Adventurers all, Hernando Cortes and his men were delighted and surprised at the strangeness and richness of the culture they encountered in Mexico. The Aztecs had not been the first settlers there, but they had become the most powerful. They eventually ruled over the descendants of both the Mayan and Toltec tribes, blending many of the traditions and skills of these tribes with their own.
Emperor Montezuma lived in a great city called Tenochtitlan (teh-NOACH-tee-TLAN) which, according to Aztec legend, was the center of the world. His tribe had wandered through the land looking for the holy spot that their god Huitzilopochtli (WEET-seel-oh-PAOCH-tli) had revealed to them. An eagle holding a serpent in its beak would mark this spot. This eagle would be perched on a pear cactus. One day, the wanderers saw just such an eagle sitting on a pear cactus on a swampy island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. They rejoiced and began building a huddled village of huts woven from the reeds they found growing there.
Soon, the Aztecs began filling in the swamp, following their neighbors’ example of building square, rectangular or pyramid-shaped buildings of mud, adobe and bricks. Interestingly, none of the Indian tribes had yet discovered the vaulted arch, which had been making buildings of many shapes possible in Europe and other parts of the world for centuries. They did, however, plan their city in much the way other cultures had, with the important public buildings, such as temples and richly carved royal palaces, surrounding a vast central square.
The walls of the people’s adobe houses were painted with whitewash to keep their interiors cool in the blistering sun. Canals and ditches criss-crossed the entire city to allow for drainage of the marshy land and the disposal of day-to-day wastes.
When one of the Spaniards, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, first laid eyes on Montezuma’s city, he wrote, “Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know whether that which appeared before us was real, for on one side in the land there were great cities and in the lake, many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and on the causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of the Mexicans.”
As stunning as Tenochititlan appeared, all was not well within its confines. The inhabitants were having trouble getting clean water to drink. Aztec builders burned poisonous limestone to produce the whitewash paint. They dumped their debris into the waterways. Human waste from homes flowed, unprocessed, into the same water which was used for drinking, cooking and bathing. Blood from the pagan sacrifices flowed down the pyramid-shaped temples to seep into the water, further contaminating it.
The smoke of thousands of cooking fires hung over the humid valley, badly polluting the air. To add to the physical misery and the hatred from the neighboring tribes there was political unrest within the Aztec tribe itself: nobles and priests had been hatching plots to overthrow Emperor Montezuma.
Even so, in a very real sense, the Aztecs had indeed found the “center of the world”—the center of the New World, that is. If a map of the New World had existed at the time of Juan Diego, and had been folded to find its geographic center, the mark would have landed in the territory now known as Mexico. God had revealed his covenant to the ancient people of the Old Testament. He had promised that they would be his people and that he would be their God. God had not forgotten, however, the people of the New World. They, too, were his children. They, too, would learn about his plan, even if it were to be at a later date. Before he ascended into heaven, Jesus instructed his disciples to spread his Good News to the ends of the earth. To the explorers venturing across vast and deep uncharted waters, the New World must have seemed like just that.
Many of the Aztecs’ religious rituals resembled the sacraments of Catholicism. The Indians practiced a form of baptism, initiated (confirmed) young people, performed marriage ceremonies, and held death rites. Their very concept of offering sacrifices to their gods echoed the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Mass, in which Jesus offers himself to the Father on our behalf.
As much as the Indians’ rituals made them open to learning about the sacraments, they were only shadows, signs of things to come. Once the Indians, like Juan Diego, had experienced the grace that the true sacraments bring, they were willing to suffer anything to receive this grace. Juan Diego had to walk for hours just to attend catechism classes. Many other Indians had to face the opposition of their friends and families when they converted to Christianity.
Native prophecy would blend into Christian reality. God would stake a claim in the New World by sending his Mother to Tepeyac Hill to conquer the false mother goddess, Tonantzin.
Mary would bring the good news that had not yet been confirmed, but which the native peoples had always suspected. Through Mary’s apparition to Juan Diego, these “ends of the earth” would become heaven’s territory, too.