From Teotihuacan to Tenochtitlán: in the National Museum of Anthropology to learn about Mexico

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In this new article, I would like to try to recount my experience in one of the most beautiful, rich and culturally alive countries in the world, and I would like to do so through the story of one of the most interesting, educational and important museums I have ever been to (twice). To quote the last article I wrote about the Met museum (published here ), if the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City were to be destroyed, it would be a huge historical loss, as it would miss an important link to the pre-Hispanic world and to the very roots of this vast and diverse nation: Mexico.
I have travelled quite a bit in Mexico and have always tried to tell the thousand facets of this land, avoiding stereotypical and reductive representations as much as possible. Many have asked me how dangerous it is to travel in Mexico and how safe I feel doing it, some of the time alone. Each time I realise that what people know about Mexico boils down to news about narco-traffickers and poverty.
Nobody asks me about the incredible biodiversity present, the folkloric richness, the kindness of the people. Few know that between 2010 and 2013, the richest man in the world was Mexican Carlos Slim Helú, similarly few know that Mexico City boasts some 150 museums, practically on a par with the city of Rome. (where there are currently about 160, according to the website of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism).

Across the Boulevards

To get to the National Museum of Anthropology, we walk along Avenida paseo de la Reforma, the large tree-lined avenue reminiscent of a Parisian boulevard and bordering the beautiful Bosque de Chapultepec park, the city’s green lung, similar to a lush and crowded London park, complete with pagoda, pond and many activities for visitors. Announcing the entrance to the museum is a monolithic statue probably dating from the Teotihuacan period, a perfect introduction to what awaits us inside and a perfect metaphor for how ancestrality and modernity blend perfectly in this city.

Avenida Paseo de la Reforma and Chapultepec park

monolithic statue on Avenida Paseo de la Reforma

This season is the flowering season of the Jacaranda: the city is full of purple foliage that makes the landscape vibrate and the pavements are filled with petals of the same colour. Even at the entrance to the museum, one of these incredible trees awaits us. A majestic Jacaranda stands out in contrast to the white walls of the museum, playing with light and shadow.

The museum route

Paying 85 pesos, one begins the long and dense museum tour consisting of 44,000 square metres spread over more than 20 rooms.

In the introductory room, the narrative starts from the roots of humankind: migrations across the American continent, solutions for survival, the development of relationships and early forms of social organisation, the creation of artefacts; things that united tribes, adaptive styles that developed between and within individuals.
Many models are used to illustrate everyday rock life: hunting, life around the fire, gathering plants and adapting to climate, flora and fauna. As in any great evolution, human beings started from the bottom: life consisted of meeting basic needs; instinct, trial and error, learning. This is the museum where history, art and anthropology are inextricably linked and their union is a memorandum on the fragility of human life.
We are overwhelmed by the Mexican narrative capacity, which possesses touches of meticulousness, as much in art as in popular culture and the expressiveness of people. Mexico is where death is celebrated “y se va a chingar” la vida (literally screwing). This is the intrinsic energy in the artwork that marks the transition from the first room to the preclassical era: a holographic video installation of superimposed photographs, where as we pass, we can see different human faces (identity, physiognomic characteristics), transforming into their very skeleton (substance, equality, matter); death and life inextricably intertwined again. The author is not stated, but I am very curious to find out.

Teotihuacan

The Teotihuacan Hall is a treasure trove of information and artefacts. Ruled by the feathered snake (serpent empluamado named Quetzalcóatl) and the face of the Sun god carved in stone, it tells of a city that developed between 100 B.C. and 250 A.D., and of a civilisation that remained active until around 550 A.D., in the shadow of an enormous pyramid, the 3rd largest in the world, that of the Sun, which, together with that of the moon, towers over the archaeological site of the same name (Teothiuacan), 40 km from Mexico City. This place, characterised by its imposing buildings, exudes a mystical, mysterious and assertive energy, only possible in a primitive civilisation. Theotihuacan was among the largest urban centres in the pre-Columbian Americas, with an estimated population of over 125,000 inhabitants from the Nahua, Otomi and Totonachi ethnic groups, who coexisted in a supposedly multi-ethnic state. Its main artery is La calle de los Muertos (Street of the Dead), which marked its social and religious time. It was perhaps a peaceful state, or perhaps the most economically assertive in the area, which is why the Aztecs took it as a model for the creation of their city-state in 1325.

