Original Villages | Delegación Cuauhtemoc: La Romita/Aztacalco, Maintaining Ancient Roots Thru Art

Island of the Herons

Semi-secluded in what is now the northeast corner of Colonia Roma, in the southwest corner of Delegación Cuauhtémoc, is a barrio that, when the Spanish arrived, was a fishing village on an island in Lake Texcoco. Now known as La Romita, Little Rome, it was originally the pueblo of Aztacalco, House of the Herons in Nahuatl.

About halfway between Tenochtitlan and Chapultepec on the western lakeshore, Aztacalco was just south of the aqueduct built by the Mexicas in the 15th century, later rebuilt by the Spanish, to bring fresh water from the springs of Chapultepec to their island city. Avenida Chapultepec now follows the path of the former aqueduct.

Aztacalco
(orange star)
was an island in Lake Texcoco
southwest of Tenochtitlan

 Aztacalco appears on this map west of the original islands (yellow)
incorporated into Tenochtitlan via landfill, cimentación, (light orange) and enlarged via chinampas, man-made islands for growing produce. (dark orange).

Características edáficas y ecológicas presentes en la isla de Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco.
Soil and ecological characteristics of the Island of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco

(based on data from Calnek 1972, 1976; González Aparicio 1980,
Reyes García et al. [eds.] 1996, Filsinger 2005, Sánchez Vázquez et al. 2007)
from:
SAN PABLO TEOPAN: PERVIVENCIA Y METAMORFOSIS VIRREINAL 
DE UNA PARCIALIDAD INDÍGENA DE LA CIUDAD DE MÉXICO
by ROSSEND ROVIRA MORGADO
San Pablo Teopan: Survival and Metamorphosis 
of an Indigenous Quarter of Mexico City
During the Viceroy Period
by Rossend Rovira Morgado

Following the Conquest led by Hernán Cortés came the process known now as the Spiritual Conquest, the conversion of the indigenous to Catholicism and Spanish European culture. So that meant, of course, the building of a church on the island of Aztacalco (not to be confused with either the Indian quarter in Tenochtitlan, San Sebastián Atazacoalco, or the altepetl, city-state of Azcapotzalco, which the Mexicas of Tenochtitlan defeated in 1428).

Santa Maria de la Natividad de Aztacalco,
St. Mary of the Nativity
1530
Now the Parish Church 
of San Francisco Javier

In front of the church is a traditional Mexican plaza that could be in any traditional provincial pueblo anywhere in Mexico—and culturally far from cosmopolitan Roma.

Aztacalco kept its name and retained relative social and cultural autonomy, even after Lake Texcoco was drained and it was no longer an island. Up to the beginning of the 20th century, the area—like most of that outside what is now Mexico City's Centro Histórico—remained rural. Then, with the development of new upper class subdivisions during and after the Porfiriato, Aztacalco was incorporated into La Roma and became known as La Romita.

As a "popular", i.e., working class, indigenously-based barrio, it kept itself apart from the new La Roma of los de arriba (those from above)—as those from above stayed away from La Romita. The delightfully independent and keenly observant pubescent boy hero of José Emilio Pacheco's “Las batallas en el desierto” (The Battles in the Desert), who lives with his upper middle class family in La Roma, speaks of the danger of entering La Romita. 

To distinguish their ancient, but now otherwise anonymous barrio, the residents have turned to a long-standing tradition in Mexican art.

Ancient Roots of Mural Art

The pueblo, the people of this place, have transformed the featureless walls of their houses with paint. Wall painting, mural art, is an ancient Mexican means of cultural expression and continuity going back to the indigeous civilizations of such cities as Teotihuacán, Cacaxtla, Bonampak and Tenochtitlán. 

Bird god of Teotihuacan
1st century C.E.

Battle Scene, Cacaxtla
7th century C.E.

Lords of Bonampak
8th century C.E.

Tenochtitlan
15th century C.E.

From Ancient Cities to Modern Streets via a Revolution

The vital link between the indigenous past and this contemporary urban street art is, of course, the Mexican Mural Movement, triggered in the context of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). In exploring the work of that Movement around Mexico City, including in its Metro stations, we have seen how these revolutionary artists sought to break through the bounds of European classic art in which they had been trained and find native Mexican roots for their work. They sought to create large scale, public art. Murals gave them the medium. To learn how to do frescos, painting on wet plaster, they had to turn to indigenous artists in rural Mexico who still knew the technique.

Diego Rivera deliberately chose to portray traditional customs. 

Viernes de Dolores en el Canal de Santa Anita
Friday of Sorrows (prior to Palm Sunday)
on the Santa Anita (aka La Viga) Canal, Mexico City
on a wall in the Secretariat of Education, Centro Histórico

David Alfaro Siqueiros commited himself to taking murals into the streets, where el pueblo, the common people, could experience them as part of their everyday life. In Mexico City his work is present inside famous historical buildings, but his only outdoor composition is on the University City campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), not exactly an ordinary urban street.

