To visit Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución (better known as the Zócalo) today is to be immersed in an urban palimpsest spanning seven centuries. The north and east sides of this central plaza are occupied by the National Palace and Cathedral, from which the nation’s political and religious life has been administered since the Viceregal period. In the space between them, dancers and drummers wearing feathered headdresses and seed rattle anklets perform in front of the archaeological site and museum dedicated to the Mexica, or Aztec, Templo Mayor: the most significant ceremonial structure of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire from 1325 until it fell to Spanish forces in 1521. Given their scale and importance, one could easily assume that the ancient temple’s ruins have always been visible. But in fact, they were razed and built over in the wake of conquest; it was only in 1978 that Mexico’s government committed to excavating the entire Templo Mayor site, following the discovery of the Coyolxauhqui monolith by electricians working to rewire the city. The Museo del Templo Mayor opened in 1987, and Tenochtitlan was added to the name of the Zócalo subway stop by former city mayor and now president Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo only in 2021. In their important coauthored book, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City, art historians Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala illuminate how the groundwork for the ancient city’s current prominence was laid in material, visual, and conceptual terms by a “social network” of archaeologists, architects, art historians, artists, and illustrators working in Mexico City between 1914 and 1964. Attentive to the intersecting dynamics of race, class, gender, and ethnicity, the authors assess the methods by which a cast of almost exclusively male, mestizo-identified characters sought to bring their city’s Indigenous past into view in postrevolutionary Mexico.

The wellspring of this painstakingly researched and beautifully crafted study is a decades-long dialogue concerning art, architecture, and scholarship in and of Mexico. It began when the authors overlapped in Mexico City as Fulbright-García Robles scholars researching their PhD dissertations: Cosentino’s on the early colonial era, Zavala’s on the period 1900–1950 (the basis for her award-winning 2010 book Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art). While the seeds of some chapters of Resurrecting Tenochtitlan were planted in individually authored articles and essays, the book is the result of a true collaboration between two scholars whose expertise extends across several centuries of Mexican visual and material culture and converges around shared concerns that include the shifting constructs of indigeneity, indigenismo, and mestizaje. It presents unified, deeply considered visual and textual analyses of cases of postrevolutionary figures’ “actual reengagement with the centuries-old historical and archaeological materials that in turn generated creative responses, which serve to represent that past within a modern spatial setting as a site of social and cultural memory” (10).

Chapter one, “Imagining Tenochtitlan,” provides a solid introduction to the book’s scope and methods. It is followed by five chapters that are arranged in roughly chronological order and address developments in the fields of archaeology, art history, cartography, muralism, and architecture respectively. The cogent concluding chapter brings these together, demonstrating how archaeological finds, maps, models, and murals were arranged to represent Tenochtitlan spatially within the Sala Mexica, the dramatic double-height gallery of Aztec monoliths at the heart of the Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA) that was inaugurated at a spatial remove from the Zócalo in 1964—a half-century after the first vertical excavations of the Templo Mayor. Those excavations, which were conducted by Manuel Gamio in the capital while revolutionary battles raged elsewhere in the nation, are central to chapter two, “Archaeologists Set the Stage.” This clever title alludes not only to archaeologists’ foundational roles in Tenochtitlan’s postrevolutionary resurrection but to the fact that some of architect Ignacio Marquina’s enduring and influential illustrations of the city’s ceremonial center were made in 1919 to accompany Gamio’s screenplay for a never-produced film about the Tlaxcalan general Tlahuicole. The authors’ deep knowledge of the history of Mesoamerican archaeology and Mexican art comes through clearly in their nuanced analysis of these drawings.

Chapter three, “The Civic Art of Early Maps,” draws on a comprehensive bibliography to reveal how, in the 1920s and 1930s, art historians including Manuel Toussaint and Justino Fernández published books demonstrating that modern Mexico City had its roots in the plan of Tenochtitlan and obtained its contours from the early viceregal mestizo city. In so doing, they helped establish the field of urban planning and shored up the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)’s nascent Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, which remains a key center for the production of art and architectural history today. The network of influential mestizo men at the heart of Resurrecting Tenochtitlan takes clearer shape in this chapter with appearances from architect Juan O’Gorman and his brother Edmundo, a colonial historian; planner Carlos Contreras; and president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). Chapter four, “Picturing the Capital, Integrating the Nation,” expands the focus from an elite group to the creators and publishers of mass-market tourist and commemorative maps that incorporated Aztec symbols and Nahua names to underscore the growing city’s—and, by extension, the nation’s—mestizo identity during the repressive Maximato period (1928–34).  

