Love Letter to San Miguel from 1958 to 2026: Your Bells Have Always Known How To Fill The Sky

By Christina Johnson

Dear San Miguel de Allende,

I love you for the memories that live in my blood and body, from childhood until this day.

Do you remember when I rode my horse into your canyon as a child? The chocolate scent of those sweet white ground flowers. The toothless man collecting sticks for his home fire, and how we laughed together, he and I, as if the afternoon had no intention of ending.

Sometimes I didn't come home until the sun had gone to warm yolk, then to crimson, then until the mountains had darkened all around us and swallowed the last of the light. Mama didn't worry. We were cast in a spell. Blessed.

Your mornings smelled of homemade tortillas on the grill in doorways. Of fireworks and brushwood smoke. Of water thrown on cobblestones at first light, that clean wet-stone river smell rising before the heat could claim it. Your bells have always known how to fill the sky. Your fireworks have never once apologized for themselves.

At noon you are cornflower blue and sure of yourself, and at night you open into something I can only call Babylonian — ancient, starlit, vast, a darkness that remembers what darkness is for. You have always known who you are. The cradle of Independent México, and proud of it, and right to be.

The fumes came, and the cars, and then the tourists — so many, so hungry for the version of you they'd seen in photographs. And I understand it, I do. You are beautiful. But your beauty is a texture woven by community, by living — not caught on camera. The streets I once moved through freely can now hardly breathe for the crowds. That is what I most want to tell you. It is the texture that is gone: a community that knew itself so well it was invisible, the way you don't notice air until it changes. Now I walk your cobblestones with caution, inhaling the memory of when my footsteps were smaller.

We have changed together.

I love you.