200 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
of limited utility; moreover, its stones were of great value
to construction projects in the city and invited pillaging, as
stone for building was scarce on the island. As before, the
dike was meant to protect the city from the inflow of salty
waters from Lake Tetzcoco, but in its reincarnation it was
to serve as a first line of defense for the city, rather than, as
previously, a companion to the longer Nezahualcoyotl dike
(which was never rebuilt) and a means of amplifying the
freshwater zone around the city. 46
This testimony comes from a witness in a lawsuit
brought by the audiencia against the cabildo for its intran-
sigence in refusing to pay for the dike building. In it, the
indigenous witnesses discuss a proposal to restore only
one of the dikes for flood protection, rather than the fuller
double-dike system that pertained under the pre-Hispanic
Mexica. But we know that such an understanding of the
role of the twin dikes was alive in the late-1530s from the
Map of Santa Cruz. This map was updated over time,
as discussed in chapter 5. While the urban center repre-
sents the city in the late 1530s and early 1540s, the dike
system shown captures an earlier point in time. It shows
the functioning of the twin dikes (of Ahuitzotl and Neza-
hualcoyotl), which is contrary to evidence from colonial
sources that suggest that the Nezahualcoyotl dike, after
being breached in the Conquest, was not repaired. 47 In
contrast, the Map of Santa Cruz shows the city with both
the dikes fulfilling their intended roles, with the inner
dike running along the perimeter of the city and the intact
outer dike running parallel, creating a band of water in
between. The difference between the waters is shown with
pigment, where sweet water is an indigo blue and salty
water a greenish pigment, seen in figure 2.9. Thus, when
the map was made, its artist was aware of the purpose of
the once-functioning dikes, that is, to keep out the salty
(green) water from Lake Tetzcoco and create a band of
sweet (blue) water between the dikes to the east of the city.
While the Map of Santa Cruz almost certainly had left the
city by the 1550s, the native leaders gathered in 1555 may
have had a similar map as a reference. The indigenous wit-
nesses repeatedly mention that Viceroy Velasco asked for
pinturas antiguas, the conventional term for native manu-
scripts, to show the solution to flooding and that the native
leaders had brought them along. 48
By November of 1555, the viceroy had also called upon
the rulers of the former Triple Alliance, including don
Esteban de Guzmán, who was then juez-gobernador of
Mexico-Tenochtitlan, to drum up the necessary labor from
the towns under their aegis, an indication that indigenous
labor was still very much controlled by native lords at that
time. Velasco would deputize an indigenous man named
Baltásar Acatliapanecatl to carry a staff of office called the
vara de justicia, and go to the towns controlled by Mexico-
Tenochtitlan and round up a labor force. We have seen in
the Codex Osuna how central the granting of this long
staff was to indigenous authority at midcentury (see figure
7.15); Velasco soon had a labor draft of six thousand indig-
enous workers under his command. 49
The construction project to rebuild the San Lázaro dike
was a massive and divisive one, pitting the audiencia and
the viceroy (who at this point favored projects that had an
indigenous pedigree) against the Spanish cabildo members
(who wanted to drain the lake entirely). The cabildo churl-
ishly rebuffed Velasco’s request to help supply the labor,
food, and tools necessary for the work—the traditional
role that the sponsoring government had adopted in the
pre-Hispanic period. Thus this enormous burden, as
workers would be required to carry their own food or else
pay local women to make their tortillas, was shifted either
to the indigenous government or to the workers them-
selves. The Spanish cabildo’s response shows that they were
less than eager to start paying for labor that once they had
benefited from for free. Since the pre-Hispanic period, the
cabildo members argued, the city’s commoners had worked
to create and maintain all the city’s public works. To change
the cabildo’s role now, they argued, would make indigenous
laborers less likely to work gratis in the future. Moreover,
they claimed that they lacked the resources, and accused
the city’s indigenous residents of being rich and idle most
of the time. 50
Such a charge came on the heels of don Esteban de
Guzmán’s investigation of the tribute paid to the native
governor don Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin,
discussed in chapter 7. When the ambitious and grasp-
ing Spanish officials on the cabildo—some of them with-
out encomiendas of their own—witnessed the quantities
of food and luxury goods being delivered to native lords
of the city, they might have had reason to think the city’s
indigenous community had untold stores of wealth (see
figures 7.6 to 7.11). What they did not realize, or perhaps
did not choose to register, was that the goods like those
we see in the Genaro García 30—those cups and vessels,
the luxury fabrics being delivered—were the lifeblood of
the symbolic economy that enabled social hierarchies that
could muster six thousand workers with a single call. Nor