Notes from Mexico

One has almost to be a sleuth, these days, to find in Mexico City architectural remnants of her civilized past. One has the impression that the entire city is engaged in the effort to obliterate every trace of the four hundred years that preceded the fall of Porfirio Diaz in 1910. The ancient Zócalo, the heart of Mexico, the great square bordered by the oldest cathedral in the hemisphere—erected on the bloody stone where the high priest wrested still-pulsating hearts from thousands upon thousands of wretched Indians consigned to the propitiation of Aztec gods—by the presidential palace and other administrative buildings, and by an old department store; the Zócalo is there still. There it will remain, an architectural oasis in a hopped-up city of experimental building, where anything goes, from surrealist-modern to pagan-primitive, all but the simple elegance of the Spanish baroque.

Mexico is a nation ashamed. The people are ashamed of the ease with which Cortés disposed of the great armies of Tenochtitlán. They are ashamed of the subjugation of their nation over the years by foreign powers. They are ashamed of their total dependence on the Colossus of the North. They are ashamed of their poverty, illiteracy, dirt: of the backwardness of the nation. The elite deplore all this and more besides. They are ashamed of the atavistic fervor with which the masses cling to their religion; of the contrast upon crossing the Rio Grande; of the color of their skin.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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One has almost to be a sleuth, these days, to find in Mexico City architectural remnants of her civilized past. One has the impression that the entire city is engaged in the effort to obliterate every trace of the four hundred years that preceded the fall of Porfirio Diaz in 1910. The ancient Zócalo, the heart of Mexico, the great square bordered by the oldest cathedral in the hemisphere—erected on the bloody stone where the high priest wrested still-pulsating hearts from thousands upon thousands of wretched Indians consigned to the propitiation of Aztec gods—by the presidential palace and other administrative buildings, and by an old department store; the Zócalo is there still. There it will remain, an architectural oasis in a hopped-up city of experimental building, where anything goes, from surrealist-modern to pagan-primitive, all but the simple elegance of the Spanish baroque.

Mexico is a nation ashamed. The people are ashamed of the ease with which Cortés disposed of the great armies of Tenochtitlán. They are ashamed of the subjugation of their nation over the years by foreign powers. They are ashamed of their total dependence on the Colossus of the North. They are ashamed of their poverty, illiteracy, dirt: of the backwardness of the nation. The elite deplore all this and more besides. They are ashamed of the atavistic fervor with which the masses cling to their religion; of the contrast upon crossing the Rio Grande; of the color of their skin.