Alfonso Reyes and his vision of Anahuac

In this blog post we recommend a text of great interest to both those who study in Mexico City and those who seek to understand it through the written word. This is the Anahuac vision of Alfonso Reyes, a "cauda of images that celebrates pre-Hispanic time and, at the same time, forms a complex perspective of Mexican history and culture."  

 

In order to understand the complex relationship between water and Mexico City, it is enough to immerse itself in its history: to take a dive into the so-called "paper City" with which Gonzalo zealously referred to the voices of those who constantly register, define it, They invent and save it from destruction. These testimonies allow to understand the life of a city that in order to build its future has destroyed its past unfailingly.

In these times in which the future of Texcoco is defined, in which we speak and live the scarcity of the vital liquid, it is important to know a little more about our capital and its environment, and that is possible thanks to texts like the one we recommend today.

This is the Anahuac vision of Alfonso Reyes, a "cauda of images that celebrates pre-Hispanic time and, at the same time, forms a complex perspective of Mexican history and Culture" (González Torres, 2010).

Alfonso Reyes − writer, poet, essayist, narrator, diplomat and Mexican thinker − wrote this work in exile, when he was in Madrid, in 1915. Perhaps that is why the work has some nostalgia, but it is also an affirmation of love for Mexico and a literary strategy to keep ties together with their country.

Considered a poetizado essay, a poetic prose or a piece of lyrical history is a text that exalts the landscape of the Valley of Mexico and the Prehispanic city, through different descriptive approaches that go from the contemporary to the conqueror, the fascinated sage The indigenous. With great narrative richness, it describes the physical and human landscape before the conquest and shows a world in which the Hispanic and the western do not represent an unchanging model, but a wide tradition that it is possible to discern and reinvent. Here we share a fragment.

It covers the desiccation of the valley from the year of 1449 until the year of 1900. Three races have worked on it, and almost three civilizations — that little is common between the colonial body and the prodigious political fiction that gave us thirty years of Augustan peace —. Three monarchical regimes, divided by parentheses of anarchy, are here example of how the work of the state grows and corrects itself, facing the same threats of nature and the same land as digging. From Netzahualcóyotl to the second Luis de Velasco, and from this to Porfirio Díaz, seems to run the slogan of drying the earth. Our century found us still throwing the last shovel and opening the last ditch.  

With a vision of Anahuac, Reyes joins in the protracted genealogy of authors that describe the origins of the city, the contact between two cultures − in fact several authors consider that the whole text is a praise to the crossbreeding −; The place of the Latin American nations in the history and the question of the historical legacies.

By laureate Martínez Figueroa