As many as 1,000 people per day have been known to visit just one of Guadalajara‘s seven museums—El Museo del Periodismo y las Artes Gráficas. The city’s top museum has a lot to recommend it and prospective visitors may find some of it surprising.
Not so surprising are the antique printing presses and equipment in the main salon that form the permanent collection, particularly a Linotype press that melts metal to form words in lines of type— a representation of printing before the digital revolution. In this salon, we also find facsimiles of the Despertador Americano, a short lived 1810 newspaper masterminded by that now-heroic insurgent against the Spanish Crown, Miguel Hidalgo when he was in Guadalajara, the capital since 1560 of Nueva Galicia, as Mexico was then called. The newspaper ceased publication when Hidalgo was captured and executed the following year.
Significantly, the printing of the newspaper was carried out on the first printing press in Nueva Galicia, and on the very lot the museum now occupies. A gracious three-story house was later constructed on the lot, capped on its roof by metal sculptures of two setters, which were imported from New York. The dogs gave the house its name, Casa de Los Perros.
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