Hola y bienvenido! This is the second article of Julian's Handbook to Mexico City, which takes the form of a westward walking tour from the Zócalo in Centro (the seat of Mexico’s government, and the former ceremonial district of the Mexica) to El Bosque de Chapultepec (the city’s largest park, where we end at a museum for the city’s waterworks). These articles are about truly understanding the context of a place, rather than just giving you tips on where to eat and shop. Any writer can email influencers and owners of local boutiques and restaurants and ask them for recommendations—and that’s a useful service! But Julian’s speaks to curious minds by conveying what these places mean to the people who live here, and the people who came before, so you can return home with more to say than just, like, how wonderful the overpriced tuna at Contramar was. Besides: Restaurants and bars and boutiques, while lovely, all have their own instagrams, their own PR, their own influencers making tiktoks in sun dresses. All of that information is easy to find these days. What’s not easy, what’s missing in travel handbook form, is the history and the meaning of a place. That’s what Julian’s is for. -s.Handbook Table of Contents
The following ten chapters will comprise the first Julian’s Handbook to Mexico City:
The Pavement of Paradise
El Zócalo and La Bandera NacionalEl Templo Mayor
The origins of the AztecsCatedral Metropolitana
Publishing June ‘24. The conquest, the razing of temples, and Mexico’s complicated relationship with CatholicismEl Paseo de Reforma
Publishing July ‘24. Mexico City’s main thoroughfare: built by the last emperor of Mexico’s to shorten his commute, paved by the last dictator of Mexico’s to burnish his reputation—to equal, he said, the Champs-ElyséesMonumento a la Revolución
Publishing August ‘24. What happens when you overthrow a dictator while he’s building a new house.El Monumento de Cuauhtémoc
Publishing August ‘24. The tragic story of Descending Eagle, the first man to defend the patria from foreignersEl Ángel de Independencia
Mexico City's most recognizable landmark is home to revelers, protestors, tourists, and the pilgrim bones of Mexico's heroes of independenceLos Niños Heroes
Publishing September ‘24. The Mexican-American War, the invasion of Mexico City, and the children fighters who, according to the legend, lost their livesEl Castillo de Chapultepec
Publishing October ‘24. Built by the man who gave the city of Galveston its name, later home to Mexico’s last emperor, and today a helluva art museum. More of a palace, really.El Carcamo de Dolores
The art museum (and terminus of an engineering marvel) where Mexico City celebrates its toxic relationship with water
Our goal is to print these articles into a bound travel guide. Target date: December ‘24. Stay with us!
"We people here”
“Today, all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing left standing.” —Bernal Dîaz
There was a brief moment in the ‘70s when the president of Mexico considered rebuilding the Templo Mayor.
This would’ve been in the middle of Mexico City.
Two hundred feet of limestone-white pyramid, complete with replica sacrificial pyres burning over the streets below, where the sad-eyed organ grinders, tireless tamale vendors, and those tribal dancers wearing Nike Dunks whirl just outside the Metropolitan Cathedral—the one built with the temple’s original stones, five hundred some years ago.
A touristy Luxor of the Azteca, had it happened! Or maybe more a Walt Disney’s Enchanted Nahuatl Room. But historically-minded heads prevailed, and instead there’s something more rigorously archaeological, if not exactly eye-catching, in its place: an excavated pit where Colonial-era buildings used to be, revealing centuries-hidden staircases, crumbled bas reliefs, and jagged sculptures laying about like broken teeth. Welcome to what remains of Tenochtitlan, five dollars gets you inside. It used to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
The Templo Mayor was the center of the Aztec ceremonial district, a city within a city on an island in a lake. Looking at the temple’s remains sitting here, as they do, in the middle of Centro, where they’re surrounded by government offices, hotels, and converted convents, it’s tempting to repeat that old bromide that tour guides utter on every walking tour: here, dear travelers, you can see the past exist alongside the present.1 I’ve heard that exact phrase from guides in Rome, for example, which has made a fetish of knuckling espresso bars around aqueducts and shopping malls between vomitoriums. The cities and towns of England, too, are littered with thousands of Medieval churches, still in genuflective use, and meanwhile in Paris you can sit cross-legged at a cafe, scrolling feeds, in the shade of Haussmann’s boulevards. You are the space your body believes in, a poet wrote; a country, by extension, is the buildings the people still inhabit, that hold memory, that still stand. Little that was here before the Spaniards, does. In Mexico City you have to peer into a hole and say look, this is who we were.
