January 2, 2019
I’m breathless in Mexico City, and that’s only partly because I’m at 7200 feet, 19 degrees north of the Equator, and about 1600 miles from Bloomington.
My physical state is partly due to what we’ve seen and done the last day and a half. Carolyn has had a long fascination with pre-Columbian art, and our library has a nice sprinkling of coffee table books accumulated over the years from exhibits at the Art Institute, but they pale before what we saw today at the National Archeological Museum of Mexico, and the remnants of the pre-Conquest ruins in Mexico City.
David Hoyt thought the museum was equivalent to the Louvre of the Western Hemisphere (he’s a Francophile), but that’s not quite accurate. The Louvre not only has treasurers of French painting (Liberty Storming the Barricades), but European as well (Mona Lisa anyone?), as well as Nike and other European paintings and sculptures—at a minimum.
The National Archeological Museum of Mexico is primarily Meso-American in focus, and that almost is exclusively what is now Mexico. And what treasures it has! A 20 ton head from the Olmec period (bear in mind Meso-America awaited Europeans to introduce metal tools). Southern Mexico had gold, but most of the area used obsidian for all purposes, including knives to kill and extract hearts for sacrifices, huge pyramids and temples and tombs (we saw the excavations of one in Zocalo, the central historic district of Mexico City), and huge stone monoliths celebrating or pacifying the gods—water, war, corn, and maize. The latter really struck home for me—the region seems to have had abundant crops, far different than Europe. It was the New World that contributed squash and beans and corn (flour and tortillas), and maguey (the Century plant, good for everything from soap to booze), and chilis—can you imagine Thai food before the European discovery of the New World?
Perhaps the two most stunning rooms in the museum were dedicated to the Aztec (Mexica) and the Mayans. The Mayans crowning achievements are in the Yucatan, a little earlier than the Aztecs. Interesting to me were some of the similarities with Cahokia Mounds, our Illinois counterparts, which indicated to me that the culture and trade stretched through the Americas.
The Spanish, of course, led by Cortes and an army that our guide insists were dregs from the prisons, arrived in 1521 determined to find gold and treasures, and dethroned (and decapitated) Montezuma and two successors, a period known as the Conquest, which initiated almost 300 years of “Nuevo Espana,” Spain’s prized possession in the new world, to which Spain brought “civilization”—the Inquisition, the Catholic Church, and the Spanish language, among other legacies.
The rest of our day was in the Historic Center, which had been the Aztec 
capital, destroyed by the Spanish, who erected their colonial capital on the site. That included a monstrous cathedral (of course), the largest in Latin America. Built in the 18th century, it’s in the baroque style I greatly enjoy, with an addition in a local style named for the architects that is even more over the top. Our guide said that every time there’s an excavation, something new is found. The famous Aztec calendar (did you know it’s about 6 feet in
diameter?) being one item, and Temple Mayor, the chief Aztec temple, being another now under excavation. Indeed, looking at the map of what’s known, less that 5% of the historic sites have been excavated.
We also visited the 18th century Palace Nacional, now the president’s palace, that had been the home of the 60 or so Spanish 
Viceroys. The building houses spectacular murals by Diego Rivera, encapsulating his (mostly socialist/Marxist) view of history. When Rockefeller commissioned him to draw a mural in the Rockefeller Center it had likenesses of Karl Marx; the Standard Oil baron paid his friend Rivera, but tore the mural down. The sketches included Mr.Polk’s war (1846-7) and the bizarre interlude when the Archduke Maximilian of Austria was offered the Mexican throne in 1864 and lasted three years before he was deposed and executed, leaving behind the furniture in Chapultepec Castle that I’ll tell more about tomorrow.