The ciTy in The conquesT’s wake • 97into conceptual alignment with other places; thus, the early
Spanish inhabitants renamed places using the toponymy of
Spain, adding “New” to the monikers to signal difference.
Thus, “Nueva España,” or “New Spain,” the name given to
the entire colony, allowed Spanish inhabitants to conceive
of the territory as something theirs and familiar (Spain)
while at the same time marking the singularity of their
experience (New). But within the city itself, the earliest set
of names we find Spanish residents implanting are not ones
that insist on the likeness of the place to the familiar—
there is no “New Venice” or “New Salamanca,” as these are
comparisons we find only in historical chronicles directed
to an outside audience. Rather, the net of names Span-
ish residents threw out over the city insisted on individual
possession; thus, in the Actas de cabildo, which largely
ignores any preexistent indigenous toponymy, we have the
“casas del marqués” (houses of the marquis) for the Cortés
family residences, the “portales de Tejada” for the market
arcades owned and built by the audiencia judge Lorenzo
de Tejada (seated 1546–1553), and the “casa de Juan Cano”
for Juan Cano’s house. City streets bore relational names
(as in “the street going from the Plaza to San Francisco”),
and land grants made by the cabildo were named by the
street and then by the names of adjacent lot owners, if
they were Spanish men (women’s names were almost never
used). Indigenous owners, on the other hand, were, with
rare exception, not named, their properties labeled sim-
ply “some Indian houses.” Thus in the practices of naming
registered in the actas, we see a web of individual Spanish
possession being established in this unique register of the
city’s spaces. 74
But if we look to native histories, we can see that key
areas, like the one around San Hipólito, were inscribed
with different names, and that they were used, as place-
names often are, for mnemonic recall. In his narrative
of the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the mestizo chronicler
Diego Muñoz Camargo would describe a crucial moment
of the war, when the besieged Spaniards and their allies
attempted to escape from the Mexica city under the cover
of night on the Noche Triste, but were exposed by the
cries of an old woman. He tells it thus: as they made their
way along the Tacuba causeway, nearing the eventual site
of the shrine of San Hipólito, “an old woman seller, who
was there at that hour to sell food to passing travelers,
with a little stall, in Ayoticpac, which was where Juan
Cano, the son-in-law of Moteuczoma built his houses,
which today belong to Hernando de Ribadeneyra, which
were left to him by Juan de Esposa Salada, the old woman
there, who must have been the devil himself, began to
cry in a loud voice, ‘Hey, Mexica—the imprisoned gods
are leaving. What will you do, you careless men? Look,
so they don’t escape! Turn and kill them so they don’t
return and take your city again.’” 75 With her cries, the
Mexica were rallied and at Ayoticpac they began to attack
the escaping Spaniards. Ayoticpac is remembered here
as a Mexica victory, and Muñoz Camargo also layers it
with new meaning, connecting it to the names of its past
and present-day owners. These were not unimportant
people: Juan Cano had married the heiress doña Isabel
Moctezoma, and they had a number of urban properties;
the last owner mentioned, Hernando de Ribadeneyra,
was a member of the Spanish cabildo beginning in 1573
and was at one point in charge of the storehouses of
maize that provisioned the city; he is recorded as own-
ing these houses on the Tacuba causeway in 1578. 76 In
all likelihood, his was a grand house, an urban mansion
that had its own supply of freshwater from Chapultepec,
quite visible and known to people entering the city along
the causeway, one of the city’s main access points. Thus,
Muñoz Camargo knew of Conquest history through its
associations with contemporary buildings and kept these
connections alive in his written account. Similarly, Chi-
malpahin would write about Ayoticpac also, linking it to
the site of the convent of La Concepción and one of its
longtime residents, doña Isabel Moctezoma, the daughter
of doña Isabel and Juan Cano, showing the slightly dif-
ferent valences that the place carried in the seventeenth
c e n t u r y. 77 Chimalpahin offers remembrance that points
almost exclusively to the past, identifying one of the sites
in this area as “ Tolteca acalloco,” or “canal of the Toltec,”
and specifies that two of Moteuczoma’s sons were killed
here during the same battle. 78
Although the area around San Hipólito offers us
Nahuatl and Spanish names and different sets of associa-
tions to both past events and present-day features, some
areas were erased of their Nahuatl names. If the entire
temple precinct had a name, we do not know it; when this
site was cleared and leveled, it came to be known as the
Plaza Mayor, or the principal plaza, a fact reflected in the
extraordinary Map of Santa Cruz, in which it is simply
named as “plaza.” The indigenous neighborhoods, where
Nahuatl was spoken, retained Nahuatl toponymy, by and
large, and the associations that residents had with those
names await study.