Resurrecting Tenochtitlan

Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City

By Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala

University of Texas Press

Honorable Mention, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art
Finalist, 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association

How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan.

After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City.

Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico’s modern capital.

Like all important urban centers, Mexico City is composed of layers of history, culture, architecture, and urban and demographic changes, and its historical foundation still plays an important role in Mexico’s political and social life. This book aims to show how these layers and foundational myths affect modern understandings of the city...Deftly weaving together archival documents and maps, graphic ideations of the city’s past and present, and historical accounts, [Resurrecting Tenochtitlan] presents [Mexico City's] complexity as a space of contestation in which different actors vie to articulate their ideological positions within the rapidly changing environment of this historically grounded city. CHOICE

What a marvelous book! Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala illuminate the urban history of modern Mexico City by demonstrating the ways Tenochtitlan—as a historical place and an idea—lived on in a rapidly changing capital. The authors bring together a stunning variety of objects to show how artists, intellectuals, and cartographers shaped the image of the city and its past, in dialogue with historical representations of the metropolis. Resurrecting Tenochtitlan is a fantastic contribution to scholarship on the place whose repeated, multilayered reinvention over seven hundred years has made it the most architecturally, visually, and urbanistically significant city in the Americas. Kathryn E. O'Rourke, Trinity University, author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital

Resurrecting Tenochtitlan excavates the fascinating process by which Mexico’s early twentieth-century artists, intellectuals, and government officials activated and materialized the foundational history of Tenochtitlan within Mexico City’s urban landscape. Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala provide a richly researched and illustrated account analyzing how these actors animated Mexico City as a territory in which the post-revolutionary ideologies of indigenismo and mestizaje could be articulated spatially, adding invaluable layers to our understanding of historical and contemporary Mexico City. Jennifer Jolly, Ithaca College, author of Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas

Delia Cosentino is an associate professor of Latin American art history at DePaul University. She is the author of Las joyas de Zinacantepec: Arte colonial en el Monasterio de San Miguel and was a guest editor for Artl@s Bulletin’s thematic volume “Cartographic Styles and Discourse.”

Adriana Zavala is an associate professor of the history of art and architecture and race, colonialism, and diaspora studies at Tufts University. She is the author of Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art.