March 13, 2025, according to the official version, marks the 700th anniversary of the founding of our city, then baptized Mexico-Tenochtitlan on the same day, but in 1325. The first problem with this centennial is that the people who supposedly founded the same city we supposedly live in today on that date didn’t use our calendar, but one with 365-day years and 260-day cycles that made centuries of 52 years. Their time was very different and wasn’t measured linearly like ours. For them, 700 years would mean nothing, assuming they wanted to use our simple calendar.
It was in the 16th and 17th centuries that some indigenous authors translated their dates into ours, allowing us to translate the year of origin of the Mexica city into our calendar. But those same authors provided several dates for the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and others for Mexico-Tlatelolco, the twin city and rival of the Mexica. Furthermore, they told us that the Mexica had already lived in the same place for years before, preparing for its founding. The defining event was the eagle that landed on the stone cactus, devouring or not, depending on the whim of the versions or its own, a serpent or various birds, or simply placing itself magnificently on an altar carefully arranged by the priests. There are brilliant authors who deny that this “miracle” ever happened. However, they maintain that the founding date was what we would call March 13, 1325. If the spectacular appearance of the god Huitzilopochtli did not occur, then what are we commemorating? The celebration of a civic ceremony with a presidium and podium where solemn speeches were delivered? Most likely, in my opinion, the ritual appearance of the eagle was practiced, rehearsed, and staged as the culmination of a careful ceremony of macehualiztli, or merit.
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Let’s accept, without conceding, that it was on that date, 700 years ago, that such a miracle or ritual could have occurred. Was that the founding of our city, the one that exists to this day and in which we live seven centuries later? Strictly speaking, as those in the historian’s profession like to do, we cannot truly affirm this. The altepetl of Mexico-Tenochtitlan conquered the sister altepetl of Mexico-Tlatelolco in 1457, and they were then destroyed on August 13, 1521, by an army that was 99% Mesoamerican and 1% Spanish. Years later, its rulers founded a new Mexica council in a city built in the manner of the Spanish monarchy and called San Juan Tenochtitlan. This city occupied the territory surrounding the Spanish city of Mexico City, which had its own council composed solely of Spaniards. To the north, the council and city of Santiago Tlatelolco were also refounded. At the beginning of the 19th century, both were dissolved by Mexican republican governments that sought to eliminate the councils and other forms of government of the indigenous communities of the city and the Valley of Mexico. Nor is there any administrative or political continuity between the Spanish council of Mexico City and the various forms of government that the capital of the Mexican Republic has had since 1821. In short, seven centuries ago, a city was supposedly founded that may or may not be related to our city through an event that may or may not have occurred. Fortunately, that’s not the end of the story, because what we call Mexico City today is much more than what was once called Mexico-Tenochtitlan and even Mexico-Tlatelolco. The Mexica, as they themselves tell us, were the last to arrive and settle in a rich valley filled with lakes where fifty other towns had already lived and founded their own altépetls, including their powerful neighbors Colhuacan, a city perhaps 700 years old if we’re interested in counting it that way, and Azcapotzalco, also much older. Both powerful altépetls had harassed them, evicted them, intermarried with them, and humiliated them for decades before allowing them to found their new and precarious altépetl in a corner of their territories. Around it lived many other towns in many other city-states, such as Texcoco (Tetzcoco), Coyoacán (Coyohuacan), Tacubaya (Atlacuihuayan), Iztapalapa (Itzapalapan), Chalco, and many more. The fact that many of these places, as well as Ecatepec (Ehecatépec), Cuatitlán (Cuauhtitlan), and Xochimilco, are part of the great conurbation that we now call Mexico City, shows us that Mexico-Tenochtitlan was founded as part of another equally extensive, much larger, and older conurbation, the urban system of the Valley of Mexico.
We could calculate that if in 1521 there were some 50,000 to 100,000 people living in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, ten times that number lived in the greater metropolitan area of the Valley, just as in today’s great conurbation, more people live in the State of Mexico than in Mexico City. And the ecological, human, technological, and political system that allowed so many people to live together had already been woven, built, rebuilt, and adapted for 2,000 years. The first great urban center, Cuicuilco, was destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions in the fertile southwestern region of the Valley. Then, in the north, the immense city of Teotihuacan grew, which was among the five largest in the world in what we call the first millennium of the Common Era. Finally, over the centuries, the multicenter system of cities emerged, to which Mexico-Tenochtitlan was integrated at birth. In size, durability, and importance, the ephemeral capital of the Mexica cannot be compared with the great Teotihuacan, built 1,300 years before it. That magnificent city was an economic, industrial, and ideological center, famous throughout Mesoamerica, copied by the distant Maya, and known as far away as New Mexico. As recent interpretations indicate, it likely had a collective and participatory government, not an authoritarian and centralized one like that of the Mexica capital—a much more positive precedent for the democratic city we are trying to build. For this reason, it dedicated the last three centuries of its existence to building decent housing for its entire population, instead of spending all its resources on expanding its Great Temple. Another lesson for the present.
But Teotihuacan, our ancient grandmother, had much more in common with Mexico-Tenochtitlan, which we could call our mother, and with our troubled Mexico City. It is very likely that the ancient city had a very diverse population of Otomi, Totonac, Zapotec, and Nahuatl peoples, while the latter was populated by Nahuatl, Otomi, Mazahua, and Mixtec peoples, just as the current city is inhabited by a large mix of national and foreign migrants. Ethnic diversity has always been the hallmark of the cities of this valley.
On the other hand, life in Teotihuacan, like that of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and also our own, depended on the complex and dynamic ecosystem of the lakes in the Valley of Mexico, which at that time was a basin with no natural drainage. The water, salty in the north and in the lower lakes, and fresh in the south, in the higher lakes, generated prodigious abundance: the banks and shallow lakes could be irrigated with canals and chinampas, allowing up to two crops to be planted per year. Thousands of species of birds, insects, fish, and reptiles that lived in the swamps and wetlands could also be hunted and fished. Water allowed for the use of canoes that could carry far more goods—wood, rocks, and food—than the shoulders of the tamemes, the only porters in Mesoamerica, where pack animals were absent. This abundance of resources enabled exceptional urban growth.
The complex lake system was the basis of life for all cities and also their greatest threat. In irregular, and not always predictable, cycles, water was scarce; the northern lakes dried up and turned into mudflats, and canals had to be dug for navigation. Then it rained, or the water surged through the mountain rivers, flooding farmland, towns, cities, and palaces. Over the centuries, the different cities built a decentralized system to manage the water, separating freshwater from saltwater, bringing water that flowed from the springs to the cities, and protecting themselves from flooding. Dikes, embankments, causeways, and canals crossed the lakes. The fertile chinampas covered an ever-increasing area. Furthermore, they knew how to maintain the cleanliness of the entire system, managing human waste dry and using it as fertilizer.
This complex system was misunderstood by the Spanish, who considered the lagoons a threat, a source of pollution and impurity, and thus dedicated themselves to further polluting them, dumping their excrement and toxic waste into the water carefully managed by the cities that preceded them. Beginning in the late 16th century, they began the slow and stubborn process of draining the lakes, extracting water from the Valley through the Nochistongo dam to the north, built thanks to the deaths of thousands of indigenous workers. Our current ecological crisis is a product of this absurd decision: we now waste as much energy and effort extracting water from the Valley as we do bringing drinking water from far away. The success of modern Mexico City has been built at the expense of and against the lakes, destroying the coexistence that had allowed great cities to prosper for 2,000 years. Perhaps the best meaning of this dubious anniversary is to try to recover some of what we have lost.
Source: eluniversal
