The Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso began in Mexico City in 1588 when Jesuits consolidated educational residences for students of their order and the colonial elite. Located near the cathedral and university in the capital of New Spain, the institution taught theology, philosophy, grammar, and the humanities. Its growth depended on church patronage, Indigenous land and labor systems, urban craftspeople, servants, students, teachers, and revenues produced within a deeply unequal colonial society.

The surviving Baroque complex was largely rebuilt during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries around arcaded courtyards. Stone façades, stairways, chapel spaces, classrooms, dormitories, and service areas made the college both a religious community and an educational institution. Jesuit intellectual networks linked Mexico City with Europe and the wider empire, but instruction also participated in colonial conversion and social hierarchy. The Crown expelled the Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767, ending their control of the college.

After expulsion the buildings served several institutional purposes. In 1867, following the restoration of the Mexican Republic, the National Preparatory School opened there as a central project of secular public education. Its curriculum and prominent teachers influenced generations of students, including future political and cultural leaders. The building therefore records a transition from Jesuit formation to republican education, while retaining religious architecture and colonial fabric within a modern national institution.

In the 1920s the school became a foundational site of Mexican muralism. José Vasconcelos's cultural program brought artists including José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Fernando Leal, Jean Charlot, Ramón Alva de la Canal, and David Alfaro Siqueiros to its walls. Their murals addressed conquest, labor, revolution, class, race, education, and national identity. The paintings were not neutral decoration; they turned corridors, stairs, and courtyards into a contested public history.

San Ildefonso is significant for colonial education, Jesuit expulsion, republican schooling, and the emergence of Mexican muralism. Since the 1990s it has functioned as a museum and cultural center through institutional partnership. Conservation must coordinate porous stone, roofs, earthquakes, pollution, crowds, lighting, humidity, and the complex material needs of murals. Interpretation should include Indigenous and Afro-Mexican experiences, workers, students, women, and political conflict while distinguishing the building's successive educational and museum phases. Murals themselves require different treatments according to pigments, binders, walls, previous repairs, and exposure. Publishing technical findings and provenance can help audiences see conservation as intellectual work as well as maintenance. It can also illuminate how artists, assistants, students, administrators, and building workers negotiated the transformation of an active school into a national cultural monument.