Something ancient... something modern

Mexico City is very old.  According to tradition it was founded by the Aztecs in 1325.  The Spanish conquerors were building their colonial capital atop the rubble of the vanquished city more than eighty years before the English built their first tiny settlements on the North American continent.  The grand churches and palaces of viceregal Mexico City predate the establishment of the United States.  It is very old indeed.

But there is one spot in Mexico City which is more than old... it is truly  ancient.   The archaeological site of Cuicuilco, on the southern edge of the city next to busy Insurgentes Avenue, is the oldest in all of central Mexico.  Between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 150 Cuicuilco was a thriving community with a population of at least 20,000 people.  Cuicuilco came to an end when the nearby volcano Xitle erupted and covered the area with lava.  For centuries the area, which is known as "El Pedregal" (Rocky Land), was a wasteland of rough volcanic rock.  It wasn't until the 1940s that part of "El Pedregal" was developed as an exclusive, upper class neighborhood and a showcase of modern Mexican architecture.  Today the archaeological site is hemmed in on all sides by the ever expanding city.

It was easy to get to Cuicuilco.  The Metrobus travels all the way down Insurgentes Avenue, and one of the bus stops is just a short walk from the entrance to the site.   The major structure at Cuicuilco is the pyramid... although with its unique circular shape it is not really at all pyramidal.  It reminds me more of the structures built by the mound builders in Ohio and other parts of the Midwest, except in this case the earthen core is faced with uncut volcanic rock.  The "pyramid" is 360 feet in diameter and rises to a height of 82 feet.
 

 

Of course I climbed to the top.  You can see how the city has expanded all around the archaeological site.  There is probably much more of Cuicuilco that could have been uncovered if the land had not been developed.

Here you can see the black volcanic rock that covers this part of Mexico City.

 

And now for something modern.  Since I was in that part of the city, I walked a short distance from the archaeological site to Perisur, an upscale shopping mall.  In the foreground you can see once again the volcanic rock of "El Pedregal".  (By the way, Liverpool is the name of one of Mexico's major department store chains.)

It looks like a mall in the United States, and many of the stores are the same ones we see at home.  I like to occasionally show pictures like this, just to break the stereotypes that so many people have about Mexico.  When I was teaching, there would be students who would ask me questions like, "Do they have televisions in Mexico?"  Even one of my friends, a very educated and cultured lady, admitted to me that she had thought that Mexico City was one enormous slum until she saw my pictures.  

It is true that there is much poverty in Mexico.  I read somewhere that 50% of Mexico City lives in poverty.  But that also means that there are around 12 million people in metropolitan Mexico City who are middle or upper class.  12 million people... that's six times the entire metropolitan population of my home town of Cleveland!  Of course there are going to be lovely neighborhoods, sleek skyscrapers, modern shopping malls, familiar fast food restaurants, multiplex cinemas showing the latest movies that we are watching, theaters presenting Broadway hits in Spanish, all of the trappings of 21st century life to which we are accustomed.  

And yet right next to something very modern, you might find something very old... one of the charms of Mexico!