But five hundred years ago, when the Spaniards crossed down into the valley and first saw Tenochtitlan, they were literally stunned. Palaces, rivaling any in Spain, shining in lime and decorated in stonework and paintings, bridges and causeways spanning across the water, canoes flitting about from shore to island and throughout verdant canals: a Venice on a high mountain lake.
What they were seeing, the historical record suggests, was possibly the most beautiful combination of the natural and built environments in human history. In letters to King Charles V, Cortés described the scene as “so wondrous as to not be believed”, so full of “grandeur, strange and marvelous things” that “we here who saw them with our own eyes could not understand them with our minds”. Another conquistador, Bernal Dîaz, who published one of the only first-hand accounts of the conquest said, and famously, that he “thought that no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world.”2 Can you imagine that? Can you imagine yourself there, with Dîaz, standing near the lakeside gardens of Iztapalapan and looking across the water at the Templo Mayor as the steel-helmeted conquistadors on horseback turned to each other and asked: is this not all a dream?
It was a dream, in a manner of speaking, but it wasn’t their dream. It was a dream that belonged to the Mexica.
Seven hundred years ago, in this spot, while the first bubonic fleas were rat-hopping their way through the Crimea, a scrappy and nomadic tribe, having made its way down from northern Mexico, came upon the unoccupied island at the center of Lake Texcoco, where the nochtli and the algae grew, and said: “home”.3 These were the people historians now call the Aztecs. They called themselves, to the extent that they used collective nouns, the Mexica. To the Mexica, the name of a people was connected to the name of a place. Tenocha was another term they used for themselves, to denote that they were from Tenochtitlan, as opposed to nearby Tlatelolco. But the phrase heard most often, at least by the conquistadors and their translators, the phrase that confused the Spaniards as they pressed forward from mosquito’d coast towards the city of Montezuma, was one that referred to all of the Nahuatl-speaking people around the lake: I nican titlaca, which meant simply, poetically, ominously “we people here.”
Those people there began simply, in the 14th century, building mud and thatch huts on the swampy island that had been allowed to them by the other tribes around the lake. That island is, today, the land that Centro and the Temple Mayor is built upon. Almost everything surrounding was once brackish water. When you follow this handbook’s path and walk West, towards Chapultepec, you’re walking on top of a dry lake. When you walk south, towards Xochimilco, same same: you’re walking on top of a dry lake. East and North, too. This, combined with the muddy thudder of earthquakes, is why so many buildings in Mexico City have developed a precarious lean, and why parts of the city are sinking at a rate of 20 inches per year.
But in the 14th century Lake Texcoco stood shallow and wide, a seahorse-shaped basin of seasonal rainfall and snowmelt from the surrounding mountains. Over the next two hundred years, give or take, the Aztecs built the city of Tenochtitlan: 50,000 or 100,000 people, nobody knows exactly, living in 5.5 square miles of meticulously planned, grid-like streets. Because the city grew so quickly from scratch, rather than gradually and organically, like Paris or London, Tenochtitlan’s construction was planned and organized. The buildings ranged along orderly, straight streets. From the center, where the zócalo is today, spread four subdivisions, each one occupying about a quarter of the city, the finest buildings near the center. Obsidian carvers in one, chocolate makers in another, all the quetzal feathers and gold somewhere else. If you look closely at the neighborhoods today, you’ll see the legacy of that tidy categorization in, for example, Colonia Juarez (where they specialize in auto body and tire shops), Colonia Doctores (where they specialize in tools, appliances, and furniture), and Colonia Condesa (which maintains an impressive and ever-changing collection of American tourists).
