Mexico City: In Search of Tenochtitlan

July 1 2017

I tried twice to get to the Historical Center of Mexico City, the great square they call the zocalo.  The first day, I rode the Metro out there only to come up short at the top of the subway stairs before a deluge of pouring rain, with thunderclaps rippling over the city.

Yesterday I went back, and this time got a calm, dry, if hazily overcast day to walk around in.  An appropriate sequence, perhaps: this is the city that had probably the most cataclysmic change of power in history, and the Historical Center is the heart of where it happened.  Here was Tenochtitlan.  And I was here to, more or less, look for the Aztecs.

The Zocalo

I did so in the guise of regular touristing, of course.  And the first thing the regular tourist sees, coming out of the Zocalo Metro stop, is, essentially, the extinction of the Aztecs, in the form of a massive projection of Spanish state power.  The zocalo is one of the world’s largest squares, and it’s surrounded by colonial-era stone buildings so enormous and imposing that even across the vast flattened plain they don’t fit in a camera shot.  Here the towering Catedral Metropolitana (begun in 1573); there the block-long Palacio Nacional (originally built by Cortes as a fortress); there the Federal District buildings from which the city has been governed since the Conquest. 

These are surrounded by the swirl and motion of modern Mexico City with its offices, cars and shopping strips, but it’s not hard at all to imagine these immense founding buildings alone in the newly conquered land, a trumpet blast in stone of the new authority that had come over the sea.

From the zocalo I walked down the Madero pedestrian mall, in search of a coffee, and was plunged into a historical tangle, modern metal-and-glass buildings and ritzy shops interspersed with the crumbling scrollworked stone of a preserved colonial church or museum.  The whole Historical district was like that: more than 1500 of its buildings are classified as historic or artistic monuments, which doesn’t disturb in the least the busy modernity of the rest, or the fact that I found my coffee at a Starbucks.

The Palacio de Iturbude

One of the older buildings was the Palacio de Iturbide, the residence of Mexico’s first (self-proclaimed and short-lived) Emperor in the early 19th Century, now a museum.  I went in.  Again I was faced with the colonial era, but with a jump in time: the exhibit featured art from the late 18th Century, from that delicate and refined New World society for whom the Aztecs were more than 250 years in the past.

I’ve always liked 18th Century art, and the museum had a good collection, though very heavy on religious allegory, in the corners of which lurked some quite realistic colonial era priests whom I wouldn’t have wanted to mess with.

Upstairs the palace took a stab at the 19th Century with a preserved room from “Emperor Iturbide’s” brief reign, a small space of rich red velvet walls, hanging curtains and priceless inlaid wooden furniture.

 The Torre Latinoamerica

From the museum I took another tack, and did the absurdly touristy thing of riding the elevator to the observation deck of the Torre Latinoamerica, Mexico City’s tallest skyscraper.  Built in 1956, the building’s observation deck retained that feel, a narrow encapsulated space of white tiles now slightly yellowed, rounded corners, thick slightly fogged glass, and souvenir counters.   But the view from the (wait for it) 37th floor was worth it.

From here you could really see the Valley of Mexico in all its original seclusion, surrounded on three sides by mountains, and with that geography it seemed a miracle that the space between was no longer a lake.  I suppose it is a modern miracle, though the bric-a-brac urban sprawl of Mexico City has replaced it with a new kind of lake under the haze and smog.  Up the clanging spiral stairs on the (gasp) 38th floor, they had an exhibit about the building that included actually the best illustrations of Tenochtitlan in its lake I saw all day (though with a little cartoon Torre Latinoamerica in the water to show its position).

Back on the ground I had a lunch at a touristy patio restaurant under the equestrian shadow of Charles IV (1748-1819).  I had a delicious Eggs Benedict and a very small coffee.

food picture by reader request! 

The Templo Mayor

Then I got serious.  The Templo Mayor is considered one of the top museums of Mexico City, as well as an active archeological site busy uncovering an important temple from Tenochtitlan itself.  And the museum is devoted to Aztec artifacts and life.

You enter the Templo Mayor through the outdoor site, which spans a vast space, most of a city block.  It’s filled with a bewildering ruin of many broken walls, levels, partial stairs and overhanging floors, all built of a leopard-spotted construction of black and reddish stones set in mortar, which I took to be the underpinnings of something whose facing has been lost.  For all its horizontal scope, the fragmentary remains weren’t enough for me to project a structure or feel a totality.  It was like trying to project the Colosseum if all you had were the underground chambers; oddly it was less evocative than the mere foundations I saw at Tula, which at least retained their magical geometry.  I wasn’t “getting” the Aztecs from it.

I went into the museum proper.

The museum was truly spectacular, well laid out, superbly lit, its multiple floors each presenting an aspect of Aztec life, filled with artifacts from large to tiny, all well explained by scholarly plaques in both Spanish and English. 

It was a great museum for photography.

In the end it was too good.  The museum was more about the museum than the Aztecs.  I was fascinated by the long informative explanations on what soil conditions led to the best preservation of paint pigments, or the different regional roles played by Tlaltecuhtli the goddess of Earth fertility, but at the end I was farther from Tenochtitlan than ever.  A faint background of humming mystical harmonics played as I wound through the spotlit exhibits, until I was sick of it.  The museum guards looked hard at me with my camera, though I wasn’t using a flash.

I was never a fan of the Aztecs.  Imperialists themselves no less than the Spanish, latecomers on the Mesoamerican scene, posing as descendants of bygone greats, a warrior culture based more in ritual than ingenuity, with, in Montezuma, one of most criminally stupid leaders in world history.  I would have liked to have seen Tenochtitlan on its lake, but that world is gone, gone like a leaf in the wind. For myself I couldn't even catch its scent.

Outdoors in the hazy brightness of the zocalo in 21st Century Mexico City you can get your picture taken next to some enterprising young men dressed as Aztec warriors, while others beat drums and dance. 

Now THAT—was the closest I got.