-Throughout the ages, there have been great empires and civilizations that have risen up, their creators ruling nations, regions, and continents for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Some of the great legacies and accomplishments of these empires may be lost in the mists of time, but from what they have left behind in rock and ruin, we can trace remarkable stories.

♪♪ -Throughout its history, Mexico has been convulsed by a series of epic, violent, and bloody struggles that have defined the culture and identity of this complex nation.

-I think it was Edward Gibbon who said that history is mostly a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind, which is a bit of a downbeat view.

But Mexican history has a lot of that.

-When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés met Aztec chief Montezuma, they created a new nationality in the instant they met.

But in the following centuries, divisions ran deep and continue to this day between the indigenous and European peoples and between church and state.

After 300 years of Spanish occupation, Mexico would, in the 19th century, suffer five foreign invasions in less than 100 years from Spain and two each from France and the United States.

These influences have created a unique culture and nation that still struggles to break free from a troubled past.

♪♪ ♪♪ Previously, at the end of the 19th century, Mexico's longest serving president, Porfirio Diaz, had opened up the country to international investment as he sought to develop an industrial infrastructure, building railroads and reopening the mining industry.

But as the Diaz era lapsed into a dictatorship and inequalities grew, so too did discontent with the status quo.

This would unleash forces that would turn the following decades into one of Mexico's most bloody periods.

♪♪ [ Bell tolling ] Ever since its independence from Spain 100 years earlier, Mexico had been a divided land.

Forces representing rich and poor, landowner and peasant, and religious and secular had battled each other through a series of wars, civil wars, and coups.

Now, in the early part of the 20th century, the cycle of unrest would escalate even further.

-It's been regarded, as, I think rightly, the first great social revolution of the 20th century.

It's an epic national tale within which there are thousands of different subplots.

-In 1910, Francisco Madero led an armed rebellion that would become La Revolucion, the Mexican revolution.

Diaz, realizing that power was slipping away, resigned and went into exile, moving to Paris, never to return.

Madero had hardly got his feet under the desk at the National Palace when he, in turn, was overthrown.

Conservative forces found their voice with Victoriano Huerta, who staged a right-wing coup and betrayed and executed Madero in 1913.

Madero had been transferred to a prison on the outskirts of town.

Here, he and his vice president were shot under the guise of a contrived escape attempt.

-Madero is a good example of someone who was too radical for half the country and not radical enough for the other half.

And eventually, the conservative forces within the kind of uneasy governing coalition decided that Mexico and their own interests would be better served with a more conservative kind of iron fist style of rule.

-A sad and lonely memorial to a man that started a revolution can be found here at the spot where it happened.

The former prison is now an archive.

The hated Huerta took power.

and even entertained alliances and a supply of arms from Germany before World War I, after the Germans offered Mexico a return of their lost lands taken during the 1848 war, once the United States was defeated, a defeat, of course, that never happened.

-He was completely ruthless, as evidenced by his murder of the man who had appointed him chief of the Federal Army.

His nickname was El Chacal -- The Jackal.

-Javier Garciadiego is one of Mexico's leading historians.

-The United States had invaded Mexico before, and Huerta's action triggered another short-term occupation by the United States, which occupied the port city of Veracruz with troops and Navy ships.

Huerta, too, was forced into exile in 1914 and would die an apparent alcoholic in the United States just a few years later.

♪♪ Now, those who had answered Madero's call rose up again.

♪♪ Most of the impetus for what was to come next had its roots not in Mexico City or the colonial heartlands of Mexico, but in the north, in isolated desert provinces and towns in the deserts close to the US border.

Chihuahua became the center of the Mexican rebellion, and it would be dominated by three personalities who would all lose their lives in the struggle.

-This man, Jose Venustiano Carranza, a wealthy landowner and shrewd civilian politician, emerged as the leader of this northern revolutionary group, supported by the other two now-powerful generals, Alvaro Obregon and Pancho Villa.

-Villa was extremely charismatic.

He was a former bandit chieftain.

He essentially changed his title from bandit to revolutionary and continued to do exactly what he'd already been doing for a good couple of years now, raiding haciendas, stealing weapons, grain, horses, treasure, and anything else that he could get his hands on, led these amazing dramatic cavalry charges, lightning attacks, sort of hit and run guerrilla tactics against superior federal forces.

