Mexico City

• 1. Introduction

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  Mexico City sits at an altitude of 2,240 meters, more than 7,350 feet above the sea, on the high Mexican Central Plateau. It is the most populous city in North America, and the oldest capital city in the Americas. According to the 2020 census, the city proper held 9,209,944 people, while Greater Mexico City reached 21,804,515. It is one of only two capitals in the Americas founded by Indigenous peoples. The city began as Tenochtitlan, built on islands in Lake Texcoco around 1325. From that island origin flow most of the questions worth asking. Why does a city this size rest on a drained lake bed that sinks almost half a meter every year? How did an Aztec island become the capital of New Spain, then the seat of an independent nation? Why do its residents proudly call themselves chilango, a word once meant as an insult? And how did a place once infamous as one of the world's most polluted cities turn itself into a model for cleaning the air?

• 2. Island Of The Eagle

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  According to legend, the Mexica god Huitzilopochtli marked the founding site by presenting a golden eagle perched on a prickly pear, devouring a rattlesnake. The Mexica founded Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1325 or 1327, on an island in the inland lake system of the Valley of Mexico. That valley was already ancient ground for human life. The oldest signs of occupation belong to the so-called Peñon woman, whose remains a 2003 study placed at 12,700 years of calendar age, among the oldest found in the Americas. Studies of her mitochondrial DNA suggest she was of Asian, European, or Aboriginal Australian origin. The island city shared its lake with a smaller neighbor, the city-state of Tlatelolco. Between 1325 and 1521, Tenochtitlan grew until it dominated the other settlements around Lake Texcoco. By the time the Spaniards came, the Aztec Empire stretched across much of Mesoamerica, reaching both the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. The Aztecs built dikes to separate fresh water for crops grown in chinampas and to hold back recurring floods.

• 3. The Siege And The Razing

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  Hernán Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlan on the 8th of November 1519, after landing in Veracruz and gathering many native allies along the way. He and his men marched along the causeway from Iztapalapa, and the ruler Moctezuma II greeted them. They exchanged gifts, but the goodwill did not last. Cortés put Moctezuma under house arrest, hoping to rule through him. On the night of the 30th of June 1520, in a struggle remembered as La Noche Triste, the Aztecs rose up and drove out the Europeans and their Tlaxcalan allies. The Aztecs elected a new king, Cuitláhuac, who soon died, and then Cuauhtémoc. Cortés began his siege in May 1521. For three months the city went without food and water while smallpox, brought by the Europeans, spread through it. Cuauhtémoc surrendered in August 1521, and the Spaniards practically razed the city. Cortés first settled in Coyoacán, then chose to rebuild the Aztec site to erase the old order. The Spanish kept the basic layout but raised Catholic churches over the old temples. They renamed the place Mexico because the word was easier for them to pronounce.

• 4. City Of Palaces

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  Baron Alexander von Humboldt, visiting in the 19th century, wrote home to Germany that Mexico City could rival any major city in Europe. To him is attributed the nickname La Ciudad de los Palacios, the City of the Palaces. The English politician Charles Latrobe described "the luxurious City of Palaces which has risen from the clay-built ruins of Tenochtitlan." Those palaces had a particular source. In New Spain the concept of nobility flourished as it did almost nowhere else in the Americas, and the Spanish respected and added to the Indigenous order of nobility. Holding a noble title here brought wealth more than political power. Families proved their worth by making fortunes outside the city, then spending the revenues in the capital. They built churches, supported charities, and raised extravagant palatial homes. The craze to build the most opulent residence reached its height in the last half of the 18th century. Much of this rose on labor and on water. The Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente Motolinia called the rebuilding of the city one of the early plagues, writing that it used more people than the construction of Jerusalem, with many crushed by beams or falling from high places. As the city grew against the lake, a labor draft known as the desagüe compelled thousands of Indigenous workers to build flood defenses across the colonial period. During those years the Zócalo also became the site of two major riots in the seventeenth century, one in 1624 and one in 1692.

