Oaxaca, Side by Side: Why the Zapotec City Was Never Replaced

Most colonial Spanish cities in Latin America were built on top of what came before. The Aztec capital was buried under the streets of what is now Mexico City. The Inca capital was buried under the foundations of colonial Cusco. The pattern is so consistent that the absence of it is the easiest thing to notice in Oaxaca. The Zapotec and Mixtec cities that sat in this valley before the Spanish arrived were not buried. They were left twenty kilometres away, on the hilltops where they had always been, and a new Spanish town was laid out down in the valley floor next to them. The Spanish did not need to flatten the indigenous capital. They simply built somewhere else.

That one decision, made between roughly 1521 and 1529, is the reason Oaxaca reads the way it does today. The Zapotec ceremonial city at Monte Albán sits on a flattened mountain about a forty-minute drive from the Zócalo. The Mixtec gold buried at Monte Albán in Tomb 7 around the year 1400 now sits in the Museo de las Culturas inside the old Dominican monastery, eight blocks from the cathedral. The baroque churches were built in the valley while the indigenous towns surrounding the valley kept going. UNESCO recognized this sequence in 1987 by inscribing the colonial centre and Monte Albán as a single property. The two sites are one heritage object, not two.

The Zapotec foundation

The Zapotec civilization is one of the oldest continuous cultures in the Americas. Settlement in the Valley of Oaxaca dates back at least four thousand years. By roughly 500 BCE, the Zapotec had built Monte Albán on a levelled mountaintop with views over three converging valleys. At its height, between about 200 and 700 CE, Monte Albán housed something close to twenty-five thousand people and ran trade and tribute networks that reached the Maya regions to the south and central Mexico to the north. The Zapotec invented one of the earliest writing systems in the Americas, with calendar glyphs and a logographic script that pre-date most Maya writing.

Around 700 CE, Monte Albán was abandoned as a major political centre. The reasons are still debated. The Zapotec dispersed into smaller settlements across the valley and into the surrounding mountains, where their descendants still live. Mixtec groups moved in from the north and west and used Monte Albán's tombs for elite burials, including the famously rich Tomb 7 that the Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso uncovered in 1932. That tomb produced more than four hundred gold, silver, jade, turquoise, pearl, and bone objects. They are now displayed eight blocks from where you are probably standing.

When the Aztecs reached this valley in the late 1400s, they did not destroy the Zapotec presence. They built a small garrison town called Huaxyacac, which means "place of the huaje trees," at the base of Monte Albán in roughly 1486. The Spanish, arriving thirty-five years later, kept the name. Huaxyacac became Antequera de Oaxaca, and then just Oaxaca.

The colonial overlay

The Spanish town founded in 1529 is the grid you walk today. It follows the standard colonial pattern mandated by the Laws of the Indies: a central plaza ringed by arcaded portales, a cathedral on one side, a government palace on another, and a square street grid radiating out. What is unusual about Oaxaca is what was placed at the corners of this grid. The Dominican order, which took spiritual responsibility for the region, built two of the great baroque complexes of the Americas in walking distance of each other. The Templo de Santo Domingo, finished in stages between 1608 and 1731, has more than sixty thousand square feet of gold leaf on its interior surfaces. The Basílica de la Soledad, completed in 1690, holds the city's patron Virgin, the carved wooden statue that Oaxacans believe walked itself into town on a donkey.

Cochineal funded most of this. The red dye extracted from insects living on prickly pear cactus was, for two centuries, the second-most valuable export from New Spain after silver. Oaxaca was the centre of its production. The wealth flowed into the cathedral, into Santo Domingo, into the network of churches and convents and the merchant houses that line the historic centre's streets.

The architecture has a recurring colour. Almost everything in the old city is built or faced with cantera verde, a green-grey volcanic tuff quarried from the hills around the valley. It is soft when freshly cut and hardens with exposure, which makes it both carvable and earthquake-tolerant. The pale green façades that give Oaxaca its UNESCO-inscribed silhouette are not a stylistic choice. They are the local stone.

The Republican layer

Mexico won independence in 1821. The most important Oaxacan in the century that followed was Benito Juárez, born in 1806 in a Zapotec village in the mountains north of the city, orphaned at three, who walked into the city barefoot as a boy and went on to become Mexico's first indigenous president. Juárez separated church and state, suppressed the great monastic landowners, and in 1867 defeated the French-imposed Habsburg emperor Maximilian. Juárez's image is on the twenty-peso bill. His former school building, the Instituto de Ciencias y Artes, is now part of the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca, four blocks from the cathedral.

The next Oaxacan to run the country was Porfirio Díaz, who ruled as dictator from 1876 to 1911 and built the European-styled grand boulevards and theatres that still anchor central Mexican cities. The Teatro Macedonio Alcalá, finished in 1909, is the Oaxacan version: a French neoclassical interior with a marble staircase and a Louis the Fifteenth-style auditorium, dropped into a green cantera façade. It was completed exactly one year before the Mexican Revolution swept Díaz out.

The artistic continuation

The most distinctive feature of twentieth-century Oaxaca is the way the city's indigenous past became its artistic present. Three painters made that case in succession. Rufino Tamayo, born in Oaxaca in 1899, built an international career in New York and Paris while filling his canvases with Mesoamerican iconography. He bequeathed his collection of pre-Hispanic art to the city; the Museo Rufino Tamayo, six blocks west of the Zócalo, displays it. Francisco Toledo, born in 1940 in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec south of the city, became one of Latin America's most internationally collected artists and used his fortune and reputation as a kind of public works programme. He founded the Instituto de Artes Gráficas (a free graphic arts library with more than ten thousand works including pieces by Picasso, Miró, and Rauschenberg), the Manuel Álvarez Bravo photography archive, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Toledo blocked a McDonald's from opening on the Zócalo in 2002 and organized the cultural resistance to the 2006 political crisis. Rodolfo Morales, born in 1925 in the nearby town of Ocotlán, used his royalties to restore sixteen historic churches across the state.

This is not nostalgia. The painters were arguing, in different idioms, that Oaxaca's indigenous and colonial pasts were continuous with its present. The argument is now built into the city's institutions.

How to see the stack

The most efficient way to read the layering is to take the two tours that cover the historic centre. The first runs through the colonial spine: Zócalo, Cathedral, Andador Macedonio Alcalá, MACO, Teatro, IAGO, Santo Domingo, Museo de las Culturas, the Ethnobotanical Garden, and the Basílica de la Soledad. The second runs through the surviving indigenous one: the central markets where Zapotec trade rituals continue, the textile museum, the Xochimilco aqueduct, the artist barrios, and a mezcal tasting at the end of the line.

The two tours barely overlap geographically. Together they describe the same point. The layers are still side by side. The market that supplies the city is six blocks from the baroque church. The Zapotec language is still spoken in the surrounding hills. Monte Albán is forty minutes away. The pattern that began in 1521, when the Spanish chose to build down in the valley rather than on top of the hilltop city, has held for half a millennium.