Resurrecting Tenochtitlan

What a marvelous book! Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala illuminate the urban history of modern Mexico City by demonstrating the ways Tenochtitlan—as a historical place and an idea—lived on in a rapidly changing capital. The authors bring together a stunning variety of objects to show how artists, intellectuals, and cartographers shaped the image of the city and its past, in dialogue with historical representations of the metropolis. Resurrecting Tenochtitlan is a fantastic contribution to scholarship on the place whose repeated, multilayered reinvention over seven hundred years has made it the most architecturally, visually, and urbanistically significant city in the Americas.

~Kathryn E. O'Rourke, Trinity University, author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital

Resurrecting Tenochtitlan excavates the fascinating process by which Mexico’s early twentieth-century artists, intellectuals, and government officials activated and materialized the foundational history of Tenochtitlan within Mexico City’s urban landscape. Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala provide a richly researched and illustrated account analyzing how these actors animated Mexico City as a territory in which the post-revolutionary ideologies of indigenismo and mestizaje could be articulated spatially, adding invaluable layers to our understanding of historical and contemporary Mexico City.

~Jennifer Jolly, Ithaca College, author of Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas

Like all important urban centers, Mexico City is composed of layers of history, culture, architecture, and urban and demographic changes, and its historical foundation still plays an important role in Mexico’s political and social life. This book aims to show how these layers and foundational myths affect modern understandings of the city...Deftly weaving together archival documents and maps, graphic ideations of the city’s past and present, and historical accounts, [Resurrecting Tenochtitlan] presents [Mexico City's] complexity as a space of contestation in which different actors vie to articulate their ideological positions within the rapidly changing environment of this historically grounded city. ~CHOICE