Calle de Veracruz

The name celebrates Veracruz, a city and state on the Gulf of Mexico, within a quarter given over entirely to the Americas. When planners laid out Hispanoamérica from the 1970s onward, they named its streets after cities and countries across the Atlantic: a few steps from Veracruz fall Valparaíso, Cochabamba and Potosí. The original Veracruz was born on Good Friday of 1519, when Hernán Cortés landed on the coast and raised there the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. The place-name joins the idea of the “true cross” —⁠in memory of the day of the Crucifixion on which they made landfall⁠— with the fame of riches that shore promised. It was the first town council on the American mainland, the legal device by which Cortés broke free of the governor of Cuba and set the conquest going on his own. Of that tropical port neither the heat nor the sea remains here, only the name pinned to a short street.