You know, so he proved himself to be a really able military leader, a very charismatic political leader.

-But soon, disagreements would emerge between these leaders who began fighting each other, culminating with Villa joining forces with another charismatic leader from the South, Emiliano Zapata.

Carranza became president in 1917, signing the new constitution in Veracruz, and for three years, he fought with Villa and Zapata.

Zapata did not seek national power, though he fought tenaciously for land for peasants.

-Just like Villa, Zapata is a very charismatic leader.

He's a very photogenic leader.

He's this very dashing figure who loves to wear his kind of charro costume.

And so, in some ways, kind of represents this kind of icon of Mexican machismo, a huge mustache and a giant hat and lots of shiny silver buttons who kind of poses for the camera very effectively.

He is very principled.

He stands for agrarian reform, for the return of land stolen by powerful elites from poor, oppressed peasants.

And actually, here is a principled man leading an army of overwhelmingly poor, but kind of honorable peasants in defense of their ancestral rights.

Even the middle classes in Mexico City see something romantic and positive in that that wins him and his forces some level of popular affection.

-In 1919, Zapata was killed in ambush.

It's thought that Carranza was behind the assassination.

-A hail of bullets ends Zapata's life, but cements Zapata's legend.

And even though photos are then taken of Zapata's dead body to serve as proof that the legendary leader really has been killed, and that really must therefore be the end of Zapatismo as a political force, his core followers and the peasantry in general can't believe that this could possibly be true.

Immediately, there are sightings of Zapata on his white horse patrolling the hills close to where he was murdered, and his legend only grows.

-A split was now developing between Obregon and Carranza.

Obregon found Carranza increasingly conservative.

Obregon was a natural leader who developed into one of the revolution's most effective generals.

-He was Napoleonic in that he combined both great military talents and a stellar military career of a self-taught kind with political skills as well.

And I think marrying those two together in the context of the revolution was very successful in the same way that Napoleon was very successful.

-Obregon fought numerous battles with Villa.

Outwitting him with wily maneuvers, he got the better of Villa, who preferred old fashioned cavalry charges.

Villa had become possibly the most famous of all the revolutionaries following his controversial attack over the border with the United States.

-Not only did he invade US soil and attack an American town, he then completely evaded the invading American troops sent to avenge this humiliation at the hands of Mexican forces, making him, you know, the ultimate kind of popular nationalist hero.

-The armies of Obregon and Villa clashed in four battles, collectively known as the Battle of Celaya.

Together, they were the largest military confrontation in Latin American history, before the Falklands War of 1982.

Although now, logistical and troop movement techniques, such as the use of trains, were used by both sides, Obregon was the first in Mexico to realize that the introduction of modern field artillery and especially machine guns had shifted the battlefield in favor of a defending force.

He learned from many tactical innovations from the Western Front in the First World War, namely trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns for defense at a time when many generals were still advocating bloody and mostly failing mass charges.

-[ Indistinct yelling ] -Villa lost as many as 50,000 men in these battles and ceased to be a force to contend with on a national scale.

In the battles, Obregon lost his right arm, and legend surrounding it grew.

His arm was blown off, the blast nearly killing him.

He claimed he then tried to kill himself as he searched for his missing arm on the battlefield.

Afterwards, Obregon always wore clothing tailored to show that he had lost his arm in battle, a visible sign of his sacrifice to Mexico.

-The arm got blown off.

They kept it, and I think it was kept in a sort of jar of formaldehyde or whatever you put -- you know.

But it kind of progressively molded away.

And in the end, I think they buried it with him after he was assassinated.

-By 1920, the tide had also turned against Carranza, fleeing from Mexico City on the train, apparently carrying most of the nation's gold.

He was assassinated near Puebla while fleeing across the Sierras towards Veracruz, where he hoped to regroup and raise a new army.

-Most of his escort were killed in an ambush.

He was taken prisoner.

And then a telegram arrived for the colonel who had led this successful ambush, saying, "Carranza is not to leave your care alive."

So essentially, it's another classic case of ley fuga.

