MEXICO

As in Rome, all of this is overlaid with a colorful folk life, sometimes almost rural, which you would not expect to see in one of the largest metropolises in the world. As of today, there are approximately 22 million people living in the Mexico City metropolitan area. Slightly larger than New York, it is the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the world and the second-largest in the Americas after São Paulo. It is not easy to get used to Mexico City, but in time, it becomes impossible to stop exploring and enjoying this fourth (or whatever number it is) Rome.

The oldest settlements in the territory of modern Mexico, the cities of Tlatilco and Cuicuilco, emerged in the first millennium BCE, when civilization was just beginning to take shape in Mesoamerica. What would later evolve into the present-day city was founded by a small but determined, and even ruthless, northern tribe from the Nahuatl group of peoples in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The tribe called themselves Mexica (mexíca), from which the word ‘Mexico’/‘México’ later emerged. According to legend, the Mexica were led to their new home by the god of the sun and war, Huitzilopochtli. One day, on one of the islands of Lake Texcoco, they saw the promised sign from Huitzilopochtli: an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus devouring a snake. Since encountering such a scene in nature was rare, the Mexica decided that they had found the promised land. Over time, the image of an eagle devouring a snake while perched on a cactus became the national emblem of Mexico.

Various sources and their interpreters contradict each other regarding the date Tenochtitlan was founded, but the most likely date is 20 June 1325. Recently, it has been suggested that initially the city was named Cuauhmixtitlan, meaning ‘a place of the eagle among the clouds’, and fifty years later, it was renamed Tenochtitlan in the memory of one of the early rulers of Tenocha.

An eagle among the clouds seems a more fitting description than the one on a prickly pear cactus. Moreover, Mexico City is situated in an exceptionally picturesque mountain valley, at an altitude of over 2 kilometers above sea level, making it one of the highest capital cities in the world. The expansive valley (approximately 75 by 125 kilometers) is surrounded by a ring of towering mountains, and at one time, the entire valley was occupied by five lakes. Tenochtitlan was built on an island in the western part of Lake Texcoco, while numerous secondary settlements lined the shores, which have now been incorporated into Mexico City limits and retain their resonant names. However, today, all the lakes have been almost completely drained or have dried up. A reminder of the unique lake civilization remains in the extensive canal system in the southeast of Mexico City, in the area of Xochimilco. Even in the early twentieth century, some of these canals reached the city center.

They say that there, one can sometimes encounter the ghost of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman). According to a popular legend, an indigenous woman fell in love with a Spanish captain and bore him children. He then abandoned her, and—depending on the version—either he or she killed the unfortunate children. Since then, her white shadow roams the shores of waterbodies, mourning her little ones. In Xochimilco, they also tell the story of a maiden who got entangled in the long stems of water lilies while swimming and drowned. Her spirit did not want to leave the place, so the owner of the chinampa (artificial island) had to appease her by offering discarded dolls found in the local canals. Since the 1990s, this place has become very popular, and since then many other fake doll islands have recently emerged for those who are too lazy to pay for a long journey to the far end of Xochimilco.

The historic center of modern Mexico City is located exactly where it was during the time of the Mexica tribes. The ruins of the main temple of Tenochtitlan were found and excavated between the Presidential Palace and the Cathedral. It was a double-stepped pyramid dedicated to the gods Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, which was constantly fertilized with bloody sacrifices.

The priest would rip open the victim's chest with an obsidian knife and tear out the still-beating heart, which poetically was called the ‘precious eagle fruit of the cactus’, likely due to the visual resemblance between the bloody heart and the flower of the cactus.

Filled with vast architectural masterpieces, the Museum of the Main Temple (Templo Mayor) has been sitting to the east of the Mexico City Cathedral for over forty years now with its open excavations of the ancient temple, known for its violent rituals. However, the excavations are only the central part of the complex; other temples and pyramids are hidden under the buildings in the neighboring districts, including under the cathedral itself and the giant main square. In one of these neighborhoods, archaeologists have gradually excavated several pyramids that can be accessed through three different entrances located on the streets of Donceles (under the Centro Cultural de España (Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico)), Calle de República de Argentina, and Calle de República de Guatemala. Those pyramids might even appear cozy and homely if it were not for the posters depicting the wall of skulls (tzompantli) excavated in the same area (but not yet open to the public) hanging on those streets. This grim reminder prevents us from overlooking the history and bloody rituals of the Mexica people. The skulls of the sacrificed people were planted on perches, which were arranged in rows along the wall. Apparently, this wall was intended to testify to the piety and the best intentions of the inhabitants of this town of ancient horrors.

The largest market in the Mexico City Valley was located on the adjacent island of Tlatelolco, connected to Tenochtitlan, where goods from all surrounding areas were brought by boat. Passable dams branched out from Tenochtitlan–Tlatelolco to settlements along the shores of Lake Texcoco to the north, west, and south. To the east, a large, and saltier, part of the lake was fenced off by a 16-kilometer wall-dam. The emblem of Mexico, issued to the city by the Emperor Charles V of Habsburg, reminds us of these dams.1¹Charles V of Habsburg was the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor (1516–1556), under whose rule Spain reached the height of its global power.

