118 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
of the indigenous city, a new center in lieu of the Tem-
plo Mayor, and their project was aided immensely by the
preexisting division of the city into its four component
altepeme, which meant that urban Tenochtitlan was not
structured like an atom, with a firm and central nucleus,
but rather like a Venn diagram, where the center was the
overlap of four autonomous units. Just like Cortés, who
parceled out the city parts to indigenous lords, including
don Juan Velázquez Tlacotzin, the Franciscans continued
to respect the earlier structure. They established chapels
in each of the four former altepeme, but maintained the
Chapel of San José de los Naturales as the religious center
of the indigenous city. In addition, dozens of smaller cha-
pels would come to be built throughout the indigenous
city and may have replaced local shrines maintained by
the pre-Hispanic tlaxilacalli. This religious network also
created opportunities for men and women within reli-
gious hierarchies. Thus the new quadripartite structure of
Mexico-Tenochtitlan, where religious and political juris-
dictions overlapped, carried forward and transformed the
pre-Hispanic city.
Resident within San Francisco were some of the lead-
ing immigrant intellectuals in the Americas, including
Pedro de Gante and Bernardino de Sahagún, who saw in
the evangelization of the New World the great challenge
of their age, so compelling that they would leave the secu-
rity of family, friends, and comfortable employ to journey
on a path that might lead—and sometimes did—to mar-
tyrdom. Within the city in the late 1530s, we can think
of don Diego Huanitzin, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza,
and fray Pedro de Gante as the holy trinity of the emer-
gent, post-Cortés city. Mendoza, although younger than
Gante, was the political father of the enterprise, establish-
ing royal authority across New Spain. With Mendoza’s
arrival, Huanitzin was recalled from his provincial seat
of Ecatepec to be reborn as gobernador in the place his
ancestors ruled as tlatoque, as we saw in the last chapter.
Gante (ca. 1476/1485–1572), one of three Franciscans to
arrive in New Spain in 1523, was the animating spirit. His
name, which means “Ghent,” marks his northern Euro-
pean origins (Ghent was part of Spain’s extended empire
in the Low Countries) and signals the international cast
of the mendicants arriving in New Spain. But the bland
geographic moniker does little to reveal Gante’s remark-
able qualities. 10 Born to a Flemish family, he was believed
to be related to the emperor Charles V, the most powerful
figure in Europe, as he was whispered to be the son of
Charles’s grandfather, Holy Roman Emperor Maximil-
ian. Throughout Charles’s life, Gante had unique access to
the emperor’s ear; Gante would appeal directly to him to
maintain royal support for the school of San José. 11 And
upon Gante’s death, Charles’s son and heir, Philip II, was
notified and reminded that Gante “was very close to your
Christian father, and thanks to this, we [Franciscans] have
been able to obtain many and great favors.” 12 Gante’s entry
as a lay friar into the Franciscan order took him into the
orbit of other powerful intellectuals: one of his compan-
ions in the New World mission was his fellow Flemish
Juan Glapión, who had been catedrático (professor) at the
University of Paris and confessor to Charles V. 13 Coming
to settle in the newly conquered city just five years after its
defeat, Gante was certainly among the first to occupy the
newly founded monastery in Moyotlan, where he would
live for forty-five years. 14 Quickly fluent in Nahuatl, he
would write and publish the Doctrina christiana en lengua
mexicana in 1553 as well as devise an ingenious “hiero-
glyphic” catechism for Nahuatl speakers.
Franciscan aspirations for New Spain were particularly
idealist in envisioning it as comprising new Christian com-
munities, populated only by indigenes, whose perceived
lack of materialism and communal ethos made them ideal
candidates for such utopias; the Franciscans’ zeal in evan-
gelizing was amplified by their belief that the conversion
of the peoples of the New World was one of the necessary
catalysts for the millennium, or Second Coming, when
Christ would reappear in triumph. 15 But more specifically,
Gante’s aspirations for indigenous peoples and his regard
for their capacities is reflected in the founding within San
Francisco of the great school of San José de los Naturales,
where he taught the sons of Mexica elites, as well as those
from the surrounding regions, to read and write in Latin
and the basics of the Christian faith. The school was also
renowned for its training in the mechanical arts. It, like the
chapel that served its new parishioners, was named after
Saint Joseph, obedient and faithful husband of the Virgin
Mary, as well as carpenter; the suffix naturales was a term
that in its day simply meant “peoples of a place.” In found-
ing an evangelizing school in the ravaged city, Gante meant
to put the city on a new trajectory; the utopia that was to
be obtained within the walls of San Francisco through the
catechizing of its youth was its future.
To create this future, Gante believed that the Mexica he
gathered needed to disconnect themselves from their pagan
past, as if the normal circuits of memory and remembrance