Cholula´s Pyramid
In these readings for this week, memories various places had come to my mind, but more than sharing them I am interested in expressing a concerns to tourist sites in my country, Mexico. Specifically the Cholula´s Pyramid located two hours away from Mexico City, in Cholula, Puebla.
In these readings for this week, memories various places had come to my mind, but more than sharing them I am interested in expressing a concerns to tourist sites in my country, Mexico. Specifically the Cholula´s Pyramid located two hours away from Mexico City, in Cholula, Puebla. This pyramid was dedicated to Quetzalcoatl and was a ceremonial place for seven different civilizations. Each civilization constructed a layer of the pyramid where through ornaments they represented their time in power in this area. The Spanish Colonizers ended this dynamic of conquest with a disturbing action. They built a Catholic church on top of the pyramid “Iglesia de Nuestra Señoras de los Remedios” and cover with sand the pyramid. This church showed the oppression and empowerment of the conquest over the indigenous covering the past for centuries. Although this site can be seen from long distances the pyramid had vanished from quotidian eyes and was kept buried until last century.
Now, Cholula´s pyramid is a tourist site, a space for memory where historical information is given, but not discuss. It is the curiosity, knowledge or familiarity, and the narratives that attract the visitors to this place every year as the article Memory in the New Berlin shares about Berlin. “Places of memory are made to evoke ghosts, localize emotions associated with haunting, and establish cultural practices that delimit social relations to the past”, even though this tourist site is giving benefits to the economy of this town the relevant information of this ceremonial site is treated not s a site of memory but just as a tourist attraction. This has create a great need to search for efficacious interaction between history and visitors where a space to discuss Mexican and International visitors to articulate the blindness of Mexicans in their own Historical Information.