96 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
site where the most bloody battle had arisen, and where the
most blood had been spilled, and where thousands of men
had died.” 71 Thus through the celebration of San Hipólito,
the triumphal narrative of the Spanish victory was remem-
bered and reenacted time and again in the collective life
of the city. A few months earlier, Corpus Christi, which
celebrated the more general triumph of the Eucharist over
pagan religions, would offer its own preamble; in this feast,
it was less the city’s secular government that was put on
display than the corporate structure of the city’s populace
in the great march of all the city’s guilds, adding to the
sense of collective identity of its residents and also leaving
its traces on the urban grid.
While the triumphalist view of San Hipólito had its
seeds in the celebrations sponsored by the city’s cabildo,
that view was also extended outward to the city’s indig-
enous residents later in the sixteenth century. By the time
Valadés witnessed the celebration, perhaps as early as
1543 or as late as 1571, the city’s indigenous elites had been
included in the procession, dressed in ceremonial costume.
However, the representation of space that they likely heard
was of an entirely different nature. In the masses said in
the city’s indigenous parishes on that day, they would have
been treated to a Nahuatl song in honor of the feast day’s
saint. We are fortunate to have a cycle of feast day psalms
written down by one of city’s leading Franciscans, Ber-
nardino de Sahagún. His collection includes four written
for the feast of San Hipólito. The second of them explicitly
connects the saint to the conquest of Tenochtitlan, and
represents the resultant space of New Spain in alignment
with the space of Israel, home to God’s chosen people, as
well as within the larger cosmic framework of heaven above
and devils below:
second PsaLm
As through a miracle God saved the sons of Israel from
the hands of the Egyptians, on the ninth day of the month
of March,
just so, through a miracle, God saved us, the people of
New Spain, from the hands of devils on St. Hippolytus’
festive day.
And the children of Israel each year held a festival to
celebrate the day of their deliverance. Just so is it required
that we, the people of New Spain, each year observe the
feast, because it is the festival of our deliverance; it is what
pertains to our deliverance.
Our Lord God wrought a very mighty miracle for uswhen those who pampered, who defended devils who were
governing New Spain were conquered.
We were the devils’ men, and the lords [and] rulers were
the devils’ guardians; they were the ones who loved them.
And God sent His warriors so that the devils and their
befrienders were conquered.
This miracle, by which we, we people of New Spain,
were saved, was wrought on the feast day of God’s beloved
Saint Hippolytus. Let us be happy; let us take pleasure.
Alleluia, alleluia. 72In this work, the Franciscans did not represent the space
of New Spain as defined by the military defeat by the
Spaniards, but as a space that had been delivered from the
pagan devils who had once taken charge of the lords and
ruler (and the text uses the words “in tetecuti in tlatoani”
to name them). The terrible violence that the Spaniards
were celebrating along the causeway is here suppressed,
and instead the Franciscans open up a new representation
of the urban space: one infused with the benefits of Chris-
tian salvation.naming in The ciTy
The civic celebration of San Hipólito offered an occa-
sion to mark the history of the Spanish triumph over the
lived spaces of the city by an important representation of
space: the place-name. In the essay discussed in chapter 1,
“Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau underscores their
importance: “Proper names carve out pockets of hidden
and familiar meanings. They ‘make sense,’ . . . disposed
in constellations that hierarchize and semantically order
the surface of the city, operating chronological arrange-
ments and historical justifications.” 73 Rare, but certainly
important in the city, were these “historical justifications”
that were applied to lived spaces that otherwise might be
ungraspable as mental images, allowing urban residents
to make sense of the city. One of these, the “Puente de
Alvarado,” is still extant in the city’s toponymy, embedding
the history of Pedro de Alvarado’s death-defying leap onto
a street corner (see figure 1.9).
But, in general, urban history was of little interest to
the new Spanish settlers, and the names they bestowed
on Mexico City in the two decades after the Conquest
operated on two registers. If the post-Conquest city was
a monster, seething with dirty waters and surrounded by
unintelligible and hostile peoples, renaming it brought it