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Oct 31, 2023 · Gods or deities of Mexican mythology. Tlaloc, god of rain, lightning and thunder. He is a god of fertility. Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, lakes, rivers, seas, streams, horizontal waters, storms and baptisms. Xipe-Totec, god of strength, lord of the seasons and rebirth, ruler of the East.
- Greg Ramos
3 days ago · Aztec Sayings ’When an Indian dies, an encyclopedia dies with him’ (Fernando Benítez) The Aztecs were great masters of their language, Náhuatl, and throughout time produced great poets and orators such as Nezahualcóyotl, Lord of Texcoco, anonymous contributors to texts such as the book of Aztec songs, Cantares Mexicanos, and the Florentine Codex.
26 El que es perico donde quiera es verde – Goodness, skill, or talent show, regardless of the circumstances. Another popular saying in Mexico is ‘a parakeet is green no matter where it goes’. This means that if you have a special talent or ability, it’ll shine through regardless of the environment / circumstances.
- Overview
- A sacred and defining force
- The sound of rushing water
- Art and national pride
- 'Water is the origin of life'
Tlaloc Fountain, featuring work by muralist Diego Rivera, captures the role of art in Mexican history and culture.
An aerial view of the Fuente de Tlaloc, or Tlaloc Fountain, featuring work by muralist Diego Rivera honoring the god of water in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City, Mexico. Picture taken with a drone.
Mexico City, MexicoDeep in a barely-seen patch of Chapultepec Park, so remote that taxi drivers, balloon sellers, and kids racing scooters may not know it’s there, a giant effigy of a god sprawls in a green pool, spitting rain into the sky. It’s Tlaloc, god of water. All powers good and dangerous flow from this god, so old that he was worshipped before the Aztecs gave him this name—and so huge that he’s visible from airplanes approaching Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport.
Even lying down, as he is depicted in this 100-foot pool, Tlaloc is monumental. Maybe frenzied, maybe ecstatic, he is frozen mid-stride. On his body, mosaics map symbols of Mexico’s myth and history. On his head, not one but two faces stare out: one into the heavens and the other, on the crown of his head, spewing water toward a tiny building a few steps away. He is guardian of a 70-year-old complex that also includes a neoclassical temple and a once-submerged fresco by Mexico’s most famous muralist.
The Water Garden Museum, as this strange complex is known, was created between 1950-52 by the iconic socialist artist Diego Rivera, commissioned by Mexico’s government. Built to celebrate a towering feat of mid-century engineering, its message is, if anything, more pressing now as the country commemorates its quincentennial. In an ideal society, this site declares, a country’s history and its present, its citizens, art, and government, its natural world and its scientists, all must be partners.
I first visited Tlaloc at the suggestion of my friend Wesley Bocxe, who spent much of his career in Mexico City, his adopted home. “You need to see this,” he said. My teenage twins and I were there for our yearly trip to Mexico City, where my mom grew up in the 1930s. Some of my earliest memories are from Chapultepec, the biggest city park in the Americas. Fifty years later, vendors are stilling sell mangos sliced into the shape of rosebuds, and the melancholy carousel tunes seem to warn that even the cheeriest childhood memories one day may become bittersweet.
Water—and its power—have defined life for Mexico City over millennia. Before Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés arrived in 1519, in fact, the city actually was aquatic: Called Tenochtitlan, it sat on an island in a vast lake fretted with causeways and speckled with islands where residents raised vegetables, flowers, and maize—the empire’s sacred staple food, entirely dependent on adequate rain.
When the Spaniards arrived, they marveled at the city’s sophisticated hydraulic engineering—and then, over the course of centuries, worked to drain the lake on which it sat. The effort left immense ecological problems, including floods, sinking buildings, and dwindling water, that plague Mexico to this day. The city’s demand for water skyrocketed in the 1930s and 1940s, when wartime demand for Mexican products exploded the economy, industry, and population.
That’s why, in 1942, the government of this ancient city devised a 20th century solution: a 40-mile aqueduct from the Río Lerma to Mexico City. It would take eight years, and the deaths of no fewer than 39 workers, to channel these waters from the mountains into the thirsty capital. The aqueduct terminated here in this quiet corner of Chapultepec, where four reservoirs redirected the water through pumps to separate quadrants.
