Mexico City outlines fall of Aztec capital 500 years ago

MEXICO CITY — Walking for hours through the gritty streets in the center of Mexico City, you can hear the daily urban soundtrack: car engines, the call of the man who buys scrap metal and the hand bells that announce the passing of a garbage truck.

It’s hard to imagine that some of these streets trace the outline of what was, five centuries ago, Tenochtitlan, a sophisticated city on an island in a bridge-studded lake where a great civilization flourished.

The Aztec emperors who ruled much of the land that became Mexico were defeated by a Spanish-led force that seized the city Aug. 13, 1521.

Despite all that was lost in the epic event 500 years ago — an empire and countless Indigenous lives — much remains of that civilization.

Then, as now, the city’s center was dedicated to commerce, with vendors laying out wares on blankets or in improvised stalls, much as they would have done in 1521.

Artists, intellectuals and the government are trying to show what it was all like and what remains, in novel forms: They plan to paint a line on the streets of the city of 9 million to show where the boundaries of the ancient city of Tenochtitlan ended.

Officials have also built a near life-size replica of the Aztecs’ twin temples in the capital’s vast main plaza.

It is part of a project to rescue the memory of the world-changing event, which for too long has been mired in the old and largely inaccurate vision of Indigenous groups conquered by the Spaniards.

For example, expedition leader Hernan Cortes and his 900 Spaniards made up only about 1% of the army of thousands of allies from Indigenous groups oppressed by the Aztecs.

Not everything ended Aug. 13, 1521, when the last leader of the Aztec resistance, the Emperor Cuauhtemoc, was taken prisoner by the Spaniards.

There is only a simple plaque marking the spot in the tough neighborhood of Tepito.

There also remain traces of Cortes, though they’re neither very public or prominent; Mexicans have learned at school for generations to view him as the enemy.

Archaeologist Esteban Miron notes that there isn’t a single statue to Moctezuma — the emperor who welcomed Cortes — in the city. Nor are there any statues of Cortes.

As Miron traces the route that the Spaniard took into the city in 1519 — welcomed at first, the Conquistadores were later expelled — there is a stone plaque commemorating the first meeting between Cortes and the Aztec emperor.

Inside a nearby church, another plaque marks the niche where Cortes’ bones are believed to lie.

On June 30, 1520, the so-called Sad Night, now re-dubbed The Victorious Night, Cortes was forced to flee, leaving many dead Spaniards behind. “The historical record say that they left walking through the lake, which was not very deep, on top of the bodies of their own comrades,” Miron notes.