The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Abby Perrault 0:04
Under Solana row has an eye are gazing into the face of a concrete crocodile.

Unknown Speaker 0:09
It has seen better days, that poor thing. Now it's green, rain, bluish. It used to be more green. Or actually

Abby Perrault 0:17
we're looking at where part of his face should be but has fallen off.

Unknown Speaker 0:22
What's sad is that it's really, really bad condition.

Abby Perrault 0:27
Elder takes out his phone and pulls up a photo taken of the crocodile decades ago, at the height of its glory before it lost the majority of its nose.

Unknown Speaker 0:36
That was, yeah, but what is it? No. You want to go see the lion?

Abby Perrault 0:43
Yes. In this park, the crocodile is part of a concrete crew. A few strides away. There's a Tuscaloosa yellow elephant, a pouting fish, even a bear.

Unknown Speaker 0:55
Well, this bear has almost just one year you will face and no hands. I'm sorry, I should have brought it here. Another four.

Abby Perrault 1:06
parks across Mexico City, and actually across all of Mexico are full of these concrete creatures. And today, we'll trace the story of how they landed here at such scale. I'm Abby Perrault and this is Atlas Obscura a celebration of the world's strange, incredible and wondrous places. When we come back, and introduction to the long unknown creator behind the widely known concrete font of Mexico's urban playscapes.

Unknown Speaker 1:45
Well, this is the lion. See how does this for the legs. Ergonomic

Abby Perrault 1:52
although is an art historian who studies public space in Mexico City, and sits in public space in Mexico City.

Unknown Speaker 1:59
Yes, every park that I go to, I have to sit there it's rule. My boyfriend hates me for that 10 minutes in a bench.

Abby Perrault 2:09
A couple of years ago, he published a book about playgrounds in modern Mexico. And in the process, he's climbed on and sat on a lot of these animals himself.

Unknown Speaker 2:18
Absolutely part of the research is to use them. Today. Of course,

Abby Perrault 2:23
it's in the name of research. But it all started when he was much younger.

Unknown Speaker 2:29
I played with them as a kid, and no people little older than me, their children played on these playgrounds.

Abby Perrault 2:40
Aldo says you can find this cast concrete characters in cities across the country in varying states of preservation or decay. Some are painted with vacant black eyes or sloping frowns. Others are adorned with flowers or stripes, or maybe coated in one solid bright color. And depending on where you are, you might see different species.

Unknown Speaker 3:04
Here Mexico City, it's very hard to find the kangaroo whereas in the state of Veracruz it's more common.

Abby Perrault 3:11
But together he says these animals make up a part of a collective history of a shared national landscape of childhood. One that started way back in the early 1900s. Following the Mexican Revolution,

Unknown Speaker 3:24
children started to be seen by the government as the social class that needed to be protected from the evil especially if they were all scared by all the war crimes that the population witnessed in the Revolutionary War.

Abby Perrault 3:38
So in the 60s, a Federal Institute was created to protect child

Unknown Speaker 3:42
well being the MP isn't as you know, the production of infancia.

Abby Perrault 3:45
And part of that protection, they thought could be designed

Unknown Speaker 3:50
and playgrounds started to become very important.

Abby Perrault 3:53
So in 1969, NB and the Mexico City government started a program that would outfit parks with new playscapes.

Unknown Speaker 4:02
So every neighborhood would have a place for kids to you know, develop and play and exercise in a you know, safe, non polluted environment.

Abby Perrault 4:13
They just needed the right artist with a vision for what it would look like. And when other was doing his research. That's kind of where the historical record fell away. For decades, everyone knew about these animals, but no one really knew who was behind them. I love look at digging, and eventually after searching the archives and talking to different artists, he came across a name Alberto Paris Soria. Hola, gracias. This is at Beto Perez Rodriguez the son of Alberto Perez Soria

Unknown Speaker 4:48
me by the way, there's the there's the whole ill middle way Torero they see the corridor the Taurus

Abby Perrault 4:54
and the father had been a bullfighter and came from a line of relatives who were pretty Legendary in the sport, and then he spent some time as a butcher working for his family's business

Unknown Speaker 5:05
Badal income, your income your total, more or less couture apparel for the left. But he

Abby Perrault 5:13
gave up all of that to take up art, you left it all behind for a vision of bringing stories to the people. His son says he wasn't so interested in the recognition of bullfighting, or the security of a family business. So he started to carve out his own path in making public sculptures. When he was commissioned to design playgrounds for this program, he landed on designs that, in a way drew from the lives you've walked away from animals. Alberto, his son says that because of his past, he had a really deep familiarity with animal forms.

Unknown Speaker 5:50
More natural does it come on instinct to know the value of the vet was

Abby Perrault 5:56
a really natural sense, almost instinctual of how they looked. He didn't particularly enjoy the process of killing them. That was part of why he walked away from the family business, but he had been fascinated by them. So he set out designing these animals. There were elegant, rounded iterations of a bear, a rhino and elephant, each with this big open space in its midsection. The idea being that kids could climb around them on them or even flip inside of them and become them. If the waitresses handyman

Unknown Speaker 6:30
cosplay always

Abby Perrault 6:34
in a way like cosplaying and NP in the city government, they were down for it. But after dropping off those initial designs, they gave him a small amount of money to kick things off, and then

Unknown Speaker 6:48
don't come as well when a commercial project or no severe loss will be released.

