A Conflux of Names

In 1951, Mexico City had a population of 2 million souls thereabouts. Its extent hadn’t changed much since colonial times, which is to say it hadn’t changed much since it was founded by the wandering Mexica in 1325 when they built their first rude huts and ceremonial platforms on piles sunk into the lake.

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The Aztec Empire had been a confederation of three city-states: Texcoco on the south-eastern shores of the lake, Tacuba on the western shore and Tenochtitlán on raised islands in the middle. A myriad of suburbs and settlements surrounded the lake, among them Xochimilco to the south, Azcapotzalco to the north, and Chapultepec to the west, each of which were connected to Tenochtitlán by long causeways over the waters.

After the fall of Moctezuma’s capital, Cortez ordered the great temples and palaces to be razed, and on the rubbled foundation new temples and palaces were erected. The vast ceremonial enclave of the Aztec center, now became the Spanish Zócalo and the paradigm for the great baroque spaces of 16th century Europe.

The canals of Tenochtitlán were filled, drained and became streets in the quadrants of the official Spanish enclave, while the settlements and suburbs around the lake were re-apportioned among settlers, friars and indians.



The city became a conflux of strange names: Mixcoac (SkySerpent), Puente de Alvarado (Alvarado’s Bridge), Coyoacan (Coyote Hill), Salto del Agua (Water’s Leap), Artículo 123, Molino del Rey (The King’s Mill), Cuahuthemoc (FallingEagle), Isabel la Católica, and Niño Perdido, the Lost Boy.

Through colonial times, the city was bounded by dikes to the east and the Alameda to the west where the earlier settlers used to rodeo their horses and beyond which lay fields, haciendas, the occasional convent and scrubby half-villages. Gradually, the lake was drained. The Aztec spa at Chapultepec (Grasshopper Hill) was made into a military fort and when Maximillian was installed as emperor in 1860, he made the castle over into his personal residence. The dusty road, through inns, workshops, and hovels which had replaced the causeway was now reworked into a magnificent tree-lined, botanical promenade named Paseo de los Emperadores.

When, four years later, the Second Empire was overthrown, the boulevard was renamed Paseo de la Reforma. By the end of the century it was phalanxed by mansions in the Porfirian style of Haussman and became the principle axis of a new city drawn up on the Parisian model A new through-way, called Avenida Insurgentes, connected Azcapotzalco to the north with Xochimilco in the south.and intersected La Reforma at Cuauhtemoc Circle dividing the city into four new quadrants. Alameda was turned into a stately pedestrian park and a proper hippodrome was built in the southwestern quadrant just off Insurgentes Avenue.

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After the 1910-1920 Revolution, the city continued its expansion west and south. The Polanco district, with streets named after scientist, philosophers, and poets, was built to the north and west of the last river to run out of Chapultepec. Still further west and ascending the foothills, Lomas de Chapultepec became the new toney area with ostentatious mansions in the Beverley Hills (Spanish) Revival style and with streets named after montains and ranges.

When the streets of this growing city weren’t named after mountains and poets they were named after states, cities, countries, rivers, the elements, and the latest generation of national heroes and scoundrels; so that in the ordinary course of life one ended up saying silly things like you get to Dublin through Sevilla y Tokio... or I live between Leibniz and Homer....

More than just denoting locations, this conflux of names served as tease points on a meta-graph of natural and cultural geography. Later on, in idle moments, while riding a bus or waiting for the light to change, I would find myself wondering what Alvarado’s bridge had looked like, what Article 123 was and why was the boy lost?

Although the city was growing, it still hewed closely to its historical matrix and was nothing like the freeway hashed megalopolis it later became. Harbingers of modernism began to appear, but everywhere there were vestiges of the past, in name and in stone -- the remains of an aqueduct, a series of broken and tilting sandstone columns in the middle of a road, the massive husk of an abandoned convent, or an undulating lava-stone snake at the base of a dusty mound. And although things might at first appear arbitrary and haphazard there was usually some logical or at least interesting explanation for why it was the way it was... why for example Amsterdam Street, just off Insurgentes where we first lodged, traced an oval without going anywhere.