Why Visit Mulege's Museum??

During my time training a group of Mulege's high school students to be bilingual guides at the town's museum (1998-2000), the former territorial prison for B.C.S. pre-Highway 1, I often met locals and longtime foreign residents who had never visited the building or not since it was a prison.

For my students, this fact became a rewarding challenge because we experienced how a building, even one with a painful past, could be a place for people to find connections to their community's history and open eyes to the rich natural and cultural environment around them.

Many of you know the building's history as the "Prison without Doors" as the inmates could leave their cells during the day to work or visit family in town and a conch shell blown at sunset would signal them to return to their cells for the night. The street leading up to museum is called La Cananea which is a reference to the building's design, a white washed fortress-like structure, modeled after a prison, now museum also, in the mainland Mexican town of Cananea.

After the completion of the transpeninsular highway, the prison's policy of open doors was less practical and the current prison south of Santa Rosalia replaced Mulege's as a regional facility but the local police department still used it on occasion. Eventually, the building sat abandoned on its prominate place overlooking the town. Pidgeons became the permanent residents until a group of Mexican locals and foreign residents came together to create a community museum after some in the group had been inspired by a historical building in Todos Santos that had been converted into a museum.

A true community effort followed as the abandoned building was given permission by the state of BCS to become a museum in the early 1990s. Already listed on Mexico's National Historic Registry, the museum would preserve the prison's unique past and highlight Mulege/BCS natural and cultural history. Today, when you walk through the building, almost every artifact has come from a local resident...a 200 year old dugout canoe from a local fisherman's family, the cheese molds from a local rancho, petroglyhs from another rancho and recreations of cell cots woven with palm by an elderly man who once made them for the prison. Watching locals and tourists explore the museum was a great honor as I saw the locals swap stories about the pieces of their world displayed around them and tourists explored thousands of years of Mulege's story.

My work with the students is over now and I'm back in San Diego at an English school but I go back twice a year for visits with my daughter's Mexican relatives. We always visit the museum too and I hope you will as well. Yes, it's true you need to go in the mornings before the afternoon break at 1:00 and not on Sundays....many people often lament to me, "I've tried to go but it's always closed". So, be sure it's a morning visit. Remember funding is slim so the hours are too...your 10 peso entrance helps with keeping the caretaker's salary and other expenses covered. Yes, the outer cells still have pidgeons "a plenty" as well as their guano but during the building's renovations one of the main goals was to chicken wire and cover enough entrance points in the main exhibit areas so the flying guests could no longer drop on the artifacts. That goal was accomplished and when you see the number of courtyard cells involved in the "bird eviction", you will see how large the remaining task is!! However, do explore the cells and you will find glimpses of its human story, the inmates' poems and their counting of days gone by marked in faded black images.

So, I hope you spend a morning exploring someday. Not only can you take in the museum's offering but its site overlooking the town affords a dramatic view of the Gulf, the river cutting through the town then disappearing into the palm oasis below the mission as the view extends out to the Sierra Guadalupe. Lastly, if you're in the mood for a little exercise climb the 100+ stone step stairway that snakes up the hillside to the museum. Disfruta y Bienvenidos!!