Saturday morning I got up and made banana pancakes for breakfast, drank coffee, sat around, surfed the net. A month ago, I would have been out the door by 9, but I'm starting to live into the weekends more. Besides, the city doesn't really come to life before 11 on the weekends anyway.
I caught a train to Tlatelolco, my site for the day. Tlatelolco is many things to many people, a condensed active slice of Mexican history which is particularly drenched in blood and subjugation.
Geographically, Tlatelolco is a massive horizontal bar of land in the north of the city. The entire complex is about 2 kilometers long by a half kilometer wide. It was a masterplanned complex of mostly social housing towers mixed in with parks, markets, museums, plazas, and a few corporate towers. I think the whole thing was made in the 1950s, a lot like Pruitt-Igoe.
Back 700 years ago, when Mexico City was Tenochitlan, an island city, Tlatelolco was another major center along the causeway to the mainland in the lake area ruled by the Aztecs. A large temple and palace complex was errected. There were frequent human sacrifices, and the skulls of the sacrificed were shish-kabobed on horizontal poles and displayed in a massive skull rack called a tzompantli.
Anyway, after a few centuries of ripping beating hearts from chests, the Spaniards arrived and ended the empire of the Aztecs. In Tlatelolco, they destroyed the temples, and used the stones to errect a cathedral right there on the site, one of the oldest in Mexico City. This dark church feels really ancient.
Fast forward to contemporary times, and the utopian modern urbanists built the massive housing scheme of Tlatelolco, and also a modernist tower adjoinging the Cathedral and the excavated ruins of the Aztecs. The large plaza created between the concrete wall of apartments, the old cathedral, and the ancient temple site became the Plaza of Three Cultures.
Each culture also brought their own bloodbaths. The Aztecs sacrificed thousands on the site to keep the sun in the sky. The Spanish slaughtered the Aztecs and used the blood of the surviviors to build the cathedral. The Mexican government slaughtered student protesters here in 1968.
1968 brought the olympics to Mexico City, but also unrest as felt in other countries around the world. A predictable and escalating pattern emerged: student protests were put down with excessive force and violence by the government, and more protests popped up, outraged by the government and military reaction. The city was wracked with protests and marches. Under pressure from the Olympic committee and US creditors, as well its own tyrannical and autocratic tendancies, the government ended the majority of the protests with a full scale military invasion of the major universities, thousands were rounded up and arrested.
A faction of the hardliners called for a protest march ending in Tlatelolco, as the protest movement had grown to include the disatisfied poor, many of whom lived in Tlatelolco. In the square, speeches were made as federal troops quietly moved in along side steets and sealed the square. What happened next is highly disputed- several accounts I've read indicate that goverment snipers started shooting at the federal troops from one of the housing blocks, and the federal troops responded by opening fire on the apartment building and the square filled with protestors. The protesters in the square attempting to flee, found every way blocked. They had been deliberately trapped.
By the governent's count, there were only 20 people killed, although the total is probably much higher. Some claim 200 killed or missing. Either way, the plaza once more ran with blood, and Mexico was never the same again.
50 years later, there is a small memorial on the square. The pedestal it sits on is identical to the stone pedestals used by the Aztecs to display the skull racks. UNAM, one of the striking universities, now controls the modernist tower and runs several museums on the site, including a memorial museum to the events of 68.
After wandering Tlatelolco, I stopped by the chicken place near Insurgentes and got the soup. Good, but spicy. I'd eaten the enchaladas there before without incident, but this time, they recogized me as a Gringo, so it turned into a spectacle- trotting out the Spanish for idiots, hey, try this special MEXICAN chili powder, it's chingon!, etc. etc. I just want lunch, not Cheech Marin, gracias.
It started to rain after I finished so I hopped a nearby metrobus and went home.
I caught a train to Tlatelolco, my site for the day. Tlatelolco is many things to many people, a condensed active slice of Mexican history which is particularly drenched in blood and subjugation.
Geographically, Tlatelolco is a massive horizontal bar of land in the north of the city. The entire complex is about 2 kilometers long by a half kilometer wide. It was a masterplanned complex of mostly social housing towers mixed in with parks, markets, museums, plazas, and a few corporate towers. I think the whole thing was made in the 1950s, a lot like Pruitt-Igoe.
Back 700 years ago, when Mexico City was Tenochitlan, an island city, Tlatelolco was another major center along the causeway to the mainland in the lake area ruled by the Aztecs. A large temple and palace complex was errected. There were frequent human sacrifices, and the skulls of the sacrificed were shish-kabobed on horizontal poles and displayed in a massive skull rack called a tzompantli.
Anyway, after a few centuries of ripping beating hearts from chests, the Spaniards arrived and ended the empire of the Aztecs. In Tlatelolco, they destroyed the temples, and used the stones to errect a cathedral right there on the site, one of the oldest in Mexico City. This dark church feels really ancient.
Fast forward to contemporary times, and the utopian modern urbanists built the massive housing scheme of Tlatelolco, and also a modernist tower adjoinging the Cathedral and the excavated ruins of the Aztecs. The large plaza created between the concrete wall of apartments, the old cathedral, and the ancient temple site became the Plaza of Three Cultures.
Each culture also brought their own bloodbaths. The Aztecs sacrificed thousands on the site to keep the sun in the sky. The Spanish slaughtered the Aztecs and used the blood of the surviviors to build the cathedral. The Mexican government slaughtered student protesters here in 1968.
1968 brought the olympics to Mexico City, but also unrest as felt in other countries around the world. A predictable and escalating pattern emerged: student protests were put down with excessive force and violence by the government, and more protests popped up, outraged by the government and military reaction. The city was wracked with protests and marches. Under pressure from the Olympic committee and US creditors, as well its own tyrannical and autocratic tendancies, the government ended the majority of the protests with a full scale military invasion of the major universities, thousands were rounded up and arrested.
A faction of the hardliners called for a protest march ending in Tlatelolco, as the protest movement had grown to include the disatisfied poor, many of whom lived in Tlatelolco. In the square, speeches were made as federal troops quietly moved in along side steets and sealed the square. What happened next is highly disputed- several accounts I've read indicate that goverment snipers started shooting at the federal troops from one of the housing blocks, and the federal troops responded by opening fire on the apartment building and the square filled with protestors. The protesters in the square attempting to flee, found every way blocked. They had been deliberately trapped.
By the governent's count, there were only 20 people killed, although the total is probably much higher. Some claim 200 killed or missing. Either way, the plaza once more ran with blood, and Mexico was never the same again.
50 years later, there is a small memorial on the square. The pedestal it sits on is identical to the stone pedestals used by the Aztecs to display the skull racks. UNAM, one of the striking universities, now controls the modernist tower and runs several museums on the site, including a memorial museum to the events of 68.
After wandering Tlatelolco, I stopped by the chicken place near Insurgentes and got the soup. Good, but spicy. I'd eaten the enchaladas there before without incident, but this time, they recogized me as a Gringo, so it turned into a spectacle- trotting out the Spanish for idiots, hey, try this special MEXICAN chili powder, it's chingon!, etc. etc. I just want lunch, not Cheech Marin, gracias.
It started to rain after I finished so I hopped a nearby metrobus and went home.
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