Coming into contact with the artefacts of Teotihuacan lays the foundations for understanding certain cornerstones of Mexico, even contemporary Mexico. The corn, the sun, cocoa; ritual masks, protective animals and death; among braziers and objects created with shells we recognise strong social rituals, first and foremost, bodily modifications (such as skull deformations, holes and dilations, dental incisions, cuts and tattoos).

We recognise the symbols of power and empowerment in the natural entities that sustain life and the existence of strong practices that indissolubly united the human to the cosmos, and thus to the divine. According to the cult of Tlàloc, primordial deity of rain, it is through the logic of contraries that material and spiritual things complement and develop: the earth is the fruit of the fusion of heat and water, generative duality, creative power. This is the power of Mexico and Mexicans; a constant balance between opposites, simultaneously shared and socially accepted. Judgement is often suspended, reality, even in its uncomfortableness, more simply accepted and seen. It is thought that it was the arrival of the Toltecs, who dominated much of central Mexico between the 10th and 12th centuries, that decreed the end of the Theotihuacan civilisation.

The Toltecs

The Toltec capital Tula, in the south-west of the present-day state of Hidalgo, had considerable political power during the period between the fall of the city of Teotihuacan and the founding of Tenochtitlán, coming to influence regions as far away as the Yucatán Peninsula, Nicaragua and El Salvador. With 35,000 inhabitants, rich in pyramids and with two fields for the game of Pelota (ball, a sport that had strong social and ritual connotations) Tula was the first to humanise the figure of Quetzalcóatl, establishing the king-priest and thus elevating a ruler to the rank of deity.

Tenochtitlán civilisation

We arrive at the ‘Hall of Tenochtitlán’ (more or less a quarter of the way through the museum), and the last great phase of pre-Columbian history also took place in the area of the Valley of Mexico, in the south-central part of the country.
The Aztecs sought the roots of their identity in the glorious past of Teotihuacán and Tula by excavating the ruins of those indigenous capitals, in order to extract valuable objects from them: masks, vases, stone statuettes; it was essential to show neighbouring peoples that their city Tenochtitlán was a centre of power, from where they would direct their conquering armies towards the four directions of the universe.

On a part of the lake basin of Lake Texcoco, the Aztecs founded The City of Mexico-Tenochtitlá in 1325. This lake was the perfect fertiliser for the development of the civilisation that for a while held its own against the Spanish colonisers: built right above the lake, it was connected to the mainland by four large wooden bridges that could be dismantled; it had wide avenues and large canals that allowed for a continuous supply. As a matter of fact, Tenochtitlà, dominated by demanding tribute from the other inhabited areas of Mexico, which sent trade goods through roads and canals. It was through the trade routes that the Spaniards also arrived from the Gulf of Mexico, and it was among the people fed up with paying tribute that the colonists found allies: Hernán Cortés was received by Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin on 8 November 1519.

In the Tenochtitlá room of the National Museum of Anthropology, one breathes a little of that concentration of testosterone, war and ingenuity, typical of the Aztec civilisation. Even the indigenous peoples of Mexico are not exempt from ‘patriarchal’ practices and male domination, although others, such as the Maya civilisation, are more balanced in terms of gender equality and with religious and power roles also occupied by women. Certainly the possibilities arising from the use of force and violence have always had appeal to some human populations, but there are also many cultures that have developed practices and values to prevent and resolve conflicts in peaceful ways, using mediation and negotiation.

One of the most symbolic relics of this dominant civilisation is the Sun Stone, an image that can be found in any souvenir shop. The sculptural monument, a large gladiatorial sacrificial altar, was discovered in 1790, in the main square of the capital of New Spain (Mexio City). In the design of the disc we recognise the face of Xiuhtecuhtli (god of fire), who emerges from the hole in the earth, holding a pair of human hearts and showing his tongue transformed into a sacrificial knife. He is surrounded by the four suns that preceded the Fifth Sun: the world was in fact created and destroyed four times in the past, and humanity’s current era is that of the Fifth Sun.

