Mexico City Research Paper

Mexico City located in the valley that was once inhabited by many indigenous groups. The city of Teotihuacan were Mexico City is now was founded in 1325 A.D by the Mexicas, also know as the Aztecs. During the colonial period Mexico City was one of the most important cities in the Americas. In 1928, all other municipalities around the Distrito Federal were abolished except for Mexico City. This made Mexico City the country's default Distrito Federal

Xochimilco a place in mexico city, It lies at 7,461 feet above sea level in the Valley of Mexico. The name Xochimilco is a combination of the Nahuatl words xochitl and milli and means “where the flowers grow.” The local agriculturalists constructed branch and reed rafts on the lake, covered

them with mud from the bottom of the lake, and cultivated fruits, vegetables, and flowers, which they shipped to Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) via canal. Xochimilco is a popular weekend outing for thousands of Mexicans and tourists, who visit the area in colourful trajineras (flat-bottomed boats). The growth of Mexico City has had serious detrimental effects on the canals and floating gardens. In 1993 Mexico City initiated a program that improved treatment of municipal sewage in order to reverse the deterioration of the site.

The term Mexico City can also apply to the capital’s metropolitan area, which includes the Federal District but extends beyond it to the west, north, and east, where the state (estado) of México surrounds it on three sides.

Spanish conquistadors founded Mexico City in 1521 atop the razed island-capital of Tenochtitlán, the cultural and political centre of the Aztec (Mexica) empire. One of the few major cities not located along the banks of a river, it lies in an inland basin called the Valley of Mexico, or Mesa Central. The valley is an extension of the southern Mexican Plateau and is also known as Anáhuac (Nahuatl: “Close to the Water”) because the area once contained several large lakes. Mexico City is a metropolis of contrasts, a monument to a proud and industrious country also faced with many problems. Some observers have fixated on the city’s dangers, horrors, and tragedies—views that were reinforced by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes when he called the city “the capital of underdevelopment.” By itself the Federal District (the city proper) is comparable in many ways to New York City, Mumbai (Bombay), and Shanghai. But the capital’s huge metropolitan population constitutes some one-fifth of Mexico’s total, representing one of the world’s most significant ratios of capital-to-national

population.

In 1519, the spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and 400 of his men marched into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and knew at once they were in a strange and wondrous place.
Streets were so crowded that the Spaniards could barely fit through them Five hundred years later Mexico’s City's main plaza still teems with shoppers and street hawkers. In 1978, workers laying electrical cables accidentally discovered the Aztecs Templo Mayor,or High Temple, two blocks from the city's central square, Zocalo. Scholars now understand that the human sacrifices that once shocked the Spaniards were not conceived as public horror or punishment, but rather as reenactments of Aztec society's own creation.