The National Palace poses on the eastern flank of the Zocolo and rises above the busy thoroughfare of Pino Suarez. Once the royal palace of Montezuma and then the residence of Hernan Cortes and later colonial viceroys, the palace, today, houses the offices of the president and those of the treasury. It keeps regular hours of operation, welcoming visitors daily from half nine in the morning to four in the afternoon. Admission is free. The palace’s entrance sits hidden in the labyrinthine network of calles that carom from the plaza and crawl into the city’s clogged interior. And by noon, on this mid-March today, lunchers queue in line for a Burger King whopper or a taco from a local tienda while pedestrians march past steel barricades that follow the palace’s square shape. Mexico City is in full throttle, Calle Mayor, a rowdy medley of conversations and purposes. A line has formed in front of an inconspicuous entrance, one of the palace’s handful, and two or three officers stand in front of the fading façade, full of old brick and plaster, checking visitors’ passports or identification cards. A nearby jacaranda tree blooms its purple petals, dropping and colouring the shiny colonial corridors in violet spots. The officers direct the visitors into a room, where they receive an entry card and deposit their backpacks if they have one. Above hangs the bell rung by Hidalgo, who in the morning of 16 September 1810, decried Spanish cruelty and called for an independent Mexico. Every evening on 15 September, the president, from the balcony above, reenacts Hidalgo’s cry of independence, amid the roars of approval from the citizens who have gathered on the Zocolo to celebrate the birth of their nation.

The palace’s size intimates. It is three stories of pomposity. It is a puzzle of endless rooms, courtyards of trimmed pine trees, brass balconies, stone alcoves, fountains, and echoing hallways, whose windows look down on the cobblestone streets. Its size swallows visitors. Towards its rear, deep in the palace’s bowels, on the second floor, hang the murals of Diego Rivera, painted between 1929 and 1951. The lighting is measured, and the wooden floors are lacquered. The space is polished, clean. Red, velvety barricades separate the murals from their admirers, who, suddenly, have amassed in large groups, under the supervision of a guide. She whispers nuggets of historical fact in chronological order and in tidy and pithy sentences. Subject. Verb. Object. Their necks careen upwards, digesting each period, slithering past each epoch depicted in violent, vibrant colours: preconquest, arrival, conquest, colonialism, independence, revolution. The murals read as a poem, an epic triptych painted in polychrome, detailing the fall of the Aztecs, brutal colonialism and impoverished independence, and the dream of Zapata, ambitious for a more harmonious future. The exquisite detail and flamboyant characters suck the visitors deep into the panels, deep into the fabled and legendary past of Mexico, its Indigenous roots and hybrid future. The images stretch high to the ceiling and bestride the onlookers, rendering them small and negligible, yet they are there, nevertheless, imprinted in the story, both children and inheritors of that November meeting. They take flashless photos and upload them to their social media accounts. And as they type their messages, the guide falls silent giving her patrons the time needed to comprehend this encounter, this story whose apex, the conquest, Diego painted just a few metres to the left, overlooking the staircase leading to the first floor, to the exit, and out to the street.

The murals intoxicate. They dizzy in their magnified detail. They overwhelm in their vastness, confuse in their complexity. Their motif is resiliency. Their thesis is rebirth and revival. The origins have not been completely erased. The images of Aztec life—quotidian scenes of pottery and weaving and painting, of selling and farming and harvesting, of sacrificing and worshipping and loving—give way to Cortes, drawn as a ghoulish dwarf, making deals with men in Cordoba hats and exchanging bags of melted gold. And behind Cortes, Aztec men and women are branded, tortured, and put to work, forests are felled, temples are replaced with crucifixes, and holy codices are burned by friars in cloaks. Yet despite the blood and wreckages, the indelible loss, the murals tell of hope. Amid the melee, the betrayals of independence, the blasts of American imperialists, greedy capitalists, and corrupt clergymen, above the fracas and fighting, rises Emiliano Zapata, a mestizo man in a sombrero, holding a sign reading Libertad y Tierra, behind whom dozens of Indigenous people stand and wait.