Mexican Cultural Institute

This guide to the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C. follows the annual Day of the Dead ofrenda tradition and the mansion's own history, from its 1911 construction for a cabinet secretary's wife to sixty-nine years as Mexico's embassy. It traces one particular altar, built in 2023 for La Malinche, the Nahua translator whose role beside Hernan Cortes has divided Mexican memory for five centuries. Look up in the great hall for the three-story fresco mural of Aztec temples and volcanoes painted in the 1930s.