In the 13th and 14th centuries, adobe houses lined the streets, each with a central courtyard. An aqueduct carried fresh water across the brackish lake, straight from the western hills. And along the edges of the island, and in the canals, were chiampas, which we would call floating gardens. Five causeways led across to three shores, and everywhere on the aquatic highways there were canoes. The Templo Mayor was the center. On the far side of the temple precinct was the former palace of Moctezuma (the elder), and nearby was a sort of zoo, where emperors kept reptiles, jaguars, mountain lions, and other animals brought as tribute from throughout the kingdom. Behind the Templo Mayor was the emperor’s palace, the terminus of a clay aqueduct that originated several kilometers away on the lake’s western shore, now El Bosque de Chapultepec, and which was part of a sprawling waterworks system containing dikes and sluices and causeways and aqueducts. 4
As for the Templo Mayor itself, it faced west toward the setting sun, and you can imagine the long shadow of its bulk, in the afternoons, draped silently across the city. Two stairways led to the top. At that summit stood two stone and thatch shrines, overlooking the city and the valley. The shrine on the right was dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and of war. The shrine on the left was dedicated to Tláloc, the god of rain, water, and earth’s fertility. These two gods represented what every Mexica was most concerned with: access to water, for life, and favor in warfare, which allowed the empire both growth and stability. In front of both were sacrificial cutting stones, where priests would cut open their victims and remove their still beating heart.
And that’s what Aztec society boils down to, in the popular imagination: sacrifice. The names of the gods are uncomfortably long and hard to pronounce, the belief system is dualistic and complex, but the fact that the Aztecs sacrificed people to their idols and supposedly ate flesh—hey now, that’s quite easy to remember.5 But here’s an historical irony: destroyers of things create perceptions of those things. In the mind’s eye an Aztec priest stands at the top of the Templo Mayor and holds aloft a handful of dripping ventricles, a vision of cruelty and evil. But the meaning and interpretation of that image, that the Aztecs were a brutal and bloodthirsty tribe, is less historical fact and more a post-invasion justification, repeated by the Spaniards, to warrant the taking of land and imposition of Catholicism. The more devilish the Aztecs seemed to be, the more justified the conquest and the greater the redemptive power of Christ, our lord and savior. That, the Spaniards said, is what gave them the right to knock the temples down and build cathedrals instead. 6 And so, the Spanish destroyed Tenochtitlan. They dismantled the aqueducts. They razed the temples. They filled in the canals and built New Spain in its place.
Over the centuries the physical evidence of Aztec rule, the temples and pyramids and zoos and aqueducts, receded, like the waters of Lake Texcoco, into the sediment of imagination. This is the way of Mexico, and much of Latin America: most of the time, what remains of the past is overgrown, deeply hidden, in jungle. But occasionally, in ever-expanding Mexico City, artifacts would be found: an idol while digging a subway tunnel, a stone while building a parking garage.7 And then one day, in 1978, workers from the Electric Light Company were digging at the corner of Guatemala and Argentina streets in Centro when they discovered a stone carved with a series of reliefs. Over the course of several days, what they eventually uncovered was a 3.25 meter wide circular monolith of a decapitated and dismembered female nude. This, it turned out, happened to be a depiction of the Aztec goddess of the Milky Way, Coyolxauhqui.8 And that goddess, it turned out, is what inspired the Mexican government to begin excavating the Templo Mayor in earnest.
Recitations of the excavation and exactly what was found inside are best left to the docents and diagrams of the Templo Mayor itself. There are urns of ceremonial remains, tecalli stone, obsidian blades, face knives, skull masks. But the dimly lit rooms are less impressive, I suggest, than the open air site itself. Enter just to the east of the cathedral, and spend a while strolling across the gangplanks above the dig, which is ongoing to this day. Sunscreen. Where lots of that.
When I was walking past the site the other day, on the way to Colegio de San Ildefonso to see a Brian Eno installation, I remembered, quite out of nowhere, what a friend had recently told me about reading: that the symbols that we call letters have no intrinsic meaning, that the value assigned to them is arbitrary. And so, he said, every time we read we are hallucinating meaning. That may be an interesting way to approach the ruins of the Templo Mayor, where significance and meaning is also continually reinterpreted, and where the temple is a place where we have to imagine—to hallucinate—what the past of this space and of this city must have been like.
What I know is that in these Mexican ruins, in the old Mexican emperors, in all of Mexican history and in a messy hole in the middle of downtown, what may be found is what other nations and other peoples have to beg for in fable and myth.
