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How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan. After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City. Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico's modern capital.

The Mapa Uppsala is the earliest known map of sixteenth-century Mexico City that was painted by indigenous artists after the city's takeover by Spanish forces. It is one of the few indigenous-produced documents about the city and its environs from this time period. While the traditional scholarly consensus has been that the map dates to c.1554, we derive evidence from an examination of the original map to argue for a creation date of c.1537-1541. This revised date, combined with the map's high degree of topographical and chorographical precision, means that the map offers a snapshot of the city's urban development and ecological changes at an earlier point in its history than has been acknowledged.

Johannes Vingboons's much-copied watercolours (c.1650s) of Mexico City, Acapulco and Veracruz, based on drawings by Juan Gómez de Trasmonte and Adrián (Adriaan) Boot made in New Spain before 1628, are considered accurate depictions of these cities in the early seventeenth century. No one has found the originals, however, nor has the route by which they reached the Netherlands at a time when the Spanish and the Dutch were at war been satisfactorily explained. We re-examine these early European representations of New World cities and consider their sources, purpose and historical context. Our arguments are based on a fresh analysis of the topographical content of the watercolours themselves and of the secondary sources, and we take into consideration new historical evidence about Trasmonte, Boot and Vingboons as well as the cities depicted. We also describe a hitherto unknown set of the Vingboons manuscripts depicting the three Mexican cities.

The map of Tenochtitlan published along with a Latin version of Hernán Cortés's letters (Nuremberg, 1524) was the first picture Europeans had of the Culhua-Mexica city, the capital of the Aztec empire. The source of this woodcut map is unknown, and the author argues here that it was based on an indigenous map of the city. Once published in Europe, the city map and its companion map of the Gulf Coast, while certainly documentary, also assumed a symbolic function in supporting Cortés's (and thereby Spain's) just conquest of the Amerindian empire.

The idea of modernization influenced a reconciliation between advocates of the revolutionary state and its conservative opponents in 1940s León, Guanajuato. Proponents of the Revolution demonstrated the transforming power of the state by advocating projects that expressed modernity. PRM supporters instituted an extensive program of construction that stripped the city of its local orientation, religious iconography, and of its status as the symbolic capital of Catholic Mexico. The eventual endorsement of the modernization ideal by conservatives allowed an ideological, economic, political, and cultural reconciliation between themselves and the PRM that contributed to the longevity of the postrevolutionary government. En León Guanajuato, la modernización jugó un importante papel en la reconciliación entre los defensores del estado revolucionario y los de la oposición conservadora. Los partidarios de la Revolución sustentaron la capacidad transformativa del Estado mediante proyectos de infraestructura que dejaban claro la modernidad revolucionaria. Adherentes del PRM pusieron en marcha una série de obras públicas que transformaron una ciudad, que otrora, había fungido como el centro del catolicismo mexicano. Igualmente, estos proyectos obfuscaron la iconografía religosa de la ciudad y cambiaron su orientación regional. Al apoyar y sancionar la obra modernizadora de la Revolución hicierion posible una reconciliación ideológica, económica, política, y cultural entre las facciones opuestas, hecho que conllevo a la longevidad del régimen posrevolucionario.