MEXICO CITY — Mexico Metropolis is marking the 700th anniversary of its founding with a sequence of public occasions on Saturday, together with inventive performances honoring the town’s Indigenous origins.
Artists in Indigenous clothes reenacted the founding of the Aztec capital in entrance of the nation’s prime officers in Mexico City’s main square. Later, lots of of dancers wearing conventional clothes, feather headdresses, drums, and ankle rattles fabricated from seeds carried out sacred dances meant to attach with nature.
The anniversary commemorates the institution of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica, a bunch also called the Aztecs, who settled within the Valley of Mexico in 1325.
As recorded by early Spanish chroniclers, Mexica elders informed of a divine signal from their patron god Huitzilopochtli: an eagle on a cactus, signaling the place to settle. That place grew to become Tenochtitlan, the middle of Aztec civilization and the location of as we speak’s Mexico Metropolis.
That image was later recorded within the Codex Mendoza, which contained historic accounts of the Aztec empire. It grew to become central to Mexican id and seems as we speak on the nationwide flag.
“Mexico was not born with the arrival of the Spanish; Mexico was born a lot earlier with the nice civilizations,” mentioned President Claudia Sheinbaum in a speech wherein she urged the eradication of the racism that also persists within the nation.
Tenochtitlan started as a village on an island in a lake ringed by volcanic peaks. However historians say many different particulars which have come down in historical past are based mostly closely on legend, and that the precise founding date is unknown.
By the point the Spanish arrived within the sixteenth century, they had been awed by a metropolis full of palaces, bridges, canals and bustling commerce, based on Spanish chronicler and conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo.
Historian Miguel Pastrana of the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico’s Historic Investigations Institute, an knowledgeable on Tenochtitlan, mentioned the weekend’s festivities are “political and civic” and don’t replicate the legislation historic analysis.
The historic document describes the Mexica as a individuals who migrated from a spot referred to as Aztlan, supposedly an island whose precise location stays unknown. They knew the right way to fish, collect aquatic crops and hunt birds, in addition to construct dams, and so they tried to settle in a number of locations earlier than arriving within the Valley of Mexico.
The primary island within the lake was already populated by the Tepaneca individuals, however they allowed the Mexica to settle there in alternate for tribute funds and different companies, Pastrana mentioned.
Little by little, the Mexica’s energy grew. They had been robust warriors and commercially affluent, and so they had been efficient at making alliances with different peoples.
Tenochtitlan grew to become an important metropolis on the middle of an empire till the Spanish conquered it in 1521.