The Mercado Libertad in Guadalajara. Photo: Angela Ostafichuk/Shutterstock / Angela Ostafichuk During these long months of visiting and revisiting the familiar landscapes within walking distance of my home, my mind has kept circling back to one work of architecture I saw shortly before the pandemic hit — not a baroque church or a UNESCO World Heritage site but the main public market in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Mexican urban markets have a different vibe. More popular than precious, crammed with necessities as well as trinkets, they serve virtually everyone except the frequent-flier elites who stick to air-conditioned malls at the city’s edge. Step inside the Mercado Libertad and it’s like entering a roofed, three-tiered metropolis. Turn this way and you find yourself in a neighborhood of watchmakers, locksmiths, knife sharpeners, and cobblers.
There has been a market on this spot in Guadalajara since at least the 16th century. Farmers and artisans converged on the banks of a creek named San Juan de Dios , in an open area framed by the three landmarks of a growing city: a church, a flour mill, and a bridge. The first two attempts to coax vendors indoors, first with a late 19th-century shed, then with a 1920s neo-Gothic palazzo, proved insufficiently ambitious.
Over the years, the building has blurred. Vendors have multiplied and spilled beyond the perimeter again. The carefully hidden wires and ducts have given way to a visible tangle. The adjoining neighborhood has crept up around the structure, obscuring its monumentality, and mariachi bands for hire mill riotously across the street. That kind of lively, messy accretion obscures an original design, but at the same time brings it alive.