subsoil

The Centro is located on what used to be swamplands and the Texcoco lakebed. As Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital incorporated a network of isles, canals and floating agricultural platforms (chinampas). During the Colonial period, as part of a strategy of generating political and power symbols, the Spaniards literally built their own landmarks on top of the former indigenous temples and public buildings. The city fabric was incorporated into the process of domination and acculturation: canals were filled, avenues and plazas were lined with European-style buildings and symbols remitting to the Metropolis. The Centro was the very epicenter of conquista and mestizaje: physical, political, aesthetic, spiritual, and mythical.

Historically, it has been a place of incredible complexity—if not plain chaos—in cultural and social terms as well as in terms of landscape. Floods came that lasted for years and drowned the complete city center, and periodically the city went back to its original watercourses. Even after the monster public sewage works began in the eighteenth century and were completed well into the nineteenth, after the last rivers and streams in the city were piped, temporary minor inundations continued to be a serious problem (even today the main highways and thoroughfares in the central city are transformed into running waterways during the rainy season).

On September 19, 1985, the uneasy subsoil of the Centro magnified the strength of the 8.1 Richter scale earthquake that struck the city. It generated a wave-like effect, and buildings tipped back and forth crashing against each other. News reporters on the go, caught in the smoke and horror of the aftermath, declared in the superdramatic tone we’ve grown familiar to from disaster movies that the Centro was extinct, that it had disappeared. This wasn’t true, of course. Despite the postapocalypse scenario of 1985 (many of the affected buildings had actually been public buildings, including major public hospitals like La Raza or the Centro Médico Nacional, which was completely destroyed. Bodies were piled up in a nearby baseball stadium for recognition. Officially, around 10,000 people died, but some estimates go up to around 30,000 or more), the Centro persisted, barely. If the subsoil magnified the tectonic waves, the earthquake itself dramatically magnified the emptying of the Centro.