Under the Streets of Mexico City: A Historian's Field Notes

Field Notes of Dr. Lucía Ortega, Historian: One Week in Mexico City

1Monday, Templo Mayor. The ruins of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan lie beside the main square of Mexico City. The Mexica, often called Aztecs, founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco in about 1325, and causeways linked it to the shore. Archaeologists found that the temple was rebuilt and enlarged at least seven times. Each new temple was built over the older one. On top stood two shrines, one for Huitzilopochtli, a god of the sun and war, and one for Tlaloc, a god of rain.

2Monday afternoon, site museum. Offerings buried inside the temple include seashells and coral from the seacoasts, greenstone from distant mountains and the bones of jaguars. None of these came from the island or the lake around it. A label says that in 1978 electric company workers digging under a street struck a huge round stone that Mexica sculptors had carved with the goddess Coyolxauhqui.

3Tuesday, library reading room. I studied a printed copy of the Codex Mendoza, a book painted by Indigenous artists in about 1541, some twenty years after the conquest, for the Spanish viceroy. Its pages show the provinces that paid tribute to Tenochtitlan and what each sent: cotton cloaks, warriors' suits, cacao beans, bright feathers and jaguar skins. Spanish notes are written beside the pictures. The ruler of Tenochtitlan, the huey tlatoani, or “great speaker,” led an alliance with the cities of Texcoco and Tlacopan, and together they collected tribute from hundreds of towns.

4Tuesday afternoon. The Metropolitan Cathedral, begun in the 1570s, stands beside the ruins. After the conquest, the Spanish built their capital, Mexico City, on top of Tenochtitlan. They pulled down the temples and reused many of the stones. At the corner of an old colonial palace a few blocks away, I found a carved Mexica serpent head set into the wall as a cornerstone.

5Wednesday, Tlatelolco. Tlatelolco, Tenochtitlan's twin city just to the north, held the greatest market in the region. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a Spanish soldier who saw it in 1519, wrote decades later that soldiers who had been to Rome and Constantinople said they had never seen a market so large and so orderly. In 1521, after a siege of nearly three months, the last Mexica ruler, Cuauhtémoc, was captured here on August 13. A plaque placed in the 1900s calls that day “neither a triumph nor a defeat” but the painful birth of the mestizo (mixed Native and Spanish) people of Mexico today.

6Thursday, reminders for my lecture. Hernán Cortés landed in 1519 with about 500 Spanish soldiers. Many thousands of Tlaxcalans and other Native peoples who resented Mexica rule and tribute fought on his side. In 1520 smallpox, a disease carried from Europe by way of Cuba, swept through Tenochtitlan and killed many people, including the ruler Cuitláhuac. Also: more than 1.5 million people in Mexico speak Nahuatl, the Mexica language, today, and English words such as tomato, avocado and coyote come from Nahuatl.