Casa Mireles to live on at museum

Last week, curandero Don Wilkins stopped by Casa Mireles to say goodbye.

The venerable downtown botánica where generations of San Antonians have shopped for medicinal herbs, religious candles, holy cards and other items, officially shut its doors Nov. 22.

For the past 20 years, Wilkins has been a regular customer, stopping by weekly for religious candles and advice from owner Estella Gardea Davila and her daughters Yolanda Gardea Davila and Bertha D. Kraft.

"It's going to hurt," he said of the closing.

Though the 89-year-old botánica is going out of business, it will be preserved in a fashion. The Gardea family is donating the store's fixtures and unsold merchandise to Centro Alameda, the organization responsible for the construction of the Smithsonian-affiliated Museo Americano in Market Square and the renovation of the Alameda Theater.

Eventually, the items — including display cases and hand-labeled drawers where dried herbs were stored — will be integrated into the gift shop of the museum, slated to open in 2006. For the time being, they will be installed at the Alameda Theater complex. The relocated botánica will be open for the Houston Street Fair on Jan. 29.

Family members gathered Nov. 22 at the botánica at the corner of Laredo and Dolorosa streets to announce the donation. The day was bittersweet for Yolanda Davila, who was literally born into the family business.

"We had an apartment up there," she said, indicating the second floor of the shop. "And my mother didn't have a chance to get to Santa Rosa, so I was born up there. So this feels like I've been here all my life."

Casa Mireles was founded in 1916 by Sostenes Mireles. When he died in 1935, his wife, Adela Gonzalez Gardea Mireles, took over the business. In 1955, she became the first woman to join the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. In 1974, the botánica passed to her daughter, Estella Davila, who began stocking religious icons and candles. Yolanda Davila ran the business with her mother for about two years. When the elder Davila became too ill to come to the shop a few years ago, her daughter decided to open by appointment only.

By 2002, the business had changed. They stopped stocking herbs when it became difficult to bring them across the border.

"And then we couldn't find the quality that we wanted," Kraft says. "The people didn't want to cultivate the herbs anymore, because it wasn't worth their time."

When artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz lived in San Antonio, he would stop by to buy items to use in his artwork and to stock at Infinito Botánica, a junk shop/art gallery he ran on South Flores Street in the '90s.

"I always told them, for years, 'If you ever liquidate, let me know,'" said Mondini-Ruiz, who currently lives in New York. "'Don't throw anything away because this is a way of life in San Antonio that is disappearing. This is truly authentic and it's a local treasure.' I was so afraid it was going to disappear."

When the building that houses Casa Mireles was sold in October, Yolanda Davila contacted Mondini-Ruiz, who has been hired to design the Museo Americano gift shop. Mondini-Ruiz put the Gardea family in touch with Centro Alameda.

As it happens, Centro Alameda chairman Henry R. Muñoz III had shopped at the botánica with his grandmother as a child.

"My grandmother would pick up her pan dulce at Mi Tierra, we'd come here and pick up some yerbas or holy cards, and then we'd make our way to the Alameda and we'd see a show," Muñoz said.

Muñoz, too, was saddened by the loss of another distinctive local business.

"I think it's very important that as much as we possibly can, we retain these customs, these traditions," he said. "If we can't retain them, we honor them, we record their history and we remind people where we came from so that it becomes a part of where we're going."

Mondini-Ruiz plans to create a gift shop with "the feel of a real Tex-Mex botánica" at the museum.

"I'm going to do it kind of rascuache style," he said. "I'm going to work with what I have and take it from there. But I really want to use as the core — at least as far as the feel — the things we get from Casa Mireles."