[The photo above is of Tlaloc, the god of rain and earthly fertility; it is from the Mexica/Aztec period (1325-1327 AD) in the Museo de National de Antropología.]
We just returned from a week in Mexico City, and what a week it was! As the biggest city in North America and one of the top ten largest in the world (with over 22 million people spread over almost 500 square miles), Cuidad de México is everything you’d expect an “alpha” city to be: chaotic, noisy, congested, crazy, gridlocked, and often incredibly frustrating. But it is also exciting, diverse, cultured, historic, good-natured, beautiful and hospitable. There’s so much to see and do and experience in this major metropolis that the attempt to tackle it all in just a few days leaves you breathless — especially since it all sits at an altitude of 7,350 feet.
My husband and I hadn’t been there in decades, so we returned with a fresh perspective as experienced travelers who have since visited many, many major cities of the world on six different continents. I think Mexico City is largely overshadowed as a tourist destination by the more famous European capitals, and even by the smaller coastal resorts in Mexico such as Cancún frequented by cruise ships. Yes, you can drink margaritas and dance to salsa music in Mexico City, but this capital city is hardly a “Margaritaville” — not by a long shot.
The City is the oldest capital city in the Americas and one of two founded by Indigenous people, the Mexica (Aztecs) in1325. It was called Tenochtitlan until the Spanish almost completely destroyed it in 1521. Under the Spanish, the City became Cuidad de Mexico and was redesigned according to Spanish urban standards. Today, much of its stately architecture and city layout bears a remarkable resemblance to Madrid, though the wide, elegant, Jacaranda tree-lined thoroughfare running through the center of the City, the Paseo de la Reforma, was built in 1865 at the direction of Emperor Maximilian to mirror the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
The Mexico City inhabitants, or the capitalinos as they are formally called, are incredibly proud of their long and fascinating history; in fact, each of the gleaming monuments of marble and gold punctuating the grand traffic circles (the glorietas) on Reforma Avenue give honor to some important hero or event in the nation’s history. The Central Historic District and the Plaza de la Constitución (also known as the Zócala) has been the center of culture, religion and politics since the days of the Aztecs. In fact, in 1978 while city workers were digging near the Metropolitan Cathedral, the remains of a carved stone disc were uncovered, which in turn led to a major archeological dig over several city blocks which uncovered an ancient Aztec site, the Templo Major. Today it is a popular tourist attraction where visitors can wander among the ruins and explore the excellent museum nearby.
Reputedly, Mexico City has more museums than any other city in the world. It certainly seemed that way to me in our breathless attempt to see so many of them in five days! Really, there are too many incredibly important cultural collections to even begin listing them all, and when you add the magnificent art galleries and studios of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo …well… you’re thoroughly worn out even before you’ve explored any of the markets, eaten in any of the fine restaurants, or experienced the inspiration of the Basilicas (old and new) of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And then you still have the trips out to the pyramids of Teotihuacán and the canals of Xochimilco. Oh my!
If I have to name one museum, however, that really is not to be missed even if you only have a weekend, it would have to be the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, surely one of the most important of its kind in the world and one that puts the history and the character of Mexico and its people in context and sequential order. Through a series of separate halls surrounding a beautiful courtyard and fountain, anthropology begins in the first exhibit hall in with the pre-historic peopling of the Americas around 30,000 BCE, and continues on into the Pre-Classic period of Central Mexico (2500 BCE). Art and archeology then move through adjacent halls and historic eras: Teotihuacan, Toltec, Mexica (Aztec), Oaxaca, Gulf Coast, Mayan, and the regions of Western and Northern Mexico.
Now I have been to huge, awe-inspiring museums before, some that lay claim to exhaustive collections, but never, never have I been to one that so clarifies and contextualizes all the information I have accumulated over the years about Mesoamericans and the history of the place that I actually live in today, which was once part of Northern Mexico. (My own ancestors got land grants here in Texas from the Mexican government back in the early 1840s.) We see bits of the art (Mayan, pre-Columbian) in other museums and we learn bits of cultural heritage here and there in South Texas, but never has any single place or any single exhibit put it all together for me the way that the Museo Nacional de Antropologia did. It was a real highlight of the trip because I learned so much.
Mexico City, as I said earlier, is often overlooked by tourists in favor of other major capital cities, but I also think it is particularly overlooked, and much maligned, by Americans. The negative press about the border, the wall, the gangs, the drugs, and the whole immigration problem is constant; moreover, for Texans, even the long-ago memories of sleazy border towns full of cheap goods and high crime linger and have given Mexico, as a country, a bad rap. Shame on us. Mexico has a long and storied history well beyond the Alamo and Santa Anna, and in so many ways, theirs is our collective history.
We shared this trip with our son, who had never been to Mexico City before, and we let him set the itinerary of sites to see and things to do. Boy! His tour direction would make Tauck or Abercrombie proud! But then we had the unexpected: a weekend spent in the Benito Juarez International Airport for two days standing in line and trying to get home after hundreds of flights were cancelled due to Popocatépetl’s eruption that spewed heavy volcanic ash into the atmosphere. Here we were having been immersed in the history of Mexico and now we were being immersed in the atmospheric thick of it.
“El Popo,” as the volcano is called by the locals, awoke in 1994 after sleeping for 70 years, and it has been giving off modest levels of fumes and ash ever since. This time, though, the eruption was more than modest, spewing sufficient lava and ash to cause havoc and threaten the well-being of some 30 million people living within a 50 mile radius. We are talking about a “stratovolcano,” capable of the kind of destruction that Mt. Vesuvius wrought (in 79AD), and it was enough to close the airport and cancel hundreds of flights. (We did get out two days later, albeit to Austin, not San Antonio.)
And so, that is the end of my travelogue for Mexico City. I’m glad we went and I loved it, and I would urge others to go. And no, I am not being paid by Mexico tourism to say that.
But, still, estoy cansada. Que Semana!