Chapters five and six delve deeply into the individual and collective midcentury creative projects of Diego Rivera and Juan O’Gorman, which continue to have a major impact on how the Mesoamerican past is understood in Mexico City. Chapter five, “The Perfect Tenochtitlan,” offers a detailed analysis of Rivera’s 1945 Palacio Nacional fresco La Gran Tenochtitlan: an image of the complete city and its diversity of inhabitants, and one that engaged with contemporary debates regarding the single-party state’s push for rapid industrialization and urbanization under the moniker of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Whereas scholars have tended to dismiss this mural as taking too many historical liberties, Cosentino and Zavala reframe it as a thorough compendium of all the information that was available to Rivera and his network regarding the Aztec capital at that time (later in the book, we learn that Rivera’s mural was a key source for the diorama of the Tlatelolco market in the MNA’s Sala Mexica). Chapter six, “Mexico City: Yesterday, Today, and Always,” offers an overview of O’Gorman’s idiosyncratic architectural and artistic career, emphasizing his extended dialogue with Rivera. The authors offer compelling interpretations of the logic behind representations of sixteenth-century maps in two of O’Gorman’s best-known works: the Uppsala Map in the 1949 painting La Ciudad de México, and the Nuremberg Map in the 1952 mosaic mural Representación histórica de la cultura on the UNAM’s Central Library. Regarding the latter work, Cosentino and Zavala engage with Luis Roberto Torres Escalona’s argument that O’Gorman intentionally inverted some elements of the UNAM mosaics, thereby offering attentive viewers the opportunity to “comprehend the colonial era from an Indigenous rather than European perspective” (149). They have identified an additional and crucial example to support this thesis, noting that O’Gorman’s representation of the Nuremberg map on the library’s south wall is both inverted and rotated, thus aligning it with the south-facing viewer’s vista. This is the authors’ culminating case for how the members of this particular social network advocated, in this first half-century after the Revolution, for modern Mexico City to be understood spatially in relation to its ancient Indigenous forebear.

Cosentino and Zavala make clear that these actors’ “interest was ultimately assimilation of Indigenous populations” into a nation unified by the ideology of cultural mestizaje “rather than advocating for Indigenous political and cultural sovereignty” (9). To suggest that they might have done otherwise would be anachronistic. But as I read this outstanding book, I remained preoccupied that as a subfield, the history of modern Mexican art and architecture has avoided grappling head-on with how elite cooptation of the ancient Indigenous past in visual, material, and spatial forms has served—and continues serving—to limit Indigenous rights and democratic aims more broadly. Many of the endeavors of the Mexico City-based creators considered in this and other monographs of the last decade—including Dafne Cruz Porchini’s Arte, propaganda y diplomacia cultural a finales del cardenismo (2016), George Flaherty’s Hotel Mexico (2016), Kathryn O’Rourke’s Modern Architecture in Mexico City (2016), and my own Mathias Goeritz (2018)—contributed to the consolidation of the PRI’s highly centralized, and at times repressive, single-party rule from 1928 to 2000. While that party’s grip has slipped in recent years, indigenismo-fueled efforts to foreground Mexico’s ancient past in public space, exhibitions, and a repatriation campaign are key to the cultural agenda of the new and powerful Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) party. Founded in 2018 by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Morena swept the June 2024 elections at the federal, state, and local levels (electing a woman, Sheinbaum, as president for the first time in North America). In their preface, Cosentino and Zavala call out the political opportunism of López Obrador and Sheinbaum’s claims to center Mexico’s preconquest past in the name of decolonization, when the nation’s living Indigenous peoples remain profoundly disenfranchised. Hopefully Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City will spark more discussions and debates regarding the pressing contemporary stakes of historical research.