Plaza del Presidente Cárdenas
Named for Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico, who took in the Spanish Republican exiles after the Civil War.
Lázaro Cárdenas was president of Mexico between 1934 and 1940, and his name reached this corner of Nueva España out of a debt of gratitude. When the Civil War drove tens of thousands of Spaniards into exile, his government took them in without quotas or reservations: first the nearly five hundred Children of Morelia in 1937, then the wave of intellectuals, workers and whole families who between 1939 and 1942 remade their lives on the other side of the Atlantic. Spain returned the gesture by putting his name on a square.
The plaza del Presidente Cárdenas lies in a neighbourhood built in the mid-twentieth century. The calle de Alfonso XIII ends here, so that a king of Spain and a Mexican president share a corner.