inTRoducTion • 3of the Aztec world has been an enduring topos of both
New World and urban history. The Spanish historical nar-
ratives about the “abominations” inflicted on the city, the
killing of its political leaders and the dispersal of its resi-
dents, might allow us to read the first clause of this book’s
title, “the death of Aztec Tenochtitlan,” as a simple histori-
cal fact. The brutal war of conquest of 1519–1521 included
a crippling siege led by Spanish forces on the island city,
and after the Mexica emperor Cuauhtemoc surrendered,
he ordered an evacuation. Its death was confirmed when a
new city, this one called Mexico City, was founded within
the island space it once occupied. But while Tenochtitlan
as an indigenous imperial capital certainly came to an end
with its conquest, the death of Tenochtitlan as an indig-
enous city is a myth. This book will argue that while the
Conquest changed an indigenous New World capital, and
it was remade into the hub of the global empire of the
Habsburg kings in the sixteenth century, it did not destroy
indigenous Tenochtitlan, either as an ideal, as a built envi-
ronment, or as an indigenous population center. Instead,
indigenous Tenochtitlan lived on. Looking beyond the tri-
umphant accounts of Cortés and the despairing accounts of
Las Casas to other representations of the city, and focusing
on ones created by and about its indigenous occupants, will
reveal the endurance of the indigenous city once known as
Tenochtitlan within the space of Mexico City.
ciTies as meTaPhoR
In my first forays into the city’s past, I carried with me the
assumption—as do many others—that the great city of
Tenochtitlan had died with the surrender of its Mexica
ruler Cuauhtemoc to Hernando Cortés in 1521, its rulers in
chains and its population dispersed. Its successor, Mexico
City, was founded within a year or two by Spanish politi-
cal leaders, a new city laid out on the purportedly vacant
island, soon to be populated by the Spanish conquistado-
res, Cortés included, who had laid waste to Tenochtitlan.
The Spanish ruling elite of Mexico City certainly promoted
this view in subsequent centuries by commemorating the
1521 founding of Mexico City on August 13 of every year. By
the beginning of the seventeenth century, Balbuena would
liken the city to a phoenix, a mythical bird in Ovid that
was believed to die in fire and then be miraculously reborn
from the ashes. Balbuena’s choice of metaphor also implies
the city’s death as a result of the siege of 1521, after which
the phoenix-like city was reborn in the decades following
the war. But just as many other certainties pixilate upon
close view, the notion of the death of Tenochtitlan with
the Conquest did too when I began to read historical nar-
ratives and look at images of this great city. It was not just
that the sharp edges of historical facts (death and birth)
tend to blur when one sees the competing and conflict-
ing accounts that comprise them. Instead, the very idea of
rebirth seemed to be founded on an even more fundamen-
tal ontological error. Can cities die?
Our idea that they can rests on the idea of the city
as a biological entity, capable of both birth and death, a
notion spurred in modern times by the title of Jane Jacob’s
famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
of 1961. In the case of Aztec Tenochtitlan, where the city’s
“death” was coincident with its physical destruction and,
more importantly, the overthrow of its political leader-
ship, it also rests on another biological metaphor. This
is the idea of the city as a body, a politically constituted
one, at whose head are its leaders, whose capitulation or
decapitation brings the death of the whole. In a European
context, such a notion of the city corresponds to emergent
early-modern ideas of the state, where the political nation
was closely identified with the body of the king. We even
know of maps that show the spatial expanse of the realm
in the form of the monarch’s body. But Tenochtitlan’s death
is also indebted to indigenous political philosophy, which
traditionally understood a charismatic and semidivine
supreme leader, the tlatoani (plural tlatoque), as a metonym
for the larger community or city-state, the altepetl (plural
altepeme); in the case of Tenochtitlan, the identification of
this leader with the city was particularly potent, the result
of a successful strategy of imperial propaganda engineered
by the city’s ruling elite before its conquest.
The annealing of the figure of the ruler to the city of
Tenochtitlan is clear from the opening image of the Codex
Mendoza. 8 This book was created by native scribes in
Mexico City about a generation after the Conquest and
contains a pictorial history of the city almost certainly
drawn from pre-Conquest indigenous manuscripts that
recorded the officially sanctioned history of the city. The
manuscript’s name was affixed only around 1780, reflecting
the idea that it was created at the behest of the powerful
Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, who arrived in the
city to shore up the authority of the Spanish Crown in- 9 Whether or not the work was Mendoza’s commis-
sion, it was undoubtedly a high-status project, with expert
native scribes clustering over unbound folios to draw up