📍Nearby sights and further reading
Visiting the Templo Mayor? You’re in the Center of the city. Lots of Spanish colonial, virreinato, and neoclassical buildings filled with examples of mid-century murals. Enjoy this selection of stops for a mural tour:
🎨 Murals, art, and sights 🎨
Casa de los Azulejos: The blue tile building. Has a Sanborn’s. Always stupid crowded. Go at opening or else avoid at all costs. Near the main staircase is Omnisciencia, by José Clemente Orozco.
Mercado Presidente Abelardo L. Rodriguez: Slightly less touristy spot for a good bite, and some floor-to-ceiling murals by Riviera’s disciples and collaborators.
Colegio de San Ildefonso: Holds La creación, Riviera’s first government-commissioned mural, La fiesta del Señor de Chalma, by Fernando Leal, and more than 20 frescos by Orozco. Where Riviera met Kahlo.
Museo de la Luz: David Alfaro Siqueiros painted several of his first murals here: La alegoría de los cinco elementos, El entierro del obrero sacrificado, Los mitos y El llamado de la libertad.
Secretaría De Educación Pública (Edificio Anexo): Currently closed for restoration, but contains several floors, staircases, and courtyards of Riviera murals depicting Mexican history and culture.
Palacio de Bellas Artes: On of the city’s most popular attractions, with murals by Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo, Roberto Montenegro, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano. Most famous is likely Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe (1934), a version of which was originally intended for Rockefeller Center.
Downtown Mexico Hotel: Wonderful hotel with a dependable rooftop bar, not to mention the site of El holocausto by Manuel Rodríguez Lozano—a melancholy sort who, to his credit, was one of the only mid-century muralists who refused to paint patriotic scenes. So, death. Death and sadness. That was his vibe.
Palacio Nacional: Holds Diego Rivera’s massive The History of Mexico. Tours in English and Spanish available daily. Tickets available across the street at Museo de la Secretaría de Hacienda.
La Suprema Corte de Justicia: Several impressive Orozco murals. Walk-up tours were suspended during covid but group tours are now available if you plan in advance.
🎭 Entertainment 🎭
La Casa del Cine: Tiny little cinema showing indie films and some mainstream favorites. Great for date night.
Zinco Jazz Club: Delightful little jazz club with period correct decor. Also great for date night.
Sunday Sunday: Semi-secret dance parties in Centro
Bósforo: Best mezcal bar in the city (some say La Clandestina in Condesa, but Bosforo is classier). Wildly different DJs playing world and EDM music, depends on when you go. Eclectic bites. Gets crazy busy end of the week.
📚 What to read 📚
When Montezuma Met Cortés: Incredible book that foregrounds the indigenous experience and reveals how untrustworthy the original Spanish texts and tales of the Conquest really are—and how those tales have created the popular and erroneous understanding . This is my favorite book about the Spanish conquest but of the books I’m recommending here, I suggest you read it last (unless, of course, you’re already well familiar with the history).
Fifth Sun: The history of the Aztecs, including their mythology and how they arrived in the Valley of Mexico, using primary sources, many of which are indigenous. Goes into immense detail, but also succinctly summarizes misconceptions about Aztec culture. Contains a useful guide to how historians study the Aztecs today, as well as a list with descriptions of primary sources. Also recommended, though quite a bit dated now: The Great Temple of the Aztecs, by Matos Moctezuma, the original director of the excavation of the Templo Mayor.
Conquistador: The story of Hernan Cortés, thoroughly researched but written almost like a swashbuckling tale. A great introduction to the harsh realities of the conquest, but compared to the other books above, rather thin on the indigenous perspective.
Postcard to Justin from Reforma
Want a postcard from Mexico? I’d love to send you one. Leave a comment (not with your address!) or reply to this email.📕 What is Julian’s?
Julian’s is a handbook for curious travelers written by Steve Bryant, who lives and works in Mexico City. Julian’s is named for his grandfather, a very handsome southerner who never traveled anywhere, but who now has a travel newsletter named after him, so who knows where his namesake will end up. The wordmark for Julian’s is designed in Frustro, a typeface inspired by the Pemrose Triangle, and which represents impossible objects—appropriate for Mexico City, which Salvador Dali once described as more surreal than his art. More about your host, Steve Bryant, at thisisdelightful.com.