Three dams lead to the golden castle standing in the middle of the lake. Two golden lions on either side of the castle are depicted scratching their claws, symbolizing the capture of Tenochtitlan by the Spaniards. Surrounding the perimeter are cladodes (or ‘leaves’) of the Opuntia cactus, where the Mexican eagle would supposedly perch before swooping down to feast on a snake.

The Spaniards led by Hernán Cortés2²Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) was a Spanish conquistador, who conquered Mexico initially entered Tenochtitlan peacefully at the invitation of Emperor Moctezuma II (circa 1466–1520). However, soon tensions began to escalate between them and the Mexica, especially after the emperor was murdered, possibly by the Aztecs. From the night of 30 June to 1 July 1520, the Spaniards and their indigenous allies from Tlaxcala decided to evacuate the area but were caught off guard at one of the dams. All the gold taken by the Spaniards was lost, and half the Spaniards (about 500 people) and most of the Tlaxcaltecs (about 5,000) were killed. Cortés managed to escape, but chroniclers unanimously recorded his suffering and gloomy reflections on his fallen comrades. A huge semi-dried tree, the Mexican Montezuma cypress, or ahuehuete, located in the Popotla district is considered to be where the grief-stricken Cortés wept. Interestingly, a few years ago, this tree was renamed the Tree of Victory Night from the Tree of Sorrows as a part of the decolonization trends of the recent years, which are strong in Mexico and especially in Mexico City.

However, whether the night was sorrowful or victorious, it was short-lived. On 13 August 1521, after a prolonged siege, the Spaniards once again captured Tenochtitlan. It was plundered, heavily damaged, and then renamed Mexico. Soon, it would become the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain. The Spanish city was planned on a grid system (in squares), and the most important centers were the temples of various monastic orders and the squares in front of them. The first city park, Alameda, had already been built in the 1560s.

In the seventeenth century, a complex of temples raised in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe, located in the northeast of the city, became a new, though distant, center of attraction. The cult originated in the town of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain, in the fourteenth century. After the conquest of Mexico, a chapel was on the Hill of Tepeyac, north of Mexico City, which was previously a place of worship for the earth goddess Tonantzin. But that, it seems, did not greatly trouble the Catholic clergy.

According to that legend, in 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared to an indigenous man named Juan Diego and told him to ask the bishop to build her a church on the Hill of Tepeyac. The Blessed Virgin likely chose to use this corrupted version of a telephone game to allow us to enjoy the beautiful continuation of the story. The skeptical bishop demanded Juan prove that his visions were real. Then, following the command of the Virgin, Juan gathered a bundle of French roses (called Rosa gallica or the Castilian rose in Spanish) on the top of the hill, although no flowers had ever grown there, especially not of any European endemics. The Virgin instructed him to wrap them in his cloak (tilma). When Juan Diego appeared before the bishop with this impressive bouquet and unfolded his cloak, a life-size image of the Virgin Mary was imprinted on it. It was placed in the chapel and has been the object of fervent worship in all of Latin America to this day.

The eighteenth century became a time of prosperity for the local (creole) elite, who were Spaniards born in Mexico rather than Spain. The most industrious of the creoles rapidly enriched themselves by exploiting silver mines, purchasing lavish noble titles in Spain, and building magnificent palaces in Mexico City, emphasizing their wealth and status. The style of this era is sometimes referred to as ultra-baroque for its particularly unrestrained festivity. An outstanding contribution to the development of Mexican ultra-baroque was made by the architect Pedro de Arrieta (circa 1660–1738). In essence, it is to him that we owe the birth of the astonishingly cohesive artistic identity of colonial Mexico. Arrieta was the first to combine the light and porous dark red tezontle stone for the walls of the buildings, pairing it with the light gray and very hard chiluca for decorating windows and doors. In a century, half of the city was constructed using these kinds of buildings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this style became popular again and helped preserve the integrity of the buildings in the city center.

The culmination of Arrieta's work is the Basilica of Santa María de Guadalupe (the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe). Through a series of architectural hints (corner towers, nine entrances, et cetera), it embodies the image of Heavenly Jerusalem, characteristic of the European Middle Ages but not typical of the Baroque period, especially in the New World.

In the nineteenth century, the descendants of the wealthy patrons of the Mexican ultra-baroque led the movement against colonial rule, eventually gaining independence for Mexico. Exactly 300 years later, on 27 September 1821, rebels entered Mexico City once again. This time, it was a local, predominantly white elite who rejected the domination of their European kin. The city became the capital of the Mexican Empire, independent of Spain, and later served as the capital of the Republic and then once more of the empire, and so on. Indeed, the political history of independent Mexico is highly turbulent.

