On May 22, 1521, Spanish forces and their indigenous allies had laid siege to the powerful Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, where Mexico City now stands. The battle lasted nearly three months, ending with the fall of the Aztec Empire and Spain’s consolidation of power in a large swath of North America. On May 22, 2021, Mexico City marked the 500th anniversary of the conquest with events that highlighted the complex ways it shaped the country’s society.
The three cultures are represented by three buildings: a ruined Aztec temple, a Spanish colonial church built atop the ruins and a modern government office building constructed in the 1960s. “It was neither a triumph nor a defeat. It was the painful birth of the Mestizo (mixed-race) Mexico today,” the plaque reads.
That sentiment, preached by the government since the 1920s — that Mexico is a non-racial, non-racist, unified nation where everyone is mixed-race, bearing the blood of both conquerors and conquered — has aged about as well as the 1960s office building.
It is largely roped off because shards of its marble facing regularly shear off and come crashing to the ground, and Indigenous or dark-skinned Mexicans continue to face discrimination by their lighter-skinned countrymen.
A much more enduring and perhaps accurate message is found a few blocks away on the wall of the tiny church of Tequipeuhcan, a place whose very name in the Aztec’s Nahuatl language sums it all up.
Credit : NBC News
Picture Credit : Google
