and have been in Saltillo ever since. It has a nice climate and is among some interesting hills. It is pretty hard to get near them or do much of anything without a car, but I have made a few watercolors, nevertheless,” he said in a letter to Frank Rehn, his New York City-based art dealer.

Edward Hopper. “Saltillo Mansion”, 1943. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Possessed of a cooler, drier mountain climate, Saltillo serves as the capital of the desert state of Coahuila, which stretches all the way to the US border, 250 miles away. It is sheltered by the Zapalinamé mountains, where El Cerro del Pueblo’s 4-metre cross stands protectively over the people. The Hoppers settled in an older part of the city where round-edged adobe buildings sat cheek-by-jowl with Spanish colonial architecture, taking a room at Guarhado House on Victoria Street.

Their second trip to Saltillo in May 1946 came after the end of petrol rationing, allowing them to drive from New York via New Orleans and cross into Mexico at Laredo, across the shallow muddiness of the Rio Grande, whose waters form a natural boundary between the two countries. Car breakdowns, torpid weather and problems finding food to their taste caused problems. The couple chose to stay at the Arizpe Saint Hotel on Victoria Street, where their room led out onto a large roof terrace with a distant view of the mountains. They had already begun to learn Spanish, and this stay proved productive, with Hopper completing four watercolours - Church of San Esteban, El Palacio, Roofs, Saltillo, and Construction.

Palms at Saltillo by Edward Hopper 1943 (private collection)

The Hoppers enjoyed driving around the mountain roads, attracted as they were to the wild, dusty landscapes of the Chihuahuan desert before exploring the region’s ‘sky islands’ where cooler and wetter micro-climates nurture waterfalls and mountain pools lined with miniature forests and banks of ferns. Just feet away were the more typical desert plants: the desert sand and rock speckled with honey mesquite, creosote bushes, Queen Victoria’s agave and grasses ‘belly high to a horse’ as reported by early settlers.

Nonetheless, Hopper wasn’t terribly enamoured with Saltillo itself, finding it already too modern and developed for his tastes. Despite this, the couple returned in 1951 for a month-long stay, although the weather caused them tribulation: rain and heat stymied Hopper in his attempts to capture the Church of San Esteban on canvas again. In December 1952, they again arrived in Saltillo, hoping to enjoy balmier weather, then ventured further south, resulting in two more watercolours.

The Arizpe Saint hotel is two blocks up from the Alameda, although friends in Saltillo tell me that a couple of the houses the Hoppers stayed in have been demolished. Two houses to the left of the hotel can be found another of the Hoppers’ holiday rentals, which has been modified out of recognition since Hopper’s [and my] time. As a child, I swam in the Sainz Hotel pool with friends, and its faded colonial splendour provided much-needed shade from the hot and dusty narrow city streets in high summer.

“The Guajardo family owned three neighbouring houses, and the family house, where Hopper stayed, was demolished in 1972 and an office building raised in its place which hosts a branch of the State Institute of Employment,” says Khan Norfolk, a childhood friend and now- retired doctor who still lives in Saltillo. “The family still lived there in a penthouse, although the members of the Guajardo family I knew have left town. Ramiro Guajardo was a schoolmate.” He tells me that the Guajardo family owned a sketch drawn by Hopper, which was shown to him.

Sierra Madre, Saltillo, Edward Hopper 1943

Hopper painted several watercolours from the hotel roof, sitting there early in the morning as the sun rose over the Zapalinamé mountains and returning late in the afternoon as the shadows grew longer, turning grey dust to purple, which threw the contours of the blocky Mexican architecture into stark relief. His lofty studio afforded him unparalleled views across the flat-roofed city buildings, punctuated with the spiked towers of the Baroque eighteenth-century cathedral, a reminder of Saltillo’s roots as a Spanish settlement. However, Hopper resented its rapid urban development because it threatened to obscure the views he craved. He found Saltillo congested, noisy and anarchic in its permissiveness regarding what was built and what could be demolished. For a man intrigued by space and the intractable nature of isolation and loneliness, the growth and change going on in the streets around him must have been challenging as spaces were filled in and new connections forged. According to the Cinema staff, Hopper complained about the brightly lit advertising signs and hoardings that littered downtown and impinged upon the ‘purity’ of the desert light. He struggled to find the shade of blue-green pigment to capture the unique shade of the mountains; in a letter to Rehn, his wife Jo explains thus:

“Among mts. Doesn’t mean you see any of them. They surround the place, but there are always walls or towers or electric signs even, to shut out the view. E. sits out on our one-story roof that affords more roofs and snips of things neither distinguished nor readily distinguishable & feeds upon that.”

