Last weekend I saw a very typical Mexican mural in the town of Cuernavaca, just south from Mexico City. The mural itself features some almost stereotypical Mexican imagery, including a guy holding a skull, his face itself painted as a "calavera" that is a stylized skull, which is common for the Day of the Dead. The fact that he's wearing a Mariachi hat just drives the Mexicanness of the mural even further home.
And this would actually be enough to have another cool looking wall painting to submit for this week's CCC's Street Art Contest. (If you're not familiar with it, please check out the link! It's a wonderful community with plenty of incredible images from walls around the world.) The artist of this piece, by the way, is fuk_guiterrez and the mural can be seen on calle Francisco I. Madero right where it meets Calle Cuauhtémoc in Cuernavaca.
Curious Surroundings
Once I had taken a pic of the mural, I started noticing the establishment next door, which seemed to be even weirder than the mural itself. The shop is called El Tigre Ramses (Ramses the Tiger), which in and of itself sounds almost like a joke. Then the list of services listed on the door, which range from palmistry and tarot readings to bondage, domination, and other kinds of "love work". Besides their local shop in Cuernavaca they seem to be present in Catemaco, Veracruz, a town known as the center of indigenous witchcraft. Of course!
Even more strangely, right next to the front door there is a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, kind of ubiquitous in Mexican religious symbology, though unlike anything offered at Ramses' shop, she is fully Catholic... or so they say. What tops off the religious eclecticism, however, is the image of dancing Jews on the window shutters to the left. This itself could possibly qualify as an example of street art, and might even be worth its own post. Well, not this time.
As for the HOW, WHY, and WTF, I'll let you reach your own conclusions. If you want to share them in the comments, I would be more than happy to read them. In either case, if you feel like checking out more cool street art from Mexico, please visit my Mexican Murals collection. Though I'm pretty sure, neither of my other posts will have this much strangeness in one place, impressive though they may be.