The People to the University, The University to the People
From the rear: el Pueblo, the People, offer the tools of learning to students
who, in turn, offer the results of their education to the People.
On the Rectory (Administration) building, UNAM

As we noted in our final post on the Mural Movement, it is in the Street Art of the City, such as that of La Romita, the ancient pueblo of Aztacalco, that this ancient tradition continues to be vitally present.

Delegación Cuauhtémoc
(light tan area)
was the site of ancient Tenochtitlan, 
now Centro Histórico,
in north central Mexico City

Delegación Cuauhtémoc

Aztacalco, now "La Romita", (red and orange star)
is a little less than two miles southwest
of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan (green and purple star).

Another two miles further west is Chapultepec Woods, (dark green area)
The Mexicas built an aqueduct from the springs of Chapultepec
to Tenochtitlan.
Its pathway is now Avenida Chapultepec,
which passes along the north side of Aztacalco/La Romita.

See also:

• Templo Mayor: The Buried Heart of Mexico
• Landmarks of the Spiritual Conquest
• Centro's Four Indigenous Quarters
• Chapultepec Woods
• Colonia Roma Norte: Dreams in Stone, Glass and Paint

Colonia Roma Norte - Part II: Dreams in Stone, Glass...and Paint

“I Speak of the City”
A novelty today, tomorrow a ruin from the past, buried and resurrected every day,

lived together in streets, plazas, taxis, movie houses, theaters, bars, hotels, pigeon coops and catacombs, . . . 

the city that dreams us all, that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild as we dream,  . . . 

I speak of the buildings of stone and marble, of cement, glass and steel, of the people in the lobbies and doorways, 
I speak of our public history, and of our secret history, yours and mine.

(Octavio Paz, “I Speak of the City” in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987,
ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger, New York: New Directions Books, 1987, 511-517)

Octavio Paz's prose poem portrays with words how the buildings and streets of any city reflect the urban human condition. But each does so embodying the historical and cultural character that makes it unique. Octavio Paz's city was Mexico City. This blog of perambulations through the streets and neighborhoods of his city is our effort to make it ours.  

"A novelty today, 

tomorrow a ruin from the past, buried and resurrected every day,. . . 

the city that dreams us all, 

that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild as we dream" 

Aztec Templo Mayor
CLICK on any photo to enlarge it and open a gallery of all photos.

Mexico-Tenochtitlán, the city dreamt by the Mixeca/Aztecs, was literally buried by the Spanish conquistadores to create the city they dreamed, colonial Ciudad de México, now the Centro Histórico. We have wandered those ancient streets and observed how they have been redreamt by subsequent sojourners up to the present moment.

Palace of the Blue Tiles
Now a Sanborns Store and Restaurant

Then we saw how Porfirio Díaz and his late 19th century companions dreamt a European city of boulevards, Neo-Renaissance and Neoclassic palaces and French Second Empire homes for the bourgeoisie of modern industrialism.

Reception Hall, Palace of Communications,
now National Museum of Art

French-style Mansion
in Colonia Benito Juárez

Our walks through the colonias [neighborhoods] created under the Díaz regime have led us to discover how that Continental vision was continued and modified in the first half of the 20th century, after the Mexican Revolution, adding a re-imagined Mexican past embodied in neocolonial and California colonial imagery, among others.

California Colonial in Colonia Cuauhtémoc

Into those earlier Romantic dreamscapes we have witnessed the intrusion of late 20th century functionalism, with its puritanical vision that presents itself as a modern "realism" free of all dreams—and memories—of the past.

Functionalist Apartments in Colonia San Rafael

That ideal is now carried even further by postmodernity's steel and glass castles rising into the air.

Torre Mayor, on Paseo de la Reforma
a play on Templo Mayor

The city that dreams us all, that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild as we dream" 

In the first part of our perambulation through Colonia Roma Norte, in the Casa del Libro and Casa Lamm, and other homes on and near Calle Orizaba, we encountered other examples of the Porfiriato and post-Revolutionary dream of recreating a neoclassic European city, or, at least, its wealthy neighborhoods.

Leaving Casa Lamm, walking along Avenida Álvaro Obregón and down Orizaba as it continues south, we encounter additional embodiments of this nostalgic wish.

Neocolonial Hotel Colonia Roma
on Avenida Álvaro Obregón

Neocolonial House

Neoclassic Mansion

French Second Empire Mansion,
now Universidad Londres
on Plaza Luis Cabrera

More Dreams,  From an Increasingly Muddled Past

However, just west of Casa Lamm, on Avenida Álvaro Obregón, we meet a rather more fanstastic vision than those more classic dreams: El Parián. It is a market named after one that stood in the Zócalo, in the Centro Histórico from the beginning of the 18th until the middle of the 19th century.

