208 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
that of the altepetl and the ordered tianguis, at the same
time that he ensured a practical benefit from community
projects, like a new source of freshwater and the protection
of communal resources. He seems also to have avoided the
divisiveness sparked by the feasts and mitotes sponsored by
his predecessors. He was so highly regarded that even after
he was deaf and infirm from age, he kept hold of his office
for a twenty-six-year term (1573–1599), which ran from 3
House to 3 Reed, occupying an auspicious half century in
the native calendar. 82
Valeriano left few gorgeous monuments for poster-
ity—there are no known featherworks that named him as
patron, nor buildings, like the tecpan, that were an endur-
ing presence in the urbanscape, for it was torn down in the
nineteenth century. One of his great achievements, the canal
from Chapultepec, has been overshadowed by its transfor-
mation in the eighteenth century into an impressive arcade
running into the city, parts of which survive today. Nearby,
the vast space of the tianguis and the tecpan courtyard exist
no longer. The area is still a market hub, with the new Mer-
cado de San Juan filling much of the space of the patio of
the old tecpan; the Tianguis of Mexico, badly compromised
by the floods of the seventeenth century, was eventually
turned over to the city’s powerful Basque community, who
in 1772 built a great school there, Las Vizcaínas, whose long
façade (made possible by the vacant space held open in the
city’s increasingly dense fabric by the tianguis) is still one
of the city’s architectural gems. 83
Instead, today one is more likely to encounter Valeriano
in one of the dozens of pedestrian documents that exist in
Mexico City’s Archivo General de la Nación, his signature
affixed to proceedings of land transfers between indigenous
parties and Spanish residents, one of the many bureau-
cratic functions that the indigenous cabildo, seated in the
tecpan, had as its responsibility. One sale of 1592 was given
particular attention by the cabildo because it involved an
indigenous widow, Mariana, who was offered 100 pesos for
her land and its houses in the tlaxilacalli of San Hipólito
Teocaltitlan by a Spanish resident of the city, Luis de Ce-
vallos. 84 In conformity with the law, such transfers of land
out of indigenous hands needed approval of the indigenous
cabildo. The area was near the parish of Veracruz, which
was adjacent to the Alameda, to the north of the causeway
of Tacuba, an area of expanding Spanish settlement. Be-
cause of the value of the property and the potential transfer
of land from indigenous into Spanish hands, Valeriano
mandated that both an auction and a pregón be carried out,
a pregón being a daily public announcement by a crier over a
specified length of time, usually over thirty days. The crier,
a man named Diego Aztaxochitl, would appear in public
spaces throughout the city and announce the news of the
sale, the details of the property, and the offered price; a
pregón such as this one gave indigenous buyers a chance
at the property, as well as Spanish ones who were willing
to pay a higher price. The crier’s trajectory wended its way
through the indigenous city, a one-man civil procession
that crisscrossed the key public areas of San Juan Moyotlan
and Santa María Cuepopan, the two parcialidades adjacent
to the sale property, his itinerary marking the lived spaces.
Each day (save Sundays and holidays) was punctuated
with a pregón in Nahuatl (and perhaps in Spanish as well)
about the impending sale and the current price; after a
month, when the public crier’s announcement had time to
travel mouth to mouth throughout the city, competing bids
started to come in, each one to be matched by Cevallos. At
Yaoltica, in San Juan Moyotlan, the price was pushed to
120 pesos; by the time the crier made his way to the tianguis,
some thirteen days later, the price was 160; at the end of
the thirty pregones, which were carried out over almost two
months, the price the widow Mariana received was double
the initial offer. Valeriano signed off on the deal.
It is not hard to see, in the figure of the crier Diego
Aztaxochitl, the extended presence of the gobernador in
the streets of the city (whose Nahua subjects still called
him a tlatoani, at whose root is tlatoa, meaning “to speak”),
making public and transparent the workings of the city
government, as it oversaw the legitimacy of such a sale,
as well as garnering the best price for its indigenous seller
and giving indigenous buyers a chance at it, too. That pres-
ence extended beyond the tecpan, where many of the maps
and documents that recorded such land transfers would be
kept. It moved outward in the crier’s near-daily trajecto-
ries through the city streets. His itinerary marked the lived
spaces of the city at the same time that the Nahuatl words
carried along by his voice made the gobernador present to
all who were listening.