In 1836 Charles La Trobe published The Rambler in Mexico, an account of his travels through the country in the early 1830s. In his book, La Trobe describes his impressions of the Historic Centre of Mexico City:

Let us do the stern old conquerors justice. Their minds would appear to have been imbued with the pervading spirit of the land which they conquered. All around them was strange, and wonderful, and colossal, – and their conceptions and their labours took the same stamp. Look at their works: the moles, aqueducts, churches, roads – and the luxurious City of Palaces which has risen from the clay-built ruins of Tenochtitlán ...

Mighty Tenochtitlán gave way to a different generation of grandiose buildings, which in turn have been dwarfed by one of the biggest cities in the world, the heart of a disproportionately centralised republic that daily pumps electricity, food, and water for – but how many people live in Mexico City? Official figures vary, from almost nine million to twenty-five, depending on how ‘Mexico City’ is being defined in the census. Interestingly, to date many still refer to this megalopolis by La Trobe’s epithet of the City of Palaces.

A statue in the interior garden at the Anthropology Museum in Chapultepec Castle (photograph by Scott Irwin)

Several of those colonial palaces still stand. There is the National Palace, the seat of the Mexican government’s executive power; and the Palace of Iturbide, eponymously named after Agustín de Iturbide, first anointed ruler of the Mexican Empire in 1822. Not far from these is the Archbishop’s Palace, now a museum, built atop the foundations of the pyramid of the god Tezcatlipoca, lord of the night and the earth, great nemesis of Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent. Even the Holy Inquisition had a palace in the New World that still stands today, although with a different name, the Museum of Mexican Medicine (it sounds like a joke, but it isn’t).

Five kilometres away from the city centre is Chapultepec Castle, also mentioned in The Rambler. Chapultepec was the official residence of Mexican heads of state until the 1940s. It is located in the centre of an urban forest, now an urban park, which covers an area twice that of Central Park in Manhattan. Inside the park one can find Chapultepec Zoo, the Anthropology Museum, and the Modern Art Museum. The latter boasts the exquisite works of British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington and her friend, Spanish-Mexican Remedios Varo, both often associated with the Surrealist movement. They are still relatively unknown outside Mexico, but their oeuvres are an important part of the country’s multicultural history and artistic patrimony.

The Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City (photograph by Ralf Roletschek)

The Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City’s foremost opera house, was built after La Trobe’s visit. It is one of the most striking buildings in the city. The style of the Palace is eclectic, half art nouveau and half art deco, a titan of ironwork and white Carrara marble surmounted by a colourful glass dome. Due to its weight and dimensions, and because it was built atop the aquiferous subsoil near the five lakes of Tenochtitlán, the palace has been sinking for the last eighty years. Inside, there are murals by David Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and Diego Rivera. Outside, carvings of local vegetation and Mesoamerican mythology decorate the façades and parapets with Aztec warriors, poppies, pineapples, and sunflowers. The crown jewel of this palace is a miracle of art nouveau design, a stage curtain made entirely of glass, designed and built in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studios in New York. The curtain is a mosaic of almost one million pieces of opalescent and iridescent tesserae that show the two volcanoes overlooking the Valley of Mexico. In 1950, before this very curtain fell at the end of the second act of Verdi’s Aida, Maria Callas, as a homage to Mexican soprano Angela Peralta, the Mexican Nightingale, sang a now legendary, unscored E flat that brought down the house.

The glass stage curtain at the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City (photograph by Scott Irwin)

As one waits in line to enter these buildings, it is not unusual to start a conversation with the person standing nearby; generally speaking, in Mexico, striking up conversations with random people at the drop of a hat is perfectly normal. Give the taxi driver five minutes and he’ll tell you all about his divorce and his plans for a new business; if the bus is running late, the lady sitting next to you may discuss that persistent pain in her lower back, and you may even be invited to a christening or two before learning your interlocutor’s name. This is the country’s modus operandi, typical of Latin America, at once enchanting and erratic. In mid-November of 2016, not surprisingly, most of these sporadic conversations tended to orbit around one pressing topic: the new president-elect of the United States.

Latin America has a long history of deranged, megalomanic dictators, most of them with a penchant for ensconcing themselves in magnificent palaces. In his Nobel Lecture, ‘The Solitude of Latin America’, Gabriel García Márquez touches on some of these colourful figures. He mentions Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the torture, disappearance, and murders of tens of thousands of Chileans during his government. There is General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez of El Salvador, ‘who invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever’. Mexico had its own Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Napoleon of the West, who lost his right leg fighting the French and later honoured said leg as a fallen hero, with a military funeral and all the concomitant pomp and ceremony.

In light of Donald Trump’s election, this legacy of madness, abuse, and despotism that continues today stirs different reactions amongst Mexicans. First, there seems to be something along the lines of optimistic resignation. Autocrats come and go, but in the meantime one has to make do, bring home the bacon, and, somehow, figure things out and deal with the immediacy of daily life, which presents more than enough challenges without having to worry about foreign leaders, over whom no influence can ever be effected.

There is also fear. What will happen to those relatives living abroad, and to the economy? Historically, when the dollar flutters its wings the Mexican peso plummets like a piano pushed from a twelfth-storey window. Now, every word Trump utters is synonymous with devaluation. Following the US election, overnight the peso lost thirteen per cent of its value. Will the country give in to Trump’s outrageous demands? Surely not, one hopes. Secretary of Foreign Affairs Claudia Ruiz Massieu has stated on a number of occasions, unambiguously, that Mexico will build no wall between the two countries. But will the government’s resolve hold, or will it buckle to the new bully?

There are constant comparisons to Adolf Hitler. Racism is a serious problem in Mexico. Along with the portentous palaces strewn across the country, it is part of its colonial inheritance, so deeply ingrained into the nation’s cultural fabric that many do not even notice it. But that is internal racism, European-looking Mexican pitted against indigenous-looking Mexican. Trump’s outspoken xenophobia has plucked a general chord of indignation. Mexicans may criticise their country and one another, but now the consensus seems to be, Who does that gringo think he is, to speak like that about us? Nepotism, racism, despotism, conflict of interest, the most profound ignorance of the workings of diplomacy. From his palace of marble and gilded steel in the heart of Manhattan, Trump has raised a mirror to Mexico, or perhaps it is the mirror of Latin America, where the Unites States now gawks in astonishment at an aspect of its culture that has finally come to light. Together, we cringe.

Gabriel García Ochoa reads 'The City of Palaces' for the ABR Podcast.