102 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
remained vacant, but it seems that Mendoza’s appointment
of the new ruler, to whom he gave the title of “gobernador,”
came around 1537 or 1538. 5
Who would the likely candidates have been? While the
polygamous marriages of the Mexica elite had once pro-
duced no shortage of candidates, after the Conquest the
pool would have been a limited one. It was the convention
for a newly consecrated Mexica huei tlatoani to purge his
competitors, and Cuauhtemoc, despite being named to a
city under siege, seems to have behaved no differently in
- 6 Cortés adopted the same strategy by executing less-
than-compliant rulers on the Honduras campaign. By the
time of Mendoza’s arrival, the best candidates (following
the Spanish idea of legitimate bloodline) would have been
two sons of the huei tlatoani Moteuczoma II, don Martín
Cortés Nezahualtecolotzin and his younger brother don
Pedro Moctezoma (the preferred spelling of the family
name from the sixteenth century onward) Tlacahuepantli.
Both survived the purges by Cuauhtemoc, but both left the
city in the 1520s. Don Martín Cortés was in Spain as early
as 1524 and was educated there by the Dominicans. 7 One
chronicler tells us that he had the misfortune of traveling
with a rival, don Hernando de Tapia, the son of don Andrés
de Tapia Motelchiuhtzin, who ruled the city from 1526
to 1530, and Tapia poisoned him on the return trip from
Spain. 8 Don Martín’s brother, don Pedro Moctezoma, was
taken to Spain with Cortés in 1528, and there he began
his lifelong legal battle to maintain the prerogatives he felt
were due to him by birthright, returning to Mexico only
in 1541, by which point his politically formative years had
been spent outside of the city. Some native sources hint
that don Pedro Moctezoma was less than competent—
perhaps an alcoholic—but what is abundantly clear is
that his battles with the Spanish Crown consumed him,
as he shuttled back to Spain, as did his son, who married
a Spanish woman. Neither held a seat on the cabildo of
post-Conquest Mexico-Tenochtitlan. 9
In contrast, Huanitzin was an engaged intellectual
and an astute politician who never, it seems, left the New
World. We do not know the year that he was born, but
he had survived the Conquest and also passed the even
stronger acid test of his political skills, the deadly house-
cleaning of potential rivals that happened on the ascent
of Cuauhtemoc in 1520. And living in the Spanish camp
as royal hostage from 1521 to 1525, including on the Hon-
duras trip, gave him an opportunity to observe and to
learn; it is certainly possible that he spoke Spanish as well
as Nahuatl. 10 The internment during the Honduras cam-
paign would also have allowed him to build relationships
with other Mexica nobles who were also under lock and
key; he would need their continued support in the actual
process of governance. Upon the end of the campaign, he
returned to the governorship of Ecatepec, a valley town,
there joining other high-ranking native elites. 11 The daugh-
ters of Moteuczoma II whom the Spanish recognized as
legitimate had been given grants of indigenous labor in the
form of the encomienda here, and Huanitzin would marry
one of their half sisters, doña Francisca. But he must also
have maintained relations with powerful figures in Mexico
City to be introduced to Mendoza. In the Beinecke Map
of ca. 1565, it is Huanitzin who is listed as the first of the
ruling line in a post-Conquest map, a choice that María
Castañeda de la Paz has argued was likely meant to under-
score an indigenous ruling line that was newly consecrated
by viceregal authority (figure 5.2). 12
With his ascent to the governorship of indigenous
Mexico-Tenochtitlan some sixteen years after the city’s
conquest, Huanitzin, one of the highest-ranking members
of the Mexica royal family, became like the city he ruled—
shaped by a past that he was called upon to forget, and
obliged to act in a place that had not been fully imagined.
At the time he came to rule, Spanish colonists were growing
more and more accustomed to calling the larger territory
that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific “New Spain,”
a name that marked their aspirations to create a new place
that carried with it the traces of their distant, transatlantic
place of origin. Within Mexico City, the form of governance
by cabildo echoed Spanish precedents. Huanitzin’s project
was the inverse. As the scion of a ruling family who had over
generations raised the indigenous city out of the mud of
the shallow lake and fashioned the island city into a sacred
capital by carefully aligning its axes to the movement of the
sun and the divinely saturated features of the surrounding
landscape, he needed to reconstruct the elements that made
Tenochtitlan such a conceptual center. His project was to
create a Mexico-Tenochtitlan that maintained the latter,
while contending with the irrefutable facts of its history:
the city’s sacred center had been taken over and made the
seat of the Spanish government, and other sacred nodes in
the urban fabric were being occupied by the city’s Francis-
cans, as part of their mission to introduce Christianity to
the city’s indigenous residents, either by suasion or by force.