Tenochtitlan: Mapas de la Identidad y la Memoria

The cartographic, artistic and symbolic representation of the territory is a manifestation of identity. When cultures are found, mixed or truncated, identity becomes a vertiginous and veering.To study such dynamic identity, we propose the analysis of representations and maps of a city that was destroyed to build on top of it a different city, in which it is still possible to find the footprints of the original civilisation: the Great Tenochtitlan, the antique capital of the Aztecan Empire, which lays now dried and buried under the colonial layout of the Mexico City’s urban core.Although its history was for centuries transmitted by oral and written tradition, the documents were destroyed during the 15th Century during the Spanish Conquest, when the empire was falling apart on the hands of a completely different civilisation. The huey tlatoani was replaced by a king living 10.000km away, for whom the fallen rewrote their history, this time soaked in glory.Given the collapse of the Empire, history was drawn in new codexes, not only to explain their origins to the conquistadors, but to ensure the permanence of identity over time. Rather than historical accuracy, what we have left is a collective memory composed of polished memoirs, and the means for displaying a city now extinct are the manuscripts, engravings, maps, and descriptions of the 16th century onwards. Therefore, Boturini, Florentin, Mendoza and Telleriano-Remensis codexes, the Letters of Relation sent 2by Hernán Cortés to Charles V, the memories written by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and Renaissance cartography are representations of the landscape that embody an identity, which has a parallel evolution to the morphology of the city.     «

The cartographic, artistic and symbolic representation of the territory is a manifestation of identity. When cultures are found, mixed or truncated, identity becomes a vertiginous and veering.To study such dynamic identity, we propose the analysis of representations and maps of a city that was destroyed to build on top of it a different city, in which it is still possible to find the footprints of the original civilisation: the Great Tenochtitlan, the antique capital of t...     »