AIR´S MOST TRANSPARENT REGION

LETTER FROM MEXICO

AIR´S MOST TRANSPARENT REGION

By Octavio Díaz G.L.

     Alfonso Reyes, one of the most encyclopedic and prominent Mexican writers of the twentieth century, once wrote: “Traveler: you have arrived to the most transparent region of air” a phrase also attributed to the Baron Alexander von Humboldt during his 1804 visit to Mexico. More recently, the great novelist Carlos Fuentes titled one of its most famous novels, “The Most Transparent Region”. Both writers and the German visitor were referring to the Valley of México or Valley of Anáhuac (“In the midst of water” in its Aztec name).  

      The Valley of México sits at 2,200 meters of altitude (7,200 ft) and is surrounded to the east and south by volcanoes. On a clear day, the view of the volcanoes Popocatépetl (“Smoky Mountain”) and the Iztaccíhuatl (“Sleeping Woman”) both covered with snow most of the time and more than 5,300 meters high (17,400 ft), is very impressive. The former volcano, has been active in the past 20 years and is indeed smoky; occasionally its ashes bathe the Valley of Mexico. To the south, an older volcano, the ancient Ajusco makes a formidable wall, where you can hardly see the remains of the cone eroded by the elements in millions of years; a few kilometers to the northeast of Ajusco the newest volcano in the region, the Xitle, only 2000 years old (Is like a few minutes old in geological time) which formed the famous “Pedregal” region in the south of Mexico City. Here you can find a fancy neighborhood from the 50´s, a large shopping mall (“Perisur”) and the National University campus among other things.

      Within the lava campus of the National University is the University Cultural Center where you can find the “Sala Nezahualcóyotl”; this fine concert hall resembles the Berlin Philarmonic Concert Hall and is one of the most beautiful in all Mexico and perhaps in Latin America. Behind the “Sala Nezahualcóyotl” you can find the “Sculptural Space” which takes advantage of the remains of frozen lava that appear to be in movement  in order  to create a most wonderful experience that reminds the spectator of the enormous lava flows that took place in this part of the city. The Xitle eruption also buried an early native civilization whose remains you can see nearby in the Cuicuilco pyramids that were covered with lava and uncovered recently.

      In the center of the valley used to be a lake, the lake of Texcoco. In the center of the lake an island. In the island was one of the largest and most impressive metropolis of the world at the time when the Spanish conquerors arrived here. It was called Mexico-Tenochtitlan. From the island departed four roads toward the four cardinal points linking the island with the shore. But this city was relatively recent. Founded in 1325 by a nomadic tribe called the Aztecs, this was the only place they could settle as the lakeshore was occupied by other tribes. They came from a legendary region in the north of Mexico or perhaps in what is now the southwest of the United States called Aztlán. Their prophet-priest told them that they should settle where they found an eagle devouring a serpent at the top of a cactus.  They found it in the island in the middle of the lake.

       But Mexico, the country, is not comprised only of the heritage of the Aztecs. Many other civilizations, like the Olmec, the Maya, the Purépecha, the Toltec that founded Tula, and the civilization of the monumental Teotihuacán of unknown origins, a city that used to have more than 100,000 inhabitants, were more powerful and advanced than the Aztecs. But it was this tribe that had the dominant empire in Middle America when the Spaniards came. Their empire expanded all across middle Mexico and parts of Central America. They were powerful warriors and had a bloody religion. For them day and night was a powerful battle between gods. You could see in the sky that the Sun god Huitzilopochtli (“Leftie hummingbird”) was bloodletting in the afternoon before dark came. This god demanded human blood to get strength and win the battle and rise again. Day after day it demanded blood and the Aztecs made war in order to get prisoners to sacrifice them to their god.  Human sacrifice in the top of the Grand Temple pyramid was conducted extracting the beating heart of the sacrificed and the heart offered to the god Huitzilopochtli. The body of the sacrificed was thrown down the enormous stairs of the pyramid (45 meters or 147 ft. high) and its remains eaten as part of the ritual. Some of the Spaniards, made prisoners during the conquest suffered this fate.

      Hunger, biological war (Smallpox), the political savvy Captain Cortés that obtained help from the enemies of the Aztecs, superior weapons and horses finally defeated the Aztecs. In an impressive account from an eyewitness, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, he said that during the three months that lasted the siege of Tenochtitlan, for nights and days the noise from drums, shell horns, screams and other sources was so loud and intense that the Spaniards could not sleep. Among the screams were those from their fellow soldiers captured and sacrificed. Suddenly, when the defeat came, a strange and pervasive silence dominated the whole Valley of Mexico: a civilization had died. The heroic, and larger than myth Cuauhtémoc (“Diving eagle”), last emperor of the Aztecs, was taken prisoner and taken to Cortés: “Señor Malinche: I have done what I am bound to do in defense of my city; I can´t do no more; and because I come here before your power and before yourself, prisoner and against my will, take that dagger that you hold in your belt and kill me.”  The heroic end of the Aztecs, reminds me the verses from T.S. Eliot:

“This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but with a whimper.”

(From “The Hollow Men”)

     The Spaniards colonized the territories of what are now California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas to the north down to Costa Rica in Central America  to form the New Spain. And for 300 years the city where the air was most transparent remained the capital of New Spain. Mexico City was transformed from an Aztec metropolis into a Spanish rich and beautiful city, full of palaces, great churches, convents, floating gardens, canals as in Venice,  a university, huge markets and a large population (However not as large as the Aztec capital until recently). 

     In 1821 it became the capital of independent Mexico and remained a beautiful city up until the 40´s of the past century, when modernization and immigration took a huge toll on constructions, roads, infrastructure and destroyed the lake. Its disorderly growth made it one of the most polluted cities in the world, insecure, crowded and full of contrasts. Today it is struggling to recover its past splendor but remains very far of what it used to be. Nevertheless it is a place full of museums, theaters, movie theaters, impressive buildings in spite of the constant earthquakes that rattle the city, recovered parks, new road infrastructure already insufficient for the number of cars in the city, impressive and countless restaurants of all sorts, quiet neighborhoods that used to be old towns around Mexico City, a large subway system, large shopping malls, elegant shopping streets, as well as slums of extreme poverty providing big contrasts of poverty and wealth side by side. This is where 8 million inhabitants (The metropolitan area contains close to 20 million) struggle to live a life of opportunities and challenges that the city provides. 

     Many of the middle sized cities in the rest of the country are now more beautiful and have better quality of life than Mexico City, but the capital still attracts many people, as visitors and as immigrants, the latter in a much smaller scale than it used to be.  In spite of the amount of vehicles that crowd the streets, Mexico City has again more transparent air (Some days, like this December 25, 2014,  you can really appreciate what it means transparent air)  than in the previous century but is still far from being what it used to be: Air´s most transparent region.

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