Paseo de la Reforma

• 1. Introduction

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  Paseo de la Reforma cuts diagonally across the heart of Mexico City like a scar from a different era. Emperor Maximilian I ordered it built in 1864, during the French occupation of Mexico, to connect the downtown National Palace with his own residence at Chapultepec Castle on the southwestern edge of town. He named it Paseo de la Emperatriz, the Promenade of the Empress, after his consort Empress Carlota. Within a few years, Maximilian was dead by firing squad and the republic had stripped his name from the avenue, replacing it with the word Reform. That renaming tells you something about what kind of street this really is. Reforma has been a stage for Mexican power, Mexican pride, and Mexican conflict ever since. Who built it, what they built along it, and what the avenue says about who Mexico chose to remember are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. An Emperor's Boulevard

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  In 1864, France controlled Mexico City and much of the country, while President Benito Juárez's republican government was on the run in the north. Maximilian I moved into Chapultepec Castle with Empress Carlota and set about modernizing the capital as part of a broader national reform program. Roads, railroads, and grand infrastructure were central to that program. The European model was explicit: the great boulevards of Vienna's Ringstraße and the avenues then being carved through Paris under Napoleon III were the inspirations. Austrian mining engineer Alois Bolland was assigned to lead the project. A committee of prominent architects and artists, including Carl Gangolf, Ramón Rodríguez Arangoiti, Felipe Sojo, Miguel Noreña, and Santiago Rebull, was tasked with routing six boulevards outward from the Zócalo, Mexico City's main square. Their original proposal would have required demolishing large portions of the city, much as had happened in Paris. Instead, the committee started the boulevard at what was then the edge of the city, 1.5 km west of the Zócalo, where the existing Equestrian statue of Charles IV of Spain stood. The route ran from there to the foot of the hill below Chapultepec Castle. Ferdinand van Rosenzweig joined Bolland in the engineering work. The original design called for two vehicle paths of 9 meters each, a central island 1.5 meters wide, and two pedestrian side paths also 9 meters wide, planted with ornamental trees and shrubs. City officials and landowners along the route objected. They cited the fragility of the terrain, which was reclaimed lakebed of the ancient Lake Texcoco, and claimed the salt-heavy soil could not sustain the greenery the plan demanded. The objections were overruled. After a competition, construction was awarded to brothers Juan and Ramón Agea, supervised by the Ministry of Development, Colonization, Industry and Commerce under Luis Robles Pezuela. Of the full 3.15 km planned, only a portion was completed between 1864 and 1865. That completed stretch was 20 meters wide, enormous by the standards of the time, with no central median and only a few rest areas for horses. There were no buildings along it and no sidewalks. The Paseo was reserved for the exclusive use of the imperial court, enforced by a dedicated police force.

• 3. Republic Takes the Street

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  On the 17th of February 1867, the Paseo officially opened to the public, even as construction continued. That same year, Maximilian's empire collapsed and the republic was restored under Juárez. The avenue received its first new name, Calzada Degollado, in honor of General Santos Degollado. Then in 1872 it was renamed again, this time Paseo de la Reforma, after the reform movement the liberals had fought to defend. The transformation from imperial promenade to public boulevard was gradual and deliberate. By 1870, tree-lined pedestrian medians had been planted between the equestrian statue known as El Caballito and the Palm Tree Roundabout, work overseen by the Ministry of Development under Francisco P. Herrera. Between 1872 and 1876, an 8-meter bridge was built near the old Hacienda de la Teja, and the pedestrian medians were extended all the way to Chapultepec. Eucalyptus, ash, and willow trees were planted, and four monumental roundabouts, called glorietas, were constructed between the Palm Tree Roundabout and Avenida Juárez. Upscale subdivisions rose along the flanks: Colonia Americana, today known as Colonia Juárez, and Colonia Cuauhtémoc. The boulevard drew immediate comparisons to the Champs-Élysées in Paris, which, given the French imperial origins of the avenue, carried a complicated irony.

