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Mexico’s Perfect Preservation Job
By Maria E Curry
March/April 2022

Editor’s note: SOHO congratulates Maria Curry, Our Heritage’s correspondent in Baja Mexico, on her new position with the state Secretary of Culture’s office. As our regular readers know, Maria is perpetually busy working on preservation on the border from multiple angles: as the state representative to ICOMOS Mexicano; an educator, speaker, and writer; an adviser to historic property owners and developers; and now this.

Maria Curry on an official visit in February 2022 with Enrique Ibarra, owner of the home of former Mexican president Abelardo L. Rodríguez in Ensenada.

The recently restored exterior of former Mexican president Abelardo L. Rodríguez’s house, which Maria Curry is helping to designate historic.

Rosy Torres, daughter of Hugo Torres, owner of the almost 100-year-old Rosarito Beach Hotel, points at a mural with Maria Curry. The hotel will soon be designated for its cultural heritage. All photos courtesy Maria Curry

I was hired as coordinator of the State Historic Archive in Baja California in November 2021. However, because there is an enormous need to solve multiple preservation issues that have stagnated for decades, Secretary of Culture Alma Delia Ábrego Ceballos decided to create a special position based on my expertise as a border preservation specialist. I will soon become director of the new Dirección de Seguimiento al Patrimonio Cultural Tangible (Department for Monitoring Tangible Cultural Heritage) to address identification, evaluation, preservation, and policies for tangible cultural resources. I will have employees and a budget to perform my duties. As someone told me, this is the perfect job for me, since it will allow me to use my preservation experience at its fullest, as a professional, academic, and grassroots organizer on behalf of Baja California’s heritage.

My eight-point working proposal for the secretary’s six-year term includes:

  • Determining the status of preservation in Baja California,
  • Creating a chronological history of preservation since enactment of the state’s 1995 preservation law,
  • Issuing updates on preservation legislation,
  • Devising solutions to the stagnated designation nominations in the queue and starting new ones,
  • Identifying and evaluating cultural resources,
  • Providing expert advice to property owners and local governments on preservation issues,
  • Initiating education and outreach, including binational cooperation, and
  • Preservation planning

Since November, I have been working on several projects, including the reactivation of the Camino Real project of restoring missions and the heritage transportation corridor with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), advising local governments on mitigation measures for projects threatening cultural resources, providing support to historians on the elaboration of designation reports, identification of cultural resources, and gathering information from community leaders on preservation concerns for preservation planning. I am also involved with the designation of the Ensenada house of ex-president Abelardo L. Rodríguez, designed by the American architect Frank W. Stevenson.

I am an architectural engineer with a master’s degree in Restoration of Monuments from Mexico and a Ph.D. candidate in Historic Preservation at Cornell University. My experience includes several positions in Mexico’s federal government as a preservation expert and in architecture schools as a teacher. In the United States, I worked briefly in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a preservation specialist. I have also been active in several historic preservation organizations since 1993, including the International Council of Monuments and Sites Mexico, Save Our Heritage Organisation, and the San Diego Model Railroad Museum.

I consider my new job an opportunity to help establish preservation policies that can protect the shared binational heritage in the Californias’ border region.

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