Source: WTL photos taken on site in the Plaza de Tlatelolco, Mexico, D.F.
Comments: This academic photo essay tour takes us to the Plaza de Tlatelolco, also known nowadays as the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Three Cultures Square). In the 15th century Tlatelolco was actually the "twin city" next to Tenochtitlán. A separate Mexica people, the tlatelolcas, maintained a very prosperous commercial center here. It also had a templo mayor (pyramid) and other smaller pyramids dedicated to the sun god and the wind god. On August 13, 1521, the Spanish soldiers under the command of Hernán Cortés conquered the last Aztec emperor, the tlatoani Cuauhtémoc along with both Aztec and tlatelolca warriors at this site. Forty thousand people died here, thus ending the Aztec empire and beginning the Spanish empire in Mexico. In the 16th century the Spanish priest and chronicler Bernardino de Sahagún worked on the Codex Florentino and the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España in the convent seen here in #9. (For a brief portrait of Sahagún, see: => Tlatelolco Page 10i. In 1968, in this famous plaza the Mexican national army killed about 400 students who were protesting the government's heavy expenditures on the 1968 Olympic Games in lieu of on education and the poor.
Tlatelolco photo series: Click on the right arrow or click on Image #1.