• 4. Porfirio Diaz and the Statues

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  Liberal general Porfirio Díaz seized the presidency in 1876 after leading Mexico against the French Intervention, and he attached enormous symbolic importance to what the Paseo would look like. His stated goal was monuments worthy of the capital's culture, monuments whose sight would remind viewers of the heroism Mexico displayed against the Conquest in the sixteenth century and in the struggles for Independence and Reform that followed. The major intersections of the avenue became traffic roundabouts where statues of Mexican heroes and notable figures were placed over the following decades. The first monument was the Monument to Christopher Columbus, which had been commissioned in 1873 by a wealthy Mexican railway magnate and executed by French sculptor Charles Cordier. It was erected in 1877, shortly after Díaz took power. For liberals it posed a problem: the Columbus monument carried religious iconography they found objectionable. A second Columbus statue was placed elsewhere in the capital by 1892. The Monument to Cuauhtémoc followed as a planned installation. The Monument to Independence, known popularly as El Ángel, was inaugurated in 1910 during the centennial celebrations of the Hidalgo revolt. Liberal general Vicente Riva Palacio, grandson of independence leader Vicente Guerrero, helped shape the early ambitions for the boulevard's profile during his tenure as Díaz's Minister of Development from 1876 to 1879. The statues lining the avenue's sides reflect who the liberal republic wanted remembered: military heroes, liberal politicians, journalists, and philosophers. Guadalupe Victoria, the first president of Mexico and a military hero of independence, was honored in a relatively understated way given his accomplishments. Others commemorated include Andrés Quintana Roo, after whom a Mexican state is named; Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, a prominent liberal politician; and Melchor Ocampo, a radical liberal murdered during the War of the Reform. Conspicuously absent from the avenue are statues of prominent conservatives like Antonio López de Santa Anna and historian Lucas Alamán. Equally absent is Porfirio Díaz himself, the liberal general who ordered so many of the other statues placed, and whose regime was eventually swept away by the Mexican Revolution.

• 5. Monuments and Memory

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  The Monumento a la Revolución stands near the central section of Reforma, across from the Alameda. It is an enormous dome supported by four arches, and its origin story runs counter to what it became. Porfirio Díaz originally planned the structure as part of a new parliament building, but construction halted when the Mexican Revolution broke out and deposed him. After Díaz's overthrow, the unfinished shell was converted into a monument to the very revolution that ended his presidency. The remains of Francisco I. Madero and several other heroes of the Mexican Revolution are buried inside. At the entrance to Chapultepec Park, a monument officially known as the Altar to the Homeland honors the Niños Héroes, the Heroic Cadets who died in the Battle of Chapultepec. A fountain near the boulevard commemorates the nationalization of Mexico's oil reserves and industry in 1938. The Diana the Huntress Fountain features a statue of the Roman goddess Diana, originally named The Arrow Thrower of the North Star. The Angel of Independence, the most famous monument on the avenue, carries a gilded Winged Victory atop a tall column. Its marble base holds the tombs of key figures from Mexico's War of Independence. Heroes of South American independence also have a place along the avenue: Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín are both commemorated. The cumulative effect is not quite a pantheon and not quite a history lesson. It is something more contested, a visual argument about which version of Mexico gets to stand in the roundabouts of its most prominent street.

• 6. Renewal and the City Today

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  In 2003, Mexico City's government launched a comprehensive renewal program for the avenue. The program included new pink quarry sidewalks and benches, intensive street cleaning, upgraded lighting, new planting structures in the medians, and a tourist route running from Chapultepec Park to the Historic Center via a double-deck bus called Turibus. The Monument to Cuauhtémoc was relocated to the crossing of Avenida de los Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma as part of the renovation. The renewal coincided with a real estate resurgence along the corridor. After many banks and businesses had migrated to the Santa Fe district on the city's outskirts, Reforma pulled them back. Torre Mayor, Torre HSBC, Torre Libertad with its St. Regis hotel, and Reforma 222, designed by Mexican architect Teodoro González de León, were all built in recent years. González de León also designed the Auditorio Nacional, which sits off the western portion of the boulevard near Polanco. More recent openings include a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Residences and a Park Hyatt Hotel and Residences. In the 2010s, five skyscrapers rose along the stretch between Chapultepec Park and the Diana the Huntress Fountain roundabout, including Torre Reforma at 244 meters, Punto Chapultepec at 238 meters, Torre BBVA Bancomer at 235 meters, and Torre Diana at 158 meters. Since May 2007, the Paseo Dominical Muévete en bici program has closed the main downtown section of Reforma to motor vehicles every Sunday from 8 am to 2 pm, except the last Sunday of each month. The avenue that was once the exclusive preserve of Maximilian's imperial court is now closed weekly so Mexicans can walk and cycle along it freely.