Rooted in Tenochtitlan
Whenever I visit a place with my camera I very seldom have a plan or a project in mind. I much prefer to simply wander around and tune into the feelings that particular place evokes within me. On our trip to Mexico City in 2023 I became fascinated by the enormous ancient trees lining many of the streets. The banyan and jacaranda trees were undoubtably magnificent, but they also appeared to be in a continuous battle against the suffocating concrete crust that humanity had laid around them, and our constant desire for neatness.
On one of our days spent in Mexico City – a place so unfathomably large that every journey seemed to take hours but could easily be improved by a cup of fat and spicy esquites – we visited the beautiful Palacio de Bellas Artes in the heart of the city itself. In amongst the astonishingly wonderful (and enormous) murals by such great artists as Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, was a small exhibition about the origins of the city itself that I found truly fascinating.
We read that Mexico City was built upon the ancient land of Tenochtitlan, the very capital of the Aztec Empire. Tenochtitlan was established in the early 14th century on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. When the Spanish, led by Hernán Cortés, conquered the city in 1521, they razed much of it and subsequently built Mexico City atop its ruins.
The Aztec People’s Close Relationship with Nature.
The exhibition showed that there is significant evidence that the Aztec Empire had a close and complex relationship with nature. They developed a sophisticated farming system called chinampas, often referred to as “floating gardens.” They built these on the shallow lake beds around Tenochtitlan by piling mud, decaying vegetation, and sediment onto woven reed mats. These fertile plots allowed for year-round farming and were highly productive, showing the Aztecs’ ingenuity in adapting to and working with their environment.
Many elements of nature held deep spiritual significance in Aztec culture. They worshiped gods and goddesses associated with nature, such as Tlaloc, the god of rain, Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and war, and Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of rivers, lakes, and water. Through rituals and offerings, the Aztecs honored these deities to maintain balance with the natural forces they depended on.
The Aztec calendar was intricately linked to agriculture, with ceremonies and rituals aligned with the agricultural and natural cycles. Their religious calendar, the Tonalpohualli, and their solar calendar, the Xiuhpohualli, guided planting, harvesting, and other seasonal activities, reflecting their understanding of nature’s rhythms.
Unlike ourselves, the Aztecs, it would seem, placed a great deal of importance upon the necessity of maintaining the balance between nature and their daily lives. They knew how to live with the land in a more harmonious way and tried to nurture it without destroying it. Today Mexico City is threaded through with fragile pathways of trees that are both vital for any wildlife that dares venture into the urban landscape and, at the same time, for us too. Protecting us from the sun in the hot summer months whilst purifying the heavily polluted air.
I see the trees as a living bridge between the ancient Aztec world of Tenochtitlan and our new world. Their roots are undoubtably firmly entrenched in the fertile soils and protective folklore that were created by our ancestors. The upper halves of the trees, on the other hand, are continually breaking through the accumulated layers of modern humanity that confine them, only to breathe our ruined air and battle to survive in a world that is rapidly forgetting the old ways.