Khan Norfolk recalls that “the house he painted from the roof of the Guajardo’s belonged to some aunts of theirs”, and I remember it as home to a hair salon called Belleza Margot, whose employees stepped outside for respite from the heat of the dryers, aprons pulled out of shape by the rows of metal hair clips pinned to their hems. Khan lived directly in front of this building for about 5 months, and it is now a protected building- not because of Hopper but because it is unique. Another building painted by Hopper was the cinema called El Palacio, which I also visited as a child to watch cartoons dubbed into Spanish. The third building Hopper captured is the Teatro Garcia Carillo, now preserved as a local museum and cultural centre. The building you see going up in ‘Construction’ is now a rather rundown hotel yet when Gail Levin (Hopper’s main biographer) visited Saltillo in 1983, forty years after the artist’s first visit, she noted that the cityscapes painted by Hopper had remained surprisingly intact, ‘even to the assortment of chimneys and cornices and the sign of the El Palacio cinema that Hopper depicted in the watercolour in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.’

Edward Hopper. "The palace". 1946. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The domed roof of the church of St Esteban, a little mission church dating back to 1592 that aimed to ‘civilise’ the Indigenous people, remains. However, the Hotel Coahuila next to the church's front facade, which Hopper painted, is now demolished. Homes were built from local materials quarried and sourced from the Chihuahuan Desert and tiled with the famous local Saltillo talaveras. The colonial centre of the Citi was constructed from pink marble. Hopper was clearly drawn to the domestic, utilitarian architecture in his paintings: amid the square local houses of the Tlaxcaltec and Guachichil people and the filigreed Spanish colonial buildings that came later, he took note of and painted rebar and rooftop water tanks, squat chimneys and piping, all those things that service a growing conurbation.

Construction In Mexico, 1946 by Edward Hopper; watercolour on paper

The blue skies, soft orange adobe foreground and mountains change colour as the earth spins on its axis. Transient light is captured and deposited like sediment onto his canvas. Light is a form of design in Hopper’s work, said Lloyd Goodrich in a 1981 talk reprinted in the Art Journal. The artist was fascinated by the idea of sunlight liberated from earthly effects, elated by its illuminative and shapeshifting nature and the way it both highlights and erases. Equally, he was frustrated and stimulated by the emotional and technical challenges of capturing forever on canvas, the dichotomy of light’s transient repetition. Construction is a master class of patterns of lines and light, shade and darkness, created when the evening sun shifted towards the rooftops at the end of the working day. As the adobe building is erected, Hopper records its geometric stillness: he captures the vertical slash of electricity poles to the right of the church cupola and the diagonal slant of the Sierra Madre mountains in translucent washes of colour. He mastered the lucence of the desert.

The paintings created from the rooftop of Hotel Ariape Sainz were produced without the preliminary work that characterised Hopper’s oils, done ‘direct from nature, outdoors’. Hopper appeared to search his surroundings for a real-world view that matched his psychological and artistic needs. His compositions were chosen because they reflected his mind’s eye. However, he once commented that he hoped he was not “a realist who imitates nature” in his desire to report on the ‘phenomena of light’ (as Kuh refers to it in her book, My Love Affair with Modern Art). Ultimately, he referred to himself as a prisoner in Saltillo as he waited for the late afternoon rain showers to cease and the light to match his internal requirements. In the meantime, he projected his irritation onto the people, the climate and the architecture.

Edward Hopper's exploration of the medium of watercolours ended after a trip to the American West in 1946. When asked why this was, he replied, “I think it's because the watercolours are done from nature, and I don't work from nature anymore."

My Saltillo

References:

The Coahuila Archive & Library site is here.

Edward Hopper and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, The Watercolors

Katherine Kuh, edited and completed by Avis Berman: My Love Affair with Modern Art

Gail Levin: Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, New York, 1995, no. W-347

Gail Levin (commentaries), Whitney Museum of American Art (author), Edward Hopper (artist) The Watercolors of Edward Hopper

Gail Levin: Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 2007

Saltillo Mansion, a watercolour

Food-related:

A decent general guide to the food of northern Mexico.

Morton’s book covers Spanish colonisers' impact on northern Mexico and its food through the lens of the tortilla.

Mexico, and especially its northern reaches must be seen in the context of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo where she ceded 55% of her territory, including what we now know as California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Mexico also relinquished her claim to Texas, acknowledging the Rio Grande as the southern boundary with the USA: border Food, Tex-Mex, Texan-Mexican, Cal-Mex, and Col-Mex tell tales of diasporic innovation married to old ancestral roots. ‘I think a taco is a representation and reflection of its time and place. It’s regional. And that regionality includes this country, Mexico’s sister country,’ writes Jose R. Ralat. I think this can be applied to many other permutations of Mexican food - especially those that hailed originally from its northern states. Border Food by Cheryl and Bill Alters Jamison will help you understand.

More on that digitized UT collection. And the UT Libary’s archival collection.

Diana Kennedy was rather dismissive of Tex-Mex and border food. Anyway, here’s a guide to her archived work.

Adán Medrano's website is an important resource about the history and culture of Texan-Mexican, Mexican, border food, and Tex-Mex food. Watch his beautiful film, Truly Texas American, if you can. It made me cry. (Available via Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and local PBS stations.) Read his book, too.