general, Agustín de Iturbide. The Mexican vice-regal capital was not a centre of the strivings and struggles.
The two decades of almost incessant sub-continentally inter-connected wars laid waste to much of American society and fatally fractured its military and political elites, issuing into decades of post-independence coups and civil wars. By 1855, Mexico, for instance, had had fifty governments in thirty-four years of independence, eleven of those governments headed by General Antonio López de Santa Anna, a burlesque, tragic-comic figure who lost Texas, California and the other north-western territories to the United States.*
These wars did not destroy, or even much damage, the major cities. Earthquakes, such as in Lima, were much more destructive. Urban colonial continuity was not broken, but the political turmoil delayed the nationalization of the colonial capitals.
The ethnic configurations and conflicts characteristic of settler states differed in the Iberian countries from the British ones, in particular before the later waves of mass immigration. Whereas the British mainstream was dichotomous – either you are 100 percent White or you are non-White – the Iberian view and practice was hierarchical: White, less White, a little White, non-White. There were African slaves and ex-slaves in Hispanic America, but not that many, and in some areas, like Uruguay, they were killed off as cannon fodder in the independence wars. Surviving Afrodescendentes, as they are now called, were usually barred from Hispanic American citizenship, like in the United States before the Civil War. The most significant groups were Spanish-born peninsulares (or, pejoratively, gachupines), American-born (more or less) White Creoles, Mestizos and Indians. Centuries of ethnic intercourse had made Hispanic America a third Mestizo, a fifth White, half Indian and 4 per cent Black.†
The size and the cultural weight of the Native population in Hispanic America induced some respect among the colonial conquerors, particularly in Peru, and most of the new nation-states took them into account. In both Mexico and Peru, independence meant an abolition of the special legal status of Indians – subordinate but also protected and locally autonomous – into national citizenship.
Hispanic American independence, and Mexican independence in particular, was not exactly a straight settler secession. The popular nationalist movement in Mexico was launched by two rural priests, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos, one Creole, the other Mestizo, under the banner of the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe and to the call of ‘death to the gachupines’. In the final Act of Independence (of 1821), reference is made to ‘the Mexican nation, which for three hundred years [i.e., since the colonial conquest] has had neither its own will nor free use of its voice’.* The Mestizos were, of course, descendants of the settlers and part of the settlements created by the conquering Europeans, societies very different from colonized indigenous communities, in the Americas as well as in Africa and Asia. But mestizaje has been a very important part of Mexican national rhetoric, imagery and urban iconography, at least until World War II.†
Brazil was part of the American slavery belt (from Washington to Rio de Janeiro), abolishing slavery only in 1888. However, it operated Black and White relations in a hierarchical Iberian way, meaning that if you were a light-skinned, non-enslaved mulatto/a, you were on your way up.
Mexico City, built on the Aztec metropolis Tenochtitlán, was the prime city of Hispanic America. On the eve of the beginning of the wars for independence, the city had about 135,000 inhabitants, the largest of the hemisphere. Half of them were White, a fourth Indian, a fifth Mestizo and some 10,000 were what was then called ‘mulattos’. It was a uniformly planned city of baroque palaces, surrounded by artisanal and shopkeepers’ neighbourhoods with an Indian periphery.* Its enormous, austere, horizontal sixteenth-century Vice-Regal Palace was the grandest building of the colonial Americas, 197 metres long. To its right side on the Plaza Mayor was the exuberantly baroque cathedral. Mexico was the capital of New Spain, the richest and the most unequal of the Indias, as the Americas were called in imperial Spain.25
The palace later became the National Palace, originally housing the two legislative chambers and the ministries as well as the president. Now it functions partly as a museum, with great Diego Rivera murals of national history, and occasionally as a ceremonial public building. The presidential residence, after some time in Chapultepec Castle, has been located somewhat off-centre since the mid-1930s. The cathedral is still in use.
The large plaza in front of these buildings was once intended to house a grand independence monument, at the equestrian site of the Spanish King Carlos IV. This was an initiative of the perennially unlucky Santa Anna in 1843. In the end there was no financing and no power to complete it; only the pedestal or zócalo was completed. But the name has stuck: the central public place of current Mexico, the central gathering place of all protest rallies and national celebrations, is the Zócalo. There is no national monument there, only a big flagpole flying a gigantic national banner.
However, the true nationalization of Mexico City came later, with a national liberal period known as the Reforma, after Mexico defeated a bizarre European imperial adventure by Napoleon III to install a Habsburg prince as Emperor of Mexico on the basis of unpaid Mexican debt. The national iconography was laid out in a monumental programme of the late nineteenth century along the Paseo de la Reforma (previously del Emperador/Emperatriz), running northeast from the huge castle park at Chapultepec Castle. The iconographic cast included a large roster of liberal and classical national politicians, military men and intellectuals, with three major stars: Miguel Hidalgo, ‘Father of the Nation’ at the feet of the Column of Independence, topped by Winged Victoria, later known as the Angel of Independence; second, the last Aztec king, Cuauhtémoc – as a majestic statue, but with a bas-relief depicting his torture by the Spanish; and finally Cristóbal Colón (Columbus) as a peaceful navigator bringing Christianity to the Americas. Mexico does not monumentalize its conqueror, Hernán Cortés. Also standing by an abstract neoclassical semi-circle, is the great, diminutive (137 centimetres, or about 4 feet 6 inches) liberal president during the years around the French imperialist interlude, Benito Juárez, to my knowledge the first Indian president in the Americas.*
Mexico City is one of the best cities to see the historical layers of urban formation. There is the Aztec and Mexican capital, the lacustrine layout of which can still be enjoyed in the southern lake area of Xochimilco, viewed from the large, visible archaeological excavations, from the central Templo Mayor to the Plaza of the Three Cultures, and experienced through the deep knowledge on display in the most stunning anthropological museum of the world. Imperial splendour is centred on the Zócalo, where the colossally horizontal Vice-Regal Palace was given a third floor by President Plutarco Elías Calles in the 1920s. Further north, alongside the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, dedicated to the patron saint of Mexico, a huge new modernist one was added in the 1970s. Mexican nationalism, a third layer of the city, did not find its urban and iconographic form until the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, under the liberal quasi-dictator Porfirio Díaz. This was when Paseo de la Reforma was made the parade street of the city and when the Avenida de los Insurgentes, referring to the classical nationalist rebels, was laid out as the main north-south thoroughfare of the city – originally as Avenida del Centenario, reflecting the focus on upgrading the capital for the coming centenary of 1910.
The revolution of 1910–17 is another stratum of Mexican urban geology. It started under the modest slogan of ‘Effective suffrage and no reelection’ – reflecting the particular political problematic of the settler nations: the main issue is not, as in Europe, ‘What rights should the people have?’ but ‘Who are the people?’ as well as respect for their rights. Nevertheless, it became the most epic story of the twentieth-century Americas. In today’s Mexico City, the most original enduring visible effects are perhaps the indoor public murals of Diego Rivera and José Orozco, the outdoor ones of the Políforo Siqueiros of culture and Juan O’Gorman’s at the Central University Library. Furthermore, they also include a recycling of an unfinished parliament building into a (sepulchral) Monument
