foRgeTTing TenochTiTLan • 125chapels adjacent to three of the temples, and located the
fourth not far from its corresponding former temple, with
the temples serving as quarries of useful building materials.
It was likely Gante who made the decision to do so, since
he claimed to be active in the process of early chapel build-
ing, as Martín de Valencia, the other Franciscan leader, was
resident in Tlaxcala during much of this time. All four of
these original Franciscan sites, although rebuilt over time,
survive in the city today (see figure 4.2). The archeolo-
gist Alfonso Caso first proposed that the churches of San
Pablo Teopan, San Sebastián Atzacoalco, and San Juan
Moyotlan had been built upon the sites of, or adjacent to,
the old altepetl temple complexes, the stone being reused. 38
But perhaps even more attractive to the Franciscans were
the voids of the precincts, those plazas that surrounded
temple-pyramids, offering ready-made spaces within the
dense urban fabric that could be easily reconfigured into
church courtyards. Such transformations happened in
other cities in New Spain and had theological sanction in
the admonition of Pope Gregory to use pagan spaces. The
spacious plazas that are seen on eighteenth-century maps
around the parish churches of San Juan, San Pablo, and
San Sebastián suggest that their antecedents were the open
spaces of those altepeme’s temple plazas; and open spaces
still exist around the chapels of San Juan and San Pablo
today. Caso also argued that Santa María Cuepopan in the
northwest, which has no recorded plaza, was not built over
or adjacent to an altepetl temple, and its sixteenth-century
(and modern) position was moved slightly.
The Franciscan vision for the religious order of the city
was captured in a representation of the urban space, in dia-
gram form, in the Codex Osuna, where we encountered
the image of the tecpan in chapter 5. Here, on a page titled
“Los quatro barrios de Mexico” (the four neighborhoods
of Mexico City), we see the indigenous city of Mexico-
Tenochtitlan in quincunx form (figure 6.5). On its surface,
the text registers a complaint about the payment for three
bells of San Pablo. But the images show something dif-
ferent. At the corners, the four parcialidades (parts of the
city) are named and identified by small chapels: clockwise
from top left we see San Sebastián, San Pablo, San Juan,
and Santa María. Their positioning on the page corre-
sponds to their location in space, oriented to the east, as
can be seen by comparison to figure 4.2. If this is a kind
of schematic map, the central pivot of this city is the great
parish church of San José, which is set in the center, with
the figure of Pedro de Gante set below, and below him,
the hieroglyphic name of Tenochtitlan. The Spanish city
is nowhere to be seen.The new Rome
Rome was made present in these newly consecrated spaces
through their names. José Rubén Romero Galván was the
first modern scholar to understand that these four indig-
enous altepetl chapels had been named after four of the
seven basilicas of Rome: three took their patron saints
from the four major basilicas, San Juan de Letrán, Santa
María la Mayor, and San Pablo Extramuros, and one from
the three minor basilicas, San Sebastián (see figure 4.2). 39
The other major basilica in Rome is the papal basilica of
Saint Peter (San Pedro). But what Romero Galván over-
looked was that San Pablo Teopan was actually dedicated
to Saint Peter and Saint Paul, confirmed by a very early
source on Mexico City, which names the neighborhood as
the “barrio de Sant Pedro e Sant Pablo.” 40 Thus Mexico-
Tenochtitlan was recast as a new Rome by carrying in it the
patron saints of all four major basilica churches of Rome
(San Juan, Santa María, San Pablo, San Pedro). The city,
for its part, would cleave to the primitive Christian utopia
that the early church once had hoped to achieve in Rome,
at the time of the founding of the basilica churches. 41
But what of indigenous participation in applying the
Roman template? Were indigenous concerns reflected
in these choices of patron saints? Both Romero Galván
and Roberto Moreno de los Arcos have suspected an
indigenous role in the choice of patron saints. 42 In par-
ticular, Moreno de los Arcos argued that the identities of
the pre-Hispanic patron deities of the four parcialidades
influenced the choice of the later Catholic patron saints.
Certainly, recent archeology has revealed pre-Hispanic
temples throughout Tenochtitlan. Evidence suggests that
Moyotlan held a temple devoted to Xipe Totec. 43 And a
round temple, the architectural form used for Quetzalcoatl
temples, has been found at the present-day Pino Suarez
metro station, which was excavated around the location
of the southern causeway of Ixtapalapa, that is, on the
accepted border between Moyotlan and Teopan. However,
beyond this, we have no firm evidence for which deities
were patrons of the parcialidades.
Our best evidence for the continuities between the pre-
Hispanic religious landscape and the early colonial one
comes from the festival calendar. If we take Motolinia’s
date of the early 1530s for the building of the parcialidad