♪♪ Ley fuga, the law of flight.

Essentially, anyone, any prisoner who tried to escape captivity could legally be shot, which was a very convenient kind of judicial fiction that basically legitimized extrajudicial murder wherever convenient.

-Carranza had signed the 1917 Constitution in Veracruz and had support here, and despite his murky end, a giant statue of one of the founding revolutionaries still stands in the center of the city.

It is thought the man who ordered Carranza's assassination was his former ally, Obregon, who now became the new Mexican president.

In the meantime, Villa, whom Obregon had comprehensively defeated several years earlier, had retired to his native Sonora.

But in 1923, he sought to make a comeback.

And like many leaders in the revolution, he would soon meet his death, gunned down by a hail of bullets.

-It was believed that if there was a major military uprising and Villa joined that, he would bestow on that military uprising his own legitimacy as a villista, as a revolutionary, as a national hero, as a kind of nationalist hero.

And so, I guess the decision was basically taken to get rid of him before he could really become a problem.

An assassination attempt was made on Villa, which was a success.

And you can still see the car that he was murdered in in Parral in Chihuahua, with all of its 100-and-something bullet holes still there.

You know, there was no way he was getting out of that car alive.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Today, the giant monument to the revolution in Mexico City entombs remains of a number of Mexico's revolutionary heroes, including Carranza and Villa.

The victor who emerged from his revolutionary battles, Alvaro Obregon, now moved to exact revenge on his perceived enemies.

-Obregon believed the rich had opposed the revolution and introduced a range of punitive taxes on everything from capital to real estate.

Foreign businessmen were forced to sweep the streets of Mexico City.

And harsh new laws were introduced against the Catholic Church.

-It was, I would say, the most serious conflict between church and state in the whole of Latin America in history.

There were a few real radicals who, arguably, wanted to subvert Catholicism.

They wanted to almost create a religion of the state.

Most of the revolutionaries didn't want to go that far, but they did want to cut the church down to size because they claimed, and I repeat, they had a justification for this, that the church had taken sides against them, both at the national level, in supporting Huerta, and also locally.

If you look at what's going on in Mexico, it's a very varied, localized kind of country.

You often had battles between landlords and peasants.

And the church, the parish priests not always, but often took the side of the landlord.

So would preach from the pulpit, "If you take land under the land reform system, then you'll be excommunicated."

So the church and religion was mixed up in politics in a very direct way, and that's how the conflict really blew up and continued.

All churches were national property, and therefore, if you wanted to operate a church, you needed the permission of the state.

They didn't say you couldn't do it, but you had to get approval.

They also wanted, and, in some cases, enacted this, that they shouldn't be too many priests.

The priests were seen as not only troublesome and subversive but also parasitic.

And so, in certain states, and it varied a bit from place to place -- state governors were often very important -- they would limit the number of priests you could have in a state.

So in an extreme case, like Tabasco, that had a very anti-clerical government -- governor, he said, "You can only have 10 priests in the whole of this state, no more than that.

Otherwise, you get kicked out."

-When Obregon was replaced by his deputy Calles, the conflict with the church worsened.

Calles enforced a number of anti-clerical laws enshrined in the 1917 Constitution even more rigorously.

-[ Speaking foreign language ] -In response, the Catholic Church called for a clerical strike which entailed ceasing to celebrate mass, baptize children, sanctify marriage, and perform rituals for the dead.

The strike lasted for three years.

Writer Graham Greene called it the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth I.

-A religious war breaks out as these committed Catholics rise up against the anti-clerical and, in their view, kind of diabolical, literally satanic revolutionary regime.

-It was the most extreme form of church-state conflict, not just in Mexico, but in Latin America.

The only comparable case would actually be the Spanish Civil War, where you had very similar, even more extreme conflict between leftist Republicans and the Catholic Church.

-In 1926, Calles introduced a law which provided for the execution of priests and other individuals who violated the provisions of the Constitution.

This now became a battle for hearts and minds.

The public execution of a Jesuit priest, Miguel Pro, for allegedly undermining the Calles laws inflamed Catholics.

Before the firing squad was ordered to shoot, Pro raised his arms in imitation of Christ and shouted the defiant cry of the Cristeros -- Viva Cristo Rey, long live Christ the King.

