Parisian déja vu in Puebla, Mexico!

My second morning in Puebla, Mexico, I awoke with a strong feeling of déja vu. Actually a very comforting feeling. I had a sense of  being in a little hotel in Paris as a teenager, my grandmother nearby. How could it be? This is Mexico! My grandmother long gone!

Then I began reflecting on my hotel room’s high, double French doors with the solid inside shutters covering them, a protection from cold and light at night.

Yes! An intuitive sense that these doors were sisters to ones that had been in that small hotel in Paris so many years ago!

Then the suspicion, no I think I had heard that the French and other Europeans, had, indeed been here in Puebla. These immigrants, business men, bankers, industrialists had come in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, exactly the period of the building I was in now and that of others around the center of the city.

And so, that day and the next I went out with my camera on a detective hunt around the historic center of Puebla. Looking for more evidence of a European presence. More evidence that I wasn’t crazy, that my déja vu experience actually had a foundation. And here’s what I found!  — Art Nouveau is alive and well in Puebla, Mexico!

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There is a little story and photo I took of my grandmother in Europe in when I was a teenager, elsewhere in this blog. You can find it here.

And on my website is a selection of photos I took on that European trip with a 1952 Kodak Baby Brownie.