Book Description

"Resurrecting Tenochtitlan considers the ways in which artists, city planners, architects, and intellectuals in Mexico shaped the evolution of Mexico City's civic identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Long forgotten and assumed to have been completely destroyed during the Spanish conquest, layers of the remnants of Tenochtitlan were discovered in the middle of a drainage project augmented under the longtime president Porfirio Díaz. As the cityscape changed in the wake of the ends of the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution, the city's layers of history were uncovered to find the remnants of the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan, which stirred imaginings of a new and modern Mexican capital and nation that still drew from its ancient history. Tying the modern city to the ancient one was also a way in which intellectuals articulated a mestizo cultural identity. This discovery led to the renewed interest in 16th-century maps by artists, architects, and city planners to understand the ways in which the Aztec capital intersected with the beginnings of Spanish settlement over it. The manuscript examines how artists such as Juan O'Gorman and Diego Rivera drew from the recent work of archaeologists to render panoramic depictions of both the modern Mexican and the Aztec capital to visualize it for public audiences. And while not strictly chronological in its organization, it looks at how attitudes toward modern Mexico City's ties to Tenochtitlan shaped national identity and shifted over time. The authors' timeframe ends with the inauguration of Diego Rivera's long-planned Anahuacalli Museum, which was created with the support of the National Museum of Anthropology to display pre-Columbian artifacts. Its completion, after Rivera's death, was met with the first waves of the youth cultures in Mexico whose disinterest in and suspicion toward state-sponsored national projects signaled the beginning of the collapse of these ideas"--