Mexico City's Sixteen Alcaldías (Boroughs)

Mexico City is shaped rather like a lumpy pear. Skinny at the top, it even has a "stem", then rounds out into a very fat bottom. It is divided into sixteen alcaldías, or boroughs, of greatly varying sizes, shapes, population densities, and histories.

Until January 2016, what was often thought of as "Mexico City" was actually el Distrito Federal, the Federal District (aka el D[e].F[e].), under direct control by the federal government since the mid-nineteenth century. Only el Centro Historico, the Historic Center--which was the original Mexico City of the 16th century--and neighboring colonias, planned neighborhoods built at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, were the official "Mexico City". Only in January 2016 did the entire Federal District legally become the self-governing Ciudad de México, Mexico City. The sixteen delegaciones (boroughs) of el D.F. became alcaldías, mayoralties, governed by elected mayors and councils.

The Historic Center of the city is in the northern, skinny part, in the alcaldía of Cuauhtémoc. It is where the Mexica (aka  Aztec) city of Tenochtitlán was located on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Other indigenous city-states or altepetls lined the lake shore, including Azcapotzalco, Tlacopan, Coyoacán, Culhuacan, and Xochimilco. 

Tenochtitlán, with Templo Mayor
Volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl form the eastern horizon.

After Hernán Cortés and his indigenous allies defeated the Aztecs in 1521, the Spanish leveled the indigenous city and began the building of Mexico City. Although the Spanish soon began draining the lakes to reduce flooding in the rainy summer season, until the 20th century, the city remained pretty much confined to the area of the island. 

The other indigenous towns were developed as separate Spanish colonial municipios, where the wealthy peninsulares (born in Spain) and criollos (Spanish born in the New World) established country homes and haciendas, rather like the estates built by Boston Brahmins on Newport Island and in the Berkshires and wealthy New Yorkers built along the Hudson. 

Valley of Mexico, mid-19th century, by José María Velasco
Mexico City lies in the distance, middle left.
Volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl form the eastern horizon.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Federal Government gradually incorporated the outlying municipios and surrounding mountains to the south and west into the Federal District.

During the Porfiriato, the continuous presidency of Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911, stylish suburban colonias or neighborhoods of large homes, such as Santa María Ribera, Condesa, and Roma were built for the newly wealthy industrial and commercial class on drained lake bed to the west and south of the city center. Not until after World War II did the city´s growth explode and, amoeba-like, ingest all these outlying settlements.

Thus, contemporary Mexico City is an amalgam, a collage of pueblos, barrios and colonias from many centuries and cultural epochs, with their varying architectural styles. Some, such as the Historic Center, and Azcapotzalco, Iztacalco, Iztapalapa, Coyoacán, Tlalpan, Xochimilco and Tláhuac, as indicated by their indigenous names, have historic cores going back more than seven centuries and some buildings, often Spanish-colonial churches, that go back four or five.

Others, including the colonias of Santa Maria Ribera, San Rafael, Condesa and Roma in Alcaldía Cuauhtémoc, are Parisian-style enclaves from the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Yet other alcaldías, like Benito Juárez (which fills part of the old lake bed), or Miguel Hidalgo and Álvaro Obregon that expand to the northwest and southwest, are Post-War modern.

And in the plains and mountains to the south and west, in the alcaldías of Tlalpan, Milpa Alta, Tláhuac, Xochimilco, Magdalena Contreras, and Cuajimalpa, there are still rural pueblos (originally indigenous villages) where nopal cactus, vegetables, and flowers are grown to supply "the city". In those pueblos, men wear cowboy hats and ride horses, and patron saint fiestas are celebrated as they are in "las provincias" (the other states of Mexico), and as they have been since Spanish Catholicism was merged with indigenous religions.

In the now five-hundred-year-long historical context of this merger of cultures, it is interesting to note the two sets of names used to identify alcaldías. Nahuatl (aka Aztec) names usually identify those with roots in indigenous altepetls (city-states). In contrast, those named for leaders in Mexico's development as an independent nation are usually more recent settlements. This distinction concretely reflects a three-way divide between Mexico's indigenous culture, Spanish-colonial culture, and post-Independence "Mexican" cultural and political stances that alternated between distancing from these two conflicting pasts or trying to synthesize them into a "Mexican" identity.

This struggle is, perhaps, most clearly embodied in the name of the alcaldía Magdalena Contreras, located in the "rural" southwestern mountains. It combines the Spanish name of the patron saint (Mary Magdalene) assigned to an indigenous pueblo, Magdalena Atlitic, with Contreras, a 20th-century colonia of textile mills. The double Spanish-indigenous name of the pueblo is tyícal throughout what was Nueva España. Spanish monks or friars, as part of their intentional acculturation of the natives, assigned Catholic saints as the patron of each extant indigenous village and added the saint's name to the indigenous one. Most pueblos retain these double names and dual identities.

Mexico City Ambles is a record of paseos, leisurely walks, spent exploring some of the colonias and pueblos in this urban-rural, multi-cultural collage.