Winged goddess of earthquakes and bones
Mexico City's most recognizable landmark is home to revelers, protestors, tourists, and the pilgrim bones of Mexico's heroes of independence
The way a society columnizes itself says something about it.
Washington monument: straight and stately, imposing in size, a minimalist ICBM. The July Column in Paris: fluted and sensuously acanthic, flirting with you. The Victory Column in Berlin: cannons, lots of cannons.
The Angel of Independence in Mexico City, meanwhile, is a party. The marble steps of the city’s most recognizable landmark is a gathering place for tourists, protesters, pride paraders, and quinceañera photo takers, all of whom must scramble, Frogger-like, to the center of a busy traffic roundabout where the column and its angel stands—or ever-so-slightly leans as things do in this city—watching its would-be visitors narrowly avoid death by pink taxi. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the monument is also a mausoleum.
Inaugurated by Porfirio Díaz in September 1910 on the centennial of Father Hidalgo’s grito1, the monument was not originally a tomb. Rather, it was a victory column, topped by the goddess Nike2, intended to celebrate Mexican independence—that is, the moment, in the ritual gibberish of the Mexican government, when the “father of the Fatherland” united the country to overthrow Spanish rule, but which we, more laboriously yet more correctly, will define as the moment a confused priest inaugurated eleven years of bloody civil war and was, for his efforts, beheaded.3 Ironically, less than a year after Díaz monumentalized Mexico’s independence, Mexico celebrated that independence by exiling Díaz to Paris. This was the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.4 In this way, the Ángel marks not one but two civil wars. So while columns are usually meant to be immutable manifestations of order and power—exclamation marks in stone—the Ángel is more of an interrobang.
It wasn’t until after the Revolution that the mausoleum was installed. The president at the time, Plutarco Elias Calles, decided to max out the amount of independence inside the monument of independence by ordering the remains of the “heroes” of that 19th century movement, including Father Hidalgo, to be disinterred from the Metropolitan Cathedral and placed within the column’s base. On the one hand: good statecraft! Better to move the symbolic origin of independence away from the church and into a civic monument.5 On the other: narrative simplification. The insurgents entombed in the Ángel were a succession of rebel leaders, each of whom had different political goals.6 This was not a cohesive band of freedom fighters. You could say they were, ahem, independent of each other.
The heroes lay in the Ángel for 85 years until they were exhumed again during the celebrations for the Bicentennial in 2010. President Felipe Calderón had the skulls and femurs ferried down the street to Chapultepec Castle, where experts discovered that the remains of one of the heroes, Mariano Matamoros, were not in the Ángel. In their stead: deer bones and the skeleton of a little girl.7 Which means the bones tourists don’t know they’re standing above may not be the bones they didn’t think were there in the first place.
If you manage to clamber atop the Ángel, pause a moment to reflect a moment on the architect who designed this monument. Antonio Rivas Mercado designed several buildings that epitomized the eclectic style of late 19th century Mexico City, including his own house (now a museum in the Guerrero neighborhood8) and a mansion in Juárez that has, unfortunately, become home to a popular family attraction called El Museo de Cera. Go to his house, skip the waxy horrors. While you may not know for certain whose remains are in the Ángel, rest assured the identities of the wax museum’s residents are never in question—only their likenesses.
Mercado remains, to this day, an excellent entry point for understanding Mexico’s recent history. Mercado’s daughter, Antonieta, was an influential arts patron and pioneering feminist who was bold enough to seek a divorce in Catholic Mexico of the 1920s, had a tortured affair with José Vasconcelos, the first public secretary of education and, when Vasconcelos was defeated in a sham presidential election, kidnapped her own son and fled to Paris. Vasconcelos’s name now adorns two of Mexico City’s most impressive libraries, which you should absolutely visit: Biblioteca de México “José Vasconcelos”, a former cigar factory and armory, and Biblioteca Vasconcelos, which resembles nothing so much as the space library at the end of Interstellar.
Antoinetta’s tragic tale is recounted in the melodramatic novel In the Shadow of the Angel, which opens with her shooting herself in the heart inside Notre Dame with Vasconcelos’s own revolver.
Which I suppose you could consider the ultimate act of independence.
Porfirio Díaz was a general and president of Mexico who served 31 years before being exiled at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Polemic character. His reign is known as the Porfiriato, during which he built many of CDMX’s most iconic monuments and buildings. You’ll be reading much more about him in these letters. We learned about El Grito in our previous letter, They paved paradise and put up a Zócalo.
That the Ángel is a Greek goddess and not, say, a more regionally appropriate representation, is the source of some amusement to locals. She holds in her hands a laurel wreath for victory, and three broken chains that symbolize the three centuries of Spanish rule. Famously, she fell from the top of the monument during the 1957 earthquake. Of the many photos of that event, the most striking is Ángel del Temblor by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one of the most famous Latin American photographers of the 20th century.
If that seems like an uncharitable way to describe the political origins of your adopted country, consider those immortal words of Jesus Christ, Jim Carrey, and the Central Intelligence Agency: ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Simplified timeline: War for Mexican Independence (1810-1821); Reign of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911); Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
Calles was rabidly anti-Catholic, and disliked that different local governments would celebrate Mexico’s independence by sending flowers and wreaths to the Metropolitan Cathedral—so he had the bones of the heroes moved to the Ángel. A lesser-mentioned fact of Mexican history is that Calles expanded and began brutally enforcing the anticlerical laws of Mexico’s 1917 constitution. Prayer was forbidden. Churches were turned into movie theaters and stables. This crackdown led to a Catholic uprising and the Cristero War, which left 90,000 dead. There are several books and movies devoted to this forgotten time in Mexican history, including La Cristiada: The Mexican People’s War for Religious Liberty (1973) and the Andy Garcia movie, For Greater Glory (2012), which is available on streaming services near you. A fun fact about Calles is that he was later exiled from Mexico while wearing pajamas.
Famously, Hidalgo wanted only liberation from the bad government of the vice royalty while maintaining allegiance to the Spanish crown.
“Huesos de mujer ocupaban la urna de Mariano Matamoros: INAH” (2010). For a full accounting of the prior travels of the hero’s pilgrim bones, see María Del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “Las Reliquias Y Sus Héroes,” Estudios De Historia Moderna Y Contemporánea De México, no. 30 (julio-diciembre 2005): 100.
The Casa Rivas Mercado offers guided tours, and you can’t show up unannounced. The best way to contact them is via email: visitas@casarivasmercado.com