Declining a blindfold, he faced his executioners with a crucifix in one hand and a rosary in the other.

When the initial shots of the firing squad failed to kill him, a soldier shot him at point-blank range.

Pro was beatified in Rome in 1988 by Pope John Paul II as a Catholic martyr killed in odium, meaning in hatred of faith.

This is the Jardin de la Bombilla, a monument to Obregon in the San Angel District of Mexico City.

It is the grandest monument of all of Mexico's revolutionary heroes.

For several decades, it housed his famous severed arm and hand.

This mausoleum was built near the site of a restaurant called La Bombilla, the location where, in turn, Obregon met his end.

One of the tenants of the revolution had been no reelection of a past leader.

But when Obregon, in turn, succeeded Calles, this outraged Catholics still further.

In July 1928, two weeks after Obregon had been reelected as president, Leon Toral, a sketch artist, entered La Bombilla, where a fete honoring Obregon was underway.

Disguised as a caricaturist, when Obregon turned to sit down, Toral drew a gun and shot him five or six times in the back, killing him instantly.

Claiming that he had killed Obregon to facilitate the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ, he was sentenced to death and executed also by firing squad.

His last words were Viva Cristo Rey, the battle cry of the Cristeros.

The government photographed Toral's execution.

Even a photograph of his bullet-ridden heart was published.

More than 100,000 people on both sides were killed in the Cristero wars.

Government forces publicly hanged Cristeros on main thoroughfares throughout Mexico.

In the Pacific states of Colima and Jalisco, bodies would often remain hanging for extended lengths of time.

The radical Calles was in power twice and aimed to abolish haciendas, take land into government control, and set up workers' cooperatives.

He was forced out of office into exile in 1933.

He was replaced by this man, Lazaro Cardenas, still regarded as the most popular Mexican president of the 20th century.

-Really the most radical political leader that had ever held power in Mexico and really changed Mexico on that basis.

Under him, you know, his rule that the redistribution of land reached a peak.

Oil was nationalized, the railways were nationalized.

The unions were kind of brought in and formed almost part of government.

-Cardenas is best known for nationalization of the oil industry in 1938 and the creation of Pemex, the government oil company.

Cardenas founded the National Polytechnic Institute in order to ensure the education and training of people to run the industry.

In the oil towns along the Veracruz Coast, he is a hero.

The company that Cardenas founded, Pemex, became a model for other nations seeking greater control over their own oil and natural gas resources.

Cardenas supported the Republican government of Spain against right-wing General Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War by selling arms to the Republican army and providing food, shelter, and education for orphaned children.

He provided a place of exile for as many as 40,000 Spanish refugees, including distinguished intellectuals who left a lasting imprint on Mexican cultural life.

In 1936, Cardenas allowed Russian exile Leon Trotsky to settle in Mexico, reportedly to counter accusations that he was a Stalinist.

Cardenas was not as left wing as Leon Trotsky, who had led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia with Lenin and Stalin.

But Trotsky described the Cardenas government as the only honest one in the world.

Mexico's post-revolutionary governments all claimed they were on the side of the people.

This was a time in Europe where Stalin ruled Russia and Hitler was on the rise in Germany.

There was little doubt which side the Mexicans were on.

Posters from the time, many produced by committed socialists such as the artist Diego Rivera, denounced the looming fascist threat.

♪♪ After his arrival in Mexico, Trotsky, who had lost out to Stalin in a power struggle, at first lived here in the house of Rivera and his equally famous wife, Frida Kahlo, who had both embraced the values of socialism and revolution.

Rivera and Kahlo soon had a personal falling out with Trotsky, but they shared his politics, for in the 1930s and '40s, art and politics shared a heady ambition.

Carlos Illades has studied Mexico's communist movement after the revolution and Rivera's role in it.

-[ Speaking foreign language ] -Back in Mexico, Trotsky had moved into his own house, where he spent time on his writing and tending his chickens.

♪♪ After surviving a machine-gun attack on his life, he installed guard towers on the perimeter walls and reinforced steel doors on one of his entrances to deter further attacks.

It was not enough.

