174 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
recognize among themselves, adhering to their ancient
customs.” 24 Here, as in the rest of Mendieta’s text, “bar-
rio” means one of the four parcialidades of the city; thus
the forest (to us) of 230 images of the saints on golden
platforms must have been to city residents a collection of
individual trees, often quite recognizable and associated
with particular chapels of the city, organized by the par-
cialidad that comprised them. We do not know how the
sixteenth-century Nahua of the city ordered the tlaxilacalli
within each parcialidad—whether the order represented in
the procession would be the same as that registered in later
tribute lists—but Mendieta’s comment suggests a publicly
known and performed order at the level of the tlaxilacalli.
Following the cult icons in the procession were the mem-
bers of the cofradías, who had their own emblems—the
cross, a statue of the sorrowing Virgin—that were held
aloft, and then finally the parcialidades of the city, prob-
ably organized as we find them in documents, with San
Juan Moyotlan first, then San Pablo Teopan, San Sebastián
Atzacoalco, and Santa María Cuepopan.
So, in the impressive public display, we can see not only
what Mendieta meant it to show within the context of his
larger Historia—the fervent and popular embrace of ortho-
dox Catholicism by the indigenous people of New Spain’s
largest city, the former capital of its pagan empire (whose
history is covered in the Historia’s early chapters)—but
also evidence of how the city represented itself to itself in
these important moments, the spectacle offering a visual
crystallization of particular social orders (the cofradías)
represented by their visual uniformity (members of the
cofradía of Veracruz and the Soledad would wear or carry
their respective insignias), whereas the other parts of the
city (likely the tlaxilacalli) were represented by their plural-
ity, each designated by a different cult image, but all con-
tained and ordered within a larger structure established by
the four-part city of ranked parcialidades.
Such public rituals have long been understood to con-
tribute to the construction of collective memory. Maurice
Halbwachs’s foundational study of the topic emphasizes the
role of public rituals in forging bonds of memory between
individuals; 25 that is, the experience of an event by many
individuals allows them to create a mental image of a past
that they all share. To this end, Halbwachs underscores
the role of commemorative events. For example, consider
the washing of the feet that the Franciscans carried out on
Holy Thursday within San Francisco. This theatrical event
provided the thousands of Nahua witnesses a shared expe-
rience, which they could remember and recall together. But
it was not just any event: it was a restaging of an event from
the Gospels. Thus, in remembering the foot washing in
the days, months, or years after they saw it, the witnessing
Nahua were recalling an event in 1595 as well as one that
had happened long before, in Jerusalem of the first century.
The repetition of the same foot-washing rite year in and
year out created layered memories, thick with associations,
all pointing back to an event in the past. Such repeated
restaging thereby contributes to an individual’s sense of
history, and at the same time this enacted past can claim
authority because of communal participation. “Through the
appropriate commemorabilia I overcome the effects of ano-
nymity and spatio-temporal distance and pay homage to
people and events I have never known and will never know
face-to-face,” the philosopher Edward Casey has written,
adding that commemorabilia “are always trans-individual
in their scope and function.” 26 Paul Connerton has taken
Halbwachs’s argument further in pointing out that, along
with the content of a commemoration (such as the reenact-
ment of the Passion of Christ), its form, specifically the
employment of a ritual language and particular bodily
gestures, brings meaning home to participants. 27 But all
argue for the crucial role of public rituals and the sense
of a past that is forged through them in giving coherence
to the social order and to the individual’s sense of existing
within a longer historical stream. 28 Because it is through
involvement with collective rituals invoking a shared his-
tory that individuals are transformed into members of a
larger social group, memory, thought in classical models to
pertain to the individual consciousness, moves out beyond
the individual into the zone of the intersubjective.
But perhaps as important as their role of creating a
shared sense of the past among the city’s residents, rituals
of reenactment and commemoration in the indigenous city
served to shape the city’s spaces—the sphere of practice
giving meaning to lived space. Practices are found in the
order that worshippers followed as they walked in proces-
sions that conformed to (and made visible) the established
hierarchy of the parcialidades, or in the way that the bearers
of the cult statues from both San Francisco and the city’s
various chapels arranged themselves as they gathered in
the monastic courtyard for the Easter morning procession.
In addition to reinforcing hierarchical order among the
lived spaces of the city, such processions established and