The year doctor plague visited San Miguel de Allende

The COVID-19 pandemic had tightened its grip in our adopted hometown by the end of March, shuttering stores, restaurants and churches and creating a spectacular, eerily empty backdrop for the city’s Spanish colonial architecture.
Roaming the deserted streets during my anxious, early morning walks, I remembered reading about the doctors who ministered to European plague victims during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in “PPE” of leather cloaks, beaked masks filled with aromatic herbs, and long canes to keep their patients at a safe distance. While those plague doctors were plying their trade in the Old World, San Miguel was reaching its apogee in the New World - and the historical juxtaposition inspired a series of artwork that combined my own iPhone images taken during the pandemic with classic versions of “doctor plague” and a spiky coronavirus.
One of my first photos, snapped in front of the iconic 17th century La Parroquia, was the year’s most disturbing: a parked funeral parlor truck piled with coffins. (If the macabre display was intended to demonstrate the gravity of the pandemic, it certainly succeeded with this viewer.) Others, like stacked chairs in an empty restaurant on the main square and a deserted swimming pool at the Rosewood Hotel, were stark reminders of the city’s economic dependence on tourism.
For better or for worse, many visitors are returning to San Miguel to ring in 2021 even as COVID-19 cases continue to climb alarmingly here. Who knows whether the festive scenes I’d photographed in previous years - a pre-dawn celebration of the city’s namesake saint and a performance by voladores, acrobatic dancers who “fly” to earth from a high pole - will be haunted by plague doctors again next year?
But when the clocks struck midnight on this Año Nuevo eve, I followed a popular Mexican tradition of scarfing 12 green grapes and making a wish with each one. And this time around, those wishes were the same: for an end to the pandemic, and the launch of a much brighter future.