He soon met a gruesome end, hacked to death with an ice pick by an assassin sent by Stalin.

His house is now a museum, and Trotsky is buried here with his wife.

Meanwhile, under Cardenas' government, many folkloric traditions with deep roots in a myriad of small indigenous communities and villages were appropriated by the state in a giant nation-building campaign.

Many of these indigenous practices ended up unrecognizable from their original form and, by the 1930s, were becoming a showcase for a new Mexican identity and a growing tourist industry.

-Creating a sense of Mexican national identity.

And one of the ways of doing that is through dance or music and putting it into the frame that says, "This is who we are."

♪♪ And so, what happened after the revolution was to try to bring the country together.

the idea of utilizing some very specific indigenous practices from different parts of the country in order to create a sense of national unity.

So when things have become very broken up, governments will try to come around a particular symbol, around an icon, around a piece of music, around a dance and say, "This is who we are.

This is our national identity."

-Cardenas lived here on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro, and his nation-building efforts involved both the controversial construction of a giant statue of independence, war hero Morelos, on an island in the middle of the lake and the encouragement of local villages and fishermen to showcase their traditions and customs.

-This huge statue that you can go up inside and come out of the fist and look over.

It's one of those very controversial actions on the part of Lazaro Cardenas that is highly visible, that is a global icon, as well, creating the island of Janitzio as a tourist attraction.

They're not fishing.

They are performing fishing.

Because, again, the tourists want to see this as part of the public spectacle.

So this is the performance of authenticity.

It gives the tourists what they want, and hopefully the people of the island of Janitzio, who have been pulled into this, are also able to make a living out of it.

♪♪ Danza de los Viejitos, the dance of the old men, and this was a dance danced in many different villages for lots of different, very local celebrations.

And it was picked up by a group of government officials and put on a stage in Mexico City.

And so, in that process, it's appropriated.

It's taken from the Purépecha and put into the national context and literally into the center of the nation in terms of government power.

So that's the power structure where indigenous peoples throughout the nation were utilized.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Under Cardenas, the branding of the new post-revolutionary Mexico also included its religious practices.

-Particular things kind of get selected as emblematic of what it means to be Mexican, and that's where they can best exemplify that process of fusion between something indigenous, rooted far back in time, and then something Spanish coming together to create something uniquely Mexican.

♪♪ -Every year on the 1st of November, Mexico celebrates the Day of the Dead.

Offerings are taken to cemeteries by friends and relatives of the family.

The most popular offerings are sugared sweets.

-So those kinds of religious festivals that are tied to the Catholic Church calendar, but they also have elements to them that have similarities with pre-colonial indigenous practices that make Mexican Catholicism and its festivals distinct from how All Souls Day or Halloween gets celebrated in other Catholic countries around the world.

-Also appropriated into the national identity by post-revolutionary governments was the macho Mexican horsemen known as the charro.

-When we come to the 1920s, the image of the charro, or the horse rider, becomes crucial to representing a sense of strength, a sense of having defeated Porfirio, of having defeated the elite.

And this man, Emiliano Zapata, who came from the very poorest roots, being able to defeat the worst dictator by riding a horse.

The very fact that here, now 100 years later, many of those iconic dances and musical pieces are still being utilized would suggest that, in fact, the processes that put them in that place indeed were successful.

♪♪ -There are female charros in Mexico and associations are quite important, who sit sidesaddle and do equally impressive maneuvers on their horses.

But it fits in with quite a male-dominated culture, and there's nothing more impressive than a man on horseback, thoroughly decorated.

I mean, he might be laughed at by Europeans, but certainly in Mexico, he carried quite a lot of prestige and weight.

In rural Mexico, in rural Mexican communities, which have both indigenous mestizo and Creole populations, dressing as a charro is a way of demonstrating that you are not an Indian.

That fitted quite well with the caste system, keeping your rank.

Dress was an important marker of social rank, and the top of the social hierarchy in rural Mexico was the great landowner, and if he's dressed like that, then you, as a small landowner or even as a rich peasant, you dress like that, too.

[ Men singing in foreign language ] ♪♪ -Today, Mexico's famous mariachi bands not only show off their musical abilities but also their costumes, influenced by the country's adopted Charro roots.

