foRgeTTing TenochTiTLan • 127but it was adjacent to San Francisco, which contained the
city’s main indigenous center of worship in San José de
los Naturales. 50 While Nahua polities traditionally rotated
leadership positions among their component parts, San
Juan Moyotlan’s enduring preeminence is signaled by
nomenclature: in early documents, all four indigenous
barrios were typically named when a matter concerned the
indigenous population, but by the end of the century, the
entirety of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was typically referred to
as San Juan Tenochtitlan, as if the saints of Moyotlan now
stood for the whole. For instance, viceregal requests for
drafts of indigenous labor after midcentury are typically
addressed to San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlate-
lolco, respectively. Moyotlan’s favored status extended to its
lacustrine ecology. Although the terrain was swampy (the
name Moyotlan means “among the mosquitoes”), this part
of the city abutted the relatively fresh Laguna of Mexico, and
while still prone to floods, its position did allow for expan-
sion by landfill as the population grew. The good quality of
the soil is signaled by the presence of both Moteuczoma’s
and then later the Franciscans’ gardens there. Moyotlan
was well connected to the rest of the valley by both water
and land—the causeways of Tacuba (formerly called Tlaco-
pan) led to it, and eventually the causeways of Chapultepec
and Piedad would be created to the west and to the south,
further linking it to the valley around. And the accessibility
of Moyotlan was certainly a reason that the great Tianguis
of Mexico was built there in the pre-Hispanic period and
was refounded on its initial site in 1533, thereby replacing
the short-lived post-Conquest tianguis established by Juan
Velázquez Tlacotzin along the Tacuba causeway.
concLusion
By midcentury, the Indo-Christian city was consolidated
in Moyotlan, centered around San José de los Natura-
les within San Francisco. The spacious tecpan down the
street offered an architectural embodiment of the order
of indigenous authority; it was also the center of a com-
mercial hub centered on the great Tianguis of Mexico. Just
as the older Templo Mayor had been set at the crossing
of axes, so too was this center. Its east–west axis linked
San Juan to San Pablo Teopan; by 1532, this causeway of
San Juan would extend farther east to reach the springs
at Chapultepec. The north–south axis was defined by the
artery that passed along the side of San Francisco and then
nearby, to Santa María Cuepopan, to end up at Santiago
Tlatelolco, this axis thus linking not only indigenous cen-
ters, but Franciscan ones as well. By the 1540s, that axis
extended south to the new causeway of the Piedad, which
linked the tianguis to the agricultural zones to the south,
particularly Chalco. 51 The Map of Santa Cruz defines this
as a principal artery by the presence of a figure walking to
the left (or south), with a bundle over his arm, as well as
by the conjoined brown and blue lines that show this was
both a road and a canal (see figure 4.8). The importance
of such visual and conceptual axes to the pre-Hispanic
city was discussed in chapter 3, and their colonial continu-
ance is treated in chapter 8. The image of this city as the
organized Christian republic finds expression twice in the
Codex Osuna; in both instances, the Christian symbols for
the patron saints, themselves referring to a sacred Roman
template, are presented as metaphors for the city. Such was
the view from the tecpan.
But what about the view from deep inside the city? This
chapter and the previous one have taken a new look at the
sixteenth-century city, reorienting it so it centers on the
pivot of the tecpan and the Franciscan complex, and we
have explored the ideologies of the Franciscans and the
city’s first indigenous governor in imagining what this new
city would be. We then turned to the physical building of
the city beginning in the 1530s, as far as can reasonably be
reconstructed, and we found that by the early 1540s, the
new center of Moyotlan with tecpan and tianguis competed
with the Plaza Mayor, around which the city’s Spanish
residents clustered. If we desire to take our analysis even
further, moving away from the elite culture of the goberna-
dores like Huanitzin and the native historians, to seek some
sense of the city as envisioned by its non-elite residents,
the potters and salt carriers and weavers who formed the
mainstay of the economy and the tributary class, we must
move deeper into one of the principal surviving representa-
tions of space, the city’s place-names, and these will be the
subject of the next chapter.