Plaza de las Tres Culturas
Memorial stone from 1993 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas with a poem by Rosario Castellanos
The Plaza de las Tres Culturas ("Square of the Three Cultures"), also known as Plaza de Tlatelolco ("Square of Tlatelolco"), is located in the center of Tlatelolco , a district of Mexico City in the Delegación Cuauhtémoc . The square owes its name to the fact that buildings are grouped around it that represent different epochs of Mexican history:
- Culture of Tenochtitlan , from before the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors ; represented by a series of pre-Columbian pyramids and ruins dating from the heyday of Tlatelolco . At that time there was an important market in Tlatelolco, where the people of the Valley of Mexico traded goods of all kinds from all over Mesoamerica . This is the epoch of the First Culture .
- Spanish culture, from the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico to Mexican independence ; represented by a convent and the Catholic Cathedral of Santiago in the Mexican colonial style . In this place was at the instigation of the two Spanish missionaries Bernardino de Sahagún and Juan de Zumarraga , the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco established. As a sign of complete submission, the Spanish conquistadors used to build their Christian churches exactly on the ruins of pre-Columbian places of worship; In doing so, they not only made use of indigenous labor, but also indigenous building materials. This is the epoch of the Second Culture .
- Modern Mexican culture, represented by the Torre de Tlatelolco ("Tower of Tlatelolco"), the seat of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2005, as well as by the residential buildings known as Unidad Habitacional Tlatelolco , several of which were designed by the famous architect Mario Pani . This is the epoch of Creole syncretism and represents the Third Culture .
In addition, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas was also the scene of other significant events in the history of Mexico several times:
- Before the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, Hernán Cortés visited the Tlatelolco market square. A few days later, on August 13, 1521, this was the scene of the final defeat of the Aztecs, when their last ruler Cuauhtémoc was crushed by Cortés. The chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes how such a bloodbath was wrought that it was not possible to put one foot in front of the other because of the pile of corpses there. It is estimated that over 40,000 indigenous people were killed in the battle.
- It was here that the Treaty of Tlatelolco was signed in 1967 , with which Latin America declared itself a nuclear-weapon-free zone . The contract was primarily the work of the Mexican diplomat Alfonso García Robles , who was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 .
- On October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening of the Olympic Games , there was another bloodbath: In the so-called Tlatelolco massacre , hundreds of civilians, mostly students, were killed by the orders of the then President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and the Interior Minister Luis Echeverría Álvarez (both belonging to the PRI ) killed by members of the armed forces and the police. The event, which until recently had always been officially denied, was edited by several Mexican writers , u. a. by Carlos Monsiváis , Elena Poniatowska and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature , Octavio Paz . Also songwriter (z. B. José de Molina ) and directors (z. B. Jorge Fons with Rojo Amanecer ) this thread is accepted.
- In 1985 several buildings around the Plaza de las Tres Culturas were badly damaged in an earthquake . a. the Edificio Nuevo León of the Unidad Habitacional .
Web links
Commons : Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Coordinates: 19 ° 27 ′ 6.1 ″ N , 99 ° 8 ′ 10.7 ″ W.