Taxco de Alarcón, Guerrero, Mexico
AA-2026-57B8CF
On the image
Three boys sprint down the main road of Taxco in matching grey uniforms, each clutching a schoolbag as if the bell has already rung somewhere out of frame. Behind them a woman in a tailored dress and a man in white shirtsleeves keep the unhurried pace of adults who have long since stopped running for anything, and a pastel American sedan idles at the kerb like a piece of Detroit that took a wrong turn into the Sierra Madre.
The sign for Plateria Rancho Alegre marks one of the silver workshops that made this hill town famous, the trade that turned a colonial mining outpost into a required stop for anyone touring Mexico with a checkbook. By the 1960s the road out front had been paved smooth enough for tour buses and finned imports, proof that the town had learned to sell its past to people who arrived by a very modern present.
Nobody in the frame looks at the camera except, implicitly, everyone does, the way people do when a stranger with equipment stands in the middle of their street. The boys, at least, had somewhere to be and no time to perform for it.
The historian's note
Taxco de Alarcón, in the state of Guerrero, is a colonial silver-mining town whose economy shifted in the twentieth century from extraction to craftsmanship, after American designer William Spratling established silversmithing workshops there in the 1930s. By the 1960s the town had become a fixture of Mexican tourism, its steep cobbled streets lined with shops selling handcrafted silverwork to visitors arriving on the newly improved highway from Mexico City and Acapulco.
The hillside townscape, with its terracotta roofs and colonial façades set against the surrounding mountains, remains largely unchanged in layout from this period, and the silver trade continues as the town's principal industry. The American automobile visible at curbside reflects the era's road-tourism boom, when improved highways brought a steady flow of U.S. visitors into central Mexico.
No individuals in the scene are identified, and the storefront shown was one of many small family-run silver workshops typical of the district rather than a landmark enterprise.
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Visually related — by likeness
Boys Running Past the Silver Shops, Taxco, Mexico, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-57B8CF. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/boys-running-past-the-silver-shops-taxco-mexico-1960s.
@misc{aaAA202657B8CF,
title = {Boys Running Past the Silver Shops, Taxco, Mexico, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-57B8CF},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/boys-running-past-the-silver-shops-taxco-mexico-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Boys Running Past the Silver Shops, Taxco, Mexico, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-57B8CF UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/boys-running-past-the-silver-shops-taxco-mexico-1960s ER -
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