Just two miles to the north-west of Mexico City’s Zócalo or main square, the archeological zone of Tlatelolco is the sole site of convergence for the overarching values of our national history: Mexico Tenochtitlan and Mexico Tlatelolco gave our country its name, and these cities began their lives, grew up, and died at the same time. Tenochtitlan lost its name, but not its face, and today its remains emerge every step of the way as we move toward modernity; Tlatelolco, on the other hand, has preserved its name over the centuries.

The archeological site of Tlatelolco was revealed to us in 1944, thanks to the work of Robert H. Barlow, Antonieta Espejo, and Pablo Martínez del Río. By 1948 this team had already succeeded in recovering the remains of the Templo Mayor’s different phases of construction, scattered across the railyards of Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, a prison, and an army barracks. Federal laws were enacted in 1953 to protect these remains.

In 1958, Adolfo López Mateos allocated an area of 300 acres—from east to west between Tepito and Nonoalco, and from Eje 2 Norte to Flores Magón—for the construction of the social housing complex that now bears the former president’s name. A total of 130 buildings were constructed, regardless of the fact that their foundations were to be built over the pre-Hispanic remains of Mexico-Tlatelolco’s ceremonial center, and also over the remnants of the Republic of Indians in the capital of New Spain, a blend of cultures which undoubtedly brought into existence the Plaza de las Tres Culturas—now tragically associated with the events of 1968.

Thanks to Francisco González Rul, Eduardo Matos, and Braulio García, we now have 67 pre-Hispanic structures framed by the facade of the church dedicated to Santiago, the saint of the conquistadors. There we can appreciate the magnificent altarpiece and pendentives: the four apostles holding up the church, mounted upon their winged emblems, handmade by indigenous craftsmen using human bones encased in colored stucco.

In the south-western corner of the Franciscan cloister we can see the water cistern of the Imperial College of Santa Cruz, with its display of more than 130 square feet of the first mestizo mural to be painted in New Spain, an allegory of the daily life of indigenous people under the new religious order.

Tlatelolco also contains the replica of the Garden of San Marcos, in Aguascalientes, where in its eastern center a columned obelisk rises up and is topped by a tholobate, the only one of its kind. To round off the impressive cultural complex of Tlatelolco, David Alfaro Siqueiros’ first mural, painted in 1944, can be seen in the remains of the Tecpan. In this work, the sculptures interact with the breaks in the surfaces, creating a triptych called “Cuauhtémoc contra el mito” ("Cuauhtémoc Against the Myth").

In short, the age-old face of Tlatelolco looks to the future with the same vigor with which it has emerged in every chapter of our history.