From Foundation Myth to National Symbol

The founding narrative was recorded in multiple colonial-era sources with real variation in detail, including the pictorial Codex Mendoza, whose opening page shows the eagle on the cactus atop a stylized map of the newly founded city, and the oral histories gathered by Sahagun and Duran from Nahua informants describing the migration and the specific circumstances of arrival. Elizabeth Hill Boone's scholarship on Aztec religious imagery situates the founding scene within the broader visual and ceremonial program the Mexica state used to assert its divinely sanctioned legitimacy, alongside comparable imagery centered on Huitzilopochtli elsewhere in Aztec art.

The eagle-and-cactus image outlived the religious world that produced it by a wide margin: adopted after Mexican independence as a national emblem and today at the center of the Mexican flag, it now functions as a secular civic symbol largely detached from the specific Huitzilopochtli-centered religious claim that originally gave it meaning. This article describes that original religious-historical account, the founding as the Mexica themselves understood and recorded it, distinct from its very different later life as a modern national symbol.