XVIII. Cortés and Mexico City

English · Español

Identifier: GE-016.
Original Publication: Novedades — Editorial Section, May 10, 1948.
Author: LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES.
Topics: Philosophy and Culture; History and the Hispanic World.

Fragments of the Epic

By LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES

XVIII

CORTÉS AND MEXICO CITY.

From the beautiful and highly original unpublished pages on Don Hernando de Cortés written by Dr. Ernesto González Aguilar, it is well now to highlight and offer the following fragments, full of a vigorous suggestiveness that invites us to dwell on them in a fruitful attitude of reflection:

“… Mexico City was not just any city, lost in the anonymity of contingent cities. It was the city that ruled a land, the visible head of a homeland, and the seat of a state, and therefore a city whose existence was necessary to explain a history.

“For there are two kinds of cities: the ordinary kind, whose existence is a matter of indifference, and the select kind, which must necessarily exist. Cities whose existence is a matter of indifference have no significance beyond their material importance as the economic nucleus of any given region. Cities that must necessarily exist have many meanings, although the most important is that they are wills that order the spiritual movement of their region. The former belong to the kind of quantity, or contingent cities, and the latter to the kind of quality, or necessary cities.

“Contingent cities, reclining upon the comfort of their utilitarianism, draw to themselves the surrounding desire for ‘comfort.’ Necessary cities have as their duty, charged to their conscience and before the Law of God, to take upon themselves the difficulties of all lives. The former are a heap of millionaires and proletarians who lie in ambush for one another behind the smoke of their cigars or their factories; the latter are the ordered stairway of moral values that love one another behind the old wall of their ancestors’ lives. The former hold contests for pretty dogs and pretty women, and competitions for apple gobblers; the latter have monuments and houses ennobled by the patina of centuries, and their systole and diastole are registered in that heart of the municipal spirit formed by the church and the town hall, facing one another. Contingent cities possess the reality of a luxurious garment, and thus pass with the triviality of a Paris fashion, without being missed by History. Necessary cities—Athens, Rome…—never die altogether: they go on living the immortality of their essence, because they are necessary to explain History.

“And Mexico City is a necessary city.

“It is a necessary city because it has many meanings, although the most important is that it contains within itself the spiritual arrow that points to the destiny of the Mexican homeland; that it is the ordering will and guiding force of the collective soul of the Mexican land, as well as the imperishable testament in which its founder inscribes the energetic, foundational outlines of the Mexican State. That is why Cortés did not request for his city a medal for sporting merit, or the gold-edged diploma that accredits members of a society for the protection of animals, or the certificate attesting to the tedious erudition of an entomologist. Cortés wanted an imperial crown for his city.”

Here is the key to Mexico City’s innermost sociological and historical reason for being. A distinguished imperial function: to be the head of one of the great centers of influence of that imperial enterprise of the Spirit in History entrusted to the Hispanic peoples.