PLace-names in mexico-TenochTiTLan • 137from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he ended up
offering strong evidence for the colonial endurance of the
pre-Hispanic spatial and social categories in the city.
This study sparked other research, and scholars such as
Luis Reyes García have since established not only that the
units Caso called “barrios” endured, but also that they were
better known in the sixteenth-century city as tlaxilacalli, a
term discussed in chapter 3. More recently, Edward Cal-
nek and Jonathan Truitt have taken up the names again,
working even more extensively with the Nahuatl corpus of
documents from the city to expand and refine the number
of tlaxilacalli names. 19 But even more important is Tru-
itt’s finding that the tlaxilacalli were not extinguished by
the Conquest or any time after, but rather, like the larger
parcialidades that comprised them, took on the names of
Catholic saints and endured into the nineteenth century.
The tlaxilacalli was the basic unit for collective identi-
fication within the city, one step up from the household
and one step down from the parcialidad. The evidence that
tlaxilacalli names were a crucial part of residents’ sense of
themselves in the city is attested to by the scores of Nahuatl
legal documents that survive from the sixteenth-century
city. While in Spanish documentation of the same place
and period it is a commonplace to identify one’s place of
residence, such locational identifiers are often quite gen-
eral, with “citizen of Mexico City” (vecino de México) being
a frequently found identifier. But indigenous residents of
the city were situated within a three-layer hierarchy, the
indigenous city, its component parcialidad (a continuation
of the four-altepetl pre-Hispanic city), and finally the tlaxi-
lacalli, or neighborhood. These layers combined into a neat
spatial package we can call “Mexico-Tenochtitlan,” which
can be roughly diagramed as shown in table 7.2.
As encountered in legal documents, the classifications
reflect the structure of the indigenous government of the
colonial city as it developed by midcentury—the gober-
nador ruled the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and under
him were two alcaldes and then some twelve regidores,
who were representatives of the parcialidades, with usually
four from Moyotlan and two or three from each of the
other parts. 20 Within the various tlaxilacalli, there were
alguaciles (constables) to carry out justice. Such a political
hierarchy was never separate from a religious one: up to
the 1560s, all of the city’s Nahua residents were officially
parishioners of San José de los Naturales within San Fran-
cisco, but they were also served by (and served within) the
churches of the four parcialidades. Many of the tlaxilacalli
had their own small chapels for worship. Slight differences
emerge between the expression of this hierarchy in Tla-
telolco, which always held itself to be separate and equal
to Tenochtitlan. Lacking the four-parcialidad division,
Tlatelolco seems to have had two hierarchical levels: the
first, the city of Santiago Tlatelolco (the complement to
Mexico-Tenochtitlan), and the second, the tlaxilacalli. For
instance, in a land-sale document of 1551, we find a local
noble who describes himself thus: “I, don Baltazar Tlilan-
calqui, and my wife, Juana Tlaco, residents of this city of
Mexico–Santiago Tlatelolco, our tlaxilacalli being Santa
Ana Xopilco.” 21
But the ways the names of tlaxilacalli are used is reveal-
ing about the way the city residents represented themselves
within this larger urban and social complex. Tlaxilacalli
names are consistently appended to personal names, often
linked by the word chane, which derives from the Nahuatl
word for “home.” Thus we find phrases like “nehoatl Ysa-
ber Ana nican nichane San Juan Tlatilco” (I, Isabel Ana,MEXICO-TENOCHTITLAN
San Juan Moyotlan San Pablo Teopan San Sebastián Atzacoalco Santa María CuepopanTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTlaxilacalliTabLe 7.2. The three-layered political hierarchy in Mexico-Tenochtitlan