126 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
chapels, we can reasonably assume that their patron saints
were set around then, as well. By this time, the Honduras
campaign was over and more indigenous elites were back in
the city. Longer exposure would have led both Franciscans
and Nahuatl-speaking elites to understand each other’s
language by then. Supporting evidence on the Franciscan
side comes from their own claims to speak Nahuatl (and
from the somewhat embarrassed apology for those, like
Francisco de Soto, who never could master the tongue)
and on the indigenous side, from the emergence of a group
of translators, like don Hernando de Tapia, who worked
for the Real Audiencia as an interpreter and was the son of
Motelchiuhtzin. 44
Among the Mexica, it may have been less important to
find saints that correlated to pre-Hispanic deities than to
maintain the festival calendar, which was pegged to fixed
solar and celestial events (solstices and equinoxes in par-
ticular) and related agricultural cycles. As mentioned in
chapter 4, as early as 1528 the Spanish cabildo celebrated
the feasts of San Juan ( June 24), Santiago ( July 25), and
the Assumption of the Virgin (“Santa María de Agosto” on
August 15). 45 The indigenous city would also hold feasts on
these days for San Juan Moyotlan ( June 24), Santiago Tla-
telolco ( July 25), and Santa María Cuepopan (August 15).
It does not seem that the indigenous nobility were using
the celebrations as “cover” for pre-Hispanic practices that
might be perceived as idolatrous; rather, it is more likely
that by linking the parcialidad celebrations into festivals
that already were important ones in the city’s festival cal-
endar, indigenous leaders were both integrating themselves
into the new calendar and giving themselves an opportu-
nity to show their importance, through the feasting, and
the gift giving and dances that such feasts entailed. As
such, the public life of the indigenous city quickly absorbed
patron saints and their feast days, as happened across New
Spain. Through the colonial period, funding for these local
festivals—often quite high—came from indigenous trea-
suries, the cajas de comunidades. 46
Moyotlan, the first among equals of the altepeme of
Tenochtitlan, represents a more complex choice in its
patron saint than the others. It had not one but two patron
saints, San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist) and San
Juan Evangelista (Saint John the Evangelist), as did San
Juan de Letrán, the Roman basilica from which its name
was derived. 47 John the Baptist was a favored patron for
Franciscan monasteries in New Spain, and his pairing with
the Evangelist was not uncommon, either, given that the
two saints can be seen as emblems of the Franciscan sense
of their mission in the New World. John the Baptist, of
course, was a symbol of the beginning, in that the baptism
he offered allowed human souls eternal life in Christ for the
first time in the history of the world. John the Evangelist,
on the other hand, was believed to be the author of that
chronicle of End Times, the Book of Revelation, whose
eschatology underwrote the Franciscans’ own millennial
views. 48 These two patron saints graced Moyotlan with
two feast days: San Juan Bautista’s ( June 24) and San Juan
Evangelista’s (December 27). These feasts, both of them
celebrated with great fanfare in Moyotlan, fell on nearly
opposite sides of the solar year, each occurring within a
week after a solstice. The twin feasts thus offered continu-
ity with the pre-Hispanic festival calendar, which pivoted
around solstice celebrations. Moyotlan’s early summer
feast (San Juan Bautista) was equally propitious within
the Catholic liturgical calendar, falling into the stretch that
began with Holy Week and ended around Corpus Christi.
Into this arc of festival celebrations was that of the par-
cialidad of San Pablo Teopan, whose patron saints (again,
double) were Saints Peter and Paul, whose single feast fell
on June 29. 49
While the dovetailing of indigenous and Spanish cal-
endars offers a rationale for the choice of this particular
Roman basilica for Moyotlan, such a rationale did not play
a consistent role in the choice of the other feast days. Santa
María Cuepopan’s feast (August 15) fell during the indig-
enous month of Xocolhuetzi, an early harvest celebration,
but not one of primary importance. The impulse for this
choice may have been Franciscan devotion to the Virgin—
one of the earliest monasteries they founded in Tlaxcala
was likewise devoted to the Virgin of the Assumption. And
the feast of Atzacoalco was that of San Sebastián ( Janu-
ary 20), which fell around the beginning of the indigenous
year or during the dangerous 5-day liminal period of the
nemontemi at the end of the 360-day year, a time marked
in the indigenous calendar not by feasting, but by a general
retreat from festive life. Scholars have linked the worship of
San Sebastián in other native communities to pre-Hispanic
devotion to Xipe Totec, as both San Sebastián and Xipe’s
sacrificial victims were killed by arrow sacrifice, but in the
city of Tenochtitlan, it is Moyotlan, not Atzacoalco, with
more clearly discernable Xipe connections.
By midcentury, Moyotlan, with its two festivals set on
either side of the year, had emerged politically as the center
of the city. Not only was it the most populous parcialidad,