When the project was finished, its implications for Mexico were so enormous that the pump station’s designers tapped the country’s most famous muralist to honor its engineers. Within two years, 64-year-old Rivera delivered a wild visual web of references to water, science, evolution, and Mexican history—starting with the statue of Tlaloc and culminating in a lavish indoor underground fresco, attended by the sound of coursing water.
So why is this multisensory artwork barely known? One major reason is its very innovation. When Rivera painted his underwater mural, he used polystyrene-based paint. At first it worked. The first visitors saw Rivera’s imagery undulating behind the movements of Mexico’s longest river.
Over time, though, that water damaged the painting. Engineers rerouted the water, but neglect and Mexico’s perennial seismic turbulence took a toll. By the turn of the millennium, the damage was bad enough that the entire complex was shuttered for a decade. Finally, with the help of the nonprofit Probosque Chapultepec, Tlaloc and the mural El Agua, Origen de la Vida—Water, The Origin of Life—were restored in 2010 and Mexico’s temple to ancient gods and modern science reopened.
I heard Tlaloc before I truly saw him. Rain—a heavy, Mexican rainy season-style downpour—pattered ceaselessly from the statue’s skyward-facing mouth into the water around him. I’d arrived in late afternoon on a spring day, and Eduardo, the young taxi driver who ferried me here, got out with me. He’d never heard of the Tlaloc statue, he said, but he’d always revered ancient Mexican cosmology and engineering. As we approached the monument, he showed me his forearm, covered entirely with an intricate tattoo of Coatlicue, Aztec goddess of fertility. “I believe in the Virgin and the saints,” he said. “But I was raised by my mother, who pushed me to finish school, and I have sisters, two daughters, and a wife. Where I’m from in the countryside, women aren’t valued for more than serving men. I have this tattoo to honor women and all they can do.”
Eduardo was also very familiar with Tlaloc. Tapping his phone, he summoned a TV documentary about the famous arrival of another Tlaloc to this part of Mexico: a dust-colored 168-ton monolith hauled in 1964 from the village of Coatlinchan, where it had resided for centuries, to the nearby Museum of Anthropology. Interspersed with vintage footage of the statue’s progress through throngs of fascinated observers in Mexico City are images of Coatlinchan’s villagers, swathed in shawls and work clothes, looking stricken. “There is a profound sadness,” a TV commentator says in the news clip Eduardo shows me. On the day the monolith entered Mexico City, Mexicans still remember, the city was deluged with the worst rainstorm ever recorded for that time of year.
Water is the origin of life. It flows from Tlaloc. Literally and metaphorically, it has been channeled to humanity—led by Mexico’s workers and engineers.
ByKathryn O’RourkeProfessor of Mexican art and architecture
But Rivera’s Tlaloc conveys another mood entirely. Rather than being a hostage, this god surges with barely-contained energy. His legs and arms flail as if caught in mid-leap across the earth, or in a frenzy of supernatural creation like a dancing god Shiva. All over his body, nubbled stone mosaics show symbols from Mexico’s past, including two sacred corncobs—the reason ancient Mexicans prayed so desperately for Tlaloc’s rainy benevolence.
Riveting as he is at eye level, however, Tlaloc was meant to be fully appreciable from airplanes. The spraying water, essayist Jeff Bale pointed out, “mimics rain and connects water with the air. His body is meant to resemble the outline of the mountains where Tlaloc was worshipped.” On Tlaloc’s left sandal is the image of an eagle poised on a cactus, overlooking a river. It’s the origin image of Mexico City itself, which Aztecs traced to an eagle that led early wanderers to the future Tenochtitlan.
Rivera helped popularize these images as a vehicle for national pride. He also was authentically fueled by them artistically. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rivera’s murals helped lead a radical renewal of interest in the indigenous cultures that had been brutalized and marginalized since the Spanish conquest. Over the years, these depictions of indigenous people and their lives have been sharply reexamined. But with his peers, Rivera helped advance a new understanding of Mexico as a country shaped equally by indigenous and European cultures.
