Christmastime in Tenochtitlan
The best time to be in Mexico City is between December 12 and January 6. During that three-and-a-half-week period, beginning on the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe and ending on Epiphany, the megalopolis’s ungodly traffic subsides. As a result, the yellow-gray layer of smog that typically hovers above the city vanishes, revealing the majestic snow-capped mountains that surround the Valley of Mexico. When I was growing up, my parents would sometimes call me to their room on clear mornings to look out their window at Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, the famous volcanoes that, according to Aztec legend, are a lapidified princess lying on her back and a warrior kneeling by her side. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the view back then, but on a recent trip to Mexico City over Christmas, I found it awe-inspiring.
It is easy to get lost in the chaos of Mexico City and forget that it sits in the valley where one of the most important events in the history of humanity took place just over 500 years ago. On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in the Valley of Mexico, home to Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. With over 200,000 residents, Tenochtitlan was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time, rivaled in size only by Paris and Constantinople. The religious center of the city was built on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, connected to the mainland and other islands by vast causeways and a complex canal system.
After almost nine months of travel — from Cuba to Veracruz, and then inland to central Mexico — Cortés and his men entered the valley through the passage between Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. They could hardly believe their eyes: “These great towns and temples and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis,” wrote Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortes’s soldiers who chronicled the journey. “Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream…It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before.”
The Spanish, unlike the Aztecs, had horses, firearms, and cannons, but they were greatly outnumbered by the experienced Aztec warriors, who were fierce conquerors in their own right. Cortés forged alliances with indigenous armies who were fed up with the Aztec’s brutal hegemony and, less than two years later, thanks in great measure to a European-borne smallpox epidemic that devastated the Aztec population, he conquered Tenochtitlan.
The significance of this victory cannot be overstated. The Aztec Empire was the most powerful empire in Mesoamerica, spanning much of what is today central Mexico. Cortés’s victory gave the Spanish Crown control over vast new territories, which became the first major mainland European colony in the New World, the New Spain. It is through the New Spain that Christianity and western culture first arrived on the American Continent, and the conquest of Mexico was a catalyst for the age of European colonialism that followed.
The fall of Tenochtitlan was also the seminal moment in the creation of a new nation, spawned from the meeting of two worlds. When Cortés arrived, the territory that makes up modern Mexico was populated by numerous civilizations and city-states, with diverse cultures and languages. There was no notion of a Mexican nation or a Mexican people. The modern conception of Mexico — an ever-changing and endlessly complicated topic — originates with the syncretism of Spanish culture and the indigenous world.
Mexico City is steeped in history but also impatiently modern, always growing, always jumping on new trends, from the colonial buildings that surround the ruins of the Aztec’s Great Temple to the French-style mansions of Roma to the sterile high-rises of Santa Fe. The city is expansive, the distances are long, the neighborhoods are distinct, and the traffic is absolutely terrible, enhancing the feeling that everything is dense and tightly packed, as if it could collapse under its own weight at any moment. (And in some places, it has; many of the city’s most iconic buildings, like the Metropolitan Cathedral and the Palacio de Bellas Artes, are literally sinking.) The city has fallen — to the Spanish, to the French, to the Americans — and has been shaken to its core by devastating earthquakes and popular uprisings. It is always being built and rebuilt. Constantly changing, its past is ever-present, and Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl witness it all.
