Friday, August 13, marks (allegedly) the 500th anniversary of the surrender of Tenochtitlan, the great city of the Mexica (Aztec) empire, from whose vestiges sprout the sprawling metropolis that is today’s capital of Mexico.
In a bid to promote a reassessment of this historic event and its aftermath, the federal government has renamed the date as the “Inicio de la resistencia indígena” (start of the indigenous resistance). This comes on the back of attempts by President Andres Manuel López Obrador to get the Spanish government to apologize to indigenous Mexicans for wrongs committed during the Conquest.
López Obrador – who some say has manipulated the real date of the fall of the Aztec city (many scholars reckon it was in 1525) to coincide with his term of office – will attend a ceremony Friday in the Zocalo, which is housing a replica of the ancient people’s Templo Mayor through September 1. This revered structure, on which human sacrifices regularly took place, was destroyed by the Spanish and many of its stones used to build the adjacent Cathedral.
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