Laurette Séjourné’s book about the Zacuala Palace in the City of the Gods is published

Where are the murals of the magnificent Zacuala Palace? In the face of uncertainty, the book A palace in the City of the Gods, Teotihuacanby Laurette Séjourné, resurfaces in a reissue 65 years after its original publication and represents a unique witness to this inexplicably lost treasure. At the same time, it sheds light on its author, an archaeologist who made the stones speak.

The sociologist Tatiana Coll states: I feel that this edition is a recovery from that past and that the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) is aware of the tragedy in that sense, because half of the national heritage is outside and only a few things are being recovered..

A free-thinking woman, owner of her life, is how Tatiana Coll presents herself in an introductory text to Séjourné, a mysterious lady who emigrated from her native Italy to France and arrived in Mexico in 1942, where she trained as an archaeologist, anthropologist and ethnologist, a woman of skill.

I want to get her back and together with her open the way to meet the real Laurette.she commented in an interview about the pages in this new edition that now precede the research published in 1959, including the detailed sketches from that time. Thus her dedication and enormous passion resurface, since her intellectual life was for the study of the pre-Hispanic past and another part was committed to collaborating with her husband, the editor Arnaldo Orfila, She was a great reader of all European and North American media..

The murals located in the buildings southwest of the Pyramid of the Sun were amazing, not only for the figures, the intensity of the color, but for the quantity there was, says Tatiana Coll in the introduction of the book co-edited by the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) and the INAH, which It is the only existing evidence of the magnitude of the murals we found in Zacuala.

The researcher studied the great city of Teotihuacan and the presence of Quetzalcoatl, a deity that was the cornerstone of Nahuatl culture. The wise men who developed religion, the arts, medicine and astronomy from that area spread to all the peoples of the region.

Coll recounted something he learned by chance in 2002, when he found Séjourné’s book among the new FCE publications, in which he described the site, the result of years of field studies in the 1950s. At that time, the murals were removed from the ruins in the state of Mexico and taken to the warehouses. The first edition from 1959 disappeared, while in the warehouses there was almost nothing left of the pre-Hispanic paintings.

Tatiana Coll visited Zacuala a few years ago and found that only some 50-centimeter walls remain, They no longer even have the vestige of that intense red. There are some murals scatteredsays with sadness the person who had been close to the archaeologist since she was a child, since her aunt Josefina Oliva de Coll was a collaborator and close friend of Laurette Séjourné.

The book was living testimony to the fact that there was incredible wealth there. If they had sold the murals, the book had to disappear. She was very aware of what Mexico was like at that time: President (Miguel) Alemán had destroyed the unions, imprisoned half the world, and his successor, (Adolfo) Ruiz Cortines, had inaugurated himself with the massacre in Alameda against the Henriquistas; then came (Adolfo) López Mateos and the massacre in Xochicalco and the murder of Rubén Jaramillo. Laurette was paralyzed, terrified.

At the same time that the book disappeared, a campaign was launched to discredit Laurette. She was one of the first to raise the issue of the influence that Teotihuacan had on the Mexicas, which is now widely accepted, but at that time it was a heresy against the great sacred cows. It was said that this was a foreignizing invention and that it did not have the rigorous scientific instruments to conclude that..

Coll mentions that Séjourné was so fascinated by Mexico that he made a trip through the mountains of Oaxaca looking for magical clues, He was present at some traditional ceremonies with pre-Hispanic syncretism, with the purpose of understanding what survived from that ancient world, brutally cut short by the Colony, and how those survivals could make you understand the world before the arrival of the Spanish..

She began work at dawn and ended her day at dusk, as happened near Amecameca, where she later scattered the ashes of her husband, Arnaldo Orfila. When she worked tirelessly, there was a very reduced version of archaeologists in the world, as if they were nothing more than those who carried out excavations, but without tools of interpretation, so that the stones could speak.