Important from pre-Columbian civilisations

In today’s society, where money is at the centre of everything and value is only measured in terms of profit, it is important to reflect on the fact that in Mesoamerican civilisations, such as the Aztecs, cocoa and maize were the true forms of currency. In contrast, gold, metals and stones (such as jade, obsidian, amber) were simply materials used to adorn themselves and increase the spiritual and energetic power of individuals. The use of organic foodstuffs, subject to decay and expiry, as currency makes us realise that ‘wealth’ was not based on accumulation, but on the power of exchange. Maize and cocoa could not be stored for long, but their inherent power to nourish and sustain life was amplified by the fact that they could be used to generate economic exchange. Movement is essential for survival: accumulating wealth without a specific purpose creates stagnation and generates imbalances. Economic power should depend on the ability to generate movement and not on the intrinsic value of inanimate objects.

The importance that these civilisations attached to the use of one’s body as a place of spiritual growth and energetic connection with the divine, suggests the affirmation of a primordial concept of performance. The body was considered an instrument through which waves and emotions were generated, intangible relationships were established and personal powers were strengthened: inextricably linked to the spirit and individual strength, it was ritually modified to express identity, social status and religious devotion. Although some of these practices may seem extreme, they were considered normal and accepted in Aztec society at the time, and indeed, it is important to note how time and energy were invested in the energetic and spiritual healing shared between human beings.

At this point in the narrative, the Spaniards arrive, interrupting the consecutio temporum of the native Mexican populations, bringing with them a series of actions and reactions that will disrupt the normal course of history. Fortunately, there is no room in the museum for the atrocities of the conquest, and applause goes to the curatorial choices of not wanting to include the disturbing element, the elephant in the room, which we all know about, but which in this context, we are not interested in.

We are not interested in the artefacts that attest to the progressive Europeanisation and poisoning of ancestral origins; we are not interested in the letters of the monks or the first ‘garments’ forced on the bare skins of the natives, nor the numbers of the dead or slaves. For this violence there is no room in the National Museum of Anthropology, which perhaps wants to remain the museum of the great indigenous power par excellence. Here, among the stones and statuettes, among the animal deities, we hear the loud roar of a civilisation that has been destroyed but does not want to be victimised, that still beats loudly under the flesh of contemporary Mexico.

Travelling among these lands today, one feels the inherent duality of a people whose history has been severed, raped, forbidden. Catholic influence has obviously done its work of conversion and subjugation, depriving many people of the spirituality that anchored them to the earth, the elements, nature and human vigour.
Being Mexican today, I believe, is a not inconsiderable work of reorganisation of personal and national history: having to accept the genes inherited from colonial infection, make them one’s own, and integrate them, while remembering and honouring that contact with the ancestral power of the pre-Hispanic peoples.
It is really a matter of claiming one’s own mixture, one’s own being a mezcla (mix) of histories, regions, cultures, and there to find a new identity, much more contemporary and avant-garde than the murderous and asphyxiating ‘ideal of purity’ of past centuries.

A blend of cultures

This vision is certainly the continuity that the museum itinerary also gives us, on its second floor, dedicated to Mexico’s contemporary indigenous cultures and religious syncretism. This section of the museum, highlights the country’s cultural diversity and the wealth of traditions that have been passed down over the centuries through traditional costumes, handicrafts, music, dances and rituals of the various indigenous communities present throughout Mexico. In these rituals, we find precisely the result of the algebraic sum of religion and folklore; the material reinterpretation of the bond between earth and sky. Maya, Otomí, Zapotechi, Mixtechi, Huichol, Gran Nayar: masks, hunting rituals, shamanism and witchcraft. Dancing bodies, coloured bodies, sacred plants and animals, rituals of passage, pilgrimages. A mystical and ritualistic substratum that encloses and continues the ancestral bond between peoples and their land.
A place with a very powerful energy; for those who are able to cope with the long tale (lots of artefacts, very large and meticulously told rooms) and pilgrimage in a land full of stories, the National Museum of Anthropology is an essential reference point for those who wish to understand and immerse themselves in the culture of Mexico, outside of stereotypes and simplifications.