10 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
of central Mexico, Mexica identified the city with the term
altepetl, a word that translates directly as “water hill.” The
altepetl rather than the larger state was the primary focus
of affiliation and loyalty; recently, Federico Navarrete has
pointed out that “the concept of the altepetl makes direct
allusion to two elements essential to any Mesoamerican
political entity: a sacred hill that was considered to be the
residence of the patron deity, and often ancestors, as well;
the spring or other source of water, which permitted the
subsistence and agriculture of its residents.” 15 In addition,
but not exclusively, an altepetl was closely identified with
its ruler, whose own political positions were solidified by
such a connection, as we saw in the Codex Mendoza. Such
identification helped clarify the rules of the political life of
central Mexico, particularly in the conquest state that the
Mexica led. The death or capitulation of the ruler meant
the defeat of the altepetl, which would then be required to
pay tribute to conquering overlords.
So how can we account for the city in a way that takes
into account these sometimes competing, sometimes
complementary vantages—the city as a political domain
and the city as an ethnic community, bound by descent
from a common ancestor? It is useful to remember that, in
addition to the ways its historians described it in political
or ethnic terms, the city of Tenochtitlan was also a space,
and a very unusual geographic one at that, an island set in
a shallow, salty inland sea, connected to the surrounding
lakeshore by causeways. And while rulers can die, spaces
cannot. And while ethnic communities are conquered or
ravaged by disease, spaces endure. Shifting our focus to the
city as a space allows us a critical vantage onto this city that
will be productive on a number of fronts. First, treating
the space of Tenochtitlan and Mexico City will allow us
a temporal continuity that is denied us if we imagine the
city as simply the political domain of a ruling class: by these
lights, Tenochtitlan—ruled by an indigenous tlatoani—did
die, and Mexico City—ruled by a Spanish town council—
was born. Secondly, as an interpretive category, space has
the capacity to contain both of these culturally specific
political ideologies of the city, the Nahua altepetl and the
Spanish ciudad, just as the spatial expanse of the island
contained them both after the Conquest. It also allows us
to bring together the different historical narratives that
fundamentally disagree about the definition of the city
(Cortés’s letters vs. the Codex Aubin) and treat them as dif-
ferent vantages onto a single entity, the island space called
Tenochtitlan in the fifteenth century, and Mexico City by
the seventeenth.LefebvRe and de ceRTeau
To treat the city as a space demands that we define what
interpretive approach we are to take, given the nearly
infinite number of meanings that “space” can have, both
concrete and metaphorical, an elasticity that can render it
shapeless. In his attempt to rescue space from the natural
and transparent position to which the Western philosophi-
cal tradition had relegated it, Henri Lefebvre argued for the
social construction of space, “at once a precondition and
a result of social superstructures.” Such a position seems
unconsciously sympathetic to Mexica understandings of
their city, where the altepetl was the result of actions of
both a ruler and an ethnic group. Moreover, approaching
the city, which is a geographic space, as a socially created
product allows us entry into some of its complications.
“The city of the ancient world,” Lefebvre wrote, “cannot be
understood as a collection of people and things in space;
nor can it be visualized solely on the basis of a number
of texts and treatises on the subject of space. . . . For the
ancient city had its own spatial practice: it forged its
own—appropriated—space. Whence the need for a study
of that space which is able to apprehend it as such, in its
genesis and its form, with its own specific time or times
(the rhythm of daily life), and its particular centres and
polycentrism (agora, temple, stadium, etc.).” 16 His invita-
tion is compelling: not just to think of the city as a collec-
tion of people, or buildings, but also to focus on those daily
practices as fundamental to that creation of the social space
that constitutes the city.
It is taken up in Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking
in the City.” In this short work, the French Jesuit philoso-
pher begins as his narrator looks over Manhattan from
the vantage point of the 110th floor of one of the towers of
the (then-standing) World Trade Center. To see the city
from the distance that the building provides “is to be lifted
out of the city’s grasp. . . . [The viewer is] an Icarus flying
above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus
in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation
transfigures him into a voyeur.” But Certeau sees the limits
of this seemingly omnipotent position: the city is experi-
enced only as an image, an “optical artifact,” captured and
bounded by “the imaginary totalizations produced by the