On the webpage of past president Ernesto Zedillo, Carlos Fuentes calls the National Palace a "traveling and an immobile construction". Traveling is used in the sense that much of its architectural style is Spanish in origin and symbolized the transplanting of Spanish civilization to the New World. It is immobile in the sense that since Aztec times, this has been the seat of earthly political power, first as the palaces of the Aztec tlatoani, then of the Spanish viceroys, then of Mexican heads of state. Only until very recently, those who held power over Mexico lived here as well as asserted their authority.