Valley of Mexico

The Valley of Mexico is a high basin that held Teotihuacan, then Tenochtitlan, and now Mexico City, and it was the ritual centre of Mesoamerica in its final pre-conquest form.

The Templo Mayor stood at the middle of Tenochtitlan, a stepped pyramid rebuilt in successive enlargements, carrying two shrines at the top: one to Tlaloc, the rain and fertility deity of long standing across Mesoamerica, and one to Huitzilopochtli, the tribal god of the Mexica who had brought them to the valley. The pairing is the theology in built form, agriculture and war, sustenance and empire, on one platform.

Excavation of the site from 1978, after a monolith of the dismembered goddess Coyolxauhqui was found by electrical workers, has recovered many hundreds of buried offerings: sacrificial knives, marine shells and coral from both coasts, jaguar and eagle remains, imported objects from tributary provinces, and human remains. Leonardo Lopez Lujan's analysis of the deposits shows them to be carefully composed rather than accumulated, arranged to represent the layered cosmos. A large rack of skulls, the huei tzompantli described by Spanish witnesses and long doubted, was located and excavated from 2015.

The Spanish demolished the temple and built the cathedral beside its ruins from its stone, which is why the archaeological zone and the cathedral now stand within a few metres of each other on the same square.

The basilica of Guadalupe on Tepeyac hill, at the northern edge of the valley, receives more pilgrims than any other Catholic shrine in the Americas, and the account attached to it is that in December 1531 the Virgin appeared to an indigenous man, Juan Diego, spoke to him in Nahuatl, and left her image on his cloak.

The historical questions are old and were raised from within the church rather than outside it. Stafford Poole's study traces the documentary record and finds no contemporary evidence for the apparition, with the principal Nahuatl narrative dating from the following century and the earliest sources describing a cult without the story. The Franciscans who had evangelised the valley were openly suspicious of the shrine in the sixteenth century, on the grounds that indigenous people were venerating an image at a site associated with a mother goddess of the previous religion. The church has canonised Juan Diego and treats the tradition as authentic; the historical debate continues alongside that.

The relation to earlier practice is likewise argued rather than settled. Tepeyac is reported in colonial sources as a place of pre-conquest worship, and the identification with a specific goddess is asserted in some of those sources and doubted in others.

What is beyond dispute is the shrine's function. Guadalupe became the emblem of Mexican national identity, carried on the banner of the independence rising in 1810 and by farm workers organising in California in the 1960s.