Anthropologist Notes on Colonial Architechture

professor nisao ogatas home plaza / photo by amy k wright

A note about architecture. This is a plaza in the center of a small town where our friend Professor Nisao Ogata was born. Like many plazas in what is now Mexico, built by the Spanish as a monument to Catholicism, it represents a small fraction of the hxstory of a place.

Thousands of years before the European invasion, there was architecture built by indigenous people. Many of the Spanish plazas now identified as "Mexican" were built by indigenous - read slave - labor with materials originally used in their indigenous buildings now demolished by colonizers.

For example - the massive Cathedral in Mexico City's main plaza, the Zocalo, is built with stone from the demolished temple of the god Huītzilōpōchtli, god of war and principal deity of the Aztecs.

Unfortunately many tourists visiting temples 'excavated' by Europeans imagine these to be the only example of indigenous architecture. Further solidifying the belief that indigenous people exist only in the romantic past.