  

El Parián Market

It is a kind of wedding cake confection of Moorish arches, Baroque spiral columns, crenellated Gothic towers and crests, and Spanish colonial elements—a quintessential dream castle. 

                       

It reminds us of the even more fantastic architecture of Porfirio Díaz´s Palacio del Correos, with its medley of Spanish Plateresque, Elizabethan Gothic, Italian Renaissance Revival, Moorish Revival, Neoclassical, Baroque and Art Nouveau styles. 

Here and there, on other streets, we run into less ostentacious but similarly fanciful daydreams.

Art Nouveau Fountain and Rainbow

    

A man's home is ....

Baroque Columns with Art Nouveau Stained Glass ...
and Asian Bamboo.

All these are, of course, the dreams of the wealthy, or of those who aspired to be so—dreams they could afford to turn into the relative permanence of stone and glass.

With their increasingly ornate elaborations and mingling of historically disparate styles, you feel that they were reaching for some lost or, perhaps, new cultural and personal identity, but were always seeking to find it in a romanticized past—one that would slip completely away over the next few decades.

Another Type of Dream

But there is another part of La Roma, without the wealth, but with a different kind of permanence and with other dreams, expressed in a far different manner. La Romita, Little Rome.

Semi-secluded in the colonia's northeast corner, La Romita was originally the indigenous Nahua pueblo of Aztacalco on an island in Lake Texcoco. With the arrival of the Spanish, came conversion to Catholicism, and, of course, the building of a parish church.

Santa Maria de la Natividad de Aztacalco,
1550

In front of the church is a traditional Mexican plaza that could be in any traditional provincial pueblo anywhere in Mexico—nowhere near upscale, cosmopolitan Roma.

Aztacalco kept its name and retained relative social and cultural autonomy until the beginning of the 20th century, when it was incorporated into the expanding Mexico City and subsumed as part of the new subdivision, La Roma. It became known as La Romita.

As a "popular", i.e., working class, indigenously-based barrio, it kept itself apart from the new La Roma of los de arriba (those from above)—as those from above stayed away from La Romita. The delightfully independent and keenly observant boy hero of José Emilio Pacheco's “Las batallas en el desierto” (The Battles in the Desert), who lives with his upper middle class family in La Roma, speaks of the danger of entering La Romita. 

Lacking the means to express their dreams in stone or glass, residents have turned to another medium to express theirs, by drawing on a long-standing tradition in Mexico.

   

Using the featureless walls of their houses, they express themselves with paint. Wall painting is one of the ancient Mexican arts, going back to the indigeous civilizations of such cities as Teotihuacán, Cacaxtla, Bonampak and Tenochtitlán.

Even Telephone Poles Become Visions

   

But there is also a more individual and modern note written on these walls:

"A Mexican never devastates me"

And with them, the universal, anonymous dream of the modern urban streets: the dream of an individual identity. 

We will come back to wall art and graffiti in our perambulations, but first we have to explore one last Porfiriato colonia, La Condesa. Then we'll move on to the next epoch in Mexico's history, the Revolution and the artifacts it has bequeathed to the City.

Colonia Roma Norte is bounded on the

North by Ave. Chapúltepec

East by Ave. Cuauhtémoc

West by Ave. Insurgentes.

South by Calle Coahuila (not shown)

Other Posts on the Porfiriato Era

• The Porfiriato: French Culture Conquers Mexico City
• The Grandeza of Porfirio Díaz
• Inside Porfirio's Palace
• Centro Historico Porfiriato - Late Nineteenth Century Mexico City
• Colonia Santa María la Ribera: Early Twentieth Century Century Popurrí
• Colonia San Rafael: Decay, Renewal and Restoration
• Colonia Benito Juárez: Where History Lives in the Shadows
• Colonia Cuauhtémoc: The First Decades of the 20th Century Marry the First Decades of the 21st
• Colonia Roma Norte Part I: Houses—and a Culture—That Survived a Revolution
• Seeking Restored Vitality: Colonias of the Porfiriato Have Varying Success
• Colonia Condesa and Its Sisters - From Past to Present, Part I - Transition to the 1920's

Delegación Cuauhtémoc

The "Porfirian" colonias line the west side of Delegación Cuauhtémoc
From north to south they are:
Santa Maria la Ribera (violet)
San Rafael (medium pink)
Cuauhtémoc, (medium blue triangle)

South of Paseo de la Reforma
Benito Juárez (horizontal triangle of three adjacent pink sections)
Roma Norte (light blue) (Doctores, to the east, is a separate colonia)
Roma Sur (darker blue)

And to the southwest (lower left):
Condesa (medium pink)
Condesa Hípódromo (dark pink)
Hípódromo (pale pink)

Centro, and its five sub-divisions (Historico, north, east, south, west)
 is to the right center (almost white)