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BY María José Gutiérrez Chávez

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To walk through Mexico City is to stroll down centuries at once. The ruins of the Aztec empire are exposed on the ground beside colonial structures built from the same stones that once made up the ancient temples. A few blocks farther, 1900s European-inspired townhouses are pressed against 1940s Art Deco apartments, and modern skyscrapers shoulder through the city’s diverse skyline.

Outside Mexico’s capital, a similar trend holds true. Various aesthetics that would otherwise seem incompatible blend together to form a new architecture movement that borrows from its long past while creating something entirely new.

In her new book, Mesoamerican Modern , the curator Su Wu and the photographer Luis Garvan document these like-minded homes and propose a new way to understand the region’s most thrilling contemporary residential spaces: as continuations of ancient traditions that never really went away.

“In many places in…