-In the 1920s and '30s, there was heavy emphasis on celebrating the pre-colonial indigenous past, especially the achievements of the Aztec empire, the Maya civilization, or the great kind of architecture and archeological remains that were being studied and uncovered in that era.

The movement known as Indigenismo was certainly about sort of celebrating the Aztec past in particular.

So lots of investment and research went into preserving and studying the remains of great archeological sites of the Aztecs and the Maya, as well, in the 1920s, '30s, and onwards.

Other things that were kind of celebrated, key aspects of indigenous food were incorporated into Mexico's national cuisine.

And there was a concerted movement of culinary nationalism from the 1940s through to the 1970s that very much identified a national traditional cuisine and celebrated aspects of indigenous contribution to that.

So chief amongst the sort of indigenous ingredients or recipes that form the basis for this fused cuisine were things like corn tortillas, chocolate, chilies, all of which could be traced back to having really widespread cultural significance in the pre-colonial era right up through to the present day, which was then about the middle of the 20th century.

♪♪ -Cacti are endemic in Mexico and have long been used for a myriad of applications.

Long before the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs were harvesting cacti, in particular the agave plant, as they do today.

Fermenting the plant produce this, Pulque, an alcoholic beverage sold all over the country in villages and on roadside stands.

The drink was also promoted by post-revolutionary governments as uniquely Mexican.

Pulque was a forerunner of what would soon become an iconic Mexican product -- tequila.

-It became an important export product for Mexico during both world wars, the First World War and the Second World War, and partly because the distilleries in the United States and Western Europe were diverted towards creating wartime things.

And so, tequila replaced those European or American spirits on international markets.

And with that expansion of the business, particularly in the 1840s -- or sorry, the 1940s -- and then the Mexican government starts introducing these legal frameworks to recognize tequila as a distinctively Mexican product.

Mexico had its first denomination of origin appellation for tequila in the 1970s.

Over the next couple of decades, tequila became one of the most successful commercial products globally that Mexico has ever exported.

♪♪ -In the heart of Mexico City, occupying one side of its giant central square, the Zocalo is the national palace.

At the center of its facade, the bell rung by Hidalgo, which started the War of Independence in 1821.

This is now home to the Mexican president.

After the revolution, politics was also fused with art to help promote the new, unique, and modern Mexican identity.

The giant murals inside the palace were painted over a period of 10 years by the man who is now Mexico's most famous artist, Diego Rivera.

He would tell Mexico's unique story, of the culture and struggle of its indigenous people, their colonization by the Spanish, the War of Independence, and then the revolution itself.

-This idea of a march forward to an era of progress, you know, this kind of positivist idea of forward movement always is literally the background to some of his most famous murals.

-[ Speaking foreign language ] ♪♪ -The narrative recounted in another great Rivera work, the "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central," is now ingrained in popular Mexican history, the 15-foot-high mural painted by Rivera in 1947 depicting Mexico's most famous who had walked in Mexico City during colonial times.

Inevitably, given Rivera's politics, the Spanish invaders, like Cortez and conservative forces, including the church, are portrayed unsympathetically... while the indigenous were celebrated, as were reformists and revolutionaries such as Madero and Juarez.

Mexico's longest-serving leader, Diaz, is prominent but ridiculed for selling out to capitalist interests.

The Mexican Revolution is applauded as a victory for downtrodden workers.

The work of Rivera was not alone in seeking to include the indigenous, for so long the exploited majority in the new Mexican story.

-[ Speaking foreign language ] ♪♪ -Rivera and his muse, Frida Kahlo, were superstars of the time.

They lived for a time in this complex.

His the red House, hers the blue in what is now a leafy and affluent Mexico City suburb of San Angel.

Rivera's studio is preserved here, as is his death mask.

♪♪ A high-level bridge connected the two houses.

Kahlo then moved to the leafy suburb of Coyoacan, where her house, too, is now a museum displaying her works of art, studio, her personal quarters, and her death mask, too.

This is a highly personal memorial and celebration to Mexico and, for a time, the world's most famous woman artist.

♪♪ Nowadays, Rivera's art and politics, in particular, has been fused into the modern Mexican identity.