Abby Perrault 6:54
And Beto Perez Soria never hears back from them. It was as if the project just never moved forward

Unknown Speaker 7:03
on your birthday and use this place, Salim Allah loose is the external Overseer and Animalis has data from poco cambios.

Abby Perrault 7:15
A couple of years later, a new version of efectos animals start showing up with the same design animals with a big space in the middle but something was a little off. First of all, there were totally new animals in the mix like lions and fish and even bighorn sheep. They were colorblocked painted flashy hues and made of concrete which, according to although it was not part of the original design. Instead of elegant, they were splashy instead of smooth and rounded. They were edgy.

Unknown Speaker 7:51
Giving courses as they receive a schema second see was

Abby Perrault 7:57
they have some sharp corners. Soon the imposter animals had migrated to it seemed like cities in every corner of the country. Kids everywhere were sitting on top of a lion climbing on a crocodile becoming a fish. I asked Alberto the son if he played with these animals growing up

Unknown Speaker 8:18
Si Si Si totalmente. Welcome to Fannie Mae and hopefully

Abby Perrault 8:22
he says including the small models his dad had made early on in the process, which he still has today. I asked him how this all sat with his dad.

Unknown Speaker 8:32
What's the focal length this should kind of where I'll mow the lawn he knows. But

Abby Perrault 8:37
he says his dad was disappointed that they weren't exactly the original designs. If they were going to steal his designs, he says it would have been better that they steal his exact designs.

Unknown Speaker 8:48
We piled it up persona kanonkop of school law firm.

Abby Perrault 8:52
But ultimately he says his dad was a person who never really pursued fame or recognition. It was something he had intentionally opted out of earlier in his life. And while lack of compensation was definitely not cool. His son says the lack of recognition wasn't uncommon when working in public art.

Unknown Speaker 9:11
Joker can momento that was the Lydia Gousto guess what the SR is to be at a saliendo and different and

Abby Perrault 9:18
at some point, Alberto says he thinks his dad even felt good that the animals had made their way to so many kids across the country, probably more than he'd ever imagined. When Alberto Perez Surya was still pretty young, he became sick. The illness was progressive. It affected his ability to move so he worked until his hands couldn't. And when they couldn't, he began to sell whatever he could that was worth something. Tools, smaller sculptures much of his own work.

Unknown Speaker 9:54
Everybody used to love Him one day, they'll send you a day that

Abby Perrault 9:57
he passed away at the age of 52. In the period in which he was able to create art was short, but it left a huge impact. These animals were a childhood that he anonymously gave too much of Mexico.

Unknown Speaker 10:13
El de la primera persona,

Abby Perrault 10:14
really his son's as it was Aldo, who's the first person to share this story with a wider audience.

Unknown Speaker 10:25
This was like his blockbuster. That's how though again, and in a way, part of the success was that they were redesigned to be in concrete. He says

Abby Perrault 10:35
that the unfortunate way that these animals came to dominate playgrounds kind of ensured their success and their survival today,

Unknown Speaker 10:44
these playgrounds have been protected by the amount by how massively they were produced.

Abby Perrault 10:51
And as they remained through time in different administrations, localities took different approaches to maintaining them.

Unknown Speaker 10:59
Local painters were hired not painters, but you know, the one of the beans your house, they were hired to paint the the animals so you have popular art, using these modern animals as a canvas for these working class, creativity. So even though they're the same, and they're industrially produced, they're unique, because in every park, they're painted in a different fashion. Because every painter sees this as a creative opportunity to paint, you know, a pink elephant with with purple dots, or a very realistic lion. Or sometimes they paint the lion as a leopard. So it's, it's really a constant renovation.

Abby Perrault 11:54
These animals became the collaborative work of countless public artists, starting with Roberto Paris, Aria, including the local painters who gave new color and sometimes new identities to each animal, to the graffiti artists who come and leave their tags on them.

Unknown Speaker 12:13
And also, the kids are the ones that really activate these cultures.

Abby Perrault 12:20
Generation after generation of doses, kids have kept climbing on these animals. Even as new shiny plastic jungle gyms rose up next to them. And even though some are falling apart, and a couple have been removed entirely, people are rallying to keep them maybe hoping to hold on to the lion or seal or bear with no ears. That served as a colorblocked landmark of childhood, of both place and time.

A really special thanks to Ed Beto, Beto Rodriguez for taking the time to talk to me about his dad's work. Today, Alberto is an artist has created sculptures and monuments in Mexico, as well as in the US. So keep an eye out for his work. And a huge thank you to Aldo Solano Rojas for sharing his research and taking me to send on photo Park, which is just one of the many parks you can visit in Mexico City and in cities across Mexico to find these incredible concrete animals. Our podcast is a co production of Atlas Obscura and witness docks. The production team includes

Unknown Speaker 13:35
Dylan theorists

Unknown Speaker 13:35
Doug Baldwin Go Chris Naka, Camille Stanley Willis, writer Arnold, Sara Wyman

Unknown Speaker 13:42
Manolo Morales Baudelaire Seuss, Gianna Palmer, Tracy Samuelson, John DeLorean,

Abby Perrault 13:49
our technical director is JC Holford. This episode was mixed by loose Fleming. Our theme and credit music is by Sam Tyndall. I'm Abby pearl. Thanks for joining.

Unknown Speaker 14:16
Witness ducks from stitcher