Barbara_E._Mundy]_The_Death_of_Aztec_Tenochtitlan

136 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy

of these carried a name. These tlaxilacalli names were pre-
served in a ca. 1789 manuscript map by the great Enlight-
enment intellectual José Antonio Alzate, a map that lay
dormant for over a century—never engraved or published
during his lifetime or in the nineteenth century. When the
archeologist Alfonso Caso encountered the single known
version of it in Paris and redrew and published it in 1956
as part of his study “Los barrios antiguos de Tenochtitlan
y Tlatelolco,” he brought renewed attention to these sub-
units of the city and their nomenclature (figure 7.3). This
map reconstructed the pre-Hispanic city, drawing on the
names from the Alzate map and cross-checking and aug-
menting these with other historical sources. Key was a 1637
list of indigenous parishes that Caso found in the British

Museum, which allowed him to corroborate Alzate’s iden-

tifications, as well as other land documents Caso’s collabo-

rator had found in the Archivo General de la Nación in

Mexico. 17 Like Alzate, Caso assumed a conservative char-

acter for the place-names, so he assumed that the Nahuatl

nomenclature belonged to the city’s pre-Hispanic past. The

study of the etymology of the place-names for linguistic

ends was of lesser interest to him. 18

For readers of the day, Caso’s article revealed a there-

tofore-unknown social order and complexity of the pre-

Hispanic city that existed within the framework of the

known four-part division. Caso took the names that Alzate

had plotted on the map and correlated the boundaries of

the subdivisions to the modern streets of the city, mark-

ing their boundaries with colored lines on a modern map,

the different colors corresponding to the four parcialidades,

with a blue trapezoid at the map’s center to mark the limits

of the Spanish traza. He thus affirmed the spatial expanse

of the hundred or so subdivisions, which he called “barrios.”

As the title of his article suggests, his interest was in the

pre-Hispanic period, but since he used colonial documents

figuRe 7.3. Alfonso Caso, map of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco,
showing the indigenous neighborhoods, from “Los barrios antiguos de
Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco,” Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de la
Historia 15 (1956). Reproduced courtesy of the Academia Mexicana de
la Historia. Photograph General Research Division, New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.