Rivera put his money where his mouth was.

He spent much of his on collecting pre-Columbian objects and then built this incredible museum influenced by the structures of Mexico's ancient peoples to house them.

He also painted here in a giant studio.

But despite the promotion of an indigenous identity by Rivera and others, indigenous people are still the most disadvantaged in Mexican society.

-For most Mexicans, being Indian is being poor and, perhaps, being the person who cooks your food and is still, in some parts, expected to walk in the street rather than on the pavement.

There is still a caste system at work, and, in general, indigenous is synonymous with poverty, marginality.

Colorful, yeah, wonderful food, wonderful dress.

But a lot of Mexicans identify with European culture, a lot with Hispanic values.

A lot of non-Indian Mexicans make a living from running museums and running anthropological institutes and doing research on indigenous communities.

That's very important, and that is fed into government policy, especially since the revolution has placed an enormous importance upon the indigenous roots of the nation.

And it is hoped and expected that real Indigenous people will visit these museums and enjoy seeing their culture celebrated.

But the cruel facts of social and economic life are that Indian population is still discriminated against, still considered to be poor and inferior.

There's very little attempt nationally to encourage bilingualism, to have indigenous languages taught in schools.

If you want to learn your mother tongue, mystic Zapotec, one of these countless different language groups which are declining but are still quite significant in certain areas, you have to make private arrangements.

[ Crowd shouting ] -Today in the center of Mexico City, a vast array of protesters air their grievances daily in the Zocalo.

-The current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, likes to hark back to the revolution.

He's very interested in history, albeit history of a very, I would say, simplistic kind.

And he calls his movement the Fourth Transformation.

And what he means by that very simply is, you had independence, you had the liberal reforms under Juarez, you had the revolution, and now you have him.

And he is leading this Fourth Transformation to lead the Mexican people into a new end-of-corruption, prosperous, socially-progressive future.

But he does like to invoke the old revolutionary leaders.

He has pictures of Madero, of Cardenas, and then Zapata.

They would be the ones I think he most capitalizes on.

But I think the notion that you can turn the clock back 100 years and sort of re-create peasant agrarian reform like Zapata in the 21st century, I am very skeptical that what we are seeing is a genuine sort of revitalization or a return to old revolutionary values.

So the revolution is still being talked about, and arguably, it's talked about now more than it was 30 years ago, when most people thought, "Well, it's, you know, cosa del pasado, it's a thing of the past."

It's back in discourse.

It's back in popular discussion.

[ Man speaking foreign language ] You feel you're living in a very free, democratic country, if you're anything above the level of the student.

But getting to being a student is a struggle.

-Over the last 200 years, in particular, this liberal calling has often been at odds with powerful conservative forces, often allied with the church.

On the Zocalo today, Latin America's largest church remains symbolically its most dominant structure.

In another metaphor, symbolizing the downtrodden indigenous, it's built on the remains of an Aztec temple ruins.

500 years ago, Cortez directed stones from the Temple be actually used in the church's construction.

♪♪ Overlooking this destruction of the Aztec citadels, in the Zocalo today, you also find a statue to the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, who was famously tortured by the Spanish by having his feet burned before his death.

Five centuries after the Spanish arrived here, the role of Mexico's ancient indigenous people remains a hotly-contested issue as this relatively new country hurtles into the future.

-Color still continued and continues to matter, and it's still something that Mexicans can't quite get their heads around.

"How can we be such a multiracial society in which all of our national heroes, certainly the 20th-century ones, many of them are of indigenous or mestizo descent?"

In practice, if you arrive from the United States with blue eyes or from Europe, you're going to get on much more quickly than if you are coming from Africa or if you're an indigenous Mexican.

-In Mexico City today, there are many memorials.

One of the newest is this, which commemorates all those whose lives have been lost to the drug trade.

In its short history, since independence, Mexico has endured many trials and tribulations.

Now in the first decade of the 21st century, it's not invasions or revolutions but the warlords of the drug trade, the narcos that are laying waste to the country.

It's said by skeptics that Mexico, like Brazil, has always been labeled a country of the future and always will be.

Will this incredibly vibrant and cultured nation prove the doubters wrong?

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