Some museums start with a grand vision. Others begin with a skeleton in the floor and a lawyer who didn’t know how to let things go.
Casa del Mendrugo, just a block away from Puebla’s historic center, looks like just another 16th-century house built by Jesuits with donations—or breadcrumbs (mendrugos)—from their parishioners. It was initially part of the San Jerónimo College, but after the Jesuits were expelled from New Spain in 1767, the house bounced between religious orders, state institutions, and private owners.
Over time, it slipped into disrepair and was eventually abandoned in the 1990s. It stayed that way until a restoration project in the early 2000s uncovered human remains under the floor, setting off a chain of events that would unexpectedly lead to its rebirth as a museum.
That part of its story begins in the 1980s when a Oaxacan named Jorge Roberto Ortiz-Dietz was entrusted with a collection of carved human skulls. Ortiz-Dietz wasn’t an archaeologist. He was a public notary with Zapotec, German, and Spanish roots, and for decades he maintained close ties with an Indigenous community in the mountains of Oaxaca.
According to his memoir, they weren't just acquaintances. They visited him in Puebla, and he visited them in Oaxaca. Somewhere along the way, they decided he was the right person to safeguard the sacred remains of their spiritual leaders. These weren't decorative heirlooms—they were skulls and conch shells engraved with mythic stories and symbols from a world that didn’t survive colonization but insisted on being remembered.
Ortiz-Dietz kept the collection in his home for more than thirty years, eventually bequeathing it to the Casa del Mendrugo Foundation on the condition that it be displayed and explained—not hidden away in the archives. The museum opened in 2013, and its primary exhibit, Amos por Siempre (Forever Masters), comprises these artifacts.
The Masters, or amos, were Alteca spiritual elders, a civilization that governed not by force but by ritual and memory. From birth, these masters were marked for leadership through cranial deformation—their foreheads flattened and skulls reshaped with wooden boards and tight wrappings, distinguishing them from the rest of the community. Their roles were hereditary, their leadership absolute, and their exits planned—they chose when to die, passing their knowledge to successors and their bones to ritual. And their bones weren’t buried, they became storyboards of history.
The Master of Great Medicine used obsidian blades to engrave the skulls of his deceased peers with cosmological myths, symbols of the divine, and coded messages meant to carry knowledge across generations. Each engraving was a ceremonial act, preserving what oral tradition could not convey on its own.
The collection also includes carved conch shells that were used as ceremonial trumpets. They were blown by heralds during major events, summoning the community to witness a death, a succession, or a message from the gods. Their purpose wasn’t just audible—the belief was that they opened a passage between this world and the next. Sound as signal. Shell as portal. You don’t need to believe it to appreciate the precision of the idea.
A line in one of the museum's exhibition texts describes death in Ancient Mexico as a layered experience. How your body was treated depended not just on how you died but how you lived, what you did, and who you were. Some people were cremated. Others were buried under their houses or left for birds thought to carry their souls to the sun. And some—like the Masters—were carved into memory and kept close. Not relics. Not curiosities. People are still telling their stories long after their voices were gone.
Casa del Mendrugo isn't grand, but it is the kind of place that’ll stick with you. A house built from crumbs holding the remains of a lost civilization that wrote its sacred texts not on paper but on the skulls of its holiest leaders.
Awesome.
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