At the time he created his Tlaloc, Rivera himself was being re-evaluated. His murals, originally subversive, gradually became a part of the Mexican government’s national project to create a unified Mexican identity. By 1950, “Rivera’s star had kind of fallen,” art historian O’Rourke says. In the 1920s muralism had been radical, with caricatures and critiques of political figures. By the 1950s critics were complaining that the genre—and Rivera, by taking on this and other public commissions—had been coopted by the state.
At the same time, though, Rivera had become more experimental, more technically daring, than at any previous moment in his career. He began to reference not only indigenous people, as he had for years, but their architecture, theology, even interactions with the earth.
Even more groundbreaking was his statue’s design, fully visible only from airplanes. This perspective, impossible until the early 20th century, had recently revealed for the first time the otherworldly scale of other indigenous landscape art, including Mexico’s pyramids and Peru’s Nazca lines.“There wasn’t such a thing as land art in the 1950s,” O’Rourke says. “With this reference to indigenous architecture, artists like Rivera were trying to resuscitate a recognition of what a modern nation can be: It cannot just be the tiny sliver of the nation that’s white.”
To fully appreciate the relevance of that worldview today, though, required a look indoors—at the river’s underground crossroads.
For a second time, I heard the monument before I fully saw it. In the small pavilion overlooking the water god, weird, wavering sounds, like a theremin, vibrated the air. They emanated from a pipe organ, with familiar-enough looking tubes on a wall, but activated by water currents and solar energy (recent repairs to the organ have been stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic). The organ, created by artist Ariel Guzik as part of the 2010 renovation, replaces the original rush of the river with eerie harmonies triggered by water currents, sun, and wind.
“It’s an instrument that plays water,” Eduardo Vazquez Martin, executive coordinator of Mandato del Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, says in a recorded lecture. In Guzik’s sound installation, he says, “the organ is connected to a complex system … that captures the movement of the water and reproduces it in sounds. The water returns as a song—as music. It’s restored as a central element.”
Far down below the protective railing, the reservoir floor swarms with painted microorganisms as if under a vast microscope. The organisms are meant to suggest the emergence of life from a primordial soup. Radiating up the walls are image upon image of other life forms: amoebas, fish, snakes and eels, frantically wiggling toward the terrestrial world. Above them, workers, Indigenous farmers, bourgeois ladies, even house pets, are shown collecting and savoring Earth’s life-giving water. Images of an African man and a woman with Indigenous features represent humans’ shared ancestors.
Finally, lining the top of this phantasmagoria, stand the scientists. Dressed in hard hats, work jackets, or coats and ties, leaning over a blueprint, these are the engineers who made Mexico’s miraculous water system a reality. Arrayed like apostles, they represent a young democracy at one of the most optimistic points in its history.
“This painting is a celebration of modern science,” O’Rourke says. “When you’re in that building and you look out, you see the head of Tlaloc. And that’s when you start to make sense of both the mosaics outside and the painting inside. Water is the origin of life. It flows from Tlaloc. Literally and metaphorically, it has been channeled to humanity—led by Mexico’s workers and engineers.”
Nov 29, 2021 · Mictlāntēcutli is the Aztec god of death, king of Mictlan. Mictlan is the realm where Quetzalcoatl went and revived human civilizations. The deepest part of the underworld, that is, and Mictlāntēcutli was in charge. There are several Aztec gods and goddesses of the underworld, but Mictlāntēcutli is the most prominent one.
Feb 8, 2024 · Among the 10 most famous Mexican myths and spooky stories we have: La Llorona and Chupacabra, La Lechuza and El Cucuy, among other never-to-be-forgotten stories. 1. La Llorona. La Llorona cries for her son… is on the list is ranked as one of the creepiest Mexican myths of Mexican legends and stories.
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Nov 6, 2019 · The Fifth Sun. The Fifth Sun (called "4-Movement") is ruled by Tonatiuh, the sun god. This fifth sun is characterized by the daysign Ollin, which means movement. According to Aztec beliefs, this indicated that this world would come to an end through earthquakes, and all the people will be eaten by sky monsters.