The next crucial stage in the development of the city, as in most cities around the world, occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. By then, the entire area surrounding Lake Texcoco in Mexico City had been filled in. Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, who was installed on the throne by the invading French troops, transformed the fortress on Chapultepec Hill into a European-style palace. He connected it to the center of Mexico City with a 4-kilometer avenue, which later became known as Paseo de la Reforma, named after the reforms by President Benito Juárez (1858–72). Ironically, it was Juárez who ordered the execution of the deposed emperor as a result of the Civil War. The transformation of Paseo de la Reforma into the Champs-Élysées of American Paris occurred during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911).

The 1940s and 1950s were marked by the construction of huge clusters of Mexican modernist architecture, including several high-rise residential complexes and the luxurious campus of the main university, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In the city center, an impressive skyscraper called the Latin American Tower (181 meters) was erected, which managed to successfully withstand devastating earthquakes. Near Chapultepec, one of the largest city parks in Mexico, a magnificent museum cluster was built, which included the world-renowned National Museum of Anthropology and History, which houses one of the most important collections of pre-Columbian art in the world.

All in all, the twentieth century was a time of great artistic achievements in Mexico City, with the birth and development of Mexican muralism and architectural modernism. A unique breakthrough in Mexican architecture of this time was the introduction of vibrant, even exaggerated, colors of everyday life and tropical nature into the urban planning language.

Juan O'Gorman (1905–82) was the first to use color (and image) as an essential element of modernist architecture. He built one of Latin America’s first functional style buildings, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s studio–house (1931–32), located in the southern suburb of San Angel. The structure, built according to Le Corbusier's principles, consists of two separate buildings, one each for the husband and wife's work, connected by a suspended bridge. The minimalist aesthetics and use of the cheapest materials are compensated by the bright colors: Diego's workshop is red and white, and Frida's is blue, like her childhood home in the neighboring district of Coyoacán, where Leon Trotsky lived immediately after his exile to Mexico.3³Leon (in Russian, Lev) Trotsky (1879–1940) was one of the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. O'Gorman's second masterpiece is the university library (1950–56). The main volume of the building is entirely covered with mosaics made of natural stone, reflecting the history of knowledge and science from pre-Columbian times through the colonial period to modernity.

The idea and use of color became a unique feature of Mexican architecture, evolving into a highly marketable aspect of Mexican design thanks to architects like Luis Barragán (1902–88) and Ricardo Legorreta (1931–2011). Barragán used colors like dark yellow, light terracotta, pink-red, and blue in a series of private chamber houses, refining what is considered the ‘Mexican’ palette.

His work was duly recognized, and he became one of the first recipients of the world-renowned Pritzker Architecture Prize. His own house near Chapultepec, in fact, is included on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. Getting inside is a real quest because the tickets are sold only online and are sold out in no time. However, the colorful, prismatic obelisk-like towers he built with the artist Matthias Goeritz at the entrance to Ciudad Satélite (Satellite City) are available to everyone and visible from afar. The metal structures, rising 30–50 meters, stand right in the midst of a turbulent stream of cars.

Equally impressive are the numerous creations of Ricardo Legorreta. He was the first to use bold colors in Barragan’s style to construct huge buildings for various purposes in different cities around the world. He was one of the first architects to introduce active color as an element of the urban landscape. His most important construction projects in Mexico are the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Supreme Court on the Alameda, and the National Center for the Arts located near Coyoacán.

Compared to other major metropolises of the world, Mexico City surprisingly changes very little. The most noticeable additions to the urban landscape are a few skyscrapers that were built in the 2010s. The most stylish ones are the Reforma Tower (246 meters) by the architect Benjamin Romano and the Torre BBVA México by Richard Rogers and Ricardo Legorreta (235 meters), located at the end of the Paseo de la Reforma and before the entrance to Chapultepec. The city's tallest building is the Mitikah Tower A (267 meters) by architect César Pelli in Coyoacán.

Against this confident and ultra-bourgeois skyline, it's hard to imagine the rare islands on the lakes, where human hearts were torn out to appease fierce gods, where conquistadors wreaked havoc, where passions boiled over during popular uprisings and revolutions, and where Leon Trotsky was killed by an alpenstock blow to the head.

1. Fuentes, Carlos. 1958. La región más transparente (Where the Air is Clear). Translated into Russian by Naum Naumov (1980).

2. Kerouac, Jack. 1959. Mexico City Blues. (1959). New York: Grove Press.

3. Ibargüengoitia, Jorge. 1990. Instrucciones para vivir en México (Instructions for Living in Mexico). Mexico City: Booket.

4. Bolaño, Roberto. 1998. The Savage Detectives. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. New York: Picador.

5. Fadanelli, Guillermo. 2010. Hotel DF. Mondadori.

6. Villoro, Juan. 2021. Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico. Translated by Alfred MacAdam. New York: Pantheon.