• 5. Battlefield Capital

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  Through the 19th century, Mexico City stood at the center of nearly every political dispute in the country. It served as the imperial capital twice, from 1821 to 1823 and from 1864 to 1867, and weathered innumerable coups before the Liberals triumphed after the Reform War. American troops occupied it for a year during the Mexican-American War of 1847-1848. The Battle for Mexico City ran from the 8th to the 15th of September 1847. The American invasion was first resisted at the Battle of Churubusco on the 8th of August, where the Saint Patrick's Battalion fought for the Mexican cause. That unit drew on Catholic Irish and German immigrants, along with Canadians, English, French, Italians, Poles, Scots, Spaniards, Swiss, and Mexicans. The fighting culminated in the storming of Chapultepec Castle. On the 13th of September the 4th Division under John A. Quitman carried the castle, with future Confederate generals George E. Pickett and James Longstreet among the attackers. Defending it were the cadets later remembered as Los Niños Héroes, the Boy Heroes. Decades later, during the Mexican Revolution, the capital escaped the worst violence. Its sharpest episode was the Decena Trágica, the Ten Tragic Days of February 1913, when forces opposing President Francisco I. Madero staged a successful coup. General Victoriano Huerta seized power and forced Madero and Pino Suarez to resign. The two were murdered on their way to Lecumberri prison.

• 6. A City That Sinks

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  Since the beginning of the 20th century, Mexico City has sunk as much as 9 meters in some areas, and it keeps sinking almost 50 centimeters every year. The cause lies underfoot. The city rests on what was Lake Texcoco, on heavily saturated clay from the old lake bed, and over-extraction of groundwater collapses that soft base. The valley has no natural drainage outlet for the water that flows down its mountainsides, which leaves the city open to flooding. Engineers cut canals and tunnels starting in the 17th century to drain it. The 1967 snowstorm coincided with the operation of the Deep Drainage System, which drained what remained of Lake Texcoco, and after the lake vanished, snow never fell over the city again. Snow had always been rare here. Between 1878 and 1895 every year except 1880 recorded snowfalls, mostly lake-effect snow, but since 1908 it has fallen only three times, the heaviest being 8 centimeters on the 12th of January 1967. The growth that strained this land was relentless. In 1900 the population was about 500,000. The Torre Latinoamericana became the city's first skyscraper in the 1950s, and between 1960 and 1980 the population more than doubled to nearly 9 million. With no housing available, newcomers from the countryside took over surrounding lands and built huge shanty towns. On the 19th of September 1985, at 7:19am, the area was struck by the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which left the one-party government so paralyzed by bureaucracy and corruption that ordinary citizens organized their own rescue efforts.

• 7. Cleaning The Air

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  By the 1990s Mexico City had become infamous as one of the world's most polluted cities, yet it has since become a model for lowering pollution. By 2014 carbon monoxide pollution had dropped sharply, while sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide stood at about a third of their 1992 levels. The weak anti-cyclonic systems over the valley still trap the pollutants produced by some 50,000 industries and 4 million vehicles in and around the metropolitan area. The metropolitan area remains the most ozone-polluted part of the country, with ozone levels 2.5 times beyond the safe limits defined by the WHO. The fight against this took many forms. Governments set up constant monitoring of ozone and nitrogen oxides, and when levels turned critical they closed factories, changed school hours, and extended the program of a day without a car. They reformulated gasoline and diesel and required a strict biannual vehicle emission inspection. The Hoy No Circula program restricts vehicles that fail emissions testing from circulating on certain days, based on the last digit of their license plates. Greener transport also arrived. The Metrobús bus rapid transit opened its first line in 2005, and Ecobici became North America's second-largest bicycle sharing system. Architects Teodoro González de León and Alberto Kalach, with a group of urbanists, engineers, and biologists, drew up a plan called Recovering the City of Lakes, which would supply water from natural sources and improve air quality if the government approves it.

• 8. Chilango And CDMX

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  The informal name for a Mexico City resident is chilango, a word people outside the city once used to suggest a loud, arrogant, ill-mannered person. Many in the city now proudly embrace it, while insulting outsiders as living in la provincia, the provinces. The more polite term capitalino is correct but almost never used. The city's names have shifted over the centuries. In 1524 the municipality was established as México Tenochtitlán, and from 1585 it was officially Ciudad de México. After independence, the surrounding territory was organized in 1824 as the country's only federal district, the Distrito Federal or DF. On the 29th of January 2016 the Federal District was officially renamed Ciudad de México, or CDMX, beginning its transition toward becoming the country's 32nd federal entity. A clause in the constitution still prevents it from becoming a state while it remains the capital. Autonomy came slowly and changed the city's politics. In 1997 residents won the right to elect both the head of government and the unicameral Legislative Assembly. Left-wing parties have held both offices since, first the Party of the Democratic Revolution and later Morena. The city adopted legal abortion, permitting it at the mother's choice before the 12th week, and in December 2009 became the first city in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. The same Legislative Assembly that opened those provisions still answers to the Congress of the Union, which sets the ceiling on the city's public debt.