Jardín de los Niños Héroes

Before it was a garden it was a market. The Plazuela del Xixi was where Indigenous traders from the Mezquital Valley sold charcoal, firewood, pulque and everything made from maguey: ropes, ayate cloth, scrubbers, tumplines and the xixi itself, the scrapings of the plant that served as detergent and bleach. It was later called the Plazuela de la Colecturía, after the building where the parish of the Asunción collected tithes, and afterwards Plaza del Colegio, Plaza de Peña y Ramírez and Plaza Felipe Ángeles.

The Colecturía building had a long school career. In 1913 the Benito Juárez Normal School moved in, with seventeen classrooms around a courtyard, and in 1916 a column to Amado Peredo was unveiled, raised by his students in thanks to their teacher. In the 1950s the building was demolished to make way for the Niños Héroes monument, inaugurated on 13 March 1957 by Governor Quintín Rueda Villagrá. It is a rectangular concrete prism with two ground-level fountains, two flag-topped columns and an engraving of the six cadets with Chapultepec Castle.

In 2015 the garden was remodelled for the building of the Tuzobús, and one station of the system now carries the name Niños Héroes. Beside the monument stand the Amado Peredo column, in yellow-grey stone and topped with an open book and a globe, and a round sundial with Roman numerals behind a wrought-iron fence. The garden faces Calle Mariano Matamoros.