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Mexico City History

And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and cues and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tales of Amadis. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream . - Bernal Díaz

It’s hardly surprising that Cortés and his followers should have been so taken by their first sight of Tenochtitlán , capital of the Aztecs. For what they found, built in the middle of a lake traversed by great causeways, was a beautiful, strictly regulated, stone-built city of 300,000 people, easily the equal of anything they might have experienced in Europe. The Aztec people (or, as they called themselves, the Mexica) had arrived at the lake, after years of wandering and living off what they could scavenge or pillage from settled communities, in around 1345. Their own legends have it that Huitzilopochtli had ordered them to build a city where they found an eagle perched on a cactus devouring a snake, and this they duly saw on an island in the middle of the lake; this is the basis of the nopal, eagle and snake motif that forms the centrepiece of the modern Mexican flag and appears everywhere, from coins and official seals to woven designs on rugs. The reality was probably more desperate - driven from place to place, the lake seemed a last resort - but for whatever reasons it proved an ideal site. Well stocked with fish, it was also fertile, once they had constructed their chinampas , or floating gardens of reeds, and virtually impregnable, too: the causeways, when they were completed, could be flooded and the bridges raised to thwart attacks (or to escape, as the Spanish found to their cost on the Noche Triste ).

The island city eventually grew to cover an area of some thirteen square kilometres, much of it reclaimed from the lake, and from this base the Aztecs were able to begin their programme of expansion: first, dominating the valley by a series of strategic alliances, war and treachery, and finally, in a period of less than a hundred years before the Conquest, establishing an empire that demanded tribute from and traded with the most distant parts of the country.

The Conquest

Cortés landed on the east coast in 1519, bringing with him an army of only a few hundred men, and began his long march on Tenochtitlán. Several key factors assured his survival: superior weaponry, which included firearms; the shock effect of horses (never having seen such animals, the Aztecs at first believed them to be extensions of their riders); the support of tribes who were either enemies or suppressed subjects of the Aztecs; and the unwillingness of the Aztec emperor to resist openly.

Moctezuma II (Montezuma), who had suffered heavy defeats in campaigns against the Tarascans in the west, was a broodingly religious man who, it is said, believed Cortés to be the pale-skinned, bearded god Quetzalcoatl, returned to fulfil ancient prophecies. Accordingly he admitted him to the city - fearfully, but with a show of ceremonious welcome. By way of repaying this hospitality the Spanish took Moctezuma prisoner, and later attacked the great Aztec temples, killing many priests and placing Christian chapels alongside their altars. Meanwhile, there was growing unrest in the city at the emperor’s passivity and at the rapacious behaviour of his guests. Moctezuma was eventually killed - according to the Spanish stoned to death by his own people while trying to quell a riot - and the Spaniards driven from the city with heavy losses. Cortés, and a few of his followers, however, escaped to the security of Tlaxcala, most loyal of his native allies, there to regroup and plan a new assault. Finally, rearmed and reinforced, their numbers swelled by indigenous allies, and with ships built in secret, they laid a three-month siege, finally taking the city in the face of suicidal opposition in August 1521.

The city’s defeat is still a harsh memory: Cortés himself is hardly revered, but the natives who assisted him, and in particular Moctezuma and Malinche, the woman who acted as Cortés’s interpreter, are non-people. You won’t find a monument to Moctezuma in the country, though Cuauhtémoc, his successor who led the fierce resistance, is commemorated everywhere; Malinche is represented, acidly, in some of Diego Rivera’s more outspoken murals. More telling, perhaps, of the bitterness of the struggle, is that so little physical evidence remains: “All that I saw then,” wrote Bernal Díaz, “is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”

Spanish and Post-Colonial Mexico City

The victorious Spanish systematically smashed every visible aspect of the old culture, as often as not using the very stones of the old city to construct the new, and building a new palace for Cortés on the site of the Aztec emperor’s palace. A few decades ago it was thought that everything was lost; slowly, however, particularly during construction of the Metro and in the remarkable discovery of remains of the Templo Mayor beneath the colonial Zócalo, remains of Tenochtitlán have been brought to light.

The new city developed slowly in its early years, only attaining the level of population that the old had enjoyed at the beginning of the twentieth century. It spread far wider, however, as the lake was drained, filled and built over - only tiny vestiges remain today - and grew with considerable grace. In many ways it’s a singularly unfortunate place to site a modern city. Pestilent from the earliest days, the inadequately drained waters harboured fevers, and the native population was constantly swept by epidemics of European diseases. Many of the buildings, too, simply began to sink into the soft lake bed, a process probably accelerated by regular earthquakes. You’ll see old churches and mansions leaning at crazy angles throughout the centre, and though repairs to buildings damaged by the disastrous earthquake of September 1985 are long complete, several empty shells remain standing.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the city comprised little more than the area around the Zócalo and Alameda. Chapultepec Castle, Coyoacán, San Ángel, and the Basilica of Guadalupe - areas now well within city limits - were then surrounded by fields and the last of the basin’s former lakes. Nonetheless, the city was beginning to take its present shape: the Paseo de la Reforma already linked Chapultepec with the city, and the colonial core could no longer accommodate the increasing population. From late 1870 through to 1911 the dictator Porfirio Díaz presided over an unprecedented, and self-aggrandizing, building programme which saw the installation of trams, the expansion of public transport and the draining of some of the last sections of the Lago de Texcoco which had previously hemmed in the city. Jointly these fuelled further growth, and by the outbreak of the Revolution in 1910, Mexico City’s residents numbered over four hundred thousand.

Modern City

As many as two million Mexicans died during the Revolution and many more lost their property, livelihood or both. In desperation thousands fled to the rapidly industrializing capital in search of jobs and a better life. Between 1910 and the mid-1940s the city’s population quadrupled and the cracks in the infrastructure quickly became gaping holes. Houses couldn’t be built quickly enough to cope with the seven-percent annual growth, and many people wouldn’t have been able to afford them anyway, so up sprung shanty towns . The city became surrounded by shacks cobbled together from whatever scraps of metal and cardboard could be found. Most had little or no water supply and sanitation was an afterthought. Gradually, civic leaders tried to improve the lot of its citizens by improving the services and housing in shanty towns, but a new ring of slums mushroomed even more quickly just a little further out. As the city expanded, transport became impossible and the city embarked on building the Metro system, an ongoing process since the late 1970s.

Urban growth continues today: some estimate that there are a thousand new arrivals each day, and the city now extends beyond the limits of the Distrito Federal and out into the surrounding state of México. Despite the spread, Mexico City remains one of the world’s densest and most populated cities with an unenviable list of major social and physical problems, and no sign of major improvement in the near future