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Mexico City was founded by the Aztecs in 1325 as Tenochtitlán.
Built on an island in Lake Texcoco, within the next two centuries,
through an inspired system of man-made islands, canals, and
causeways, it grew into the seat of the Aztec empire. By the time
the Spaniards arrived in 1519, Tenochtitlán was one of the world's
largest cities, with a population of about two hundred thousand.
It was a city of pyramids and palaces, the majesty of which
stunned the conquerors. Nonetheless, the Spanish promptly destroyed
that city and built their own stone citadels atop the ruins. Mexico
City became New Spain's headquarters. Much of the colony's Central
American and Caribbean assets were administered from the capital.
The colony lasted nearly three hundred years.
The capital's history in the nineteenth century was marked by
violence. After the War of Independence liberated the country from
Spain in 1810, the battles were internal, but in 1847 the United
States invaded Mexico City, and the upshot of the resultant occupation
was the sale of half of its territory at bargain-basement
prices to its northern neighbor. From 1864 to 1867, Mexico was
occupied by Maximilian of Hapsburg, who built the splendid
Chapultepec Castle in the heart of the capital. The last decades of
the century were marked by the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz,
whose governing style was known as pan o palo (bread or the
stick) : those who marched in line for him received sustenance,
while those who disobeyed were met with brutality. Mexico's
entrance into the modern era was also turbulent, with carnage
rocking the capital not only during the Revolution of 1910, but
continuing well into the subsequent decade.
After peace was restored, by the middle of the twentieth century
Mexico City was known for its fresh air, clear skies, and for being
Latin America's most cosmopolitan capital. At this point, while the
city's growth was under control, each new neighborhood basically
imitated the historic center of the city, usually spreading outward
from a tree-lined square with the area's most important church and
local government buildings. Yet in the second half of the twentieth
century, Mexico City became the poster child of contemporary
urban chaos and overdevelopment. Between 1950 and 2000, its
population grew from roughly three million to about twenty
million.
The city expanded horizontally in all four directions, swallowing
and engulfing other towns, villages, and municipalities in a
willy-nilly, ad hoc manner. During those fifty years, what passed
for urban planning allowed for no more than catch-up, reactive
measures. For example, the inner-city throughways, such as the
Viaducto and the Periférico, became obsolete almost as soon as
they were completed, given how quickly the population and its fleet
of cars grew during the years they were built.
Apart from the obvious problems of traffic and transportation, the
growth created other confusing complications. Today, out of the city's
eighty-five thousand streets, there are about eight hundred fifty called
Juárez, seven hundred fifty named Hidalgo, and seven hundred
known as Morelos. Two hundred are called 16 de Septiem bre, while a
hundred more are called 16 de Septiembre Avenue, Alley, Mews, or
Extension. Nine separate neighborhoods are called La Palma, four
are called Las Palmas, and there are numerous mutations: La Palmita,
Las Palmitas, Palmas Inn, La Palma Condominio, Palmas Axotitla,
La Palma I y Palma I-II Unidad Habitacional.
Today, greater Mexico City is composed of the Federal District,
home to approximately eight million residents. The other twelve million
live in nearly sixty municipalities in Mexico State, which make
up the rest of the urban sprawl to the east, west, and north. The Federal
District is divided into sixteen delegations (the equivalent of boroughs
in New York, subregions in London, or arrondissements in
Paris), each with its own somewhat autonomous government. Only
four of the delegations are considered the center of the city. Like most
big metropoli, Mexico City is divided into smaller, sharply contrasting,
and mostly self-contained neighborhoods that are called colonias.
There are about five thousand in greater Mexico City.
Compounding the city's complications is the fact that the Federal
District exists in a political and judicial limbo. It is neither a
state nor a territory that belongs to another state. It is not sovereign.
For most of its budget, it is dependent on the largesse of the federal
government, to which it has had an increasingly antagonistic relationship
in the last decade or so. Although it generates about half of
the country's federal taxes and close to 25 percent of Mexico's gross
domestic product, the Federal District receives only about seven
centavos for every peso it delivers to the national treasury, as
opposed to the states, which receive about double that amount.
It is an architectural eyesore. In any given neighborhood, sometimes
within a block or two, there can be an elegant nineteenth-century
mansion next to a squat and brightly painted Art Deco
apartment house. Close by will be a pink Swiss chalet adjacent to a
modernist nightmare that rises from the ground in the form of a
tube. Around the corner is a gray concrete bunker opposite the
husk of a construction that crumbled in the 1985 earthquake.
Although it has a few distinctive monuments, such as the statues
of the Angel of Independence and Diana the Huntress on the
broad avenue Paseo de la Reforma (the city's answer to the Champs Élysées),
Mexico City defies physical description and lacks notable
iconography. A few neighborhoods, such as the centro, San Ángel,
and Coyoacán, have lovely colonial architecture, while quite a few
more (Condesa, Juárez, Narvarte, Santa María la Ribera) have Art
Deco or neo colonial buildings. But the pretty areas are exceptions.
Architects describe Mexico City as "short and fat," given the number
of one-, two-, and three-story buildings in its seemingly infinite
land mass. Many of those buildings are unfinished, with rebar
sprouting from the top in anticipation of the day its residents can
afford to build another story.
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