I heard this exact phrase from a tour guide in Rome, once. She repeated it and even made a joking song of it: 🎶 The past 🎶 alongside the present 🎶 alongside the future 🎶. I’ll always remember that, because you can make the argument that the creation of the unified state of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century is inextricably bound with the creation of mass tourism. See Stephanie Malia Hom’s The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy for an in-depth look at how the first-ever tourism package tours were devised by the Englishman Thomas Cook “to foster sentiments of national belonging among Italians.”
How do we know what the Aztecs were like, or Tenochtítlan, or the Templo Mayor? The answer usually begins with Dîaz’s book which, along with Cortés’ self-serving letters to his king, informed the Western view of the Mexica culture for centuries. For an in-depth examination of how early Spanish-speaking sources are responsible for Western misunderstandings about Aztec culture, see Matthew Restall’s excellent When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History. For an overview of Aztec culture and mythology, plus to understand how scholars study the Aztecs today (and why that study has changed over the last few decades), see Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.
History and myth suggest that around AD 1000, the Aztecs left a place called Aztlan, their island homeland in the north, and began to wander towards the Valley of Mexico. Some historians believe that Aztlan was a frontier outpost of the Toltec empire, with its capital at Tula—which you can visit today, Toltec artifacts an all. As for places called Aztlan, well, that’s now the name of an amusement park in El Bosque de Chapultepec.
Don’t miss, in El Bosque de Chapultepec, El Monumental Fuente de Nezahualcóyotl, in honor of the monarch of Texcoco who built a large stone and wood dam in Lake Texcoco to prevent flooding, and that also prevented the salt and fresh water of the lake from mixing.
The very first impressions of Tenochtitlan and the Aztecs in Europe came from newspaper accounts that mixed eyewitness observations, rumors, and imaginative speculation, including that “Great Venice” was “enormously rich in gold, and in cotton, wax, and honey”, that the city’s roofs were made of “pure silver”, and that the inhabitants “fatten and eat dogs, which are the only animals in the land” and “they eat much flesh”. The first eyewitness accounts came years later in the form of Cortés’ letters to Charles V; those letters were written to justify the possession of Aztec land and the installation of Cortés as governor of New Spain. See Matthew Restall’s excellent When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History.
The truth of the sacrifices is much more interesting. In the early decades of Tenochtitlan, few people would have been sacrificed on the monthly religious festival days, and those people were treated as a holy of holies before they died. The onlookers who watched fasted and stood holding sacred flowers. After a sacrifice, the warrior who had captured and presented the victim kept the remains and ceremonial regalia in a special reed chest in a place of honor in his home. This was sacrifice as religious necessity. In Aztec myth, the gods asked humans to appreciate what they had been given and to make sacrifices mostly by bleeding themselves, but sometimes by giving the ultimate gift of human life. If humans refused to do this, the fragile world might come to an end. The Aztecs believed that previous worlds had ended in disaster. This world, the Fifth Sun, began because of a man’s sacrifice of himself to restart the sun. It was the Aztec duty to keep the flame alit. But as powerful as this myth may have been, even the Aztecs’ own histories, as written down in ancient carvings and 16th-century codices prepared with the Spaniards, indicate that they understood that political life didn’t revolve around gods or sacrifice but the realities of shifting power imbalances throughout the Valley of Mexico. Aztec chiefs had many wives. Those wives could have literally dozens of sons. Those sons could have factions, depending on who the boys’ mothers were. A weaker faction in one city-state might ally with a losing band of boys in another city-state, threatening to topple dominant families and changing the political map. The prisoners of war who faced sacrifice were usually collateral damage in those struggles. Sacrifice wasn’t blood worship. It wasn’t flesh eating. It was politics. For more on this, see Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.
For a full accounting of the excavation of the Templo Mayor, see The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlan by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma
Who, according to myth, tried to kill her own mother (who had been impregnated by a ball of feathers from the sky), but instead the baby boy inside her mother, Huitzilopochtli, emerged from in utero and killed Coyolxauhqui instead. He cut off her head and when her body fell it broke into pieces.
Agreed. Bósforo is definitely more fun than La Clandestina. But don't you ever have the urge to have less fun and Clandestina is just the mellow vibe you didn't know you needed?